Lunchtime Lectures: Story Weaving: Charles Dickens's Working Notes

Charles Dickens wrote all of his novels in monthly or weekly instalments, most over 19 months. At times he was only a month or two ahead of his readers. To manage his writing process over time, Dickens developed an innovative notetaking practice. These notes are held in the V&A’s National Art Library along with the largest collection of Dickens’s manuscripts in the world. In this Lunchtime Lecture, the co-director of the Dickens Notes project will explain how these working notes bring to life the writing practice of the nineteenth-century’s most important serial writer. 

Dickens described himself as a “story-weaver at his loom” able to see the “whole pattern” of his novels. His working notes have often been understood as that very pattern—”number plans” he made before writing. But, as this talk will show, these are actually dynamic documents of compositional process. Filled with questions and answers, ideas, names, plot details, and phrases, they were written in various inks before, during, and after Dickens wrote his instalments. In this lecture, you will see how these manuscripts let us watch Dickens at the “loom” as he plans, questions, decides, changes his mind, imagines, summarizes, and manages his writing process across the serial time and space of his long novels. 

Dr. Anna Gibson is the co-director of the Dickens Notes project (dickensnotes.org), an open-access scholarly edition of the working notes Charles Dickens kept for his novels. She is an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she researches and teaches nineteenth-century British literature. She is currently co-writing a book on Dickens and the processes of novel form with Adam Grener (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand).