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Scroll down to enjoy excerpts, then
click here to buy.
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There is only one known prompt copy of A Christmas Carol that Charles Dickens
used, and The New York Public Library has it. Levenger Press is delighted to lift
the curtain on this remarkable look into the author’s thinking, with the first-ever
full-color facsimile of the prompt copy. Just what is it, and how did Dickens use
it? Read on...
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Readers the world over know him as a consummate novelist, but Charles Dickens had
a love for the theater from an early age. So it was not all that surprising, albeit
somewhat unusual, that Dickens decided to perform readings of his works on stage—most
notably, A Christmas Carol.
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As a performer, Dickens was a maestro. His audiences laughed, cried, cheered, sighed.
As far as the audience knew when Dickens referred to his book on stage, it was just
another copy of A Christmas Carol. But it wasn’t. Dickens had cobbled together
a prompt copy.
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The prompt book is an annotated copy of a play that a stage manager normally uses
during the performance. For A Christmas Carol, Dickens had the pages of a
published edition of his book set into larger pages. That way he could add his stage
cues in the margins, make any rewrites, and either cross out the sections he wouldn’t
read or glue together those pages.
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Dickens’s prompt copy became a sort of reverse palimpsest, with different passages
disappearing at different times. What began as a three-hour performance would sometimes
be as short as an hour and a half. He used this personal working copy for years,
including his sell-out tour in the U.S. in 1867. Now you can see what Dickens’s
audience never saw.
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From The Prompt Copy of A Christmas Carol, published by Levenger Press, 2009
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