Chapters:
Charles Lamb Meets John Milton 00:00
Introduction To The Bodleian Exhibition 02:19
Jane Austens Manuscript Of The Watsons 03:42
Giveaway Announcement 05:55
Mary Shelley Drafts Frankenstein 06:27
Franz Kafka Invents His Famous Narrator 08:58

When Charles Lamb was shown John Milton’s autograph manuscript of Lycidas he was horrified.

Those perfect verses, so often seen perfectly printed, were not the immaculate conception of imaginative genius, but had been scribbled onto a page, crossed through, and scribbled again, “as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! As if they might have been otherwise.”

Lamb wished that Trinity had thrown the manuscript in the Cam, and he vowed to never “go into the workshop of any great artist again.”

But if you’re like me, you’ll want to spend as much time as possible in the workshops of great artists, peering over their shoulders to see how they wrestled their works into being.

And that's why I visited the Bodleian Library to speak to Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, co-curators of their new exhibition of literary manuscripts Write, Cut, Rewrite.

There, through writing of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Franz Kafka, we can see the extraordinary value in the survival of these manuscripts.

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I'm Tom Ayling and I'm an antiquarian bookseller, somebody who sells rare books and manuscripts. You can find out more on my website www.tomwayling.co.uk