There is a book about the manuscript of The Waste Land and a summary of its findings here; a paperback facsimile of the original is available from Faber. In 1974 Lyndall Gordon, who would go on to write many books, including a biography of T S Eliot (and two Persephone Prefaces), wrote a piece about The Waste Land manuscript. She began: ‘The manuscript of The Waste Land was a hoard of fragments accumulated slowly over seven and half years.’ This is a 1922 page.

Two chapters of Persuasion have survived in manuscript and are in the British Library: more details here and here, where this page is deconstructed; and here one can zoom in.

The manuscript of Middlemarch is in the British Library and sixteen pages are online here. In December 1870 George Eliot decided to combine  the chapters she had already written with  a new story called ‘Miss Brooke’: the BL manuscript consists of four notebooks containing the final, revised draft; originally written on loose leaves, they were later bound into volumes. There is a book about the composition of the novel, Jerome Beaty’s Middlemarch From Notebook to Novel (Athlone Press, 1967). It would be a fascinating exercise to reread Middlemarch with Beaty’s book to hand.

The first Persephone Posts of the year and something which now no longer exists – corrected manuscripts. Future generations will find our interest in earlier versions of ‘the text’ incomprehensible as no one will ever see the first, second or third electronic file of a book – only the finished version. This is a page from Finnegans Wake. How the typesetter coped with this is unimaginable. We would not have had an excellent fifteen-year relationship with our typesetter (Keystroke in Wolverhampton) if we had presented them with typescripts like this! (Presumably whole books have been written about the manuscript of Finnegans Wake and James Joyce’s corrections.) A friend told us over Christmas that listening to it as an audio book was the way to go, apparently far more comprehensible than reading it….

Midnight New Year’s Eve Chelsea Arts Ball was painted by Sir Francis Cook (1907-78) in 1947. A Very Happy New Year to all Persephone readers. We  are open today from 10-6 but shall be closed tomorrow January 1st, then open as usual on Saturday 2nd (from 12-5) and as usual from Monday onwards (10 a.m.).

A Chelsea Interior is on the endpapers of The Carlyles at Home. Robert Tait painted it in 1857 and it now hangs in Carlyle’s House. Although one would not expect a married couple to be grinning rapturously at each other, there is something quite sad and sombre about this painting – a little like the aftermath of Christmas. (The Persephone Forum is brilliant – as usual – about The Carlyles at Home.)

Christmas is over, and as we unwrapped our own presents we felt rather proud and happy about the thousands of people unwrapping a grey Persephone book and by today, perhaps, finding an hour or two on the sofa to read it. The Day After Christmas by Mark Lancelot Symons was painted in 1931. It’s at the Bury Art Museum. (If you go to Titles by Publication Date on our website, it appears that two of our books were published in 1931 and might be in this picture – Making Conversation and The Fortnight in September; the latter was a bestseller so there’s quite a good chance it was there.)