A bound collection of "All the Year Round," a Charles Dickens magazine, has recently been discovered in Wrexham by a book dealer. The annotation is in the famous editor's very own handwriting. The handwriting reveals that Dickens' published unattributed short stories, poems and articles to have been written by Lewis Caroll, creator of Alice in Wonderland, Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and Elizabeth Gaskell, according to The Telegraph.
The book dealer ordered the collection from an online bookseller last September, but did not open his box until December when he arrived from his home in Hungary.
"When I saw the listing of 20 volumes in red cloth with gilt edges for sale I was excited. There was no mention of annotation but when I opened the box and saw the notes it was all my Christmases at once. To realize it was Dickens's own set and his own handwriting revealing who wrote everything was incredible. That has never been public information because the pieces were deliberately published without attribution, as Dickens's name appeared on the top of every page," said Jeremy Parott, the antiquarian dealer who discovered the 20 issues of Dicken's magazines revealing the Rosetta Stone of Victorian Literature, as reported by The Independent.
Dickens, born in Portsmouth in 1812, was a famous author and known heavy-handed editor who would revise articles by less assertive writers. Beginning his literary career, he worked as a journalist. He later published a vast work of novels, edited weekly periodicals, wrote plays and performed before Queen Victoria in 1851. His final unfinished novel was "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." He died from a stroke in 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, according to BBC.
