Here’s a pub quiz question: where is Great Expectations? No, not where is the movie playing, nor where is the book set (don’t phone a friend, the answer is London). I mean, where is the manuscript of Dickens’ great novel? The original bits of paper where Miss Havisham, Pip and Estelle first migrated from the fertile imagination of the great storyteller? Whither have they gone? Where is the handwritten manuscript scribbled out for his weekly publication All Year Round? Before you guess ‘British Library’ or ‘Tennessee State College’ or go for Google, let me present one word which you would never associate with Charles Dickens. That word is “Wisbech”.

Yes, the ‘capital of the Fens’, one of the rare recipients of special EU funding for its social problems, is the home of this priceless rare treasure: hundreds of quarto sized loose leaves, later bound in leather and crammed full of Charles Dickens’ tiny, furiously generated handwriting. It is the only one of his original manuscripts not in the V&A. Instead it is housed, and has been for 150 years, somewhere safe in the bowels of the Fenland and District Museum, The Crescent, Wisbech, Cambs.

Chauncy later offered to mesmerise Charles, but the novelist was having none of it…

What this wonder of the world is doing in the Fens is in large part an accident, albeit a very lucky one, of history. When Dickens published Great Expectations in 1861, he dedicated the work to his friend Chauncy Hare Townshend. One would give anything to have a friend with a name like that, and his marvelous moniker is there on the inside page of the first edition. Who was Chauncy?

Townshend was a rich landowning gentleman who had three abiding passions: his own health (he was a dedicated hypochondriac), collecting rare books, manuscripts and autographs; his final passion was mesmerism. Townshend was a pioneer of this strange, therapeutic great grandpa of hypnotherapy. Dickens in fact had met Chauncy at a demonstration in which a female patient was ‘cured’ of her ills by means of some mesmeric mumbo jumbo.

Chauncy later offered to mesmerise Charles, but the novelist was having none of it, fearing it might impede his considerable imaginative powers. Townshend went on to write a major study of mesmerism, which was then so little understood that it was allied to spiritualism; not surprising that Dickens also gifted a crystal ball to his old friend.

The friendship began in 1840 and continued up to Townshend’s death in 1868. After the publication of Great Expectations, Dickens not only dedicated the work but gave his manuscript as a gift to the ageing mesmerist (who also fancied himself as a poet). Chauncy owned land in the Fens, and was a supporter of the wonderful museum built in Wisbech in the 1840s. In his will he left a vast collection to the V&A and in equal measure to the Wisbech and Fenland Museum. Among his gifts was the famous manuscript left to Wisbech in perpetuity: and perpetuity being what it is, the treasure is still there today.

If you want to see the original manuscript of Great Expectations, with its myriad of crossings out, inky blotches and furious speedwriting, go along to the museum on the first Saturday of each month. It is currently on display as part of the museum’s ‘They called me PIP” exhibition which recreates in stunning fashion Miss Havisham’s mouldering wedding table. Apart from the precious manuscript, you can also see the crystal ball (though you can’t see anything in it, least of all your future).

“Greater Expectations” […] imagines Charles, Chauncy and other worthies meeting in Wisbech in 1865…

I have been fascinated by this strange link between Dickens and the small Fenland town, a beautiful Georgian port which has seen better days. This is one reason why I have written a play Greater Expectations for the local community. It imagines Charles, Chauncy and other worthies meeting in Wisbech in 1865. The party includes Octavia Hill, the founder of the National Trust and a native of Wisbech. We are also involving the local school, The Thomas Clarkson Academy (named after the great slave emancipator who also came from this extraordinary little town). We hope that the project (funded by Heritage Lottery) will make a tiny contribution in bringing the town what is so deserves: great expectations.

Mike’s play ‘Greater Expectations’ will be performed at the Thomas Clarkson Academy, Wisbech on Wednesday 5th December, 7 pm. Tickets are free on the door. 

The exhibition, ‘So they called me Pip’ is at the Wisbech and Fenland Museum until mid December. Visit www.wisbechmuseum.org.uk for further information.

A facsimile of the original manuscript has been published by CUP and is now on sale.