A new reproduction of the 'Oliver Twist' manuscript

SP Books has published a reproduction of the handwritten manuscript of Oliver Twist, with colored versions of George Cruikshank's illustrations and a new introduction by Simon Callow. It's a pricey but beautiful edition, especially valuable because of what it shows us about the changes Dickens made as he wrote the novel. As Craig Simpson observes in the Telegraph, "Charles Dickens’ classic work examining crime and poverty in Victorian Britain was self-censored to be less brutal about the relationship between Bill Sikes and Nancy, with offending words like 'damn' also removed from the text. . . . Callow writes that the more calm prose of the final version left 'more to the imagination', and also ironed out 'inconsistencies in the plot' after Dickens decided to make Nancy a more sympathetic character. 'Nancy would be the new, tragic heroine of the work,' Callow writes in the introduction to the book published by SP Books."