From a story on lithub.com by Anna Quindlen on “The power of writing by hand”:

The following is excerpted from Write for Your Life by Anna Quindlen.

The manuscript of A Christmas Carol, which is in the Morgan Library in New York City, is really something else. It’s not simply that Scrooge, the Cratchits, and the Fezziwigs live in it; it’s that Dickens does. In heavy-handed black ink he pushes forward on unlined paper, something about his script suggesting speed, or perhaps it’s just that I know he wrote the book in six weeks. It’s a bit terrifying to consider that this was the only copy of the novella. A fire? A flood? A disaster.