Lord of the Flies manuscript- an overview
Preamble:
(if you don’t care about this, I start talking about the actual manuscript under the cut. but be warned- it is very long)
So as some of you know if you’ve been following my blog, I have been wanting to go and see the original first draft of Lord of the Flies (handwritten by William Golding in a college notebook and currently held by the University of Exeter’s special collections here in the UK) for a really long time now! It took a while, but today I finally went! I’m sure a lot of you are curious about how it differs from the final book so I decided to put together a list of things I noticed. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to quote anything from the manuscript verbatim due to copyright restrictions, but I’ll try my best to tell you what I can without getting into legal trouble (hopefully). Also, I only managed to get through the first 7 chapters before the library closed (I’m truly devastated) partly because I struggled a lot to decipher Golding’s very messy handwriting and also just because I’m not a very fast reader and I only had about 5 hours with the manuscript, so I’ll just be talking about what I’ve read so far. I plan on returning in the summer to see the rest so there will be a part 2 to this post eventually!
Also also, at the time of posting it is 3am and I am too tired to proofread this properly so apologies in advance for any mistakes.
Now, onto the part of the post you actually care about- talking about the manuscript!
