Sunny Dunny

Sunny Dunny on his blog has purchased the facsimile of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (Faber and Faber, 1971) and, being a creative writer himself, ruminates about the survival of draft material in the digital age. This is a topic that also came up, inter alia, at the Study Day on the James Joyce Manuscripts at the Institute of English Studies. As media change--from handwriting to typewriting to writing on the computer--so do writing habits and (possibly) the writing experience, the methods of composition, and so on, but also of course the means by which manuscripts are preserved. One thing is certain: the survival of manuscripts for posterity remains a matter of luck, regardless of the medium which has produced. Any writer bent on destroying his drafts will do so, and yet s/he can never be certain to have destroyed all. Time will tell whether in 100 years' time there will be less manuscripts that have survived from the early twenty-first century than from the early twentieth-century. Yet I would be that the difference would not be enormous.