By Abbie Fentress Swanson: WNYC/WQXR Newsroom

Charles Dickens wrote the beloved holiday ghost story A Christmas Carol in a quick six weeks in September 1843.

Printing the manuscript was a Christmas rush job, so there wasn't enough time for Dickens to make a clean manuscript copy. As a result, the copy that went to print is heavily marked up and extremely difficult to read.

But it's an amazing look into the literary process and the Morgan Library and Museum where the manuscript is kept displays one page at a time once a year.

This year, for the first time, all 66 pages are available online.

In this week's Arts File on WQXR, WNYC's Kerry Nolan talks to Alison Leigh Cowan, Metro Reporter and creator of the "On the Records" blog for The New York Times. Cowan asked The Times to put the Dickens classic manuscript online and start a contest for readers to catch some of the 2000 edits Dickens made on the manuscript.

Declan Kiely, the Robert H. Taylor curator and department head at the Morgan Library and Museum also weighs in on why the manuscript is such an extraordinary one.

As part of WQXR's look at A Christmas Carol, Kerry Nolan also talked to Gerald Charles Dickens.

Dickens is an actor based in London who performs one-man shows based on the books of his great great grandfather, Charles Dickens. Gerald Charles Dickens performs A Christmas Carol at the Park Avenue Christian Church on Friday and Saturday night. Click below to listen to Dickens' conversation with Kerry Nolan and a performance from A Christmas Carol.

(Photo: Byers' Choice Ltd., 2009)