The new technique allows researchers to discover how the author shaped and reshaped his prose. 
 
 The Victoria & Albert Museum pilot study focused on his Christmas story, The Chimes, using technology developed by Ian Christie-Miller, a former visiting research fellow at London University. Although no dramatic revelations emerged from deletions in that short story, scholars are excited by the technology's potential on novels such as Bleak House. 
 
 Florian Schweizer, director of the Charles Dickens Museum in London, told The Independent: "We're talking of tens of thousands of manuscript pages that could potentially be unlocked." 
 
 The technology, separating layers of text, involves combining two or more digital images – a frontlit and backlit image of a page. 
 
 By digitally subtracting one from the other, differences are revealed. 
 
 In The Chimes, the tests showed for example that the published sentence – "Years … are like Christians in that respect" – originally read: "Years … are like men in one respect." 
 
 Dr Schweizer said: "Why did he make that change? Quite a change. Literary scholars will ask themselves those questions." 
 
 Rowan Watson, a senior curator at the V&A, described Dr Christie-Miller's technology as "ingenious and inspiring". The manuscripts show Dickens "almost thinking aloud on to paper," he said. 

 Following a pilot study on his short novel, The Chimes , at the Victoria and Albert Museum, researchers have decided that significant lost passages might be unlocked from the original manuscripts of his great novels, including Bleak House . 
 
 The tantalising new technology did not produce any significant finds during the first crawl, besides a few interesting word changes. One sentence, “Years … are like Christians in that respect” originally read: “Years … are like men in one respect.” 
 
 However, Rowan Watson, a senior curator at the V&A, described the technology in The Independent today as “ingenious and inspiring”. The manuscripts show Dickens “almost thinking aloud on to paper,” he said. 
 
 Florian Schweizer, director of the Charles Dickens Museum, has said that Dickens was a furious scribbler and blotter, which means the material unearthed could be plentiful. “We're talking of tens of thousands of manuscript pages that could potentially be unlocked,” he said. 
 
 Developed by Ian Christie-Miller, a former visiting research fellow at London University, the device illustrates the hidden work with the use of a special 1mm-thick sheet, which produces a bright light when an electric current is passed through it. 
 
 This lights the page from behind and it is then photographed and computer software is used to strip out the image on the front. 
 
 The light was used in 2006 to successfully reveal damaged sketches by the renowned 18th century architect Robert Adam, which had been lost for more than a hundred years.
– We could soon have some "new" Charles Dickens to peruse. Researchers are preparing to pore through the manuscripts of Dickens' novels using a device that reveals what the author crossed out, the Independent reports. That allows scholars to experience the novelist "almost thinking aloud on to paper," says a museum curator. They've already used the process on his story The Chimes, but there's much more to explore. "We're talking of tens of thousands of manuscript pages that could potentially be unlocked," says the head of the Charles Dickens Museum in London. The device uses an electrically-lit, 1 mm-thick sheet that illuminates a manuscript page. After a photograph is snapped, a computer "removes" the top layer to reveal the hidden text, the Telegraph reports.