The surviving manuscripts, including one in Turkish and one in Hebrew, span the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
And among his surviving manuscripts are some remarkable notes on sexual techniques, toys and positions whose explicitness would have made Mill blush.
Whatever the reasons for its cancellation, the surviving manuscripts suggest that the work might have provoked controversy had it made it to opening night.
Hundreds of years later, some of these texts were still being copied in monasteries, and our earliest surviving manuscripts date from around the 10th and 11th centuries.
The use of paper spread slowly, however, and most of the oldest surviving manuscripts are of other materials, particularly vellum (fine-grained lambskin, kidskin, or calfskin).
His surviving manuscripts, which included many unpublished works, were mostly sold by Constanze to the firm of André in Offenbach, which issued editions during the 19th century.
To celebrate the 70th anniversary, Cape should consider authorising a critical edition of the diary, drawing on the surviving manuscripts, as well as on the background information amassed by the Kilvert Society in the years since its foundation in 1948.
In 1887 there was published, from surviving manuscripts, the Note Book, of Sir John Northcote, sometime M.P. for Ashburton, and afterwards for the County of Devon, containing Memoranda of Proceedings in the House of Commons during the first Session of the Long Parliament, 1640.
Let's remember this wasn't a writer filled with a 21st century sense of ennui, but a man writing 400 years before the earliest surviving manuscripts of English poetry, 600 years before Chaucer, 900 years before Shakespeare and 1,200 years before Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and co picked up the mantle.
"Bringing the four surviving manuscripts together for the first time will create a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for researchers and members of the public to see them in one place, and will be a fantastic start to a year of celebrations".
