It was noted that the 25-year-old Dickens "moderated Bill's brutality to Nancy" and cut "violent expressions of emotion" towards the gangster's moll.

The young author, publishing in monthly instalments in the magazine Bentley's Miscellany between 1837 and 1839, also expurgated "damn", "God", "cursed", and "blast" to mellow his more explicit first draft.

Callow writes that the more calm prose of the final version left "more to the imagination", and also ironed out "inconsistencies in the plot" after Dickens decided to make Nancy a more sympathetic character.

"Nancy would be the new, tragic heroine of the work," Callow writes in the introduction to the book, published by SP Books.

"The working out of her destiny in its pages would transform a mere serial into a genuine novel."

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He added, that returning to edit his first drafts, Dickens "wrote with new vigour and focus and a much tighter grip on the book, building towards the terrible and inevitable climax in which Bill Sikes kills Nancy".

The manuscript bears the marks of Dickens' corrections, with inked out paragraphs and extensive annotations.

The edition also contains illustrations by George Cruikshank, a caricaturist who collaborated with Dickens on the novel.