Stenographic literacy

The overall argument of the book is that the influence of Gurney shorthand on Dickens created a form of stenographic literacy (the stenographic mind) which he passed on to his readers. Section 8.1 of this concluding chapter introduces the ideas of foreignization and domestication and argues that Dickens’s stenographic mind enabled him to recalibrate the balance between the two and connect with a wider readership. Section 8.2 stresses how stenography helped Dickens exploit the pleasure of word play to motivate and enthuse his readers, while section 8.3 explains how this exploitation became a way to control his readers’ voices. Section 8.4 argues that the Gurney system, with its emphasis on the creative manipulations of vowels, constituted a pedagogy for reading spoken words and hearing written ones, which Dickens acquired at Doctors Commons and passed on to his readers in a learnable literary form.

The stenographic mind

This chapter brings together the descriptions and discussion in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 to summarize the main argument of the book. Drawing on Douglas-Fairhurst’s metaphor of the concertina, the chapter introduces the idea of the ‘stenographic mind’ as the consequence of the intensive mental operations involved in writing and reading Gurney shorthand. These operations include word games and language play (section 4.1), phonotactics (understanding what words are possible in a language) and redintegration (combining parts of words to produce a whole one) (section 4.2), visualization (section 4.3), and vocalization (section 4.4). The chapter argues that the cumulative effect of these operations was to produce a form of stenographic thinking which enabled Dickens to solve the mental puzzle of the Gurney shorthand script and control the relationship between stenographic writability and readability. This is argued to be a new form of literacy which strongly influenced Dickens’s writing practices.

The devil’s handwriting

This chapter provides a technical analysis of Brachygraphy, with a focus on the writing of shorthand. It begins with a description of Gurney’s symbols and arbitrary characters (section 2.1), drawing on Dickens’s teaching notebooks to highlight the complex memorization process involved (section 2.2). Section 2.3 explores Gurney’s bizarre rules for abbreviation and vowel reduction during the writing process, while section 2.4 describes the mental processes involved in taking down verbatim speech in Gurney shorthand and shows how, by comparison with the more economical Pitman system, the mental processing involved in writing Gurney shorthand was much more demanding on its users. Section 2.5 examines Dickens’s distinctive shorthand writing style by comparing it with that of his novice pupil Arthur Stone, while section 2.6 shows how Dickens used creative shortcuts and graphic alterations to change the Gurney system to one that was easier both to write and to teach.

Reporting

This chapter examines Dickens’s use of shorthand as a law reporter at Doctors Commons, in the Gallery of Parliament and as a journalist. It describes the culture of reporting in each environment (section 5.1), particularly the notions of ‘faithful’ and ‘verbatim’ reporting (section 5.2). It also draws on Dickens’s Jarman v Bagster manuscript and a Mirror of Parliament report to assess his accuracy as a reporter (section 5.3). The chapter then addresses Dickens’s role as a court reporter in relation to his fiction. Drawing on Levinson’s ‘participation roles’ and Goffman’s ‘production format’, section 5.4 argues that the practice of shorthand reporting enabled Dickens to transcribe the words of unseen witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants into the fictional words of unseen characters by developing his technical skill in reporting speech and his ability to manipulate ‘voicing’ to control readers’ vocalizations of his fictional work, particularly through variations in phonetic speech.

Gurney and Sons

Dickens learned shorthand in 1828 from a manual called Brachygraphy, written by Thomas Gurney, which he memorably describes in David Copperfield as a ‘savage stenographic mystery’. This chapter contextualizes the mystery by placing Gurney shorthand in its historical context, as one of many competing alphabetical shorthand systems in the Victorian period. Section 1.1 of the chapter traces the chronological development of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century stenographies and contrasts the alphabetical design, structure, and contents of Brachygraphy with the phonographic system of Isaac Pitman, which came to dominate the nineteenth-century market. Section 1.2 sets out the principles of economy in speech and writing which constrained stenographers in the design of their systems. Section 1.3 examines the surviving shorthand texts that Dickens produced. It also introduces Dickens’s ‘Manchester notebook’, showing how his shorthand teaching notes sought to iron out defects in the Gurney system and provide creative alternatives.

Epilogue

At Gadshill at Christmas time we had a great deal of nonsense, for that dear man had the greatest delight in nonsense that ever existed. Marcus Stone1 1 Collins, II, 186. The summer of 1860 was as full of stressful events for Dickens as 1859 had been. In mid-July, his favourite daughter Katey married Charles Collins, the son of Wilkie Collins. By his own account, Dickens made the required arrangements for a successful wedding, but disapproved strongly of the marriage....

PKWK

This chapter explores the impact of Dickens’s shorthand reading and writing habits on his well-known representations of dialect in Pickwick. It introduces the main literary techniques used by nineteenth-century writers in their representations of dialect (section 6.1) and explores Dickens’s use of non-standard orthography in his representations of the speech of the Pickwickians (section 6.2). These deviant spellings are analysed in terms of allegro speech and eye dialect (section 6.3) and semi-phonetic speech (section 6.4). Section 6.5 examines how, in his deviant manipulation of spelling, Dickens uses rules that he learned from the Gurney shorthand system. These are summarized in Table 6.2 (section 6.6). The argument made in the chapter is that learning the Gurney system made it easier for Dickens to visualize and construct non-standard spellings and gave him the mental flexibility to find a variety of orthographic solutions to complex phonetic problems.

Despotic reading

This chapter focuses on the reading of the ‘despotic’ Gurney script, which was so different from the Roman script that Dickens was used to decoding (section 3.1). It explores how Dickens was able to emerge from his initial state of bewilderment, described in David Copperfield as a ‘sea of perplexity’, by training himself in visualizing its character shapes (section 3.2), sounding out the missing vowel sounds in the Gurney script (section 3.3), and inferencing their meaning (section 3.4). The process of decoding Gurney is then compared to episodes from Dickens’s own childhood reading at home and at school (section 3.5). The chapter argues that the Gurney system’s extra level of coding, which involved the graphic representation of letters rather than sounds, drastically diminished its learnability. Dickens’s undeciphered shorthand letters are used to illustrate these difficulties.

Prologue

… it is highly desirable—above all things—that you should now get to the Short Hand. If you can begin with me here at 10 tomorrow morning, do. Letter to Arthur Stone, 20 November 18591 1 Letters, IX, 173. On 18 November 1859, Charles Dickens met the illustrator Frank Stone in Tavistock Square. Frank, his friend and neighbour, was suffering from a heart condition. After he had ‘walked about with him for a little while at a snail’s pace, cheering him up’,...

Plays of the pen

This chapter explores representations of shorthand in Dickens’s life and work, providing examples of stylistic areas that were influenced by his shorthand learning. These include his use of consonant clusters to obtain phonaesthetic effects in character names (section 7.1), reported speech in Doctors Commons (section 7.2), stenographic direct speech in Bleak House and Little Dorrit (section 7.3), the construction of verbal puzzles in Pickwick, Great Expectations, All the Year Round, and the Uncommercial Traveller (section 7.4), and stenographic episodes of reading and writing in Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, The Haunted Man, and Bleak House (section 7.5). The last two sections hypothesize that Dickens may even have adopted a stenographic perspective in the construction of plot (section 7.6) and of his own identity as an author (section 7.7). The chapter argues that the stenographic representations pervading Dickens’s work directly reflect his experience of learning and using shorthand.