Dickens's Shorthand Manuscripts

Dickens's shorthand manuscripts may be the only texts written by Dickens that have never been properly read. They have certainly been looked at, but have rarely been understood because the system of shorthand that Dickens used, Thomas Gurney's Brachygraphy, is now almost unreadable. This is not just because the shorthand was as difficult to understand as David Copperfield claimed it to be. It was also because Dickens altered the system for his pupils and personalized it for himself. In a clear attempt to turn it into a system that was more user-friendly, he made his shorthand unreadable to anyone but himself. This article will describe Dickens's shorthand manuscripts in detail and explore the changes that he himself made to the original Gurney script. It aims to shed light on how Dickens, like David Copperfield, faced up to the challenge of the "savage stenographic mystery" (535; ch. 43) both as a shorthand writer and a teacher of shorthand. It will also highlight the conceptual challenge that scholars face when trying to unravel the undeciphered items of his shorthand.

The shorthand manuscripts

There are currently eleven manuscripts of shorthand written by Dickens known to exist in museums, libraries and collections round the world, and their dates range from the 1830s until the late 1860s. Details of the manuscripts are set out in Table 1 below. The upper half of the table lists the items of shorthand for which the date of composition is not known and the lower half lists the remaining items in chronological order.

Table 1.

Items of Dickens's shorthand

The most substantial documents are the two teaching notebooks (items 1 and 9). The first, which will be referred to as the "Manchester notebook," is a 12 folio document in which Dickens has written notes on how the Gurney system should be used. This notebook is Dickens's personalized revision of the Gurney system. He may have written the notes in order to make the system more comprehensible to himself, or as a supplement to guidelines for pupils who were using the Gurney manual. The notes seem to be an attempt to set out the key points of Gurney's system and to iron out its complexities for teaching purposes. None of the shorthand in the Manchester notebook requires deciphering because the transcription is written alongside it in Dickens's hand.

The notebook of Arthur Stone¹ (item 9) is a set of booklets of approximately seventy pages, which mostly contain notes by Arthur, although there are three or four pages of characters and transcriptions by Dickens (see the section on "Arbitrary characters" below). The most interesting sections of the notebook are the six dictation exercises, which remain undeciphered. These exercises have been written in shorthand under six intriguing headings written in longhand ("Didactic," "Anecdote," "The Two Brothers," "Travelling," "Sydney Smith," and "Nelson"). Dickens and Arthur have written their own shorthand versions of each text. The source material for the "Sydney Smith" text has been identified as a section of Sydney Smith's Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy², but the sources for the five other texts remain a mystery.

Items 2 and 3 are one-page lists of Gurney's arbitrary characters, written in Dickens's hand. Sophie and Lucy Dickens, Charles's great great granddaughters, each inherited one page, which their father had originally bought at an auction of Dickens's memorabilia³. It is likely that these two pages were part of a six-page set that belonged to Charles's son, Henry. William Carlton writes that Henry Dickens "still treasures half a dozen leaves from a notebook prepared by his father [… They comprise the Gurney alphabet and a list of arbitrary characters with their signification."⁴ This six-page set of characters was probably used by Henry when he was being taught shorthand by his father in the 1860s.

Items 5, 6, 7 and 10 are business letters which have been transcribed, or whose longhand version has survived. Item 4 is a single sheet of shorthand for which there is no...