Dickens and the Stenographic Mind by Hugo Bowles (review)

In June 1858, Dickens corresponded with Francis Waugh, a young admirer, signing his letter to the boy in a characteristic way, by underscoring his signature with a sequence of diminishing lines penned from a single stroke–in this particular instance, seven switchbacks in bright blue ink. Dickens's flourish reveals his embrace of the superfluous–so his postscript to Waugh suggests: "Perhaps you'll wonder why I make that flourish. I don't know. I have not the least idea" (Letters 8: 593). As Daniel Tyler notes in his introduction to Dickens's Style (2013), the novelist seems to revel in what is unnecessary and excessive, his language taking on "a life of its own" as it "runs away with itself under its own impulses" (9). Or as George Orwell expressed the point in 1939, "the outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens's writing is the unnecessary detail" (qtd. Tyler 7).

In Dickens and the Stenographic Mind, Hugo Bowles presents us with a very different side of Dickens–the writer trained to elide and compress–as he worked "as a legal, parliamentary, and news reporter … between 1829 and 1834" (17). Far from reveling in excess, Dickens the shorthand writer was forced to capture speech economically, his stenographic art one in which "you … write more with less" (3). Following Thomas Gurney's principles as outlined in Brachygraphy or An Easy and Compendious System of Shorthand (his copy most likely the fifteenth edition, published in 1825), Dickens "squeeze[d] redundancy out of the writing system" (13). He did so, in part, by omitting vowels from words and using a code of symbols to represent alphabetic letters, which are themselves a code of speech sounds (20).

As Bowles explains, shorthand is "a substitution cipher," with "plaintext" replaced by "ciphertext" (21). The Gurney system provided symbols for each letter (or paired letters) of the alphabet–with each symbol also representing a specific word or set of words, most of them beginning with that alphabetical letter and "constructed around just four types of shape (dot, dash, curve, line), with the occasional small circle" (28). In addition, one set of arbitrary characters stood for "prepositions and terminations" and another for particular keywords or sets of keywords–in the second set, "g" for "govern," "governing," and "government," to cite one example (25). The writer abbreviated words before transcribing them into shorthand, generally dropping vowels unless they occurred at the start of words–for instance, "assault … to <aslt>" (22). Gurney was particularly difficult not only because some letters shared a symbol, because certain features of vowel coding were left to the discretion of the shorthand writer, and because consonant sounds can be spelt by more than one letter, leading to inconsistencies in representation–but also and more importantly because the system was based on spelling rather than pronunciation–on "letters rather than sounds" (24). Unlike Pitman, therefore, Gurney required two phases of encoding, as spoken words heard in court or in parliament were first changed into written words in the mind of the shorthand writer, and then into the stenographic code.

Despite the system's many difficulties, Dickens mastered it as a teenager, and Bowles explores the consequences of the writer's "acquired stenographic competence, the 'stenographic mind'" (4); he examines in considerable detail what Dickens learned from Gurney's system–the "experimentation" with language and syntax that it promoted (42)–and explains how the novelist made it his own, "personalizing" it "for the purposes of his own shorthand," altering the shapes of symbols and inventing his own arbitrary characters (40–41, 44–45)–and thus rendering some of his extant shorthand manuscripts virtually undecipherable to this day. Detailing the complexities of the stenographic process, Bowles underscores that it required both compression and expansion, as the stenographic writer faced the challenge of "translating" his own shorthand manuscripts into longhand–a process that required the writer, as shorthand reader, to play with language as he considered the linguistic variations and possibilities created by reinserting...