Dickens and the Stenographic Mind by Hugo Bowles

Abstract

 Reviews sets up the timely and urgent ethical demand of open receptivity to the suffering of all creatures—human and non-human. N U E M Dickens and the Stenographic Mind. By H B. New York: Oxford University Press. . xvii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Dickens and the Stenographic Mind brings a linguistic perspective to the problem of sound and symbol in the work of Charles Dickens. Dickens’s ability to capture the sounds of speech has long been traced to his training in stenography, as phonographic training in recording language. Against this emphasis on sound, Hugo Bowles foregrounds spelling—or, more precisely, the relationship between the way a word sounds and how it is represented in writing. Bowles begins by pointing out that Dickens was biscriptal, ‘able to read and write in two graphic codes’ (p. ). Dickens learnt an alphabetical system of stenography that demanded that he be able to encrypt a word spoken aloud into a condensed representation of its written form, and then to decode his own notes back into English (thus, to write and read a second graphic code). Bowles argues persuasively that mastering this system helped Dickens develop unusual ways of processing language, a stenographic mind adept at ‘higher-order abilities of visualization and vocalization, which interacted with lower-order abilities such as the manipulation of letters and sounds to hypothesize possible words’ (p. ). ese skills are evident in the way Dickens ‘sets puzzles’ for readers, forcing them to decode new combinations of letters into familiar sounds (p. ). Dickens learnt stenography but also taught it, and developed a slightly idiosyncratic style that he continued to use later in life. e first three chapters of this book explain how Gurney shorthand (an alphabetic system), at the time Dickens learnt it, worked in comparison with its major competitor, Pitman shorthand (a phonographic system). What emerges is a vivid backdrop for Dickens’s play with sound and writing in his reporting, letters, and novels. ese mesmerizing chapters move between scholarly explication of the writing manuals and David Copper- field’s encounter with one, and between general rules of language use and specific examples of Dickens teaching shorthand. e focus of Dickens and the Stenographic Mind pivots at Chapter  from ‘what [Dickens] learned and how he learned it’ to show how, in the process of learning, ‘Dickens acquired the mindset of a puzzle solver by learning to encode and decode an unusually difficult shorthand system’ (p. ). is chapter begins a more speculative part of the book about the relation between cognition and creation. Here, the claims vary in scope, from specific claims supported by carefully chosen examples to broader conjectures made in passing. Chapter  gives historical context for Dickens’s court and parliamentary reporting to argue that he gained a more textured sense of different levels of reported speech. Entitled ‘PKWK’, Chapter  describes the variety of ways in which Dickens reshaped words in that novel, and connects those with habits of mind the Gurney system also demanded. MLR, .,   In Chapter , two things some of us thought we already understood—that Dickens’s work oen concerns the pedagogy of reading and writing, and that it oen calls attention to language as a baffling or misleading code—take on a new shape as Bowles pulls together some of the puzzles created by Dickens that are oen discussed in separate contexts, such as ‘Altro’ and Jenny’s riddle for Bradley Headstone in Little Dorrit, the letter from the lawyers to Esther Summerson, and Charley learning to read in Bleak House; Boffin’s semi-literacy in Our Mutual Friend, Jingle’s fractured speech, and  ,   from Pickwick; even Pip’s letter to Jo in Great Expectations. Sprinkled in among them are examples from Dickens’s correspondence, the Uncommercial Traveller, and e Haunted Man. For those who study texts with only a passive awareness that written language is an arbitrary method for encoding sound, this book is of special value as a careful study of the rules that govern another specific, shared code. Bowles ultimately develops in the reader what he calls us to recognize in Dickens: ‘a more sophisticated and transparent state of literacy and an...