Overview

Initially described by Dickens as a 'savage stenographic mystery', shorthand was to become an essential and influential part of his toolkit as a writer. In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study, Hugo Bowles tells the story of Dickens's stenographic journey from his early encounters with the 'despotic' shorthand symbols of Gurney's Brachygraphy in 1828 to his lifelong commitment to shorthand for reporting, letter writing, copying, and note-taking. Drawing on empirical evidence from Dickens's shorthand notebooks, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind forensically explores Dickens's unique ability to write in two graphic codes, offering an original critique of the impact of shorthand on Dickens's mental processing of language. The author uses insights from morphology, phonetics, and the psychology of reading to show how Dickens's biscriptal habits created a unique stenographic mindset that was then translated into novel forms of creative writing. The volume argues that these new scriptal arrangements, which include phonetic speech, stenographic patterns of letters in individual words, phonaesthemes, and literary representations of shorthand-related acts of reading and writing, created reading puzzles that bound Dickens and his readers together in a new form of stenographic literacy. Clearly written and cogently argued, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind not only opens up new evidence from a little known area of Dickens's professional life to expert scrutiny, but is highly relevant to a number of important debates in Victorian studies including orality and literacy in the nineteenth century, the role of voice and voicing in Dickens's writing process, his relationship with his readers, and his various writing personae as law reporter, sketch-writer, journalist, and novelist.

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9780198829072

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Reviews

A very original and in many places ground-breaking piece of research; it explores an area of Dickens's professional life that has often been either ignored or skirted around, offering a series of well-grounded suggestions as to the areas and extent of impact of the 'stenographic mind' on Dickens's methods of composition and creativity with language. * John Drew, Professor of English Literature, University of Buckingham * This work breaks new ground both about Dickens's life and his works insofar as his acquiring an understanding and practice of shorthand writing is concerned. It illuminates many passages in Dickens's writing that have gone unnoticed, and supplies a fresh and complete analysis of David Copperfield's recorded struggle to master the practice. It is well written - necessarily dense in explicating Gurney's system, clear and persuasive in expounding its implications about hearing, speaking, and reading as well as writing. * Robert L. Patten, Senior Research Scholar, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London *

Dickens and the Stenographic Mind makes a significant contribution to Dickens scholarship. While it proves a fairly technical and challenging book to read, it illuminates an aspect of Dickens's life that hasn't been considered in nearly enough detail ... Bowles generously invites us to use his research to illuminate the novelist's work more fully - an invitation we would be wise to accept, with thanks. * Lillian Nayder, Dickens Quarterly * succeed[s] in debunking a criticism often levelled at Dickens studies: that there is nothing new to say. On the contrary, by asking that we engage with Dickens's works with a view to stenographic inspiration and material afterlives, these studies both offer fresh approaches and reveal just how much work remains to be done. * Katie Holdway, Victorian Periodicals Review * This work breaks new ground both about Dickens's life and his works insofar as his acquiring an understanding and practice of shorthand writing is concerned. It illuminates many passages in Dickens's writing that have gone unnoticed, and supplies a fresh and complete analysis of David Copperfield's recorded struggle to master the practice. It is well written - necessarily dense in explicating Gurney's system, clear and persuasive in expounding its implications about hearing, speaking, and reading as well as writing. * Robert L. Patten, Senior Research Scholar, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London * A very original and in many places ground-breaking piece of research; it explores an area of Dickens's professional life that has often been either ignored or skirted around, offering a series of well-grounded suggestions as to the areas and extent of impact of the 'stenographic mind' on Dickens's methods of composition and creativity with language. * John Drew, Professor of English Literature, University of Buckingham *

This exciting suggestion is one that I hope Bowles will pursue on a larger scale in a later work. * John Glavin, Georgetown University, VICTORIAN STUDIES * Dickens and the Stenographic Mind makes a significant contribution to Dickens scholarship. While it proves a fairly technical and challenging book to read, it illuminates an aspect of Dickens's life that hasn't been considered in nearly enough detail ... Bowles generously invites us to use his research to illuminate the novelist's work more fully — an invitation we would be wise to accept, with thanks. * Lillian Nayder, Dickens Quarterly * succeed[s] in debunking a criticism often levelled at Dickens studies: that there is nothing new to say. On the contrary, by asking that we engage with Dickens's works with a view to stenographic inspiration and material afterlives, these studies both offer fresh approaches and reveal just how much work remains to be done. * Katie Holdway, Victorian Periodicals Review * This work breaks new ground both about Dickens's life and his works insofar as his acquiring an understanding and practice of shorthand writing is concerned. It illuminates many passages in Dickens's writing that have gone unnoticed, and supplies a fresh and complete analysis of David Copperfield's recorded struggle to master the practice. It is well written - necessarily dense in explicating Gurney's system, clear and persuasive in expounding its implications about hearing, speaking, and reading as well as writing. * Robert L. Patten, Senior Research Scholar, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London * A very original and in many places ground-breaking piece of research; it explores an area of Dickens's professional life that has often been either ignored or skirted around, offering a series of well-grounded suggestions as to the areas and extent of impact of the 'stenographic mind' on Dickens's methods of composition and creativity with language. * John Drew, Professor of English Literature, University of Buckingham *

A very original and in many places ground-breaking piece of research; it explores an area of Dickens's professional life that has often been either ignored or skirted around, offering a series of well-grounded suggestions as to the areas and extent of impact of the 'stenographic mind' on Dickens's methods of composition and creativity with language. * John Drew, Professor of English Literature, University of Buckingham * This work breaks new ground both about Dickens's life and his works insofar as his acquiring an understanding and practice of shorthand writing is concerned. It illuminates many passages in Dickens's writing that have gone unnoticed, and supplies a fresh and complete analysis of David Copperfield's recorded struggle to master the practice. It is well written - necessarily dense in explicating Gurney's system, clear and persuasive in expounding its implications about hearing, speaking, and reading as well as writing. * Robert L. Patten, Senior Research Scholar, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London * succeed[s] in debunking a criticism often levelled at Dickens studies: that there is nothing new to say. On the contrary, by asking that we engage with Dickens's works with a view to stenographic inspiration and material afterlives, these studies both offer fresh approaches and reveal just how much work remains to be done. * Katie Holdway, Victorian Periodicals Review * Dickens and the Stenographic Mind makes a significant contribution to Dickens scholarship. While it proves a fairly technical and challenging book to read, it illuminates an aspect of Dickens's life that hasn't been considered in nearly enough detail ... Bowles generously invites us to use his research to illuminate the novelist's work more fully - an invitation we would be wise to accept, with thanks. * Lillian Nayder, Dickens Quarterly *

Author Information

Hugo Bowles is professor of English at the University of Foggia in southern Italy and publishes in applied linguistics and language education. His recent work focuses on stylistics and linguistic approaches to literature and his monograph Storytelling and Drama: Exploring narrative episodes in plays, published by John Benjamin in 2010, was awarded the 2012 Book Prize for Linguistics by the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE).

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