The Dickens Code: with Hugo Bowles & Claire Wood

In this bumper episode Dominic is joined by the brilliant Prof. Hugo Bowles from Italy's University of Foggia and welcomes back to the series the inimitable Dr. Claire Wood.

Together they take the listener on journey inside THE DICKENS CODE: a project that seeks to crack the code of Dickens' unique form of shorthand, and decipher the author's hidden messages from 150 years ago ...

To book for Dominic's GHOSTS AND MURDER live stream on Monday 31st October - which includes readings of Sikes & Nancy, The Dead Hand,The Signalman  plus a live Q&A with Dr. Claire Wood - click here: https://dickensmuseum.com/blogs/all-events/ghosts-murder

You can watch wherever you are in the world!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:16

Hi everyone. I'm imagining an old drawing of a face. It has a stern expression, furrowed brow and piercing eyes. It may be sporting a handlebar moustache or a top hat with stars on it. At shoulder level, a hand is pressing forward, its forefinger pointing towards its target. In large letters above the head, and this is where the image might differ from what you expect. There is a caption which reads, The Dickens Code wants you, the listener, to join a volunteer army of codebreakers. On Christmas Eve, in 2021, an appeal went out to the public to try and help researchers decipher a letter that Dickens had written in his own unique form of shorthand. The response was overwhelming. Now, 70% of this Taverstock letter can be read, and only this week another breakthrough has been made. But there are more Dickens texts out there with strange alien symbols that remain a mystery. Here to talk to us about the Dickens Code, are its co-founders, Professor Hugo Bowles and Dr. Claire Wood. Hugo teaches forensic linguistics at Italy's University of Foggia and is also the author of Dickens and the Stenographic Mind for Oxford University Press. He has also been a fan of Dickens since he was a schoolboy. And Claire, who you will have met before if you listened to our old Curiosity Shop episode, joins us again from the University of Leicester, where she lectures in Victorian literature. She is also the secretary of the Dickens Society, and her book, Dickens and the Business of Death, was published by Cambridge University Press. Hugo, hello. Hello, Dominic. Thanks for inviting me along. No, it's lovely to meet you for the first time. And Claire, hello.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

What a pleasure it is to be back, Dominic. Hi.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

It seems like only yesterday we're talking about Little Nell. And it's not funny. So you're both here because you are founders of the Dickens Code project. For those of us that don't know much about it, what is it?

SPEAKER_00 2:30

So I think essentially the project is an arts and humanities research council funded collaboration between the University of Leicester, where I'm based, and the University of Fogger in Italy, where Hugo is based. But it's not just a collaboration between us, it's a collaboration with a whole network of academics working in different universities and in different disciplinary fields. And I think most importantly of all, it's a collaboration with members of the public. And together we're all seeking solutions to Charles Dickens's mysterious shorthand writing, which for various reasons is a more difficult, tricky task to unravel than you might expect.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

The other thing we're doing is we're creating a kind of a mind experience. Because you know, when like you go on a walking tour of Dickensian London, you know, tourists get taken around to look at all the places where Dickens was, and you go through all the streets and go to St. Paul's and go to all these places. And in a way, what we're doing is we're trying to give people a mental experience, like the experience of doing something that Dickens actually did, which was learn shorthand. And we're giving them the exact system that he used and that he learned when he was 16 years old. Uh maybe 16, 17 years old. And it's a new experience, but it's a real one. It's a real one, and it's it's helping, of course, to decipher the shorthand.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

Why did Dickens use shorthand throughout his life? What were his main reasons for doing it?

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Right. The same reasons that people use shorthand generally, I would have thought. The manuscripts we've got, there's lots of different manuscripts. Well, not lots, but there's different types of manuscripts. So we've got things like a scribble on a diary, various business letters. He kept a copy of one of his of the chimes. We know that. We haven't got the copy, but he did copy down his work. So shorthand was used really for making drafts of things and making copies of things. Um and it was an everyday experience, like it was for many, many people in the 19th century and indeed in the 20th century.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

And maybe just to go a little bit into the specific impetus for Dickens choosing to go and learn shorthand, I think this is a great part of the Dickens story. It's a real part of his mythology. Um, we think he learned the shorthand in about 1828, 1829. So he's a teenager, he's around 16. And he was working in the office of a solicitor. And I don't know, he uses some roundabout phrase, like he says, I didn't much like it in this letter to Wilkie Collins. So something, something like that. Um, I always think of those office boy kind of characters in his fiction. You know, in Our Mutual Friend, where you've got young Blight, this office boy who is starved of anything to do, who's bored out of his mind because his boss doesn't have any clients, and ends up endlessly just cycling through different names, so working through the alphabet. I think he, what does he say? His list, Mr. Maggs, Mr. Bags, Mr. Kaggs, Mr. Daggs, Mr. Faggs, Mr. Gaggs, and Mr. Boffin. So he's bored out of his mind and he's just left with his imaginative resources too to fill in the time. And I've always thought that young Blight is a bit of an avatar, really, for young Dickens, stuck in that poorly paying office job. It's probably not terribly stimulating. And and shorthand, I think, is is a bit of a way out for Dickens. It's a tool of social mobility. It's a way for him to get better paid, more interesting work as a court and parliamentary reporter. So it's a bit of an escape route, I think. And it's putting that imagination, it's putting that kind of mental faculty that's being severely underused to better use, I'd say.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Sorry, Claire, this isn't the old curiosity shop part two. But you mentioning, you mentioning our mutual friend. Of course, our friend Dick Swiveler going to work for the brasses, having not knowing what the hell to do, writing his name lots of times on a piece of paper whilst whistling. I just thought we never touched on that one.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Another underemployed kind of clerk there, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

But is it, I mean, is it a case of its convenience, isn't it? Is it so that you can write at the speed of your thoughts if you haven't, if you're under pressure or if you're is it that as well? Is that a key like with texting today, that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Yeah, so it's doing a few things really. We've got to think, I think we're so embedded now in the internet age where your inbox is keeping a record of every message that's coming in and every message that's going out. We're so used to not having to do the hard labor of copying things out. And maybe sometimes what we forget about the Victorian age is if you want a copy of something once you've sent it off, you need to manually make a copy. So shorthand is a great tool for that. And if you want to record things, really important things like parliamentary debates, verbatim, you know, the technology isn't there. You don't have your mobile phone, you don't have your dictophone. There's got to be a way of capturing the human voice, verbatim, getting those important debates down, and shorthand is is the way to do it really.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

And in the early 19th century, that was that was all starting off. There was this big drive for recording, recording, getting the the spoken word written down. And and before then, that people weren't really much interested in that. So there was no need for really recording things. But then people started to think parliament has to be taken seriously, our law courts have to be taken seriously, we've got to get it all written down. And so people were looking for efficient systems and ways of doing that.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

There's no way to record audio, then, is there? Of course, obviously. So that's the way you do it. How did you two both link up to create this project? Do you use shorthand yourselves in your own work?

SPEAKER_01 8:09

I certainly didn't. I mean, I I was, I mean, initially my mum was a secretary, and she, when I was a little boy, I would remember seeing shorthand, bits of shorthand, lying around the house. And I always thought that was very interesting. I'd look at them and say, What does that say? What's that? And she would say, potatoes. You know, it was a shopping list. And it was just an everyday, because this is the kind of the everyday shorthand, and and people used it. And I remember thinking that was very cool that my mum could could write in code, you know, and I told all my friends, and you know, this is isn't this amazing? And it was it's the everyday thing. So I always I've always had that in my mind. And I was I'm a linguist, so I wasn't, I'm not a Dickens scholar like Claire is. So I'm uh I'm just a fan like you, Dominic. I think I'm just I was a Dickens fan. But I I was studying legal language and I was interested in Dickens's how he he was able to imitate these so brilliantly, these legal styles of of speech and bureaucratic style. And um I wrote the book, really. I wrote a book about Dickens's use of his shorthand.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

Dickens and the stenographic mind?

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Is that that's right.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

Well, even that title is really intriguing to me, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Well, because of your brain, you see, your brain, we're gonna we're gonna we maybe come to that later on, the brain fire, but it was the stenographic brain, stenographic mind. And I'd written the book, or I'd finish, I was finishing it off, but there was still a huge hole. And the hole is really that even though we know about the shorthand, and you can say a lot of things about how it influenced Dickens's life and work, we still couldn't decipher it, you know, and that really bugged me. You know, the fact that we we know about it, and here we are in the 2000s, and we still, after 150 years, we've got these manuscripts that nobody can read. Dickens' text that hasn't been read for 150 years. And so I thought, well, you know, maybe we can put our heads together with more people putting their minds to it. We can we can decipher this, these manuscripts. And I went to a conference in York to to to talk about it. And and so I was interested in a kind of follow-up project on deciphering. And I met Claire on the bus. And and Claire would knew about public engagement. So, Claire, what about you know, you were you had also done public engagement?

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Yeah, so this was actually before I got the job at Leicester, and I was working in public engagement, which is a profession in which you help researchers, you help academics to be able to share their work with um much wider public audiences. And Hugo was doing this amazing work, and when he said that he's undeciphered Dickens material, with both hats on as a Dickensian and the public engagement expert, I thought this is the most amazing hook, the opportunity to read, never before read Dickens. Oh my goodness, what could be in these notebooks? And secondly, to involve members of the public in a genuine collaborative partnership in helping us to find these answers. So, really thinking about flipping this relationship between uh academic expertise and the public, because in many ways the Dickens decoders, the members of the public, they are the experts here. They are the ones who are brilliant at word puzzles and deciphering and putting all of this stuff together. So it's all about um the public and the academics working hand in hand, really.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

Well, I mean, and this is this is amazing, isn't it? And and also this is not this is not your standard conversation between two people that meet one on a bus, is it, is it? That's amazing. I I understand that Dickens modified the shorthand. He did his own symbols, which is why there's a code to crack. How did that come about?

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Well, the code, the problem there is that the system itself is really hard. And then Dickens changed it, and that makes it doubly hard. So that's where everything gets very interesting. So, really, when talking about the system, first of all, I think it was an old system called brachygraphy. Um, and even when Dickens was using it and started learning it in 1828, it was already almost a hundred years old. So it really is, it goes back into the 18th century. And it was invented by a man called Thomas Gurney, but it was actually no, it wasn't invented. It wasn't invented by him at all because he actually copied it most of it from other people, like you did in like you did really, because shorthand is really a bit like language learning. Nobody really knows what the optimum system is, so everybody thinks that they their system is better, and and so that's why there are lots of different systems. Like if you want to learn a language online or something, there's all these different methods you can use. None of them is any better than the other one, really. And that's what that's what it was like in the 19th century. There were all these, maybe you know, 30 or 40 different systems to choose from, and you just sort of pick one off the shelf and and tried it. So that was the kind of the situation that Dickens was in. And he bought this system. He said it cost him 10 and sixpence, which was actually a lot of a heck of a lot of money. That's a big investment. It's like, I think, I'm not sure, it might be about 100 pounds or something like that, the equivalent. I haven't actually checked that, but so maybe someone will. So that's a pretty significant investment to make, even though you're and you're being so you're teaching yourself. It was a self-teaching system, you have to do it on your own. And the system itself, it's a load of symbols you've got to learn. Okay. There's three types of shape: there's straight lines, circles, and little hooks. And the system is an alphabetical system, which means that these symbols stand for letters. You know, a shape will stand for a letter, and the letters are mostly consonants. Okay, so it's your burker consonants. So, for example, a vertical line will stand for the letter T, and a short horizontal line will stand for the letter N. So that's your basic outfit. You have a basic alphabet, and then you get a load of other symbols called arbitrary characters, which Dickens actually writes about in David Copperfield. Um, he calls them despotic characters. And there are 72 of these characters, and they stand for words mostly, or bits of words, like a word like after will have its own character. So you have to memorize all these characters really. You've got 72 of these to memorize as well. And the other key thing about the system is that you don't use vowels. So, for example, if you're writing a word like bit, B-I-T, you wouldn't write B, let the symbol for B, the symbol for I, the symbol for T. You just leave out the I. So you'd write the symbol for B and the symbol for T. So you get B T on the page in symbolic form. And that's okay. I mean, that's that makes sense because vowels don't carry any information about a word. This is what we do in text messages. Like we write tomorrow TMRW, and you still recognize it as tomorrow. We just take out the vowels. So it's like, as you were saying at the beginning, Dominic, it's a bit like text messaging in symbolic form. So you've got to take out the vowels, turn it into a symbol, and write it down. Is that right, Claire? Have I got it? Is that sort of more or less?

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Yeah, I would say I would just add a couple of things. When you look at this alphabet table, you immediately start to spot some of the difficulties in that identical um symbols like the dash, the oblique, is is being used for more than one letter. So already we've got a problem there. And sometimes you have a symbol that already stands for two or even three letters. And I mean, that is okay when you are the shorthand writer. If anyone out there has got messy handwriting, you'll know if you're writing up your own notes, generally you can read them back because you can remember in your own mind, oh yeah, I sort of remember this is where I was when I was doing it, and this is what it was about, and I can read the words around it, and I can probably work out that middle one. Okay. So for the shorthand writer, they're reading it back and they're thinking, oh yeah, I've got the gist of this, and so and so was saying such and such. Fine, okay. But then for the decoders coming to this more than 150 years later, we don't have those context clues. We're starting from scratch, basically. And so all of those possibilities are in the mix. When it stands for three different letters, all of those three different letters need to be considered when you're coming up with your interpretation of a particular glyph. What Hugo is saying about missing the vowels out. Well, that means that so many words have got multiple um interpretations, multiple possibilities, even relatively simple or short words like bad, the A is missing, we've just got B D. Think of how many different kinds of possibilities there are just from two consonant symbols on the page.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Come on, it like the BT, okay. I was writing down how many words can you make out of Bt? Does it start? Have a go. But boot. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

Bot would be a contemporary one, wouldn't it? Yes. Bit. Yes. Bet is that six?

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Yeah, that's loads. You can you can also go bait, bite, bort, boat. Oh, of course, because you have the ones after the T as well.

SPEAKER_02 17:32

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

And you can stick plurals in, and that would all be the same symbol. So you can see the problem when you're reading back. The problem isn't so much the writing, it's the reading, because you've got you've just got two little consonants there, and you've got to construct words out. It's like playing Scrabble in your head or something, like, or Wordle. You know, do you I don't know if you play Wordle on the online on the New York Times.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

I'm probably the only person left on the planet who hasn't played Wordle because I just see other people doing it. I'm just feeling cross with it still. I know I will eventually really enjoy it, but for some reason I'm choosing to be a Luddite.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

And your listeners, your listeners who have played Wordle will understand this problem that we're talking about because it's about filling in gaps with consonants and vowels and possible words. It's kind of making possible words out of little bits of words, really. And that's what Dickens became really good at by learning shorthand. He spent three years putting vowels into words instead of going bit, bat, bat, bot, bait, bite, bot, boat, to try and find the right word that he was transcribing. Sounds complicated, but it's uh the difficult mechanism is that.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

And with the breakthroughs that you're making, I mean, how much text you're aware of is there still to be deciphered?

SPEAKER_01 18:50

How much is there left? We've got little letters have been done almost completely. Um, the Talistock letter, which our brilliant transcribers did, we got 70% of that letter, which is amazing, which is an amazing result. There's a notebook by one of Dickens's pupils, Arthur Stone, which has got about 60 pages, and we're working our way through that. So there is still a lot to do.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Do you have any kind of software to kind of log these symbols like a kind of Enigma machine of some sort?

SPEAKER_00 19:20

At the University of Leicester, we're working with some really talented um colleagues, Professor Zhou and Xin Yu Yang, who are building a neural network. So this is using um deep learning technology, AI essentially, to build up a data set of the Dicking shorthand symbols and to see whether the computer can assist us with making any predictions about the stuff in the manuscripts. Um it's interesting because some of the challenges for the human decoder and for the computer are the same. There's some in which the human decoders definitely have the advantage, like this interpretation of a dot that sometimes appears after a symbol that could be indicating a vowel sound at the end of the word, or it could be a completely separate word. And humans are quite good at judging, you know, whether this belongs with that or whether it's something on its own. Whereas the computer currently still struggles a bit on deciding where those dots belong or even what line they they should be in.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

Yes, I just wondered if um say if you were using software, if you had the complete works of Dickens or his letters as well as his novels, whether there are turns of phrase that you know an algorithm could pick up and then see in the code itself. I don't know. I wonder.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

I certainly think that could be helpful, perhaps in uh a further stage of this neural network, a a kind of sense of Dickens's own uses of language. At the moment, we're still at this early stage in which we're we're building the data set, we're trying to train the neural network to understand the rules of brachiography and use them interpreting and predicting in simple ways. Um, but I think that would add another, another layer, really. It's certainly something we've done as human decoders. We've sometimes come up with a phrase in one of the stories. Dickens uh uses this word appearance for a ghost. And we thought, that seems weird. Why isn't it apparition? Shouldn't it be apparition? Uh, but then we found he had used appearance for uh ghosts in in other stories. So we thought, okay, well, actually, this usage seems to be correct. The interpretation is probably right.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

Yeah. So obviously I can understand that if he's in parliament and he's wanting to get verbatim quickly, everything down. But does he ever use his own special symbols in a way that he would share with another person, Ellen Ternan or something? Did he write secret letters to people that only they would understand out?

SPEAKER_01 21:52

That's a really interesting question, Dorinic, about the secrecy, because that's the other side of shorthand, which is that it's either completely transparent and you're recording every single word that someone has said for public consumption, like a parliament or law court. And then it's got this secret side, as you're saying. And that this is what used to happen in the in the sort of 16th, 17th centuries, where people would keep diaries in shorthand. And go and kind of record sermons and copy other people's work secretly in shorthand. But we haven't got any secret manuscripts. All the manuscripts we have so far are all like business letters and so on. I mean, he could certainly have done that, but I'm not sure that Ellen Ternan would have been able to read it. It's a question of who's going to read it in the end. And the problem with Dickens' shorthand is that it seems to me, and maybe also to our transcribers, to be readable only to himself in a way, because he's changed the system, which means that, of course, that the manuscripts that we get are idiosyncratic. In other words, they don't really follow the original Gurney system. Sometimes we just come to a symbol and you have no idea what it is. So you think, well, this is something that Dickens has invented himself. And he did invent, you know, he invented his own symbols and his own way of doing things. So it's a it's a mystery within a mystery, if you like. And that's part of the intrigue of the whole thing. But he I don't think he was passing messages to other people. I think he did write notes to himself. On his pocket diary, there's a little scribble in shorthand, which is a quote from one of his novels, a quote that he wanted to use in a speech that he was going to give later on that week. And he wrote it down on the diary to remind himself to use it, as it were. So it's a kind of personal thing, I think. Shorthand was quite a personal thing for Dickens. Sometimes he writes it really, just really badly. And Dickens calls it, he actually calls it the devil's handwriting. There's a quote from somebody who'd talked to Dickens, and he noticed that Dickens was scribbling something down in the middle of a conversation. And he noticed that he was scribbling down in shorthand. So it was obviously something that he'd heard in the conversation or something. And he says, Yes, Mr. Dickens used to tell me that it was the devil's handwriting. So there is this kind of sinister side to it all, and the secret side, I think, in the word devil's handwriting. It's a nice metaphor.

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Well, just taking the word stenographic and thinking that shorthand doesn't just apply to that one system, does it? That actually it's a way of seeing symbols and conveying meaning through symbols. Um I'm just thinking in the notes that we've got here about Pip's letter to Joe when he's a little boy.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Absolutely. That's how Dickens it made him almost obsessed with shapes of letters and acts of reading and writing. When Claire mentioned this in your wonderful podcast on Old Curiosity Shop, when Nell is teaching Kit to read, Dickens is his work is full of this kind of image of people reading and writing, and a very, very close description of how they write the words, how the shapes of words and what they look like, um, like the Charlie Neckett in Bleak House, which is a wonderful description.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

Yeah, I'm just thinking too there on Bleak House of Crook, right? And writing those letters, which are in some way quite similar to shorthand symbols, the way he's putting one onto the wall and then erasing it. And it is, Hugo, exactly like you're saying, that obsession with the individual letter and the word and a kind of playfulness and ability to manipulate or or reorder or or reshape language. I think that's part of what the early shorthand training is doing for Dickens.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

We're at the beginning of gross expectations when Pip is looking at the gravestones, and he imagines the characters of people using the letter shapes on the gravestone. So he's looking at the shapes of the letters on the gravestone and imagining that this person is, I can't remember the actual descriptions, but he imagines what his mum has freckles or something.

SPEAKER_02 26:03

Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 26:03

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

That's right. So he imagines them just from looking at the shapes of the letters on the gravestones.

SPEAKER_02 26:09

Hearing you say this, it's almost as if, in some respects, the shorthand is a bridge between straight text that you read in a novel to something very physical. It's sort of more elaborate in a way, perhaps. Or just the fact of using shorthand makes you see language and letters in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

That's what it is. It's I agree with you there. I think it's the fact of learning shorthand is what made Dickens particularly. But I think anyone who has done that kind of thing, it gives you almost a technical ability to manipulate letters and words to create particular effects. So it became kind of natural for Dickens to spell the same word in different ways. So that's why I think that Dickens was very good at phonetic spelling, for example, when he's writing accents. He's when he's imitating an accent on the page, as it were. It's like Sam Weller, the great Cockney. Um, he's got to write Cockney, which is difficult. Writing an accent is difficult because you can imitate an accent. I mean, you're an actor, Dominic. So can you imitate? Are you good at accents? Do you do a meme Oh give it a go? Well, Dickens, Dickens was good at imitating, um, but that's not enough for yeah. When you've got to get it on the page, that's actually quite difficult to put an accent on the page. It's a real skill. Let's take an example of Samuela. The word widow, okay, a cockney would say widder. Now he's got to spell that out, and he spelt it W-I-D-D-E-R, which is good because it means as you read it, you can't read it any other way except widder. You know, if he'd spelt it W I D E R, we would with one D, we'd have read it as wider, which isn't right. So he's this is what Dickens is very good at. He makes it very easy for readers, his readers, to read Cockney, which is fun. You know, when you when you've got a bat a funnily spelt word and you try and read it out, and you say widder, that's kind of fun, isn't it? Because you've seen a word written differently, but it's still that word. Other writers do it. Thomas Hardy does it for the Dorset accent, Emily Bronte and the Yorkshire accent. But when they do it, it's quite hard to read it. The Dorset descriptions in Hardy is actually quite hard sometimes. And actually, Charlotte Bronte corrected Emily Bronte's depiction of accents in phonetic speech because he says people don't understand it. You've got to make it a bit more simple. But by making it simpler, you make it less accurate, you know. So then you've always got that problem. But Dickens is just brilliant at making an accent. You put you he puts it on the page and you can read it, read it off straight away, and you become a cockney. That's part of the appeal. You know, someone like Sam Weller became a very famous character. And part of that is the way that Dickens just put his voice on the page.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

Yeah, you you saying that reminds me that the number of times I think Dickens has written Cockney characters speaking whenever they have an R, it's a W. Yeah. The weak R. And I wonder whether actually in some ways he's actually transcribing, recording in the only way he can, accents from that time as well, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

That's right. We don't exactly know how people pronounce things in the early 19th century, but that is a well-documented, the VW shift is quite well documented. And he was, he wrote that down. That's exactly right. Yeah. We were talking about what it did to him. Um the ability to manipulate letters, and also his his obsession. I mean, I think it it produced his obsession with with consonants and consonant clusters, especially in surnames like um TR, okay, a consonant cluster like tr, okay, which is um, because he's been crunching everything up into consonants for three years in his Gurney training, he becomes it, but they become imprinted in him, I think. So you've got his characters tradles, Trab, Trent, Trotter, Trotwood, you know, why all these consonant clusters with people? Uh, you know, K C R, Crag, or Kra, Krag, Creekle, Cratchit, Chris Barkle, Crummels, Cruncher, Crook. You know, you can go, you can go on and on. And this is to do with him squashing up the words, uh, getting rid of the vowels, and having an overdose, an overdose of consonants in his brain. I mean, I'm I'm really simplifying here, but that's what I think happens is you when you do something a lot, it becomes natural for you and spontaneous to produce this stuff. And he was just brilliant at it, you know, absolutely brilliant at it.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

I've written down, because you mentioned about coming back to it, Arthur Stone's notebook. What's this about?

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Arthur Stone's notebook is the main body of material that had never previously been deciphered. It's at the Free Library of Philadelphia. We've been able to digitize the whole lot as part of this project. And it's over a series of uh individual kind of bound booklets. Sometimes you have kind of 15 pages or so, don't you have continuous shorthand writing? Sometimes there's big gaps. There appear to be two hands in these booklets. We think it's most likely to be Dickens and then Arthur Stone's version of exercises, but there are a number of kind of uncertainties here that we are still really plumbing the depths of. And I think the the focus for us over this last year in the Dickens decoders has been the series of shorthand dictation exercises with these beautifully evocative titles. So Sidney Smith, traveling, didactic, anecdote, the two brothers. And I know Hugo, you had an early breakthrough, didn't you, with Sidney Smith, which made us hope, made us think that maybe this whole deciphering business was going to be a little bit easier than it's actually turned out to be.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

Yeah. Arthur was the son of Dickens' next-door neighbor in Tavish Top Square, Frank Stone. And Frank was a friend of Dickens, but he was very ill and he he died in November 1859. And Dickens very generously decided to help his two teenage boys out by teaching Arthur shorthand. Arthur was a trainee barrister, but obviously, I think would have needed some help, some extra money. And so to do that, obviously, shorthand reporting was a way to do it, as it had been for him when he was Arthur's age, you know, and you wonder whether Dickens sees himself in Arthur. Um, so Arthur would pop next door for shorthand lessons with Dickens, and part of the training was dictation. So Dickens would dictate something to Arthur, and Arthur would write it down in shorthand, and Dickens would correct the shorthand. This is what we think was going on. So this is what interests us is what's he dictating? You know, and you've got these headings of stories, and we don't know what they are. Well, Sidney Smith, we do know because the name of Dickens' second eldest son, or third, can't second, I think.

SPEAKER_02 33:25

I'm gonna get emails now, Hugo, for that.

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Yeah, that's fine. That's great. That's great. The more the better, I think. So you see a title in Longhand, Dickens' Longhand, Sidney Smith. So I thought, well, this is a story about his son, who Arthur would have known, presumably. But Sidney Smith was also the name of a philosopher. In fact, Dickens had named his son Sidney Smith because he was a big fan of the philosopher Sidney Smith. So you've got two choices. Either this is something written by Sidney Smith, or it's a little a story about his son, Sidney Smith. And I looked at the first line, and there was a circle in the first line on the shorthand. And I knew that a circle stood for the word world. So I Googled world in Sidney Smith, the philosopher's work, and I got about 10 hits on that. And one of the hits matched that line and the rest of the passage in shorthand. So we got a complete match for Sidney Smith, the philosopher. So that text with the title Sidney Smith was a piece that he'd taken off the bookshelf by the philosopher Sidney Smith, The Elements of Modern Philosophy, and he dictated a couple of pages from that to Arthur. So exciting because we transcribed it, but not a story. But the other ones, the two brothers, anecdote and so on, could be stories. In fact, well, we know what they are, some of them. So that's what we're doing. We're working through these notebooks to see what's there, what Dickens has been dictating to Arthur.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

There's a court document, isn't there, I think, where Shakespeare answers, just says his name or something, but we know that that's recorded verbatim in that moment from Shakespeare, this man we barely know existed beyond his writing. So I can I can well imagine that if Arthur Stone is writing down from dictation, Dickens, that's almost that's the closest you can get to pressing record and having him exactly in his voice.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

Yeah. And also it's his exact words. I mean, they're because Arthur is doing shorthand, he wants to get every single word. So we can be pretty sure that that's every single word that he says is there. So it's it's as if Dickens's voice is lurking behind this shorthand.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

Gosh. So I suppose my next question then is how do I become a decoder? How much time do I have to put into learning shorthand and doing all this?

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Well, the best way to get started, just come along to our website, dickenscode.org, follow us on Twitter at Dickens underscore code. And on the website, we've got a range of resources that will help you to get started, including that that wonderful glossary that Hugo did that I've already mentioned, and also a decoding video that will talk you through different types of symbols that you're going to find on the page and how to get started with those. And then every month we have a Solve It Dickens challenge. So each month we try to tackle a whole page of Arthur Stone's notebook. And we always say, just give it a go. Every contribution, every solution that is attempted is really helpful to the project. We say to people, it's not about sitting there and getting every single symbol and every single line and having everything 100% correct. Even one symbol, I think, is a real kind of victory here because it can be so tricky, particularly when you're new to this. And I should say to you that that every contribution, every symbol that is transcribed for the first time, we have this wonderful roll of honor. You can use your own name, Dominic. You can choose a Dickensian pseudonym if you want, and you can be credited for first transcriptions of the new symbol there on the roll of honor.

SPEAKER_02 36:59

I have to say, I've looked at the roll of honor and I'm very worried about two people, a guy called Shane Bags and Ken Cox. How how do we how do we stop them from just doing the whole thing?

SPEAKER_00 37:10

They are both brilliant decoders. And if you've seen any of the news stories around the Taverstock Letter, um, Shane was our original overall prize winner, Ken Cox was our highly commended runner-up. And they, you know, have been instrumental, I think, in making a great deal of progress into the shorthand manuscripts, along with, of course, the contributions of all of other Dickens decoders.

SPEAKER_01 37:35

I mean, all the others are almost up to Shane and Ken's level now. So I'm it's a really, really good standard. And you can improve very, very quickly. And we give everyone feedback and you can do a lot. But what's great about it is the collective enterprise, really. And we can't make progress without everybody putting their heads together because it's not just one person who will be able to do it. So anyone who wants to have a go, uh, you're very, very welcome.

SPEAKER_02 38:03

Brilliant. Well, I'm definitely going to have a go. I've got a quick question. The name, the Dickens code. Are you deliberately using the DC initials there? The C D DC as a reverse thing. Was that a special code within the title of the project itself?

SPEAKER_00 38:16

I think uh yes, let's say we were that clever and we're putting our encoded message in, Dominic. But let's say perhaps there was a little inspiration from the Da Vinci Code.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

Of course, of course. And David Copperfield. Yes, of course. Seminal text for shorthand.

SPEAKER_02 38:31

I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography, which cost me ten and sixpence, and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were wrung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else entirely different, the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles, the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies legs, the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way blindly through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors called arbitrary characters, the most despotic characters I have ever known, who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation, and that a pen and ink skyrocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

I think it's just an utterly brilliant passage from David Copperfield because it's so funny, but it's also so insightful about just how difficult it is for David and we feel behind it for Dickens to actually learn this fiendish shorthand system. I I love the kind of imagery that David is conjuring with here. He talks about being plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me in a few weeks to the confines of distraction. And he talks in quite detailed ways, really, about some of the brachiography rules. So when he's saying here the changes that were wrong upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else entirely different, the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles, the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs, the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. So again, just as we've been talking about Dickens' obsession with language, you get this sense that in that moment of shorthand learning, it's permeating his whole consciousness, dreaming in shorthand symbols. Did you know it's it's becoming a kind of monomania here? I think.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Brain on fire, Dominique.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Brain on fire, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

Yeah, but that that um that David Copperfield bits wonderful, isn't it? It's almost a warning, a slightly coded warning to future decoders. Be careful what you're letting yourself in for here. This is going to take over your life and drive you to distraction.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

The other great thing in this in the description is the things are the imagery, like the fly's legs, the beginning of a cobweb, and the pen and ink skyrocket. These are the images of the symbols themselves. This is how he sees them, as sort of from the natural world. And that's because this is a really brilliant way to describe your complete bewilderment when you're faced with something that you can't understand. You know, something that looks like a fly's leg, he wants it to mean like a child. He wants it to mean that means fly's leg. And something that looks like a skyrocket, it's got to mean skyrocket, or something that looks like a cobweb should mean cobweb. And of course, it doesn't. And so in this childlike way, we've got to learn what they mean. But it's just, it's a wonderful, wonderful imagery, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 42:11

Yeah, it's so imaginative, isn't it? And we were talking before about Dickens seeing words, seeing letters and thinking of them in this very kind of substantial way. And I guess maybe some of that hyper focus comes from the shorthand training in that here the things just don't match. Hugo, as you said, this child like wants for things to match with one another, or like when Pip's reading the gravestone and the font looks like how he imagines his mother. And here it's a frustration in learning. It doesn't make it easy because the things just don't match up in the way that instinctively you you want them to do.

SPEAKER_01 42:49

So in fact, one of the symbols that he invents in his notebooks, he puts new symbols in. One of them is a square, and it means square. You know, he's doing what he wanted in David Copperfield. I mean, also electric, the one for electric telegraph. I don't really know why he put it in, because it's not as if you're going to be using electric telegraph very often in your speech, because it's a new thing, the electric telegraph. So he thinks, well, we've got to have a symbol for this in our shorthand system. So he writes three horizontal lines rather dramatically in blue ink, and that stands for electric telegraph. So again, it's this kind of idea that he wants things to look like what they are.

SPEAKER_02 43:31

Master Adolphus was also in the newspaper line of life, being employed by a more thriving firm than his father and co to vend newspapers at a railway station, where his chubby little person, like a shabbily disguised cupid, and his shrill little voice, he was not much more than ten years old, were as well known as the horse panting of the locomotives running in and out. His juvenility might have been at some loss for a harmless outlet in this early application to traffic, but for a fortunate discovery he made of a means of entertaining himself, and of dividing the long day into stages of interest without neglecting business. This ingenious invention, remarkable, like many great discoveries for its simplicity, consisted in vain. The first vowel in the word paper and substituting in its stead at different periods of the day all the other vowels in grammatical succession. Thus, before daylight, in the wintertime, he went to and fro in his little oilskin cap and cape, and his big comforter, piercing the heavy air with his cry of morning paper, which about an hour before noon changed to morning pipper, which at about two changed to morning pipper, which in a couple of hours changed to morning popper, and so declined with the sun into evening papa. To the great relief and comfort of this young gentleman's spirit.

SPEAKER_01 44:58

Yes, I think that this is very much about obviously repeating the central vowel. So we've got paper which becomes morning paper, which becomes morning pepper, which becomes morning pipper, morning popper, and morning papa. So it's this is the exercise that this is what he would have been doing, like we did with butt and uh BT, and you you know how many words can you make out of this? This is Dickens making something out of something, or making something out of nothing, because the thing is that Dickens was very lonely in chambers when he was writing up his notes. You go into court for the day, write down the shorthand, go back to the little office in Doctor's Commons where he was working, sit on his stool and transcribe his notes, you know, which is take two or two or three hours, three or four hours to do that. And you're bored and lonely. So what do you do? You make your own entertainment. And this is what Master Adolphus is doing. He's entertaining himself throughout the day just by changing a central vowel. Um, it seems to me absolutely what Dickens spent three years doing in Doctor's Commons. It's a lovely piece.

SPEAKER_02 46:06

Yeah. And then Charlie Neckett, going back to Bleak House. Well, Charlie, said I, looking over a copy of the letter O, in which it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped, and collapsed in all kinds of ways. We are improving. If we only get to make it round, we shall be perfect, Charlie. Then I made one, and Charlie made one, and the pen wouldn't join Charlie's neatly, but twisted it up into a knot. Never mind, Charlie. We shall do it in time.

SPEAKER_00 46:38

And again it just takes us back to the shapes of the letters and that moment of of learning. I mean, part of the shorthand learning is of course learning to get the things on the right angles. And when you're writing really quickly, of course, things can start to change or or be distorted because you're going so so quickly. And although we're dealing here with with Roman script, the letter O in particular, I I feel like behind this again, there is just that having to become bicepal, having to be able to use two different scripts. I think that learning is is is embedded here in what Charlie is trying to do and being coached and encouraged, probably more than poor Dickens, who was just working from this very dry brachiography manual, which when you you break it down, it gives you tons of prefaces. And do you know a poem about the king? And then you get the meaty bit in just sort of three or four pages, the alphabet table, the arbitrary characters, a few different rules. And then after that, a few examples really of what the shorthand should look like. They use examples from the Bible, and I think something from a kind of legal judgment or a criminal act or something. And then after that, you just get the uh the strings really of consonants. So they also present to the shorthand learner what this would look like without the vowels in it. So brachiography, learning that, very different to learning a language on duolingual or something, because you're just having to do all of the work yourself, memorizing and then putting into practice. It's really, really tricky. Yes, of course.

SPEAKER_02 48:13

And just this little excerpt because it's isolated like this. I'm really seeing the name Charlie and thinking of little Charles Dickens as well. And Esther's last line, never mind, Charlie, we shall do it in time.

SPEAKER_01 48:23

It's wonderful. There's a lot of empathy. The we, okay, we're improving. Yeah. Yeah. Um and it's written almost like a child when he says, then I made one and Charlie made one, and the pen wouldn't join, you know, this and that and that. It's as if a child is actually writing it almost. And also the idea that it's not the child's fault. The pen wouldn't join Charlie. Yeah, it's the pen's fault. Um, it shows that Dickens is, I think, real empathy as a as a teacher and a real understanding of what children need to learn. And I think he shows that a lot. And I think that may have come, as Claire was saying, from the fact that he maybe didn't get very much help himself. But he's he's he's managed to sort of understand that and and and show it in his writing how children do need to be need to be helped.

SPEAKER_00 49:14

It's a lovely interesting too, isn't it? We have um so many awful teachers in Dickens, don't we? Right? Really kind of brutal examples of of pedagogy in action. So this is a lovely counterbalance to that. And something too in the shorthand project is that we're seeing Dickens um as a teacher shorthand, another kind of dimension to his character, given that he's so interested in learning um and teaching and gives us so many wicked teachers.

SPEAKER_02 49:46

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 49:48

I mean, you can sense that he is a good teacher, that he's made the system easier for Arthur in his notebooks. You know, they're they're simplified. He's taken all the nonsense out of the original Gurney system. Like in the original Guinea system, there's a symbol which stands for from one end of the world to the other. All right, the entire phrase from one end of the world to the other has got a symbol of its own. You know, it's it's insane, that kind of thing. So Dickens has got rid of all that. He knows it's pointless. And he's simplified things. And he's also written some corrections for Arthur. He says, your C is generally wrong. Um, express vowels a little more, things like just a little gentle encouragement. But it you can see that his notes are very careful, they're detailed, and they're simplified. And you know, he he looks to me like a good teacher, somehow. What do you think, Claire? Do you think he's a good teacher?

SPEAKER_00 50:46

I think so. And I think I don't know, I have a feeling that he would quite enjoy the role of teacher. He was so taken with playing different roles, wasn't he? And I can imagine him wanting to step into this to be Mr. Mell rather than one of these other awful teachers.

SPEAKER_02 51:03

I'm sure he's an excellent teacher because he'd be a massive hypocrite almost if he weren't, because he's so good at identifying awful ones. And because that inner child he had throughout his whole life, that sympathy for children, I think you can safely say that he was probably fantastic. And then and then you've got an example coming up with Mrs. Joe finding ways to communicate after she's been done in by Orlick.

SPEAKER_01 51:28

Yeah, this is a really interesting little paragraph. So she's sort of heavily concasted.

SPEAKER_02 51:34

When at last she came round so far as to be helped downstairs, it was still necessary to keep my slate always by her, that she might indicate in writing what she could not indicate in speech. As she was, very bad handwriting apart, a more than indifferent speller, and as Joe was a more than indifferent reader, extraordinary complications arose between them, which I was always called in to solve. The administration of mutton instead of medicine, the substitution of tea for Joe and the baker for bacon were among the mildest of my own mistakes.

SPEAKER_01 52:12

So what you've got here is Pip mediating between Mrs. Joe and Joe, almost like a stenographer does. You're mediating between someone who can't read and someone who can't write. And the mistakes here in the text, mutton and medicine, T and Joe, Baker and Bacon, when you actually write them in Gurney, they look very, very similar. So it's these aren't, I don't think they've been chosen at random. Like if you write Baker in Gurney Shorthand and Bacon in Gurney Shorthand, um, they're pretty much the same. You could easily make a mistake, and and you could read you could read this symbol as either Baker or Bacon, for example, just by a little slip of the pen. And he talks about his mistakes. Again, he's conscious of his mistakes here, the mildest of my own mistakes, as if it's his fault, you know. Here is Pip almost blaming himself for trying to help them out, you know.

SPEAKER_02 53:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

Um, but that's that's I think you can see here that the stenographer in Dickens is coming through in Pip somehow.

SPEAKER_02 53:17

Just seeing this a second, Hugo, also, where the substitution of T for Joe. And I suppose on printed text, the T and the Joe don't look very similar, but I can imagine that that letter, at least if it's written, could easily pass through the side. Yeah, it could be.

SPEAKER_01 53:33

The T the T is a vertical line and the and the J, the J could be slightly slanted. But if you don't, if you're not accurate with your writing, it could just be miswritten and the vowel wouldn't be there, probably. Um, so you've got that, you put a dot there or something. So you'd have the T followed by a dot or the J followed by a dot. But if you don't write it correctly, it could be read as T or Joe. So these are are kind of stenographic mistakes.

SPEAKER_02 54:01

There's another from Great Expectations here, which I I love this one. Pip's letter to Joe. My dear Joe, I hope you are quite well. I hope I shall son before to teach you, Joe, and then we shall be so glod and pranked to you, Joe. What lark and believe me, infects and pip.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

I just love this, and when you see it on the page, it's got all kind of capitalization in the wrong places. It's taking us back to the shape of the letters, which we've touched on a couple of times today. And it begins with that, my dear Joe, and and my MI, you know, again that that reminds us of the way that maybe dots are being used in brachiography when they signal a kind of vowel sound at the end of the word. I think there's a little bit of confusion there, which so beautifully represents the kind of child's mind as someone learning language.

SPEAKER_02 54:57

And of course, never using punctuation. That's just a rule when you start writing as a child, isn't it? You know, and here's an example actually of really seeing it on the page. It has more of an impact, I think, than probably hearing it. That you really see obviously what he's what he's doing. But it also looks really modern. You know, it's almost like some sort of post-modern thing going on that he slipped into a chapter where it's like this, possibly. I mean, what I'm trying to say is I don't imagine, would there have been many writers of his time that would have transcribed the words in that sort of way? I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 55:28

Interesting. I mean, you see sometimes in sensation fiction, things like Wilkie Collins, a kind of keenness on reproducing typography. Not exactly like this. I think something special is going on here, but that sense where you're reading lines and lines of text in a novel, and then suddenly that formatting that typography changes and it draws your attention to text as text in a slightly different way.

SPEAKER_01 55:51

There's one thing also in that that I've always really noticed is in the famous words from what larks, which is you know Pip and Joe's famous sort of what what a lot of fun, what larks spelt what W-O-T and Larks L-A-R-X. Um, you might write that easily, and it's in it, you know, that's texting, isn't it? Larks with the X there like that. And what is very interesting also, because with phonetic spelling, you change the spelling to change the pronunciation. So widow becomes widder, and you get the cockney. What doesn't change the pronunciation at all, it's just W-O-T. Dickens often writes what, like what in the mouths of his cockney characters. So what's he doing there? What kind of effect is he trying to produce? He's he's either just doing it for fun, just to change a word for fun. Or it could be that he's saying that the person who says this isn't educated because this is how they would write it. He there's this maybe just a tiny little message in there saying this is how it would be spelt by someone who's not educated enough.

SPEAKER_02 56:59

And then there's something in the notes about connection to a raven. Have I got oh yes, the raven.

SPEAKER_01 57:04

I I mean, I was when I listened to your raven episode, which I really enjoyed, it made me think about ravens a lot and the idea that you admire ravens and you're also quite scared of them. You know, they're scary things. And but you also think, wow, this is pretty impressive, what ravens do. And then you're thinking about Dickens' raven and that that he's the stuffed raven in the hallway at Gads Hill, you know, and there's this sinister aspect, you know, about the raven. And that it can, you know, in my mind, I was thinking again of the devil's handwriting and this sinister side of shorthand, you know, the the the hiding side and so on. And I was thinking also about the raven, you know, what are ravens? Ravens, the connections between ravens and shorthand, you wouldn't think that they were connected, but there are two things I think going on with this, which is that ravens reproduce real speech. So they will hear something and reproduce it exactly. And that is what shorthand is doing as well. But then there's that other thing that ravens do in your podcast with the you talked about, which was the hiding stuff. And Dickens talks about his ravens doing that. They would take pieces of cheese and hide them in the garden and then dig them up again. Hiding is also what shorthand does because you're hiding the word. When you write it down in shorthand, you're hiding it. And it's accessible just to you or someone who knows the system. You're kind of burying it like a raven would, and it's up to the reader to dig it out again, in a way. So, what our transcribers are, and what we are, and what our transcribers are, and what Dickens was is a raven. He's buried it, and we're digging it out, if you can see what I mean. So we're all ravens, really, you know.

SPEAKER_02 58:49

Yeah. Oh, this has been this has been so fantastic. Thank you so much, both of you. I've really, really enjoyed this.

SPEAKER_00 58:56

Didn't we see you're doing kind of some readings or a show at the Dickens Museum dominant?

SPEAKER_02 59:01

Oh, yeah. It's online. It's uh filmed uh Sykes and Nancy, the Wilkie Collins is the dead hand and the sibling, all inside the Dickens Museum, the Dickens' house there. Oh really, and um with a live QA afterwards. So it's quite fun. Well, I will send I will send you all of that.

SPEAKER_00 59:18

And you've got to that.

SPEAKER_02 59:20

Thank you, and all the best with everything else that comes over.

SPEAKER_00 59:23

Oh no, it's been lovely, really, really nice. Thanks for for having us on the case.

SPEAKER_02 59:28

Before you go, is there anything you want to point us towards again?

SPEAKER_00 59:30

Well, of course, we'd have to put a final plug in for the website, Dominic, uh dickenscode.org on Twitter at dickens underscore code and just encourage everyone to just have a go. Whether you can crack one symbol or an entire line or an entire page, we would really welcome you into this project.

SPEAKER_02 59:49

Amazing. Yes, I'm gonna do that definitely. Thank you so much. Thanks.