Dickens Code Crackers

shorthand deciphering is ‘a series of lightbulb moments'

Sometimes items that are in libraries can’t be read. Charles Dickens’ stenography is an example.

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) was an English writer and social critic and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius.

Dickens and the Stenographic Mind

In Dickens and the Stenographic Mind, Hugo Bowles presents 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." 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." Following Thomas Gurney's principles as outlined in Brachygraphy or An Easy and Compendious System of Shorthand , Dickens "squeeze[d] redundancy out of the writing system."¹

The topic of Dickens and the Stenographic Mind by Hugo Bowles is stenography and how it relates to Dickens’s life and work.² The book covers the period from Dickens’s learning of Gurney’s Brachygraphy³ in 1827/8 to his teaching of shorthand to Arthur Stone in 1859—almost his entire working life. It examines all existing shorthand sources in detail. Dickens and the Stenographic Mind explores Dickens’s shorthand as a nineteenth-century textual practice, arguing that the manual’s alphabetical characteristics were the defining elements of the mindset that Dickens acquired through learning and practising shorthand.

Bowles explores the impact of shorthand on Dickens’s law and parliamentary reporting and how it is expressed through the phonetic speech of Pickwick⁴ and stenographic representations in his literary work.

Dickens used shorthand throughout his life but while he was using the system, he was also changing it. So the hooks, lines, circles and squiggles on the page are very hard to decipher. The Dickens Code Project project aims to change that. The Project intends to create a community of decoders and recreate the system that Dickens used – the Dickens Code.

Kelly McCay, a shorthand expert from Harvard describes shorthand deciphering as ‘a series of lightbulb moments that gradually come together into something coherent, and collaborating with others means a lot more lightbulbs’.⁵

The Dickens Code Project is offering a prize for shorthand transcription and running workshops to help solvers with the deciphering process.

To decipher Dickens’s shorthand manuscripts The Dickens Code Project is working in collaboration with a range of partners. If you want to help, please subscribe and get cracking the Dickens Code.

1. Nayder, Lillian. “Dickens and the Stenographic Mind by Hugo Bowles (review).” Dickens Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2020): 285–89.

2. Bowles, Hugo. Dickens and the Stenographic Mind. Oxford University Press, 2019.

3. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos (narrow) and graphein (to write). It has also been called brachygraphy, from Greek brachys (short), and tachygraphy, from Greek tachys (swift, speedy), depending on whether compression or speed of writing is the goal.

4. Carolyn Vellenga Berman (2018) “Snoring for the million: Pickwick and the parliamentary papers, “ Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 40:5, 433-453,

5. The Dickens Code: Enduring mystery of Dickens shorthand letter solved with crowd-sourced research. University of Leicester. February 7, 2022.