Dickens and the Stenographic Mind

Dickens and the Stenographic Mind
ISBN-10
0192564331
ISBN-13
9780192564337
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
240
Language
English
Published
2019-01-10
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Hugo Bowles

Description

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.

Similar books

  • The One, Other, and Only Dickens
    By Garrett Stewart

    In The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens’s novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic ...

  • Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals
    By Melisa Klimaszewski

    Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. Sharpe, Will. “Authorship and Attribution.” In William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays, ...

  • Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development
    By Joanna Hofer-Robinson

    In analysing allusions to Dickens in a variety of archival sources, including dramatisations, press reports, political debates and the visual arts, this book asks what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives, and whether we can ...

  • Mother Night: A Novel
    By Kurt Vonnegut

    In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all. “A great artist.”—Cincinnati Enquirer “A shaking up in the kaleidoscope of ...

  • Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People
    By Carolyn Vellenga Berman

    Repr . in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt . Vol . 8. Ed . A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover . Dent , 1903. 106–32 . Hazlitt , William . “ What is the People ? ” 1818. The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt . Vol . 4.

  • The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens
    By Pete Orford

    ... Dickens in his early writing career . ' He was making a living by his pen , but his words were having no effect ... Stenographic Mind , in which he shows how learning to write in shorthand effectively rewired Dickens's approach to ...

  • Dickens, Death, and Christmas
    By Robert L. Patten

    ... Dickens , ed . Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David ( Columbus : Ohio State University Press , 2009 ) , 75–92 . Bowles , Hugo , Dickens and the Stenographic Mind ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2019 ) . Bown , Nicola , Carolyn Burdett ...

  • Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination: The Inimitable and Victorian Body Language
    By Peter J. Capuano

    ... Dickens shaped many of his era's most memorable characters by way of their fantastically embodied descriptions , and although there is ... Stenographic Mind ( 2019 ) . figurative . For example , the transition from a strictly 12 INTRODUCTION.

  • Dickens's Style
    By Daniel Tyler

    This collection of twelve essays addresses the essential but often overlooked subject of Dickens's style, with each essay discussing a particular feature of his writing.

  • Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity
    By Joshua Gooch

    Smith's notion of the cognitive work of reflection, then, at times seems to fade into a pure transparency of self that allows one to feel simply as another rather than as oneself. The specularity of Smith's unitary subject, however, ...