Decoding Dickens: Social Stenography and the ‘Tavistock’ Letter

Victorian  author,  Charles  Dickens,  is  better  known  for  his  fiction  than  his shorthand writing. However, shorthand played a key role in his early career as a court and parliamentary reporter and remained an essential part of his writer’s toolkit thereafter. Dickens’s surviving shorthand  has  proved  difficult  to  decipher,  due to the nature of the Brachygraphy system he learned and his idiosyncratic use of it. This paper traces the importance of social stenography – dyadic or collective work  to  improve  shorthand  deciphering  and  writing  –  in  transcribing  Dickens’s  shorthand. Focusing on the efforts of William J. Carlton and his associates William L. Stower Hewett and Frank Higenbottam in the twentieth century, and the work of  participants  involved  in  a  competition  to  decipher  Dickens’s  ‘Tavistock’  letter,  hosted as part of The Dickens Code project, in the twenty-first century, this chap-ter  argues  that  social  stenography  has  an  important  role  to  play  in  finding  solu-tions to previously undeciphered shorthand manuscripts.