Novels in Shorthand: Dickens, Holmes and Alice for Stenographers

Around the end of the First World War, a London publisher’s catalogue offered readers A Christmas Carol for one shilling and threepence, or one and ninepence in cloth. A few lines below came The Sign of Four, three volumes of The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. They were printed in Pitman’s shorthand, and they sat in a section headed “Shorthand Reading Books,” graded from Elementary to Advanced Style like rungs on a ladder.¹

Books like these now turn up in library stacks and on archive.org as curiosities: Dickens, Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll reduced to hooks, curves and dots. They were not curiosities to the people who bought them. They answered a practical problem that every shorthand learner met, and for one publisher they also expressed something close to a creed.

Older than phonography

Printing shorthand for reading was not a Victorian invention. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica records that the New Testament and Psalms were engraved in Jeremiah Rich’s characters in 1659, in two tiny volumes, and that William Addy brought out a whole Bible engraved in shorthand in London in 1687.² Scripture was a likely choice for such experiments, since many readers knew the words closely and could check their decoding against memory.

What changed in the nineteenth century was scale, and the reason for learning. Charles Dickens broke into parliamentary reporting by memorizing Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy, using a reprint of a manual first issued in the eighteenth century, as Leah Price notes in an essay on the history of stenography.³ He gave the ordeal to David Copperfield, who buys a manual for ten and sixpence and is tormented by dots that change meaning with position, by “marks like flies’ legs,” and by an alphabet that was “an Egyptian Temple in itself.”⁴ In 1837, a dozen years before David Copperfield appeared, Isaac Pitman published Stenographic Sound-Hand, the phonetic system that became known as phonography.³⁵

Isaac Pitman’s printing problem

Pitman wanted more than a tool for reporters. Price describes how his system spread through a counter-culture of early adopters (teetotallers, vegetarians, pacifists and other reformers), held together by postal correction schemes and shorthand correspondence. In her phrase, “Pitmanism was idealistic, distributed and male.”³ A movement that wanted people to write in shorthand also needed something for them to read.

The difficulty was mechanical. Shorthand outlines join consonants into single strokes, so they cannot be set from a small font of letters. According to the biography by Alfred Baker, Pitman found his answer in Manchester in December 1841, in the office of the lithographers Bradshaw and Blacklock (George Bradshaw of the railway timetables). Shown how to write on transfer paper, he practised for an hour and then wrote eight pages that became the first number of the Phonographic Journal, dated January 1842.⁵ Lithography let Pitman print his own handwriting. By his own count, he lithographed 4,800 pages of phonography in four years, and he said he “never afterwards wrote anything but for the purpose of its being printed.”⁵

The list of books he produced this way, compiled in an appendix to Baker’s biography, shows what the movement chose to read. A New Testament and Psalms came out in 1849, and a complete Bible in 1867. Then came Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1867), Macaulay’s biographies and essays, the narrative of The Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost (both 1871). Goldsmith had a different use: The Vicar of Wakefield of 1869, subtitled “An Exercise in Phonography,” was a workbook for pupils to write out in shorthand through the styles from the Learner’s to the Reporting, and a full shorthand edition from engraved characters followed in 1891.⁵ A complete Bible lithographed in the “easy reporting style” was issued in 1890, with London, Bath and New York imprints; one digitized copy came from the library of the Massachusetts Bible Society.⁶

Type made of whole words

Lithography had limits. Every page had to be written out by hand, and Pitman admitted that his transfers were “produced in a short time, and often amid interruptions.”⁵ Baker explains that Pitman had used metal shorthand type for single signs in his textbooks since 1847, cast by the London founders V. and J. Figgins, but that attempts to build whole outlines from pieces failed. In 1873 the Phonetic Institute adopted a different method. Each word or phrase in a story or speech was engraved on its own small metal “blank,” and these blanks were then set by a compositor like ordinary type and stereotyped. The blanks went back into cases labelled in dictionary order, and when a new text called for a word not yet in stock, its outline was engraved and added to the collection.⁵

The same year, the Phonetic Journal dropped its price from threepence to a penny and began printing two pages of shorthand reading every week from the engraved characters. Pitman later said that its circulation had risen from 1,000 to 24,000.⁵ In 1881, responding to a complaint in The Times about the high price of Disraeli’s new novel Endymion, he claimed that the sale of shorthand books in England was “above 100,000 a year” and that “eight hundredweight of phonetically printed books in shorthand and phonotypy” left the Phonetic Institute every week.⁵ These are the publisher’s own figures and cannot be checked independently, but they show the scale he believed in.

By 1911 the Britannica could list, besides Bibles and the Prayer Book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Vicar of Wakefield, Pickwick Papers, Tom Brown’s School-Days, Gulliver’s Travels, Bacon’s essays and “a long list of tales and selections” printed or lithographed in phonography.² Price adds that shorthand magazines reprinted Robinson Crusoe, Around the World in Eighty Days and all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and that copyright libraries still hold many Victorian shorthand editions of A Christmas Carol.³

Why read a novel in shorthand?

The main answer is that writing shorthand fast is only half the skill. A reporter or clerk also has to read the notes back, often hours later, and quickly enough to transcribe them. Fluent reading comes from seeing thousands of correct outlines in context, and a novel supplies them in a form that keeps the reader turning pages. Pitman’s catalogue of about 1918 makes the teaching purpose plain: its reading books are sorted by stage, with Aesop’s fables in the Elementary Style, The Vicar of Wakefield and Irving’s sketches in the Intermediate, and Dickens, Doyle and Verne reserved for the Advanced.¹ A Toronto edition of A Christmas Carol, catalogued with a conjectural date of 1912, carries the note “Printed in the advanced stage of Pitman’s shorthand.”⁷

Pitman also had an argument about handwriting itself. Baker quotes him: “Phonetic shorthand is much more legible than longhand, supposing both styles to be written with equal rapidity.”⁵ Printed shorthand was a standing demonstration of that claim. A clean engraved page showed learners what correct outlines looked like, which their own hurried notes often did not.

Reading was also a matter of numbers. Shorthand was a professional requirement in a growing range of jobs. The Britannica reports a count made in 1894 that found 95 percent of British newspaper reporters using Pitman’s system.² The same catalogue that offered Dickens also offered commercial readers on topics such as commodities and leaders of commerce, and shorthand books of business correspondence.¹ Literature was one strand of reading practice among several, chosen because it held attention better than invoices did.

Gregg’s library of classics

In the United States, the main competitor was John Robert Gregg’s system, devised in 1888, which Price notes came to dominate the American market while Pitman’s held its lead in Britain and its colonies.³ Gregg’s own manual says his shorthand was first published in America in 1893 and spread slowly until a cloth-bound edition of 1898 brought rapid adoption by schools.⁸ The 1908 revision advises students that “a great deal of practice in reading and writing is necessary to acquire skill in writing and confidence in reading,” and recommends the monthly exercises in the Learners’ Department of the company’s magazine, the Gregg Writer.⁸

The Gregg Publishing Company built its own shelf of fiction in shorthand. A Gregg edition of The Sign of the Four appeared around 1915 or 1916, with plates written by Alice Rinne Hagar.⁹ A heavily abridged A Christmas Carol, with plates by Winifred Kenna, followed in about 1918,¹⁰ and Alice in Wonderland, written out by Georgie Gregg, in about 1919.¹¹ The title pages credit the “shorthand plates” to these named writers, who wrote the text out by hand in shorthand for reproduction, so each book was in a sense a manuscript as well as a printed edition.

The intended readers are spelled out in Alice Margaret Hunter’s Graded Readings in Gregg Shorthand (1919), whose plates were also written by Georgie Gregg. Its introduction states: “Shorthand teachers have long recognized the need for simple, interesting well-graded reading material which could be used from the very beginning of the work.” It adds that literary matter begins at Lesson Eleven alongside business letters, and that the spread of shorthand into junior high schools had “created a demand for some material of this kind.”¹² Graded readers of this kind were schoolroom books, meant for pupils as young as the grades and junior high school as well as older shorthand classes.

A changing readership

That schoolroom was increasingly full of young women. Price traces how the typewriter, the phonograph and the demand for office labor turned stenography from a male movement of enthusiasts into a vocational skill associated with women. She quotes the Phonetic Journal complaining in 1901 that “the great majority of young girls study simply for the proficiency which will enable them to enter business.”³ The shorthand novel sat at the meeting point of the two cultures. It was a product of Pitman’s belief that phonetic writing could serve all of literature, and a training aid for students who mainly wanted a job.

Direct evidence of how readers felt about these books is thin. No diary or letter describing the experience of reading one for pleasure was found for this article, and most of what is known comes from what publishers and teachers said the books were for. What survives in quantity are the books themselves: Bibles, fables, Goldsmith, Dickens and Holmes, written out by hand or engraved word by word, and printed for readers who already knew the stories and wanted fluency in the signs.

Footnotes

1. Pitman & Sons, Abridged List, “Shorthand Reading Books.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911), “Shorthand.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Price 2008, London Review of Books 30(23). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Dickens, David Copperfield, ch. 38. ↩

5. Baker 1908, chs. on the Phonographic Journal, engraved shorthand type and the 1881 Endymion letter; Appendix III. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

6. Pitman shorthand Bible, 1890, Internet Archive item record. ↩

7. Canadiana record oocihm.80300. ↩

8. Gregg 1908, preface and “Advice to the Student.” ↩ ↩²

9. Gregg Sign of the Four, title page and item record. ↩

10. Gregg Christmas Carol, title page and item record. ↩

11. Gregg Alice in Wonderland, title page and item record. ↩

12. Hunter 1919, Introduction. ↩