Character building

  • A page in a book. The paper shows age staining. On the page is printed a table divided into four columns, with the first column further subdivided in two. Above the table is the number one in brackets. The table has three headings: 'Alphabet', 'Letters' and 'Words'. A slim column on the far left shows simple Brachygraphy symbols. The second column shows alphabet characters and words that the symbol can also stand for. The next column provides examples of the Gurney spellings of words, eliminating duplicate letters and internal vowels (i.e. 'assault' becomes 'aslt'). The next column spells the word out using joined shorthand symbols. The final column translates the joined shorthand character back into a longhand word.

    Alphabet Table from Gurney's Brachygraphy manual.

  • A page in a book. The paper shows age staining. On the page is printed a table. Above the table is the number three in brackets. The table is headed 'Arbitrary Characters for Prepositions and Terminations &c.' The table lists Brachygraphy characters in three narrow columns, each next to a wider column listing the accompanying definitions.

    Table of 'Arbitrary Characters for Prepositions and Terminations' from Gurney's Brachygraphy manual.

  • A page from a book. The paper shows age staining. On the page is a printed box divided in two halves horizontally. Above the box is the number two in brackets. The top box is titled 'Of the Vowels'. In it is writing in English and intermittent Brachygraphy characters. The bottom box is titled 'Arbitrary Characters' and contains two narrow columns of brachygraphy characters and their meanings in wider columns next to each. There are faint pencil markings in the top margin of Brachygraphy characters.

    Rules for representing vowels and a table of arbitrary characters from Gurney's Brachygraphy manual.

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Arbitrary characters were not Dickens’s only problem. Most words were not represented by arbitrary characters and had to be constructed from the shapes that Gurney gave to alphabetical letters. Dickens found these constructed Gurney symbols hard to read. He was floundering in a ‘sea of perplexity’ because he saw shorthand symbols as pictures rather than combinations of letters, comparing them to ‘the Chinese inscriptions on an immense collection of tea-chests, or the golden characters on all the great red and green bottles in the chemists’ shops’.[1] In the eyes of the novice shorthand learner, the symbol for the word disadvantageous became a ‘skyrocket’ and the word expectation the ‘beginnings of a cobweb’. He is right, as you can see from the images below. But David couldn't read what the skyrocket and cobweb were saying. How should he have divided the symbols up? Hover over the images to find out.

The 'skyrocket' symbol, standing for the word 'disadvantageous'. Hover over the image to see what each shape stands for.

The 'cobweb' symbol, standing for the word 'expectation'. Hover over the image to see what each shape stands for.

David's problem was that he did not know how to make full words out of the alphabetical letter shapes. He needed to recognise that the skyrocket symbol was a combination of shapes for <d> + <s> + <advantage> + <s> and the cobweb shape was a combination of <x> + <p> + <ct> + <s> + <n>. Building letter-shapes into characters (writing) and deconstructing characters into letter-shapes (reading) clearly needed a lot of practice.

References

[1] Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, edited by Jeremy Tambling (London: Penguin, 2004), 551, 553.