Arthur Stone

Dickens’s second known shorthand pupil was Arthur Stone (1838-1919), the 18-year-old son of the illustrator Frank Stone (1800-1859), who was Dickens’s friend and next-door neighbour in Tavistock Square. Arthur was a trainee barrister and after Frank’s sudden demise in November 1859, Dickens offered to teach him shorthand, presumably so that he could earn some extra money reporting court cases for the newspapers, as Dickens himself had done 30 years previously.

  • A black and white illustration. In the foreground a small wooden rowing boat is being rowed by a young woman with dark hair blowing in the wind. She wears a simple dress and a cloak and is looking over her shoulder as she raises the oars out of the water. A man is at the back of the boat crouched with one hand on each side. He has a dark grizzly beard and hair. He is dressed in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and trousers. In the background of the picture is a skyline of tall buildings and a church spire with tall ships in port in front. Another small rowing boat is coming in to frame from the left.

    Dickens also sought to help Arthur's younger brother, Marcus Stone, who would later illustrate several of Dickens's novels, including this image, 'The Bird of Prey', for Our Mutual Friend.

  • A pencil sketch on paper of a large end of terrace Victorian townhouse. A woman in Victorian costume is approaching the porticoed door. The left foreground features a clump of small trees on grass. To the right of the townhouse similar homes imply an adjacent street. In the left bottom corner is written ‘Tavistock House’ along with the date and artist’s signature.

    A pencil sketch by F. G. Kitton of Tavistock House and the immediate surroundings, where Dickens and Stone were neighbours. Courtesy of the Charles Dickens Museum, London.

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In a letter dated 30 November 1859, just 12 days after his father’s death, Dickens urged Stone to make a start:

It is highly desirable—above all things—that you should now get to the Short Hand. If you can begin with me here at 10 tomorrow morning, do.[1]

These lessons began on 1 December 1859 and continued at least until the following February. Dickens’s friend, George Augustus Sala (1828-1895), recalls that the shorthand lessons took place ‘regularly’ at the office of All The Year Round, though Dickens was also available next door if needed – ‘if you have any thing to ask me about, I shall be at home this morning until halfpast one’.[2]

There is a record of Dickens and Arthur’s lessons: 6 booklets containing 145 pages of shorthand notes and now part of the Benoliel Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia. In Arthur’s handwritten preface he writes that the booklets were ‘made up’ by Dickens and that a large part of the notes were in his (Arthur’s) writing, ‘probably from his [Dickens’s] dictation’.[3]

Arthur Stone's preface to the shorthand booklets he kept from his time as Dickens's shorthand pupil. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Arthur struggled to memorise Brachygraphy’s symbols just as Dickens had – ‘I think you had best not write with me again until you have had a day or two’s thorough good practice with the arbitrary characters and letters. I am rather afraid of your otherwise confirming some present mistakes.’[4] These ‘mistakes’ are visible in Arthur’s shorthand. Dickens encourages Arthur to ‘express vowels a little more’ by using spaces between consonant symbols to make the shorthand easier to read back.[5]

The booklets flip vertically and are mostly written in pencil. To save time, the writer (Arthur or Dickens) wrote on one side of the page, flipped the page over and started again on the next page. Scattered across three of the booklets are seven shorthand texts with a curious set of headings written in Dickens’s longhand: ‘Didactic’, ‘Anecdote’, ‘The Two Brothers’, ‘Travelling’, ‘Sydney Smith’, ‘Sunday Night Fifth February’, and ‘Nelson’.

  • Eighteen lines of Brachygraphy shorthand characters written in pencil fill the page of a notebook with 'Didactic' written in longhand at the top. In the top right corner is the number twelve, indicating the page number.

    'Didactic'. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

  • Eighteen lines of Brachygraphy shorthand characters written in pencil fill the page of a notebook with 'Anecdote' written in longhand at the top. In the top right corner is the number ten, indicating the page number.

    'Anecdote' Part 1. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

  • Nineteen lines of Brachygraphy shorthand characters written in pencil fill the page of a notebook with 'The Two Brothers' written in longhand at the top. In the top right corner is the number six, indicating the page number.

    'The Two Brothers' Part 1. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

  • Eighteen lines of Brachygraphy shorthand characters written in pencil fill the page of a notebook with 'Travelling' written in longhand at the top. In the top right corner is the number nine, indicating the page number.

    'Travelling' Part 1. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

  • Sixteen lines of Brachygraphy shorthand characters written in pencil fill the page of a notebook. At the top is a longhand title, which reads 'Sunday Night Fifth February 1860', with the word 'Fifth' partially crossed through. In the top right corner is the number one, indicating a page number. In the middle of the page, a vertical line runs from top to bottom. The symbols are not arranged in relation to this line, perhaps suggesting that it was added later.

    'Sunday Night Fifth February' Part 1. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

  • Nineteen lines of Brachygraphy shorthand characters written in pencil fill the page of a notebook with 'Nelson' written in longhand at the top. In the top right corner is the number two, indicating the page number. The word 'Nelson' in longhand also appears in the first line.

    'Nelson' Part 1. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

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All seven of these texts, except ‘Sunday Night’, appear in two different shorthand versions. There are also two versions of an eighth text without a longhand heading which begins ‘All privileges…’. All eight texts except ‘Sydney Smith’ were transcribed by the Dickens Decoders in 2022-2023.[6]

The two different versions of a text exhibit a different quality of shorthand. This suggests that one version might be a novice version by Arthur and the other an expert version by Dickens, aimed at showing Arthur how his version should have been written. Look at the two versions of the first line of 'Sydney Smith' below. Which one looks like it has been written by Arthur the novice and which one by Dickens the expert?

Version B of a shorthand dictation exercise titled 'Sydney Smith'. The shorthand symbols read 'A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want'.

Version A of a shorthand dictation exercise titled 'Sydney Smith'. The shorthand symbols read 'A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want'.

The page at the top is by Dickens, written in his consistent and confident shorthand. The one at the bottom – much more hesitant – is by Arthur; his circle for ‘world’ is wobbly and his symbol for ‘great’ is incomplete and incorrect. On another page, Dickens tersely writes in the margin that ‘g is generally wrong’.

  • SydneySmith.1.versionB.tif

    Compare the two versions of 'Sydney Smith'. The way in which the characters are written suggests that this version is by a practiced shorthand writer. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

  • SydneySmith.1.versionA.tif

    Compare the two versions of 'Sydney Smith'. The way in which the characters are written suggests that this version is by someone less experienced with the Brachygraphy system. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

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The texts with two versions seem to be either improvised dictations or taken from a manuscript. Thanks to the Dickens Decoders, we now know what they say, but where do they come from? We know the sources of three of them. ‘Sydney Smith’ and ‘Sunday Night Fifth February’ have been identified as extracts from Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy by Sydney Smith (1771-1845), a book which Dickens is known to have admired and carried around with him. ‘The Two Brothers’ follows the contours of an earlier ghost story that Dickens included in ‘To Be Read at Dusk’, published in The Keepsake in 1852, although it is not a word-by-word dictation. The sources of the other five texts are still unknown. ‘Anecdote’ is another ghost story; ‘Travelling’ is a philosophical piece on the effects of travel; ‘Nelson’ is a description of the death of Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar; ‘Didactic’ is a critique of Roman Catholicism; the ‘All privileges’ text analyses hereditary privilege. The intriguing possibility is that these are new, ‘improvised’ texts by Dickens himself.

The public can certainly help us find out more about these texts. Readers can follow our investigations on the Dickens Code website.

References

[1] ‘To Arthur Stone, 30 November 1859’, The British Academy/The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Nine, 1859-1861, edited by Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 173.

[2] ‘To Arthur Stone, 11 December 1859’, Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Nine, 177.

[3] ‘Arthur P. Stone note’, The Shorthand Notebooks of Charles Dickens and Arthur P. Stone, The Free Library of Philadelphia [cdc5890020].

[4] ‘To Arthur Stone, 11 December 1859’, Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Nine, 177.

[5] The Shorthand Notebooks of Charles Dickens and Arthur P. Stone, The Free Library of Philadelphia.

[6] The 'Sydney Smith' shorthand was transcribed by Hugo Bowles in 2018. See 'Dickens's shorthand deciphered by identifying "Sydney Smith" source text', Notes and Queries (December 2017): 614-617 <https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjx170>.