Early lessons and the ‘Manchester notebook’
Dickens began teaching shorthand almost as soon as he had learned it himself. In 1836, while he was working for the Morning Chronicle and reporting from Parliament, he gave lessons in his spare time to his brother-in-law Robert Hogarth (1816-1843). He once had to postpone a lesson because he was so busy:
I am truly sorry to say that I have no alternative but to postpone our First Lesson until Monday Morning. I have just been requested to hurry two articles I have to write this week; and as the House meets on Thursday, I really cannot spare the time.[1]
The ‘Manchester notebook’, a 12-folio manuscript, currently in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, is an example of the kind of pedagogical material that Dickens would have used with Hogarth. In the notebook, which is entirely in Dickens’s handwriting, he has reworked the Gurney manual into six numbered sections, slimming down the lists of arbitrary characters and explaining Gurney’s rules on the use of dots in a very colloquial style – ‘suppose you want to write “and the man said”: it would be thus […]’.[2] It also seems to have been written with a specific pupil in mind, addressing him or her directly: ‘But when you are more proficient and know the characters reading by sight, you will find it necessary to express very few vowels.’[3]
A page from Dickens's shorthand notebook, which explains the contextual function of dots in relation to other shorthand symbols. For example, a dot under any word represents 'down'. Courtesy of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Manchester notebook is the novelty of the practice examples, which are Dickens’s own inventions, like the nonsensical ‘The subjectibility of the hand is parallel to nothing’.[4] This bizarre sentence, which is being used to illustrate how to write difficult words, may be a typically Dickensian attempt to make shorthand practice a bit more entertaining.
A page from Dickens's shorthand notebook, featuring phrases written in Brachygraphy shorthand. The examples demonstrate the use of spelt and arbitrary characters, with the latter underlined in the accompanying English transcriptions. Courtesy of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester.
References
[1] ‘To Robert [Hogarth], [?1 February 1836]’, in The British Academy/The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume One, 1820-1839, edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 121.
[2] ‘Part 2. Dots’, Manuscript Shorthand Book (English MS 725), John Rylands Library, 4r. <https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/MS-ENGLISH-00725/7>.
[3] ‘Part 3. Dots as vowels’, Manuscript Shorthand Book (English MS 725), John Rylands Library, 5r. <https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/MS-ENGLISH-00725/9>.
[4] ‘Part 6. Examples’, Manuscript Shorthand Book (English MS 725), John Rylands Library, 11r. <https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/MS-ENGLISH-00725/21>.