Tracing Characters

Abstract

This chapter focuses on reporting, examining Dickens’s apprenticeship to reading and writing shorthand through Gurney’s Brachygraphy, as it is depicted in David Copperfield, in order to reconsider the relationship between parliamentary representation and print culture. Though we have long known about shorthand as an element of Dickens’s career, we have not yet seized its role as a fulcrum for media, politics, literature, and print in the nineteenth century. Writing was one of several “arts of representation” being modernized early in Dickens’s career. The chapter examines Gurney’s manual alongside claims for shorthand as a modern form of writing, excerpts from Dickens’s autobiographical fragment, and Dickens’s fiction. Shorthand was a crucial part of the ecosystem of news publication, but it was profoundly incompatible with print. It was at once a technology for breaching parliamentary privilege and a means of fostering secrecy through cryptography. The chapter untangles the dense political history of Victorian writing.