Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).
Here’s an article about Dickens and stenography, complete with charts of arbitrary characters from Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy (1825), the manual Dickens would have used: Hugo Bowles’s “Stenography and Orality in Dickens: Rethinking the Phonographic Myth” (Dickens Studies Annual ). Alas, no arbitrary characters for expectation and disadvantageous , which may be Dickens’s inventions.
You can see the 1778 edition of Brachygraphy (with the first chapter of Genesis and other texts in shorthand) via HathiTrust.
Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)
Friday, August 28, 2026
Stenography
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Speaking of notebooks, Sten means narrow, hence stenographer's books with their distinctive dimensions. And coil.
ReplyDeleteI was a student reporter before journalists stopped learning shorthand in J-school. I asked a reporter why he reviewed plays with a steno pad instead of a big clipboard, as I did. (Everyone knew I was a critic) He thought a moment and said, "So I can slip it into my blazer." (Inside pocket)
A good reason. Gay Talese uses (or used) shirt cardboards in the same way (the inside jacket pocket).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the etymology, which I’ve never thought to wonder about. (I should have: my mom was a steno champ in her high-school classes.)