The final session for the semester in the History of the Book Seminar will be led this coming Monday, November 19, by IVAN KREILKAMP, Assistant Professor of English here at IU. His subject will be: SPEECH ON PAPER: CHARLES DICKENS, VICTORIAN PHONOGRAPHY, AND THE REFORM OF WRITING.
The session will held, as usual, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in the LILLY LIBRARYLOUNGE, with coffee, fruit juice and cookies starting at 3:30. An abstract of Ivan's talk is beneath. We hope to see you all there; any notes, however, must be taken in shorthand.
SPEECH ON PAPER: CHARLES DICKENS, VICTORIAN PHONOGRAPHY, AND THE REFORM OF WRITING
Ivan Kreilkamp (Department of English)
Lilly Library Lounge, November 19, 2001
4 to 5:30 p.m
This talk looks at Charles Dickens's representation (in David Copperfield, 1850) of a young man's apprenticeship in shorthand reporting in the context of a number of shorthand and phonography manuals from the 1830s and 40s: these include G. Bradley's A Concise and Practical System of Stenography (1843), J.H. Clive's The Linear System of Short Hand (1830), V.D. de Stains's Phonography, or The Writing of Sounds (1842), and the manual Dickens himself had actually used as a young reporter, Thomas Gurney's Brachygraphy, or An Easy and Compendious System of Shorthand (1825). If, in the era of Johnson's Dictionary, standard English was thought to check the arbitrary profusion of speech, in the early nineteenth century shorthand manuals offered a new narrative in which shorthand offered to reform the randomness, lack of planning, and inaccuracy of English.
By the early Victorian period, voice was being represented as the ideal to which writing aspired. Indeed, speech had come to signify what was immediately and genuinely human in a culture in which language was subject to mechanical reproduction. The grandiose claims made for shorthand in the early Victorian era indicate a new way of thinking about writing and its relationship to human utterance. Dickens's fictional representation of a young man's struggle to learn shorthand in David Copperfield, I argue, at once parodies and challenges the claims made for shorthand by the various manuals and handbooks that proliferated in earlyVictorian England.
Posted November 19, 2001