How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (19 page)

John Forster’s echoes of
Copperfield
have taught us to read that episode backward—from Dickens’s celebrity on the reading, lecture, and after-dinner-speech circuit, to novelist, to humorist, to journalist, to reporter, to clerk. Dickens’s professional success can be measured by his progress from taking notes to having notes taken on him. Readers were quick to identify David’s ten-shilling manual full of “marks like flies’ legs” with Dickens’s 1824 edition of Thomas Gurney’s 1750 how-to book,
Brachygraphy, or, an Easy and Compendious System of Shorthand
(Steven Marcus). Reciprocally, identity politics ensured that
David
Copperfield
was immediately transposed into shorthand—excerpted in a phonographic magazine, reprinted as a freestanding volume, and even mined for practice exercises in shorthand textbooks. This self-help literature both promised and represented upward mobility, whether for better or for worse: when R. H. Hutton asserted that “in some important intellectual, if not mechanical respects, Mr. Dickens did not cease to be a reporter even after he became an author,” the social connotations of “mechanic” must have grated (Hutton 575). They prefigured our present-day reduction of “stenography” to a term of abuse—once again, for journalism that’s mechanical rather than creative.

When Dickens bought Gurney’s
Brachygraphy
, he could just as easily have chosen Tachygraphy, Zeitography, Zeiglography, Semigraphy, or Semography. For centuries, an alphabet soup of mutually unintelligible notation systems had vied for the loyalty of court recorders, parliamentary reporters, diarists like Pepys, theater-goers making unauthorized transcripts, and clergymen plagiarizing each other’s sermons. Published in the same year as
Pickwick
Papers
, Isaac Pitman’s
Stenographic
Soundhand
began as one among many such systems, spread virally through a counterculture of early adopters: spirit-rappers, teetotalers, vegetarians, pacifists, antivivisectionists, antitobacconists. Like the open-source movement a century and a half later, Pitmanism was idealistic, distributed, and
male. The First International Congress and Jubilee of Phonography was transcribed by “an army of phonographers . . . not at all concerned with the economic rewards of shorthand, important as these are, but only with the service—personal, social—even professional—which one Pitmanite can render another in any part of the world” (Cope 130). The delegate who termed shorthand a “bond of brotherhood”
²²
corroborated one textbook’s accusation that longhand spelling invested English, “a strong and masculine language,” with “a garb altogether unfitted for it.”
²³

Within Dickens’s lifetime, however, the American Civil War began to leach men from the workforce; the typewriter, first commercially distributed in the year of his death, would later be joined by the phonograph to create demand for white-collar, and then pink-collar, labor. A magazine promoting the competing system launched in 1887 by Gregg opened with a column called “Our Ladies’ Chatterbox” that presented its alphabet as user-friendly and specifically female-friendly: “Dear Girls, You will be glad to hear we are to have our corner in the magazine all to ourselves . . . After all, we have heard lately about ladies and light-line and its being the ladies’ accomplishment” (Butler 149). Gregg was to Pitman as Windows to Linux: a technique that could be universalized from male nerds to female clerks only once stripped of the ideological baggage that had originally impelled its spread. An identitarian ethos gave way to a utilitarian skill: by 1901, the
Phonetic
Journal
was complaining that “the great majority of young girls study simply for the proficiency which will enable them to enter business” (“Midland District Conference of the National Federation of Shorthand Writers’ Associations”). Even a pacifist like Pitman acknowledged that his system needed “an army of advocates” (Pitman 7). A magic lantern slide advertising Pitman’s method captioned a portrait with the remark that “many knights have won their knighthood with their swords; Isaac Pitman won his with his pen” (
A
Lantern
Lecture
on
Isaac
Pitman
, slide 4). One journalist praised “the drill of the pen” by analogy with the parade ground (“Excerpt from
Hereford
Times
”).

No surprise that Dickens should be enlisted in this rearguard action—both as role model and as content provider. Potted anecdotes of his life became shorthand for a golden age when stenography was still a prelude to authorship, not to marriage.
Half
Hours
with
Popular
Authors, printed in the advanced stage of Pitman’s shorthand
(1927) excerpts Dickens’s speech to his “brethren” at the Press Club in 1865 (who proceeded, of course, to record it in shorthand). Within the speech, Dickens already shows nostalgia for a youth spent transcribing shorthand notes “on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, all through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.” The coach’s gallop across “wild country” magnifies the hand’s race along the page: nothing less
like David’s image of the stenographer going in circles (“my imbecile pencil staggering about the paper as if it were in a fit”), let alone Uriah’s finger making “tracks along the page like a snail” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
504, 222). As the office shifts to the wilds and the day job to “dead of night,” words per minute conspire with miles per hour to prefigure the speed with which Dickens will rise from a deskbound clerk to an uncommercial traveler on the international lecture circuit.
²⁴

Ivan Kreilkamp has argued that the bravado of this speech (of which he considers only the longhand version) echoes Dickens’s earlier attempt to align shorthand with masculinity in
David
Copperfield
.
²⁵
That biographical parallel makes it all the more puzzling, however, that neither
Gleanings
from
Popular
Authors
(1888) nor the
Popular
German
Reader
(1897) chooses to reprint the most obvious passage from
Copperfield
—that is, the extended description of David learning stenography. In its place, both anthologies quote the scene of a woman copying—in longhand.

Dora told me, shortly afterwards, that she was going to be a wonderful housekeeper. Accordingly, she polished the tablets, pointed the pencil, bought an immense account-book, carefully stitched up with a needle and thread all the leaves of the Cookery Book which Jip had torn . . . Her own little right-hand middle finger got steeped to the very bone in ink; and I think that was the only decided result obtained. Sometimes, of an evening, when I was at home and at work—for I wrote a good deal now, and was beginning in a small way to be known as a writer—I would lay down my pen, and watch my child-wife trying to be good . . . She would take up a pen, and begin to write, and find a hair in it. Then she would take up another pen, and begin to write, and find that it spluttered. Then she would take up another pen, and begin to write, and say in a low voice, ‘Oh, it’s a talking pen, and will disturb Doady!’ . . . Or, if she were in a very sedate and serious state of mind, she would sit down with the tablets, and a little basket of bills and other documents, which looked more like curl-papers than anything else . . .

I occasionally made a pretence of wanting a page or two of manuscript copied. Then Dora was in her glory. The preparations she made for this great work, the aprons she put on, the bibs she borrowed from the kitchen to keep off the ink, the time she took, the innumerable stoppages she made to have a laugh with Jip as if he understood it all, her conviction that her work was incomplete unless she signed her name at the end, and the way in which she would bring it to me, like a school-copy, . . . are touching recollections to me. (596)

Mary Poovey has shown that in the novel itself, Dora’s domestic labor fills the space that David’s literary works might be expected to occupy
(
Uneven
Developments
89–125). In the Pitman reprints, however, what Dora crowds out is David’s vocational copying. Instead of replacing the aesthetic by the utilitarian, that is, the
Gleanings
present us with an even (and gender-neutral) trade: the ledger for the steno notebook, the cookbook for the “approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence)” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
504). Unlike the father’s books, a cookbook or a how-to manual can be priced.

Why excerpt a scene about Dora instead of about David? Pitman’s eagerness to cultivate a male audience may make this choice appear even more perverse. His other 1888 abridgments projected their own gender politics backward, sometimes in a form recognizable only to that subsection of their readership who remembered the full-length original (as when he reprints Dobbin’s schoolyard fight but excises Miss Pinkerton’s Dixionary), sometimes under a cruder—and more self-contained—thematic guise. The same series reprints the scene from Frederick Marryat’s
Mr
Midshipman
Easy
in which Mrs. Easy tries to coax her son past “B” in the spelling book, he retaliates by pouring a boiling tea urn into Mr. Easy’s lap, and Mr. Easy packs him off to a school run by a master with a caseful of canes displayed on the wall like billiard cues. The cane that’s mightier than the pen could have looked continuous with Pitman’s interest in Dickens’s interest in the embodied nature of writing, except that the gender roles are neatly reversed. The Marryat excerpt assigned men the task of realigning mind with matter; in contrast, the Dickens quotation takes David’s “writing” to refer to abstract literary composition, delegating to Dora the more literal writing “smeared” by association with the material world and the body. Whether her body, David’s, or even Jip’s hardly matters: just as the noisy pen usurps the articulateness that Dora herself never quite achieves, so the hairy pen recalls Dora’s habit of distracting David from
his
writing by trying to curl his hair. Her own curlpapers, recycled from the account book, literalize the equivalent ledger that Clara Copperfield ruined by putting “curly tails to my sevens and nines” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
17). On his end, David turns the house into an office, whether by spending his own evenings “at home and at work” or by nagging Dora to align housekeeping with bookkeeping;
²⁶
on hers, Dora turns the study into a kitchen, juxtaposing pothooks with pots, borrowing aprons and bibs, replacing reading by stitching, and “steeping” her finger like a cup of tea, like a dog’s inked paw or like Uriah’s hand.
²⁷
In Phiz’s illustration, even the bookshelf contains a jar marked PICKLES. The spines of the books between which it’s jammed are blank: in this topsy-turvy household, food can be read while books only provide raw material for curlers.

By the time Pitman reprints the scene, the handover of clerical work from husband to wife—the progression from David as stenographer to David as author whose works are copied, or “copied,” by Dora—has come to look like ontogeny anticipating phylogeny: the novel’s plot writ large in the replacement of male clerks by women. In the pages of
Gleanings
, Dora’s writing takes over the logic that David’s has outgrown. Yet a century of pink-collar work makes it hard to notice that
Copperfield
is crowded with male characters who copy: not only the young David, but Uriah, Traddles, mad Mr. Dick, and bad Jack Maldon.
²⁸
Far from inertly reflecting any existing vocational practice, David’s marriage anticipates the higher-level parallels—woman is to man as book to text—that will enable a new division of clerical labor to emerge a generation later. To those of us who stand on the other side of those turn-of-the-century developments, the opening battles between children reading texts and adults handling books look like the groundwork for the gendered division of labor that emerges after puberty. The difference is that the latter reinforces the social hierarchy that the other overturned. In the first case, powerful adults are associated with brute materiality, powerless children with airy abstraction; in the second, “writing” can refer metaphorically to men’s production of ideas, or literally and comically to women’s reproduction of pages.

Figure 3.1. “Our Housekeeping,” David Copperfield, 1850. Phiz [H. K. Browne], “Our Housekeeping,”
The
Personal
History
of
David
Copperfield
by Charles Dickens (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850).

Competing definitions of writing rest on not just by whom it’s done, but where: study or kitchen, kitchen or law office, law office or school, school or kitchen. (“The way in which she would bring it to me, like a school-copy . . . are touching recollections to me.”) Dickens identifies that problem
from the outset of his novelistic career, when Squeers organizes a spelling lesson around “c-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour” (
Nicholas
Nickleby
8). Once the drunken cook’s “written character, as large as a proclamation,” comes to echo the equally oversized, and equally unreliable, sandwich board that earlier labeled David “a dangerous character” (
David
Copperfield
81), school begins to align itself not (as Mary Poovey suggests) with the home created by Agnes’s self-effacing housework, but on the contrary with the domestic chaos created by Dora’s all-too-visible labors (
Uneven
Developments
101). The space in which the sandwich board does its work complicates that analogy further. “The playground was a bare gravelled yard, open to all the back of the house and the offices; and I knew that servants read it, and the butcher read it, and the baker read it” (
David
Copperfield
82). At midcentury, the word “office” was still in transition from a term for the kitchen and servants’ workrooms to a term for the space occupied by male clerks like Uriah. The problem with Mr. Creakle’s school is marked, even before he ever appears, by the relocation of reading from white-collar spaces (including the schoolroom but also the “office” in its newer sense) to the space associated with trade and with manual labor. Trade (in the person of the butcher and the baker) prefigures Creakle’s belief that education’s goal is to put money in an ex-hop-grower’s pocket; manual labor (in the form of the servants), his confusion of teaching with laying on hands.