by Price, Leah
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 ach
ieves, 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).
TALES OUT OF SCHOOL
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.
The taxonomy that the novel elaborates doesn’t just distinguish real writing surfaces from imagined or counterfactual or metaphorical ones. Its metaphors also distinguish different kinds of writing surfaces, corresponding to different technologies of inscription. At one end of the novel, David’s back is reduced to a blank slate by the arithmetic lessons that drive him to rub chalk into his skin; at the other, “the palms of my hands, hot plates of metal” imply a body waiting to be engraved, not inscribed (Dickens, David Copperfield 339). More literally, Creakle removes the sign reading “HE BITES” in order to make good his threat that “you won’t rub out the marks that I shall give you”: like Micawber drawing “the ruler from his breast (apparently as a defensive weapon),” Creakle confuses bodies with pages (689).29 But he’s not the only one to equate handwriting with bringing up by hand: the whisper that “impressed” David with Creakle’s cruelty echoes Murdstone flogging David “with an impressive look” and Steerforth’s graffiti “cut very deep and very often” as closely as it will be echoed in turn by the donkey’s owner “leaving some deep impressions of his nailed boots in the flower-beds” (84, 90–91, 199). Even before the cane makes David the butt of an oral image—a biter bit by what Creakle calls the “tooth” of his cane—Mr. Creakle’s long-awaited entrance into the novel is announced by a print metaphor: “A profound impression was made upon me, I remember, by the roar of voices in the schoolroom suddenly becoming hushed as death when Mr. Creakle entered after breakfast, and stood in the doorway looking round upon us like a giant in a story-book” (90; my emphasis).
Where children’s bodies became writing surfaces, their minds were compared to writing surfaces. A longer philosophical tradition made multiple media available as possible analogues for the mind: Locke’s tabula rasa itself comes from Plato’s comparison of the soul to a wax tablet, while Rousseau’s comparison of education to “engraving” imagines the mind as a metal sheet, not a paper one (A. Richardson 131). The metaphorical slates and real boards that punctuate David’s childhood forbid us to take for granted the nature of the surface to which his mind is compared and his body assimilated. Within the novel itself, writing media extend beyond paper to cloth (David’s clothes labeled “in indelible marking-ink” as well as the sailor’s waistcoat with “Skylark” spelled out across its chest), brass (the Micawbers’ doorplate), mugs, walls (real or imagined), and even desks (marked by graffiti) (Dickens, David Copperfield 206, 154, 10). This array reflects Dickens’s long-standing interest in the historically changeable—but also socially specific—range of alternative writing surfaces. In a discussion of clerks in The Uncommercial Traveller, blotting pads are described as “the legitimate modern successor of the old forest-tree: whereon these young knights (having no attainable forest nearer than Epping) engrave the names of their mistresses” (Dickens, Uncommercial Traveller 337).
Where critics in the age of the ballpoint fixated on the metaphor of inscription, nineteenth-century writers drew finer distinctions within that metaphor: was the body being compared to paper or parchment, and were the marks on it assimilated to writing or printing? A generation before Creakle’s school, the Lancastrian system had replaced the traditional manuscript signs pinned to dunces’ foreheads with preprinted punishment labels bearing captions such as “Idle,” “Talking,” “Playing,” and “Dirty boy” (Rickards and Twyman 104). And the child’s scarred skin might more aptly be compared to parchment than to paper: as a clerk like Dickens would well have known, parchment itself is skin. In Gaskell’s contribution to a Dickensian round-robin, a memory of parchment may be buried in a mother’s almost cannibalistic lament that “London is as bad as a hot day in August for spoiling good flesh, for [her son] were a good-looking lad when he went up, and now, look at him, with his skin gone into lines and flourishes, just like the first page on a copybook!” (Reynolds 89).<
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Like a piece of parchment, too, David’s skin bears witness to his history. Years after he notices that in Mr. Creakle’s classroom “My head is as heavy as so much lead,” Dora can still remark, “‘Oh, what ugly wrinkles in my bad boy’s forehead!’”; “and still being on my knee, she traced them with her pencil; putting it to her rosy lips to make the mark blacker, and working at my forehead with a quaint little mockery of being industrious” (Dickens, David Copperfield 92, 586). (Melville would mechanize the metaphor in the voice of the narrator of “The Tartarus of Maids” watching two women working in a paper mill: “I looked upon the first girl’s brow, and saw it was young and fair; I looked upon the second girl’s brow, and saw it was ruled and wrinkled” [325].) Where Agnes “reads” David’s “thoughts,” Dora can only write his face; where Agnes’s depth psychology helps David develop, Dora can age him only visually (Dickens, David Copperfield 788). Yet Agnes’s own face, too, is marked by an “indelible look” (24). The pencil’s power to reduce David to a flat character prevents the novel from confining the violence of inscription safely to Creakle’s schoolroom or even Heep’s showdown. In a novel where rulers are more often used to mark schoolboys’ skin than to line schoolboys’ paper, even the most loving relationships equate impression with aggression. Here again, however, Dickens’s metaphors draw fine distinctions among writing surfaces: the novel’s media ecology reduces David to a manuscript only after assimilating him to something more like a published book, bound between boards labeled not with his name but rather with “HE BITES.”