Stenography and orality in Dickens: rethinking the phonographic myth

This article explores the stenographic origins of Dickens's fictional speech by analysing the differences between the Gurney and Pitman systems, highlighting the different ways in which they would have affected their users' awareness of script in relation to sound. It is argued that the difficulties and internal contradictions of the Gurney system, illustrated so graphically in David Copperfield, combined to produce a unique system for the processing of language.and that the repeated use of this mechanism provided Dickens with a unique blend of phonotactic and alphabetical creativity - a creativity that the transparently phonographic Pitman system was not designed to produce.