The mystery of a Dickens letter

BN Goswamy

Brachygraphy: A system of writing using abbreviations or special characters; shorthand. From French brachygraphie, from Ancient Greek (brakhus, “short”) + (graphia, “writing”). — Dictionary meaning

I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence); and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots… the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. — Charles Dickens

IF there was one English writer whom we had heard of, or read, while in college, it was Charles Dickens. His presence could be felt everywhere: in our course books, in the esteem of our teachers, in our conversations. Names of his books easily rolled off our tongues: ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘David Copperfield’, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’; our teachers brought characters from his books alive for us — Oliver, David, Fagin, the Beadle. Mr Barkis, even Miss Peggotty (the teacher in our small-town Punjab college used to pronounce her name as Pay-go-ttee, and used to add that you will remember her if I were to tell you that “she was very motti”, meaning fat); and often, in jest, we would use in our lives, phrases or utterances from his books, like “Barkis is willing”, “Please sir, may I have some more?” and apply them to real situations in our limited lives. And when we came to that wonderful, ringing passage with which his ‘Tale of Two Cities’ opens — “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity” — we were awed. Simply awed.

Long years have gone by since I last picked up any book of Dickens to read. But suddenly, he is back in my awareness and that of many others, and this is not because of any known work of his which has suddenly surfaced, but because of unknown ‘words’ that he wrote, the meaning, or import, of which has remained hidden — ‘an enduring mystery’ into which one gets slowly drawn — for close to a century and a half. These words occupy a one-page letter that Dickens wrote on his letterhead in 1859, which has been held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York since at least 1913. There is a whole body of ‘Charles Dickens scholars’ scattered across many countries, who have been trying for more than a century to decipher the letter. It is written in a brachygraphic manner, something that Dickens refers to in the short passage cited above, using a form of shorthand that was obviously very personal to Dickens — but without success. The letterhead bears in print the name Tavistock House — the London house in Bloomsbury in which Dickens and his family lived from 1851 to 1860 — but the rest of it is in Dickens’ hand: a series of dots and dashes and symbols and scribbles that have defied decipherment.

But now, it appears, that things have taken a turn. Two Americans — Shane Boggs, a computer technical support specialist from San Jose, California, and Ken Cox, a 20-year old cognitive science student at the University of Virginia — with obvious backgrounds in computer science, seem to have made substantial headway in decoding the letter. They, it is said, were motivated by a challenge from the University of Leicester, which ‘posted a copy of the Tavistock letter online and promised a reward of three hundred British pounds to anyone who could make the most sense of this Dickens Code’. As many as 1,000 persons entered the competition, and these two — neither of them, interestingly, having had any interest in Dickens before this — came on top, having decoded most — about 70 per cent — of the ‘text’ on the page.

There is nothing earth-shaking, it seems, in the letter: no secret revelations, no whiff of scandal, no confessions, nothing salacious. It is, putting it plainly, a note written by Dickens to JT Delane, editor of The Times of London, concerning a rejected advertisement for a new magazine — Household Words — that the writer had launched and from which he was hoping to earn a measure of money. In the background of this letter, as researchers have pointed out, were possibly some financial difficulties that Dickens was faced with at that time; also, possibly again, his impending divorce. But nothing can be said with certainty. With the aid offered by the present decipherment, however, more documents in similar shorthand might get decoded, it is being hoped. The Dickens Code is not wound up yet. For, all one knows, scholars say, there might be another priceless story by Dickens hidden somewhere in these sheets. As a scholar/curator said: “Part of what is exciting about this project is that there are still new things to discover about an internationally famous author, more than 150 years after his death… The Tavistock Letter gives us insight into Dickens’ business dealings — the other manuscripts could include extracts from books on Dickens’ shelves, extemporised speeches, or even an unknown short story.”

Incidentally, the Dickens Code project runs to February 2023. The competition is still open. Before anyone from here applies to enter, however, let me add a couple of things that might not be widely known: something along the lines of ‘Little Known Facts about Well Known People’. Like many other authors — Gogol, Kafka, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Byron, among them — Dickens burnt a very large volume of his notes, diaries, memoirs, manuscripts before he died. And when he moved into Tavistock House in 1851, he decided to fill two spaces in his new study with bookcases containing fake books, the witty titles of which he had invented. “And so,” a Catalogue of his Letters notes, “on October 22nd, he wrote to a bookbinder named Thomas Robert Eeles and supplied him with the following ‘list of imitation book-backs’ to be produced”. Among them: ‘Capt Cook’s Life of Savage’, ‘History of a Short Chancery Suit’; ‘Catalogue of Statues of the Duke of Wellington’, ‘Five Minutes in China’, ‘Forty Winks at the Pyramids’…

Two fake volumes of each, please. Or was it three?