Amateur sleuths solve 160-year mystery by decoding Charles Dickens letter

Last October, a collaboration called The Dickens Code project made a public appeal to amateur puzzle fans and codebreakers for assistance in decoding a letter written by Victorian novelist Charles Dickens in a tortuously idiosyncratic style of shorthand. The crowd-sourced effort helped scholars piece together about three-quarters of the transcript. Shane Baggs, a computer technical support specialist from San Jose, California, won the overall contest, while a college student at the University of Virginia named Ken Cox was declared the runner-up.

Dickens himself hardly needs an introduction, deemed by many to be the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and of course, his timeless 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, are just a few of the works contributing to that well-deserved reputation. A lesser-known aspect of Dickens' life is that he taught himself a particularly difficult form of shorthand as a teenager, relying on an 18th-century manual called Brachygraphy by shorthand writer Thomas Gurney. Dickens mentions this in passing in his semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield:

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, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; 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.

It took Dickens about a year to master Gurney's Brachygraphy, and he spent three years using the shorthand as a court reporter. He also began adding his own unique symbols to write personal memos to himself, maintain teaching notebooks, write letters, and so forth. Alas, very few examples survive. There are only about 10 currently known manuscripts of Dickens’ shorthand, dating from the 1830s to the late 1860s. Several of these remain undeciphered, including a letter from the 1850s and a set of shorthand booklets collected by Dickens’ shorthand pupil, Arthur Stone (the son of his friend and neighbor).

The Dickens Code project is the brainchild of two Dickensian scholars: Claire Wood of the University of Leicester, and Hugo Bowles of the University of Foggia. "Dickens’s shorthand has proved extremely difficult to decode," they wrote on the project's website. For those seeking to crack the code, it helps to identify the original source material, although "in most cases, experts have been unable to locate the source texts used for the exercises," they wrote. "They could be published or unpublished passages written by Dickens, or by another author."

One of the samples of Dickens' shorthand is a dictation exercise headed "Sydney Smith," likely arising from the shorthand lessons he gave to Arthur Stone. Dickens was a great admirer of a reverend philosopher of that name, often carrying around a copy of Smith's Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy. Dickens admired Smith so much, in fact, that he named his seventh son Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens.

So which Sydney Smith did the dictation exercise refer to—the son or the philosopher? According to Wood and Bowles, this one was fairly easy to decipher thanks to a known symbol meaning "world." They just had to search for occurrences of "world" in the philosopher's works, which yielded about 10 candidates. But only one of those used "world" in the first line of a paragraph: a lecture entitled "On the Conduct of the Understanding." Wood and Bowles think it makes sense that Dickens would have dictated something by his favorite philosopher to Stone as part of the latter's shorthand lessons. Once they had identified the text, it was relatively simple to complete the rest of the transcription.

The team has also (mostly) cracked the code for a shorthand sample dubbed "The Two Brothers"; only three symbols remain unsolved. The opening line of the transcribed text reads, "I once heard a story... which struck my imagination," so this seemed to be Dickens' notes for a new piece of fiction. Initially, the folks at the Dickens Society thought it was a legal story, since other symbols indicated that the narrator had heard the story "from the mouth of a deceased judge." There were also symbols for "will" and "wards" of courts.

Instead, as the transcription progressed, the scholars discovered it was actually a fragment of a ghost story about two old bachelor brothers living in Slough and London. The framing story—a narrator relating the tale after hearing about it from a judge—was a common trope in 19th-century ghost stories. All we know is that one of the brothers appeared as a ghostly apparition in the other's bedroom one night, with the strange, pale figure making no answer when the brother addressed it.

How does the story end? Nobody knows, because the second page of the story is missing. In fact, there may not even be a second page of the story. The following page consists of a seemingly unrelated courtroom speech. "We won't know if the story continues until we have had a closer look at the sequencing in the notebooks and transcribed more of the pages," Wood and Bowles wrote.

But the contents of the Tavistock letter remained maddeningly elusive—until now. The Dickens Code project's competition closed on New Year's Eve, with sixteen formal submissions, none of which were complete. The judging panel assessed both the quality of the transcription and the quality of the accompanying report for each submission. In the end, Baggs and Cox managed to decipher the most symbols, although it was still very much a combined effort. The full line-by-line transcription, now about 70 percent complete, is here.

"On compiling these solutions, the puzzle pieces started to fit together: a word here, or a key phrase there, that enabled us to pin down the timeframe and understand the context," Wood and Bowles wrote. Three translations proved especially critical.

"HW" was a reference to Household Words, a periodical Dickens edited and co-owned with a publisher called Bradbury and Evans (B&E). Another entry linked the symbol for "round" with a new journal Dickens had founded in 1859, All the Year Round, after he had a falling out with B&E. And two symbols translated into "Ascension Day," which helped pinpoint the likely time period in which the Tavistock letter had been written: 40 days after Easter in 1859.

The analysis revealed that the letter was addressed to J.T. Delane, editor of The Times, in May 1859, a personal acquaintance of the author, concerning a rejected advertisement for Dickens' new magazine. Per Wood and Bowles, Dickens was suffering some financial constraints at the time. He was divorcing his wife. And he had fallen out with B&E because the publisher had refused to publish Dickens' furious denial of his extramarital affair with an actress in Punch (which it also published). B&E didn't accept Dickens' offer to buy its share of Household Words, a major source of the author's income at the time.

That's why Dickens started All the Year Round. B&E sued to keep Dickens from telling people that Household Words was being discontinued. Dickens won the case, provided he made it clear in such statements that it was Dickens, personally, who was discontinuing the magazine, not B&E. The Times advertisement announcing the launch of All the Year Round used such terminology, and a clerk mistakenly rejected it, prompting the Tavistock letter.

There is another known letter, written in longhand, from The Times manager, apologizing to Dickens and reinstating the rejected advertisement—likely in response to the Tavistock letter. So Dickens won that battle and soon won the war. All the Year Round launched with the first installment of one of his most famous novels, A Tale of Two Cities, and the magazine became a literary sensation. Meanwhile, without Dickens as editor, Household Word's readership declined. B&E was forced to auction off the title, and Dickens bought the magazine at a steep discount, incorporating it into All the Year Round.

"Thanks to the work of the Dickens decoders, we have gained new insight into this particularly fraught time in Dickens’s publishing career," Wood and Bowles concluded. "Rather than Dickens the author, we see Dickens the businessman, involved in the minutiae of ensuring his new journal’s success and appealing to powerful friends to get the outcome that he desired."

The Dickens Code project has funding to run for another year, and Wood and Bowles told the Guardian that they hoped to expand the number of amateur sleuths contributing to their decoding efforts. Some of the remaining un-transcribed documents are even more difficult to decode than the Tavistock letter, and one—a series of notes simply headed "Anecdote" in longhand—might just be a new Dickens story, per Bowles. If anyone is game to take a stab at decoding Dickens, the project has an introductory eight-step video guide to get you started: