Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture
eBook - ePub

Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

Leah Price, Pamela Thurschwell, Pamela Thurschwell

Share book
  1. 176 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

Leah Price, Pamela Thurschwell, Pamela Thurschwell

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Secretaries are the hidden technicians of much literary (and non-literary) writing; they also figure startlingly often as characters in modern literature, film, and even literary criticism. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture brings together secretaries' role in the production (and, more surprisingly, consumption) of modern culture with interpretations of their function in literature and film from Chaucer to Heidegger, by way of Dickens, Dracula, and Erle Stanley Gardner. These essays probe the relation of office practice to literary theory, asking what changes when literary texts represent, address, or acknowledge the human copyist or the mechanical writing machine. Topics range from copyright law to voice recognition software, from New Women to haunted typewriters and from the history of technology to the future of information management. Together, the essays will provide literary critics with a new angle on current debates about gender, labour, and the material text, as well as a window into the prehistory of our information age.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture by Leah Price, Pamela Thurschwell, Pamela Thurschwell in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literatur & Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information


Chapter 1
Speech on Paper: Charles
Dickens, Victorian Phonography,
and the Reform of Writing

Ivan Kreilkamp

1 The Reform of Writing

In 1855 Henry Noel Humphreys published a lavish tome entitled The Origin and Progress of the Art of Writing. Following his survey of the world history of writing - from the “Picture-writing of the Mexicans” to the “System of Writing of the Chinese” and “the Cuneiform Writing of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia” - Humphreys appends a brief coda on the current, Victorian practice of writing. He concludes his survey with a tribute to a new method that he suggests may well utterly and permanently revolutionize the ancient “Art of Writing.” The changes introduced by this new writing system could be so sweeping, he suggests portentously, that we might wonder “whether professorships may be established in our colleges for the study of the ancient pseudo-hieroglyphic character, [that is, ordinary written English] in which books were printed and letters written, so late as the nineteenth century.”1 Figuring himself and his age as poised on the brink of a monumental epistemic shift, Humphreys foresees the obsolescence of traditional writing and standard English, and the rise of an altogether new system, one which would eliminate the “arbitrary” and the “contradictory” from writing, and create “a more severe and scientific method, truly and originally founded upon a classification of all the sounds which the human voice is capable of enunciating.”2
Since we still find ourselves, even on e-mail and by fax, using that same “ancient pseudo-hieroglyphic” writing that Humphreys predicted would imminently become a relic of history, we might well wonder what this new form of writing was that promised, in 1855, to reform English on the basis of “the human voice.” The object of Humphrey’s rhapsodic praise was Isaac Pitman’s “phonography,” a new system of shorthand that, in 1837, marked a new phase in English print culture’s relationship to speech. Lacking mechanical reproduction, phonography seemed to offer a more exact and mimetic registration of speech than ordinary writing could claim. The excitement that greeted phonography reveals an early-Victorian yearning for the storage and recording capacities that become available only later in the century with the invention of the phonograph. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that “the cultural work of defining a new medium may go on during and in a sense even before the invention of the device itself”3; we can see phonographic shorthand along these lines as doing the necessary cultural work for the later invention and reception of the phonograph.4 In fact, the historical accident of Pitman introducing his phonographic system in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s inauguration, makes irresistible the claim that the Victorian era was fundamentally phonographic. For its first 40 years, up to and beyond Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, Victorian culture struggled resourcefully to find ways to transcribe and write voice. Pitman’s phonographic technique - a form of shorthand that, unlike those that had existed for centuries before, based itself on phonetics and the actual sounds of human speech - emblematizes Victorian culture’s ongoing romance with voice as a cure for print culture’s ills.
Humphreys concludes his book by imagining a world transformed by phonography. His vision of “the most valuable books ... reprinted in the more scientific method of phonographic notation,” and professorships established in the obsolete “pseudo-hieroglyphic” standard English, offers a window to a Victorian understanding of the relation of voice to writing that is startlingly different from our own. Humphrey’s predictions may seem eccentric or extreme, but he was in fact simply participating in a well-established early-Victorian discourse that heralded shorthand phonography as the means by which writing might be reformed by voice. The banishment of the “arbitrary” from writing is an aim returned to again and again, as the progress of a humanized (if also “severe and scientific”) and vocalized writing is associated with a social shift away from arbitrary state rule, and the advent of a Victorian era of reformed social power. Shorthand offers the promise of a reformed writing that would bear the trace of the living voice of speech.5
In his 1842 A Concise and Practical System of Stenography, or Short-Hand Writing - one of the many dozens of such self-help guides available in England in the first half of the nineteenth century to ambitious young men eager to learn the skill of legal or Parliamentary reporting - G. Bradley discusses the primitive state, prior to 1780, of the journalistic reportage of public speeches. He points to the reporting career of Samuel Johnson as embodying a pre-Victorian, primitive notion of the proper relationship between speech and writing, and between public politics and its representation in the press:
It is singular that although stenography was introduced into this country at a very early period, yet that our forefathers should never, until a very recent date, have thought of adopting it to that which is now its primary, although by no means its only use - we mean the transcript (so to speak) of addresses delivered to the public ... [U]p to 1780 public proceedings, or rather miserably abridged sketches of them, were taken down in ordinary writing for the London journals. Dr. Johnson was one of the earliest reporters of the debates in Parliament, and the doctor boasted that he took care the Whig rascals should not have the best of the argument - a course which he could well adopt; for, instead of reporting the speeches of noble lords and honorable members, he composed them, and it is recorded that he made them all speak in the same pompous and grammatical style in which he was himself accustomed to write.6
Samuel Johnson, according to this highly biased account, does not so much “report,” or accurately transcribe the speeches he heard, as put them into his own words. The varied speeches all become perfect, “grammatical” Johnsonian prose - they are reported in the same form Johnson was “accustomed to write f The problem here lies in a slippage from speech to a writing that excludes voice altogether, that lacks any connection to the human speech it purports to transcribe. Johnson, claiming to “report” on spoken language, bypasses voice entirely, and arrogantly imposes his own monolithic, homogeneous standard of written English on speech.7 So if the major problem identified in Johnson’s reporting lies in a kind of technical oversight - the unaccountable failure to use the available practice of shorthand, which had after all been around since the Romans, to reproduce speech - it is also a moral or ethical lapse. Johnson’s slipshod method of transcription leads, predictably, to overt bias in his reporting, as he “composes” the speeches in order to make his political opponents come off badly. We should not, of course, confuse this account with an accurate description of Samuel Johnson’s - or the eighteenth century’s - attitude toward or practices of transcription of voice. In fact, Johnson made no claims to be doing anything other than offering his own impressions of the speeches he had seen. What is important, for our purposes here, is the Victorian presumption that Johnson should have been attempting an exact transcription of speech, even that writing or opinion’s ethical value may depend on its fidelity to spoken utterance.8
Bradley’s shorthand manual draws a line between an eighteenth-century relationship of writing to speech and its newly reformed, nineteenth-century relation. Where once writing was imposed in whole cloth on speech, flattening differences of voice and expression in the forcible rule of “grammatical” written law, now - so these manuals tend to claim - a new approach to writing embodied in shorthand incorporates the vocal and so reforms an inhuman, rule-bound writing.9 This shift brings with it a moral improvement, it is implied, as the representation of politics attains a new standard of mimetic accuracy, permitting the free workings of an unbiased fourth estate. If Habermas’s influential account of the public sphere suggests that the nineteenth century is already the era of that institution’s decline, Bradley insists that the eighteenth-century’s flawed public sphere will be mended by new techniques of shorthand transcription.
The grandiose claims made for shorthand in the early Victorian era signal a new way of thinking about writing and its relationship to human utterance. Shorthand promises not simply an efficient system of information storage, but a means by which writing might be infused with orality and the living breath of vocal articulation. This realm of orality, formerly understood as an inferior stage on the way to the proper use of language in writing, is now invested with a new value. Phonography, seen as the means by which writing might move one step closer to orality and the presence of voice, attains new significance as the method by which writing might reform itself.
As Lisa Gitelman explains,
Shorthand was the subject of particular attention and acclaim during the middle of the nineteenth century, encouraged in part by the British publication of Isaac Pitman’s Stenographic Sound-Hand in 1837. Prior to Pitman, shorthand was called stenography (derived from the Greek, narrow or close writing), tachygraphy (swift writing), or brachygraphy (short writing). But Pitman soon dubbed his system phonography (sound writing) because he claimed that his was the first shorthand based explicitly on the phonetics of English, rather than on its spelling ... Phonetic shorthand emphasized the oral character of language at the same time that it sought to perfect a technology for linguistic representation.10
Pitman, whose system Humphreys predicted would revolutionize writing, discusses the difference between “spoken and written language” in his 1842 manual z. “Hitherto, among all nations,” he writes, “there has existed the greatest disparity, in point of facility and dispatch, between these two methods of communication: the former has always been comparatively rapid, easy, and delightful; the latter, tedious, cumbrous, and wearisome.”11 Pitman stages a conflict between a living voice and the dead letter of writing. He figures writing as a kind of ponderous tool of bureaucracy, an inhuman technology opposed to the “delightful” voice. But Pitman’s system, he suggests, “offers a method of really exhibiting speech on paper, by signs as simple and intelligible as the sound they represent.” Political and moral progress is conjoined with the incorporation of speech and sound in writing. To represent “speech on paper” is to infuse the “wearisome,” inefficient realm of writing with the free spirit and vitality of voice.
The oddly-named V.D. de Stains, in his similarly-titled 1842 Phonography, or the Writing of Sounds, goes still further in associating a non-vocal writing with misery, dry scholasticism, and unremitting labor. Discussing the tiny elite whose education permits them to attain the “power” of “knowledge,” de Stains laments, “How dearly even those few must pay for it, not with money, but with the precious years of their youth passed sorrowfully in a damp, dull school-room, bent over the great tormentor of childhood: the spelling-book!”12 A dedicatory poem to Thomas Gurney’s famous shorthand system figures writing in the pre-shorthand era as the painful labor of “pale-ey’d scribes” who “watch’d their midnight oil / O’er the slow progress of their folio toil.”13 If Samuel Johnson serves for Bradley as a figure of irresponsible pre-Victorian writing, these “scribes” practice a miserable writing, a writing associated with torment and “toil.” The “introduction of a rational alphabet,” de Stains suggests - meaning a non-arbitrary shorthand alphabet based on vocal sounds - would not merely return “to the studious world years till then spent in misery and confinement,” but would indeed “render a greater service to mankind than the discovery of a new world!”14
This “new world” is no other than a voice in writing, the attainment of a writing released from misery and infused with orality...

Table of contents