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 âPicture-writing of the Mexicansâ to the âSystem of Writing of the Chineseâ and âthe Cuneiform Writing of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persiaâ - 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 âArt of Writing.â The changes introduced by this new writing system could be so sweeping, he suggests portentously, that we might wonder âwhether 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.â1 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 âarbitraryâ and the âcontradictoryâ from writing, and create âa more severe and scientific method, truly and originally founded upon a classification of all the sounds which the human voice is capable of enunciating.â2
Since we still find ourselves, even on e-mail and by fax, using that same âancient pseudo-hieroglyphicâ 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 âthe human voice.â The object of Humphreyâs rhapsodic praise was Isaac Pitmanâs âphonography,â a new system of shorthand that, in 1837, marked a new phase in English print cultureâs 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 âthe cultural work of defining a new medium may go on during and in a sense even before the invention of the device itselfâ3; 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 Victoriaâs inauguration, makes irresistible the claim that the Victorian era was fundamentally phonographic. For its first 40 years, up to and beyond Edisonâs invention of the phonograph in 1877, Victorian culture struggled resourcefully to find ways to transcribe and write voice. Pitmanâs 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 cultureâs ongoing romance with voice as a cure for print cultureâs ills.
Humphreys concludes his book by imagining a world transformed by phonography. His vision of âthe most valuable books ... reprinted in the more scientific method of phonographic notation,â and professorships established in the obsolete âpseudo-hieroglyphicâ standard English, offers a window to a Victorian understanding of the relation of voice to writing that is startlingly different from our own. Humphreyâs 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 âarbitraryâ from writing is an aim returned to again and again, as the progress of a humanized (if also âsevere and scientificâ) 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 âreport,â or accurately transcribe the speeches he heard, as put them into his own words. The varied speeches all become perfect, âgrammaticalâ Johnsonian prose - they are reported in the same form Johnson was âaccustomed 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 âreportâ 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 Johnsonâs 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. Johnsonâs slipshod method of transcription leads, predictably, to overt bias in his reporting, as he âcomposesâ 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 Johnsonâs - or the eighteenth centuryâs - 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 opinionâs ethical value may depend on its fidelity to spoken utterance.8
Bradleyâs 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 âgrammaticalâ 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 Habermasâs influential account of the public sphere suggests that the nineteenth century is already the era of that institutionâs decline, Bradley insists that the eighteenth-centuryâs 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 Pitmanâs 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 âspoken and written languageâ in his 1842 manual z. âHitherto, among all nations,â he writes, âthere 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.â11 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 âdelightfulâ voice. But Pitmanâs system, he suggests, âoffers a method of really exhibiting speech on paper, by signs as simple and intelligible as the sound they represent.â Political and moral progress is conjoined with the incorporation of speech and sound in writing. To represent âspeech on paperâ is to infuse the âwearisome,â 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 âpowerâ of âknowledge,â de Stains laments, âHow 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!â12 A dedicatory poem to Thomas Gurneyâs famous shorthand system figures writing in the pre-shorthand era as the painful labor of âpale-eyâd scribesâ who âwatchâd their midnight oil / Oâer the slow progress of their folio toil.â13 If Samuel Johnson serves for Bradley as a figure of irresponsible pre-Victorian writing, these âscribesâ practice a miserable writing, a writing associated with torment and âtoil.â The âintroduction of a rational alphabet,â de Stains suggests - meaning a non-arbitrary shorthand alphabet based on vocal sounds - would not merely return âto the studious world years till then spent in misery and confinement,â but would indeed ârender a greater service to mankind than the discovery of a new world!â14
This ânew worldâ is no other than a voice in writing, the attainment of a writing released from misery and infused with orality...