A DICKENS CODE IS FINALLY SOLVED

It was a letter to the Editor of the Times

Despite the intricate plots, Charles Dickens was a messy writer. His manuscripts are full of inky splodges, with barely legible alterations crammed in between scrawled, sloping lines. Worse still was his love of a type of shorthand dating from the 1700s. To this, he added his chaotic modifications to create what he called “the devil’s handwriting”.

The great Victorian writer used these time-saving hieroglyphics to make notes and copies of his letters and documents, reams of which he burned. Academics are still toiling to decipher 10 shorthand manuscripts that survived. And for a long time, this Dickens Code had seemed uncrackable.

Last year, the experts behind what is known as the Dickens Code project put out a call for amateur sleuths to enter a competition, the task being to transcribe one of these baffling documents: a mystery letter that has been kept for more than a century in a New York library. It is scrawled in blue ink on paper bearing the letterhead of Tavistock House, the London home where Dickens wrote Bleak House.

When the competition opened last October with a £300 prize, the note was downloaded 1,000 times in three days. Participants were invited to use guides to brachygraphy, the now obsolete shorthand system that Dickens had adapted. In the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield, brachygraphy is described as a “savage stenographic mystery”.

Competitors also had access to a notebook in which Dickens explained, with characteristic ambiguity, some of his symbols. He used “@” for “about” and an angular kind of “t” to mean “extraordinary”. In the end, only 16 people, from all over the world, were able to submit solutions. None managed the entire thing.

So what does the Tavistock letter say? Sadly, what it does reveal is a suitably convoluted tale of a canny businessman who has reached a fraught juncture in his love life and literary career, and is now leaning on his connections and the courts for help.

“The decoders have helped to cast light on this troubled period in Dickens’s life,” says Dr Claire Wood, lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Leicester. Wood leads the decoding project with Hugo Bowles, professor of English at the University of Foggia in Italy. After a lengthy process of piecing the entries together and cross-checking with other sources, the pair have a transcript that is 70% complete.

“I feel obliged,” the letter begins, “though very reluctantly, to appeal to you in person.” Three newly translated phrases were vital in understanding what comes next. One sleuth deduced that “HW” referred to Household Words, a periodical Dickens edited and co-owned with the publisher Bradbury and Evans. Another linked the symbol for “round” to All the Year Round, a new journal Dickens founded in 1859 and owned himself after falling out with Bradbury and Evans.

In another breakthrough, one solver translated two scribbles as “Ascension Day”, a Christian feast that falls 40 days after Easter. This fascinated Wood and Bowles because Ascension Day in 1859 coincided with a period in which we know Dickens was attempting to incorporate Household Words into All the Year Round. 

These clues shed light on another letter, written in longhand, fortunately, that is kept at the same New York library. It’s an apology to Dickens from the manager of the Times about a row that had erupted when Dickens asked the newspaper to print an advert alerting his readers to All the Year Round. It mentions another letter, one Dickens had written to John Thadeus Delane, editor of the Times. Until now, this letter was assumed lost.

1859 was a tricky year for Dickens, then 47.  Despite the fame, he had earned with Bleak House and David Copperfield. A year earlier, his marriage had fallen apart amid rumours of an affair with an actress. Dickens published a furious statement in Household Words, describing the rumours as “most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel-involving”. When he asked Bradbury and Evans to print the statement in Punch, which is also published, the company refused. Their relationship fell apart and the publisher declined an offer from Dickens to buy its share of Household Words.

He had a divorce, a rumoured mistress, and 10 children to look after. Household Words, which Dickens launched in 1850, was a vital source of income. It had taken off in 1854 with the serialisation of his novel Hard Times.

Bradbury and Evans wanted to keep Household Words alive without him – and sued to prevent him from giving the impression the magazine was closing. However, a judge ruled in Dickens’s favour. yes, he could announce the switch, as long as he said Household Words was being “discontinued by him” and not the publisher. A triumphant Dickens used this phrase in the advert intended for the Times, but a clerk rejected it. The Tavistock letter is, we now know, the writer’s desperate bid to rescue the situation by appealing to the editor, an acquaintance. The Times apologised and reinstated the advert.

All the Year Round, which he launched with the first instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, was a sensation. A year later, it serialised Great Expectations. 

The £300 prize was won by Shane Baggs, a Californian IT worker and code enthusiast, who solved the most symbols.