Deadline: 30 June 2022
Our #SolveItDickens challenge for June 2022 was another shorthand dictation exercise from the notebooks of Dickens’s shorthand pupil, Arthur Stone, at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Unlike ‘Nelson’, the title of this piece – ‘Anecdote’ – gave us little to go on. Potentially this could be Dickens talking about something that happened to him, or relating something that he was told. We need to transcribe the text to find out more!

Image © The Free Library of Philadelphia [ref: cdc5890009]
Use our ‘Resources’ to help you decipher the text and look out for words written in longhand and double quotation marks as well. Remember that it is unlikely that you will be able to solve the whole text, but even one new symbol can be useful. Anyone who successfully describes a new symbol with be credited as its discoverer on our Roll of Honour.
This challenge is now complete – many thanks to everyone who entered! We will publish the results on 18 July 2022. You can still download the original challenge entry forms below.