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Chinnery shorthand: Some snakes and ladders

Our Chinnery summer transcription is proving something of a ‘staggerer’. In a second guest blog, V&A research fellow Patrick Conner provides some help, explaining how Chinnery used shorthand in his sketches, as well as recurring phrases and signs and potential pitfalls.

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Charles Dickens, George Chinnery, and Gurney shorthand

What did Charles Dickens and the artist George Chinnery have in common? Both were practitioners of Gurney’s Brachygraphy shorthand. Find out more about what connects these two fascinating figures in a guest blog by Patrick Conner.

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Letter to Bentley progress

May’s ‘Letter to Bentley’ shorthand decoding challenge turned out to be the trickiest yet. Find out more about our progress here…

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‘Didactic’ transcript

‘Didactic’ has turned out to be a short piece criticising Rome and commenting on Catholicism in terms similar to Dickens’s ‘Pictures from Italy’ (1846). Download a transcript here.