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Cracking the Dickens Code is a story that caught the world’s imagination. The ‘Tavistock’ letter discovery, made thanks to the efforts of the Dickens Decoders, has featured on ITV News at Ten and French cultural show 28 minutes – Le magazine d’actualité. Claire and Hugo have been interviewed by BBC Radio 3, Times Radio, Australia’s ABC Radio National and Radio Melbourne, NTV Russia, and talkSPORT/talkRADIO, as well as contributing to various podcasts. You can find highlights from media coverage of the project below.
Radio and podcasts
- ABC Radio Melbourne – ‘What the Dickens’ segment on ‘Breakfast with Sammy J’ (7 February 2022) [3m 13s]
- ‘The Dickens Code’, Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire – podcast with actor and musician Dominic Gerrard (21 October 2022) [60m]
- ‘The Rundown – How Westminster Works: Everything that’s ever been said in Parliament’ – a podcast for PoliticsHome, featuring Hugo on Dickens’s early shorthand learning (5 August 2022) [from 15:32 and 19:00]
- BBC Radio 3 – Free Thinking ‘Being Human 2021’ (11 November 2021) [12m, from 30:10]
Press releases
- ‘Dickens codebreakers recognised at Higher Education “Oscars”‘, University of Leicester News (18 November 2022) [digital]
- ‘The Dickens Code: Enduring mystery of Dickens shorthand letter solved with crowd-sourced research’, University of Leicester News (7 February 2022) [digital]
Articles
- Feature: Jenny Gross, ‘Decoding Dickens’s Secret Notes to Himself, One Symbol at a Time’, New York Times (8 February 2022) [print and digital]
- Feature: Simon Usborne, ‘Forget Wordle! Can you crack the Dickens Code? An IT worker from California just did’, Guardian (7 February 2022) [print and digital]
- Daniel Capurro, ‘Unique shorthand created by Charles Dickens finally deciphered, revealing angry dispute with newspaper’, The Telegraph (7 February 2022) [print and digital; paywall]
- Jennifer Harby, ‘Charles Dickens’s code cracked by amateur sleuths’, BBC News (6 February 2022) [digital]
- Feature: Sara Tor, ‘What the Dickens? Academics offer reward for anyone who can crack the great writer’s code’, The Times (Saturday 20 November 2021) [print and digital; paywall]
You can also hear more about Hugo’s research for Dickens and the Stenographic Mind (Oxford University Press, 2018) in the video below, produced by the Dickens Society.