Getting started
Not sure where to start? Download our ‘Beginner’s Guide to Gurney’s Brachygraphy‘. The same file is provided in .docx and .pdf formats for your convenience.
Decoding Dickens’s shorthand
Digital resources
Below are a range of free-to-access digital resources that provide additional insight into Dickens’s shorthand, his life, and his work.
- The original Brachygraphy manual can be accessed here. Dickens used this to teach himself the shorthand system.
- Dickens’s shorthand book at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, outlines his take on the rules of Brachygraphy – as well as listing some of the new symbols that he created.
- In 2023 we launched an online exhibition, exploring the place of shorthand in Dickens’s life and work. Visit ‘Decoding Dickens: The Shorthand Mysteries’.
- Newly discovered Dickens letters are made freely available via the Charles Dickens Letters Project.
- You can access Dickens’s journals, Household Words and All the Year Round via the University of Buckingham’s Dickens Journals Online project.
- Various collections of Dickens’s letters can be accessed here, via Archive.org.