Hostname: page-component-669899f699-vbsjw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-02T08:46:43.779Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

You Can’t Write “tombsteans” in Shorthand: The Pitman Method, Polyglot Dictionaries, and the Suppression of Speech Difference in Dracula

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2025

Carolyn Jacobson Open the ORCID record for Carolyn Jacobson [Opens in a new window]  and
Erik Simpson Open the ORCID record for Erik Simpson [Opens in a new window]
Carolyn Jacobson
Affiliation:
Grinnell College, Iowa, United States
Erik Simpson
Affiliation:
Grinnell College, Iowa, United States
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) offers the reader fantastical versions of two seemingly realistic office technologies: shorthand writing and polyglot dictionaries. In both cases, Stoker’s changes allow the reader to see varieties of spoken language in ways that the real technologies would not have allowed. Representing dialect through shorthand, as Mina Harker does, would have been impossible with Pitman shorthand as well as antithetical to the principles behind that writing system. And no books existed that could have enabled the translations that Jonathan Harker claims to make with his polyglot dictionary. However, Stoker uses standard English spelling when representing characters of higher status, such as Van Helsing, Morris, and Dracula, all of whom represent national types that were routinely marked by dialect respelling in other fictions of Stoker’s time. The novel therefore exhibits two contrary tendencies: Stoker uses nonstandard spelling when he could easily have avoided it, and he avoids it when he could easily have used it. We place that contradiction in Victorian debates about spelling reform and language purity. We argue that the novel uses standard spelling to reinforce an alliance of Anglo-Teutonic elites, whereas the heteroglossia and polyglossia of these language technologies undermine that trajectory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , Winter 2024 , pp. 681 - 711
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006.Google Scholar
Baedeker’s Conversation Dictionary in Four Languages: English, French, German, Italian. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1889.Google Scholar
Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves. London: Smith, 1865.Google Scholar
Barrow, Barbara. Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry: Political Dialects. New York: Routledge, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bateson, Frederick Wilse, ed. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Volume III: 1800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
[Beattie, James.] Scoticisms. Edinburgh: n.p., 1787.Google Scholar
Becke, Louis. “Ludwig Schwalbe, South Sea Savant.” In Pacific Tales, 279–98. London: Unwin, [1897].Google Scholar
Brown, Stephen W., and McDougall, Warren, eds. Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707–1800. Vol. 2 of The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Brundan, Katy. “The Polyglot Vampire: The Politics of Translation in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 52, no. 1 (January 2016): 1–21.Google Scholar
“Books for Young People.” The Literary World 48 (August 4, 1893): 91.Google Scholar
Cahen, Louis. Serbian-English and English-Serbian Pocket Dictionary. London: Kegan Paul, 1916.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. Almayer’s Folly: The Story of an Eastern River. London: Unwin, 1895.Google Scholar
Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8 (1984): 107–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. 1837. London: Macmillan, 1892.Google Scholar
Dictionaries of the Scots Language, s.v. “stane,” www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/stane (accessed February 19, 2022).Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda C. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Dumas, Alexandre. Twenty Years After. 2 vols. Boston: Little, 1897.Google Scholar
Edison, Thomas. “The Phonograph and Its Future.” North American Review 126, no. 262 (May–June 1878): 527–36.Google Scholar
Ellis, Alexander John. A Plea for Phonotypy and Phonography; or, Speech-Printing and Speech-Writing. Bath: Pitman, 1845.Google Scholar
Fenn, George Mannville. Cormorant Crag: A Tale of the Smuggling Days. London: Partridge, [1895].Google Scholar
Ferguson, Christine. “Nonstandard Language and the Cultural Stakes of Stoker’s Dracula.” ELH 71, no. 1 (2004): 229–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000): 417–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, W. Bert. “A Fiery Vengeance.” The Argosy 26, no. 2 (January 1898): 193–238.Google Scholar
Francis, Francis. Wild Rose: A Tale of the Mexican Frontier. New York: Macmillan, 1895.Google Scholar
Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
[Guthrie, Thomas Anstey, writing as Anstey, F.]. Mr. Punch’s Young Reciter. London: Bradbury, [1897].Google Scholar
Herschel, John. “Sound.” In Encyclopædia Metropolitana; or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge, 4:747–820. London: Fellowes, 1845.Google Scholar
Hrobak, Philip Anthony. Hrobak’s English-Slovak Dictionary. Middleton: Jednota, [1944].Google Scholar
[Hume, David.] Scotticisms. [Edinburgh?, 1770?].Google Scholar
Jacob, Priyanka Anne. “The Pocket-book and the Pigeon-hole: Lady Audley’s Secret and the Files of Victorian Fiction.” Victorian Studies 61, no. 3 (2019): 371–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Chris. Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1986.Google Scholar
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey and Wutz, Michael. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Kreilkamp, Ivan. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lexiconul de la Buda (originally Lesicon románescu-látinescu-ungurescu-nemțescu: quare de mai multi autori, in cursul' a trideci, și mai multoru ani s' au lucratu). Budae [Buda, later Budapest]: n.p., 1825.Google Scholar
Mathew, Frank. A Child in the Temple. London: John Lane, 1897.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Translated by Fischer, Susan, Forgas, David, and Miller, David. London: Verso, 2005.Google Scholar
Page, Leanne. “Phonograph, Shorthand, Typewriter: High Performance Technologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Network 3, no. 2 (2011): 95–113.Google Scholar
Parrino, Maria. “His Master’s Voice: Sound Devices in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 94 (2021), https://journals.openedition.org/cve/9789.Google Scholar
Pitman, Benn. Manual of Phonography. Cincinnati: Phonographic Institute, 1856.Google Scholar
Pitman, Isaac. Stenographic Sound-Hand. London: Bagster, 1837.Google Scholar
Pitman, Isaac. A Manual of Phonography; or, Writing by Sound. London: Bagster, 1842.Google Scholar
Pitman, Isaac. A Manual of Phonography; or Writing by Sound. London: Pitman, 1845.Google Scholar
Pitman, Isaac. A Manual of Phonography or Writing by Sound. London: Pitman, 1865.Google Scholar
Pitman, Isaac. A Phonographic and Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language. 6th ed. London: Pitman, 1890.Google Scholar
Pitman, Isaac. A Manual of Phonography or Writing by Sound. London: Pitman, 1893.Google Scholar
Pitman, Isaac. A Manual of Phonography or Writing by Sound. London: Pitman, 1894.Google Scholar
Roper, Jonathan. “English Purisms.” Victoriographies 2, no. 1 (2012): 44–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russan, Ashmore, and Boyle, Frederick. The Orchid Seekers: A Story of Adventure in Borneo. London: Frederick Warne, [1897].Google Scholar
Shaw, George Bernard. “Notes to Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.” In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, 2:418–26. London: The Bodley Head, 1971.Google Scholar
Sorensen, Janet. Strange Vernaculars: How Eighteenth-Century Slang, Cant, Provincial Languages, and Nautical Jargon Became English. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Constable, 1897.Google Scholar
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Edited by Auerbach, Nina and Skal, David J.. New York: Norton, 1997.Google Scholar
Stoker, Bram. Dracula: The Postcolonial Edition. 1897. Edited by Artenie, Cristina and Moraru, Dragos. Montreal: Universitas, 2016.Google Scholar
Stoker, Bram. Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition. Annotated and transcribed by Eighteen-Bisang, Robert and Miller, Elizabeth. McFarland: Jefferson, 2008.Google Scholar
Ter Reehorst, K. P. The Mariner’s Friend and Nautical Dictionary [. . .] in Ten Different Languages. London: Janet Taylor, 1851.Google Scholar
Tolhausen, Alexander. Technological Dictionary in the English, German, and French Languages. Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1885.Google Scholar
Valente, Joseph. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.Google Scholar
von Strahlenberg, Philip John. An Historico-Geographical Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia [. . .] Together with an Entire New Polyglot-Table of the Dialects of 32 Tartarian Nations. London: Innys, 1738.Google Scholar
Walker, John. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language. Dublin: n.p., 1794.Google Scholar
Walker, John. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language. 25th ed. London: Cadell, 1822.Google Scholar
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 1764. Penguin: New York, 2001.Google Scholar
Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 467–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilkinson, William. An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldova. London: Longman, 1820.Google Scholar