The writer’s archaic shorthand has baffled experts for over a century. So they launched a deciphering competition for fans – with stunning r
When Dickens sat down to compose the Tavistock letter, he would have been amused to consider that, almost 165 years later, it would be pulled to pieces, endlessly analysed and ultimately deciphered by, among others, a 20-year-old student from Ohio called Ken Cox. “I thought it was mind-boggling that there was something he’d written that nobody had read yet,” says Cox, a fan of puzzles, Dickens and even shorthand, who studies cognitive science at the University of Virginia.
So what does the Tavistock letter say? Sadly, it is not notes for – or even part of – a long-lost short story, although there is hope that the other documents may include fiction. What it does reveal is a suitably convoluted tale of a canny businessman who has reached a fraught juncture in his love life and literary career, and is now leaning on his connections and the courts for help.
“The decoders really have helped to cast light on this troubled period in Dickens’s life,” says Dr Claire Wood, lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Leicester. Wood leads the decoding project with Hugo Bowles, professor of English at the University of Foggia in Italy. After a lengthy process of piecing the entries together and cross-checking with other sources, the pair have a transcript that is 70% complete.
