As we reach the last few days of campaigning for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, a pro-remain friend reports on Facebook that she has found a torn-up ‘IN’ poster outside her front door. Coming a few days after the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, this is scary stuff.

It may be harder to read the words on a torn-up poster, but its message is all too legible. It also reveals something important about the medium: about paper, with its susceptibility to tearing, to shredding, to violence–its palpability, which is also its palpable ability to act as a metaphor for the body. If you hate this blog post, you can leave an abusive message in response to it; you can troll me or mount a cyber-attack. But you cannot convey your anger through the universal language of the tear. Ripping the page to shreds is a micro-drama that is rapidly fading from our everyday life. The power of paper turns out to be its weakness, its disposability.

There are a few moments in Shakespeare that capture these aspects of paper. Amid the utter bleakness of the ending of Troilus and Cressida, Troilus receives a letter from Cressida. We never find out what it says; Troilus dismisses the contents as ‘words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart’, before tearing it up. ‘Goe wind to wind, there turn and change together’. The fluttering of the paper becomes a visual metaphor for what Troilus perceives to be his beloved’s faithlessness.

At a similar moment of trauma in Cymbeline, Imogen learns that her beloved Posthumus Leonatus wants her killed. She doesn’t yet know why this should be so, and guesses that he has met a new love; ‘Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, / […] I must be ripped: To pieces with me!’ She asks her servant Pisanio to get on with the job of stabbing her, and bares her heart to make the job easier. But she finds the way to her heart barred: ‘What is here? / The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus, / All turn’d to heresie?’ It turns out that she has been storing the letters inside her clothing, like a lining. In this case, she merely throws the letters away (‘Away, away / Corrupters of my faith, you shall no more / Be stomachers to my heart’). In a play that is full of images of bodily dismemberment, it matters that she doesn’t seem to rip them up, and that Pisanio refuses to rip her up. This is a play about restitution–the words will come together, and will be full of meaning once more, by the end.

Let’s hope the political sphere will see some similar restitutions in the coming days and months…

Filling in a questionnaire about digital photography–since, praise the Lord, archives and libraries are increasingly allowing visitors to take photographs of materials in their collections–I start to wax lyrical:

‘Broadly speaking, I’d say that being able to photograph has allowed me to develop my sense that the visual is as important as the verbal in written communication. I think I am quite visually responsive to text—where an older generation would just want to get at the ‘content’, my generation sees content in the physical disposition of words and their endless interactions with images.’

It’s not exactly The Who, but I think it’s true all the same: for those of us who straddle the shift from print to digital, there’s something a bit scandalous about our interest in the visual. And given the ease with which images can be shared on social media, the scandal looks set to deepen with time.

Isaac Pitman’s phonographic shorthand or ‘sound-hand’ was invented in 1837 and remains the mostly widely used system of shorthand in the world, now more commonly known as ‘Pitman Shorthand.’

Shorthand – otherwise known as stenography, brachygraphy, or tachygraphy – is a system of written signs designed to enable their user to write words down at the rate at which they are spoken. The earliest known form of shorthand is found in the ‘Tironian Notes’, developed by Marcus Tullius Tiro in order to quickly and accurately transcribe Cicero’s speeches. Later English-language systems include: Timothy Bright’s Characterie: An Arte of Shorte, Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character (1588), Thomas Shelton’s Short Writing (1626) (used by Samuel Pepys in his diaries), and Samuel Taylor’s 1786 system. Taylor’s system was widely used throughout the English-speaking world and the young Isaac Pitman mastered it before developing his own system.

These shorthand systems were primarily orthographic, using particular marks to indicate common clusters of letters – prefixes, suffixes, common endings, and everyday words – although they also often included marks representing vowel-sounds. Pitman’s innovation was to invent a shorthand system with a strictly phonetic basis. Phonographic shorthand transcribed sound rather than abbreviated spelling: it bypassed conventional orthography in order to give written form to the accents and inflections of pronunciation. As Pitman himself put it, phonographic shorthand was a system of writing in which the ‘very sound of every word is made VISIBLE.’

Pitman’s specific concern was to develop a system of shorthand in which audible speech – rather than just its linguistic meaning – could be perfectly reproduced from written signs. His interest in the relationship between texts and pronunciation began at a young age: coming across unknown words in Paradise Lost, he discovered that he could reconstruct their correct stress and intonation from Milton’s prosody. This interest remained with him, prompting the development and endless refinement of phonographic shorthand, and eventually leading him to establish his Phonetic Institution which was to become the headquarters of the Spelling Reform movement and the centre for its many publishing and pedagogical activities.

While there is sometimes a mismatch between Pitman’s pedagogical ambition for the system and its actual success, the development of his long-distance learning programme indicates the level of popular engagement with phonographic shorthand. Every Phonetic Institute publication advertised that ‘Any Person may receive lessons from the Author by post gratuitously. Each lesson must be enclosed in a paid letter. The pupil can write about a dozen verses from the Bible, leaving spaces between the lines for corrections.’ By 1845, Pitman was receiving 10,000 phonographic letters a year. Similarly, while the ‘Phonetic Sunday Schools’ that Pitman imagined would be central to the education of children in phonetic literacy seem never to have been established, phonographic shorthand was nevertheless used on the mission field to produce the first written records of un-transcribed languages, including Bengalee, Tongan, and Malagasy. There were also reports that the system was used to take notes in the Chinese Parliament

The extent of popular engagement with phonographic shorthand is indicated here, as is its global reach, and some of the ways it influenced literacy, engagement with educational activities, and understandings of language. Despite this, there has been very little investigation into the use of the system or its significance for how we think about writing and language more broadly in the nineteenth-century. The Rare Books Department at Cambridge University Library has an extensive collection of Phonetic Institution publications, including teaching materials, exercise books, phonotypic publications, and phonetic periodicals. Much of this material has never been studied, and many of the books still have their pages uncut. There is, I think, some very interesting work to be done here.

Pitman’s endeavour also reflects the proliferation of phonographic experiments and the growing concerns about language in the nineteenth-century. Attempts to inscribe sound in such a way that it could be reproduced took many different forms. Alexander Melville Bell, a professor of physiological phonetics at Edinburgh, developed a system of ‘Visible Speech’ in which grammalogues depicting the shapes of sound in the human mouth were used to teach the profoundly deaf correct pronunciation. His son, Alexander Graham Bell, was such an accomplished reader of ‘Visible Speech’ that his party-trick was to use ‘Visible Speech’ transcriptions to read out loud foreign texts in languages he couldn’t speak (includng Sanskrit and Gaelic) to the satisfaction of native speakers. A. G. Bell subsequently developed the telephone (patented 1875-77). Thomas Edison invented the phonograph (the precursor to the gramophone) in 1877 which made re-playable voice-recordings by tracing a vibrating needle over wax cylinders. Turning from technological experiments to linguistic research, concerns with accurately recording the sound of speech were central to nineteenth-century investigations into philology, etymology, and regional accent. They also play out in the dialect poetry of Dorset poet William Barnes, and can, I argue, be traced in Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with disembodied voices and forms of inscription (see ‘‘How you call to me, call to me’: Hardy’s Self-Remembering Syntax’, Victorian Poetry, Spring 2016).

As such, Pitman’s phonographic shorthand also offers an insight into a particular historical moment in which these questions about the relation between texts and sounds were at the forefront of technological and linguistic research. Establishing the relationship between text and sound was not only a practical problem. It also pressed philosophical questions about the nature of meaning – about the relationship between linguistic sense and sensuous form, about what writing is for and how it relates to speech, and about the kinds of sound, experience, and meaning that become available when we read.

Some of the philosophical thinking about language that attended Pitman’s innovations can be seen in his phonographic books. They show an anxiety that we might not be able to hear the difference between different categories of sound and language when all noise is inscribed as the same kind of phonographic text: in the phonographic edition of Thankful Blossom: A Romance of the Jerseys, 1779, by Bret Harte (1889), Pitman – bizarrely – leaves the cow’s moo-ing untranscribed; similarly, in Plutarch’s Lives of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar (1887), Pitman leaves all Latin names untranslated. In the ‘Exercises in Phonography’ appended to A Manual of Phonography (1845), Pitman seems to take particular delight in demonstrating how his phonographic system makes the end-rhymes of the metrical psalm visible as a sequence of paired symbols.

But these questions about the relation between text and voice also raise philosophical questions about the nature of human identity: the relationship between voice and presence, between being and knowing, between embodied life and the traces of human experience and knowledge we leave behind. Edison, with a mixture of pride and sadness, acknowledged the extent to which these phonographic experiments raise questions that intrude on and threaten the self-reflexive knowing that constitutes the sense of self: ‘The phonograph, in one sense, knows more than we do ourselves. For it will retain a perfect mechanical memory of many things which we may forget, even though we have said them’.

Anna Nickerson

An exhibition of Pitman-related materials is currently on display on the first floor lobby of the Faculty of English, 9 West Rd.

I just caught up with an interview with the American author Don DeLillo in a recent Saturday edition of the Guardian. Two moments in it caught my eye. (Well, three, actually but I’m only going to quote two):

‘”People always use the word ‘identify’. ‘Do you identify with these individuals?’ And I really don’t. I can’t talk about characters outside the frame of the fiction. I identify with the words on the page. I identify with the paragraphs.”‘

And then

‘I ask DeLillo how he came to write [White Noise], but his recollection is hazy. The rhythms and patterns appear to be all that remain. He says, “I can remember the main character’s name, which is Jack Gladney. And there was something in that name–JA for Jack and GLA for Gladney–which felt important. I’ve done the same thing for other books. I’m always very conscious of the patterns of letters in a name. Ross Lockhart isn’t a great example, but its RO and then LO. So it’s a thing that I do. A character takes shape because of that confluence of letters.’

The comments resonate with a moment in DeLillo’s gruelling 9/11 novel Falling Man, when a (very minor) character learns that his name is his destiny:

‘Someone told Rumsey one night, it was Dockery the waggish adman, that everything in his life would be different, Rumsey’s, if one letter in his name was different. An a for the u. Making him, effectively, Ramsey. It was the u, the rum, that had shaped his life and mind. The way he walks and talks, his slouchings, his very size and shape, the slowness and thickness that pour off him, the way he puts his hand down his shirt to scratch an itch. That would all be different if he’d been born a Ramsey.’

The way that a character–or a type, a way of being in the world–unfurls from a single letter in a name here is rather magical, and it’s interesting that it’s the adman who should be most attuned to the power of names. DeLillo’s writing practices take us back to the root of the word ‘character’, which was being used to indicate brands, stamps, marks and letters for a good century before it was used to signify a person’s identity. (The OED currently gives the first citation in the latter sense to Ben Jonson, and the list of characters that preceded Every Man in his Humour in 1600). Of course, though the Guardian interviewer doesn’t mark it, it must matter that Don DeLillo has himself got the most wonderful little poem of a name, a tongue-twister incorporating a miniature Manhattan skyline, and the best brand that he could have hoped for.

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through one or more informal presentations and general discussion. All are welcome. Easter Term meetings will take place in the Milstein Seminar Room, Cambridge University Library between 2-4 PM.

Friday 6 May 2016.

Dr. Irene Ceccherini: ‘The Network of Cursive Handwriting: Late Medieval Italian Notaries, Merchants, Scribes and Scholars between Documents and Books’

Friday 20 May 2016.

Dr. Katya Chernakova: Title To Be Announced.

Dr. Eyal Poleg: ‘The Late Medieval Bible’

Friday 27 May 2016.

Professor David Ganz: ‘When is a ‘Script’ not Several Scribes?’

For more information, see the attached poster.

Convenors: Teresa Webber, Orietta Da Rold, Suzanne Paul, Sean Curran and David Ganz. For further details, email Orietta Da Rold (od245@cam.ac.uk)

Thursdays at 5 pm

28 April–Current Med/Ren MPhil students will discuss their textual studies projects.

Venue: Milstein Seminar Room, CUL

12 May–Ian Gadd (Bath Spa), ‘Errant commas, absent pages, and shifting typos: the strange bibliographical world of Jonathan Swift’s English political works’

Venue: Keynes Room, CUL

I’m really looking forward to our two panels representing what you might call the diasporic CMT at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Boston this Thursday:

The Early Modern Material Text I: Reading, Collecting, Compiling

Thu, March 31, 8:30 to 10:00am, Park Plaza, Mezzanine, Georgian Room

There was a Guardian obituary yesterday for Ray Tomlinson, the man who put the @ in your email address. Back in 1971, he needed to find a way for computers on the Arpanet (precursor of the internet) to send messages to each other, and he created the now-ubiquitous identifier username@computername format. The invention apparently caused some problems in operating systems that used the @ symbol to mean ‘delete this line’. (The obituary sadly doesn’t tell us who invented the dot, as in .com).

Coincidentally, yesterday my wife was phoning various Italian archives to try to get permission to reproduce pictures in their collections. Intimidating archivists were rattling off email addresses far too quickly. What’s a ‘chiocciola’? A bit of googling established that the chiocciola (snail) or sweeter still the chiocciolina (little snail) is indeed the @ sign. But the @ is also a mouse’s tail or a sleeping cat in Finland, a rolled pickled herring in Czechoslovakia, a monkey in Poland, and a puppy in Russia. Or perhaps all of the many contributors to this online discussion were having their readers on?

A new CMT exhibition in the English Faculty first floor atrium, 9 West Rd

Anxious musings about ‘the fate of reading in the electronic age’ are now commonplace, with most attention focused on perceived threats to the tangible pleasures of the book. Gutenberg elegies are, however, seldom sung for print magazines – perhaps because they were always intended to be ephemeral.

This miniature exhibition, associated with our up-coming symposium Books in the Making <http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26185>, focuses on American fiction, and celebrates the mass-market and avant-garde magazines in which some of the best known twentieth-century writers first found a place to publish.  Sometimes magazines published extracts from novels, but more often than not they relied on and promoted short stories – complete fictions that were said to appeal to modern readers because (as one late nineteenth-century editor put it) they could ‘be taken down with a gulp.’

For more than half a century, American magazines – big and small –  loved short fiction, which in all sorts of contexts (including Playboy!) provided a powerful enticement for readers and therefore for advertisers.

Today, however, things are different – advertisers and many readers have departed for TV and the internet – and even little magazines struggle to maintain a print presence. While, as Stephen King pointed out in 2007, the high-paying New Yorker remains the ‘holy grail of the young fiction writer’, much original short fiction today is published in web-based outlets. Nonetheless, new media often look back to earlier moments; this year the Evergreen Review, a once venerable print journal, will be relaunched online <http://www.evergreenreview.com/>.

Kasia Boddy and David Winters

Last week I was involved in a seminar in which Professor Marjorie Garber, visiting from Harvard, reported that she bans her students from writing ‘Shakespeare says…’ Shakespeare doesn’t say anything; you can’t find anything in any of his works which isn’t contradicted by something else in them. So it was amusing to read, this week, that the British Library is planning to digitise the section of the manuscript play Sir Thomas More that is thought to be Shakespeare’s sole surviving draft.

Shakespeare writes some stirring speeches for More who, in his role as a sheriff, is called in to quell a riotous mob of Londoners who are protesting against immigrant labourers. Supposing the King should banish them for their insurrection, he says, ‘whither would you go?/ What country, by the nature of your error,/ Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,/ To any German province, Spain or Portugal,/ Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:/ Why, you must needs be strangers’.

As the BL curators have pointed out, this is all strikingly relevant to current politics. But, much as we might like to associate Shakespeare with these anti-xenophobic sentiments, we can’t know where he stood; he was just doing his best to fill a gap in a play that was struggling (and which would eventually fail) to get past the censor. Still, the scene at least reminds us how very hackneyed our problems are.