“Even a heavy door only needs a small key,” Charles Dickens once said. For every problem in life, big or small, there is a solution. More than 150 years after his death, however, the key does not seem to be that small, but the door is particularly heavy: Volunteers from all over the world have been trying for years to decipher his handwriting in order to finally be able to read an encrypted letter. However, a team of English and Italian Dickens researchers launched a competition. The prize money: 300 pounds, about 350 euros. Now the code is 70 percent cracked – programmers who have little to do with literature, of all people, managed the coup.
Charles Dickens is one of the most famous Victorian writers, he wrote 15 novels, his most important book “Oliver Twist” was filmed several times. But for decades, linguists despaired of his handwriting. Dickens wrote them in a shorthand system, a 1700’s shorthand composed of simple characters. In his autobiographical novel “David Copperfield” he called shorthand a “wild stenographic secret”.
In England there were a total of 200 such shorthand systems; compared to the German systems, geometric signs dominate there. Dickens used shorthand during his time as a court reporter, before his literary breakthrough. But he changed the system over time: in addition to the usual stenographic signs and symbols, he also used dots and dashes. His way of writing became a secret code. He himself called it “the devil’s handwriting”. That made the question all the more intriguing for Dickens researchers: What the hell was Dickens writing about anyway?
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was one of Victorian England’s most famous writers. Four of his 15 novels, including “David Copperfield” and “Bleak House”, were later voted the greatest British novels. He took his last book to his grave – his fans have been trying to find an ending to the story ever since.
(Photo: dpa/dpa)
The researchers were particularly interested in the “Tavistock Letter,” one of many manuscripts that Dickens wrote in his modified version of shorthand. One of the participants in the competition found the word “advertisement”, another the word “rejected”, yet another the word “unfair” – this is how the message of the letter was deciphered piece by piece. It is about a dispute between Dickens and the London edition of the Times. The newspaper had declined to print an advertisement for Dickens’ new work. The author complained and again requested that his ad be printed. The letter begins with the words: “I feel compelled to address you personally.” The writer had at that time from the editors of his journal Household Words separated and was in the process of setting up a new magazine: All the year round. He needed the ad to keep his readership.
“The fact that the Dickens code was cracked is unique,” says Gudrun Müller, an expert in forensic linguistics from Neuss. “Algorithms have to be created that then also fit the style.” Dickens’ writing is incredibly difficult to decipher because he wrote in a very different time, says the linguist. Even if you understand part of it, you never know how the information relates to the next line. From a linguistic point of view, says Müller, you have to learn to recognize a sentence structure as regular, to isolate parts of a sentence – and to pay attention to whether linguistic features occur several times. Because only then can you be sure that it is not an accident.
Claire Wood from the University of Leicester and Hugo Bowles from the University of Foggia in Italy led the Dickens Project. They had offered the participants workshops to learn the shorthand systems. For some, their previous knowledge of Dickens helped them to recognize certain patterns in his life. However, other participants with some knowledge of Dickens sometimes overinterpreted the symbols and tried to give them a “Dickensian” reading, says Wood.
But the fact that “@” stood for “All the year round” was discovered by the winner of the competition without any context about Dickens’ life: Shane Baggs, a hobby programmer from California. He unscrambled most of the symbols and thus won the £300 prize money. He did not take part in the competition out of enthusiasm for Charles Dickens – he had no soft spot for literature – but simply for the joy of puzzling. Baggs says he developed an interest in computer language and code at an early age and spent a lot of time in a group of coders on Reddit.
In any case, the decoding of the Dickens code did not harm the cooperation between linguists and programmers. Will it be possible in the future to read secret writings primarily using computers? Claire Wood is already working on a neural network to learn more about the role of computers in decryption. She believes it is possible to train computers to decode shorthand systems. In the case of Charles Dickens, however, this could be difficult: “There are only a few shorthands left for the machine to learn from,” says Wood. “Instead of a huge data set, we only have ten known shorthand manuscripts.” The Dickens Project is running for another year to decipher the remaining 30 percent of the Tavistock Letter – but this time with no prize money.
According to the experts, Charles Dickens had no intention of actually keeping his code secret. Linguist Gudrun Müller believes that shorthand was basically only there to save time. It was simply easier for him – and therefore all the more difficult for the programmers and linguists who were so interested in what he had to say. A small key for a very, very heavy door.