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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
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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.

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

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