"This exciting suggestion is one that I hope Bowles will pursue on a larger scale in a later work." -- John Glavin, Georgetown University, VICTORIAN STUDIES "Dickens and the Stenographic Mind makes a significant contribution to Dickens scholarship. While it proves a fairly technical and challenging book to read, it illuminates an aspect of Dickens's life that hasn't been considered in nearly enough detail . Bowles generously invites us to use his research to illuminate the novelist's work more fully -- an invitation we would be wise to accept, with thanks." -- Lillian Nayder, Dickens Quarterly "succeed[s] in debunking a criticism often levelled at Dickens studies: that there is nothing new to say. On the contrary, by asking that we engage with Dickens's works with a view to stenographic inspiration and material afterlives, these studies both offer fresh approaches and reveal just how much work remains to be done." -- Katie Holdway, Victorian Periodicals Review "This work breaks new ground both about Dickens's life and his works insofar as his acquiring an understanding and practice of shorthand writing is concerned. It illuminates many passages in Dickens's writing that have gone unnoticed, and supplies a fresh and complete analysis of David Copperfield's recorded struggle to master the practice.

It is well written - necessarily dense in explicating Gurney's system, clear and persuasive in expounding its implications about hearing, speaking, and reading as well as writing." --Robert L. Patten, Senior Research Scholar, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London "A very original and in many places ground-breaking piece of research; it explores an area of Dickens's professional life that has often been either ignored or skirted around, offering a series of well-grounded suggestions as to the areas and extent of impact of the 'stenographic mind' on Dickens's methods of composition and creativity with language." --John Drew, Professor of English Literature, University of Buckingham.