UC Riverside

This dissertation, which was inspired by information theory, analyzes three nineteenth-century reading and writing systems that relied on dots and dashes to send and receive messages: Braille, Morse code, and phonetic shorthand. Although each was originally developed for a limited group of people, the frequent representation of these systems in literature made them more culturally widespread. In my first chapter, I analyze how schoolchildren at the Massachusetts Institute of the Blind—whose stories were publicly shared by many nineteenth-century authors, including Charles Dickens—learned reading and writing in the early nineteenth century. Particularly, the education of 13-year-old deafblind student Laura Bridgman emphasizes how the labor of lower-middle-class women and female teachers reframed what it meant to learn “reading” and “writing” in the mid-nineteenth century. In my second chapter, I explain how British and American telegraph operators, who were increasingly female in the late nineteenth century, developed the ability to automatically interpret auditory Morse code through the skill of “sound-reading,” as if it was a spoken language unto itself. I use the author and activist Ella Cheever Thayer to draw a historical connection between the female technological workforce and suffragette movement. In chapter 3, I discuss two influential shorthand writing methods—Gurney’s Brachygraphy and Pitman’s Phonography—both of which used dot-and-dash symbols in an attempt to transcribe language phonetically. I then argue that depiction of shorthand in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone serves as an example of the high hopes nineteenth-century thinkers had for phonographic writing systems, as well as the inevitable failures that they encountered when expecting that any mediated form of communication could be purely objective. Finally, in chapter 4, I draw direct parallels between phonographic shorthand and the groundbreaking theories of Charles Darwin via his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Ultimately, my dissertation demonstrates that a literary and cultural studies methodology derived from information theory can productively highlight the reading and writing skills of communities who are historically marginalized due to gender, disability, socioeconomic status, and/or nationality, among other identity categories.