Universal Writing Begets Universal Speech: The Fantasy of Pitmanite Phonography

Dracula embeds an irony about linguistic diversity that goes unremarked by its narrators. Count Dracula worries that his book-derived English has not given him the common touch he seeks in London conversation: “I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them” (26). To remedy this deficiency, he looks to Jonathan Harker as an example and corrective for his speech. However, Dracula comes ashore not in London but in Whitby, and Whitby’s speech is embodied by the old sailor Mr. Swales, whose first words Mina represents as “I wouldn’t fash masel’ about them, miss. Them things be all wore out” (64). At the moment of Dracula’s arrival in England, the conversations between Mina and Mr. Swales illustrate the impossibility of achieving a single manner of speech that characterizes the English.

Dracula thinks of himself as seeking out authentic orality to augment his book-learning. In engaging Jonathan as a model, however, Dracula has avoided modeling his own speech on a British vernacular—what Janet Sorensen calls “the language one possessed by dint of living in a particular place, even if it was at times low.”Footnote ⁵ Dracula has sought out a man who speaks like a book, in the sense that Harker’s speech would carry the cultural capital necessary to be represented as standard in written English.Footnote ⁶ As Mina hears and interprets Swales’s speech, on the other hand, it requires substantial respelling into nonstandard forms to express its anchoring in the “particular place” of Whitby. In other words, the novel participates in what Sorensen identifies as the “invocation of Britishness via eccentric speech,” whereas Count Dracula has instead prioritized the elimination of eccentricity.Footnote ⁷

The mode of Mina’s writing adds an additional complication to the scene, in that Mina ostensibly captures Swales’s “eccentric speech” in her shorthand diary.Footnote ⁸ Any reader can understand that Mina’s transcription is wildly implausible, even for gothic fiction: she claims to be remembering and transcribing long speeches, verbatim, in a dialect that she struggles to understand. However, readers who knew about shorthand—and there would have been many such readers in the 1890s—would have understood a deeper problem. Shorthand in general, and particularly the Pitman shorthand that predominated at the time, was incapable of capturing the kind of dialect speech that Mina presents in Swales’s voice. (We will discuss that problem in detail.)

Dracula also depicts a technology better suited to record an individual’s voice, in the form of an Edisonian phonograph machine. Stoker’s characters rely on both technologies and contemplate their relative merits. Because shorthand writing was also called “phonography,” the coexistence of the two technologies produced an oddity of phrasing. Both shorthand and the phonograph represented means of inscribing speech without relying on conventional English spelling. The word “phonograph” captures that sense of sound inscription, as do the terms Isaac Pitman used for his shorthand system: first “sound-hand” and then “phonography.”Footnote ⁹ Jill Galvan notes the connection between stenographic “phonography” and Edison’s “phonograph,” emphasizing that comparison of the technologies depends on the early Edison machines’ ability to record as well as play sounds.Footnote ¹⁰ That is, like shorthand, but unlike the later gramophones, Edison’s early phonographs were mainly understood as technologies of sound capture. Therefore, as Lisa Gitelman argues, “Edison’s primary model was shorthand,” which helped create “the cultural preconditions” for Edisonian sound recording.Footnote ¹¹ As the phonograph transformed into the twentieth-century record player (used mainly for music and never for recording), this connection became difficult to perceive, but in the 1890s, the tie between the phonograph and phonography was readily apparent.

Dracula draws our attention to the capabilities and limitations of shorthand by staging the moment when Mina encounters her first phonograph:

Mina’s reaction—“this beats even shorthand!”—involves her perception of the commonalities between her shorthand writing and Seward’s phonograph recording. We can see Pitman’s shorthand as having done, as Ivan Kreilkamp puts it, “the cultural work necessary for the later invention and reception of the phonograph.”Footnote ¹² Indeed, Mina perceives them as competing technologies of speech recording: she apprehends the phonograph as hypermodern, with capabilities amounting to a kind of dream shorthand, copying and reproducing speech without an intermediating alphabet.Footnote ¹³ Pitman’s system claimed to “relieve the penman from the drudgery inseparable from the use of the present system, by making writing as easy and as rapid as speech”; Edison’s machine promised to eliminate the “penman” altogether.Footnote ¹⁴ From this point of view, Pitman’s phonography and Edison’s phonograph are different technologies attempting to do fundamentally the same thing: to record speech accurately and efficiently.

The two technologies differed radically, however, in their approach to varieties of speech. If Swales had spoken in the presence of Seward’s phonograph, the machine would have captured his speech with the same (limited) fidelity as it would have captured Seward’s. Phonographic shorthand, however, could not have recorded Swales’s Whitby speech with any indication of its regional inflections. Furthermore, the inability of shorthand to capture dialect speech was not incidental and not a flaw: that inability was technically, ideologically, and centrally related to the goals of Pitman’s system. Pitman shorthand sought to eradicate differences of speech, not to capture them.

Pitman’s opposition to capturing English dialects seems at odds with his claim that in his system, “the words are written exactly as they are pronounced.”Footnote ¹⁵ In modern sound recording, capturing words “exactly as they are pronounced” involves a fundamental diversity of speech, both at the level of dialect—differences among speakers of English from, say, Belfast, Delhi, and Atlanta—and the level of idiolect, the variations among individual speakers within the context of their dialects. For twenty-first-century readers, capturing such variations among individuals and groups is the obvious, indeed the only, plausible meaning of recording words “exactly as they are pronounced.” Edison himself recognized the value of his phonograph as an instrument of preservation in this modern sense. In “The Phonograph and Its Future,” Edison states that his machine will “correctly represent the peculiar property of each and all the multifarious vocal and other sound-waves.”Footnote ¹⁶ His examples of applications include “preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family,” and he notes that “[f]or the preservation of languages [phonographic books] would be invaluable.”Footnote ¹⁷ Edison’s language—“peculiar property,” “each and all,” “multifarious”—consistently emphasizes the diversity of articulation that his machine will capture. We in the twenty-first century share Edison’s sense of phonographic fidelity.

Pitman, however, did not. When Pitman aspired to record words “exactly as they are pronounced,” he did not mean to reproduce the ways that individual people say them. He meant, rather, to depict words as they are properly pronounced—that his phonography would foster and transmit a standardized, purified spoken English. As counterintuitive as it may seem that a system of writing would be a means of standardizing speech, Pitman and his followers consistently articulated this logic and its benefits for the practitioners of shorthand. For the Pitmanites, the fundamental problem of English orthography lay in its multiplicity—the ability of a given character to represent many different sounds, and contrarily, the ability of a given sound to be represented by many different characters.

By eliminating that multiplicity, phonography sought not only to produce efficient writing but also to foster uniform speech. As Gitelman explains, the Pitmanite reform of spelling involves a “one-to-one mapping” of written characters to phonemes, a mapping that removes the multiplicity in both directions.Footnote ¹⁸ With rationalized spelling, every character represents one and only one sound, and every sound is represented by one and only one character. As Pitman puts it in his 1837 pamphlet, “By sound hand, then, we mean where every vocal utterance in the language has its mark, which mark is never used to express any other sound. It is hoped that now the reader will understand our meaning in saying, that in this Stenographic card the English language is written as spoken.”Footnote ¹⁹ From the collapse of the written and spoken emerges correction: stenographers capture “a correct pronunciation of the language, indicated by simple and infallible marks.”Footnote ²⁰ Pitmanites claimed that their phonemes captured the full range of English sounds; what they meant was that they wanted everyone to speak the sounds represented by their phonemes.

For Pitmanites, therefore, correct pronunciation was not only an abstract ideal from which individual speakers depart. It was also a standard that phonography would push all speakers of English to reach. Pitman indicates the import of that standardization in the title of the main essay in his 1837 pamphlet: “Short-Hand, Founded on ‘Walker’s Principles of English Pronunciation.’”Footnote ²¹ The “Walker” of that title is John Walker, author of A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1794). For Pitman, Walker describes the true pronunciation on which Pitmanian phonography is based. As Pitman puts it, “Write every word according to its true pronunciation, and follow ‘Walker’ till you have a better guide.”Footnote ²² The mention of a better guide anticipates the later publication of Pitman’s own phonographic dictionaries, but until then, Walker would do.

To follow Walker is to standardize. The title page of his Pronouncing Dictionary defines its audience, advertising “Rules to be observed by the Natives of Scotland, Ireland, and London, for avoiding their respective Peculiarities.”Footnote ²³ Like Pitman after him, Walker sought to bring spoken and written English together, quoting Samuel Johnson’s advice “to consider those as the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written words,” although Walker acknowledges the limits of the principle in cases such as “finite” and “infinite,” words whose spelling does not fully indicate differences in pronunciation (v).

Walker’s was one of many books of linguistic standardization and correction in the eighteenth century. Some of these works focused on pronunciation and some on idiom; the latter category included collections of Scotticisms by David Hume, the philosopher, and James Beattie, the influential pre-Romantic poet.Footnote ²⁴ But their ambitions were generally more modest than Walker’s. As much as Beattie (a Scot) viewed the introduction of Scotticisms as a cause of English “degenerating,” for instance, he separated idiom from accent: “To speak with the English, or with the Scotch, accent, is no more praiseworthy, or blameable, than to be born in England, or Scotland.”Footnote ²⁵ Walker, however, sought to standardize accent as well as idiom. His book sets out to help all speakers of English sound the same.

Walker’s Dictionary expresses his skepticism that rationalizing spelling can achieve that goal. He criticizes one of Pitman’s predecessors for “absurdly endeavouring to alter the whole orthography of the language” (3).Footnote ²⁶ Instead, Walker proposes practical exercises for vocal self-improvement. For example, he describes Irish speakers of English pronouncing their words with a falling inflection and Scottish speakers of English with a rising one. Walker regards both tendencies as undesirable extremes, preferring the “nearly equal measure of both slides which distinguishes the English speaker” (xiv). He therefore recommends that Irish and Scottish speakers begin the reformation of their respective flaws by practicing the contrary pattern: he writes that he “would advise a native of Ireland, who has much of the accent, to pronounce almost all his words, and end all his sentences with the rising slide; and a Scotchman in the same manner, to use the falling inflexion” (xiv). By speaking every sentence against their respective inclinations, Walker hopes, Irish and Scottish people can come to sound English.Footnote ²⁷

But that’s not all: according to Walker, the speech of England’s peripheries would need reform as well. Walker thus turns his attention to the dialects “peculiar to Cornwall, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and every distant county in England” (xv). His solution to all of these problems is to reform and propagate London speech. Walker sees the speech of Londoners as the least flawed version of English; they are “upon the whole the best pronouncers of the English language” (xvi), and they will model pronunciation for the people of outlying provinces. Walker’s vision, therefore, involves a corrected version of London English radiating outward in a wave of further correction and standardization, its progress enabled by the efforts of English speakers everywhere to unlearn the speech patterns of their communities.

What now seems absurd about Walker’s self-correction exercises stems in large part from a simple technological problem: Walker could not advise people simply to listen to the pronunciations he wanted them to imitate. In a pre-Edisonian time when media did not enable the transmission of sound or video, people who wanted to try their fortunes in London-based enterprises could not experience the speech of educated Londoners by, say, turning on the BBC. Stoker stages the problem explicitly in Count Dracula’s awareness that he needs more than books to learn the spoken English of London. Wicke elegantly captures his difficulty: “Dracula experiences some of the poignant sense of estrangement of the colonial intellectual, who has utterly mastered the print language, is an adept in all things English, including the ascot, and yet who lacks that touch of spoken familiarity.”Footnote ²⁸ In the visions of Pitman and his Victorian followers, phonography could build on Walker’s standardizing of pronunciation to solve Dracula’s problem. Dracula has hired Jonathan Harker, in essence, to become his embodied pronouncing dictionary.

In pursuing a global linguistic monoculture, the Pitmanite Victorians fostered ambitions even grander than Walker’s, as we can see in works such as Pitman’s Manual of Phonography. That much-reprinted volume illustrates the global ambitions of phonography, in part as phonography has become attached to other schemes of Enlightenment rationalization. From 1845 onward, the Manual’s introduction carries an epigraph from Sir John Herschel (misspelled “Herschell,” in a presumably unwitting tribute to the difficulties of conventional English orthography).Footnote ²⁹ Son and nephew, respectively, of the astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, friend of Charles Babbage, himself the polymathic inventor of the blueprint, Herschel lived near the center of early Victorian science and thus became an apt contributor to the 1845 Encyclopædia Metropolitana; or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge. The epigraph to Pitman’s Manual comes from Herschel’s Encyclopædia essay on “Sound.” There, Herschel writes that a phonetic reform of writing will improve mankind by “facilitating the intercourse between nations, and laying the foundation of the first step towards a universal language, one of the great desiderata at which mankind ought to aim by common consent.”Footnote ³⁰

In the 1845 version of the Manual, Herschel’s call for a universal language stands in tension with the rest of the volume, which offers shorthand as a universal writing system to capture the sounds of all languages. (The manual carries appendices on shorthand’s use for many of them.) However, later versions of the introduction—a piece written as a collaboration between Pitman and Alexander John Ellis—put imperial meat on the abstract bones of Herschel’s vision.Footnote ³¹ By 1865, the introduction states that “[f]acilitation of intercourse diminishes the number of dialects,” so in an age of increased travel, one can hope that “‘the whole earth’ shall again be ‘of one language and one speech.’”Footnote ³²

The “one language” was to be English. That 1865 introduction quotes Jakob Grimm declaring that “truly, the English language may, with good reason, call itself a universal language, and seems chosen to rule in future times, in a still greater degree, in all the corners of the earth.”Footnote ³³ By 1894, the sentence included an addition extending the destined rule of the language to that of the people who speak it, saying that the English language “seems chosen, like the English people, to rule in future times, in a still greater degree, in all the corners of the earth.”Footnote ³⁴ Through these steps, the Pitman method comes to proclaim itself not just the reformed spelling system of English but, in the phrasing of the Pitmanites, “The Alphabet of Nature,” which manifests itself as a Pitmanized method of writing English.Footnote ³⁵

This Pitmanite vision of language reform obviously carries the baggage of imperial standardization. However rationalist and democratizing its initial impulses, the imagined triumph of phonography would replace local and national speech communities with the language spoken at the center of global economic and military power. At their most radical, the Pitmanites imagine a world of frictionless communication through standardized speech and writing. That uniformity would allow Count Dracula to head to London without linguistic qualms and enable Jonathan Harker to travel to Transylvania with no worries about the region’s polyglossia.

Shorthand and the Englishes of Dracula

Dracula’s fictional rendition of shorthand-mediated speech and writing departs drastically from those Pitmanite ambitions. We can see that departure by returning to Mr. Swales, the sailor whom Mina meets in Whitby. Taking a word from Swales’s speech will illustrate the method a Pitmanite phonographer would use to transcribe it, and thus how different the result would be from the typewritten version rendered in Dracula. Swales describes the empty graves of Whitby in these terms: “Why, there be scores of these lay-beds that be toom as old Dun’s ’bacca-box on Friday night” (66).Footnote ³⁶ Though Mina acknowledges her difficulties understanding Swales, the novel requires us to believe that she hears the sentence and transcribes it in shorthand, including the rendering of “tobacco” as “’bacca.”

Let’s say we are shorthand writers, imagining ourselves in Mina’s position with Swales, then following Pitman’s instructions. We would hear Swales say the word and recognize it as his version of “tobacco.” We could either write “tobacco” in shorthand right away or, to be especially careful, we could turn to Walker’s pronouncing dictionary to ascertain the authoritative pronunciation. Either way, this standardizing step is crucial. Even if Swales verbally dropped the first syllable and transformed the last vowel from “o” to “a,” Pitman’s phonography does not aspire to capture that information. Indeed, the system intentionally excludes such evidence of linguistic variation: “The pupil must observe what is the pronunciation of well educated persons, and for any given word write the phonographs which represent the particular sounds of which it is composed.”Footnote ³⁷ Therefore, we would turn to the “T” section of Walker, not the “B,” to look up “tobacco” rather than “’bacca.” In Walker, we would find the entry shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Detail from page 537 of Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (London: Cadell, 1822). Photographed by the authors from a volume in their collection.

Walker indicates the segmentation of syllables, the shape of each vowel, the stress on the second syllable, and the phonetic transformation of the double “c” into “k” sounds.Footnote ³⁸ Now—having standardized the word to remove the alterations imposed by Swales’s speech—we have enough information to render the word in shorthand marks.

We would then write the phonemes of “tobacco” in shorthand, and the result would appear as shown in Figure 3, which is taken from an 1890 edition of Pitman's Phonographic and Pronouncing Dictionary:Footnote ³⁹

Figure 3. Detail from page 246 of Isaac Pitman’s Phonographic and Pronouncing Dictionary (London: Pitman, 1890). Photographed by the authors from a volume in their collection.

And this is the key point: by design, this shorthand rendering captures only the standard form of “tobacco,” not anything resembling Swales’s spoken version. Anyone seeking to re-create the spoken word underlying the shorthand transcription would have no way to do so. In other words, the Pitman system achieves its efficiency of recording by removing the ability to encode variations of pronunciations, which cannot subsequently be recovered. (That is, the system functions like today’s lossy compression of media files, which similarly create efficiency—of storage—by sacrificing the ability to re-create the higher-fidelity original.)

Could a Victorian phonographer have captured dialect speech by breaking the rules of phonography? In theory, one could record the sounds of “’bacca” by using Pitman’s shorthand symbols and refusing to follow Pitman’s instructions—simply making the shorthand marks for a hypothetical two-syllable word sounding like “back-uh.” However, such an approach would not only create an idiosyncratic word that would confuse other shorthand writers, but it would also undermine the essence of the Pitman system’s fundamental one-to-one correspondence between words and their reformed spellings. Such an approach would not only lie outside of the phonographic system; it would erode the system’s foundations.

From the Pitmanite perspective, some of Mina’s other dialect respellings would be even worse. For instance, take her rendition of “tombstones”—perhaps the most important word in Swales’s speech—as “tombsteans” (66). The “ea” of “tombsteans” has all the ambiguity and quirkiness of conventional English spelling without even the ballast of conventionality. It could indicate a long “a” sound, as in the widely used Scots spelling of “stane” for “stone” (but then why not use that spelling?), or it could signify either of the vowel sounds used in the present and past tenses of the verb “read.”Footnote ⁴⁰ That is, “tombsteans” is an orthographic ghoul from a spelling reformer’s nightmare: it makes the pronunciation of the word opaque even for expert readers, and it would be an even greater absurdity in shorthand. To create “tombsteans” in shorthand and then on her typewriter, Mina would have needed a kind of magical heteroglot shorthand with little resemblance to the one used in Victorian office work.

We could suppose that Stoker invites us to imagine Mina has created her shorthand version of the text, then drawn on her memory of the conversation to create a more phonetically diverse representation of speech in her typing. Perhaps so, but this method, too, would fly in the face of shorthand’s goals and methods. As Pitman explained in his 1842 manual, “In Phonography, it may almost be said, that the very sound of every word is made visible; whereas, in decyphering any former system of short hand, the context, the memory, the judgment, all must be called in to assist the eye.”Footnote ⁴¹ For Pitman, the power of standardizing both speech and writing lies in the ideal of sidestepping individual memory and having standard English arise, undead, from the unambiguous marks on the page.Footnote ⁴²

In other words, the novel presents two ways of deviating from standard English spelling. The first way, shorthand writing, involves standardizing beyond standard, in an effort to produce a universal English. The second way, typewritten dialect spellings, alters standard forms to represent the multiplicity of spoken English. The novel shows Mina, especially, using the two methods in sequence but buries the fundamental conflict between them. Shorthand not only did not capture speech variation but also sought to eliminate it; dialect respellings, on the contrary, sought to stretch the affordances of English spelling to make spoken variation visible on the page. The conflict between those approaches to English heteroglossia takes on an additional dimension in Jonathan’s encounter with Count Dracula’s polyglot environment.

Beyond English: The Problem of the Polyglot Dictionary

Jonathan’s encounters with languages other than English create still more problems for shorthand technique. The treatment of non-English languages was not uniform in shorthand systems or even within Pitmanite phonography. We have described the Anglocentric strand of Pitmanism that imagined phonography as a means by which a corrected English could become a universal language. Other Pitmanites worked on ways to demonstrate that, with some alterations to account for variances of phonemes, the Pitman system could capture the sounds of other languages. For example, even Alexander John Ellis himself, the aforementioned advocate for a Pitmanite universal English, authored an 1845 Plea for Phonotypy and Phonography that includes an appendix with a “Complete Phonotypic Alphabet” of eighty-two elements that aspires to capture the sounds of any language, “except perhaps Chinese.”Footnote ⁴³

Nonetheless, the way in which Jonathan Harker captures speech in other languages in his shorthand diary strains credibility. The limitations of phonography cause part of the problem, and we will return to that issue. More centrally, however, Jonathan seems to possess a magical version of another linguistic resource, one even more implausible than Mina’s dialect-sensitive shorthand: his polyglot dictionary. As he makes his way east to Dracula’s castle, Jonathan gathers hints of danger from the language he picks up from the people nearby. He records the experience in his shorthand journal. The novel presents what happened (presumably via Mina’s later retyping) in this passage:

Jonathan’s surreptitious use of his dictionary to give him instant translations in multiple languages would have been impossible for a number of reasons, as becomes clear when we look at the polyglot dictionaries that a Victorian traveler could have consulted.

Jonathan describes himself as hearing words in both Slovak and Servian. The British Library’s earliest Slovak dictionary—of any kind, not just polyglot—is Philip Anthony Hrobak’s of 1944, nearly half a century after Dracula’s publication. Jonathan could have had slightly better luck looking for help with the Servian language. “Servian” was a common spelling of Serbian in Stoker’s time, and Jonathan could have found some songs or historical works about Servia. The British Library holds no Servian or Serbian dictionaries for English speakers published before Dracula, however. (Jonathan researches Transylvania in the British Museum [9], whose library holdings mainly moved to the British Library in 1997.) A Victorian traveler likely would not have been able to look up either Slovak or Servian words in a travel dictionary, not to mention both in the same book.

Indeed, scholars tracing the lore underlying Dracula have found Stoker’s source for the words that Jonathan calls Slovak and Servian, and it is not a polyglot dictionary at all, but rather the descriptive prose of Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves from 1865. That fact is among many compiled by Cristina Artenie and Dragos Moraru in their richly informative footnotes to this passage, which point to the numerous and varied sources Stoker needed to construct it (as well as the errors of spelling and interpretation in the details of Jonathan’s account).Footnote ⁴⁴ Some of those sources do have elements of polyglot lexicography, such as William Wilkinson’s brief, three-column list of about ninety-three Wallachian, Italian, and English words; or Lexiconul de la Buda, a genuine polyglot dictionary of 1825 that collates terms from Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Latin (but notably not English).Footnote ⁴⁵ Scholars have long known, in other words, that Stoker did not draw on a single volume the way Jonathan claims to.

The limitations of real Victorian polyglot dictionaries illuminate the curious powers of Jonathan’s. The real books often focus on specialized vocabularies, as in Tolhausen’s Technological Dictionary (1885) in English, German, and French—which lists words only alphabetically in English, not allowing the user to look up the German or French versions—and similar works of commercial, maritime, medical, and military terminology. The focus of these works illustrates how daunting the construction of a true, general polyglot dictionary would be. To allow a reader to look up words in any of its languages, such a dictionary requires entries amounting to the number of words times the number of languages. A general polyglot dictionary would become an enormous book very quickly. Therefore, anything approaching the ambition of polylingualism, such as Philip John von Strahlenberg’s table of “the Dialects of 32 Tartarian Nations,” must limit the scope of its vocabulary accordingly; von Strahlenberg’s table lists only a few dozen common English words.

The more comprehensive Mariner’s Friend and Nautical Dictionary of over 4,500 words, written by K. P. Ter Reehorst and published in 1851, achieves an impressive feat of polyglot reference (with each term running across ten columns on two wide pages), but even that requires the user to look up each term in English alphabetical order. The ability to look up the term in any of the ten languages, as Jonathan’s method requires, would require a volume ten times as large as Ter Reehorst’s already-large book. That is, the polyglossia of Dracula’s environment creates a problem of textual form analogous to Benedict Anderson’s insight that what “limits one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness, but one’s own mortality.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Katy Brundan astutely observes that Dracula himself solves that problem by not dying, but there was no solution to the material limitation of reference sources: that a dictionary could contain many terms or many languages, but not both.Footnote ⁴⁷ Practically considered, Jonathan’s access to other languages would be limited by human constraints. He cannot live infinite years or carry unlimited pages.

As Brundan notes, polyglot travel dictionaries did exist—Jonathan could have purchased Baedeker’s Conversation Dictionary in Four Languages: English, French, German, Italian (1889), for example—but they did not come in the necessary languages. Just as importantly, they (like Ter Reehorst’s The Mariner’s Friend) anchored their polyglot translations by listing words alphabetically in English, so Jonathan’s method of hearing a foreign word and looking up the English translation would not work at all. (Tellingly, the real dictionaries help the anglophone traveler to speak, not to listen.) Moreover, the words Jonathan wants to translate are hardly the common terms that a general-purpose dictionary would include. For example, even Louis Cahen’s 1916 Serbian-English and English-Serbian Pocket Dictionary—published well after Dracula and addressing only one non-English language—lists none of the occult words Jonathan notices in its Serbian section, and its English section has only “vampire,” for which it gives “vampir” as a translation rather than the novel’s “vlkoslak.”Footnote ⁴⁸

In sum, it seems implausible, though remotely possible, that Jonathan could have found a dictionary of Servian or Slovak to use on his journey, but not both, and certainly not one with Hungarian, Romanian, and other languages to boot. Even if such a thing had existed, finding an unknown word in an unfamiliar language would have been, if not impossible, extremely difficult and painstaking work, certainly not something a linguistic novice such as Jonathan Harker could have accomplished on the fly in a social situation. Jonathan would need exceptional powers of linguistic discrimination to detect the source language and associated spelling conventions of multiple unfamiliar languages in the same chaotic scene. (In the most extreme case, he would need to catch “vlkoslak” from the air and spell it correctly, resisting the temptation to add a vowel after the initial “v” that would push him to the wrong section of his dictionary.) Therefore, to a Victorian reader with any sense of the travel books then available, Jonathan’s polyglot dictionary would have been a fantasy as wild as that of the vampire itself.

The final step in Jonathan’s process involves writing what he has heard in his shorthand diary, which presents yet another problem. To capture “vlkoslak” in shorthand, Jonathan would have two options. First, assuming he could hear the word accurately, he could improvise a representation of its sounds using a phonetic alphabet. The difficulty with this approach, however, lies in its audience: Mina would be unable to reconstruct the spelling of the word from the phonemes. The more conventional stenographic solution, therefore, would be for Jonathan to break out of shorthand and resort to longhand spelling for the difficult foreign words. This approach, however, would create a more serious problem: the ominous language of vampires and werewolves would become legible to Dracula when he insists on inspecting Jonathan’s journal. Like the polyglot dictionaries available at the time, phonographic shorthand would not be up to the task to which Jonathan applies it.

In Dracula, therefore, the peculiar magic of the shorthand journals and the polyglot dictionary lies in their unrealistic capacity to bring heteroglossia (in shorthand) and polyglossia (through the dictionary) onto the page. Even in the face of the standardizing ideology of phonography, the novel allows Jonathan and especially Mina to pay close attention to the language around them, recording and presenting what they hear. Their unrealistic deployment of the technologies invites the reader into a greater diversity of British and global speech than those technologies would realistically have allowed.

Conclusion: Does Dracula Have an Accent?

To this point, our analysis has led us to examine closely the speech of minor characters: Mr. Swales, the multinational crowd around Jonathan Harker in Bistritz, and so forth. In closing, we turn back to the central characters whose writing and speech constitute the bulk of the novel’s dialogue: Dracula and the vampire-hunting Crew of Light.Footnote ⁴⁹ The novel describes these characters as speaking differently from one another, mainly because they come from different countries. Some of that variety appears in the printed representation of their voices, but in many ways, these characters’ voices are remarkably and increasingly similar on the page. That similarity raises a question: after giving himself nearly magical powers to represent heteroglossia and polyglossia, why does Stoker use those powers so sparingly in representing these characters?

Consider, for example, the absence of the simple phrase “I vant,” which has become the instant signifier of Dracula’s speech in popular culture, as in “I vant to suck your blood.” Readers today may suppose that “I vant” is a retrospective imposition of twentieth-century popular culture, but the phrase was well established as marking national accents for readers of the 1890s. Looking only at books published between 1890 and 1897 in London, readers could have found “I vant” in the speech of a French captain (“You stay here on ze deck and vait till I vant you”); “a dark pathetic and thieving Italian” named Allessandro (“I vant ze zings”); or “Solomon Poheim, a well-known mining speculator of obvious [i.e., Jewish] extraction” (“Say, poys! I vant to tell you a goot ting vat happent here—”).Footnote ⁵⁰ The continuing popularity of Charles Dickens’s works also kept The Pickwick Papers (1837) in print, with its presentation of Sam Weller’s Cockney speech as substituting v- for w-sounds and vice versa: “I vant to have a little bit o’ talk with you, Job.”Footnote ⁵¹

Most consistently, however, “I vant” occurs in the speech of Dutch and German characters. In Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), set in Indonesia, the wealthy Dutch character Hudig says, “I vant bonies.”Footnote ⁵² Mr. Punch’s Young Reciter (n.d.) offers a comic piece spoken by a character from Hamburg who declares, “I vant to dell you how mein vriend behafe himzelf sooblime.”Footnote ⁵³ Other examples come even closer to Dracula, featuring Van Helsing-like savants who contribute specialist knowledge to multinational teams of men adventuring around the world. The Orchid Seekers: A Story of Adventure in Borneo (1893) presents Ludwig Hertz, a German orchid collector who is “well read, a thorough botanist, acquainted with every tree and herb in the universe, or nearly so”; he says, “If I vant a place to grow Aneoctochili, dis de fery spot.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, in Louis Becke’s “Ludwig Schwalbe, South Sea Savant”—published in Pacific Tales (1896) and republished the next year in the Jerome K. Jerome-edited Idler—the eponymous Schwalbe displays his medical and scientific expertise: “I vas vonce a dogtor; but I haf nod bractised vor a long dimes now. I vas ein naduraliz now.” Schwalbe says, “I vant to prove dot dot man is ein dam fool.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In Dracula, by contrast, Van Helsing and Count Dracula use initial w-sounds routinely, and Stoker’s narrators never mark them as spoken like v-sounds. As it happens, Van Helsing frequently speaks about his wants, using “I want” formulations at least fifteen times, as in “There are books and things there which I want” (116), “I want light!” (145), “I want all help and courage that may be!” (150), and the more pedestrian “I want to tell you something” (294). Likewise, Count Dracula uses “I want” late in the novel, with no unusual spelling to describe his manner of speaking: “Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (267). Van Helsing and Dracula do exhibit eccentricities of usage and syntax; Franco Moretti speaks of Van Helsing’s English as “approximate and mangled.”Footnote ⁵⁶ However, compared to the spelling of similar characters’ speech in other books of the 1890s, Van Helsing’s, like Dracula’s, is notably unmangled.

The novel’s deployment of dialect respelling becomes especially clear when Jonathan represents Van Helsing talking to the Scottish Captain Donelson. Donelson’s speech is packed with dialect respelling, as in “the Deil himself were blawin’ on yer sail,” but Van Helsing’s responses are not (301). He even repeats Donelson’s “Deil” as “Devil” (301). Indeed, Van Helsing writes as he speaks, demonstrating that the novel’s representations of his linguistic tendencies are not specific to speech. The letter in which he introduces himself to Mina displays those tendencies, such as nonstandard verb forms and unconventional word ordering, as in “I should come to Exeter to see you at once if you tell me I am privilege to come, and where and when” (161). Nothing in Van Helsing’s speech or writing participates in the “I vant” (or “tombsteans”) mode of indicating peculiarities of speaking individual words.

Count Dracula’s speech also retains conventional spelling on the page, as do his occasional forays into writing. The novel’s main characterization of Dracula’s speech difference—Jonathan says he speaks “excellent English, but with a strange intonation” (22)—does not necessarily concern accent. On the contrary, “strange intonation” was a stock phrase of nineteenth-century fiction that implied a speaker’s emotional distance from the listener. We have found many instances of “strange intonation” in nineteenth-century fiction, and none of them involves an individual’s accent or habitual way of speaking based on regional or national culture. Instead, the typical usage involves ordinary words spoken with uncommon import, as in this passage from W. Bert Foster, published just after Dracula: “‘Jonah Hess!’ repeated the other, with a strange intonation of voice, and with his face turned from Kennard.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Alexandre Dumas gives a similarly ominous quality to the phrase: “There was in these three words, I hope so, such a strange intonation that every one shuddered except the king.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The idea of “strange intonation” implies the speaker’s eerie consciousness based on a private subtext that the listeners can notice but not fully understand. Novels generally portray that private subtext as reflecting a fleeting state, a moment of unsettling realization. As a vampire, however, Dracula has that kind of eerie consciousness as a permanent state of being. In the presence of nonvampiric humans such as the naïve Jonathan who meets Dracula at the novel’s beginning, Dracula’s inhuman state and secret plans give him a constant strange intonation but—consistent with these other representations of “strange intonation”—not a dialect represented in nonstandard spelling.

The Crew of Light, too, have their speech conventionally spelled on the page, in spite of the pains that Dracula takes to help the reader imagine how different they would sound from one another, by means of syntax, diction, and inferences about national accents. If we imagine them as people in the 1890s speaking to one another, we must suppose, for example, that the accents of Van Helsing, Morris, and Jonathan Harker would be instantly distinguishable. That variety contributes to what Christine Ferguson, referring specifically to Van Helsing’s language, persuasively describes as “the creative and unregulated use of language that is fundamental to antivampiric identity.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This approach sets orthography aside, accepting the novel’s prompts to imagine the characters’ differences of speech.

However, the orthographical similarity of the Crew’s voices on the page reinforces a sense of their shared language. Even Quincey Morris, whose characterization seems to beg for markers of American dialect, has his speech standardized on the page after his initial use of Texan slang to flirt with Lucy. Lucy represents Morris as using slang selectively and humorously, not habitually: “Mr Morris doesn’t always speak slang—that is to say, he never does so to strangers or before them, for he is really well educated and has exquisite manners—but he found out that it amused me to hear him talk American slang, and whenever I was present, and there was no one to be shocked, he said such funny things” (59). As the work of the Crew becomes serious, Morris’s speech settles firmly into standard spelling on the page.

In that way, Morris operates as a synecdoche for Dracula as a whole: in the latter part of the novel, its earlier polyglossia and heteroglossia fade away. For the most part, the Crew does not encounter marked speech variation in people outside of their circle. This fading produces a linguistic version of the “winnowing directive” Priyanka Anne Jacob identifies in Victorian detection plots, in which “bits of information . . . remain untapped or unprocessed.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The Crew’s trip to Transylvania lacks the linguistic encounters of Jonathan’s first visit. No Eastern European speech disrupts the conclusion’s monoglossia, and Donelson’s Scottish voice is the last to feature dialect respelling.

As a result, the novel relies on two contrary tendencies in its portrayal of speech. On one hand, it stretches to include the heteroglossia of British accents and the polyglossia of European languages, even to the point of defying the realistic capabilities of the characters’ linguistic tools. On the other hand, it minimizes the distinctiveness of characters such as Dracula, Van Helsing, and Morris, all of whom represent national types that were routinely marked by dialect respelling in other fictions of Stoker’s time. The first pattern connects to Stoker’s persistent use of dialect writing, in this and his earlier novels, which feature heavy doses of Irish, Scottish, and American dialect respellings. The second pattern, seen on its own, shows Stoker resisting the tendency of late Victorian novels to employ dialect respelling, even for characters and plots very similar to Dracula’s.

The tension between these tendencies eases if we see spelling as constructing the characters’ social relations as well as their differences of regional and national speech. The wealthier and well-connected characters—the Crew of Light and Dracula—have their speech rendered in standard novelistic spelling, whereas many of the working-class characters do not. Spelling purports to be a mechanism for recording sound, especially in the cases of dialect respelling, but in Dracula, it more reliably indicates varying levels of access to social and financial capital. That is, the imagined reality of the elite characters’ speech reinforces their diversity, whereas the appearance of their words on the page points to their shared status, perhaps implying a spelling-based version of the “elite purism” Jonathan Roper identifies in Victorian language debates.Footnote ⁶¹ Standard spelling indicates status rather than sound and, in doing so, supports Moretti’s reading that the plot of Dracula represents a triumph of the standardizing forces of “literary English.”Footnote ⁶²

Those standardizing forces can lead us further into a reading of the novel’s imperial and racial politics. Standard spelling is itself a technology, one that Stoker uses to create an elite cross-national community that we could read as supporting the Victorian idea, in Linda C. Dowling’s words, of “English as a convergence of the Teutonic and Romance linguistic lines [that] seemed uniquely suited to its imperial destiny.”Footnote ⁶³ As Chris Jones observes, some manifestations of that logic extend linguistic theory to racial theory, in “the view that ‘true’ English, British, or even Anglo-American people are of Teutonic stock.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In this view, even the varieties of national origin among the Crew of Light seem calculated to consolidate Anglo-Teutonic identity. We could read Dracula as enacting something like the view Barbara Barrow finds in Thomas Carlyle, where the linguistic energies of “the underclass” are necessary as “temporary renovators of the social and political order” but do not make the speakers “the lasting agents of their own hardly won sovereignty.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The characters in Dracula with speech marked by difference do not join the final alliance, the Crew of Standard Spelling.

In the end, however, we agree with Ferguson that such a reading understates the novel’s interest in linguistic variety. The way Dracula stretches its representations of Victorian linguistic technologies to capture particularities of local and global speech reinforces Ferguson’s argument for “the novel’s logic of linguistic and subjective vitality.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Our examination of shorthand writing and polyglot dictionaries demonstrates the extraordinary effort Dracula makes to represent a range of spoken language, in spite of the realistic limitations of the novel’s technologies. As Joseph Valente points out, the novel allows us to resist “taking the novel’s point of view as substantially identified with or sympathetic to its vampire-busting protagonists.”Footnote ⁶⁷ We can therefore consider, among other things, the potentially destabilizing absence of Ireland and Irish voices in the novel’s vision of Anglo-Teutonic triumphalism. Even if the Anglo-Teutonic Crew of Light triumphs, the novel gestures obliquely to the exclusions and resentments that allow for the many readings that have undermined the sense of the completeness or rightness of the Crew’s victory.

Such reasoning underlies Valente’s persuasive and influential argument that Stoker is “a highly improbable conduit for the cultural fantasies of the ruling groups.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Outside of those ruling groups lie the characters whom Dracula represents as having speech represented by departures from standard English spelling. Those characters, from an English sailor to the villagers of Transylvania, display a consistently reliable awareness of the dangers of their vampire-infested universe—unlike, say, the vampiric women of Dracula’s household, who inexplicably seem to speak an effortless English rendered in standard spelling. In the long-running debate about the novel’s posture toward linguistic standardization, therefore, we incline to Ferguson’s side, seeing the novel as ultimately undermining the standardizing impulses it figures. More fundamentally, however, our investigation of these technologies leads us to see the debate itself as intractable, with Stoker mobilizing tropes and tendencies that signal his attachment to standardizing and antistandardizing impulses by turns.

We cannot resolve the interpretive conflict because it arises from genuinely contradictory tendencies in the text. We do hope, however, to move the conversation closer to the roots of that conflict’s irresolution. It stems in part from the tension we have identified between Stoker’s choice to use nonstandard spelling when he could easily have avoided it, and to avoid it when he could easily have used it. Like Pitman’s system of shorthand itself, the meaning-making of this novel of textual fragments relies on a logic of lossy compression: once consolidated into a collection of documents, the imagined world of spoken interactions cannot be re-created. This logic applies to any printed novel, of course. Literary characters have no originating orality to re-create, and even if they did, paper could not re-create it. Dracula, however, goes further: from the table of contents onward, Dracula attends to the problem of lossy compression with unusual intensity, offering a printed textuality that reminds the reader of the technological barriers between the voice and the page.