Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1885 — How He Learned It. [ARTICLE]

How He Learned It.

Tho famous novelist started in life as a reporter. He learned short-hand by the old clumsy methods that were the fashion in his time. It was as serious a business as learning Greek and committing to memory the whole of the “Iliad.” But Dickens worked at it and stuck to it through thick and thin, till finally he mastered it In later years he became very wealthy, and the most renowned story writer of his time' But he never would have done if he had not worked jnst as hard at writing as he did at learning short-hand. Have some of our boys and girls thought thev would like to become stenographers’? Here is how Charles Dickens learned it. He says: “I bought an approved scheme of the art and ihystery of stenography, (which cost me ten-and-sixpence;, and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me in a lew weeks to the confines of distraction. f “The changes that were hung upon dots, which in one position meant one thing, and in another position something else; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like fly’s legs; the tremendous effect from a curve in a wrong place, not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. “When I had groped my way blindly through those difficulties and had mastered the ‘alphabet,’ which was an Egyptian temple itself, then there appeared a possession of new horrors called ‘arbitrary characters’—the most despotic characters I have ever known —which insisted, for instance, that the thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant ‘expectation,’ and that a pen-and-ink sky-rccket meant ‘disadvantageous.’

“When 1 had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it. Then, beginning again, I forgot them. Then, while I was picking! them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system. In short, it was almost heartbreaking.” He was very yonng at this time to be so persevering. He was a mere bov reporter when at last he got the thing learned. He continues: “I went into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter when I was a boy not eighteen, and I left it—l can hardly believe the inexorable truth —nigh thirty years ago; and I have pursued tho calling of a reporter under circumstances T>f whiefi many of my brethren here, and my brethren’s successors, can form no adequate conception. “I have often transcribed for the printer from my short-hand notes important public speeche-s in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palip of my hand by the light of dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. “The very lasi time I was at Exeter \ I strolled into the castle-yard there to ) identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I ‘took’ an election speech of my noble friend, Lord Bussell. It was in the midst of a livelY fight kept up by all the vagabonds in the vicinity, and under such pelting rain that I remember two good-natared colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. “I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the House of Commons, and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled like so many sheep.— Exchange. I 1