Thomas Gurney (stenographer)

Thomas Gurney

Thomas Gurney (* 1705 in Woburn in the county of Bedfordshire , England ; †  June 22, 1770 ) was a British parliamentary and court stenographer and developed a shorthand system .

Live and act

Thomas Gurney initially learned the craft of watchmaking . As a boy he is said to have bought some books, including a textbook by the English stenography system inventor William Mason (1640-1720). At the age of 16 he is said to have literally recorded a speech. Thomas Gurney was eventually tasked with recording the negotiations of the British House of Commons committees and court sessions of the House of Lords in shorthand . In 1737, at the age of 32, he was employed as a court stenographer at the Old Bailey Court in London . In 1748 Gurney was officially employed by the City of London at the Old Bailey Court and charged with editing the reports of the session. The Gurney Institute, founded by Thomas Gurney, trained almost the only practical stenographers in the United Kingdom well into the 19th century and was involved in many court hearings from the various parties inside and outside London.

Work of Gurney's descendants

Thomas Gurney's son Joseph Gurney (1744-1815) was also called in to the court sessions of the House of Lords as a stenographer. There he stenographed z. As the famous state process from 1788, in which Warren Hastings , Governor-General in British East India was accused. Joseph Gurney's son William Brodie Gurney (1777-1855) was officially employed in 1813 as a stenographer for the committee negotiations of the House of Commons and for the court sessions of the House of Lords. He passed this office on to his descendants. A new version with only minor changes to the Gurney system was used in the British Parliament in 1922 . The Gurney family produced five generations of stenographers.

System description and publications

In the first edition of Thomas Gurney's textbook, which he published in 1750 under the title "Brachygraphy", he described himself as a pocket and church tower watchmaker . Thomas Gurney used William Mason's system based on the 1707 version as the basis for his shorthand system and improved it. Mason's shorthand is one of the ancient geometric font styles. The characters come from the basic shapes of planar geometry (straight lines, circles and parts of circles in various directions and sizes). The characters are directly connected to one another without connecting lines. In contrast to the neo-geometric font style, the old geometric font style has simple characters as well as composite characters with multiple lettering for one character. The vowels were indicated by William Mason by placing the vowel following the vowel as a reduced sign at a certain point of the preceding vocal sign (intermittent self-vowel indication).

Thomas Gurney: Brachygraphy, London 1835 Alphabet overview with example words

Gurney also used this intermittent vowel indication, whereby, like Mason, there were only three positions for the vowels to accommodate them well on one side of the consonant. A and e, i and y as well as o and u were merged and, if there was a risk of confusion, they were differentiated by moving the self-indication of reduced characters further away from the previous consonance. Gurney reduced Mason's shorthands for whole words and phrases to about a hundred and created some special abbreviations specifically for parliamentary reporting. Individual dots in different positions have been used for different very common words.

After Gurney's death in 1770, when the 7th edition of his "Brachygraphy" appeared, his sons published the system in new editions. His son Joseph Gurney made a few minor changes and in 1772 published the 8th edition under his and his father's name. In the 9th edition ( Manchester 1773) the reference to the original system of Mason was omitted. Joseph and Martha Gurney published a brachygraphy edition in 1778. In 1789 an edition was published in Philadelphia in the US state of Pennsylvania . Gurney's system was in use in the United States until the late 19th century . The 16th edition was published in 1835 and states Thomas Gurney, Joseph Gurney and William Brodie Gurney as authors or editors. It was also published as a reprint in 2008 in Whitefish (Montana) , USA (see references). In total there were at least 18 editions of Gurney's shorthand system.

Used by Charles Dickens

The most prominent user of the Gurney system was the English writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870). He worked his way up to a parliamentary stenographer and, since 1829, has been writing on the Gurney's system for the rapporteurs gallery of the House of Commons. It has been wrongly pointed out that Charles Dickens depicts the difficult learning of the Gurney system in his novel "David Copperfield" , which has most of the autobiographical features. In his humorous narrative, Dickens made shorthand rather than a specific system the subject of his humor. In the end, however, he assured me that he had managed to read his transcript under all circumstances.

literature

• Faulmann, Karl : History and literature of shorthand, Vienna 1894
• Gurney, Thomas, among others: Brachygraphy: or an easy and compendious System of Shorthand, London 1835, 16th edition = reprint by Kessinger Publishing's Rare Reprints (Whitefish 2008)
• Kaden, Walter: New history of shorthand. From the creation of writing to contemporary shorthand, Dresden 1999
• Johnen, Christian: General history of shorthand, Berlin 1928, 3rd edition
• Mentz, Arthur: History of Stenography, Berlin 1920
• Mentz, Arthur, among others: History of the shorthand, Wolfenbüttel 1981, 3rd edition
• Moser, Franz, among others: Living shorthand story. A guide through the theory of shorthand and shorthand history, Darmstadt 1990, 9th edition

Web links

• Brachygraphy or Short Writing by Thomas Gurney - title page of the 2nd edition from 1752
• Image of Thomas Gurney on Old Bailey website
• Thomas Gurney's grandson William Brodie Gurney - in English