Interpreting the Labor and Legacy of the Independent Literary Typist; or, the Typing of Ethel Kate Dickens

Abstract

While analysis of the figure of the “typewriter girl” abounds in literary scholarship, few have yet taken the real typewriting women, those individuals involved in the production of literature, as serious subjects of literary study. This article focuses on one such typist, Ethel Kate Dickens (1864–1936), in an examination of the types of intellectual and social work that constituted her literary-adjacent career. Ethel Dickens was not only a representative “independent literary typist” at the turn of the twentieth century, she was also the granddaughter of the “inimitable” Charles Dickens, a business owner, and a playwright; she typed for G. B. Shaw, J. M. Barrie, and other notables. Leveraging evidence that includes Barrie's “The Twelve Pound Look,” archival letters, historic typewriting manuals, and a wide array of periodicals, I argue that reevaluating her work as specifically literary labor recuperates significant processes that are frequently omitted from official accounts of literary history. Recovering the interpretive and transformative processes of Ethel Kate Dickens's professional literary copying thus expands what it might mean to make and experience literature, and to have literary value, beyond the persistent paradigms of “originality” that continue to structure literary studies today.