Last October, a collaboration called The Dickens Code project made a public appeal to amateur puzzle fans and codebreakers for assistance in decoding a letter written by Victorian novelist Charles Dickens in a tortuously idiosyncratic style of shorthand. The crowd-sourced effort helped scholars piece together about three-quarters of the transcript. Shane Baggs, a computer technical support specialist from San Jose, California, won the overall contest, while a college student at the University of Virginia named Ken Cox was declared the runner-up.

Van Gogh spent three years in London and delighted in Britain’s literary heritage, a love that is explored in a new Tate show

When Charles Dickens died, he left behind an unfinished book containing unresolved mysteries. In ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ who killed Drood—and is Drood really dead?