He was born on 4 January 1813 at Trowbridge, where his father was superintendent of the Anglican Sunday School and his mother attended Zion Baptist chapel. After five months at Borough Road Training College, London, from 1832 to 1836 he was a schoolteacher at Barton-upon-Humber, where he attended the WM chapel and was admitted on trial as a local preacher in 1832. In 1837, having moved to take charge of a Methodist school at Wotton-under-Edge, Glos, he was dismissed from his teaching post because he had joined the Swedenborgians, an association he maintained for the rest of his life. He is remembered chiefly for his system of shorthand, the first version of which was explained in his Stenographic Sound-Hand (1837). His later years were spent in Bath, where he founded the firm of Isaac Pitman & Sons in 1886. True to his upbringing, he remained a vegetarian and an abstainer from smoking and alcohol. He was knighted in 1894 and died at Bath on 22 January 1897.
'We have sometimes amused ourselves with drawing comparisons between Isaac Pitman and John Wesley; and, did we believe in the transmigration of souls, we might imagine that the soul of Wesley had left its 'world parish' to write shorthand, and persuade Englishmen to spell phonetically. Unlike Wesley, Pitman is tall, but, like him, he is spare and muscular, with bright eyes, a keen face, and rapid motions. Like Wesley, his habits are regular, and almost ascetic. He goes to bed early, and rises early summer and winter, and may almost invariably be found posted at his desk by six in the morning… Like Wesley, he is very abstemious: wine, beer or spirits of any kind never pass his lips: nor fish, flesh, nor fowl… Like Wesley, he has no love for money, save for its use in promoting his ends. His personal wants are few and simple, and every penny beyond what is required for them is devoted to the phonetic propaganda. Like Wesley he has a governing and despotic temper. In all things he takes his own way…'
William White (a Swedenborgian who knew Pitman well) in A. Baker (1908) pp.157-8