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A History of Learning to Write

EWAN CLAYTON

W

in the way handwriting is understood. Over the lasthalf-century our knowledge of its history has developedin detail but not in perspective; new areas of scholar-ship and technology are now changing that. Recentstudies of the history of reading have opened our eyesto the sheer variety of ways in which we read; privatelyor in public, skimming, reflectively, slowly and repeat-edly; in church, kitchen, library, train or bed. Peoplehave not always read the same way; reading has a his-tory. Handwriting, too, has a history and is practisedin an equally rich diversity of ways. We write differ-ently when we copy notes for revision or annotatethe margins of a report, the handwriting on our tele-phone pad is different from that in a letter of sym-pathy or on a birthday card, the draft of a poem orthe cheque written at the supermarket checkout isyet again different from the ‘printing’ on our taxreturn. Over our lifetime our different writings alsocontinue to change. Most literature on handwritingtreats it as an undifferentiated phenomenon. InHandwriting: Everyone's Art we want to look at thisarea afresh, not proclaiming allegiance to this or thatsystem but simply focusing attention on what isactually already there.

This essay seeks to explore the diversity of hand-writing practices by concentrating on just one issue,namely how handwriting has been taught. This focusreveals handwriting to be one of the areas where ourpresence to ourselves (self-identity rather than per-sonality) is simultaneously forged and disclosed aswe conform to or diverge from cultural models andwork with body and mind in an integrated or dis-associated way.

I begin with a brief background account of theorigins of our present letterforms and how theyarrived in England. This story has its starting point inRenaissance Italy; the Gothic hands of the MiddleAges, their origins in the twelfth century and theAnglo-Saxon, early European and late Roman cursivesthat came before them are a subject in their own right.The focus here is on the sixteenth century, an extra-ordinary period in which all our contemporaryconcerns about handwriting have their roots. Studyof the intervening five centuries challenges the viewthat there is nothing more to be said than to listwriting masters and convey a vague feeling that it wasdownhill all the way. In fact it was. An understandingof the origins of our present day scripts helps us tosee that the sub-text underlying most discussions onhandwriting is our changing definitions of what it isto be human. This may account for some of the heatthat discussion of handwriting often generates.

The handwriting we use today is rooted in the scriptsassociated with the Italian Renaissance. These scriptscan be divided generically into the humanistic book-hand which provided our roman lower-case lettersand italic, a cursive hand which became the sourceof our joined-up writing; both evolved in the first fewdecades of the fifteenth century amongst a circle ofscholars based in Florence. The changes that led tothese developments had started much earlier in theuniversities of northern Italy when individuals werereawakening to a current of vitality in the survivingliterature of the Roman world. This would be themotivating force of the Renaissance. One scholar in

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particular, Petrarch (–), living far from hisnative Florence, at the papal court in Avignon, gaveforce to this movement through his imaginative recre-ations of the classical world. Combining a passionateidealism with careful scholarship he reanimated thecultural legacy of the ancient world and passed thisenthusiasm on to a new generation of followersamongst whom was Coluccio Salutati (–),Chancellor of Florence. Salutati was a great collectorof rediscovered classical works. It was he who encour-aged his copyists to experiment with clearer forms oflettering, to ensure accurate and accessible texts. Hiscopyists, principally Poggio Bracciolini, looked fortheir inspiration to northern Italian writing of theearly twelfth century when letterforms, based uponCaroline minuscule, were open and round, unlikelater compressed and abbreviated Gothic writing. Theletters that Poggio developed, known to us today ashumanistic minuscule (fig. ), were the emblems ofmodernity when printing was introduced to Italy inthe mid-fifteenth century. In order to compete withcontemporary scribes printers adopted these letter-forms for the Italian market.

The cursive writing associated with the Italianhumanists, italic, was probably the invention ofNiccolò Niccoli, another Florentine scholar in thecircle of Salutati and Poggio. He combined the openletters of humanistic minuscule with the diagonaljoining stroke used in running forms of Gothicwriting. Popularised amongst scribes and scholars inFlorence, this new hand was adopted by the papalchancery in Rome and became the handwriting of

choice for those who wished to associate themselveswith the new spirit in scholarship and the arts thatspread from northern Italy. The hand was probablyfirst introduced to Britain by Peter Carmelianus, LatinSecretary (Foreign Secretary) to Henry VII. EdwardVI and Elizabeth I both wrote the hand, and CambridgeUniversity seems to have had many scholars who exper-imented with the style.

In , in Rome, the first printed writing instruc-tion manual was published by Ludovico degli Arrighi,a scribe working in the papal chancery. Other manualsfor a specialist audience (largely secretaries) followedof which the most significant were the writingbook of the Venetian scribe Tagliente and GiovanniBattista Palatino's Libro Nuovo d'imparare a scriveretutte sorte lettere antiche e moderne di tutte nationi,first printed in . Palatino's book is interesting forwhat it tells us about the ordinary writing of thattime. Most documents in the sixteenth century werestill written in varieties of Gothic cursive and Palatinoillustrates examples of such hands from Milan, Rome,Venice, Florence, Sienna and Genoa. In fact almostevery great commercial centre or large organisationsuch as the papal writing office had developed its ownvariety of writing. Writing was not as homogeneousas it is today and there were many different styles inuse concurrently.

With hindsight, we can see that the most influentialmanuals of the sixteenth century were those producedby Giovanni Francesco Cresci, a scriptor in the VaticanLibrary (fig. ). He criticised the work of earlier mas-ters as too slow and deliberate, ‘a thing of angles and

2 Humanistic minuscule. British Library Add. Ms 50002. Italy, last decade of

the fifteenth century [By permission of the British Library

3 GF Cresci, Writing manual. Rome 1560

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points’ with narrow letters that were difficult to joinwith diagonal ligatures. He introduced a rounderform, easier ligatures and an increased slope whichmade the script faster to write. This set the patternfor the ‘Italian’ hand that would be influentialthroughout Europe during the commercial expansionof the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The first writing manual printed in England A BookeContaining Divers Sortes of Hands by Jean deBeauchesne and John Baildon was published in .Other books followed including The Pens Excellencie() by Martin Billingsley, writing tutor to the futureCharles I, Edward Cocker's The Pen's Trancendencie(), John Ayres's A Tutor to Penmanship () andGeorge Bickham's The Universal Penman (). Overthe next three centuries these books and others led tovariations on Italian scripts replacing the system ofGothic and secretary hands which had developed inEngland from the twelfth century onwards; but forseveral centuries these systems existed side by side(figs. ). In the s only the nobility and theirsecretaries along with university academics wroteitalic. By the early seventeenth century the Italianhand had developed in two directions: a narrow,sloped ‘roman’ considered appropriate for women'swriting and a stripped-down version suitable forcommerce. The later style, eventually known asEnglish round hand, was initially modified from theItalian version by French and Dutch writing masterssuch as Lucas Materot (active ), Louis Barbedor(–) and Jan van den Velde (–), all ofwhom were admired by Samuel Pepys who, inciden-tally, was a keen follower of writing masters and col-lector of their work. It seems likely that it was throughDutch traders, the most successful merchant class ofthe first half of the seventeenth century, that this kindof writing came to influence ordinary correspondencein England, just as it was through English traders thatround hand would eventually become popularisedthrough most of the rest of Europe and in the colonies.

Although it would be possible to confine an accountof sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century hand-

writing to a list of writing masters and their books,this would obscure very real differences in the way itwas understood and practised. Reading and writingwere taught separately; many people were taught toread but not everybody went on to write. Writing wastaught on a need-to-know rather than a universalbasis. So the well-born, doctors, clergymen, business-men, lawyers, book-keepers, and their clerks and sec-retaries learned to write. Some evidently taught them-selves from manuals but usually students enrolled ina writing master’s academy for day or evening classes.

Learning to write was a complex business requiringthe mastery of several hands and the avoidance of otherscripts as inappropriate for one's social station, profes-sion or gender. The counting house and commercialworld stressed hands that were round, simple and clear(fig ); a legal clerk would have to master a variety ofcourt, chancery and engrossing hands, and men ofleisure affected a distinguishing carelessness in theirwriting. Women were taught a different hand to men,a narrow, sloping hand (fig. ) often regarded merelyas an accomplishment, a skill for the leisured, likeneedlework or dancing. This practice continued intothe nineteenth century. Handwriting was withheld

4 T O P Court hand. England, early seventeenth century [Private collection

5 B O T T O M Letter of receipt in ‘Italian’ hand. English 1686 [EJF Collection

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altogether from some sections of the population.Society in seventeenth century England was stratifiedby hierarchies of power and status. The handwritingpeople were taught was part of the way these bound-aries were marked and maintained with tell-tale signsthat shaped the kinds of messages they could writeand the way in which their communications wouldbe read. The complexity of writing styles meant thatreaders faced difficulties; it was not unheard of, evenas late at the early nineteenth century, for someone toconsider themselves a reader of books but not ofhandwriting. Legal scripts were so obscure they wereconsidered inaccessible to all but members of the pro-fession themselves and several attempts were made dur-ing the Commonwealth and the s to reduce thenumber of hands used. In the seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries writing was seen far less as a meansof self-expression, but rather as an accomplishmentappropriate to a particular milieu or station in society.

The craft of handwriting required a wide range of

skills. The scribe used quill pens that were individuallycut and resharpened as they wore down. Writerswould have to make their own ink and lined paper.The paper or parchment would be prepared before-hand with pounce or gum sandarac – powders thatgave the pen grip on the page and sharpness of line.There were many rules about pagination and docu-ment layout to be absorbed. Letters were folded andsealed with wax or wafers, and there were no pre-prepared envelopes or universal postage system.

Printing had been invented in the mid-fifteenth cen-tury but its use did not become generally widespreaduntil much later than is generally appreciated. InBritain, Acts of Parliament had restricted printing tothe City of London and the universities of Oxford andCambridge until the last decade of the seventeenthcentury. It was only in the early decades of the eigh-teenth century that printing spread to the regional

5 T O P ‘Round Hand’ and 6 B O T T O M ‘Italian Hand’ from George Bickham’s The Universal Penman (1st ed.1743)

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towns of Britain. All business was transacted throughhandwritten documents and much more literaturethan we once thought was produced in manuscript.Most pamphlets of a satirical, political or religiousnature were issued as handwritten copies, sometimesin editions of many hundreds. Some forms of litera-ture gained in prestige by being published only inmanuscript, poetry for example. John Donne's workwas circulated principally in handwritten editionsduring his lifetime. Another substantial area ofscribal publication was the news sheets filled withLondon news and gossip subscribed to by out-of-town gentlemen. It was only from the s onwardswhen laws regulating the location and number ofprinting presses were eased that scribal publicationdiminished and a distinctive print culture emerged.

As print became more popular links between itand the pen were lessened. So, for instance, whilstJoseph Moxon in his Mechanick Exercises on the WholeArt of Printing (–) argues that the ‘true shape ofletters’ should approximate geometric forms ‘as mod-ified by the course and Progress of the Pen’, the FrenchRoyal Commission of recommended a reform oftype design without reference to the pen; their newdesign was based on an analytical grid of ,

squares. In the public perception, print eventuallycame to stand for the mechanical, regular and imper-sonal. Handwriting, on the contrary, began to bedefined as we know it today as personal, authentic andindividual. It was no longer simply the appurtenanceof a class or profession.

This trend to identify handwriting with the indi-vidual grew through the eighteenth, nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. It would lead to the ‘science’ ofgraphology, the cult of the autograph and its use asproof of identity before the law. In handwritingeducation it resulted in a succession of changingapproaches as the nature of the individual was under-stood differently over time.

In John Clark, an English writing master expectedhis student to get ‘an exact notion, or idea of a goodletter by frequent and nice Observation of a CorrectCopy’. In other words, learning to write was conceivedas a largely passive process of copying an appropriate

model. Writing manuals presented ideal alphabetsand model sentences that the student imitated onblank sheets of paper. This was typical of the meth-ods used until the late eighteenth century. But it canbe contrasted with the John Jenkins manual of

which shows letters broken down into componentparts; the alphabet is reduced to as few as six penstrokes. The student is expected not only to learn theletter shapes but also to learn by heart a catechism ofletter formation recited in response to the teacher'squestions. An oral and analytical element is creepinginto the learning process. This would become normalpractice in the nineteenth century when in theEnglish Committee of the Council on Educationrecommended that Charity Schools adopt a systemdeveloped by M. Mulhauser, a schools inspector inGeneva. His system incorporated another develop-ment typical of the period. The letters were formedby command with the teacher calling out letterelements and the students simultaneously writingthem down on the page; the letters mysteriouslyappeared out of the assembled elements. This wasknown as ‘handwriting drill’. The pen was even pickedup and dipped into ink by the whole class on shoutedcommands or the beat of a classroom metronome.

Such exercises were seen as character building. Asample of someone’s script became a recommenda-tion of industry and self-discipline. As the Victoriansbegan to stress the moral nature of the individual,handwriting came to be viewed literally as a processof character formation. Writing was presented as anact of will, the mind extending control over the baseand brutal body, resulting in ‘command of hand'.

In America Spencerian script, based on the rhyth-mical forms seen in nature, and its successor thePalmer method, introduced detailed prescriptionsfor ‘correct’ posture and penhold and ‘muscular’training movements. Palmer went so far as to advocatea rigid arm supported on the surface only by the littlefinger. All finger movement was prohibited, gesturescame from the shoulder, left-handedness was rigorouslydiscouraged. Although the language used to teach thismethod was one of freedom and movement the realitywas that the writer was deprived of any sensory feed-back from the writing surface and was required toproduce a rigid limb whose sweeping gestures could

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not in fact generate clear or controlled forms. Thebody was treated as a machine and its movementsautomated. Palmer writing depended on a series ofseemingly endless movement drills.

The promotion of ideas such as mind over bodyreflecting changing views of the individual, were notthe only pressures on the evolution of script. We havealready seen how the rise of print culture in the eigh-teenth century had effected the way handwriting wasunderstood. New technology introduced during thenineteenth century had a similar impact.

With the development of the railways, the telegraphand the postal system and consequent expansion ofbusiness, from around the second third of the nine-teenth century documentation grew enormously. Thisbrought with it pressures to find new ways to copyand store the mountains of paperwork.

By the last half of the nineteenth century the mostcommon way of copying outgoing correspondencewas the press book. Letters were written in special ani-line inks that took time to dry. The letter was placedin a book of tissue paper and pressed onto the layerof tissue that lay above it. The inked impression couldbe read right way round through the other side of thesemi-transparent tissue. Another copying method wasto write in aniline inks onto paper which was thenlaid down on a gel to which the ink was transferred

and from which prints could be taken. The exagger-ated thick and thin shading and steep slant which haddeveloped by this time in traditional English roundhand was unsuitable for these and other copyingmethods as some strokes were too thin to reproducewell and others filled in (fig. ). H. L. Vere Foster, withthe patronage of Palmerston, the Home Secretary,promoted a new model of writing, reverting to thewider letter body proportions of eighteenth centuryhands and eliminating the contrast between thick andthin strokes. The Vere Foster Civil Service hand (fig.) was the most frequently taught writing in Britishschools from the s until well into the s.

In the early s a number of other influences shifted‘expert’ perceptions of handwriting. Evolutionary the-ory was describing humans as organisms subject todevelopment; new sciences were emphasising thematerial basis of created things, in our case thebody, its bones, muscles and nerves; simultaneously,psychology was explaining human consciousness as amulti-levelled phenomenon whose life was expressednot only in the mind but through the whole psycho-physical complex. Academics seized on these theoriesto argue for a number of changes in handwriting

7 Letter in Victorian copperplate writing. London, Christmas Day 1898

[EJF Collection

8 Vere Foster writing. Child aged ten, 1940

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education. In America they criticised Palmer forimporting methods of instruction appropriate to abusiness school into a classroom of children whosecognitive, perceptual and motor skills were not yetfully developed. They recommended that children beallowed to write without ruled lines, in larger shapesand using pencil or chalk rather than ink pens. Theybegan to measure writing for individual differences.In E.L. Thorndyke of Columbia University pub-lished a handwriting scale, the first of many which setout a method for grading samples of script. Thisemphasis on measurement was part of a wider move-ment that saw the introduction of I.Q. and otherquantitative tests for the assessment of both pupil andteacher. Education, like business, was developing sys-tematic management practices.

-

At the beginning of the twentieth century one move-ment reconceptualised writing in a new way. This wasthe result of innovative technology and its effectsinteracting with a wider movement for social reform.It is the effects of this interaction that we in Britainhave inherited today. By the s typewriters hadbeen invented. These machines revolutionised busi-ness correspondence. Twenty-seven words a minutewas the typical handwriting speed at that time, butafter the development of touch-typing in the stypewriters were attaining speeds in competitions ofone hundred and twenty words a minute. Using car-bon paper, typewriters could make up to ten copiesof a letter at a time. Not surprisingly, most officialwork became typewritten.Since the late sixteenth century one of the underly-ing justifications for learning to write had been thatit enabled the student to participate in business. Now,this fundamental assumption was being graduallyundermined. Once the link with commerce was bro-ken, handwriting was once again open to redefinition.The first half of the twentieth century saw a varietyof new and sometimes competing movements inhandwriting education: the introduction of print-script, a revival of italic and an emphasis on creativewriting. But they all shared one characteristic, anassertion of the connection between handwriting andauthorship, book culture and cultural history. Once

the association with business was lost handwritingwas redefined in terms of its affinity with the arts andliterature. The case of print-script illustrates this.

In the London County Council introducedthe writing of simplified letters for children into itsschools, as a result of a long process of debate involv-ing a number of contributors. The medical professionasserted that sloped writing was bad for posture andeyesight and roman letters might be more suitable.The calligrapher Edward Johnston suggested an evo-lutionary approach to writing which traced the his-torical development of forms eventually leading towhat he called a running round hand which actuallylooks very like a cursive italic. The LCC's pro-posal gave us what we know today as print-script. Inthe United States, to which it was introduced in ,it was known as ‘manuscript writing’. Soon, in bothcountries, print-script was replacing other methodsof teaching writing in the early school years.

As originally conceived, the movement towardsprint-script had a wide sweep. Like the educationalpsychologists, the reformers rejected the copybookmethods of business schools, but their logic was dif-ferent. It was not simply that they wanted to adjustfor the limitations of a child's motor developmentbut rather that they were reconceptualising writing asa tool for individual expression. It was writing ratherthan handwriting that was important. Instead ofhandwriting drill attention was focused upon naturalsituations for written expression. These might includemaking signs and cards, recording lunch orders orordering seeds for the classroom window box, keep-ing diaries or weather journals. Handwriting wasbeing learned in the context of its use. Print-script,they argued, broke down the barrier to self-expres-sion because it enabled even young children to writemeaningful words legibly from the beginning. It alsobroke down the barrier between reading and writingby abolishing the difference between the letterformsused by each. Reading and writing could be taught inparallel for the first time. The traditional criteria forassessing handwriting such as speed and neatnesswere superseded by another, the degree to which ahand enabled self-expression from the earliest years.Problems came when pupils moved on to writing acursive hand. The cursive forms chosen in both

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Britain and the United States for the first half of thetwentieth century were the looped cursive of thePalmer and Vere Foster methods with complexcapitals and unusual letterforms like the openand knotted . There was no developmental logicbetween these earlier and later hands. A much betterbasis for the transition would have been Johnston'ssuggestion of a linked, sloped and slightly compressedversion of print-script, a running round hand as hehas called it. In effect this is what Marion Richardson(with advice from Johnston and Fairbank) endeav-oured to produce in her Dudley Writing Cards(fig. ). Many other systems have followed, with theNelson scheme and Ruth Fagg's ‘everyday handwrit-ing’ among the more notable.

Historically, of course, we already have an exampleof a roman lower-case letterform, similar in proportion

to print-script, with a history of having been adaptedfor everyday handwriting: the form is the root formfor the whole history which we have laid out above,the many variations on ‘Italian hands’ or italic. AsJohn Nash discusses elsewhere in this book, in themiddle part of the twentieth century a number ofeducationalists developed schemes based upon thisletter. They fall into two categories according to theirstarting point. Some take early- to mid-sixteenth-cen-tury work as their model. This can give, as Crescipointed out very early on, a rather angular and narrowletter which is hard to join when children are in theearly stages of learning to write. Others have looked atmore expanded and cursive forms. Such shapes liebehind Irene Wellington’s Copy Books and the ‘simplemodern hand’ of her student Tom Gourdie. Theseforms are probably closest to the shapes Johnstonoriginally envisaged.

In Britain the force that underlay the redefinition ofhandwriting in terms of authorship and book culturewas the Arts and Crafts movement. Highly scepticalof the social and material consequences of the wayindustrialisation had developed in Britain, its leadersargued that factory production methods had sepa-rated the maker from the designer, resulting in botha joyless worker with no real responsibility and baddesign unrelated to working methods or conditionsof use. In print culture, so the argument ran, theoriginal designer-maker was the scribe; the solutionshould then be that a reform of print required therevival of calligraphy. Both the private press move-ment, a revived interest in fine printing, and thetwentieth century calligraphic revival sprang fromthese roots.

These reformers painted a history of handwritingin similar terms to that of designing and making.Engraved ‘copperplate’ copy books had distorted goodletterforms producing shapes that could not in factbe made easily with a pen. The need, then, was fordirect representations of real writing and in theinterests of reuniting print and written culture thereformers advocated the use of the edged penwhich produced a natural thick and thin shadingwithout the elaborate pressure/release movements

9 Print-script. Child aged six, 1996

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of copperplate writing. In origin, however, we seethis critique was not simply one of style, as it seemslater to have become, but part of a wider movementfor radical social and educational reform. Print-scriptwas part of this reform. It eliminated rhythmical writ-ing exercises that were abstracted from the context ofuse and reunited designing and making even in learn-ing how to write. Children were to write real things;from the earliest days the purpose and power of thewritten word were to be self-evident.

So where are we now? What are the facts of our owntime and situation? In the last decades of the twenti-eth century computers have developed to the pointwhere they are no longer simply calculating devices;connected to screens and printers and graphics soft-ware they have become new writing tools in the lin-eage of the quill pen and the typewriter. Our ordinarywriting tools have changed too. In the middle of thelast century, coinciding with the development ofglazed paper, steel nibs replaced the quill, but our cen-tury has seen even more radical innovation with theinvention of ballpoint and fibre-tipped pens. In justthe last year in Britain we have seen a government‘Literacy Hour’ introduced into schools. In some areasteachers are now being encouraged to abandon print-script and teach joined-up writing from the start.

What does our history of handwriting have to sayabout these developments? Some things are clear. Theintroduction of new technology will change our atti-tude to handwriting. Handwriting has been defined inrelation to literature, but now computers are invadingthat territory, for they are certainly tools of authorshipand allied to print and book culture in obvious ways –such as the typefaces they use.

Perhaps the special kind of attention and sustainedfocus that handwriting involves will become its strength.Free from other pressures it will be seen as a way in whichwe can bring our attention to bear carefully upon things;it provides an opportunity for focused expression as wellas for the personal and intimate in an electronic worldthat is increasingly public and interconnected. Certainly,as we come to understand the diversity of ways in whichwe use handwriting, the discussion of whether or not itwill disappear will become more grounded. Paper and

pen are useful because they are instantly accessible,robust, inexpensive. They are also transportable intoall the extraordinary situations into which our bodiesventure. There are parts of the world that computerswill take many generations to reach in an affordableand culturally useful form. Handwriting is here to stay.

In this country government intervention in hand-writing at a national level is new. The nature of theintervention is revealing. The history of handwritingeducation shows that this has been one of the areaswhere a society's anxiety about control versus free-dom has found a focus. During this century as neverbefore our society has recognised the autonomy andrights of children, but we are clearly ambivalent aboutwhat this newly acknowledged individuality mightentail. The Literacy Hour illustrates this. It tries totackle a problem but avoids engaging with the partic-ular way it presents itself, which is always in terms ofan individual. Its unit of measurement is time spentteaching rather than individual need addressed andso perhaps it discounts such things as the attentionspan of different ages of children, or changes inapproach that might be necessary from child to child(the problem of left- or right-handedness, for instance).It could be seen as a hands-off approach for a hands-on problem.

Whilst the Literacy Hour may be one way we areaddressing a feeling that a younger generation issomehow getting away from us, the paradox is that intheir own terms the young are very literate. They areoften the experts within a household in the new tech-nologies of literacy – computers, and for the first timein the history of any culture youth has evolved its ownvigorous vocabulary of written forms in graffiti(fig. ). People who have not engaged with graffitiartists might not be aware of how wide is their knowl-edge of print and even calligraphic culture; and theirsense of community is international.

For the individual teacher trying to find a waythrough the many handwriting schemes on offer itmust be confusing, but if you are looking for guidancethe history of writing says look within, ask yourselfwhat you believe it means to be human and examinethe assumptions that lie behind the scheme on offer.What is it that you want pupils to learn about thehuman condition and through what channels? This or

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that scheme may argue it is faster or more legible, butfaster for what? Just what are we teaching handwritingfor and do our instruction methods convey this purpose?

Handwriting has changed so much over time andis used in so many different ways that we should be

sceptical of any claims to definitive authority. It is anart with all the richness and diversity of use that ourlives can call forth from any art. It is one of the artsof everyday life and it really can be an art for everyone.

See, for instance H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford . Love argues that print culture devel-oped much more slowly than was once thought and that scribalpublication continued well into the eighteenth century. See A. Manguel, A History of Reading, London . See T. P. Thornton, Handwriting in America, New Haven . Iam indebted to Thornton’s book for this perception and thereby formuch of the discussion of late seventeenth-century attitudes towriting and of physical constraint in nineteenth-century schemes.My discussion of twentieth-century developments pursues one of herbasic arguments but not in a way that she has chosen to pursue herself. For this history see L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes andScholars, rd ed., Oxford . The dates given here are for the first known editions of the work.Many of these books were continuously re-issued, with variations.Edmund Coker, for instance, is the author of up to twenty works onpenmanship and this is not untypical. H. Love op. cit. In Algernon Sidney argued in his trial for treason that ‘Thesimilitude of hands is nothing, we know that bonds will be coun-terfeited, so that no man shall know his own hand’. Handwritingwas not admissible as evidence. The only proof that a person hadwritten a particular document was a witness who had seen it beingwritten. By however Geoffrey Gilbert, a legal scholar, was argu-ing that everyone's handwriting like everyone's face is unique andthe identification of a script is comparable with the identification ofan individual. See Thornton, op. cit., p.. Platt Rogers Spencer (–); in the hands of his sons theSpencerian empire eventually spread to a chain of business colleges

and its text books were marketed to forty-two states. The systemreduced writing to a number of basic elements which Spencerclaimed could be found in nature thus taking penmanship ‘quiteout of the circle of arts merely mechanical’ providing it with ‘digni-ty as an intellectual pursuit’. A.N. Palmer (–). Palmer simplified the Spencerian system,reducing flourishes and writing in a strict monoline. He too built up asubstantial business supplying pens and copy books and paper andteaching by correspondence. His method dominated the Americaneducation system in the first half of the twentieth century. The method originated with the London writing master JosephCarstairs, and was adopted by the Bostonian Benjamin Foster in from whom it came to Spencer. For discussion of the development of business documentation I amindebted to J. Yates, Control through Communication, Baltimore . The example illustrated here is by Lindsay Castell’s mother, RuthCastell (née Chandler). For a short introduction to handwriting in Britain during theVictorian period see the exhibition catalogue Writing by Rote withan introduction by V. H. Crellin, University of Reading 1982. See E. Johnston, Lessons in Formal Writing, ed. H. Child & J.Howes, London , p.. I. Wellington, The Irene Wellington Copy Book, parts, London. T. Gourdie, The Simple Modern Hand, London .See note above. See the preface by W. R. Lethaby to E. Johnston, Writing &Illuminating, and Lettering, London ; nd impression .

N O T E S

10 Graffiti. San Francisco, 1996