Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ physical mastery of pen, ink, and letter-forms. It also revealed his or her social rank, education, taste, and character. Penmanship signified so powerfully partly because writing had been an exceptional skill in the colonial era and partly because it acquired new meanings after the Revolution. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Anglo-Americans viewed reading and writing as separate and only tangentially related skills. Although significant percentages of colonial men and women learned to read, if only to read the Bible, writing remained the province of a far more select group. Ministers, doctors, lawyers, wealthy women and men, and, especially, merchants could wield a pen. As the expansion of commerce increased the demand for writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, the expansion of education increased opportunities to acquire it. But if writing became less rarified, it did not become less resonant. The proliferation of print in the second half of the eighteenth century tightened the association between handwriting and selfhood. Unlike the mechanized, impersonal regularity of a typeface, the small idiosyncrasies that marked one man’s round or Italian hand also signaled his temperament. In the years following the Revolution, this association became far more urgent. Educational theorists who posited republican society as the guarantor of a republican state attempted to identify the particular script best suited for a republic. At the same time, pervasive anxieties about authenticity compelled some readers to seize on a “good hand” as one more proof of an individual writer’s character. Thus, a “good hand” rendered both text and writer legible.³²

      With so much riding on the stroke of a pen, handwriting could not be left to chance. Although the ability to write was a prerequisite for admission to an academy, an ongoing emphasis on penmanship was a routine component of the curriculum. Some academies hired writing masters outright; others made do with teachers already on staff who claimed some competence as “writing instructors.” Whatever form the training took, students could expect to be judged on their proficiency with the pen. The younger students at the Bethlehem Female Seminary, for example, kept both individual writing books and a collaborative daily school journal. All these books were evaluated on the grounds of “writing and language.” Congratulating the girls on their improvement in “writing a fair hand,” school principal Jacob Van Vleck admonished them not to rest on their laurels but rather to continue “giving all possible pains in obtaining this noble art.” The Bethlehem students were not alone. Well into the nineteenth century, academy students spent hours and hours copying words, phrases, and epigrams into their penmanship books: “By commendable deportment we gain reputation.” “Virtue preserves friendship.” “Xenocrates recommended virtuous employments.” “Commend good men.” “Merit creates envy.” “Wisdom and virtue are ornaments of the soul.”³³ The more advanced the student, the longer the passages. During their second year, the young men at Nazareth Hall graduated from short epigrams to business correspondence: “Rec’d from Francis TrueMan the Sum of Forty Seven Pounds Pennsylvania Currency being in of a Debt due by Mssr.s Trueman and Wilson.” Even when students moved beyond the rote copying of the penmanship book, they were expected to continue honing their hands at the same time that they composed letters and filled up commonplace books and diaries.³⁴

      This was not a matter of elevating style over substance. As one educator put it, a good hand bestowed a “grace to composition.” Thus Cheever understood that he was expected to fill his journal with his “feelings just as they are, and if possible in good style and fair writing.” The quality of handwriting mattered well beyond the walls of the academy. To hear Stephen Salisbury’s parents tell it, his wretched handwriting spoiled the letters he sent them from a Massachusetts academy. “Your father rec’d your careless Scrawl, & desires me to ask you if any of the other Scholars send such scraps of paper folded up as letters,” his mother wrote. Ignoring the letter’s contents—which recounted her son’s life at school—she issued a warning: “It is time you did better Stephen.” The quality of the medium and the message were of a piece.³⁵

      Figure 2. William Winchester prepared this example of the running hand for the Oct. 1793 examination at Nazareth Hall. Samples of the students’ writing were preserved in a volume marked “Specimens of Writing Made by the Scholars in Nazareth School for the Autumnal Examination.” Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.

      The conventions governing students’ penmanship paralleled and amplified the conventions of their compositions. Both were governed by the aesthetics of emulation and the mechanics of reproduction. The work submitted by students at Nazareth Hall for their 1793 examination, for example, certified them as masters of the running hand, which was the script of choice for commerce and the professions. But the samples also certified the boys as masters of the copy. Almost to a one, they replicated the example provided by the teacher so closely that it is all but impossible to distinguish one writer from another. Only the small notation of names on some of the entries makes it possible to distinguish one boy’s work from the next. For these boys and countless others, the goal was not legibility so much as submission to the conventions of a codified style. This discipline ensured consistency across the pages of script penned by a single writer as well as consistency among all the student writers. An observer might recognize a particular penmanship sample as an example of the running hand but he would not immediately identify it as the product of any particular individual’s hand. The uniformity of the script appears effortless. Along with the identities of the writers, the labor necessary to comply with the model has been effaced.

      Figure 3. Nathaniel Ray Greene’s “specimen,” prepared for the same examination as William Winchester’s, is nearly identical to it. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.

      Like the return of the repressed, traces of labor that have been erased in one place reappear in others. Occasionally, students’ everyday writing—marked by careening slants and misshapen letters—hint at the effort required to produce writing that met the standards held up by instructors and parents. Penmanship books, like the one kept by Samuel Salisbury in the summer of 1780 provide a clearer picture of a good hand in the making. For two months, Salisbury alternated daily between copying pages of single letters and pages of epigrams. Gradually, his lettering became more consistent, his script more fluid. Salisbury’s book evidences his labor, but does not remark on it.³⁶

      Memoirs are more explicit on this point, recording both the effort and its value. Mary Jane Peabody recalled that the girls at her “boarding school” were required to write abstracts of Sunday’s sermons. By the time she left, she had filled several books with summaries set down in “round, clear hand writing.” But although the précis were easy to read, she was not satisfied with her writing. “Determined to write better, more like a lady,” Peabody found a “good copy to imitate” and took “infinite pains.” Her progress was measured on paper, in a book that began in her “usual hand” and ended in “very delicate neat writing.” While Peabody described her pursuit of a good hand in a memoir, Samuel May inscribed his in the front covers of the same penmanship books he had filled as a boy. Near the end of his life, he wrote that because he had but a “cramped and awkward hand” at the age of twelve, his father arranged for him to leave the public Latin school for an hour and a half each day to take “at least 110” private writing lessons with the Reverend John Pierpont, “a penman of the very rarest excellence & good taste.” At the minister’s house, he traced sloping, parallel lines to memorize the ideal slant of the running hand and repeated single letters for pages at a time. Only then did he graduate to words and, shortly after that, to an “intermediate” writing school. In May’s telling, his work with Pierpont was as significant a step on the road to Harvard’s entrance examinations as the time he spent at the public Latin school.³⁷

      Chirography—the art of writing—involved more than the hand-eye coordination necessary to form letters. СКАЧАТЬ