The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  Once this idea had taken root, copperplate in its Spencerian form was doomed. Spencer’s principles of discipline, practical application, speed and fluency were good enough in the abstract. They had succeeded, at least, in doing away with an idea of handwriting which was going to find it necessary to scribble a pair of doves in the margin.* But those principles ought, as well, to have done away with the idea of a capital T with a camp little curl to the left, like a teapot. Whichever way you looked at it, those ornamental loops and curlicues were not a very good idea. They slowed down the execution, but without improving legibility; indeed, they made the handwriting less legible, but without allowing the writer to speed up. Something had to be done, and something soon would be.

  We have to deduce most of the process of imbuing students with copperplate from surviving workbooks of students and from copybooks from which students could work on their own. One rare practical work on the teaching of handwriting from the copperplate age in England survives, and has been examined by the handwriting expert Rosemary Sassoon. Henry Gordon’s Handwriting and How To Teach It has less of a Bismarckian spirit than Spencer’s major-generals, stalking round the Midwest press-ganging the young into joyless drills. He was strongly against simultaneous writing of exercises in a set time, which would bore the practised students and do nothing for the slapdash ones; he was shocked at the idea of speaking to a pupil who had made a mistake ‘in a faultfinding tone’; he said that handwriting exercises should never be used as a punishment; and if he supports the idea of ‘constant supervision’, the sense of his work is less of a single terrifying Spencerian eye at the front of the class than of a kindly fellow going round and helpfully pointing out where things could be individually improved. ‘What an excellent teacher Gordon must have been,’ Sassoon remarks, accurately.11

  An example from Henry Gordon’s Handwriting and How To Teach It.

  But you only have to look at Gordon’s models to see that improvement in both legibility and ease of writing could not be far away. He provides two entire lower-case alphabets, one ‘looped’ and the other ‘unlooped’.* His capital H, I am sorry to say, is a demonstration of sheer madness, the four corners of the letter having four completely different terminations – from top left clockwise, a hammocky squiggle, a little rightward loop, a rising link and a fat leftward loop like a cushion. I mean, I’m all for baroque in its place,† but it does no good to pretend that the eventual mastery of these intricate flourishes does anything for legibility, efficiency, grace or attractiveness of the final result.

  Nevertheless, copperplate survived for an extraordinarily long time, and still remains present in our minds, I suspect, when the word ‘handwriting’ is pronounced in approving tones. In 1958, a Survey of Handwriting was published by Reginald Piggott, an adherent of the italic writing style. Many attempts were made to spread italic beyond a small and largely public-school coterie, so that the whole population would, sooner or later, write in this beautiful style. The approach of Piggott, however, was different. He placed advertisements in the press, and solicited examples of handwriting of every type, from all sections of society. His attempt may have been to draw attention to the corruption of handwriting, and to suggest a universal cure in the sloping nib and elegant alternation of thick and thin in italic. Certainly, the last pages of his book are an arid confection of instructions and aestheticism, which anyone, even at the time, could have seen would never come to anything much.

  But the fascination of the Survey is in the body of the book. Piggott collected hundreds of examples of handwriting, and categorized them confidently. His categories are not quite ours. He doesn’t find a place for two of the most common and useful handwriting styles of his time: A.N. Palmer’s commercial hand, which was the most widely taught technique in America at that time, and Marion Richardson’s sensible, rather round letterforms – we will come to these two shortly.

  Most of the people who supplied Piggott with examples were people who had good reason to be proud of their handwriting. It seems likely that he seriously overestimated the incidence of italic writing in the population at the time, and many quite exhausting pages are filled with boys writing in from public schools to show off the beauty of their italic style. There is, too, a high incidence of people with what, in the 1950s, would have been very old-fashioned copperplate, or its derivative, ‘Civil Service Hand’, as Piggott calls it. Victorian styles survived in all sorts of ways much longer than any of us think. It is tempting to envisage the 1950s as a decade in which everyone from the Queen downwards wore a beehive and giant jazz-coloured skirts or teddy-boy outfits and duck’s-arse haircuts, according to gender.* Not everyone had festival-of-Britain printed curtains. Quite a lot of people went on wearing exactly what they had always worn, among the furniture which their parents had bequeathed them. You only have to think of people like Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, living on into the very end of the 1960s with an unmodified Edwardian wardrobe, amid bleak Georgian furniture, to see that life for many people did not change greatly with the turn of each decade.

  To look at some of Piggott’s copperplate examples is to imagine them being written by Mrs Lopsided in The Lady-killers, who sees off all the bank-robbers who are trying to do her in. Actually, that image of survival isn’t so inappropriate. Though they may look like the handwriting of some dear old lady preserving the handwriting of a Victorian childhood, in fact some of Piggott’s copperplate examples were written by busy commercial men in their thirties. Why did this antique hand survive so long and with such appeal? Why is it copperplate that we tend to think of when we think of ‘fine handwriting’?

  Copperplate still surrounds us at various moments, unlike many historical styles. It is pretty unlikely that you are going to come across an example of an uncial hand today – the style which introduced lower-case letters to the Roman world, which has a faint scent of incense about it, and looks like this:

  Uncial hand

  Similarly, the only way in which you are going to come across a black-letter script is in print rather than handwriting. There are probably two calligraphers in Munich who are still capable of writing black-letter. But for the rest of it, it would only surface if a harassed copywriter at an advertising agency was presented with a monk-brewed beer, and couldn’t really think of anything better to do with it than reach for the drop-down menu to write:

  (Interestingly, this sort of thing is referred to by computer programmes as ‘Old English’, like a dog, rather than ‘Gothic’, which has been long taken up for a completely different and non-Gothic font, or black-letter, which they have clearly never heard of, confirming our impression that computer programmes just don’t know what they’re talking about.) But copperplate is the hand we reach for at elevated moments of our lives, whether printed in a simulacrum of a hand –

  Mr and Mrs Edward Boffin

  Unwillingly invite you to the wedding of Their Pregnant Daughter Ethel

  To the Worthless Wretch Who Did the Deed

  Or, of course, if we’re extremely rich and show-offish, we may even stretch to paying a professional calligrapher to write wedding invitations to every one of our 250 Beverley Hills friends, in, of course, professional copperplate. (You are not going to shell out to see a calligrapher indulge his admiration of Marion Richardson’s school-room hand).

  It has an odd knack of surfacing in the most peculiar places. I am reminded by Kitty Burns Florey, in her enjoyable book on the rise and fall of handwriting,12 that one of the most commonly seen uses of copperplate these days is in the Coca-Cola logo.

  Looking at that logo as a surviving example of copperplate, something rather odd emerges. It contains two uppercase C’s, but if you look at each of them, they are not just different in the way they are extended – the first one at the bottom, the second at the top – but in the way they are formed. The first upper-case C is made by moving downwards from the top of the letter; the second from the bottom upwards, and then along the top of the word ‘Cola’ and through the l
oop of the l.

  No doubt the complexity of the writing evolved, in this case, in order to make it more difficult for imitators and fraudsters to copy. But isn’t there something strange about a style of writing where a single letter, in the same position, preceding the same letter, can be written in two completely different ways? Even if it’s done with deliberate perversity, for commercial reasons, isn’t there something strange about a hand which can encompass such random variations in the ways the letters are formed? In the end, the practical eye is going to conclude that copperplate is unnecessarily elaborate, and, moreover, really quite ugly. A style which seems to allow you to alter the way the form is made from one word to the next according to idle whim, as in the Coca-Cola logo, offends against taste, habit, good manners and good looks. Someone was going to have a better idea.

  8 ~ Vere Foster and A.N. Palmer

  One of the most successful of these better ideas in the UK was inspired by Lord Palmerston, the great Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister.* Palmerston, in the course of a busy life, found time to concern himself with handwriting, and said once very strongly that ‘Children should be taught to write a large hand and to form each letter well, instead of using fine upstrokes and firm downstrokes that looked like an area railing, a little lying on one side.’† The object of Palmerston’s theory was a friend called Vere Foster, who took the instruction seriously. He produced a series of copybooks which were put into immediate circulation, and survived in British schools for the best part of a century.

  Vere Foster firmly believed that traditional copperplate, as specified by penmasters like George Bickham, was pursuing an impossible aim. Foster preferred to take ‘real free writing’ as his model. His copybooks look very artificial to us now, but there was a strong, idealistic, simplifying spirit behind them, which took public service as its goal, and the furthering of the carrière ouverte aux talents as a good beyond questioning.

  A page of exercises from a Vere Foster copybook.

  The age that produced Vere Foster also produced the Northcote Trevelyan reform of the Civil Service. In 1857, Dickens had published a novel, Little Dorrit, which contained a savage satire on the conduct of public life – the Circumlocution Office, staffed, it appears, solely by offshoots of the Tite Barnacle family. Unexpectedly, Little Dorrit was the best-selling of all Dickens’s novels in his lifetime: there was clearly something in the air.

  Vere Foster’s copybooks are a minor, but very interesting, contribution to the vast reform and opening up of public service, and the slow movement towards universal education, from where a boy from the humblest background could (ideally) become a responsible public servant. Northcote Trevelyan utterly transformed the British civil service, away from the values of patronage and idleness which Little Dorrit so powerfully portrays. The system that would serve the values of competitive examinations and the reward of merit, regardless of connections, was slower to emerge. But one of the key components of this was a system that would teach children how to write legibly and competently. Vere Foster was ideally placed to deliver this. By 1870, written tests for copy boys and clerks were introduced into the civil service. Before long, the requirements of Vere Foster were being identified as ‘civil service hands’, a term which seems, as late as Reginald Piggott’s Survey of 1958, to need no explanation.

  In America, the next stage of handwriting to emerge came from a very similar place to Spencer’s chain of franchised disciples. In some ways, the appearance of the results is similar. But the originators of the style of writing thought of themselves as modernistic, simplifying, clarifiers. They regarded the copperplate style as ornate and outdated. Away with it!

  Unlike Vere Foster, whose aim became identified as the public service, his American counterparts focussed on the practice of business, commerce, and independent-minded moneymaking. From the 1890s onwards, the American penman A.N. Palmer worked through the well-established methods of business colleges, lectures, and correspondence courses. It was the golden age of salesmanship, of aspiration, of getting by and getting on, and one thinks of Herbie in the Jule Styne musical Gypsy, going from town to town with a pocket full of badges attesting membership of various business societies, declaring himself an Elk or an Oddfellow, as opportunity presented itself.

  Civil Service hand, by a writer aged six.

  Between the 1890s, when Palmer published his first manual, Palmer’s Guide to Business Writing* and the 1910s, Palmer’s simplified and rapid methods took over American handwriting schooling, and produced a completely new style. In some respects, the style remains in place to this day, despite the last Palmer school having gone bankrupt in the 1980s. If the Spencer style remains the admired ancestor of American handwriting, the Palmer manner and its direct offshoots remain a living presence as an idea of good handwriting for many Americans. When we English think of an American handwriting, with the loops and efficient forward dynamism – like the example shown opposite – it’s Palmer we’re thinking of.

  Palmer’s aim, like Spencer’s, was efficiency in a business world. The demands of business had increased enormously since Spencer’s day, which now seemed the product of a more leisured age. It is the story of handwriting since the dawn of time. Florentine scribes in the Medici counting houses in the sixteenth century had no time to be writing uncial hands, and took to what we call italic; copperplate was a more efficient way of writing than before; and we don’t have time to be writing in taught hands, so we’ve given up altogether. In Palmer’s case, he assured his readers that an elaborate copperplate hand takes time to produce, and cannot be speeded up. Whatever its legibility for the reader, it does not enable the writer to work with rapidity. The new writing style would be plain and legible, and also rapid. Its proponents liked the idea of ‘real, live, usable, legible and salable penmanship’ which would be ‘no more beautiful than is consistent with utility.’1

  The 1950s notebook of LAPD Sergeant Con Keeler.

  The names and addresses of notorious gangsters – including Mickey Cohen – can be seen.

  The new style aimed to get it down quickly. It was a handwriting for the Gilded Age, when elevators were enabling the construction of buildings in Kansas City fifteen storeys high* and the full potential of speed was being realized in all sorts of ways. As Palmer’s potential for speed was being realized, the first automobiles would be seen on the roads; during the rise of the style, ‘Jacky’ Fisher, the British First Sea Lord, would be commissioning and building a whole new fleet of warships of incredible velocity and ferocity; before Palmer’s principles triumphed, men would take to the skies.† Efficiency, speed, ugly clarity and consistency: that was the future of writing.

  With the same clarity of application that he expected from his pupils, Palmer produced some pseudo-scientific truths and some truly gruelling exercises to enable the student to enter into his prescribed style. Far more than any previous handwriting entrepreneur, he examined the movements necessary to writing. He concluded that handwriting was an athletic activity, which involved much more than the hand.

  It became an item of faith with Palmer that good handwriting was produced with movements of the whole arm. The use of the whole arm would avoid writers’ cramp, and enable us all to go on working late into the evening tirelessly. Palmer talked in terms of blood and muscle, rather than pebbles and petals and waves, seeming to think of a physical movement – from the brain, down the neck, across the muscles of the shoulder, down the muscles of the arm, and then through the hand (basically unmoving) and fingers, and down the pen, as if the ink reservoir were just a continuation of the body’s arteries. He spoke of handwriting, not emerging from the nib, but ‘operating along the muscles of the arm.’2

  Posture was dictated in extraordinary detail by Palmer and his successors. As late as 2000, we hear of an elementary school teacher in Detroit saying, ‘Where do your feet go when we do D’Nealian?* Flat on the floor, that’s right.’3 Probably you write as I do, with the movements of the body not extending much fur
ther up the arm than the wrist. Palmer was certainly correct, that the small movements of the hand are tiring, and, much repeated, might even be damaging. Such grim effects as carpal tunnel syndrome hit inefficient handwriters, pianists and those who write on laptops, with the characteristic tiny movements of the hand – old-fashioned typewriters are much better for you, demanding much larger hand movements.* I’ve written the last three pages by hand, and I can feel an ominous tightening and ache on the inside of the wrist, and at the bottom joint of my little finger where it curls under and makes a cushion for the biro.

  Try Palmer’s whole arm movement, and it does feel refreshing to write from the shoulder, even without trying to imitate his letterforms. It has some curious effects on your writing, however. I immediately find that my handwriting gets bigger, for instance. I press much less hard on the paper, and the tip of the pen glides across the page. Interestingly, it becomes much less natural to lift the pen in the middle of words, or even between them. If I write the word ‘unimportantly’ in my usual handwriting, it comes out like this – U ni mpor tant ly – four breaks in one word:

  If I try to write it from the shoulder, my whole arm moving, it comes out very readily in one movement, every letter joined together. Weirdly, without attempting to imitate Palmer’s letterforms at all, my handwriting has, in an independent-minded way, developed some of the same characteristics. There is suddenly a bold loop under the p, where it normally just drops and stops. The y at the end, amazingly, just seems to find it perfectly natural to loop and close, in rather an extravagant way. Those loops and joins in Palmer’s style of writing which seem so anti-functional to us, so at odds with Palmer’s message of pared-down efficiency, are in fact serving an efficient end. The name of that end is whole-arm movement.