Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly
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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. A penman “of the rarest excellence” produced legible text and did so in a way that commentators routinely described as “useful and polite” or “easy and correct.” These stock phrases make clear that a “good hand” was defined as much by the person manipulating the pen as by the letters inscribed on paper. While we might trace Salisbury’s progress as a penman by the changing appearance of his handwriting, his contemporaries would also have considered the changing appearance of his body as he wrote. Polite penmanship was a total body effort: That was the message drilled home by the “practical” writing guides published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Claiming to duplicate in book form the training offered by writing masters, authorities like George Fisher and Nathan Towne dictated the correct placement of every finger in the hand that held the pen and cautioned students never to allow the “ball and fleshy part of the hand” to touch the paper. But they also prodded would-be writers to pull their elbows in close to their sides, to keep their pens inclined toward their right shoulders. They insisted variously that writers sit “pretty upright” or that they lean forward over the table, making sure to keep their heads within the same plane as their spines.38
These dicta obviously helped novice writers learn to control the flow of ink and to protect their sleeves and cuffs from stains. But they also prescribed a bodily aesthetic. Like the pen-wielding sitters painted by John Singleton Copley or Charles Willson Peale, the writers conjured by Fisher and Towne could turn gracefully from their work to acknowledge observers. They arranged themselves, their pens, and paper to communicate that they were engaged with but never consumed by the texts they produced. Real writers and painted ones drew attention to the performative and social contexts of penmanship, underscoring an aesthetic that encompassed process as well as product.
Figure 4. John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815), John Hancock, 1765. Oil on canvas, 49 1/8 × 39 3/8 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Deposited by the City of Boston, L-R 30.76d statement. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.