LITMIR.BIZ

      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.