Making their Mark: Eighteenth-Century Writing-Masters and their Copy-books

AILEEN DOUGLAS

Never has there been a race of professors in any art, who have exceeded in solemnity and pretensions the practitioners in this simple and mechanical craft.

(Isaac D’Israeli, ‘The History of Writing-Masters’)’

The race of professors Isaac D’Israeli so comprehensively dismissed were the writing-masters or penmen of the early eighteenth century - men such as George Shelley (1666?-1736?), Charles Snell (1667-1733), or Joseph Champion (1709-1765) - and since his essay formed part of his immensely popular and frequently reprinted Curiosities of literature, his dismissal was an influential one. Nor was D’Israeli’s scorn without some measure of justice, for the copy-books - collections of printed writing samples made from engravings and intended for the use of novices - which were the writing- masters’ chief claim to fame, were indeed often characterised both by solemnity and pretension. Decked out with grandiose portraits of their authors, and embellished with iconography that might include cherubs, crowns of laurel, quills and Latin inscriptions, the copy-books sought to assert the writers’ gentlemanly status as well as their skill. The penman’s own talents might be asserted through testimonials solicited from colleagues, while intemperate denunciation of rivals - and those rivals’ views on esoteric aspects of the writing process - was common. To D’Israeli, all of this was comical proof of egomania and intellectual vacuity. He left it to ‘more ingenious investigators of human nature’ to explain the powerful delusions of men, ‘who have been generally observed to possess least intellectual ability in proportion to the excellence they have obtained in their own craft’.2

It would be ironic, however, if the vaingloriousness the writing-masters occasionally exhibited in their attempts to bolster their social and professional pretensions were responsible not merely for the derision they attracted in the nineteenth century but also for their twentieth-century neglect. In fact, the flamboyance of the eighteenth-century penmen was related, not so much to a sense of personal accomplishment, as to an estimate of their social function. Despite their comic rivalries, the penmen were strikingly single-minded in their view of what writing was for, and the copy- books are united in their promotion of writing as an engine in the development of England as a commercial nation. Eighteenth-century

British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (2001). p.145-160 0 BSECS 0141-867X

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penmen grasped, and made explicit in their work, intimate connections between writing, social change, and the distribution of social power.

The reflections of the penmen were not, however, limited to the social function of writing. They also attended to the history of writing in a way that notably anticipated modern theoretical concerns, not least through their insistence on the materiality of literal writing and their consequent unsettling of logocentricism. Yet the historical significance of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century copy-books is not simply equivalent to the historical consciousness of their authors. Taken collectively, these books evidence the mobility of writing: that is, the fact that writing does not have a stable meaning across society or across historical moments. Even as they made writing more widely available, the penmen shaped writing in decisive ways. Dissemination altered the object disseminated.

The writing-masters of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were not the first of their kind. In his study of the ‘materials and materiality’ of English Renaissance writing, Jonathan Goldberg firmly places the teaching of writing within the context of social change and the ambitions of a non- aristocratic intelligentsia. He argues that humanist pedagogues understood themselves as part of an increasingly bureaucratised state, and that they aimed, through their teaching, to secure a place within the state for intellectuals like themselves, while limiting access to such places for 0the1-s.~ The aspirations and ambitions of such pedagogues are to be understood in the context of classical education and state service: in the sixteenth century, Roger Ascham taught King Edward VI to write: in the seventeenth century, Martin Billingsley was tutor of the future Charles I. By contrast, the writing- masters of the early eighteenth century serve a considerably more extensive and far less elevated social group. Their pedagogy is often achieved not through personal contact but through the mechanically produced copy- book. More marginal in social terms than the humanists Goldberg discusses, eighteenth-century penmen are just as concerned as those earlier teachers to define their society so they themselves have a central role. Through the agency of their copy-books, the writing-masters discussed in this essay projected a very distinct social view. Their works define both writing, and society, in terms of commerce, technology, and the vernacular: good penmanship and national prosperity became identical. Literature of the period, most memorably the poetry of Swift and Pope, powerfully represented commercial society, and especially technologies of mass-production and the proliferation of print, as turning all writing to waste and rubbish. For the writing-masters, in contrast, commerce promoted writing, and mechanical reproduction (albeit with some complications we will later consider) perfected the power of writing, because it was through such reproduction that new writers were made.

Although Isaac D’Israeli chose not to reveal the fact, his ‘History of Writing-Masters’ drew heavily on a two-volume work published in 1763 by

Eighteenth-Century Writing-Masters and their Copy-books 147

the schoolteacher William Massey. In his Origin and Progress of Letters, Massey provided a ‘compendious Account of the most celebrated English Penmen, with the Titles and Characters of the Books they have published both from the Rolling and Letter Press’ along with ‘a new Species of BIOGRAPHY never attempted before in Engl i~h’ .~ Having silently exploited Massey for his own essay, D’Israeli still felt able to comment on the ‘great singularity’ of a work involving the biographies of penmen: ‘for what can the most skilful writing-master do but wear away his life in leaning over his pupil’s copy, or sometimes snatch a pen to decorate the margin, though he cannot compose the page?’5 D’Israeli’s tone here is characteristically sardonic, yet the question is one fundamental to the history of writing. So, Jacques Derrida has argued that the history of Western metaphysics includes the history of a metaphor ‘that systematically contrasts divine or natural writing and the human and laborious, finite and artificial inscription’.6 Within the history of this metaphor, literal writing is condemned as secondary and fallen, while writing in the metaphorical sense - for instance, the natural law ‘written’ on the human heart - is venerated. Natural writing, good writing, is immediately ‘united to the voice and to breath’, whereas literal writing, bad writing, is denigrated as technique, ‘exiled in the exteriority of the body’. In D’Israeli’s logocentric view, the writing-masters exemplify a dead exteriority: lacking what is truly valuable - intellectual ability - they make a noise about mere technique, the inconsequential details of a ’simple and mechanical craft’. It was William Massey, in contrast, who recognised not only the materiality of writing but also its historicity.

‘Writing being thoroughly historical, it is at once natural and surprising that the scientific interest in writing has always taken the form of a history of writing.’* Derrida’s own work has done a great deal to renew interest in eighteenth-century thinkers such as William Warburton, whose efforts to provide a science and history of writing had been ‘too often ignored or undere~timated’.~ Yet, even though we now have a greater appreciation of eighteenth-century attempts to explicate the relationship between historicity and writing, our history of writing in the century remains incomplete. This is especially the case if one bears in mind the fact that, as Henri-Jean Martin insists, ‘the history of writing by no means concerns pure spirit: writing is first and foremost material’.’O D’Israeli’s incredulity that mere writing- masters have ‘had their engraved “effigies” with a Fame in flourishes, a pen in one hand, and a trumpet in the other: and fine verses inscribed, and their very lives written’,’’ springs, at least in part, from a refusal to acknowledge that practitioners, as well as philosophers, have claims on the history of writing. Such an attitude had been foreseen and self-consciously challenged by William Massey, D’Israeli’s source, when he argued that it was his own practical experience which fitted him to author The Origin and Progress of letters:

Some perhaps may wonder, that I should undertake this province, which more properly belongs to the Members of the Antiquarian Society. I do not pretend

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indeed to an Antiquarian, in the common acceptance of that term: but as my studies, and employ, for above forty years past, have so near a connection with the subject of my book, I thought I had some title, and right to the claim I have made, in this branch of literature; and as none of that ingenious and learned society have precluded my labours by any undertaking of this kind, I hope they will cordially excuse this attempt.”

The material legacy of the writing-masters poses certain problems. As Ambrose Heal points out in his crucial biographical dictionary and bibliography, the copy-books were intended for the use of learners, and many were destroyed by repeated handling. Heal continues: ’Of those that are left to us, many are imperfect, wanting plates, frontispieces or title-pages, so that it is not always possible to define the original composition [...I the plates are as often as not unnumbered, and the letterpress leaves without signatures or paginati~n.’’~ Those copy-books still extant are typically composed of some letterpress and a series of plates. In the letterpress, penmen might address the history of writing, the social role of writing, their own skills, the shortcomings of their rivals, and the relationship of the art of writing to that of engraving. The engraved plates fall into two main categories, depending on their function: the first, and larger, category consists of samples for the student to copy, the second of virtuoso pieces by the master, to be admired by students and noted by rivals. John Ayres’ Tutor to Penmanship is, in this regard, representative: Ayres provided ‘Fifty large Plates’ which, he claimed, omitted nothing ‘Necessary to make an Accomplished Penman or Accurate Clerk’ and a considerably smaller number of plates designed to beget ‘Emulation among the Men of [his] own Profe~sion’.’~

Eighteenth-century England occupies a particular place in the history of handwriting because it is here that the multiple hands of the Renaissance - engrossing, secretary, court, italic and so on - gradually give way to the English round hand, the ancestor of modern handwriting. The samples provided in early eighteenth-century copy-books not only allow us to trace the development of English round hand, they also reveal the ideological implications of its subsequent domination. By the late seventeenth century, round hand was being touted as ‘the only hand’ and ‘the hand most in use’.15 Although many copy-books advertised samples of all the ‘usual hands’ of England, this phrase increasingly came to mean versions of round hand. The ‘Law-hands’ - Engrossing, Common Chancery, Great Court, Small Court, etc. - were still in use but they were increasingly represented as a specialisation to which a small number of copy-books were dedicatedUT6 In 1714, the penman John Clark identified six hands of ‘absolute use’, four of them law hands which he distinguished from ‘the Round-Hand and Italian, in which most of the Common Affairs of Trade, and the ordinary Business of Life, are written by all E~ropeans’.’~ It is not clear from Clark’s statement whether round hand is to be specifically associated with trade, and Italian with other ordinary business of life, but in the first half of the eighteenth

Eighteenth- Century Writing-Masters and. their Copy-boo ks I 49

century, such associations not only became fast, they did so in a gendered way. In the seventeenth century, round hand and italic had both been presented as hands suitable for both sexes. At the beginning of the century, Martin Billingsley had recommended italic generally, and, at the end of the century, several round hand copy-books aimed at both men and women were published. Eighteenth-century copy-books, however, explicitly design their round hand samples not only for men but for those involved in trade. Women, rarely considered, are identified only as writers of italic. For example, a section of George Bickham’s EngZish Monarchical Writing-Master (1756), is devoted to an ‘Italian Copy-Book’ of Ladies’ Hands. A decade later, in his Treatise on the Art of Writing, Ambrose Serle speaks of italic as being ’peculiarly practiced by the Ladies’. Copy-books of the first half of the eighteenth century represent law hands, and italic, as being exceptional cases. The limited attention these hands receive not only contrasts dramatically with the sustained industry devoted to round hand, it indicates a significant paradox in the relationship between the copy-books and writing. Several features of the copy-books - the fact that they reached students with no other route of instruction, and the emphasis within the books on practice, rather than innate skill, as the chief ingredient in good writing - made writing both more visible and accessible. Yet the domination of copy-books by round hand, which in turn was almost completely identified with trade, meant that the form and function of the writing the copy-books made available were very narrowly defined. The copy-books promoted writing, and made it more widespread, but in so doing they curtailed the nature of writing itself.

Copy-books were directed at several audiences. Some were explicitly aimed at those who had no access to other forms of instruction, but others were intended to facilitate the work of the writing-master within the schools. Whatever a student’s circumstances, however, the future imagined for him by the copy-books rarely varied: deploying English round-hand in a commercial enterprise. Many penmen ran schools themselves, the object of which was to produce clerks for merchants and tradesmen: ‘nothing does more universally commend a Man in any Office or Imployment than to be a dexterous and ready Penman, a compleat Arithmetician, and accurate Ac~omptant’.’~ At his own school ‘in St P a d s Church Yard At the Hand and Pen’, the penman John Ayres taught writing, arithmetic and merchants’ accounts, while among the subjects taught by another family member were navigation, surveying and fortification. As one might expect, the samples these books provide to copy are often Bills of Exchange, orders for goods, receipts and so on. Copy-books taught the student to write by introducing him to the basic documents of commercial life. A series of dedications in various copy-books reveals how closely penmen identified their ambitions with commercial society, and how eagerly they sought to be valued by it. George Shelley’s NatLiral Writing (1709) is dedicated to the ‘the Governor,

I 50 AILEEN DOUGLAS

Deputy-Governor and Directors of the Bank of England’. John Clark justified the dedication of a work to Samuel Stainer, Lord Mayor of London, by a general reflection on the links between writing and trade:

’Tis well known that the Art of Penmanship had scarce ever reach’d that Degree of Perfection it is now arriv’d at, had it not been for that generous Encouragment which the most Considerable Traders have all along been pleas’d to afford it. and this particular Honour may without partiality be ascrib’d to our own Nation, that Writing and Accompts, no less than Trade and Commerce have given us the Precedence above all others. The natural Dependence which the Art of Writing and Trade have on each other made me think so great and well known a Name in Commerce as your Lordship’s would be the best Protection to this essay.’”

When Joseph Champion came to dedicate his The Parallel: or Comparative Penmanship Exemplified (1749) to the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen of the City of London, he expressed similar ideas, but with more pronounced self-interest. Noting that he had had ‘the honour of being repeatedly distinguished by this City on emint. Occasion and favour’d with constant Employment’, Champion looked forward to future, mutually beneficial enterprises:

As this august Metropolis (in which I was Educated) is the chief seat in the British Kingdoms, of Penmanship and Accompts I was naturally directed to your Worships as its first and chief Magistrates: and as the Arts I profess are of the highest advantage to a Mercantile City I flatter myself that my Labours for the public service will be received with indulgence.”

Copy-books in the first half of the eighteenth century claimed a symbiotic relationship between trade and writing, in which each facilitated the expansion of the other. The encouragement of tradesmen allowed writing to attain a degree of perfection, while the art of the penman was so advantageous to the mercantile city that his efforts might fairly be considered a public service.

In furthering their own interests, early eighteenth-century penmen did not dedicate themselves alone to London, heart of the mercantile nation, but also to the nation state more generally. For the penmen, the cause of writing is also that of the vernacular, and assurance in the physical act of writing becomes a celebration of the English language and an expression of national pride. Penmen explicitly contrasted the education they provided with that available in the Latin Grammar Schools, proclaiming themselves to be not only more generally useful than their rivals, but also better placed to develop a student’s national identity. John Ayres took the opportunity presented by the penman John Smith’s move to a ‘New and stately’ writing school to erect a ‘Little monument’ in script,

not only to commemorate so Illustrious a design for ye publick good, but chiefly hereby to excite & stir up Generous Souls to imitate in some Measure so brave an Example. As to Erect free writing-schools in our Country Towns,

Eighteenth-Century Writing-Masters and their Copy-books 151

because where ye Grammar school sends forth one scholar for Divinity. Law or Physick, forty if not a hundred are sent out to Trades & other imployments, many of wch want ye instruction of such as Your affectionate frd.”

The same penman mordantly presented a subsequent copy-book as, in part, a remedial opportunity for those who had suffered the misfortune of a classical education, arguing that it would be helpful for those ‘as had spent a great deal of Time at the Latin School, to so little purpose, that they knew not how to Write or spell English in any tolerable Meas~re’.’~ Ayres blames the inability to write ‘dextrously well’ on the practice of taking children away from the writing-master to scribble Latin exercises which are barely legible. Such children do not become ‘true grammarians’, a process which requires ‘the Assistance of an able purse and sufficient time’, but nor do they acquire proper habits in writing. From this perspective, Latin is a luxury, and ‘the greatest number of private Schoolmasters might find themselves Irnployment enough, to teach the rest of our Youth the true Use and knowledge of their own M~ther-Tongue’.’~

Early eighteenth-century copy-books are, in fact, part of a more general movement which sought to reverse an established hierarchy of knowledge by favouring the vernacular over Latin.25 In this process, writers might employ a variety of, at times, contradictory rhetorical ploys: acknowledging the relative inferiority of English by seeing it simply as a preparation for classical study, or representing ignorance of the classical languages as national purity. William Laughton, for instance, modestly presented his Practical Grammar as designed chiefly for ‘the Fair Sex, and such as require only an English Education’, but the same text includes the boast that ‘here British Soil is sown with native Seeds, / Completely purg’d from Greek and Roman weeds’.z6 Copy-books of the early eighteenth century encouraged students who could not afford a classical education, and who were destined to earn their livings as clerks, to see their accomplished penmanship as a particularly English quality in which pride might justifiably be taken. In this instance, the perfecting of technique, the hours of practice involved in obtaining a proper habit, is not the mark of enslavement to base, mechanical acts but a necessary initiation into a new social identity. It is also significant that copy- books variously convey the view that writing is an acquired, not an innate, skill, and that the purchaser of a copy-book may himself aspire to be a master. For example, George Bickham’s Universal Penman (1733-1741), an important collection of writing samples from the most prominent masters of the time, contains an engraving of a student penman, assiduously copying from the Universal Penman. The book is open at the text, ‘If you would like a Master write / Practice by Day as well as Night’. It was diligence, not genius, which made a master. We could say that the clerk in his counting house is manifesting Englishness, but that would be inaccurate because the English- ness does not exist apart from the practice of the pen. Only in the masterful act of literal writing does it come into being.

Writers are instrumental in a trading society, and the need of trade for a

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legible hand speedily executed was decisive in the development of eighteenth-century English hand-writing. John Ayres explained the success of ‘the Bastard Italians’ amongst Merchants and intelligent tradesmen by referring to their ‘utility and excellency [...I dispatching Business with much facility and n e a t n e ~ s ” ~ - and it was Ayres who was singled out by other penmen for having ‘introduc’d the mixed round hands, since naturalized and improved among us’.28 Dispatch could be achieved because English round hand was ideally executed in one smooth, flowing movement. As one mid- century manual had it: ‘Writing is performed at once, with one Operation of the Pen.’29 The celerity and smoothness of the English hand became another source of national pride. Indeed, the increasing dominance of the English round hand throughout the continent became the subject of congratulatory verse: ‘And Europe now, strikes to the British Hand / For Justness, Neatness, Freedom and Command.’30

The material and symbolic interrelationships between trade and writing developed by the copy-books are graphically represented by a map in George Bickham’s extraordinary copy-book-cum-atlas, The English Monarchical Writing-Master. The map is of ‘the King of Great Britain’s dominions in Europe, Africa, and America’, and in the top right hand corner is written the following note: ‘Countries, Islands, Forts and which are in the Round-hand Character, belong to the King.’3T The English round hand marks English possessions. Bickham’s map capitalises on the relationship between trade and writing, his copy-books both participating in, and giving symbolic expression to, definitions of England as a trading, commercial nation. To their users, books such as Bickham’s promised not only mastery of a technique, a skill, but also a way of being an integral, necessary part of a vibrant nation. This promise, although couched on occasion in inflated rhetoric, was not an empty one, and the ‘natural dependence’ of trade on writing made cultural capital of literal writing.

In keeping with Derrida’s contention that a scientific interest in writing always takes the form of a history of writing, many writing-masters complemented their view of the power of writing at that time with a brief historical perspective. Significantly, these histories - the most notable being that in John Ayres’ Tutor to - concentrate on the recent human past of writing: divinity and magic are displaced in favour of materiality and t e ~ h n o l o g y . ~ ~ Ayres, for example, notes the association of writing and divinity but has no interest in dwelling upon it:

The Antients, and with some appearance of reason, have Ascribed the finding out of letters to God only, for they looked on it as something above the Reach of man: but whether the Original of Letters was Immediately from the Divine hand, and particularly when God gave the Tables of Stone to Moses on Mount Sinai, or Mediately by his Gifts bestow’d on Men, is what I have not Curiosity to Inquire into nor Capacity to Determine.

Lacing his pragmatism with wit, Ayres concludes the issue by remarking that ‘Those who assert that God is the Immediate Author of Letters, have this

Eighteenth-Century Writing-Masters and their Copy-books 153

to alle’ge in favour of their Opinion that no other Author can be Named’. Ayres’ prose becomes more animated when it turns to a technological development: the rebirth of writing through engraving in the sixteenth century.

And then Writing began to Revive again; about which time they found out the way of Engraving Writing on Copper plates; and it is strange to consider, what wonderful Perfection the way of Writing now used, was brought to on a Sudden, by the Great Masters of that Age, who furnished the World with Curious Pieces of Art, to which we at this time must own our selves particularly obliged. These were the Incomparable John Vanden Velde of Holland, Lucas Materot of Avignon, John Beaugrande of France, and many other great Pen-men, both of Holland and France: neither must we be forgetful of the Advantages afforded us by the Antient Famous Masters of our own Country, such as John Davis of Hereford, Mr. Gething. Billingsley, Goodyear, Gery and others.34

In The Parallel, Joseph Champion - more categorically than Ayres - ascribes the origin of writing to Adam, but in his history, too, the real moment of excitement is the discovery of the rolling-press: ‘Wonder not, courteous Reader, to find that our Countrymen did not sooner appear in the Field of Fair Writing, since the use of the Rolling or Copper Plate Press [...I was unknown in England till the Reign of King James I.’35 For both Ayres and Champion the discovery of engraving represents the fortunate moment when the history of handwriting becomes the history of the copy. Ayres’ roll-call of famous copy-books credits the impact copies of the hands of continental masters have had on his own style, his own mastery results from his contact with mechanically reproduced copies. Here, the iterability of writing through engraving is not a source of anxiety but a cause of wonder and astonishment. In the histories of writing provided by early eighteenth-century penmen, mechanical re-production, far from diminishing the written image, allows for its perfection.

For some modern commentators, the process of making writers is inevitably violent. Jonathan Goldberg, scrutinising seventeenth-century copy-books and their elaborate instructions on cutting quills, methods of holding the pen, and posture while writing, insists that ‘quills are made into writing instruments by knives: writers are made in the process’.36 From discussion of the ‘literal’ scene of the knife, Goldberg moves to contemplation of the illustrations of detached hands that feature in these copy-books: ‘the hand appears to have been separated from the body, made to serve the quill’ (p.84). The illustrations of penhold, he concludes, ‘suggest that the hand’s accommodation to handwriting, naturalization of the hand, its realization as properly human, demands dismemberment and decorporealization, detach- ment from the body’ (p.95). Part of the work of the copy-book, in Goldberg’s argument, is to mystify this ‘ideological and idealizing formation’ by renaturalising it through description (p.96). Goldberg’s elegant and coherent analysis does justice to the unnerving qualities of his materials, and the fact

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that copy-books of a later period do not contain disembodied hands and the like does not necessarily make what he has to say irrelevant to them.37 In fact, one could argue that the very disappearance of such materials from later works only goes to prove Goldberg’s larger point: as writing becomes more familiar, the social inscription of the individual meets with less resistance, and the ‘violence’ becomes naturalised.

Copy-books of the early eighteenth century are not at all concerned to mystify (through natural or any other kind of imagery) their ideological commitments to trade and commerce, but an examination of their conception of ‘natural writing’ reveals ideology at work in other ways. In its narrow sense, natural writing is that relatively unadorned hand which is perfectly suited to commercial purposes. When John Ayres introduced his ‘Bastard Italians’ or ‘new A La Mode Round-Hands’ to the public, he spoke of ‘Nature having made them such absolute Beauties, as not to require any Artificial daub, or Paint to set them off, being performed with one intire touch’.3s The tendency of the English pen was towards expedition, and a natural hand was one that progressed uninterrupted by ‘artificial’ effects. The good penman was not to be distracted: ‘Turn not your Pen, nor alter the Position of your Hand, but let it move with a steady easy Motion, and perform every Letter without Catchings and convulsive F l ~ t t e r i n g s . ’ ~ ~ In keeping with the dictates of commerce, these men turned their backs on the kind of virtuoso calligraphy for which Edward Cocker had been famous in the previous century. That natural writing could not accommodate the fanciful or whimsical was made clear by a controversy that began with the publication of George Shelley’s Natural Writing in 1709. Some of the elaborate plates therein excited the derision of Shelley’s competitors. Charles Snell, for instance, denounced those who made ‘Owls, Apes, Monsters, and sprig’d Letters, so great a Part of their Copy-Books’ and ridiculed John Clark’s The Penman’s Diversion as ‘a Title proper enough for a book crouded with Monsters, fit only to be laugh’d at’.40 Clark responded by speaking in favour of a ‘free and Natural Writing’ and against ‘the folly and Ill-Nature of a LATE AUTHOR, in the Violent Noise he has made about Sprigging of Letters, and Pencilling of flour is he^'.^' Sprigging and flourishes hindered dispatch, and were not appropriate to a commercial hand. To the extent that such decoration became the monstrous ‘other’ of natural writing, we can speak of English round hand as an ideological formation.

In its more general sense, natural writing required that the body be comfortable, at ease with itself. The round hand required relatively little pressure on the pen, and the ideal writer was one who worked at a steady pace without strain or agitation. Writers were instructed:

To sit easie, not awry, either with your Head or Shoulders, but straight forward, without cringing, or such a Posture as may create Pain, by drawing or contracting your Body; grasp not your Pen too hard in your Hand, which will necessarily create a Tremor as well as Weariness, by an irregular beating of the Pulse; avoid as much as possible too great a Hurry, by too much Concern

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and Impatience: let not your Desire run too fast for your hand; but with a Sedateness and Easiness of Temper, let your Fingers move with a constant and regular Motion, without any fluttering or needless Shakes of Hand.42

If dispatch was desired, hurry was to be avoided: ‘let your Hand move with an easy Motion: and without Hurry, performing as much with the continual Motion of the Pen, as you possibly can, without straining or carrying it beyond what you can Command with Freedom and Ease’.43 Natural writing is the product not of the hand alone, but of an entire body working at its own pace. Ultimately, of course, the comfort of the writer serves the cause of writing, and productivity, and to that extent it is an ideological requirement.

There are, however, moments in these books when the attempt to convey the wonder of writing and the particularity of its power exceeds ideological requirements. A recurrent theme in the copy-books is the near-miraculous nature of writing, and in attempting to describe their wonder before it penmen became extremely sensual. A plate in John Ayres’ A Tutor to Penmanship provides a good instance:

’tis almost a Miracle that a meane could be invented whereby Words and Sounds wch naturally be the Objects of ye Ear should be made ye Objects of the Eye, as we see ye one is by Letters in Writing, the other by Notes in Singing: Is it not admirable that sounds 81 voices should by ye power of certain Characters bestoln away from their own proper sense and conveyd into another by a sort of Leger-du-Main, and so made an object of ye same. No invention ever yet could make ye object of seeing ye object of Hearing, Only the object of Hearing by this Invention of Lettres is in some sort made the object of seeing.

One might argue that understanding writing as a transformation of sound into mark is fundamentally logocentric; one might also observe that it is technically i n a c c ~ r a t e . ~ ~ Insistence on these points, however, risks ignoring the fact that what most interests Ayres is not source or origin, but the distinctive sensual natures of speech and writing respectively. Writing and speech are not only to be understood in terms of what they communicate, but also in terms of the senses they employ. Each exists in a different physical modality. For Ayres, the notion that as speakers and writers we move from one modality to another is a kind of romance. Characters are stolen away ‘from their own proper sense, and conveyed into another’; they take on different qualities. That writing animates 1s a perception common to eighteenth-century penmen, one memorably expressed by the penman Robert More: ‘Something there is that gives Life and Spirit to a Letter, that makes Strokes seem to Move, and casts a kind of Glory round ’em.’45 The same author’s query ‘On the Art of Writing’, is not a distinguished poem, but its delight in the sensual complexity of writing is tangible:

Tell me what genius did the art invent The lively image of a voice to paint? Who first the secret how to colour sound, and to give shape to reason wisely found?46

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Voice may come first, but that does not mean that writing is simply a second order of meaning. More’s poem celebrates the positive and distinctive qualities of writing, the shapes and lines which make particular demands on the human senses. In eighteenth-century copy-books, writing was a ‘mystic Art’ not because it had a divine origin, but because it transformed very human abilities, making ‘one Sence perform the Task of THREE’.47 For the eighteenth-century penmen, writing was a mystic, transformative art. This art could, however, be successfully transferred from the master to the diligent pupil through the medium of the printed engraving.

The penmen celebrated technology, and cited the discovery of engraving as the most important recent event in the history of writing. It was the technology of engraving, after all, which made the master’s samples widely available, thereby ensuring that those with the price of the book, and the dedication to practise, could become writers in their turn. As Ambrose Heal points out, ‘the high state of perfection to which the engravers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century brought their art accounted for a great deal of the improvement of current hands, and was responsible for the spread of the art of writing which took place at that period’.48 At the same time, however, the copybooks betray certain anxieties in relation to the very art which ensured their success. From early on, penmen expressed fears that they might be completely supplanted by engravers. John Ayres, for example, opined that ‘copy-books in England, may be likened to a Lottery, where for one Prize, you have forty Blanks’, a statement glossed by the explanation that ‘where one hath been publisht by Pen-men, forty have been published by Gravers’.49 Those ignorant of penmanship, John Ayres worried, ‘Generally conceive mighty things of Engraven Copy-Books, and that no written copy can be so Correct as that which is e n g r a ~ e n ’ . ~ ~ Penmen were vexed by purchasers who thought ‘all Printed Writing was only Engrav’d upon a Plate, without an Original first perform’d’. In his Writing Improved, John Clark took the opportunity to explain that:

Such writing is first done upon Paper, with an Ink without Gum; and taken off from thence upon the Plate; by rubbing the back of the Paper with a Burnisher, ’till the perfect Impression of every Stroke and Letter is left behind; so that the Engraver goes over upon the Plate, what was first performed upon the Paper.

The implications of Clark’s explanation are clear: penmen are artists, engravers mere copyist^.^' Penmen also insisted that their work, though mechanical in execution, ultimately depended on the mind. A maxim of the penman Robert More was ‘Writing derives its Origin from the Imagination, is executed by the Hand, and perfected by Exercise’. In similar vein, Charles h e l l distinguished between practical and speculative writing, and claimed that ‘all the Letters must be perfectly impress’d on the Imagination, before the hand can so perform them on the Paper’.52 Not only did penmen assert the importance of imagination and originality to penmanship, they also

Eighteenth-Century Writing-Masters and their Copy-books 157

extracted, from their engravers, deprecating references to the latter art. Ayres’ reflection on the way engravers were muscling in on the penmen’s territory was followed by a testimonial from his own engraver, John Sturt, admitting that he could not ‘pretend to Engrave a Correct piece of writing so well as the Original Copy’. Skill was not the issue here, but the nature of the tools involved.

[Flor the looseness of the Hand and Pen is such, the Nature thereof so subtle, and such Spirit and Vigor Exerted in so few Strokes and so small dimension, and the Graving Tool is an Instrument so unlike the pen in its Nature, Motion, Operation and Conclusion, that it may be accounted almost a Miracle when even it reach the Pen.53

So routine were testimonials from engravers proclaiming the shortcomings of their work that George Shelley could make fun of the genre, promising not to trouble his readers with long stories of his difficulties in getting an engraver to ‘Imitate Free Natural writing’ or of how far the engravings fall short: ‘This were to play an old Game, and suppose you easy of belief.’54 Other contemporaries were prepared to acknowledge the distinct demands of engraving as an art. Chamber’s Cyclopedia, for instance, discussed engraving as a branch of sculpture, and explained that ‘in the conduct of the graver consists all the art: for which there are no rules to be given: all depending on the habitude, disposition, and genius of the artist’. The inability of penmen to do their engravers justice owes much to their own insecurity. Although they challenged logocentricism by cogently arguing for the claims of writing as a material practice, the penmen ultimately fell back on logocentric logic. When Ayres and Clark represented engraving as the falling-short, the purely external, they placed engraving in the same relation to writing as writing takes, in logocentricism, to speech. Faced on one side by consumer ignorance of the penman’s role in the production of engraved copies, and on the other by dismissive attitudes to writing itself, the penmen found in the denigration of engraving a way of asserting their own claims to originality, artistry, and to the social status that these qualities entailed.

‘What can the most skilful writing-master do but wear away his life in leaning over his pupil’s copy [...I though he cannot compose the page.’ This essay has attempted an answer to D’Israeli’s rhetorical question. Far from wearing their lives away leaning over the copies of individual students, the writing-masters discussed here turned their attention to an impersonal market-place, and spread the art of writing more generally. Ultimately, though, it is the paradoxicat nature of the copy-books that proves most arresting: they spread the art of writing, but only by restricting its form and function. Brashly celebrating writing as instrumental technology, the copy- books moulded writers for a commercial nation, a space from which the other myriad possibilities of writing were almost excluded. They made the power of writing available, but they envisaged that power in a very limited

158 AILEEN DOUGLAS

way. If we want to understand how complicated the story of writing in early eighteenth-century England is, we should allow the writing-masters to compose some pages of our history.

* Research for this article was made possible by support from the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund, Trinity College, Dublin.

NOTES

I. Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature. 14th edn (London 1849). iii.185. D’Israeli

2. D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, iii.185. 3. Jonathan Goldberg. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford

4. William Massey. The Origin and Progress of le t ters (London 1763). p.iv. 5. D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, iii.187. 6 . Jacques Derrida. Of Grurnmatology. trans. Gayatrai Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and

7. Derrida. Of Gramrnatology, p.17. 8. Derrida. Of Grammatologg. p.75. 9. Derrida. Of Grammatology, p.75; Nicholas Hudson’s Writing and European Thought, 1600-

TO. Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago

I I. D’Israeli. Curiosities of Literature, iii.18 j. 12. Massey, Progress of Letters, p.iv. 13. Ambrose Heal, The English Writing-Masters and their Copy-Books, 1570-1800 (Cambridge

1931). pix. For the reasons given by Heal, references to copy-books in this essay will not usually include page numbers. Samples from copy-books are reproduced in Joyce Irene Whalley. English Handwriting r540-1843: An Illustrated Survey Based on Material in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum (London 1969).

published six volumes under this title between ~ 7 9 1 and 1834.

1990), p.41.

London T976). p.1 j .

1830 (Cambridge 1994) offers a useful consideration of English and some French sources.

1988). p.ix.

14. John Ayres. A Tutor to Penmanship (1698?). 15. The Only HandlAdapted for business of Merchants Tradesmen S c , listed in Heal, The English

Writing-Masters. p.162: William Elder, A Book of Copies for Learners qf the Round-Hand (1685; 1686). listed by Heal, p.154.

16. For example, Charles Snell touched on the law hands in his Art of Writing in its Theory and Practice (London 1712) but referred those who wanted to progress beyond the beginner stage to the works of Thomas Ollyffe, several of which were dedicated to the law hands.

17. John Clark, Writing Improved (1714). 18. Charles Snell’s The Standard Rules of the Round and Round Text Hands ( I 717) is unusual in

advertising itself not only as ’absolutely necessary to Writing-Masters’ but as ‘very Useful for Engravers, Painter, Masons etc.’.

19. John Ayres, Youth’s Introduction to Trade: A n Exercise Book, Chiefly Designedfor the Use of the Writing-School. 5th edn (London 1716).

20. Clark, Writing Improved. 21. Joseph Champion, The Parallel; or Comparative Penmanship Exemnplijkd (London 1749). 22. Ayres, A Tutor to Penmanship. 23. Ayres, Youth’s Introduction to Trade. p.4. 24. Ayres. Youth’s Introduction to Trade, p.4. 25. For a brilliant account of a later stage in this process, the development of a polite

vernacular poetry in mid-eighteenth-century England, see John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (Chicago 1993).

26. William Laughton, A Practical Grammar of the English Tongue (London 1739). 27. John Ayres, The New A-la-Mode Secretarie: or Practical Penman (London 1682). Stanley

Morison notes that almost all hands other than secretary and court were called ‘Italian’ and that Ayres’ immediate model was in fact provided by the Traite’ d’Art d’Escrire (1640) of the

Eighteenth-Century Writing-Masters and’their Copy-books 159

French penman Barbedor (‘The Development of Hand-writing’, in Heal. The English Writiriy- Masters, p.xxiii-XI. xxxiv.)

28. Champion, The Parallel. 29. William Leekey. Discourse on the Use of the Pen (London 1733)). p.9. 30. Quoted in Snell, The Art of Writing. English round hand was, as the writing-masters

claimed, widely exported. According to Joyce Irene Whalley. the middle of the eighteenth century was ‘perhaps the peak period of English handwriting’ and ’the supremacy of the English hand, neat. clear, quick and practical, became as generally accepted as it was widely known - a position brought about by the ubiquity of English bills of lading and letters of credit’ (English Handwriting, p.xi). Stanley Morison, although he finds the script ‘colourless. thoroughly unromantic and dull’, acknowledges its wide influence throughout Europe (‘The Development of Handwriting’, p.xxxviii).

31. George Bickham, The English Monarchical Writing-Master (London 1754). 32. This history so impressed Samuel Pepys that (acknowledging the author) he quotes it

almost word for word to preface his own ‘Calligraphical Collection’ (Heal, The English Writing- Masters. p.7). Pepys had an extensive collection of copy-books and went to considerable lengths to acquire both native and continental publications.

33. Such a history provides evidence of the ‘demystification’ of writing from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century which Nicholas Hudson traces, using different sources, in Writing and European Thought.

34. For biographical and bibliographical details of the seventeenth-century writing-masters named by Ayres, see Heal, The English Writing-Masters: see also Goldberg, Writing Matter. p.105-107, 127-37.

35. Champion, The Parallel. 36. Goldberg, Writing Matter, p.64. 37. For a brief general description of changes in the contents of copy-books see Heal. The

38. Ayres, The New A la Mode Secretarie. 39. William Laughton, A n Introduction to the Art of Writing (London 1739). p.186. 40. Snell, The Art of Writing. 41. Clark, Writing Improved. 42. George Shelley, The Second Part ofNatural Writing (London 1714). 43. Clark, Writing Improved, p.5. 44. For assessment of eighteenth-century theories of the relationship between sound and

45. Robert More. On the First Invention of Writing (London 1716?), p.6. 46. More, On the First Invention of Writing. The poem was a popular writing sample in copy-

47. Peter Motteaux. ‘The Pen’, in Snell, The Art of Writing. 48. Heal, The English Writing-Masters, p.xiii. 49. Ayres. The New A la Mode Secretarie. 50. Ayres. A Tutor to Penmanship. 51. This issue would be a sensitive one for engravers throughout the century. In 1736, in

his A Conference Between a Painter and an Engraver, Thomas Atkinson proposed that, while Engravers were ‘pretty much Painter’s Copyists’, nonetheless an Academy should be established to guide young practitioners in the art. Engravers were incensed at their exclusion from membership of the Royal Academy upon its foundation in 1768 (they were granted ‘Associate’ membership the following year, a status that many engravers regarded as demeaning: see Richard T. Godfrey, Printmaking in Britain, Oxford 1978. p.32, 135).

52. More, On the First Invention of Writing, p.7; Snell, The Standard Rule of the Round and Round Text Hands. 53. Sturt was a writing-master as well as an engraver. As an engraver, his most impressive

accomplishment was a Book of Common Prayer, published by subscription in 1717. 54. Shelley, Natural Writing.

English Writing-Masters, p.xvii.

mark, see Hudson, Writing and European Thought, p.93-101.

books of the period.