Handwriting History
Thornton's book sheds light on the role of penmanship in understanding America's cultural history

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Today many Americans lament the fact that handwriting skills seem obsolete, but cultural historian Tamara Plakins Thornton, associate professor of history, says the demand for old-fashioned penmanship training is merely nostalgic and represents the rejection of modernity itself.

In "Handwriting in America" (Yale University Press, 1996), Thornton explores the ways in which Americans have used handwriting as both a lesson in conformity and a talisman of individuality. Her book explores the historical shifts in our notions of handwriting's significance and function as a way to better understand our cultural history.

Thornton notes, for instance, that handwriting didn't always carry a heavy burden as the signifier of character. It wasn't until the 19th century that script came to be associated with the articulation of self, in contrast to the impersonality of print.

"Ever since that time," Thornton says, "the 'kind' of self defined or revealed in one's script has been debated in the context of changing economic and social realities, definitions of manhood and womanhood, and the concepts of mind and body."

Parties to disputes over the importance of handwriting have included "writing masters," who used penmanship training as a method of forming and describing character; scientific experts, who chalked up variations in script to physiological distinctiveness, and autograph collectors and handwriting analysts who believed that signatures that broke copybook rules were marks of personality that revealed "the uniqueness of the self."

Thornton notes that Spencerian script popularized in the 19th century was later replaced by the "plain and rapid" Palmer method for reasons having to do with attempts at character formation.

By the late 19th century, handwriting was seen by many educators as an important tool through whose application "the vast body of conglomerate material that comes from Europe" could be turned into competent American citizens. This notion, Thornton points out, arose out of the presumption that if handwriting signified character, then character could be molded by the formation of letters.

The Palmer method, which emphasized conformity to specific forms, was thought to be better adapted to the "rush of business" in America's industrial age. To this end, millions of American children were subjected to decades of Palmerian exercises in uniform stroke formation. Penmanship, the very trait once celebrated as an idiosyncratic art formÑone's personal mark, so to speakÑthus became subject to rigorous training in uniformity.

Thornton says that despite this formal attempt to develop a homogeneous American character, handwriting in the 20th century has generally been marked by the popular idea of individuation on a grand scale.

She points to the popularity of graphologyÑa 20th-century invention believed by aficionados to reveal information about the writer's secret self or, in its more scientifically acceptable form, reveal clues to the identity of the writer.

Although Thornton disdains the notion that penmanship accurately denotes character and personality, she does read other cultural goings-on from attitudes toward handwriting. "We can read our past through the values with which we embued handwriting in the past," she says. "The historical study of handwriting offers the reader the possibility of being sensitive to the many meanings that earlier generations inscribed in their scripts. It tells us many things about ourselves and the culture we constructed at various times in our history."

Thornton's book is rich with fascinating details about handwriting mythology and pedagogy, the love of "beautiful forms," celebration and fear of idiosyncratic expression, post-World War II handwriting paranoia and other desperate attempts to embrace or escape from what she calls "Ye Olde Penmanship."