From Spencerian Script to Emoticons: Historian Pens History of Handwriting In America

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- There is no reason to mourn the demise of penmanship, says a University at Buffalo historian, the author of a new and popular book that is the only cultural history of handwriting ever published.

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

In "Handwriting in America" (Yale University Press, 1996), Thornton explores the many ways in which Americans historically have used handwriting as both a lesson in conformity and a talisman of individuality.

She provides a historical and cultural context in which to more readily examine attitudes toward the importance and function of handwriting, explaining that these attitudes constitute an important cultural trait that help explain the evolution of American beliefs and social forms.

Thornton notes, for instance, that although in our lifetime handwriting style has been accepted as a "signifier of character," it didn't always carry such a burden. It wasn't until the 19th century that script even came to be seen as a medium intimately associated with the articulation of self, in contrast to the impersonality of print.

"Ever since the last century," Thornton says, "when Œself' began to be identified with handwriting, the Œkind' of self defined or revealed in one's script has been debated in the context of changing economic and social realities, including definitions of manhood and womanhood and the concepts of mind and body."

autograph collectors and handwriting analysts who believed that signatures that broke copybook rules were marks of personality that revealed "the uniqueness of the self."

The elaborate Spencerian script popular in the early 19th century was later replaced by the "plain and rapid" Palmer method for reasons having to do with attempts at character formation.

Thornton explains that 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 expectation 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 simplicity and 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. Handwriting, once celebrated as an idiosyncratic art form -- one's personal mark, so to speak -- was now subject to rigorous training in uniformity.

Despite this formal attempt to develop a homogeneous American character, handwriting in the 20th century generally has been linked to the popular idea of individuation on a grand scale.

Thornton points to the popularity of graphology over the past 80 years as a case in point. Graphology, she says, is a 20th-century invention believed by aficionados to reveal information about the writer's secret self through a study of his or her script. In its more scientifically acceptable form, graphologists study handwriting for clues to the identity of the writer.

Thornton does not think it possible to read personality and character from letter formation, but as an historian, she gleans other information about American culture from its attitudes toward handwriting.

"Just as graphology claims to read Œcharacter' in handwriting, historians can read our past by studying the values with which we embued handwriting in the past. The historical study of handwriting can make us much more 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."

She explores as well the contemporary nostalgia for the past marked by the return to beautiful handmade papers, journals and calligraphic fountain pens, all of which recall the intricate relationship between mind and the writing hand. Thornton points out that even today, that relationship is valued. Even computer-writing, lamented by some as a "killer of good penmanship," she says, emphasizes individual expression by employing different fonts, colored type, "emoticons," line art and other means of particularizing the writer's typescript.

Thornton also is the author of "Cultivating Gentleman" (Yale University Press), a study of how 18th- and 19th-century American industrialists developed country estates and gardens in an attempt to identify themselves with European aristocracy and thus mitigate their popular identification as grasping capitalists who exploited the natural environment and the working classes.