A scholarly stroll through handwriting styles - the good, the bad,
and the illegible - and how much we read into them. Thornton's
(History/State Univ. of New York, Buffalo) focus is more on social
trends and pedagogic approaches than individual practice. She
begins her history in the 17th century, when gender, profession,
and social standing dictated one's writing style(s) (indeed, what
lady would write like a clerk?). Platt Rogers Spencer, creator of
the 19th-century Spencerian style, showed himself a child of the
Romantic age by looking to "the sublime and beautiful in nature"
for the "true imagery of writing." Consistent with that period's
new sense of the uniqueness of the individual was a corresponding
sense of the uniqueness of handwriting, at least of important
people. The masses were merely expected to copy what was put before
them. The way the rest of us wrote didn't attract interest until
later in the century, when graphologists sought a "scientific"
approach to interpreting handwriting as a way of plumbing
character. One might consult a graphologist to size up a
prospective spouse, assess an employee, or even search for the hint
of something that made oneself seem a little special in the Gilded
Age's increasingly impersonal society. By the end of the century,
Austin Norman Palmer, attuned to the period's "rush of business,"
was winning converts to his plainer writing style, the very one
gracing many of our own classroom walls. To progressive-era
pedagogues, especially those seeing people as "bundles of
neuromuscular connections" and education as the process of training
them, the Palmer writing method was a kind of precision student
drill, offering a way to control the disorderly and Americanize the
immigrant. As computer fonts begin to displace script, we look
again to handwriting to express self, tinkering with calligraphy
and toting ostentatiously pricey fountain pens. A history of the
ordinary that should pique the interest of nonspecialists. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Copybooks and the Palmer method, handwriting analysis and autograph
collecting-these words conjure up a lost world, in which people
looked to handwriting as both a lesson in conformity and a talisman
of individuality. In this engaging history, ranging from colonial
times to the present, Tamara Plakins Thornton explores the shifting
functions and meanings of handwriting in America. Script emerged in
the eighteenth century as a medium intimately associated with the
self, says Thornton, in contrast to the impersonality of print. But
thereafter, just what kind of self would be defined or revealed in
script was debated in the context of changing economic and social
realities, definitions of manhood and womanhood, and concepts of
mind and body. Thornton details the parties to these disputes:
writing masters who used penmanship training to form and discipline
character; scientific experts who chalked up variations in script
to mere physiological idiosyncrasy; and autograph collectors and
handwriting analysts who celebrated signatures that broke copybook
rules as marks of personality, revealing the uniqueness of the
self. In our time, concludes Thornton, when handwriting skills seem
altogether obsolete, calligraphy revivals and calls for
old-fashioned penmanship training reflect nostalgia and the
rejection of modernity.
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