Book Review

Canada and the United States

Tamara Plakins Thornton's exceptional study lays out the influence of changes in conceptions of social hierarchy, gender, and character formation on the theory and practice of handwriting from the colonial era to the recent past. Starting in the eighteenth century, she observes, the trajectories of print and script diverged. Printed alphabet letters, which typeface designers traditionally had rendered in notably diverse (often somatic) forms, became more uniform. This standardization of print redefined the medium of script, which increasingly became associated with the expression of both one's unique self and one's social rank. Writing masters taught gentlemen how to convey their leisure and grace in the act of writing, merchants to suggest bold and masterly qualities in a fast and legible script, and ladies to reflect their distaff gentility in a diminutive and ornamental hand.

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During the nineteenth century, new cultural tasks were assigned to handwriting. Now a neat hand signified a young man's trustworthiness and self-discipline; handwriting became more a medium of one's "character" than of one's social status. Public schools stressed uniformity in penmanship in order to produce model, uniform citizens. Writing instructors started to employ truss-like ligatures to bind the hand into the proper writing position. Under the influence of the entrepreneurial Platt Rogers Spencer, who exerted enormous influence through the public schools and his Spencerian business colleges, students were taught to break down letters into components, each to be mastered by drill and then combined into beautiful forms that suggested the symmetry of nature's oval flower buds and majestically straight sunbeams. By the late nineteenth century, however, Austin Norman Palmer, originator of the Palmer method, attacked the Spencerian style as too ornamental and introduced a plainer and swifter style suited to the rush of business.

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