A Letter From 1871

[teela_brown]

I dearly love old hadwriting like that. As a real property law secretary, I sometimes get my hands on photocopies of old deeds written in the 1800’s by some careful, painstaking county clerk. I always picture them with the inkwell and quill patiently scratching out that beautiful, antique cursive that only master calligraphers could manage nowadays.

[JpnDude]

Those are some classy words in that letter by your great grandfather. Kudos.

[Kythereia]

This is where I put great hope and faith in genetics for Cicero’s case.

[monica]

@ivylass

What a beautiful treasure. I also love the handwriting…my daughter isn’t taught cursive and I don’t think it’s taught in school anymore. We were watching Gone with the Wind and she couldn’t read the letters they showed in the movie (and I think they weren’t written in true cursive anyway!)

[hijack]Seriously? No cursive?That’s awful. I’m still fairly young (21), and I was taught cursive around 3rd grade. I remember being required to write in it at least in 4th and 5th grade, and somewhere along the way I realized that I actually like writing in it better. I can write faster and it’s easier on my hands.[/hijack]

@Derleth

Am I the only one not impressed by flowery diction and bulky, complex sentence structure? Maybe having been forced to slog through William James cured me of any starry-eyed wonder at a sentence that doubles as a paragraph, page, doorstop, and whaling vessel, and words that do not appear in any dictionary a mule can pull unaided. What’s worse is that they weren’t showing off: That’s really how they wrote back then, the poor buggers.

Nope. I was thinking, “Hey, this is sweet- now get to the point!”

I actually found it interesting to learn about a month ago that people really still do ask the parents of their intended fiancees for their daughter’s hand in marriage. And when I asked the guy what he would’ve done if the father had said no, he said “I wouldn’t proposed.” I was shocked.

[Man_With_a_Cat]

Wow. Very cool.

[Freudian_Slit]

@Derleth

Am I the only one not impressed by flowery diction and bulky, complex sentence structure? Maybe having been forced to slog through William James cured me of any starry-eyed wonder at a sentence that doubles as a paragraph, page, doorstop, and whaling vessel, and words that do not appear in any dictionary a mule can pull unaided. What’s worse is that they weren’t showing off: That’s really how they wrote back then, the poor buggers.

I’m not so much either. Maybe I’m too much a child of the modern era, but brevity = wit and all that.

Also not too impressed by a society where a man had to ask permission for a woman’s hand–I guess I can’t see that as polite so much as patriarchal. Yeah, yeah, it looked nice, but did women ever go to ask a man’s family for HIS permission? Didn’t think so…

[Sunspace]

That’s amazing, Cicero. Although I first read the date as 1971 and was expecting hippies and flowers and ‘oh wow, dude’.

Have you considered making a copy of the scan and then photoshopping it to bring up the contrast?

I’m another one who thinks that verbosity is not necessarily next to godliness… I’m imagining these two cautiously, cautiously reaching out to touch one another. The SDMB often seems to strike a much better balance between the art of writing and the art of clarity. But perhaps the people of 1871 didn’t want clarity…?