Everytime I see handwritten documents from the 18th century they appear to have such fine penmanship. Think of the Declaration of Independence.
Why was penmanship so good? I remember as a child, before computers were as prevelant, that we still had to learn longhand, but the forms for it were much simpler (and less attractive) than the older longhand.
And how can someone, today, learn how to write in the 18c manner? Does it require a quill pen?
Back then there was a category of people who wrote neat documents for a living. Not everyone had such good penmanship, and a higher proportion of people were entirely illiterate.
People worked at it. If you were getting paid to write neatly you’d work your butt off to do it as perfectly as possible.
It’s called “calligraphy” and one can take lessons. Expect to put in a fair amount of repetitive practice.
No. It does use special purpose pens with various nibs to achieve the desired effect, but these days they’re made of metal and plastic, not chicken and turkey feathers with points whittled into shape.
They were taught. Look up copperplate.
What you’re referring to is a giant case of selection bias. Either you’re seeing special event display handwriting designed to be as perfect as a printed document is today or you’re seeing what is known as a “fair copy,” the final copy redone from the everyday ordinary hurried original so that it would be readable.
The originals of handwriting for almost every famous figure in history are mostly illegible to anybody but trained experts. Even they have scholarly battles for years over words. Does this squiggle mean “this” or “that”? Nobody knows, even after 400 years. Proofreading a printed manuscript was a long tedious business because the typesetters couldn’t figure out what the guy was writing half the time and so just guessed at what to set into type.
Let’s do away with any notion that people in the past were somehow better or different from us. They weren’t. Handwriting was mostly terrible except when they put considerable, special effort into it.
I generally agree with your point, but there has certainly been a change in emphasis and skill, just as there used to be more farriers than there are today. Although there was no more talent in those days, there was more of an emphasis on teaching penmanship.
My 10-year-old son has poor handwriting, and instead of forcing him to do endless drills to practice, his teacher lets him so some of his homework on the computer. When I was his age in the fifth grade in a suburban Baltimore public school in 1967, we were required to use fountain pens–the teacher referred to ballpoints as “glorified pencils.” (Student fountain pens were available in every drugstore next to the pencils and rulers; you can’t find them today.) In first grade we were taught the proper mechanics of writing: how to hold the pencil, where to position the paper, where to put our arm. My children learn none of this today, and I fully expect by the time they’re in high school they’ll have even less need to write by hand. Things have changed a lot in those 40 years so I can imagine what had changed in the hundreds before that.
How are we disagreeing? Agreed, people put special, considerable effort into handwriting in the old days because they had to. Today we don’t have to. Ever since Mark Twain wrote a book on a typewriter, people have flocked to abandon penmenship because it’s too hard for everyday life. So kids don’t get taught it today. They don’t need to. Let it disappear except as a hobby. Just because your school was insane in 1967 doesn’t mean that should be a standard.
Just was using your post as a jumping-off point for further discussion.
Some people did. Most people didn’t. We saved more of the legible documents than the illegible ones.
Not the Declaration of Independance, but here’s a short Wikipedia article on Jacob Shallus, the “Engrosser or Penman of the United States Constitution”. He was paid $30 for the job.
Having had to try and puzzle out the handwriting on original period documents, I can attest that not everyone had exemplary handwriting. Some of my transliterations have plenty of lacunae where I couldn’t even guess at the correct words.
Others have noted this above. And, for an interesting look, read C.S. Fprester’s novel “Hornblower and the Atropos”, where the titular captain has to rely on a battery of midshipmen to write out all the orders necessary for a ceremony, and puts the stupidest one (who nevertheless has the best handwriting) to writing the opening sentences before handing offthe res to his more intelligent (but poorer handwriting) brethren to finish up.
Most people today have average handwriting. Most people in the 18th century had average handwriting (those of them that could write). No different from today. And oh yes, reading primary documents like that can be a gigantic nightmare. If you’re ever reading a quotation from a primary document that goes something like “and on the Fifteenth day of March I spied a Rock of a Curious hue that was Larger than my Head and yet Smaller than a Carriage-wheel, and I Caught Up said Rock and heaved it Towards the [giant squid?] that had been Circling the Island…” there’s a good chance that original is maybe 1/12 as easy to understand and the part in brackets is commonly accepted as the meaning, based on other bits of the document, but might in fact be something else entirely.
My daughter just studied Lewis and Clark, and we found that people argue over what the dog’s name was–Seaman or Scannon? No one knows; the handwriting isn’t legible enough.
The US census takers who filled out the forms in the late 1800s were slobs when it came to handwriting, in my experience.
I say selection bias.
Practice.
Practice, practice, practice.
In a world with no typewriters, telephones or voice messaging, in which the one and only way you communicate with anyone not present is to write, one would expect the standard of penmanship to be much higher than today.
Not at all true. Ordinary people may see more of the legible documents because those are put on display. Scholars, historians, and amateur geneologists have to deal with millions of ordinary letters, ledgers, church and government records, shipping bills, notes in book margins, and all the other records of the world for previous centuries, the vast majority of which are difficult to read.
I think it depends what we mean by terrible handwriting.
I have seen documents from the average citizen in the past, mostly from the UK
and even people with no higher education had for a lack of a better word
“Fancy” writing in todays terms.
you see the average person in the 18th century who completed elementary school would of had good handwriting compared to todays children.
why? because the style of writing used in that time was copperplate, cursive, Flourishing Alphabet,The Italian Hand,Round Hand.
so compared to todays writing their writing was far superior to ours today.
today we basically write in two forms, cursive (which is dying) and printing which is the norm.
so to say that 18th century writing was terrible or illegible is complete nonsense!
Just because people in the 21st century can not Decipher documents from the 18th century doesn’t mean they were terrible writers, it just means you are not educated in that script to decipher it.
so don’t blame them. Blame yourselves!
anyone can put a young adults essay written on pen today vs a paper written in the 18th century side by side and anyone can notice that the 18th century writing is far superior to todays script.
It’s black and white how different it is.
This goes for kids who only graduated elementary school also.
NO child today writes even close to what the kids who were in school in the 18th century were writing.
It has been pointed out already that only a ſmaller number of ſuppoſedly “important” documents are commonly ſeen by many people today, and thoſe tend to have fine penmanſhip; and that documents were ſometimes ſent to a profeſsional ſcribe to be written.
Of courſe, the authors of a lot of important documents knew they were writing important documents (to-wit: Declaration of Independence; Conſtitution; etc.), and thoſe were certainly going to be profeſsionally inſcribed. And thoſe are the ones commonly diſplayed today. So it’s not exactly a coincidence that we, the hoi polloi, ſee a lot of the moſt finely inſcribed docs.
I gather that scriveners mainly wrote court/legal documents, and that scribes were more employees of nobles (e.g., someone who wrote for a king). Is there a name for people who write, as a profession/occupation letters and such for common folk?
Hundreds of times more children are in school, and are actually writing a lot more than their counterparts two hundred years ago.
I’d say your bias is showing. There are thousands of documents, letters, and other written material from the time period in question and you think they are all entirely perfect and legible if only our feeble modern eyes could see it? Bullcrap. People scribbled, slipped, smudged, and made mistakes, and wrote different letters that look the same. Not to mention the whole nonexistence of spelling.
Same goes for British census takers. Causes no end of problems for genealogists.
Talking about old documents, I referred to Magna carta in another thread. This as I am sure you all know was the inspiration for the US Declaration of Independance. Four original copies from the original 13 or so survive, and they are not identical because they were written by different people for general distribution. In those days you couldn’t give it to an intern and say “run me off 20 copies”. Each one probably took days to write out but the scribes are unknown.