Every summer, jobbing academics experience the same shock. After months of marking word-processed essays, you are confronted with exam scripts and you see the thing itself: handwriting reams of it. Whatever the varying qualities of all the different students' different essays over the year, print has invested them with a semblance of uniformity. Now you can really see the sheer variety of hands and, it would seem, personalities. The pile of handwritten essays is a kind of visual cacophony spiky or looped or crabbed or wandering, with every shade of blue or black, every kind of pressure and slant and flourish. They could not look more different from each other.
Philip Hensher's celebration of handwriting and the individuality it enacts comes at a time when, because of technology, this once essential human activity seems "about to vanish from our lives altogether". Everything is typed or texted. The apparent demise of handwriting is nothing much to do with educational ideology. Hensher notes that the National Curriculum makes rather stern demands of a child's handwriting skills, describing the seven levels through which a young person must pass to get from the basic shapes and orientation of letters to a script that is not only legible but "attractive". Yet to some (including a few of his more benighted creative writing students, it would seem) handwriting is simply unnecessary.
Reading this book reminds you of the aura that a specimen of handwriting can have all the more so as it becomes a rarer thing. Literary manuscripts perhaps most vividly preserve the heat of a person's singularity. Keats's letters are wonderful to read in print, but look at an actual letter in a photograph or a museum's glass case and you see something more. "This living hand, now warm and capable" reaches towards you. From Alexander Pope's disconcertingly perfect and pretty script to Byron's slapdash rapidity to Sylvia Plath's wobbly yet decisive jottings, struggling to find invisible lines and margins, handwriting seems to show us how an extraordinary person felt as well as what he or she wrote.
As handwriting matters very much to those who study literary authors, so its significance recurs in many literary works. Some of the best chapters here are the self-contained studies of particular writers. There is a brilliant little piece on how handwriting features in Dickens's novels, where so often "the act of writing, of forming letters, acts as an impetus for the plot". Most will remember Lady Dedlock in Bleak House suddenly glimpsing a sample of her dead lover's handwriting, but Hensher gathers many more examples. You realise that Dickens had a thing about it.
Another chapter fixes on Proust's odd predilection for illegibility in the letters of some of his friends, turned to revealing account when we see how illegible handwriting features in the plot of A la recherche du temps perdu. Legibility being potentially "shallow and cruel", the impenetrability of a person's script becomes a metaphor for their complexity. Proust's narrator is, we are made to see, excited by the mysterious signs of individuality he detects and tries to describe in a person's handwriting.
What for the novelist is a fascinating hypothesis became a pseudo-scientific creed in the work of graphologists. In the late 19th century, there was "an explosion in books explaining how to discern character from handwriting". Sherlock Holmes's certainty in The Sign of Four that he could divine a suspect's character from the way he formed his letters ("There is vacillation in his k's and self-esteem in his capitals") was a habit of his times. What started as a Victorian parlour game became a weirdly respected science. It is shocking to discover that, in the late 20th century, leading European and American companies might still have been using graphology in making their recruitment decisions.
Hensher thinks that the idea of handwriting as distinctive of an individual came only in the 19th century, and he specifies court cases in which this was first enshrined in law. Yet this cannot quite be right. The 18th-century novelist Fanny Burney sedulously disguised her handwriting in the 1770s to prevent being outed as the author of Evelina, while in the 1720s Jonathan Swift had a friend write out the copy of Gulliver's Travels supplied to his publisher so that his authorship would not be recognised.
Here, as sometimes elsewhere, the historical generalisation comes a little too easily. And, disappointingly, Hensher does not go back very far. There is a spirited rumination on the qualities of Elizabeth I's signature, but otherwise nothing much on handwriting before the 18th century. The book does not reach back to the English manuscript culture that keeps palaeographers in business the alien conventions of the "secretary hand" beloved of Elizabethans, the beautiful strangeness of the hands used by medieval scribes.
He really gets going in the 18th century with the development of copperplate, "still the hand we reach for at elevated moments of our lives" (you see it replicated in printed form on certain kinds of invitation, especially to weddings). Oddly, it is preserved in the official logo of Coca-Cola. Then there was italic, developing from the faux antiquity of William Morris and hardening into the instructive books of Monica Bridges. It is a style that Hensher himself enjoys using, but one whose zealous proponents, influential in English public schools, he disdains. Quoting several stalwarts of the Italic Handwriting Society, he characteristically exclaims: "What came first being an arse, or writing in italics?" One of the paradoxes of the story he tells is that, while handwriting is an expression of individuality, self-appointed experts have always strived to regularise it.
The history explains how different nations have different handwriting habits as a result of past projects of regimentation. The Germans have only fairly recently extricated themselves from enslavement (for such it seems) to the Fraktur script that approximates to black-letter prints. Americans distantly owe their preferences to AN Palmer, whose Guide to Business Writing established the connection between his method for forming letters and commercial success. The heroine of Hensher's story is Marion Richardson, proponent of child-centred learning, whose 1935 manual Writing and Writing Patterns formalised her advocacy of children's delight in scribbles and patterns. In her educational practice Hensher finds a pleasure in idiosyncrasy that he shares.
This pleasure licenses his own digressive and colloquial style (a footnote that begins "This is nothing to do with anything " gives you the tone of voice). The anti-solemn footnote is his speciality. He quotes a Scottish headmaster who doubts the importance of training in handwriting and his footnote performs a tizzy of exasperation. "Oh, crap. Seriously, what crap Jesus, sometimes you really want to give up". Some digressions, such as his capsule history of ballpoint pens, serve a good purpose; others, such as a long account of trying to buy a fountain pen with an italic nib at various leading West End stores, do not. The historical descriptions and case studies are interleaved with space-filling transcripts of chats he has had with relatives and friends. They may show that individuals do think and care about handwriting, but they contain not a single observation that has stayed with me.
The book ends with an anecdote about his experience of finding a notebook filled with the jottings of someone who had recently died. It is a telling example of how the very flow and contour of handwriting gives back something of the person who produced it. Many readers will know what it is to come upon the handwriting of someone they once cared for who is now dead, and to feel the shock of proximity. As much as any photograph, and more than any sound or video recording, handwriting can bring back to us the essential character of a person.
"Writing this book, I've come to the conclusion that handwriting is good for us. It involves us in a relationship with the written word which is sensuous, immediate, and individual. It opens our personality out to the world." You have to agree. As a history, The Missing Ink is patchy and too anecdotal for its own good, but its advocacy of one of the most humane and pleasurable forms of self-expression is pretty much irresistible.
John Mullan's What Matters in Jane Austen is published by Bloomsbury.
