Organic Supplements

Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790

Miriam Jacobson, Julie Park, Miriam Jacobson, Julie Park

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813944951
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms—and things that originate from living organisms— enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take place for the people who wore, used, consumed, or perceived them.

Part I

Inscription and Incorporation

Feather, Flourish, and Flow

Handwriting’s Organic Technology

Julie Park

If technology is understood as an application of materials to achieve defined ends, and technique the methods by which those ends are met, then writing has always been both a technology and technique.1 Yet it was in the early modern period when writing was framed especially as a highly technical skill that required written or in-person instruction, as well as manual dexterity and diligent practice, especially in the handling of the pen. Made out of the organic material of a bird’s feather, the quill pen needed to be cut with a sharp knife and was held at specific angles to produce the desired “hand at particular” or handwriting style. A precise amount of pressure from the writer’s arm on the page was required. These and many other physical exertions of control contributed to the desired display of “command of hand,” without which, according to eighteenth-century penmanship guides, “the most regular piece of writing will be like a dead corpse.”2 Letters, in other words, were not just “written” in the eighteenth century. They were made and even given life through acts of manual skill and physical coordination. The quill pen was the tool from nature that enabled these acts of making and giving life, extending the mind of the writer through the touch of the pen on paper and the hand on the pen.

What exactly do we know about the physical characteristics of eighteenth-century written documents—letters or otherwise—and how they came to be created, beyond the common knowledge that they were made of paper and entailed the use of a quill pen? What was the relationship between the bodies of the letter writers and the documents that issued from their actions? And what forms of touch and motion mediated the relation between those bodies? Examining the skilled interactions between human hands and quill pens that made letter writing and its forms of remote touching possible, this essay posits that such technical interactions form the organic basis on which eighteenth-century hands found the most expressive instruments for communicating thoughts and views. At the same time it suggests that eighteenth-century fiction’s long-celebrated verisimilitude can only be fully understood through the embodied practices of everyday life from which it purportedly derives.

As an act of making, writing rendered not just vision but also touch significant in eighteenth-century epistolary correspondence. Writing master Joseph Champion observes, “Penmanship, or Writing, is an art, mechanically speaking, dependent on the Hand and Eye.”3 While voice and by implication hearing have been emphasized in prior works on epistolary writing, the tactile dimensions of writing, including the materiality of the quill pen remain unexamined. The very means by which eighteenth-century handwriting became a technology rested on the transformation of organic material, from the cotton, linen, and hemp rags used for paper to the iron galls of trees used for ink and the quills of birds used for pens. Of particular interest is the quill’s transmutation from organic material on an animal’s body to a tool attached to a human body, serving as a supplement for the human’s “organ of speech.” A riddle in a penmanship guide lays this scenario bare as it voices a feminized goose quill’s story of being “dragg’d” from her “Mother’s Side” by “Tyrant Man”: “He pick’d my Marrow from the Bone, / To vex me more, he took a Freak, / To slit my Tongue, and made me speak.”4 Here, the actions of the hand create the violent situation by which the goose quill acquires the prosthetic function of projecting the writer’s voice on the surface of the page. Without the human hand and its actions of scraping the feather’s shaft—or picking its “marrow” from its bone—to create a nib, and of cutting a slit therein, the quill would not be able to accomplish this feat. Writing allows the writer’s voice to be heard, yet it does so with words that are made through a practice of manual exertion rather than oral. The hand is made to speak through a mouth fashioned out of a feather, itself an appendage to a living creature with a mouth of its own.

The manual and tactile aspects of eighteenth-century writing indicate the extent to which eighteenth-century epistolary narratives produce a level of fictionality whose materiality is tacit. This is to say that fictionality in epistolary narratives encompasses not just the authenticity of characters and their experiences but also the materiality of the medium the narratives purport to be. In other words, the printed “letters” that were held by readers’ hands in fiction by Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, and Samuel Richardson, for instance, were meant to be imagined as handwritten ones and as such, issued directly from the intimate touch of human hands on quill pens. In this way, epistolary novels try to represent the acts of writing letters as well as handwriting itself and the interiority they both engender (to be discussed later in this essay) with the technology of print.

It is print that mediates the pen as a fictional presence, a notion demonstrated in Richardson’s Pamela when the heroine plans, during her captivity in Mr. B’s Lincolnshire estate, to “write on, as things happen.”5 Here, the novel presents its masquerade of having been issued directly from the hand of Pamela as it moves a pen across a blank page in reaction to immediate events and experiences. The novel most baldly presents the fiction that its own typography is handwriting when Pamela declares “I can hardly write; yet, as I can do nothing else, I know not how to lay down my pen. How crooked and trembling the lines!”6 Epistolary fiction such as Richardson’s invented not just a story but also its own materiality as a collection of handwritten letters. Necessary to integrate into literary history is an understanding of the technical manner with which those fictional touches on the pen and page, and the alluring flourishes they produced, were created. Such an awareness was implicit for contemporary readers of epistolary fiction at the time the genre became prominent but has been forgotten about through the passing of time and the changes in writing technology that have taken place therein.

Writing technique in the eighteenth century as well as the early modern period entailed not just the use of writing tools but also detailed instructions on how to use them. For those without recourse to a hired tutor or private writing master, such instruction was found in the copybooks created by the most eminent writing masters of the period. Though copybooks appeared in the early modern era too, by authors such as Peter Bales and Richard Mulcaster, they predominated in the eighteenth century as guides for students learning to become clerks and keep accounts, not elite subjects receiving a humanist education, the subjects of Jonathan Goldberg’s influential study.7 Evincing the interplay between word and image inherent in penmanship, copybooks were divided in sections, one of letterpress text, the other of engraved plates. The letterpress section, usually placed at the beginning, instructs the writing student how to perform every step of the writing process, from making the pen and “managing” it to positioning the body, desk, seat and sheet of paper when writing.8

Detailed directions are sometimes given on how to create the letters of particular hands, such as the creation and positioning of particular characters and particular hands such as round, secretary, Italian, Roman, and German.9 Accompanying these typeset instructions were engraved sheets replicating the writing masters’ penmanship, including their feats of ornamental flourishing and command of hand. The student’s act of copying or tracing these engraved models equivocates between writing and drawing. One of the most successful and influential of copybooks, with a title that reflected its inclusive approach to penmanship, was George Bickham’s The Universal Penman, which presented the specimens of 25 different penmen in 212 folio pages and was issued to subscribers in installments of 52 parts from 1733 to 1741.

Made up of verse, epigrams, and precepts on male and female conduct in various hands, as well as samples of documents used in trade transactions, copybook handwriting samples ensured that writing pupils would receive a moral education as well as a professional one. Indicating the valuation of the pen, the titles for the writing manuals and copybooks that proliferated during the early part of the century highlighted the pen or defined the writer by the tool. One who writes was not a writer, but a “penman.” The titles emphasizing the pen and its user include Writing Improved, or Penmanship made Easy (1712) and The Penman’s Diversion (1712) by John Clark, The Penman’s Companion (1732) by George Shelley, and The Practical Penman (1713) by Thomas Ollyffe.

When attending to the spread of penmanship manuals and copybooks in eighteenth-century England, scholars have fixated on their roles as tools for the advancement of mercantilism and commerce, as well as the competitive culture of writing masters that drove the emergence of such manuals.10 This view is supported by the fact that many samples in writing manuals are for documents a merchant would need to write in the course of day-to-day business. Some of the most beautiful examples of penmanship can be seen in these copybook samples of commercial documents, such as those displayed in Champion’s Penmanship Illustrated (1759–60). Here, elegant models of promissory notes, bills of parcels and exchange, receipts for the pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Process and Connection
• Part I. Inscription and Incorporation
• Part II. Interface and Merger
• Part III. Vitality and Decay
• Afterword: Virtuous Properties of the Organic Supplement
• Notes on Contributors
• Index