The Missing Ink Read online

  An advert for Joseph Gillott’s pens, 1900.

  People had attempted to create a pen with a reservoir for many years, without a great deal of success, battling against gravity’s demands on ink. The early years of the nineteenth century were lively ones for patent fountain pens. The incitement, which just went on growing as the century went on, was that people were simply writing a very great deal more. The vast expansion of trade, of industry and of the public service; the creation of the penny post by Rowland Hill in 1840, which meant many more people were communicating with each other, and communicating with each other vastly more; the expansion of education, culminating in the introduction of universal education in 1871, which meant that everyone not only had the means to communicate, but was able to communicate; all these led to a need for cheap, effective, efficient methods of writing with pen and ink that could keep on going all day. The problem with a new writing device was, first, of getting the ink out of the nib in a steady, blotless flow, only when the writer wanted it, and not when, for instance, the pen was sitting in one’s pocket – a problem that fountain pen manufacturers have never overcome. ‘The fountain pen has never quite lost the tendency to leak its contents – although almost all pen manufacturers when putting a new model on the market claim it as the final leak-proof fountain pen.’4

  Secondly, more obviously, the demand was to provide a reservoir of some sort to allow the writer to carry on without a break, for line after line. Pen patents from this time onwards show any number of solutions to this problem – ‘by means of plungers, pistons, rubber tubes to be operated by hand or by some mechanical device’.5 Most inventors went along the path of an internal reservoir, as far down as those disposable ink cartridges of the twentieth century, but not all. They start being called wonderful things like ‘Scheffer’s patent penograph, or writing instrument’ – an invention, or pseudo-invention, of 1819. Joyce Irene Whalley has a delightful diagram of a Galland-Mason external ink vessel of 1900, looking remarkably like a colostomy bag. It would be perfectly all right if you never had to leave your desk to write anything.

  Some advance, too, had occurred with inks, which were now much less likely to corrode metal nibs. Stephens’s ink was first made in 1834, and proved a popular and stable success. Further improvements were made with the discovery of aniline dyes in 1856. Aniline dyes were themselves an accidental discovery by an 18-year-old, William Henry Perkin, who was attempting to produce a synthetic version of quinine.* I quote Wikipedia, having no intellectual alternative here:

  In one of his attempts, Perkin oxidized aniline using potassium dichromate. Under these conditions, the aniline reacted with toluidine impurities in it to produce a black solid, a fairly common result in ‘failed’ organic syntheses. While trying to clean out his flask, Perkin discovered that some component of the black solid dissolved in alcohol to give a purple-coloured solution, which proved to be an effective dye for ilk and other textiles.

  Perkin called his new colour ‘mauveine’ and subsequently ‘mauve’ – Queen Victoria had at least one gown made out of mauve-coloured silk to encourage industry, modernity, Prince-Albert-like go-aheadness and so on, and for a brief period it didn’t seem like a fairly hideous colour. Still, inventing an entirely new colour seems like quite a dashing thing to do for a teenager, as they then weren’t called. Mauve was the first of the synthetic aniline dyes, and a series of stable, synthesized dark inks for pens was a still-less predicted outcome of Perkin’s initial attempt to find a synthetic quinine.*

  Coloured inks were much older than one presumes, however. Red ink had been around for printers’ use for centuries, and indeed had found its way into the language in the form of ‘red-letter day’, a day marked on the Roman Catholic calendar as a feast day, which had been in metaphorical use as a day of celebration at least since the 1770s – Coleridge uses it in a jovial way. ‘Rubric’, too, which now just means ‘running head’ or ‘summary’ or something of that sort, specifically meant a heading printed or written in red ink, and actually goes back beyond the birth of printing to the age of incunabula.

  Social functions started to evolve around the provision of ink. We still say ‘ink monitor’ in a jocular way, sometimes alternating it with ‘milk monitor’ when we refer to a sort of upper-junior-matron figure in an office – the sort of person who will, when faced with a pot of tea and a cup, ask ‘Shall I be mother?’ Ink monitors survive in idiom, but were once real roles in schools and perhaps in offices, too. ‘It would have been the duty of one pupil to issue the daily supply of ink. He would have used a tray-like container with special holes to keep the desk inkpots steady while they were refilled. This tray also had handles so that the monitor could carry the full pots round the class and hand them out. Trays like this have mostly disappeared as have the once-common china inkwells with the maker’s name lettered round the rim.’

  It may seem excessive to dwell on the details of pens, inks, inkholders and the like. But it is worth considering how much human investment was placed in these things. People would have used the same pen from day to day, and the same ‘china inkwells with the maker’s name lettered round the rim.’ Each step forward in the technology would have been experienced not just as an improvement in technology, but a letting go of some element of the writer’s past. The wonderful transformation of writing with a reliable ink reservoir, or transportable bottles of ink, would have been accompanied by a jettisoning of the writing companions of decades – sometimes without the faintest regret, sometimes with a tinge of sadness that things had changed. We gaze at these things, now so useless, and try to garner the faintest sense of the human investment which once went into them.

  19 ~ Marion Richardson

  If this book has a hero, it’s the proponent of child-centred art and writing, Marion Richardson. She was primarily a teacher of art, and fascinated by children’s art years before the avant garde turned it into a cult object. She must have been a woman of extraordinary energy and originality of mind. Born in 1892, she brought Roger Fry a portfolio of work executed by her pupils at Dudley Girls’ High School in 1917. It was a remarkable collection. Only in her mid-twenties, she had removed her pupils from any notion of copying and rote imitation, going as far as to ask ‘her pupils to sit with closed eyes, perhaps listening to a description, and [waiting] for images to appear in “the mind’s eye”.’1

  Across the world, traditional methods of teaching and perception were up for grabs. It’s interesting to speculate what Richardson would have made of Paul Klee’s teaching methods, just then about to be launched on an unsuspecting Bauhaus in Weimar. Klee’s teaching was based, in a revolutionary way, on theories of colour, patterning and many other abstract designs in ways that refer back to the pleasure of the moving body and idiosyncratic ideas of movement and form. In the same way, Richardson regarded movements not as things to be subdued and made to conform, but things to master and control for expressive purposes. I have a copy of the Teacher’s Book which went with Richardson’s unassumingly titled Writing and Writing Patterns, published in 1935, and it’s an object of strangely alluring physical beauty. It’s just the size of a floppy school exercise book, covered all over with five-pointed stars, a pleasure to handle and full of unexpected delights. A book full of a kind of spiritual beauty, too: Richardson’s love of children in all their weird variety and inventiveness, and her love of the presence and energy of simple shapes on paper just shine out of her work. She was a solid, plain-looking, intelligent woman: Klee would have loved her.

  The Marion Richardson alphabet.

  Richardson’s programme aims towards a free cursive handwriting, and she says, as A.N. Palmer was saying shortly before her, that it should use ‘only easy movements of the hand and arm’.2 Richardson’s wonderful insight was that these easy movements were to be found in children before they even thought of writing, ‘in primitive forms of decoration and in childish scribble’. Unlike Palmer, whose classes centred on the blackboard, and on grim unison drills, Richar
dson wanted the child to explore a range of patterns for themselves, playing with crayon on paper as a foundation of good handwriting. She warns against imposing an ‘adult sense of correctness’ on children. After reading of handwriting masters whose interest is in conformity, duty, and preparing for a job in commerce or the civil service, it is a pleasure to come across someone who really knows what it is to be a child, and sees that not as something to subdue in the interests of a professional future in an office, but something valuable in itself.

  These pre-writing exercises are of very great importance. Not only are they a source of delight to the little child, being but a development of the spontaneous scribble that children make in imitation of ‘real’ writing, but by presenting the several writing rhythms in isolation one at a time, they make it possible for him to experience the essentially cursive nature of handwriting from the beginning, even before he has actually learnt to write.’3

  You want to cheer. For the first time ever, perhaps, a reforming figure has not only noticed that the child can have pleasure and even ‘delight’ in making marks on paper, but has made that absolutely central to the programme. I had to sneak off to make looping cursives that resembled handwriting before I could actually write anything in it. If Marion Richardson had been anywhere in the vicinity, I would have been actively encouraged to do it in the classroom as an important stage in learning to write.

  Richardson sets out a series of patterns to inspire the child – she’s very clear that they should be allowed to invent their own patterns rather than slavishly copy these. They are a line of zigzags, a looped pattern ‘which is a great favourite with children . . . and goes well to the jingle “up curl, down curl”’, broken patterns, and still more. ‘A rich and almost endless variety of patterns will appear if the children’s powers of invention and visualization are encouraged, and if they are allowed to colour the shapes of their patterns after they have outlined them.’

  You could have a small pause at this point to imagine what would happen if anyone suggested to A.N. Palmer, Vere Foster, Spencer or even Edward Johnston that students be ‘allowed to colour the shapes’ in handwriting practice. Even when we get to children up to the age of nine, when Palmer was no doubt starting to think they ought be sending their CVs out to the blacking warehouse, Richardson is still thinking of ways to make writing fun in this way – ‘it will of course add to the children’s pleasure in writing these copies if they use coloured ink as well as black’. Utterly true: it was a delight at Christmas to get a small box of Winsor & Newton coloured inks, with those interesting pictures on the side* – canaries to indicate the yellow, and so on – and then to spend the patch between Christmas and New Year writing thank-you letters to all the rellies in one lurid shade after another.†

  Trembling, not quite expressed, in Richardson’s argument is a sense that every stage in the learning of handwriting has its own value and beauty; they shouldn’t be rushed through in order to attain the perfect adult handwriting. And this is true. We certainly recognize, without any hesitation, the difference between a neat child’s handwriting and an adult’s. A mixture of cultural development and of educational accomplishment means that we can probably tell the difference in most cases between the hand of someone of twelve, twenty, forty and eighty. But should any of them be automatically regarded as inferior to any other? Aren’t the delighted discoveries of a new writer of seven as rewarding and satisfying as an old writer of thirty? These questions hover over Richardson; none of her predecessors would have found them the slightest bit comprehensible.

  There are two photographs of classes at work that show the immense shift between the pseudo-militaristic approach which culminated in Palmer, and Richardson’s ideas of starting with what the child can do, and what he will enjoy doing. If you look at one of Palmer’s classes the desks are arranged in rows; the students sit facing the same direction; their pens are poised at exactly the same angle, as, indeed, are their heads. Their own mothers couldn’t tell them, or their work, apart. And on the wall – it is quite hard to see, but it looks rather as if what hangs on the wall are photographs of Great Presidents of the USA, or possibly even Mr Palmer’s own face. Compare this lovely and very period photograph of Marion Richardson’s pupils. They are standing up at easels – it was clever and observant of Richardson to know that very young children find it easier to wriggle than to sit still, and prefer to work where they can move about freely. Sitting still is a perfect torture to many small children, and it is much nicer to stand up. These ones are dressed in sensible, loose clothes that can bear an ink stain or two. They are making different patterns on their sheets of paper, and have reached different places. Their work is not lined up in rows, but positioned wherever they happen to be, and, working on either side of an easel, two children can happily talk to each other as they concentrate on their work. Best of all, on the walls, properly framed, are examples of the nicest of the children’s work, coloured in and there for everyone to enjoy. In other photographs, if children have to sit at a table, they face each other as they work, not the authority at the front; in another, they lie prone, the paper on the floor; in another, they have been encouraged to build pretend shops in the classroom. It must have been fantastic fun to have had Miss Richardson teaching you. She says, in her book, that ‘the [photographs of] classroom scenes are given as being the next best thing to seeing the children themselves at work’.

  An exercise from a Marion Richardson textbook. The patterns on the left-hand page are meant to aid with the letters on the right.

  Richardson was an art teacher before she interested herself in handwriting teaching,* and her joy in pattern-making in small children is like a Mameluke master of decorative geometry, saying approvingly, ‘The movement is very light and swift’, ‘the added rings complete the pattern very successfully’, ‘the movement is swift and beautifully controlled’, ‘an ingenious variation’, ‘the contrast between the large pattern . . . and the small pattern made from ea is very happy’, ‘a fine swinging movement makes an interesting shape’.4 And they are beautiful; they look very much like the patterns that Paul Klee was introducing into his own painting at around the same time, and was to go on to encourage in Bauhaus students.

  The letterforms that Richardson encouraged students to work towards have a slightly italic quality to them – they are upright, and the students’ books progress towards the use of a broad-edged nib. But her style is generous and broad, and throughout stresses what is easy to write, and a pleasure, and what is easy to read. Unlike the masters of italic, Richardson felt that the number of lifts of the pen should be limited in the interests of speed and ease – some italic teachers have no particular objection to repeated lifts in the course of a word, and even in the middle of letters. As a model of teaching and learning, enabling the child to progress at his or her own pace, with pleasure at their own achievements at every stage, it could hardly be improved on. The basic style of Richardson’s letters were nearly ideal: stripped of obfuscating ornament, but still able to move at a smooth cursive pace. There are no loops in Richardson, though I know plenty of people who have chosen to introduce them subsequently, in the interests of ornament.* As I said earlier, though I admire Richardson’s style immensely, I did feel, at ten years old, that there must be more to life than her distinctly no-nonsense f’s.

  By the 1930s, the principal schools of handwriting were established, and by the 1950s, the different schools were fighting for dominance. The old-style copperplate had its refined proponents; the Civil Service/Palmer hand was still claiming efficiency in the business world; educationalists were fighting over the different principles represented by print hands – even the fundamentalists who insisted that cursive should never become necessary – and Marion Richardson’s running cursive, child-centred at every stage; and somewhere, the italic obsessives were forming societies and pressure groups and writing each other letters beginning ‘I wonder if I might momentarily crave your distinguished attention.’


  20 ~ Reading Your Mind

  Like most people, I have a set of unexamined prejudices about handwriting. It’s not so much a set of prejudices about the look or style of writing. It’s more about the ways in which characters reveal themselves through handwriting. Probably we all believe that we have some sense of what people are like through the way they write. That is one of the reasons why it was so disconcerting to realize that I didn’t know what the handwriting of a good friend of mine looked like. Because of the way we live and write now, I had been deprived of a crucial piece of evidence in the art of reading, interpreting, discovering the personalities of my friend. For all I knew, his handwriting slanted backwards at forty degrees.

  We needn’t make a systematic study of character through handwriting to realize we have some firm principles. We’ve seen that Dickens already in the nineteenth century had views about what constituted a woman’s handwriting, a villain’s, perhaps (in Little Em’ly’s too-large and too-black handwriting) that of a woman with too-strong sexual desires. I don’t suppose he had thought about these matters precisely; all the same, he had made his mind up.

  Here are some of the things which I believe can be inferred about a person from their handwriting. If I had a letter from a stranger, I would have a sense of what they were like almost before I started reading.