Copperplate: the engraved roundhand, 1700s–1800s

Round hand reached America in English copybooks. Their models were usually illustrated with costly copperplate engravings, and before the 1790s almost all of them were imported.^[1] By 1766 an English writing master could note that round hands had been adopted by the schools and counting-houses,^[2] and although the style was sold to merchants and tradesmen, most writers took it up.^[3] George Bickham engraved the work of eminent masters for The Universal Penman, issued in parts in London from 1733 to 1741.^[4] Page 194 of the Dover edition^[5] reproduces his round hand^[6] in a letter dated 30 August 1740.^[7]

In the colonies it was the hand advised for the clerk's desk and the merchant's counting house.^[8] A writing manual printed in Philadelphia^[9] set out the forms for bonds, bills, indentures and wills,^[10] and the engrossed Declaration of Independence was written in English round hand, or copperplate.^[11]

The pen was a goose quill,^[12] brought to a fine point,^[13] and the breadth of its nib set the weight of the downstrokes.^[14] Upstrokes stay fine and downstrokes full,^[15] on a slope one master put at anywhere from 58 to 62 degrees.^[16] In the first half of the 1800s, steel pens superseded the quill.^[17]

In the 1500s to 1700s, Percy J. Smith writes in his notes to Day's 1911 collection of pages from the old writing books, the writing masters were often men of culture and influence, held in high esteem.^[18] The beautiful Italian semi-formal script of the Renaissance had a decisive influence on the other European styles,^[19] and under it English cursive lost much of its disjointed, angular character and took on a freely written, linked-up manner.^[20] Linked-up is the first thing to expect of a copperplate page: the letters of a word run together, and the reader's work is to find where one letter ends and the next begins.

The copybook models were engraved, and John Clark's Writing Improv'd (1714) explains how. The master wrote on paper with an ink without gum,^[21] and the sheet was rubbed onto the copper until the impression of every stroke and letter was left behind^[22] for the engraver to cut. A copperplate model is a master's own writing, traced into metal. The masters also copied one another: the editors of Day's collection found that the later masters were in the habit of calmly copying from their predecessors without saying so.^[23] That is why the same letter shapes turn up in book after book, and why one copybook can help you read a hand learned from another.

Clark sorted the hands in use into those for business and those for ornament. Two of them, the round hand and the Italian, carried most of the common affairs of trade and the ordinary business of life,^[24] while the engrossing, square text, court and chancery hands were the law's.^[25] Charles Snell's Standard Rules (1717) draws the same line by shape: the slope hands are the round text, the round and the Italian, both set and running,^[26] and the square hands are the court and chancery hands and the texts.^[27] So the first question to ask of an unfamiliar page is whether it leans. A leaning, joined hand in a letter, an account or a bill is the round hand or one of its kin; an upright, broken hand on a deed is a law hand, and needs another guide.

By Clark's time the round hand had taken the place of the older running secretary hand, and he gives no examples of the secretary at all because the round hand was generally used instead.^[28] Ambrose Serle adds that the large round text is derived from the round hand and is not a distinct hand,^[29] so a heading in big round letters is the same alphabet at a larger size, and the same rules read it.

Clark builds the round hand from an oval and a straight line, leaning to the right,^[30] at an angle of 58 degrees or thereabouts.^[31] Serle asks only that the slope lean to the right, easy and graceful.^[32] John Jenkins's Art of Writing (1813) sets the downstrokes at not more than fifty-five degrees, with the hairlines after the turns climbing from left to right at about forty-five.^[33] The masters disagreed by a few degrees, and so did their pupils. What marks the hand is a steady lean, every downstroke at the angle of its neighbours. And because the joining hairlines lie flatter than the downstrokes, the steep strokes in a word belong to letters and the flatter ones to the joins between them.

Jenkins puts a common copy hand at three eighths of an inch high, and makes his measure letter, the n, two thirds as wide as it is high.^[34][35] Learners wrote between four full ruled lines and a dotted one,^[36] and Serle thought nobody could write the round hand with any certainty without lines.^[37] The rule the lines enforced was evenness: every letter without a stem above or below the line was to be the same height.^[38] On a page whose ruling has gone, the tops of the short letters still make an invisible line. A letter that breaks it is a tall one, an l, b, h or d, not a short one written large.

In the round hand the weight is in the downstrokes. Serle wants every letter, after its first fine stroke, to come down with an even, easy thickness until it rises in its last fine stroke,^[39] and puts that thickness at a third, or a little more, of the distance between the main strokes of a letter such as m or u.^[40] He names the fault of a stroke swollen in the middle with both ends weak and pointed, like a conic spindle.^[41] In a copperplate hand, then, the full strokes are the letters' bodies and the hairlines are their joins. Read the dark strokes first and count them: an m has three, an n and a u have two, and the word's letters usually follow.

The weight came from the breadth of the nib, not from bearing down. Clark tells the learner to take care not to press hard on the pen in any hand,^[42] and Serle forbids going back over a stroke: once it is made nothing should be added to it, for that is not writing.^[43] A stroke that looks doubled or retouched on a fair copy was mended after the fact, and the letter under the mending is the one the writer first made.

The masters taught that a few strokes make the whole alphabet. Jenkins says the letters are made by different combinations of a few leading strokes,^[44] twenty-five of the small letters and several capitals among them,^[45] and that the art is learned by drawing and combining six principal strokes.^[46] Snell goes further: all letters depend principally on three,^[47] which between them hold every stroke of the pen that the others are drawn from.^[48]

The first of Snell's three is the n.^[49] The second, the o, begins at the top and comes down its left side in a full stroke,^[50] and the third, the f, begins at its upper stem.^[51] This is a reader's tool. A copperplate letter you cannot read is usually a familiar stroke in a new combination, so look inside it for the arch of the n, the oval of the o or the long stem of the f. An oval with its weight on the left side is the o, or the bowl of an a, d, g or q, which are an o with a stem added.

Clark's rule for spacing is by eye: the space between letters should look about equal in area to the white inside an o or n.^[52] Words stand twice as far apart as letters,^[53] and Serle, who thought word spacing often neglected, asks for the room that an e or n of the same size would take.^[54] In a hand that keeps these rules, a gap narrower than a letter lies inside a word, and a gap a letter wide or more lies between two words.

Joins tell a reader less than they seem to. Clark lets the writer take the pen off when the hand needs ease, even in the middle of a letter,^[55] but never in a full stroke, and only where the stroke can be carried on without the break showing.^[56] Fisher's Instructor wants letters joined wherever they join naturally, without straining, especially in the running hands.^[57] So a break is not proof of two words, and an unbroken line is not proof of one; trust the spacing over the pen-lifts. Jenkins warns pupils against top turns that are too sharp.^[58] Where a writer's turns did go sharp, the n, m and u turn into rows of pointed strokes, and they have to be read by counting the strokes against the word.

Serle names one misreading outright. Young learners, he noticed, made the last stroke of the small r inverted, from the middle, like the last stroke of a v.^[59] An r written that way reads as a v, so a v where the word wants an r is most likely an r.

Fisher gives the rule for the two s's: the long ſ at the beginning and in the middle of words, never at the end, and the short s at the end.^[60] A tall letter at the end of a word is therefore not a long s. Inside a word, a tall stroke like an f without its crossbar is one, and a double ſſ is two of them, not an f and an s.

Capitals trouble modern readers most, because the 1700s used far more of them. Fisher begins with rules a modern writer would know: capitals begin sentences,^[61] are not used in the middle or at the end of a word,^[62] and begin every Christian name and surname,^[63] and the names of places, ships and rivers, such as George, London, the Dreadnought, Thames and Severn.^[64] Then he ventures a general rule of his own, that capitals begin all nouns,^[65] adding that an adjective may take a small letter while its noun takes a great one.^[66] So "the white Horse" and "brown Bread" are the period's custom, not names. A capital in the middle of a line marks a noun, and only sometimes a name.

Fisher thought a readiness with abbreviations showed dexterity in writing and was very necessary for dispatch:^[67] a word was set down by some initial letter or letters of it.^[68] His table is a crib for the reader. Dr. stands for Doctor or Debtor,^[69] and in an account book it almost always means Debtor. Inst. stands for instance or instant,^[70] and in a dated letter it is the second, this month, as in "yours of the 5th inst." The context settles which meaning a writer intended; the letters alone do not.

Most surviving letters and accounts are not in the copybook's set round hand but in its running form. Serle's running hand, so well adapted to business, springs from the same source as the round hand but allows greater latitude,^[71] and written too close it loses one great end of its use, swiftness.^[72] Jenkins finds the letters of the running hand wider for their height than those of the copy hand.^[73] Carstairs, writing in London in 1816, describes a youth taken into a merchant's office and kept copying letters for four or five years to make his hand fit for the day-book and ledger,^[74] and advises gentlemen without a counting-house to attend to a free, easy, flowing, small running hand.^[75] The clerk's hand and the gentleman's are one alphabet at different degrees of care: a ledger is usually the more regular, and a private letter the faster and looser.

The Italian hand is the round hand's slender relative. Clark gives it the same slope and fundamental letters as the round hand.^[76] Serle says it had lately been peculiarly practised by the ladies,^[77] that written with freedom and correctness it strikes the eye very agreeably,^[78] and that its marks are the slenderness of its characters, their delicacy, and the easy pressure the pen needs to make them.^[79] He doubted it was as well suited to business or study as the round hand,^[80] and spaced its words wider, the breadth of an m, on account of its slender looseness.^[81] A thin, light, open hand with the round hand's letters is the Italian. Read it by the same rules, and expect less shade and more air between the words.

Mary L. Dougherty's 1917 history of handwriting teaching in America finds that in the colonial period English texts were almost exclusively used.^[82] The quill took so much of the master's time to make and keep in order that it was a source of much wasted time.^[83] Birch bark often served for copybooks because paper was costly,^[84] and children often ruled their own paper with a lead plummet, the forerunner of the pencil.^[85] Faint grey lines under an early American hand are often plummet lines, and they help: they show where the writer meant the line to be.

Ink was made of nut-galls bruised in water with rusty nails.^[86] Carstairs gives the usual ingredients of black ink as gallnuts, copperas and gum arabic,^[87] and says the ink took its blackness chiefly from the iron in the copperas.^[88] On a faded page the full strokes, which carried the most ink, are the last to go, so read them first and supply the hairlines from the shapes above.

After the Revolution came the attempt to provide American texts for the schools,^[89] and as engraved copies came into common use, a whole class was taught at once instead of one child at a time.^[90] A class copying one engraved line tends to write alike, so a hand from those schoolrooms is often more uniform than an older one, and the rules of its copybook read it well.