1. People who don’t join up their letters are often creative, and often visually imaginative. Alternatively, they may be a little bit slow.
2. People whose handwriting leans forward are often conventional in outlook; people whose handwriting leans backward are often withdrawn.
3. People who don’t close up their lower-case g’s are very bad at keeping secrets.*
4. People whose writing doesn’t have much in the way of ascenders or descenders – stubby f’s and y’s which just gesture downwards deadly – don’t have much of a sex life.
5. If someone’s handwriting leans to left and right and upright like a drunk sailor in a gale, and sometimes joins up and sometimes doesn’t, then they might one day murder someone for no reason at all.†
6. People whose handwriting is mainly round are generally nice. Generally, I said, generally.
7. Someone who uses the Greek E probably had an early homosexual experience. Might have had a homosexual experience last night, too.*
8. People whose signature is wildly different from their normal writing may or may not be trustworthy, but they aren’t altogether satisfied with their existence.
9. People who underline their signature are convinced of their own significance in the world.†
10. If you ever come across anyone who signs their name and then, instead of underlining it, runs a line through it, run a mile. Years of therapy await.
11. Anyone who writes a circle or a heart over their i’s is a moron.**
12. A handwriting where the crossbar of the t doesn’t touch the upright is that of an impatient person. Hire them. They get stuff done.††
13. Someone who has unexpected upper-case forms for lower-case letters, often R and Q, would jump out of an aeroplane, fuck a pig, steal and drink the homebrewed absinthe of a Serbian warlord, just to see what the experience was like. Go for a drink with them. Just not in Serbia.
14. Anyone who puts a loop on their ascenders in b, d, f, h, k, l, and t is either an American who went through the Palmer programme or someone who puts on their pyjamas and bunny-faced slippers to watch The X Factor with a nice cup of cocoa.
15. If there are big gaps between your words as you write, then you’re a little bit lonely. If your words come close together and even join up, then you’re more likely to be gregarious.
All this is not very systematic. It comes from decades of observation and mindless prejudice, and in some cases the single source of the observation is clear to me.* But the skill of reading character through handwriting has been developed over hundreds of years. Its specific insights into aspects of handwriting have hardened into firm principles, and have been used for a number of purposes. Graphologists often make a good living through various applications of their skill. They may be called upon by the courts to pass judgement on the authenticity or otherwise of a handwriting or a signature. They may be employed by companies to examine the handwriting of candidates for a job, to explain what signs of strength and weakness they have discovered. Or they may be used to give a sort of mock-occult reading of someone’s handwriting for their personal interest and curiosity – a sort of palmistry with, it must be said, more reliable results.
It may seem peculiar that the legal/forensic and character-reading side of the graphologist’s trade are practised at the same time. It would be grossly improper, for instance, if a graphologist said that he discerned a criminal or a psychotic personality in the handwriting of the man in the dock. But these strands of graphology developed more or less at the same time. Graphology started as a means of distinguishing the extraordinary – the genius and the criminal. What you were like, and what people could be like, was the driving force behind graphology from the start.
Before the nineteenth century, handwriting was not thought of as something which was particularly individual. Now that we communicate almost entirely through typing, we may be in the process of stripping writing of those individual associations again. Before the very end of the eighteenth century, it didn’t seem at all desirable, or indeed probable, that handwriting was one of those things which separated men out from each other. People learnt to write in a particular school, and practised until they could execute the style of that school, more or less anonymously. They wanted to turn themselves into typewriters, or word processors, and different styles of handwriting were akin, as it were, to fonts, just as we now distinguish ourselves only by our choice of words and our choice of pre-prepared fonts. Of course, this avoidance of the individual style was not always completely executed, and people could always be distinguished by their writing. We know this, among other things, because of a dirty joke in Twelfth Night as Malvolio reads a forged letter from his mistress, Olivia: ‘These be her very c’s, her u’s and her t’s, and thus makes she her great P’s. It is in contempt of question her hand.’* It was not until much later, however, that this individuality began to be seen as important, and later still that it started to be interpreted as a clue to what people might be like as human beings.
The eighteenth century was interested in the ways in which the personality reveals itself through external means – the pseudo-science of physiognomy, in which a criminal or a noble character is shown in the face,† and the even odder one of cranium-reading, or phrenology, according to which if you had a big bulge at a certain point, it showed you were musical. More productive was the study of gesture at the time. Previous ages had settled for a survey of how ladies and gentlemen moved, and presented the facade of gentlemanly behaviour as an ideal for study.** The end of the eighteenth century started to think of gesture as something which revealed thoughts and emotion, and, to a certain extent, character. When, in Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage, we are told of Lady Jane Granville that ‘in all her Ladyship said, in every look and motion, there was the same nervous hurry and inquietude’, we see a growing interest in the ways in which people’s outer crust gives away their inner concerns. That interest would soon spread to the ordinary person.
With regards to writing, it was not altogether clear that people wrote in individual ways. The principle that a person could be identified by their writing was established in English law in 1836.* It had been suggested as early as 1726, by Geoffrey Gilbert in The Law of Evidence, that the differences between men’s handwriting could serve to identify them. By 1836, the question was settled: a handwriting was individual, and possessed something called ‘the general character of writing, which is impressed on it as the involuntary and unconscious result of constitution, habit, or other permanent cause, and is therefore itself permanent.’1 The power of handwriting, thus impressed on the reader in a permanent way, had an awesome authority.
It was not just in the legal arena that a handwriting’s individuality was being examined. This was the age of the cult of personality, and of the autograph collector. The odd hobby of acquiring the signatures of famous, notorious or completely unknown figures rose to great heights in the nineteenth century. Some of the collections amounted to more than 100,000 individual signatures, and were sold for large sums of money. In an essay of 1840, Edgar Allan Poe examined some autographs of famous literary figures, and suggested that ‘a strong analogy does generally and naturally exist between every man’s chirography and character.’ He took the opportunity to talk about some celebrities of the day, in sometimes rather sharp terms: you feel that his view of their literary qualities preceded his analysis of their handwriting. The worst thing that can happen to a writer is that their hand shows no individuality. The genius, it seems, should reveal his character through the strokes of his pen. William Cullen Bryant had ‘one of the most commonplace clerk’s hands which we ever encountered.’ The forgotten poet Rebecca Nichols’s writing was ‘formed somewhat too much upon the ordinary boarding-school model to afford any indication of character’. Another writer, David Paul Brown, had trained as a lawyer, and this, Poe thought, had suppressed any kind of character other than that of the professional class. When Poe admires someone, you can’t but feel that he is not
really describing the handwriting: William Ellery Channing, a clergyman, has writing with ‘a certain calm, broad deliberateness, which constitutes force in its highest character, and approaches to majesty’.
People like Poe might be on to something. The qualities which he identifies – boldness, conventionality, unpretending simplicity, deliberateness – are surely ones which we have privately identified ourselves in reading the handwriting of a stranger. It’s true that it is hard to see what led him to the conclusion in each case, but there is no reason to think that Poe was not sincere, or that his mass audience thought that what he had identified was implausible or random. But there was a gap between the handwriting and his impression of it. Now that many people thought that the individual character was manifest in handwriting – even if it was only a character impressive for its commonplace nature – and that many people might agree, in general terms, on the impression given by a man or a woman’s handwriting, the time had come to move beyond the general, and to produce a systematic, detailed guide to the elements of handwriting, and what they might mean.
21 ~ Witness
A: ‘We were taught normal and cursive – I forget the name for normal, standard? – but I remember cursive. Normal was print, cursive was joined-up. I remember handwriting lessons in school. We had special tabs of paper that had two horizontal lines, and you filled them in, and did the letters over, and over, and over, and you were done. Or were there three lines? We faced the front of the room, and we did it all together, all at the same time, took the pen off the paper, and then handed it in. That was in the Miami Dade County public-school system, circa late-seventies [laughs]. My handwriting’s changed completely. I only do cursive s’s now – I never do standard. I only do a cursive s with a standard t. I mix it all together, it’s not anything like it was before. I’m always getting complaints about too small, spidery – my father calls it stick and scratch. An example is ‘Steve’ – the way I write my name. A sort of cursive S, then a standard t, e, v, e, with joins. It’s just a mish-mash. That’s Miles, that’s me [shows interviewer signature on Christmas card]. Miles is much clearer than I am. Is my signature really so unlike my handwriting? Well, there’s always the big S, and it’s more joined, obviously, and when I write things I don’t ever write things in cursive.
‘And we did calligraphy at school. So. Picture it. This is in the sixth grade, so I would have been twelve, and we’d do these mini-courses, and we did a four-, five-week course. We did calligraphy. And I can remember using the utensils, and learning how to do it, and you lay the pen flat, and make the letters the right way . . . that’s all I remember. We had special pens, and we had the ink to dip it in. So it was all done very authentically. Very alien to all of us . . . Such a waste.
Interviewer: ‘What?’
A: ‘Did you see that straight guy?’
S.B., financier, 39
22 ~ Vitativeness
A chart of 1900 or thereabouts1 aims to show readers what qualities may be revealed through a person’s handwriting. The chart displays dozens of human characteristics, written in a handwriting that is supposed to embody that characteristic. They include ‘amativeness, conjugality, inhabitativeness, philoprogenitiveness, destructiveness, approbativeness, concentrativeness, vitativeness, firmness, veneration’, and many others, some of which seem actually to be words. Charts like this beg a question. Is it really the case that human beings embody single predominant emotions, to be exhibited on all occasions? Or could it be that all of us have our destructive moments, possibly followed by a conjugal mood in the evening over dinner?*
The late nineteenth century saw an explosion of interest in the external signs that people carry with them; they were ways by which strangers could be read. Think of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, wildly popular from their first appearance in 1887, and Holmes’s initial remark to Watson, ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ Holmes’s famous facility to ‘read’ an individual through a hundred minuscule external signs appealed to an audience who were tickled by the idea of understanding strangers without having to speak to them. Slightly surprisingly, Holmes, or Conan Doyle, doesn’t show a great deal of interest in handwriting, and what interest he does show can be absurd. In ‘The Reigate Puzzle’, Holmes not only deduces someone’s age from their handwriting, but says, ‘There is something in common between these hands. They belong to men who are blood-relatives. It may be most obvious to you in the Greek e’s, but to me there are many small points which indicate the same thing. I have no doubt at all that a family mannerism can be traced in these two specimens of writing.’ In ‘The Naval Treaty’, he is confident of the sex of the writer of a note. In ‘The Norwood Builder’, Holmes rather brilliantly works out that a note which goes from fluent to wobbly to illegible has probably been written on a train which was periodically passing over points. The nascent science of graphology suddenly and unexpectedly enters into ‘The Sign of Four’ in the following exchange:
‘Have you ever had occasion to study character in handwriting? What do you make of this fellow’s scribble?’
‘It is legible and regular,’ I answered. ‘A man of business habits and some force of character.’
‘Holmes shook his head. ‘Look at his long letters,’ he said. ‘They hardly rise above the common herd. That d might be an a, and that l an e. Men of character always differentiate their long letters, however illegibly they may write. There is vacillation in his k’s and self-esteem in his capitals.’
The analysis of handwriting is only part of it, however, and one which would appeal to other people much more than to Holmes – it is quite striking, as a measure of Conan Doyle’s modernity, that he is at least as interested in the supposed individuality of typewriters as he is in the handwriting of individuals. But the examination of individual traces was, in itself, of great modern necessity. The range of disciplines supposedly mastered by Holmes would hold no appeal in a society where everyone lived in a small community, and knew everyone’s business. It is a fantasy from an urban world, where almost everyone is a stranger, and almost anyone could be dangerous.
Not everyone could be a Holmes – actually, nobody could, since he’s a fictitious character.* But everyone could acquire some skills which would enable them not to employ an embezzler or marry a libertine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for an Elizabeth Bennet to discover the truth about a Wickham was comparatively straightforward: you balanced his account of himself against Darcy’s and Darcy’s apple-cheeked housekeeper, and came to a conclusion. When external signs are noted in Jane Austen, they don’t necessarily signify anything very much. Jane Bennet writes, we are told, ‘remarkably ill’. Thirty years later, a novelist would expect his readers to understand something because of that. In Austen, everyone lives in a small society, so that they don’t need to examine Jane Bennet’s handwriting to understand that she’s made of sterling stuff – you just had to ask her friends and acquaintances. By the end of the century, an adventurer who was carrying on Wickham’s old trade had a much better chance of success. He could appear out of nowhere, with nothing but a vast and indifferent urban landscape to appeal to. The wary employer or fiancé had to appeal, Holmes-like, to some means of diagnosing vitativeness in a stranger, before they emptied your safe or gave you syphilis. Whatever vitativeness may be.
The end of the nineteenth century saw an explosion in books explaining how to discern character from handwriting. All of them emphasize the essentially mysterious, hidden quality in handwriting, and the fact (naturally) that you’d have to buy a book and master the system before you could begin to understand the principles involved. Their titles tell the story, from the 1870s onwards, and what had been an occasional, speculative idea spun out into an essay becomes a dauntingly pseudo-scientific school: L’art de connaître les hommes d’après leurs écriture (1878); Chirography, or the Art of Knowing One’s Character Through Handwriting; How to Read Character in Handwriting (1890); How to Read Character From Handwriting (1
891); Talks on Graphology: The Art of Knowing Character Through Handwriting (1892); The Mystery of Handwriting (1896); Reading Character From Handwriting: A Handbook of Graphology for Experts, Students, and Laymen (1902); What Handwriting Indicates (1904), and so on, in a virtually unbroken line to the present day.
Some of the interests of these books are in enabling people to understand their own characters better, in the way that people read horoscopes, star signs, and go to palm-readers to listen to someone else talk about them. Probably the initial interest in graphology was exactly that, to discover what sort of person one was from analysing one’s own character. In the maelstrom of the late-nineteenth-century City of Dreadful Night, a Holmes could discover not only that the world was full of strangers, not only that the partner of one’s life and bed was a stranger,* but that you could perfectly well be a stranger to yourself, in need of the professional and occult services of the graphologist. Nevertheless, though this was certainly the primary appeal of the new school of handwriting analysis, it was often sold as a means to detect imposture and character flaws in others. The early graphologists boasted about their ability to detect marital incompatibility, and thereby prevent a long-term unhappy marriage, to advise people about the sorts of work they were most fitted to, and, on the other side of the coin, to advise employers about the qualities which a candidate for a job might be concealing, or perhaps not really understand himself. A 1911 Practical Method of Reading Character Through Handwriting claims to understand ‘whether or not two persons are suited to each other’, and by the 1920s, business clients of the graphologists William French and the sonorously named DeWitt B. Lucas were happily indicating that they would be willing ‘to admit that I should take Mr French’s delineation in preference to my own judgment’. Lucas claimed that he could give the executive ‘unusual wisdom and sagacity in dealing with people near or far, known or unknown to him.’2
The Missing Ink Page 12
