18 ~ Pens
When you are elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, as most English writers sooner or later are, you are offered the choice of signing the Book during your induction ceremony with one of two writing implements, both inherited by the Society. You either sign with Byron’s pen, or with Dickens’s quill. The majority, interestingly, go for Dickens’s quill, as I did, even though it must have been one of many thousands to pass through Dickens’s hands – quills don’t last all that long. The counter-intuitive nature of the sequence pen-before-quill suggests, however, that the historical picture that most of us have, that the eighteenth century wrote with goose feathers trimmed and dipped in ink, to be succeeded with much more durable and effective metal pens in a steady sort of way, is quite wrong. Pens co-existed with quills for a very long time.*
The problem with quills, and for many pens, was an obvious one. A quill has a very limited means of holding ink, as well as being a short-lived sort of tool. Oddly, the problem of increasing the ink reservoir of a pen attracted a solution long before anyone thought of making the nib more durable by making it out of metal. Pepys, unexpectedly, had what seems to have been an early reservoir pen. On 5 August 1663, after a busy day which left him in a sweat after ‘towsing’ a tart called Jemimah and reading Descartes, he records, ‘This evening came a letter about business from Mr Coventry, and with it a silver pen he promised me to carry inke in, which is very necessary.’
By 1710, such pens were known as ‘fountain pens’; the term doesn’t seem to make obvious sense to us, but the eighteenth century would have seen something which held a body of liquid to be made to flow at will. In any case, in the OED it’s recorded from 1710, and by 1723 we have a detailed description of its working in English, in Edmund Stone’s translation of a M. Bion’s The Construction and Principal Uses of Mathematical Instruments. Stone, or Bion’s, account of how the pen works, or fails to work, makes you realize that the dark corner of the human soul that works for IKEA and tortures us with flatpack instructions is not at all a new phenomenon.
A pen about five inches long, consisting of a Pen, which ought to be well slit, and cut, and screwed into the inside of a little Pipe, which is soldered to another Pipe of the same Bigness, as the Lid; in which Lid is soldered a Male Screw for screwing on the Cover; as likewise for stopped a little Hole at the Place 1, and so hindering the Ink from running through it. At the other End of the Piece F, there is a little Pipe, on the Outside of which the Top-Cover H may be screwed on. In this Top-Cover there goes a Porte-Craion, that is to screw into the last-mentioned little Pipe, and so stop the End of the Pipe at which the Ink is poured in, by means of a Funnel. When the aforementioned Pen is to be used, the Cover G must be taken off, and the Pen a little shaken, in order to make the Ink run freely. Note, If the Porte-Craion does not stop the Mouth of the Piece F, the Air, by its pressure, will cause the Ink all to run out at once.
The other problem that writing implements faced were the poor durability of goose quills as nibs. The answer ought to have been plain – to make them out of metal. But in fact it is not quite as simple as it seems to make a metal nib. What quills had strongly in their favour is flexibility. You can’t write with just any narrow piece of metal: as the historian Joyce Irene Whalley points out, ‘If you try to write a good hand with, for example, a knitting needle, or even a piece of metal more nearly adapted to pen form, you will have a good idea of the problem facing the would-be pen improvers.’1
The technical demand that the nib be flexible was also supplemented by an aesthetic demand – the predominant style of writing, from Bickham’s ideal copperplate in the eighteenth century onwards, required an alternation between thick and thin strokes that required a flexible nib, such as a quill. There was also the point that the inks of the day corroded metal, which would require the replacement of a relatively expensive item.
These questions were worked on, and the manufacture of steel pen nibs for general sale started about 1829. Most steel pen-makers set up in Birmingham. The firm of Joseph Gillott is credited with being the first to improve the flexibility ‘by making three slits in a nib instead of one – one in the centre of the point and one on each side of the “shoulder”.’2 These manufacturing processes were complex and highly intricate. Nineteenth-century authors describe ‘fifteen or sixteen distinct processes [that] have to be completed’ in the making of a nib.3 By 1840 Joseph Gillott was Steel Pen Maker to the Queen, and boasting in an advertisement that he
has been for Twenty Years engaged in the Manufacture of Steel Pens and during that time has devoted his unceasing attention to the improving and perfecting this useful and necessary article; the result of his persevering efforts, and numerous experiments upon the properties of the metal used, has been the construction of a Pen upon a principle entirely new, combining all the advantages of the elasticity and fineness of the Quill, with the durability of the Metallic Pen, and thus obviating the objections which have existed against the use of Steel Pens.
These pens were not, for the most part, fountain pens in our sense, but just nibs. Your metal nib, held by some sort of ‘pen-holder’, had to be repeatedly dipped into the bottle of ink as you wrote. It was tiresome, inconvenient, and it went entirely against the rule of writing-masters that a smooth and cursive hand be maintained with a steady flow. Reading copybooks like George Bickham, with their uninterruptedly smooth flow of line, it is difficult to believe that their authors seriously expected many people to be able to achieve the same effect without a steady flow of ink. Apart from anything else, the transfer of the pen from ink-pot to foot of page must have been a constantly perilous step, and many pages must have been ruined by a falling drop of ink.
An advertisement 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
Second, 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.6 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 eighteen-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 silk 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.