9 ~ Dickens

If you look at a page of Dickens’s writing, the overpowering impression is one of energy and fury – it is one of the great unreadable nineteenth-century handwritings. But his early training as a parliamentary reporter ought to have given him a solid hand. Instead, what it gave him was a consistent interest in the possibilities of handwriting – the human dimension – which crops up in marginal, significant ways all through the novels.

It’s surprising how often the act of writing, of forming letters, acts as an impetus for the plot in the great Dickens novels. The action of Bleak House kicks off when Lady Dedlock, bored, notices an unusual hand in an official document. It is the unusual hand, it ultimately transpires, of her lover, Captain Hawdon. The villainous solicitor, Tulkinghorn, notices her interest, and makes it his business to track down the scribe who wrote it. ‘“There was one of them,” says Mr Tulkinghorn, carelessly feeling – tight, unopenable oyster of the old school! – in the wrong coat-pocket, “the handwriting of which is peculiar, and I rather like.”‘ It is a variety of the legal hand known as Chancery, which survived for hundreds of years in specialized practice after it dropped out of ordinary use in the early seventeenth century. We know, through another narrator, that the style is ‘law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and Carboy’s office and the letters I had so long received from the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr Krook, within.’

Law-hand, which is what Captain Hawdon writes, and which draws him to the attention of Lady Dedlock, was an exotic intrusion into ordinary reality in Dickens’s time. It had more or less disappeared from ordinary writing by the seventeenth century, surviving only for special legal purposes. Already, in The Pickwick Papers, we have the barrister’s clerk who justifies the bizarre style by saying ‘The best of it is, that as nobody alive except myself can read the serjeant’s writing, they [the plaintiffs] are obliged to wait for his opinions, when he has given them, till I have copied ’em, ha-ha-ha!’ Much later, in David Copperfield, Traddles’s adorable wife surprises David by learning law-hand to help him in his practice.

‘What do you say to that writing, Copperfield?’

‘It’s extraordinarily legal and formal,’ said I. ‘I don’t think I ever saw such a stiff hand.’

‘Not like a lady’s hand, is it?’ said Traddles.

‘A lady’s!’ I said. ‘Bricks and mortar are more like a lady’s hand!’

Dickens, like many people, believed firmly in the difference between male and female hands. Guppy asks Jobling in Bleak House whether a piece of writing by Lady Dedlock ‘was a man’s writing or a woman’s?’: ‘A woman’s. Fifty to one a lady’s – slopes a good deal, and the end of the letter “n” long and hasty.’ An old observation, but a specific one: there’s no reason to think that Dickens would have disagreed with Jobling’s professional analysis.*

A handwritten page from A Christmas Carol.

There are professional writers at the one end, who write in a way peculiar to a sort of priestly caste, and at the other, ordinary people, who cannot write, or who struggle with the task.

Sam Weller sat himself down in a box near the stove, and pulled out the sheet of gilt-edged letter-paper, and the hard-nibbed pen. Then looking carefully at the pen to see that there were no hairs in it, and dusting down the table, so that there might be no crumbs of bread under the paper, Sam tucked up the cuffs of his coat, squared his elbows, and composed himself to write.

To ladies and gentlemen who are not in the habit of devoting themselves practically to the science of penmanship, writing a letter is no very easy task; it being always considered necessary in such cases for the writer to recline his head on his left arm, so as to place his eyes as nearly as possible on a level with the paper, and, while glancing sideways at the letters he is constructing, to form with his tongue imaginary characters to correspond. These motions, although unquestionably of the greatest assistance to original composition, retard in some degree the progress of the writer …

The gap between absurd expertise on the part of some characters, and the struggle to write anything at all on others, comes up repeatedly. In Nicholas Nickleby Nicholas brings ‘no greater amount of previous knowledge to the subject [of penmanship] than certain dim recollections of two or three very long sums entered into a ciphering book at school, and relieved for parental inspection by the effigy of a fat swan tastefully flourished by the writing-master’s own hand…’* Just how ineffectual a style this is, in Dickens’s view, is shown by a slightly poisonous comparison with the way Old Dorrit talks – ‘he surrounded the subject with flourishes, as writing-masters embellish copy-books and ciphering-books; where the titles of the elementary rules of arithmetic diverge into swans, eagles, griffins and other calligraphic recreations, and where the capital letters go out of their minds and bodies into ecstasies of pen and ink.’ In Nicholas Nickleby, another writing master ‘touched up’ Kate Nickleby’s letters from school ‘with a magnifying glass and a silver pen; at least I think they wrote them, though Kate was never quite certain about that, because she didn’t know the handwriting of hers again.’ If a writer has never benefited from one of these absurd instructors, it is possible that people might simply not be able to say what they think. Newman Noggs writes to Nicholas, and Nicholas reacts to his handwriting: ‘“Dear me!” said Nicholas. “What an extraordinary hand!” It was directed to himself, was written upon very dirty paper, and in such cramped and crippled writing as to be almost illegible.’

Only occasionally does the instruction in writing seem reasonable. There is a lovely vignette of a writing lesson in The Old Curiosity Shop, in a schoolroom where ‘the great ornaments of the walls were certain moral sentences fairly copied in good round text…’

‘That’s beautiful writing, my dear.’

‘Very, sir,’ replied the child modestly. ‘Is it yours?’

‘Mine!’ he returned, taking out his spectacles and putting them on, to have a better view of the triumphs so dear to his heart. ‘I couldn’t write like that, now-a-days.’

George Orwell said, vis-à-vis Dr Strong’s academy in David Copperfield, that Dickens couldn’t imagine what a good education might be like. How false that is is shown by a rare and specific account of a writing lesson in The Old Curiosity Shop. It’s a sort of vision of child-centred education that still seemed radical eighty years later, when Marion Richardson was starting out.

Writing time began, and there being but one desk and that the master’s, each boy sat at it in turn and laboured at his crooked copy, while the master walked about. This was a quieter time; for he would come and look over the writer’s shoulder, and tell him mildly to observe how such a letter was turned in such a copy on the wall, praise such an upstroke here and such a down-stroke there, and bid him take it for his model.

More common is the beautifully sordid glimpse in Little Dorrit of the impoverished Professor of Writing who lives upstairs in Bleeding Heart Yard, who ‘enlivens the garden railings with glass-cases containing choice examples of what his pupils had been before six lessons and while the whole of his young family shook the table, and what they had become after six lessons when the young family was under restraint.’

Not just the act of writing, but styles of writing, act as little time-bombs in Dickens, often connected to self-improvement and ultimate social isolation. When the young Pip, in Great Expectations, writes his first letter to his brother-in-law Joe on a slate, he is starting on a path which will threaten to separate them for ever. ‘MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD…’

Writing takes Little Em’ly, in David Copperfield on the path out of her class; when she is a girl, her ability awes her relations in that upturned boat – ‘“Her learning!” said Ham. “Her writing!” said Mr Peggotty. “Why, it’s as black as jet! And so large it is, you might see it anywhere!”’ We smile at the way simple people think of a good hand. But much later, when she has disappeared, and has been ruined for ever, it is her handwriting, again, that breaks Dan’s heart. ‘She tried to hide her writing, but she couldn’t hide it from Me!’ On the other hand, the mastery of handwriting can offer a way out of a terrible situation. The orphan Charley, in Bleak House, is taught to write by Esther, and like Sam Weller,

she seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners like a saddle-donkey. It was very odd to see what old letters Charley’s young hand had made, they so wrinkled and shrivelled, and tottering, it so plump and round …

‘Well, Charley,’ said I looking over a copy of the letter O in which it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped and collapsed in all kinds of ways, ‘we are improving. If we only get to make it round, we shall be perfect, Charley.’*

We can see the same sort of passionate aspiration implicit in a handwriting when Lizzy Hexham’s brother, also called Charley, turns up at the Veneering’s dinner, and his handwriting surprises the gentry. ‘His voice was hoarse and coarse; but he was cleaner than other boys of his type; and his writing, though large and round, was good; and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.’

Usually, in Dickens, a characteristic handwriting displays a social condition. Only rarely does an observation seem to bear upon a character apart from that. Mrs Clennam, in Little Dorrit, has ‘maimed writing’, probably through illness. There is something retrospectively horrifying about Merdle’s suicide note being dashed off in pencil – the busy man of business, even in extremis, reaching for the nearest, inadequate writing implement. The pencil is often a harbinger of horror, like the horrible letter in Our Mutual Friend which ‘was scrawled in pencil uphill and downhill and round crooked corners, ran thus: OLD RIAH, Your accounts being all squared, go. Shut up the place, turn out directly, and send me the key by bearer. You are an unthankful dog of a Jew. Get out. F’.

Dickens was the greatest observer of the human condition, and keenly aware of what people make of themselves, and what people might make of themselves, if society were not in the way. I’ve looked at some of the ways in which handwriting comes into his books, precisely because he never really focussed on it as a subject. It is just something that it is there. Probably no one in the nineteenth century is a better witness of how handwriting might be an agent for change, and Charley Hexham, with his excellent handwriting and his booklover’s gaze, was exactly the sort of person to benefit from Northcote Trevelyan and the Vere Foster revisions. If he had been born thirty years later, Sam Weller, writing with his head on the desk with his tongue out, would have been one of those persons, too, rather than stuck as the valet to a fat idiot called Pickwick.