Identifying Late 18Th And Early 19Th C Scripts

[LeftyLipp]

Hello!

I work as an archivist which gives me plenty of opportunity to see old documents. On occasion I am struck by particular scripts and hands but am (bleep) at identifying them. There are two specific examples that have been bugging me for a while and am hoping the brain trust might be able to shed some light on them.

 

One is an excerpt from the Lewis and Clark journals (with the fish), 1804-1806. The other is from one of the de Anza expeditions to California in the 1770s, and is in Spanish. Best guess on the Spanish one is Italica, but it isnt quite right, especially the capitals. I am at a complete loss for the L&C journal script.

 

Any help identifying what these might be or direction to good resources for late 18th and early 19th hands?

 

Thanks!

[langere]

Why do you think each author used a specific script? I think that, like most people, they adapted what they had learned in school to create their own script. I work a lot on Spanish scripts and I see a lot of variation; I think it's mainly individual variation.

 

Erick

[LeftyLipp]

No particular reason. Was just curious if this might be from a specific schooling or method.

[Pickwick]

No particular reason. Was just curious if this might be from a specific schooling or method.

There was a standard script, Spenserian being one for writing official documents and office use until the advent of the typewriter. A number of books written in the 19th century by handwriting experts for use in banks and legal departments in the USA for help in detecting handwriting forgery, for example, checks, wills and other important documents hand written and signed by individuals other than trained clerks. It was recognised that no two individual handwritings were identical and could be detected the same as a fingerprint. If a person attempted to forge a long document, at the start they would be fairly successful but would inevitably lapse at times back to their own style and not realise it. Although an individual may have been taught a certain script attending a school, inevitably he/she will eventually adopt their own style with probably but not always some elements still there that they were originally taught.

 

 

Detecting forgeries became a specialised business

[txomsy]

The Spanish one is a specific national script, called "Bastarda", I'd say, based on the version of Olod.

 

Bastarda was a script derived from Italica Chancelleresca, Castilian, Aragonese, "redondilla" (Round hand) and maybe other scripts, (hence the name) developed initially by Yciar and De Lucas. It quickly became the National Spanish hand until the XX Century. Over time it would be repeatedly revised and refined by many authors, lemme check... Madariaga, Morante-Palomares, Casanova, Ortiz, Polanco, Olod, and others...

 

I seem to remember that by those times (XVIII C) "the English hand" (Copperplate) had started to influence some masters in Spain and being taught, influencing also the Spanish "bastarda".

 

Judging from the copybooks/treatises I have, in Spain there were several hands that persisted and coexisted through the centuries, mainly "Bastarda" and "Redondilla". Bastarda, as I mentioned was an evolution of Italic, acquiring higher slant with each master, but typically characterized by rounder forms than Italic (since de Lucas). Redondilla had no slant and round forms. Both were written with italic nibs, and both persisted until the late XX C. Roman Capitals, Gothic, Italic ("grifa" after Griffo), and foreign scripts like English (Copperplate) French or current Italian scripts were also typically taught and used for specific texts. Most copybooks I have do teach "Bastarda", "Redondilla", Roman, "Grifa" and "Gothic" at least, consistently, through the ages.

 

Letters were written with just one stroke, not many as in Copperplate (Olod, 1768), and prgressively added ligatures aiming for joining all letters ("encadenada", chained) which may explain many of the differences (more rounded, more ligatures, etc...) from Italic. There were often several competing masters teaching slightly different scripts, and in many cases -from the digitized documents I've seen- people would mix various forms of letters (long S, the two forms of s, two forms of r, two d, etc...) and scripts simultaneously and in the same document.

 

The document you post reminds me of the Bastarda alphabet demonstrated by Olod, 1768 in his "Tratado del origen y arte de escrbir bien", which I must have got from either the Spanish National Library digitized collection or the French National Library Gallica collection (as neighbors there must have been a continuous exchange between both and one can find books from one Country in the other). From what I understand Olod became very influential in the next decades (until new fashions blew him out).

 

Shortly: the Spanish document seems to be Bastarda as introduced by Olod in 1768.

 

BTW, if you find the book, the plates are at the very end.

 

But remember, while there was a National script (Bastarda), it was in constant evolution and people would learn and use (and often mix) various scripts. Here, the letters are more slanted, similar to those introduced by Torío in 1798, but the forms, being a bit rounder than those of Olod, are still much more like those of Olod than the later forms by Torio (which show the influence of English Copperplate / Roundhand) although one can already see some later forms (like in l, compare "la" and "el" in the image).

 

I don't remember the URL now, but in a different thread I posted a link to a web site that provides links to hundreds of copybooks from most Western Countries over the ages. A great resource.

[txomsy]

As for the text in English, I doubt it is Spencerian, because I think Spencerian is later (~1850). Sadly, while I have found many early copybooks and textbooks from Spain, France, Holland and even Germany, I have only four early texts from UK (dated 1510, 1598, 1618 and 1680), next is 1856. So I cannot check it as closely. Plus, my impression is that UK/US scripts didn't change as much as the Spanish, French or Italian hands did.

 

I am sorry, please accept my apologies for not being of much help with that one.

[LeftyLipp]

I am sorry, please accept my apologies for not being of much help with that one.

 

Oh man! This was all fantastic. Thanks so much for all of that information. I will definitely see if I can track down that Olod from 1768.

[langere]

txomsy, my hat off to you! (Yes, I also wear hats.) You are a fount of knowledge and I just learned a lot.

 

Erick

[txomsy]

Just had time to run a search. You can find Olod's book on BNE (not difficult once you know what you are looking for). Nice thing is that you can click on the book and browse it online (remember, plates are at the end), and even save the book (entirely or part) as a PDF. Here is a link to the start of the plates:

 

http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000098536&page=129

 

 

The trick was knowing it was from Spanish origin and the date. I have downloaded lots of ancient calligraphy books (sadly, I wasn't careful to note their respective origins, but Google usually knows), so all I had to do was look in the books closest by date to the dating of the document. Not much merit there. The rest is mostly (I believe) from Wikipedia or other calligraphy sources. The trick here is in reading a lot. I think I got started on Lucas from Johnston's "Writing, Illuminating, Lettering", and from there on...

 

BTW, I just found I also had a lot of earlier books on English calligraphy on a separate hard disk. I'll try to find time to review them. Most oddly, when I see your first sample, it reminds me a lot of my own handwriting.

Edited November 11, 2019 by txomsy

[txomsy]

The English sample has some characteristics of Jenkins' 1791 "The Art of writing reduced to plain and easy system", but it has even more of Williamson's Penmanship for the use of schools (1797), e.g. page 5 & f.

 

Found it! The site with tons of links to old copybooks is pennavolans.com, a great resource. It doesn't say much about Williamson's (other than it is incomplete) so I don't know if it might have had much influence in general education, but its samples certainly look alike to yours..

 

So, there.

 

Williamson's book is in the British Library and on Google books (I mention this because when I tried to download from the BL it would often fail but there was a note that the book had been digitised with help from Google, which led me to discover that many BL books are easier to find and download from Google).

 

Some similar hands, but dated later, can be found in Lewis' 1816 "The royal lewisian system of penmanship", or 1818 "An invaluable discovery in writing...", so it may have influenced later authors or perhaps they just reflected what was the current use of the time.

Edited November 11, 2019 by txomsy

[LeftyLipp]

What a follow-up. Thanks again, txomsy! So much to start working through.

[AAAndrew]

@txomsy brings the serious information, as usual.

 

I was thinking Williamson's as well, at first.

 

Do we know which one wrote that entry? Lewis would most likely have picked up his writing style in the early 1780's and Clark a few years before. It seems, from a quick look at Wikipedia, Lewis was originally educated by private tutors before being sent off to school at Liberty Hall, now Washington & Lee University. So, he may or may not have had a formal, penmanship style taught to him by his private tutors. His hand may have been based on a tutor's own handwriting. It obviously is a style springing from Roundhand roots.

 

Clark was also privately tutored, and seems he was self-conscious of his grammar and spelling. (though both, at the time, were more of an interpretive dance than any kind of formal rules)

 

it would be great to see a larger version of this. But even from this example, it looks like a pretty common style you find in the late 18th century up through the mid-19th.

 

Here is a good example on an earlier style. This is a letter from Benjamin Franklin from 1861. He writes a very, nice, clear hand. One interesting thing I've noticed about penmanship from the 18th to the 19th-century is for a while it seemed as if letters became less connected. Look at Franklin's nicely connected hand.

 

 

 

A few decades later, in 1797, a clerk for Samuel Otis wrote this letter. You start to see some separation of letters.

 

 

 

 

And as we move into the 19th-century, especially with regular people (as opposed to trained clerks), the letters are not connected even more often. This is a letter from 1821 written by a woman to her brother-in-law asking about her sister's death. It's from Massachusetts and is in my own collection. (the others are from an auction site)

 

 

 

Until the mid-19th-century, there was a proliferation of penmanship styles and masters, who often ranged from town to town selling their services for a period of time. It can be very difficult to nail down in which of these schools a person was trained. It wasn't until the mid-late 19th-century, accompanying educational reforms, that you had clearer, formal penmanship styles, including Spencerian. By the 1890's a thousand schools began to bloom: Vertical, Modified Slant, Natural Slant, Palmer, etc...

 

If you're really interested in penmanship books in the 18th and early 19th-centuries, ping me privately and I'll share some of the references I have.

[LeftyLipp]

Thanks for that added info, AAAndrew. I am mostly interested in the specific examples I cited above because they happened to catch my eye as particularly legible and attractive hands, possibly something to try and emulate. Though asking one question tends to lead one to many more!

[Intensity]

The second script is very attractive, I'd like to ee about copying it a bit. Is there a high resolution scan of it that you wouldn't mind posting, LeftyLipp?

 

Thanks to others in the thread for the interesting information and references to follow up on.

[LeftyLipp]

My original image is 2160x3840 but the file upload to the forums is much smaller. Give this imgur link a try: https://imgur.com/a/Y5Bd2jk.

[Intensity]

Thank you!

[sidthecat]

The history of handwriting is more complex and interesting than you may think, and might be useful to an archivist for purposes of dating. You might check out the IAMPAS site for info and examples.

[txomsy]

I think that the history of Humanity is more complex and interesting than you may think. I mean, writing only reflects partially the writer. And writers are humans in a huge variety of flavours, many of them willing to closely follow traditions and many as well disregarding them and trying to pave their own ways. That's often what drove progress, and changes in writing hands. And as with any other human endeavour, much of that variety would be the result of a mix and match process to suit the personal preferences of the writer.

 

From the copybooks and manuscripts I have downloaded from public libraries, I tend to feel that there is hardly any "style" in calligraphy, but just reference copybooks written by various masters that were used as a -more or less- rough guide by students to build up their own, personal style.

 

A case in point may be "modern" (and even more, "contemporary") calligraphy and lettering from the end of the 19thC till now: the amount of scripts, fonts, whatever you want to call them has exploded to extend to all limits of imagination and to overcome any standardization. Granted, most people will use "Arial" as the default in their Windows PC... but, does it mean it is "the standard writing" of our age?