guesses at how this was written in 1922?

[fountain_new]

Document, 1922. Any guesses about how handwriting was taught to the writer and how (with what instrument and ink) she wrote it? The writer was female, 20 years old, grew up relatively well-to-do, attended boarding schools in the greater Philadelphia area.

 

Thank you!

[Mercian]

Hi,

it's only ever been professional 'scribes' - calligraphers and, prior to the widespread use of typewriters, 'business writers' - whose writing adheres closely to the models that they were taught.

'Normal'/'ordinary' people have always developed their own idiosyncratic variation on the handwriting model that they were taught in their youth.
And the older that one gets the more one's handwriting tends to deviate from the model, and become more and more 'individual'.

 

As such, I suspect that working out which handwriting model this writing is based-upon could be very difficult indeed.

 

Do you happen to know how old the lady who wrote this note was when she wrote it? Given that you know that it was written in 1922, knowing her age at the time of writing would enable you to make a rough guess of the era in which she was taught to write.
You could then look through the collection of vintage handwriting models/copybooks on IAMPETH.com, and see whether any of those models was around/taught in that era, and seems to be a good candidate for the basis of this handwriting.

→ link to copybooks etc on IAMPETH.com ←

Of course, if the lady grew up in, say, France, or Argentina, or Sweden, or Ireland, or Madagascar, the task of identifying the handwriting model will be made more difficult.

 

If you do know when the lady was born, and where she grew up, sharing that information here would perhaps enable anyone who happens to be familiar with the history of writing in that area in that era to make an educated guess at the identity of the handwriting model.

 

As for the writing implement that she used, one would have to guess a fountain pen or dip pen at that time, because ballpoints had not been invented.
I strongly doubt that it would be possible to narrow it down any further than that.
The idiosyncratic characteristics of any individual person's handwriting completely over-ride/dominate/disguise any potential potential differences that may be discernible about the width/shape/flexibility of the implement used to write it.
E.g. FPN member GClef can write what looks like edged-pen calligraphy when using a Bic ballpoint! 😮

→ link to a photo that shows this ← 🤯

→ link to the thread that has lots of examples of GClef's handwriting ←

 

You will have a similarly-intractable problem in attempting to identify the ink that was used, as the writing is very likely to have faded/changed colour as the ink has reacted with the paper and the atmosphere over the last 102 years.
So, unless you have access to a mass-spectrometry lab, and a comprehensive list of all ingredients (& in what proportions they were) used in all commercially-available inks that were produced in the period 1900-1925, I think that it won't be possible to say for certain what ink that is.

Even then, the ink may have been some variety of 'home-brewed' ink (e.g. walnut ink).

 

I wish you all the best in trying to identify these things, but I do think that it will be very difficult, and may in fact not be possible.

Good luck!

 

Slàinte,
M.

[fountain_new]

Thanks very much, @Mercian. I've added what I know to the first post -- age 20 at time of writing in 1922, attended boarding schools in the greater Philadelphia area.  Born 1901.

[I-am-not-really-here]

Curious how the writer shifts her lowercase 'e' from a reversed '3' (or reduced-in-size uppercase 'E') to a more normal cursive 'e' and back again.  And why all the breaks, e.g. hos p it al. As if the writer is not comfortable with cursive letter transition, maybe still learning the movements or was handwriting education interrupted and she's left with this pseudo-cursive hand.

 

Still readable by me but then it's rather close to how my writing has regressed after so many decades of printing.

[fountain_new]

1 hour ago, I-am-not-really-here said:

Curious how the writer shifts her lowercase 'e' from a reversed '3' (or reduced-in-size uppercase 'E') to a more normal cursive 'e' and back again.  And why all the breaks, e.g. hos p it al. As if the writer is not comfortable with cursive letter transition, maybe still learning the movements or was handwriting education interrupted and she's left with this pseudo-cursive hand.

 

Still readable by me but then it's rather close to how my writing has regressed after so many decades of printing.

I wondered about some of this, too. To my knowledge, her education was not meaningfully interrupted, but who knows. 

 

I thought she didn't like linking p to a preceding letter, but then she does it plainly in "I went up" in line 4 from the end. 

 

I enjoy the variation in her lowercase t's (cross over nearby letters, crossed long and straight, crossed at an angle as in the two occurrences of After, linked to the following h).

[fountain_new]

Same writer, 1916. Personal journal.

 

 

 

 

 

[Chris1]

I found it odd that m looks like w and n looks like u. But once I'd 'got my eye in' I could read the text pretty readily.

[Mercian]

18 hours ago, fountain_new said:

Same writer, 1916. Personal journal.

 

I'm rather surprised by the large degree of variation in the handwriting within the entries from August and December 1916.

I wondered if she might have been writing them late at night, in a room that was very cold.
But the greatest variation is in the entry from August, when one would expect the temperature to be the least-inhospitable 🤷‍♂️

 

I also find myself wondering what 'the weekly questions' in March were 🤔

Maybe her family was helping her practice her responses to the questions that she would be asked at her 'confirmation'?

The only thing that I can say for certain is that they were/are #NoneOfMyBusiness

[fountain_new]

@Mercian No idea what the weekly questions were.

 

The family were not of a denomination that practices confirmation -- plus this was the year she turned 15.

 

Would writing in the cold cause such wild variation as seen in the August entry? 

 

Maybe she was just amusing herself.

 

@Chris1 Agree, several of the forms in isolation look odd to me, but I find I can read the text pretty easily.

 

 

[Mercian]

3 hours ago, fountain_new said:

Would writing in the cold cause such wild variation as seen in the August entry? 

 

Not necessarily the specific variations that are shown in that entry, but if you've ever become really cold, you will have found that your fine motor control has suffered markedly, as your body tries to keep as much of your blood as possible in your body's core, rather than allowing it to go to your extremities (e.g. your fingers), from where it would lose heat to the outside world.

 

If one is trying to write while one has very cold hands, or especially if one is cold enough to be shivering, this may result in lesser control, and thus variations in handwriting.

 

E.g. my school had my age cohort sit some of our 'mock' (i.e. practice) exams for the public exams that we would sit at age 16 in an old (17th/18th Century?) chapel on the outskirts of the school grounds.

It was unheated (IIRC the heating was either broken, or had been turned off in that building to save money). On two of the days of our 'mocks' in particular it was very cold. We all had difficulty writing, and a couple of my friends said that the ink in their pens had become gooey, and wasn't flowing very well.

I remember being very glad when they let us out of the chapel, and we could get back in to the buildings that were heated!

 

But this 'explanation' obviously doesn't 'work' for writing done in August.

 

I also 'slightly' doubt that a fifteen year old girl would have been drunk when trying to write in her journal, which removes another possible 'explanation' for the variations 😁

 

3 hours ago, fountain_new said:

Maybe she was just amusing herself.

 

Seems like a good explanation to me
Especially if she had been e.g. trying out her writing with her non-dominant hand. Not that it looks like that to my eyes.
I think that she perhaps decided to write her first line as fast as she possibly could, and her final line only slightly less-speedily.
Most of the writing is clear to me, but I can't decipher the name of the spring, nor the final two words (after "And the same after Church") of that entry.

[fountain_new]

@Mercian It seems unlikely to me, too, that she was drunk while writing that entry.

 

Interesting about fine motor control. I've been plenty cold, but never that cold while trying to write.

 

My reading of the entry in question:

 

Had my lesson then walked to Litus spring with everybody came back and went swimming. did the same after lunch except Litus

 

i.e. after lunch, she repeated the same activities, minus the spring.

 

I would love to find out where Litus Spring was. Google gave me nothing. It may have been destroyed long ago, for all I know. If I could figure out which boarding school she was at, or exactly where, that might help...

[Mercian]

16 hours ago, fountain_new said:

Had my lesson then walked to Litus spring with everybody came back and went swimming. did the same after lunch except Litus

 

i.e. after lunch, she repeated the same activities, minus the spring.

 

Thank you for that.
FWIW, I agree with you

 

16 hours ago, fountain_new said:

I would love to find out where Litus Spring was. Google gave me nothing. It may have been destroyed long ago, for all I know. If I could figure out which boarding school she was at, or exactly where, that might help...

 

Perhaps 'Litus spring' is an abbreviation, or just a nickname that was in common use in her school at that time 🤷‍♂️

[knarflj]

Fwiw, I would have guessed "Titus" rather than "Litus".  Not finding a "Titus spring" anywhere near Phila. on a web search, either, though, so not sure that helps any. 😕

[AAAndrew]

Having seen all of the pages I'm pretty solidly convinced they were using a fountain pen for the 1922 page. The line has too little modulation and the quality of the ink is too consistent to be a dip pen. I've written 1000s of pages with over a hundred types of dip pen and this just doesn't look like it.

I would say probably a fountain pen for the March 1916, as well as the August entries. The December entry, though, looks like a dip pen. The edges are very clear and sharp, sharper than you tend to get from a tipped fountain pen nib, but is common for untipped dip pens.  Almost certainly a "fine stub" like an Esterbrook 312 Judge's Quill. 

[fountain_new]

On 11/11/2024 at 10:46 PM, AAAndrew said:

Having seen all of the pages I'm pretty solidly convinced they were using a fountain pen for the 1922 page. The line has too little modulation and the quality of the ink is too consistent to be a dip pen. I've written 1000s of pages with over a hundred types of dip pen and this just doesn't look like it.

I would say probably a fountain pen for the March 1916, as well as the August entries. The December entry, though, looks like a dip pen. The edges are very clear and sharp, sharper than you tend to get from a tipped fountain pen nib, but is common for untipped dip pens.  Almost certainly a "fine stub" like an Esterbrook 312 Judge's Quill. 

Wow, thank you very much!

[SpencerianDream]

I love deciphering these old journals and letters, it’s like a window into another world. It sounds like she just had a baby in the first entry? 
 

If I had to guess “style” I’d say it was the standard Palmer type cursive that came to supplant Spencerian in 20th century America. It’s interesting that she has a leftward slant, that is somewhat unusual. 

[fountain_new]

10 hours ago, SpencerianDream said:

I love deciphering these old journals and letters, it’s like a window into another world. It sounds like she just had a baby in the first entry? 
 

If I had to guess “style” I’d say it was the standard Palmer type cursive that came to supplant Spencerian in 20th century America. It’s interesting that she has a leftward slant, that is somewhat unusual. 

Thank you. Yes, I also really enjoy reading this stuff (and I knew the writer, but when she was in her 80s and 90s). 

 

Yes, the first thing I posted was her record of the time after her first child's (my grandmother's) birth.

 

I found myself writing with a bit of a leftward slant sometimes once I started writing with a fountain pen, and well before I ever looked at her writing, but I can't imagine that a bit of a leftward slant when controlling a nib is heritable at this distance...

[Sailor Kenshin]

Watching thread.  Interesting indeed.

[fountain_new]

On 11/14/2024 at 8:53 AM, Sailor Kenshin said:

Watching thread.  Interesting indeed.

Since it's gotten more interest than I expected, the next time I peek in the archive, I can see whether there are any other interesting samples from the same person. Or I could even check the diary I have here and see if there's anything else noteworthy.

[sandy101]

The line variation could eflect the speed of the writing with a flexible nib.

 

The first entry, she's writing pages - it shows that she's probably sitting at a desk and writing methodically and slowly. A lot of thought is going into it - which means a lot of concentration is going into the writing.

 

The later entries reflect a slapdash approach. The writer is making short notes and is likely writing quickly to get it over with - as a result the nib is flexing every where, because the hand is applying uneven pressure, so the nib is flexing every where and you get a whole lot of variation.

 

It's difficult to write quickly and neatly with a nib that flexes. Certainly, I get the same effect with my vintage nibs. It shows that stiff nibs have their advantages as you do not have to take as much care and attention and can dash off a quick note much easier.