Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWork in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840. Aileen Douglas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x+229.Rachael Scarborough KingRachael Scarborough KingUniversity of California, Santa Barbara Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFor several years, it has been commonplace in eighteenth-century studies—in a bid for relevancy or as a way to clarify an argument—to liken the effects of the period’s changing communications media to our own experiences with the incorporation of digital media into everyday life (I frequently make this comparison, in both writing and teaching). This can be done in a fairly simplistic fashion, by equating the “death of print” to the impact that print itself supposedly had on the circulation of texts in manuscript; but it is increasingly being done in a more nuanced and accurate way, by using our own awareness of the complex, contextual, and nonhierarchical interrelations among digital, printed, written, spoken, and filmed media today as a portal into eighteenth-century “print culture.” Aileen Douglas’s Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 does not explicitly make the connection between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, but the book is an important contribution to the new, multimedia book history that has been particularly invigorating for eighteenth-century studies. Focusing on how printed texts and images made visible new ideas about handwriting, Douglas reveals manuscript as not a static but a changing medium. As she writes, “Long after its supposed demise, script not only persisted but continued to evolve as a potent and dynamic technology” (2). Our own understanding of how print continues to evolve in the “digital age” supports this assertion.In Work in Hand, Douglas helps us see not the grand categories “manuscript” and “print” but the variety of kinds of handwriting and printing and how they illuminated one another. Her strongest and most original points in this vein come in her attention to the significance of engraved facsimiles of handwriting, which appeared in penmanship manuals, biographies, and letter collections. While studies of print, even those focused on its interactions with other media, tend to see it as a synonym for “letterpress,” Douglas highlights how it was often in the “peculiarly distinctive conjoined form of the engraved, printed facsimile” that the manuscript medium came to take on new identities (128). Writing masters’ printed copybooks disseminated the newly dominant handwriting style of English round hand, which emphasized speed and legibility and characterized “English writing as national, commercial, and masculine” (45). Conversely, italic handwriting became increasingly gendered as feminine over the course of the century (64). But at the same time as engraved samples of handwriting standardized these “fonts” and their normative meanings, they also revealed a multitude of ideas about print and script. Writing masters debated the place of delight and artistry in handwriting and emphasized their own intellectual process over the apparently mechanical copying of the engravers, even though without engravers the authors’ work could never reach a reading public. The in-between media status of engraved facsimiles—which Douglas also discusses in the context of publications like the Paston Letters, reproductions of Samuel Johnson’s and Alexander Pope’s handwriting, and William Blake’s “illuminated printing”—“consolidated script’s place in print, encouraging interpretations derived from seeing, as well as reading” (124).After two chapters focused on the practical and educational aspects of acquiring literacy and penmanship, particularly in the context of colonial and working-class education, Douglas shifts to discussion of how a variety of canonical authors understood the physical processes of writing and printing, with individual chapters focused on Johnson, Pope and Blake, and Maria Edgeworth. She argues that, as manuscript became increasingly associated with the individual and human over the course of the eighteenth century, authors had to negotiate the borders between their printed bodies of work and their personal writings such as letters and journals. The publication of Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations after his death—which revealed his frequent inability to compel himself to write—undercut his image as the embodiment of professional authorship, while Edgeworth’s educational interest in encouraging working-class literacy while confining it within certain bounds engendered her novels’ recurrent character of the working-class copyist who achieves social mobility through his manipulation of written documents. While Douglas makes a number of nice points here about how professional authorship, rather than solely implicating “print culture,” involved a rearticulation of manuscript values as well, at times the material linkages between handwriting and print become less clear as her attention turns to the somewhat more vague category of “writing.” The moments that most straightforwardly connect to her central thesis about how “the presence and power of print drew fresh attention to script as a specific form of writing with distinctive graphic significance” (2)—such as her insightful reading of Blake’s shift from Roman “hand” in Songs of Innocence to italic in Songs of Experience as marking the earlier volume’s “openness … and aspiration toward universal legibility” (144)—show the benefits of reading poetry alongside texts such as penmanship manuals, plans for Indian school systems, and debates over Sunday school writing instruction.The final body chapter returns to proposals for working-class education, a fact that points to a certain organizational weakness in the volume. There are, in a sense, two introductions, with both the introduction and chapter 1 offering overall statements of the argument and previews of examples that will be discussed in more detail in later chapters. Chapters 2 and 3, as noted above, then focus on the practical processes of learning handwriting, while 4 to 6 offer close readings of literary works and 7 circles back to discussions of education. This structure creates difficulty for the reader; given that the book does not follow a strictly chronological organization, it seems odd to defer arguments that relate more directly to earlier chapters for nearly one hundred pages. In some ways, it gives the sense that Douglas’s subject is so expansive, and so in need of more scholarship, that there could be two books here, each of which would allow for more specificity about the “co-existence of script and print” (2). There were times when I wanted a bit more argumentative oomph, as when Douglas writes, for example, “the book’s primary interest is not in opposing script and print but rather in gaining a fuller sense … of how a print author’s scribal acts and practices may best be understood,” or when she proposes “to reconsider the phenomenon of eighteenth-century script so as more fully to recognize and contextualize its graphic intelligence” (13, 15). How should we understand these scribal acts and practices? What is eighteenth-century script’s “graphic intelligence”? The book’s capaciousness at times led to a sense of raising (important, intriguing) questions but not fully answering them.Work in Hand reminds us about the necessity not only to consider manuscript and print in tandem with one another, but also to see them in all of their bibliographical complexity. Unpacking the process by which a writing instructor adapted existing handwriting models to scribally produce his own specimen for an engraver to then carve with a burin onto a copper plate, in order for the book to be used to death by schoolchildren writing on paper and slates, fruitfully elucidates the complex relationships among multiple media. Douglas importantly adds to the body of work forcing us to see how eighteenth-century “print culture” both depended upon handwriting and shaped new ideas about the manuscript medium. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 3February 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700684HistoryPublished online October 04, 2018 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.