"Whoops!"

22 June 2023: The post’s title comes from my (hastily scrawled, I must note) marginal note when I came across this passage, discussing Mary Elizabeth Sherwood’s 1897 Manners and Social Usage:

“In her comments qualifying the link between penmanship and character, Sherwood nonetheless reminds her readers of the importance of letters ‘agreeable to the eye,’ and of the general link between correspondence and character: ‘We cannot enter into that great question as to whether or not handwriting is indicative of character, but we hold that a person’s notes are generally characteristic, and that a neat, flowing, and graceful hand, and a clean sheet, free from blots, are always agreeable to the eye’” (Mahoney 417).

Look, she isn’t saying people with my kind of handwriting are trash. She’ll leave that for others to prove. Fair enough. 

Work Cited

Mahoney, Deirdre M. “‘More Than an Accomplishment’: Advice on Letter Writing for Nineteenth-Century American Women.” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature, vol. 66, no. 3–4, 2003, pp. 411–23. EBSCOhost.