Joe Bennett: New technology has meant handwriting has become obsolete

With new technology, handwriting's obsolete. And something's been lost from the world. Photo / 123rf

My mother read a lot but got her books from the library. Her favourite author was Ngaio Marsh whom I didn't know how to pronounce.

One of the very few books we owned, parked permanently on a shelf by the record player, was A Tale of Two Cities bound in dark blue boards. I never saw anyone read it.

What happened to it after my mother died I don't know, but if it survived the house clearance its current owner could open it to find a squiggly line that runs across the marbled end-papers, like the printout from a seismograph. I did that. I did it aged three or four. I did it when still illiterate. I did it with an orange crayon. And then I showed it to my mother in the kitchen and said, 'Look, mum, I can write.'

What I was emulating was my parents' handwriting which was all I had ever seen. Both wrote fluently, my father so fluently that the pen just skidded across the paper in what was effectively a single horizontal line relieved at intervals by humps and hollows and the odd dot.

I have a couple of letters he wrote to my mother. How long it took her to decipher them, I don't know. It took me a while and some of that was guesswork.

My mother's hand was easier on the eye and mind. It had a regularity and liquid fluency of lettering. And even when her brain was raddled with dementia her writing never lost its neatness.

Both my parents were of their time. When they were at school great emphasis would have been placed on handwriting.

They would have had copy books, exercise books in which they wrote the same phrase repeatedly so as to gain consistency of hand. Education back then was a sterner business than now, with more things done by rote.

In a rural museum in Southern England I once came across a copybook from 1722. It was open at a page where the following line was written a dozen times:

Conceal your wants from those who cannot help you.

The lettering was firm and faultless, a thing of beauty. The author was Henry Adams, aged eight.

In 1722 most people were illiterate. Those who did learn to write were in demand to keep accounts, or registers of birth and death, or tax receipts, or any of a thousand other forms of recording. There were no typewriters. Clarity and neatness mattered. Handwriting was both a craft and a trade.

And that craft goes way back beyond little Henry Adams. It goes back to the greatest copiers of all, the monks. Back when there were no printing presses, every copy of the Bible was a unique manuscript, a word that means literally written by hand.

The monks worked in freezing cells in the great abbeys and the texts they created are among the most beautiful of all man-made things.

So neat handwriting has thousands of years behind it. But then something changed and it happened around my generation. I have a few things I wrote at school around the age of eight.

To compare my handwriting with Henry Adams' copybook is telling. His letters are uniform; mine swell and shrink. His hand is sure; mine wobbles. Aged eight in 1722 his hand is disciplined. Aged eight in 1965 mine's not.

But while there is a difference in craft, there is also a difference in content. Henry Adams wrote what he was told to write.

I wrote what I chose to write. He wrote other people's words. I wrote my own words. He was instructed to copy. I was encouraged to invent. My self was considered important. His wasn't. Henry and I are on either side of the romantic revolution and the cult of the child.

Whether that led to a better life for Henry or for me, I'll leave to others to decide. But it certainly led to worse handwriting for my generation.

And as for succeeding generations, well, last month I taught a day at secondary school. I watched a few kids write and it was not a pretty sight. The reason isn't far to seek. With new technology, handwriting's obsolete. And something's been lost from the world.