The idea that handwriting styles might differ meaningfully from one person to another—and that those differences could be a means of showing your true nature—really took off in the 19th century, around the time that business correspondence and records started being outsourced to the typewriter. As penmanship was freed from professional constraints, it became more personal. “It was really believed that handwriting could be the articulation of self, that indeed the character of script said something about the character of a person,” says Mark Alan Mattes, an assistant English professor at the University of Louisville and the editor of the upcoming collection Handwriting in Early America.
Nowhere was that belief better exemplified than in the field of graphology—basically, phrenology for handwriting. In the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe (who was taken with all manner of scientific measurements) published his analyses of the signatures of more than 100 writers, and how their lines and squiggles corresponded to each writer’s prose style. Of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s autograph, he wrote, “We see here plain indications of the force, vigour, and glowing richness of his literary style; the deliberate and steady finish of his compositions.” Poe was not as kind to the poet Lydia Sigourney: “From [the signature] of Mrs. S. we might easily form a true estimate of her compositions. Freedom, dignity, precision, and grace, without originality, may be properly attributed to her. She has fine taste, without genius.” An 1892 guide to graphology is more systematic, informing readers that people who connect all their letters at the base are “purely deductive” in their reasoning, while those whose letters have some elbow room are “purely intuitive.”
Graphological tendencies continued into the early 20th century, when researchers published studies proclaiming that readers could guess a person’s gender from their script with better-than-chance accuracy—as if students hadn’t still been taught that boys and girls should write in different ways as of just a few decades prior. Through the 1970s, scientists were plumbing handwriting for character traits; one study found that “missing i dots are related to the nonsubmissive, non-egocentric, socially interested person,” whereas the “number of circled i dots relates positively to the intelligent and sophisticated personality.”
Handwriting analysis moved further toward the fringe in the age of computer connectivity, when typing took over. “We are witnessing the death of handwriting,” Time proclaimed in 2009. Things have only gotten more digital since then. I now spend half of my waking life talking with my co-workers, and I have no idea what any of their writing looks like. Same for the subset of my friends who don’t happen to send birthday cards. One of my best friends is getting married next year, and I have never seen her fiancé’s handwriting. How am I supposed to know whether he tends toward deduction or intuition, whether he’s intelligent or socially interested, whether he’s an artist or a serial killer?