These stock phrases make clear that a “good hand” was defined as much by the person manipulating the pen as by the letters inscribed on paper. While we might trace Salisbury’s progress as a penman by the changing appearance of his handwriting, his contemporaries would also have considered the changing appearance of his body as he wrote. Polite penmanship was a total body effort: That was the message drilled home by the “practical” writing guides published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Claiming to duplicate in book form the training offered by writing masters, authorities like George Fisher and Nathan Towne dictated the correct placement of every finger in the hand that held the pen and cautioned students never to allow the “ball and fleshy part of the hand” to touch the paper. But they also prodded would-be writers to pull their elbows in close to their sides, to keep their pens inclined toward their right shoulders. They insisted variously that writers sit “pretty upright” or that they lean forward over the table, making sure to keep their heads within the same plane as their spines.38
These dicta obviously helped novice writers learn to control the flow of ink and to protect their sleeves and cuffs from stains. But they also prescribed a bodily aesthetic. Like the pen-wielding sitters painted by John Singleton Copley or Charles Willson Peale, the writers conjured by Fisher and Towne could turn gracefully from their work to acknowledge observers. They arranged themselves, their pens, and paper to communicate that they were engaged with but never consumed by the texts they produced. Real writers and painted ones drew attention to the performative and social contexts of penmanship, underscoring an aesthetic that encompassed process as well as product.
Figure 4. John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815), John Hancock, 1765. Oil on canvas, 49 1/8 × 39 3/8 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Deposited by the City of Boston, L-R 30.76d statement. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Student Bodies
Learning to cultivate and demonstrate one’s taste, like learning more generally, was an intensely embodied process. For one thing, the richly aestheticized education promoted by early national academies depended on the senses, especially sight. It was manifested materially, physically. Thus it is not surprising that teachers paid careful attention to the students’ bodies. For another, educators, parents, and students were heirs to a long-standing western tradition that elevated a mastery of the body into a hallmark of gentility, imagining it as a central element of what one scholar has called “the civilizing process.” An individual’s mind and affections correlated with his or her physical form.
This inclination to view the body as the initial register of character was invested with new political and cultural significance after the Revolution, when Americans were keen to find evidence of themselves as a people who were truly republican and intensely worried that they would come up short.39 The same assumptions and anxieties that connected the life of the mind to the body politic also connected the life of the mind to the bodies of students themselves. Accordingly, many academies incorporated into their curricula what we might call a course in physical education, one that started at the washbasin and ended in the ballroom.
First, students learned to pay close attention to their bodies. Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy included instructions about hygiene in the school’s long list of rules, requiring “Cleanliness in Dress and Person” and directing students to take care that “the head be combed and the hands and Face washed before coming to School.” Young women were also encouraged to heed their appearance. Every week, students at the Litchfield Academy were directed to inventory their bodies as well as their souls. Just as they “prayed to God in whose hands your breath is” they were to review whether they had “been neat” in their “persons” or careless with their clothes, whether they had combed their hair with a “fine tooth comb” and cleaned their teeth every morning. This preoccupation with the well-groomed body as a manifestation of inner character worked its way into book learning. “Neatness is the natural garb of a well ordered mind and has a near alliance with purity of heart,” wrote one Litchfield student, pointing out that “Richardson whose taste was exquisite as his imagination glowing has painted his Clarissa as always dressed before she came down for breakfast.”40
Regular and diligent grooming was a precursor to physical grace. In repose and in motion, students were taught to conform to the kinetic conventions of refinement. The goal was a kind of erect ease through the torso and neck, leaving one’s arms, legs, and head free to trace Hogarth’s line of beauty. Failure to master those conventions was a matter of real concern. Elizabeth Way, who operated a school for girls in eighteenth-century Delaware, was especially vigilant in policing the bearing of her charges. Way reportedly hung necklaces of “Jamestown-weed burrs” round the necks of students who let their heads hang forward and strapped both steel rods and “morocco spiders” to the backs of young girls inclined to slouch. In 1802, fourteen-year-old Lucy Sheldon shamefully reported that when she and her peers at Litchfield assembled to hear “Miss Pierce tell our faults,” she had been singled out for “holding my arms stiff which made me appear awkward, and which I shall certainly endeavor to correct.”41
If steel rods and public scoldings discouraged bad posture, dancing fostered physical grace and infused it with politeness. Both a physical discipline and a mode of interaction, dancing represented the union of genteel body and genteel sociability. Accordingly, many schools made dancing lessons available to male and female students for an extra charge. As Mary Bacon put it in an 1820 composition, dancing was “professedly an essential part of a good education as correcting any awkwardness of gestures giving an easy and graceful motion to the body.” She was not alone. Speaking before Philadelphia’s Young Ladies’ Academy, Swanwick suggested that dancing promoted health and rendered “the figure and motions of the body easy and agreeable.” The principals of the Clermont Seminary went further. They promised parents that dancing lessons combined with a close supervision of their sons’ manners would impart “a taste and relish for decorum, and politeness,” which was “no small part of education.” Indeed, the Reverend James Cosens Ogden told the notables assembled for the dedication of the Portsmouth Academy in 1791 that dancing contributed decisively to a broader social good by dispelling “the rust of prejudice.” When diverse and even divided men and women see one another in their “best dress and most pleasant face,” he enthused, “spleen flies—harmony reigns.” Amid the rancorous political climate of the 1790s, some observers hoped that society could serve as a balm to the wounds of partisan politics.42
Certainly, dancing attracted its share of critics. The novelist and educator Hannah Webster Foster surely spoke for many when she listed dancing among “the most fascinating, and of course the most dangerous,” of accomplishments. The dangers were especially acute for women. A woman might well appear “polite and elegant” while executing the steps of a cotillion. But the thrill of self-display and the gratification of public recognition all too often lead to “unbounded wants,” to psychic ambitions and physical desires that could not be satisfied within the realm of propriety. Because the ballroom was the setting for collaborative, ensemble performances, a woman who aspired to command center stage was surely headed for trouble. The boundary between the polite and the erotic was disconcertingly porous. Even Bacon, who credited dancing with erasing “awkward gestures,” worried that “modern manners may however have carried the fondness for this accomplishment to an immoderate extreme.” She wondered whether “exceling in this particular does not inspire too great a fondness for dissipated pleasures and proportionably abate the ardur for more retired virtues.” After all, she reasoned, “a woman who can sparkle and engage the admiration of every beholder at a birth night or a ball is not always content with the grave office of managing a family.”43
Removing dancing from a school’s curriculum did not remove it from its culture. Many of the same schools that excluded dancing from their course lists included balls on their social calendars, suggesting that educators and parents expected students to have at least a passing familiarity
