Cursive Script

Is cursive script so-named because it is cursed? Probably not, I suppose, but instances of it have definitely brought forth curses – at least from me!

I’m working to transcribe the hundreds and hundreds of handwritten pages prepared for the Mitchell Library by Louisa Lawson’s daughter, Gertrude. In them, Gertrude provides a ‘Family History of the Lawsons’ and, in another document, ‘Louisa Lawson life and work not including womanhood suffrage’. Never fear, the suffrage material is provided separately. She’s also provided scrapbooks full of cuttings of Louisa’s published works, typed up transcripts of Louisa’s speeches and recollections, plus many priceless family photos, drawings and certificates.

As you might imagine, I’m very grateful to Gertrude. 

And in order to transcribe the material, I’m forced to read her very closely and carefully. It’s paying off – every now and then some particular insight clicks into place, or she tells a small story with much larger implications. She also includes some wonderfully vivid anecdotes that will surely make their way into my biography.

I’ve been particularly struck by how much laughter she describes, particularly Louisa’s.

As all these thoughts occur to me, I just insert them into my transcript in a different colour font, at whatever point the idea arrived – after all, the transcript is only for my own use, and I’m mainly doing the work so that I can later perform searches (using Word) on Gertrude’s recollections. For instance, what was that thing she wrote about the “dog”? A quick search and there it is, Henry’s dog Pedro, who “disliked Henry swimming, he would retrieve him every time he entered the water” and usually by the hair of his teenaged master’s head!

But, as I type away for hour after hour, I do sometimes wish she’d written just a little more clearly.

To be fair, Gertrude’s handwriting is far from awful and – given that she was writing in 1920 rather than 1620 – usually not too hard to read, especially once you get an eye for it. Sometimes, if I can’t quite make out a particular word, the context and the surrounding words make it clear. But other times, particularly when she writes about people’s or place names, I get frustratingly stuck. Hence the cursing.

At least Gertrude never resorts to ‘crossing her letters’, where a document contains two separate sets of writing, one written over the other at right-angles. My previous subject, Elizabeth Macarthur, occasionally crossed her letters when paper in the young colony of New South Wales was hard to come by and I found those documents unreadable.

Luckily for me, some kind soul at the library had already transcribed them. At some point I guess I’ll talk to the library to see if they’d like my own transcriptions (with my notes redacted!) in the hope that I can pay it forward, and make some future researcher’s life a little easier.

Which is not to say that I don’t also love and adore a beautiful handwritten document.

Many documents in the archive – just routine records when they were created – now seem like calligraphic artworks.

Here’s a page from the records of the Lady Kennaway, a sailing ship that docked at Circular Quay in 1842 carrying over 200 British emigrants – including Louisa’s mother Harriet, and her mother’s sister Emma.

Isn’t it beautiful?

If you’re not too distracted by the exquisite copperplate, you might be able to see that Harriet Elizabeth Wynn, housemaid, arrived as a single woman aged 16 (fifth row from the bottom). Harriet could both read and write but her older sister Emma Sophia (the row above Harriet), a nursemaid aged 17, could only read. Perhaps Emma’s handwriting wasn’t beautiful enough.

Dr Andre Brett, lecturer and historian at Curtin University, was only half-joking when he posted on social media that “The history profession has reached a point where we are going to need to teach cursive (at the least the reading of it) to historians who did not grow up using it. This would differ from ordinary education in cursive as it would account for changing styles over time … My own postgrad cohort joked about gravitating to projects with typewritten sources.” Dr Brett has also noted that he can’t write in cursive script on the board anymore, because too few of his students can read it.

Dr Brett’s comments about younger people not being able to read cursive script certainly ring true for me. My grown-up children (aged 19 and 21) can’t read my late mother’s handwritten recipes (she was born in 1932), and struggle to read my own handwritten cards and letters to them.

A few years ago a young public servant emailed me a medical document from the 1930s, one that she and I had spent a long time gaining permissions to access. She rang to tell me she’d found it but was at pains to point out that, given the handwriting, it was actually illegible. She couldn’t read a word.

Reader, I could read it.

And if you grew up writing in cursive script, you probably could have too.

I suppose younger historians will have to resort to AI, feeding their cursive script documents into a machine reader – and really, what could possibly go wrong with that…?

Notes

• According to the excellent site etymonline.com, cursive is from French cursif (18c.), from Medieval Latin cursivus “running,” from Latin cursus “a running”, and from past participle of currere “to run”.
• The word to describe transcribing old documents is palaeography. Isn’t that wonderful? I wrote about palaeography years ago, in relation to Elizabeth Macarthur, here: https://michellescotttucker.com/paleography-transcribing-old-letters/
• For useful hints on how transcribe old letters, try this online tutorial at the UK National Archives: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/palaeography/ The best bet, though, seems to be just having a go.