Between the mind and the hand: Gender, art and skill in eighteenthcentury copybooks

The production, style and aesthetic status of script was a persistent theme in eighteenth-century English handwriting manuals, known as copybooks, where penmanship was put in the service of burgeoning global commerce and the display of rationality and politeness by both men and women. Eighteenth-century copybooks also presented visual and textual reflections on concepts of art and skill, and consequently are useful documents for understanding changing aesthetic attitudes toward various forms of creative work in the increasingly commercial, imperial and industrial culture of eighteenth-century Britain. Even as categories of liberal and mechanical arts were in the process of separation and codification, these copybooks suggest that the manual practice of writing was strongly connected to other forms of material and visual production, particularly that of drawing. This essay explores the visual and textual claims made by eighteenth-century English copybooks to argue that the practice of writing was understood as both an embodied and a gendered skill that was linked to changing ideas about artistic production in the period.