Illegibility: Reading and Insecurity in history, law and government

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 68, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 99-121

  Caplan, Jane ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350117107     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbp012     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. Letter from Varnhagen to Fouqué, 31 December 1811, Rahel Varnhagen im Umgang mit ihren Freunden (Briefe 1793-1833), Munich, 1967 (vol. 10 in series Lebensläufe, Biographien, Erinnerungen, Briefe), p. 313. I am indebted to Liliane Weissberg for this reference.
2. Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan, London, 2000
3. Jane Caplan, '"Speaking Scars": The Tattoo in Popular Practice and Medico-Legal Debate in Nineteenth-Century Europe', History Workshop Journal 44, autumn 1997
4. Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey, Princeton, 2001.
5. Arlette Farge's commentary on the archive as a site of manual copying by the historian, situated between childhood writing exercises and Benedictine monk-copyists, is pertinent here; so too her description of a document written phonetically phrase by phrase, so that the reader must speak it aloud in order to grasp the words: Le goût de l'archive, Paris, 1989, pp. 24f, 71-5.
6. Jack Goody points out that 'writing was not essential to the development of the state but of a certain type of state, the bureaucratic one': Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, Cambridge 1986, p. 92.
7. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Berkeley and Los Angeles, pp. 44f. See also Steven R. Fischer, A History of Writing London 2001, p. 22.
8. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, London, 1979, p. 3
9. Ian McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s-1820s, Berkeley, 2003.
10. Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society, Berkeley, 1993.
11. Michel Foucault, 'Governmentality', in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, Oxford 1991, p. 101
12. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978, Houndmills, 2007
13. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 31-47.
14. There is no law that is not written on the body ... It inscribes itself on parchment made from the skin of its subjects. It constructs them as a juridical body, makes them into its book...living beings are "put into text", cast as signifiers of rules': Michel de Certeau, 'Des outils pour écrire le corps', Traverses 14/15, 1979, p. 3.
15. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven 1998, p. 3.
16. Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 65, 214.
17. Messick, Calligraphic State, chap. 12
18. echoing Foucault in Discipline and Punish.
19. Gérard Noiriel, Réfugiés et sans-papiers: La république face au droit d'asile, XIXe-XXe siècle, Paris, 1991, p. 314.
20. Du papier a ̀la biometrie: Identifier les individus, ed. Xavier Crettiez and Pierre Piazza, Paris, 2006
21. Claudine Dardy, Objets écrits et graphiques a ̀identifier, Paris, 2004, p. 73
22. Irma van den Ploeg, The Machine-Readable Body: Essays on Biometrics and the Informatization of the Body, Maastricht, 2005.
23. There is an echo of this in Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, 2009.
24. Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 78.
25. Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 83.
26. See especially the essays by Veena Das, Mariane C. Fermé and Pradeep Jegnathan in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, ed. Veena Das and Deborah Poole, Santa Fe and Oxford, 2004
27. for similar European practices see for example Andreas Fahrmeir, 'Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth-Century Europe', in Documenting Individual Identity, ed. Caplan and Torpey, pp. 218-34
28. e siècle', in L'identification: Génèse d'un travail d'état, ed. Gérard Noiriel, Ilsen About and others Paris, 2007.
29. Veena Das, 'The Stigmatization of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility', in Anthropology in the Margins, ed. Das and Poole, p. 225.
30. An example given by Das is the traffic in illicitly obtained (and legally unnecessary) sterilization certificates in India in the 1970s, prompted by the linkage of city beautification, population control and entitlement to rehousing, a traffic which depended on a rich confusion of central government pressure, local bureaucratic corruption and popular rumour: Das, 'The Stigmatization of the State', pp. 239-41.
31. Feb. 1851 (National Archive, FO 800/382).
32. Dec. 1857 and 21 April 1864 (NA FO 800/382).
33. Horner to Fitzroy, 24 March 1853 (NA HO 45/4758). Horner could not afford to employ a secretary and was obliged to write out all his reports himself.
34. Edward Hertslet, Recollections of the Old Foreign Office, London, 1901, pp. 76-83
35. Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston, London, 1970, chap. 9
36. Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years 1784-1841, London, 1982, pp. 417-27
37. Kenneth Bourne, 'The Foreign Office under Palmerston', in The Foreign Office 1782-1982, ed. Roger Bullen, Frederick, MD, 1984. Many of these notes are quoted at length in these texts, which also include some reproductions.
38. See Robert Aguirre, 'Agencies of the Letter: The Foreign Office and the Ruins of Central America', Victorian Studies 46: 2, 2004, for a reading of Palmerston's notes in terms of the challenges of imperial governance;
39. also on empire as a system of information, Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London, 1993, pp. 2-7.
40. Hertslet, Recollections, p. 78.
41. An exception is Bourne, Palmerston
42. by contrast, the subject is not mentioned in Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks, Manchester, 1976
43. Jonathan Wild, The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880-1939
44. Houndmills, 2006, or Dalia Chakrabarti, Colonial Clerks: A Social History of Deprivation and Domination, Kolkata, 2005.
45. Charles Marvin, Our Public Offices, London, 1879, p. 50.
46. Other examples are quoted in Alan Delgado, The Enormous File: A Social History of the Office, London, 1979, pp. 19-20
47. and in Rodney Dale and Rebecca Weaver, Machines in the Office, London, 1993
48. see also the repeated comparisons with a machine or mill in Shan F. Bullock's novel, Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk, London, 1907, for instance pp. 73, 139f., 258ff.
49. See documents in NA HO/5280 and 5540
50. also The Times, 6 June 1854. Palmerston was perhaps less interested in the speed of writing than his clerks would have been: His perspective was exclusively that of the reader: 'The object should be not so much to teach children to write rapidly but to teach them to write distinctly so that what they write may be read rapidly' (Palmerston note, 19 June 1854, NA HO/5540).
51. Examples include William Stewart Thomson, Copying Manuscript Exercises, for Civil Service Examinations, Aberdeen, 1892
52. Robert Johnston, Copying Manuscript. Civil Service Specimens, London, 1875
53. W. H. Unger, The Student's Blue Book: Being Selections from Official Correspondence, Reports etc.; for Exercises in Reading and Copying, Manuscript, Writing, Orthography, Punctuation etc., London, n.d. [?1870].
54. The Principles of Penmanship as exhibited in Vere Foster's Bold Writing or Civil Service Copy Books, London, n.d., p. 1.
55. For example, Philips' Semi-Upright Copy Books, a series of twelve copy books for schools.
56. Civil service handwriting was explicitly proposed as a model for teaching writing in infant schools, on grounds that included its uniformity and superior legibility: See A Method of Teaching Civil Service Writing in the Infant School, London, 1895.
57. Henry R. Evans, The Shorthand Clerk: A Manual of Practical Instruction, London, 1880, p. 43.
58. The double promise of the typewriter was that it would deliver its users increased speed without compromising legibility - see for example, A. D. Southam, Typewriting as a Means of Earning a Livelihood, London, 1894, p. 13.
59. Quoted in Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance, Stanford, 1990, pp. 233-4.
60. Tamara Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, New Haven, 1996, pp. 12-14.
61. This fine study of American handwriting history has no parallel for Britain, but see Randall McGowen, 'Knowing the Hand: Forgery and the Proof of Writing in Eighteenth-Century England', Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 24: 3, 1998, for pertinent observations on handwriting and penmanship in this period.
62. C. H. Mitchell, Penmanship: A Guide to Good Handwriting for Civil Service, Commercial, Legal and General Purposes, London, 1882, pp. 5-6.
63. Frederick C. Cleaver, Papers on Penmanship, London, 1886, p. 12. Cleaver, a London boys' school teacher, also offered a tiresomely opinionated categorization of other national writing styles: 'the handwriting of the French is small ... and somewhat given to flourishing; it is the handwriting of a light-hearted, excitable nation. The handwriting of a German is thick, heavy ... the whole tends to have a solid look about it, and bespeaks a lethargic constitution. The handwriting of an Englishman is more free and flowing ... It possesses a character of its own, and stands apart from the handwriting of any other nation.'
64. Justin Watts, contribution in Signatures and Portraits as Trade Names: Seminar on the 18th November 1999, London, 1999, p. 2.
65. Jerome B. Lavay, Disputed Handwriting, Chicago, 1909, pp. 5-6.
66. See also the categorization of signatures in Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Lire et écrire: L'alphabétisation des français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, vol. 2, Paris, 1977, pp. 91-3, 99.
67. Rosemary Sassoon, The Art and Science of Handwriting, Oxford, 1993, p. 82.
68. Lavay, Disputed Handwriting, p. 5.
69. Lorna Brazell, Electronic Signatures Law and Regulation, London, 2004, p. 3.
70. Béatrice Fraenkel, La signature. Genèse d'un signe, Paris, 1992
71. Fraenkel, 'Remarques à propos des transformations en cours des procédures de signatures' (unpublished paper, Colloque EHESS, Paris, 2004).
72. See Christopher Alan Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, c. 1780-1870, Cambridge, 1996,
73. and Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company, Chicago, 2007, p. xvii.
74. Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 162.
75. Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 219.
76. Bayly, Empire and Information, pp. 246-7.
77. Charles Hardless, Jr., The Identification of Handwriting and the Detection of Forgery, Calcutta, 1914, p. 3.
78. Randall McGowen, 'The Bank of England and the Policing of Forgery 1797-1821', Past and Present 186, 2005
79. Philip Handler, 'Forging the Agenda. The Select Committee on the Criminal Laws Revisited', Journal of Legal History 25, 2004
80. also McGowen, 'Knowing the Hand'.
81. Documentation in India Office Records (IOR), L/PJ/6/499/file 75.
82. Officiating Secretary to the Chief Commissioner, Assam, to Secretary to the Government of India, Legislative Dept., 16 Dec. 1898; (IOR) L/PJ/6/ 499/file 75 (No. 133-L. & L. - 502 T-J).
83. Hardless [C.] and Hardless [C., Jr.], Forgery in India: A Practical Treatise on the Detection of Forgery dealing with the Languages of India Chunar, 1920, p. 7.
84. See copy of Report of Court of Session, Muttra District, Trial no. 5 of 1895, 25 March 1895 (IOR, L/PJ/6/516).
85. For the status of handwriting in the history of the English law of evidence, see Julius Stone, Evidence: Its History and Politics, London, 1991, chap. 21
86. Jennifer Mnookin, 'Scripting Expertise: The History of Handwriting Identification Evidence and the Judicial Construction of Reliability', Virginia Law Review 87: 8, 2001, especially Part 3
87. also, for the eighteenth century, McGowen, 'Knowing the Hand'.
88. John Pitt Taylor, A Treatise on the Law of Evidence as Administered in England and Ireland, London, 10th edn 1906, vol. 2, pp. 1,203, 1,336-45.
89. The Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (Act No. I of 1872), as Modified up to the 1st September 1906, Calcutta, 1906, _§st 45 and 47
90. C. D. Field, The Law of Evidence in British India, Calcutta, 1884, pp. 377-81.
91. Field was also exercised by what he saw as Indians' propensity to forge whatever was necessary to prove their case. There were parallels with verbal testimony too. Referring to Jeremy Bentham's representation of all witness testimony as a 'copy' of the facts in question, Field observed that 'if the copy may be incorrect, when the witness speaks the same language as the Judge, how much greater the room for incorrectness is there when the vernacular of the witness and of the Judge are different, and by a process of mental translation, there is presented to the Judge's mind a copy of the copy produced by the witness! The danger of inaccuracy in this respect, when European Judges sit to administer justice in a language foreign to them, cannot be over-exaggerated or too carefully guarded against' (Law of Evidence pp. 43-9).
92. See documentation in IOR, L/PJ/6/728, file 2039 and L/PJ/760, file 1330
93. also Percival J. Griffiths, To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police, London, 1971, p. 337.
94. This was the case of Adolf (or Adolph) Beck, sentenced to penal servitude in 1896 and again in 1904 for 'obtaining by false pretences', with erroneous handwriting evidence presented by a well-known expert, Thomas Henry Gurrin; see Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Case of Mr. Adolf Beck, HMSO Cd. 2315, 1904.
95. See Ram Prasad Srivastava and Charles E. Hardless, Case Law on Expert Evidence in India, Allahabad, 1934, chap. 4.
96. For the USA, see Mnookin, 'Scripting Expertise'.
97. Hardless and Hardless, Forgery in India, p. 3.
98. Hardless [C.]. and Hardless [C., Jr.], Faults and Fallacies in Handwriting Identification and Expert Evidence in India, Chunar, 2nd edn. 1919, pp. 1ff.
99. See Ludwig Klages, Das Problem der Graphologie. Entwurf einer Psychodiagnostik, Leipzig, 1910, pp. 19-27.
100. See Jacques Raveneau, Traité des inscriptions en faux et reconnoissances d'escritures et signatures par comparaison et autrement Paris, 1666.
101. For example Hans Gross, Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook London, 3rd edn, 1934, pp. 221-41,
102. and Herbert Streicher 'Zinken', in Handwörterbuch der Kriminologie ed. Alexander Elster and Heinrich Hagemann, Berlin/Leipzig, 1936, pp. 1,154-6.
103. Nicholas Hudson, Writing and European Thought 1600-1830, Cambridge, 1994, p. 32.
104. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, chap. 4, and pp. 7-11, 2, 21.
105. Classic here is also Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), London, 2002.