Chapter 9
Many theories over centuries have linked character to physical traits. One’s face is said to show character; the eyes are the window of the soul or, as it says in the book of Isaiah, “the show of their countenance doth witness against them.” The Greeks sometimes judged people according to which animal they supposedly looked like: those with “dog-like” noses were short-tempered, while those with “lion-like” noses were generous.1 Even handwriting was occasionally used to mark temperament before the nineteenth century: the emperor Nero apparently said of one of his courtiers that “his handwriting showed him treacherous,”2 and an eleventh-century Chinese philosopher stated that “handwriting can infallibly show whether it comes from a person who is noble-minded, or from one who is vulgar.”3
One of the first to argue that handwriting was related to personal character was a seventeenth-century Italian doctor, Camillo Baldi, who developed a theory and wrote a pamphlet explaining his system. “If the writing is both fast, even and well-formed, and appears to have been written with pleasure, it has probably been written by a man who knows nothing and is worthless, because you rarely find intelligent and prudent men who write neatly”4; however, “if the handwriting is uneven … he is likely to be choleric and apt to be unrestrained in following his desires.” No one took to Baldi’s system, probably because they could not conceptualize such a link, as handwriting at the time was more often correlated with status and rank, not individuality. A few other Europeans followed in Baldi’s wake, but their attempts to sell their insights into human character failed as well, save some traveling minstrels who performed handwriting analysis in circuses and as party tricks.
The conception that handwriting might offer insight into the writer began to gain traction in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romantic era, when spontaneity, originality, and individuality were prized. In America, such a Romantic interest in handwriting took the form of autograph collecting and analysis of the signatures of famous people. Edgar Allan Poe helped popularize this trend in a series he wrote for Graham’s magazine that aimed “to give the Autograph signature—that is, a facsimile in woodcut—of each of our most distinguished literati; second, to maintain that the character is, to a certain extent, indicated by the chirography; and thirdly, to embody, under each Autograph signature—some literary gossip about the individual, with a brief critical comment on his writings.”5 Poe’s critiques revealed as much about his own literary tastes and prejudices as anything else. He wrote that William Cullen Bryant, whose writing Poe did not like, had handwriting that looked like “one of the most commonplace clerk’s hands which we ever encountered, and has no character about it beyond that of the day-book and ledger.” A now-obscure female author showed “a strong disposition to fly off at a tangent.”6 Poe felt those who wrote as they had been instructed were less original than those whose handwriting departed from what they were taught in school.
By the mid-nineteenth century, a new hobby, autograph collecting, became popular, and autograph albums proliferated. Collectors asked illustrious figures to provide samples of their signatures, sometimes by writing to them and sometimes by asking them in person. But the most treasured signatures were those done without premeditation, garnered from the famous person unawares. As one collector advised: “We should come by it obliquely, and not by direct attack. A name written at the request of a stranger is only about as valuable as the same name stamped by machinery. To have any character, it should have been written in a careless or confidential moment.” 7 Therefore, so-called autograph harpies, as they were called, would come up with excuses—for example, asking a congressman to sign a fake petition.
Collectors ascribed a certain magic to these autographs. Through gaining a sample of a famous person’s writing, they could “drink inspiration from original fountains.” The well-known being solicited often got annoyed. One commented that it was like being asked for “a lock of one’s mental and moral hair,” and another that it was “a subtraction from our potency.” 8
It is a short step from prizing autographs by authors to believing handwriting reveals the inner self of ordinary folk, too, and to wondering if the strict lessons of writing masters were perhaps suffocating people’s individuality. Isaac D’Israeli, a British essayist (and father of Benjamin Disraeli), was another early handwriting romantic, and worried in 1823 that rote schooling was making people too mechanical; he thought writing masters made script too standardized and uniform. “Regulated as the pen is now too often by a mechanical process … the true physiognomy of writing will be lost among our rising generation.” 9 He argued that British writing masters forced students to use “automatic motions, as if acted on by the pressure of a steam-engine,” a method which ultimately produced writing “all appearing to have come from the same rolling-press … Our hand-writings [are as] monotonous as our characters in the present habits of society.”10 D’Israeli’s critiques spoke to the nation that handwriting was something distinguishable from what is machine-made, something that connotes individuality.
Graphology as a formal enterprise and a theory was invented when a French clergyman, Abbé Jean-Hippolyte Michon, yoked empirical science to the idea one could deduce character from handwriting. Born in 1806 in a village in western France, he was ordained as a priest in 1830. He served in a small parish school until 1842, when the church was closed. One of the other teachers at the school, Father Flandrin, a philosophy professor, told him about the analysis of character through handwriting. After the school closed, Michon took to preaching around France. He wrote treatises on the archaeology and history of his area of the country and was asked to travel to the Holy Land with a group of archaeologists, the only priest among scientists. He became one the best-known liberal Catholics of the time, founding a magazine in Paris calling for greater separation between church and state, reduced papal power, and greater democracy among the clergy. He published a book, On the Renewal of the Church, in 1860, which the Church promptly put in the Index of Prohibited Books. He was forced to publicly retract the book, after which he turned to writing pseudonymous anticlerical novels, including The Maudit, about a young priest struggling to reconcile his liberal views with the Church establishment. (The Maudit was a hit, translated into many languages, and although the Church tried to ferret out the author unsuccessfully, only after Michon’s death was his handiwork revealed.)11
After the first Vatican Council in 1868, which strengthened the power of the then ultraconservative church under Pope Pius IX, Michon became even more disillusioned and stopped fighting for reform. He started preaching for a new cause: handwriting analysis.
Michon’s first book on handwriting was The Mysteries of Handwriting, published in 1872 with Adolphe Desbarrolles, who believed in the relationship between handwriting and the occult. Michon quickly disavowed that book, given its association with the occult, as well as Desbarrolles’s work, which he did not think was sufficiently scientific. He founded a journal, La Graphologie: Journal de l’autographes, which, in its inaugural issue on November 18, 1871, used the term “graphology” for the first time. Michon offered free handwriting analysis to the journal’s first subscribers. He followed that with a lecture announcing his new science and then traveled across France and Europe to explain and demonstrate graphology. Michon evangelized for his cause: “Graphology has proved itself to be a new tool for the moral world … one that has appeared through divine intervention at the height of material advances brought about by the discovery of the steam engine and electricity.” 12
Michon published two further books elucidating his system, La méthode pratique de graphologie and Système de graphologie. A third text, Histoire de Napoléon ler d’après son écriture, was devoted to analyzing Napoleon’s handwriting throughout his life. In these books, Michon drilled into readers the importance of practicing graphology scientifically, which meant conducting painstakingly detailed empirical research. “I began by classifying my collection of autographs of strong-willed authors and weak-willed authors,” Michon wrote of his rigorous scientific method. “The comparative research of thousands of handwriting samples shows that all weak-willed people cross their ‘t’s feebly. The line is always weak, filiform, and terminates with a scarcely noticeable pin-head … [I]n contrast, all strong-willed writers cross their ‘t’s forcefully and firmly, while exerting strong pressure on their pens.”13
Michon worked to link religion and science to present a theory that would undergird both: that the soul shows itself scientifically through handwriting. Michon felt this did not occur in handwriting taught in school but rather when someone “enters into spontaneous and free life and wants to express his thoughts and feelings towards other people quickly, without effort, without study, without being concerned in the least about forming letters well or badly.” Then “he instinctively abandons his habits of calligraphy and shifts to a writing with unique characteristics”:
This philosophy of the manifestation of the soul through graphic signs is based on the intimate connection which exists between each sign … which emanates from the human personality, and the soul, which is the substance of that personality. Who can doubt that every word is the spontaneous and immediate translation of thought? And who can doubt that handwriting is as spontaneous and immediate a translation of thought as speech? All handwriting, like all language, is the immediate manifestation of the intimate, intellectual and moral being.14
Michon’s ideas caught on in Germany later in the nineteenth century. In 1890s Germany, the main proponent of graphology was Wilhelm Preyer, a physiologist who stated that handwriting was “brain writing.” Preyer divided the brain into the “mind,” which is rational (ego), and the “soul,” over which we have less control (id), and argued mind and soul are revealed through the motor actions one takes when writing. Preyer’s disciple, Ludwig Klages, explained that, in handwriting, the movement between mind and soul is “caught” and can be interpreted. A clerk writing a letter for his supervisor, Klages argued, would use standard-size letters, since he is at work; but when he writes a letter to his beloved, his true nature would come out, whether through larger capitals, wider spaces between words, or any of the many identifying signs of graphology.15
As the Germans took on graphology, Michon’s concept of the soul was slowly replaced by Freudian and Jungian theories of instinctual drives and psychological complexes to explain what comes out of our pens. The German psychoanalyst graphologists added more identifying signs; if someone put a lot of pressure on the pen, for instance, he had a strong libido. If he used “downward plunging strokes,” he had an earthy nature. As Freudian and Jungian theories of the individual psyche spread, so would the psychological analysis of handwriting. Other European countries developed graphological societies, and the science crossed to America in the twentieth century when June Downey published Graphology and the Psychology of Handwriting in 1919.
As graphology spread, it joined other pseudosciences, such as phrenology and eugenics, that used fake empiricism to discriminate. Phrenologists claimed that measuring the size of skulls and areas of the brain could determine character. Phrenology was used to justify European superiority over other races—even to create a hierarchy of races based on skull shapes—and to claim male superiority over women. Eugenics examined hereditary traits to make similar false claims about the superiority of races, ethnicities, and genders and advocated reproducing desired heredity traits and eliminating undesirable ones. Graphology had a role in similarly unsavory practices: Thomas Byerley, a British journalist, argued the physical act of writing could not be faked and so could be used to determine criminality and mental illness, unlike “in all other actions … [in which] some share of guile and deception may lurk, which it requires penetration, experience, and skill to be able to detect.” 16 Byerley claimed handwriting tells all. Exceptions were made to so-called rules of graphology to help smooth out problematic conclusions. For instance, geniuses with bad handwriting were excused from being labeled idiots, aberrants, or criminals because “men of intellect sometimes work under great nervous tension. They see ahead and feel the spirit of that which they are writing, and thoughts flow too quickly for the pen.”17 The flourishes and ascenders of a person’s script became a common tool for assessing employees to ascertain, for instance, if applicants are controlled by their minds, “indicated by the smoothness, evenness and refinement of their pen strokes; others are controlled by their bodily appetites, as indicated by the thickness and coarseness of the strokes,” wrote one expert.18 Graphologists had a steady business counseling people before answering marriage proposals as well.
Graphology continued to be popular, if slightly less so, throughout the increasingly empirical twentieth century. Today it is practiced by licensed experts, and in some cases handwriting by job applicants is analyzed by a graphologist as a precondition for employment. The British Academy of Graphology, founded in 1985, offers a diploma upon completion of a three-year course at the London College of Graphology. Continental Europeans, who invented graphology, are still the most serious about it. The European Deontological Association of Graphologists was founded in 1900 to “unite the European Graphological Associations in applying graphology on a higher scientific and quality level.” They adhere to the “Code of Deontology,” which outlines fourteen principles, including never displaying one’s graphological qualifications on professional documents “if these are associated with an activity concerned with the occult or divination” and abstaining from “issuing diagnoses in fields reserved for the medical profession.”19 The association comprises groups from western European countries: Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France.
The French are the most active practitioners of graphology. Graphologists claim that more than half of employers use graphology to some extent when screening job candidates (although the real number is hard to verify, as many employers do not disclose this practice, and some may use it only occasionally). Catharine Bottiau, a leading French graphologist, explains that “normally we are consulted once the client has already drawn up a shortlist of candidates. Then the candidates will be asked to write a motivational letter, using their own handwriting. We will examine the letters, and offer our advice. Usually this will tend to confirm the impressions already gleaned from interviews, the CV, personality tests and so on. But sometimes we can draw attention to aspects of personality that have been missed, and which might prove detrimental were the person to be recruited.” 20 A headhunter in France acknowledges that it works but he has no idea why: “Look, I place 100 or so people every year in very senior international positions. If graphology didn’t work, it would quickly become obvious, and I would lose my clients. But they keep coming back. I have no idea how it works, but to me it is obvious: the handwriting of a marketing guy is not the same as the handwriting of a sales guy, which is not the same as the handwriting of an artist or of an accountant!”21
Andrea McNichol’s 1991 Handwriting Analysis: Putting It to Work for You offers strategies for individuals to analyze people in their life, such as “who is lying about his age, which potential mate is more considerate, who cheated his customer and which babysitter is on drugs.” McNichol, whose author bio states that she has been “consulted by the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, Scotland Yard, the U.S. Department of Defense, and Fortune 500 companies,” explains that people who do not dot their i’s are untidy, and those who write in all capital letters are egotistical. Stable people cross their t’s in the middle of the ascender (upward stroke). Those who slant their words to the right are forward looking, whereas those who slant to the left look backward. If you use long descenders, as in the bottom of the letter g, you are sad, and if there are excessively wide spaces between letters, you are abnormal. As McNichol explains: “Abnormally wide spacing is extremely strange and abnormal because so few people do this. Anytime you see a writing that is abnormal, it means that the writer in abnormal … The abnormal distance he puts between each letter symbolizes the abnormal distance he puts between himself and other people. So this person is socially isolated.”* 22
Whether or not one takes stock in the findings of graphology, its rise signaled the shift to the meaning of handwriting as the unconscious manifestation of the authentic inner self, a concept we continue to hold today. Each person’s handwriting is considered unique. Why not, then, introduce handwriting as evidence in a court of law—to attempt to prove, say, that Grandpa really did change his will on his deathbed?
* Arthur Storey’s 1922 guide, A Manual of Graphology or the Study of Handwriting, interprets wide spaces differently, stating they indicate “lavishness, generosity and lucidity.”