Betsey Heath’s Handwriting Lessons

Last month Heather Wilson wrote on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Beehive blog about a copybook written out by Elizabeth Heath (1769–1853) in 1781, when she was a student at the Brookline school.

Wilson wrote:

The cover of her book is plain—the faded, splotched, brown paper does not even bear a title, or her name. Inside, however, Betsey’s personality shines through. At the bottom of each page, after copying lines, Betsey saved space for doodles. She always wrote her name, sometimes her school and the date, and then she added her flair.

On 3 July, twelve-year-old Betsey copied lines of “The living know that they must die” and then got to doodling, adding merry faces into two of her swirling lines.

On 9 August, she added squiggly lines, flashes of red ink amongst the black, and her school and the date crammed inside of a heart.

The doodling, however, was not the only unexpected find within Betsey’s book. On each page, above the doodles, Betsey copied down an aphorism, often one that rhymed.

Handwriting teachers assigned such aphorisms as penmanship practice—doubling, of course, as moral lessons. They even came to be called “copybook maxims.” The choice of sentiment was probably not up to the students. Still, they could reflect the spirit of the day.

The lines Betsey copied on 26 October 1781, however, were different. “Liberty, peace & plenty to the united states of America,” she wrote. The previous day’s lines had included the book’s only explicit Biblical reference (“Uriahs beautiful wife made King David seek his life”) and then the next day took on a distinctly patriotic tone. This was the only entry from her entire school year that was not a piece of wisdom, or advice. But, why?

Wilson deduced that the burst of patriotism at Betsy Heath’s school on that day came from learning about the British surrender to American and French forces at Yorktown earlier that month. Looking at other items in the M.H.S. catalogue, she noted that on 25 October John Carter printed a broadside with that news at Providence.

In fact, we can nail down the date that the news arrived at Boston.

TOMORROW: All we need is the right diary.