Readers Writing: The Curriculum of the Writing Schools of Eighteenth Century Boston

Abstract

Housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, is a collection of 188 single-page manuscripts penned between 1748 and 1782 by 117 boys at Boston’s three eighteenth-century writing schools. Because of reduplication, there are only 106 different texts on the 188 manuscripts. This collection formed the basis for a reconstruction of the form and content of the writing school curriculum. The source for two-thirds of the pieces longer than a single sentence was George Bickham’s Universal Penman (1743). At a time when writing was equated with penmanship, school progress was measured in terms of mastering successive scripts, beginning with the round hand. The 106 different texts copied by the boys, when analyzed for their content, were found to portray the secularism, rationalism, optimism, and materialism of the eighteenth century.