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Never has there been a race of professors in any art, who have exceeded in solemnity and pretensions the practitioners in this simple and mechanical craft.(Isaac D'Israeli, 'The History of Writing-Masters')'The race of professors Isaac D'Israeli so comprehensively dismissed were the writing-masters or penmen of the early eighteenth centurymen such since his essay formed part of his immensely popular and frequently reprinted Curiosities of literature, his dismissal was an influential one. Nor was D'Israeli's scorn without some measure of justice, for the copy-bookscollections of printed writing samples made from engravings and intended for the use of noviceswhich were the writingmasters' chief claim to fame, were indeed often characterised both by solemnity and pretension. Decked out with grandiose portraits of their authors, and embellished with iconography that might include cherubs, crowns of laurel, quills and Latin inscriptions, the copy-books sought to assert the writers' gentlemanly status as well as their skill. The penman's own talents might be asserted through testimonials solicited from colleagues, while intemperate denunciation of rivalsand those rivals' views on esoteric aspects of the writing processwas common. To D'Israeli, all of this was comical proof of egomania and intellectual vacuity. He left it to 'more ingenious investigators of human nature' to explain the powerful delusions of men, 'who have been generally observed to possess least intellectual ability in proportion to the excellence they have obtained in their own craft'.2 It would be ironic, however, if the vaingloriousness the writing-masters occasionally exhibited in their attempts to bolster their social and professional pretensions were responsible not merely for the derision they attracted in the nineteenth century but also for their twentieth-century neglect. In fact, the flamboyance of the eighteenth-century penmen was related, not so much to a sense of personal accomplishment, as to an estimate of their social function. Despite their comic rivalries, the penmen were strikingly single-minded in their view of what writing was for, and the copybooks are united in their promotion of writing as an engine in the development of England as a commercial nation. Eighteenth-century British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (2001). p.145-160 0 BSECS 0141-867X

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