“These Lines I Here Present unto the Sight, Of you, My Friends, to Show How I can Write”: Children displaying their writing in the very long eighteenth century

Writing was a valued skill in the long eighteenth century, important for business, but also for a multitude of other purposes. The teaching of writing was a specialized trade. Among the tools employed in teaching writing to children were “school pieces”. These were folio sheets printed from copperplates. A pictorial border form surrounded a blank centre onto which a child would transcribe some text in their best handwriting. Completed examples might be displayed by their teacher, taken home to their parents, or displayed round the parish. 

As educational tools, they were also interdisciplinary, displaying representations of subjects well beyond a formal curriculum but were key to a polite education. Like letter writing, school pieces were part of the process through which children absorbed cultural expectations and practices. Although they were completed by a broad range of children, their interdisciplinary function largely catered to those seeking a polite education.

I have just completed a descriptive bibliography of well over 600 school pieces published between ca, 1660 and ca. 1860. Identifying individual children who completed school pieces, the sources of their transcribed texts, and the diverse subject matter portrayed in the printed pictorial borders, this paper offers a re-examination not only of our understanding of polite education in the very long eighteenth century, but also of children’s participation in and access to a variety of public events and activities.