We remember (early remembrances are more durable than recent) an epithet
employed by Mary Wollstonecraft, which then seemed as happy as it was
original:—“The _iron_ pen of Time.” Had the vindicatress of the “Rights
of Women” lived in these days (fifty years later), when the iron pen is
the almost universal instrument of writing, she would have bestowed upon
Time a less common material for recording his doings.
Whilst we are remembering, let us look back for a moment upon our
earliest schooldays—the days of large text and round hand. Twenty
urchins sit at a long desk, each intent upon making his _copy_. A nicely
mended pen has been given to each. Our own labour goes on successfully,
till, in school-boy phrase, the pen begins to splutter. A bold effort
must be made. We leave the form, and timidly address the writing-master
with—“Please, sir, mend my pen.” A slight frown subsides as he sees that
the quill is very bad—too soft or too hard—used to the stump. He dashes
it away, and snatching a feather from a bundle—a poor thin feather, such
as green geese drop on a common—shapes it into a pen. This mending and
making process occupies all his leisure—occupies, indeed, many of the
minutes that ought to be devoted to instruction. He has a perpetual
battle to wage with his bad quills. They are the meanest produce of the
plucked goose.
And is this process still going on in the many thousand schools of our
land, where, with all drawbacks of imperfect education, both as to
numbers educated and gifts imparted, there are about two millions and a
half of children under daily instruction? In remote rural districts,
probably; in the towns certainly not. The steam-engine is now the
pen-maker. Hecatombs of geese are consumed at Michaelmas and Christmas;
but not all the geese in the world would meet the demand of England for
pens. The supply of _patés de foie gras_ will be kept up—that of quills,
whether known as _primes_, _seconds_, or _pinions_, must be wholly
inadequate to the wants of a _writing_ people. Wherever geese are bred
in these islands, so assuredly, in each succeeding March, will every
full-fledged victim be robbed of his quills; and then turned forth on
the common, a very waddling and impotent goose, quite unworthy of the
name of bird. The country schoolmaster, at the same springtime, will
continue to buy the smallest quills, at a low price, clarify them after
his own rude fashion, make them into pens, and sorely spite the boy who
splits them up too rapidly. The better quills will still be collected,
and find their way to the quill dealer, who will exercise his empirical
arts before they pass to the stationer. He will plunge them into heated
sand, to make the external skin peel off, and the external membrane
shrivel up; or he will saturate them with water, and alternately
contract and swell them before a charcoal fire; or he will dip them in
nitric acid, and make them of a gaudy brilliancy but a treacherous
endurance. They will be sorted according to the quality of the barrels,
with the utmost nicety. The experienced buyer will know their value by
looking at their feathery ends, tapering to a point; the uninitiated
will regard only the quill portion. There is no article of commerce in
which the market value is so difficult to be determined with exactness.
For the finest and largest quills no price seems unreasonable; for those
of the second quality too exorbitant a charge is often made. The foreign
supply is large, and probably exceeds the home supply of the superior
article. What the exact amount is we know not. There is no duty now on
quills. The tariff of 1845—one of the most lasting monuments of the
wisdom of our great commercial minister—abolished the duty of
half-a-crown a thousand. In 1832 the duty amounted to four thousand two
hundred pounds, which would show an annual importation of thirty-three
millions one hundred thousand quills; enough, perhaps, for the
commercial clerks of England, together with the quills of home
growth;—but how to serve a letter-writing population?
The ancient reign of the quill pen was first seriously disturbed about
twenty-five years ago. An abortive imitation of the _form_ of a pen was
produced before that time; a clumsy, inelastic, metal tube fastened in a
bone or ivory handle, and sold for half-a-crown. A man might make his
mark with one—but as to writing, it was a mere delusion. In due course
came more carefully finished inventions for the luxurious, under the
tempting names of ruby pen, or diamond pen—with the plain gold pen, and
the rhodium pen, for those who were sceptical as to the jewellery of the
inkstand. The economical use of the quill received also the attention of
science. A machine was invented to divide the barrel lengthwise into two
halves; and, by the same mechanical means, these halves were subdivided
into small pieces, cut pen shape, slit, and nibbed. But the pressure
upon the quill supply grew more and more intense. A new power had risen
up in our world—a new seed sown—the source of all good, or the dragon’s
teeth of Cadmus. In 1818 there were only one hundred and sixty-five
thousand scholars in the monitorial schools—the new schools, which were
being established under the auspices of the National Society, and the
British and Foreign School Society. Fifteen years afterwards, in 1833,
there were three hundred and ninety thousand. Ten years later, the
numbers exceeded a million. Even a quarter of a century ago two-thirds
of the male population of England, and one-half of the female, were
learning to write; for in the Report of the Registrar-General for 1846,
we find this passage:—“Persons when they are married are required to
sign the marriage-register; if they cannot write their names, they sign
with a mark: the result has hitherto been, that nearly one man in three,
and one woman in two, married, sign with marks.” This remark applies to
the period between 1839 and 1845. Taking the average age of men at
marriage as twenty-seven years, and the average age of boys during their
education as ten years, the marriage-register is an educational test of
male instruction for the years 1824–28. But the gross number of the
population of England and Wales was rapidly advancing. In 1821 it was
twelve millions; in 1831, fourteen millions; in 1841, sixteen millions;
in 1851, taking the rate of increase at fourteen per cent., it will be
eighteen millions and a half. The extension of education was proceeding
in a much quicker ratio; and we may therefore fairly assume that the
proportion of those who make their marks in the marriage-register has
greatly diminished since 1844.
But, during the last ten years, the natural desire to learn to write, of
that part of the youthful population which education can reach, has
received a great moral impulse by a wondrous development of the most
useful and pleasurable exercise of that power. The uniform penny postage
has been established. In the year 1838, the whole number of letters
delivered in the United Kingdom was seventy-six millions; in this year
that annual delivery has reached the prodigious number of three hundred
and thirty-seven millions. In 1838, a Committee of the House of Commons
thus denounced, amongst the great commercial evils of the high rates of
postage, their injurious effects upon the great bulk of the
people:—“They either act as a grievous tax on the poor, causing them to
sacrifice their little earnings to the pleasure and advantage of
corresponding with their distant friends, or compel them to forego such
intercourse altogether; thus subtracting from the small amount of their
enjoyments, and obstructing the growth and maintenance of their best
affections.” Honoured be the man who broke down these barriers! Praised
be the Government that, _for once_, stepping out of its fiscal tram-way,
dared boldly to legislate for the domestic happiness, the educational
progress, and the moral elevation of the masses! The steel pen, sold at
the rate of a penny a dozen, is the creation, in a considerable degree,
of the Penny Postage stamp; as the Penny Postage stamp was a
representative, if not a creation, of the new educational power. Without
the steel pen, it may reasonably be doubted whether there were
mechanical means within the reach of the great bulk of the population
for writing the three hundred and thirty-seven millions of letters that
now annually pass through the Post Office.
Othello’s sword had “the ice-brook’s temper;” but not all the real or
imaginary virtues of the stream that gave its value to the true Spanish
blade could create the elasticity of a steel pen. Flexible, indeed, is
the Toledo. If thrust against a wall, it will bend into an arc that
describes three-fourths of a circle. The problem to be solved in the
steel pen, is to convert the iron of Dannemora into a substance as thin
as the quill of a dove’s pinion, but as strong as the proudest feather
of an eagle’s wing. The furnaces and hammers of the old armourers could
never have solved this problem. The steel pen belongs to our age of
mighty machinery. It could not have existed in any other age. The demand
for the instrument, and the means of supplying it, came together.
The commercial importance of the steel pen was first manifested to our
senses a year or two ago at Sheffield. We had witnessed all the curious
processes of _converting_ iron into steel, by saturating it with carbon
in the converting furnace;—of _tilting_ the bars so converted into a
harder substance, under the thousand hammers that shake the waters of
the Sheaf and the Don; of _casting_ the steel thus converted and tilted
into ingots of higher purity; and, finally, of _milling_, by which the
most perfect development of the material is acquired under enormous
rollers. About two miles from the metropolis of steel, over whose head
hangs a canopy of smoke through which the broad moors of the distance
sometimes reveal themselves, there is a solitary mill where the tilting
and rolling processes are carried to great perfection. The din of the
large tilts is heard half a mile off. Our ears tingle, our legs tremble,
when we stand close to their operation of beating bars of steel into the
greatest possible density; for the whole building vibrates as the
workmen swing before them in suspended baskets, and shift the bar at
every movement of these hammers of the Titans. We pass onward to the
more quiet _rolling_ department. The bar that has been tilted into the
most perfect compactness has now to acquire the utmost possible tenuity.
A large area is occupied by furnaces and rollers. The bar of steel is
dragged out of the furnace at almost a white heat. There are two men at
each roller. It is passed through the first pair, and its squareness is
instantly elongated and widened into flatness;—rapidly through a second
pair,—and a third,—and a fourth,—and a fifth.—The bar is becoming a
sheet of steel. Thinner and thinner it becomes, until it would seem that
the workmen can scarcely manage the fragile substance. It has spread
out, like a morsel of gold under the beater’s hammer, into an enormous
leaf. The least attenuated sheet is only the hundredth part of an inch
in thickness; some sheets are made as thin as the two-hundredth part of
an inch. And for what purpose is this result of the labours of so many
workmen, of such vast and complicated machinery, destined?—what the
final application of a material employing so much capital in every step,
from the Swedish mine to its transport by railroad to some other seat of
British industry? _The whole is prepared for one Steel-pen Manufactory
at Birmingham._
There is nothing very remarkable in a steel pen manufactory, as regards
ingenuity of contrivance or factory organisation. Upon a large scale of
production the extent of labour engaged in producing so minute an
article is necessarily striking. But the process is just as curious and
interesting, if conducted in a small shop as in a large. The pure steel,
as it comes from the rolling mill, is cut up into strips about two
inches and a half in width. These are further cut into the proper size
for the pen. The pieces are then annealed and cleansed. The maker’s name
is neatly impressed on the metal; and a cutting-tool forms the slit,
although imperfectly in this stage. The pen shape is given by a convex
punch pressing the plate into a concave die. The pen is formed when the
slit is perfected. It has now to be hardened, and finally cleansed and
polished, by the simple agency of friction in a cylinder. All the
varieties of form of the steel pen are produced by the punch; all the
contrivances of slits and apertures above the nib, by the cutting-tool.
Every improvement has had for its object to overcome the rigidity of the
steel,—to imitate the elasticity of the quill, whilst bestowing upon the
pen a superior durability.
The perfection that may reasonably be demanded in a steel pen has yet to
be reached. But the improvement in the manufacture is most decided.
Twenty years ago, to one who might choose, regardless of expense,
between the quill pen and the steel, the best Birmingham and London
production was an abomination. But we can trace the gradual acquiescence
of most men in the writing implement of the multitude. Few of us, in an
age when the small economies are carefully observed, and even paraded,
desire to use quill pens at ten or twelve shillings a hundred, as
Treasury Clerks once luxuriated in their use—an hour’s work, and then a
new one. To mend a pen, is troublesome to the old and even the
middle-aged man who once acquired the art; the young, for the most part,
have not learnt it. The most painstaking and penurious author would
never dream of imitating the wondrous man who translated Pliny with “one
grey goose quill.” Steel pens are so cheap, that if one scratches or
splutters, it may be thrown away, and another may be tried. But when a
really good one is found, we cling to it, as worldly men cling to their
friends; we use it till it breaks down, or grows rusty. We can do no
more; we handle it as Isaak Walton handled the frog upon his hook, “as
if we loved him.” We could almost fancy some analogy between the gradual
and decided improvement of the steel pen—one of the new instruments of
education—and the effects of education itself upon the mass of the
people. An instructed nation ought to present the same gradually
perfecting combination of strength with elasticity. The favourites of
fortune are like the quill, ready made for social purposes, with a
little scraping and polishing. The bulk of the community have to be
formed out of ruder and tougher materials—to be converted, welded, and
tempered into pliancy. The _manners_ of the great British family have
decidedly improved under culture—“_emollit mores_:” may the sturdy
self-respect of the race never be impaired!