George Bickham: The Universal Penman's Forgotten Master

Long before Copperplate and Spencerian became household names among modern pointed-pen hobbyists, an English engraver named George Bickham compiled a single book that shaped how English-speaking clerks, merchants, and schoolchildren wrote for the next two centuries. That book was The Universal Penman, published in London in weekly installments between 1733 and 1741. Almost nobody outside calligraphy circles recognizes Bickham's name today, yet the business ‘round hand’ his book popularized is a direct ancestor of the elegant pointed-pen scripts still taught for wedding invitations and monograms with the English calligraphy generator. His story is a useful reminder that most calligraphy styles we treat as timeless were, in their own era, practical tools built for a specific job.

Who Was George Bickham?

George Bickham the Elder was an English engraver and drawing master working in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, generally placed around 1684 to 1758. Engraving, at the time, was the only practical way to reproduce handwriting at scale: printing presses could set movable type for ordinary text, but a flowing, personal-looking script had to be cut by hand into a copper plate, then printed from that plate one sheet at a time. Bickham built his career on exactly that skill, engraving other people's handwriting so it could be studied, copied, and sold as a teaching tool.

He was not working alone. Bickham's real contribution was less about his own handwriting and more about his eye as an editor and engraver: he gathered specimens from roughly two dozen practicing English writing masters of his day, then engraved their work into a single, coherent volume. His son, George Bickham the Younger, also became a well-known engraver, though he is remembered more for satirical prints than penmanship manuals.

The Universal Penman: Anatomy of an 18th-Century Bestseller

The Universal Penman was not a single writing lesson. It was closer to a sampler catalog, roughly 200 engraved plates gathered into one volume, each showing a different hand, a different flourish, or a different practical use case for elegant handwriting. Bickham's stated goal was as much commercial as artistic: give merchants, clerks, and schoolmasters a reference book of the best handwriting styles in use, so that legible, attractive penmanship could be taught consistently rather than picked up haphazardly.

A Trade Compilation, Not One Man's Handwriting

Because the book drew on so many contributing writing masters, it functioned as a snapshot of the entire English penmanship trade at a single moment, rather than one person's personal style. Readers could compare a formal legal ‘court hand,’ an Italian-derived italic hand used for polite correspondence, an ornamental German-influenced text hand related to blackletter traditions, and, most importantly for later history, a fast, looping business ‘round hand’ meant for everyday commercial writing. Seeing several professional hands side by side, rather than a single teacher's opinion, is part of why the book carried so much authority.

Flourished Birds, Beasts, and Ornamental Knotwork

Alongside the practical scripts, Bickham included show-off plates of pure penmanship flourishing: swans, eagles, ships, and elaborate interlocking ‘knotwork’ patterns built entirely from continuous pen strokes, with no lifting of the nib. These were not meant for daily writing. They were advertising, proof that a writing master's hand control was skilled enough to draw a recognizable bird using the same pressure-and-release technique used to shade a capital letter. That same flourish tradition is still visible today in modern Copperplate and Spencerian practice sheets, where swashes and loops beyond the letters themselves are treated as a distinct skill worth training on their own.

Round Hand: The Business Script Behind the Book

The most historically important script in The Universal Penman is round hand, sometimes called English round hand or engrosser's script. It is a slanted, looped, joined hand designed to be written quickly with a flexible metal or quill nib, using pressure changes to create thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes. That thick-thin contrast, produced purely by how hard the writer pressed rather than by a specially shaped nib edge, is the defining technical trait round hand passed on to its descendants.

Why Merchants and Clerks Needed a Faster, Legible Hand

England's eighteenth-century trade boom meant a rapidly growing number of ledgers, bills of exchange, shipping manifests, and business letters, all of which had to be both fast to write and easy for a stranger to read later. A few practical pressures shaped round hand directly:

• Clerks needed a joined, cursive hand fast enough to keep up with dictation and daily correspondence volume.
• Merchants needed handwriting that stayed legible across cities and countries, since a badly written figure on a bill of exchange could cost real money.
• Schools needed one teachable standard, rather than dozens of individual teachers' idiosyncratic hands, so The Universal Penman doubled as an early standardized curriculum.

That combination of speed, legibility, and teachability is exactly why round hand outlived Bickham himself by well over a century.

From Round Hand to Copperplate to Spencerian: A Family Tree of Scripts

It helps to think of the scripts that followed round hand as a family tree rather than a straight line of direct copies. Later teachers and engravers adjusted the letterforms, but the underlying pressure-based technique stayed remarkably consistent:

1. English round hand (1700s): the business script shown throughout Bickham's book, written with a flexible quill and heavy pressure contrast.
2. Copperplate script (late 1700s–1800s): the term calligraphers now use for the refined, more uniform version of round hand that dominated engraved invitations and formal documents; you can compare its slant and shading rules in this site's own guide to nibs and slant drills.
3. Spencerian script (1840s onward): developed independently in the United States by Platt Rogers Spencer, drawing on the same pressure-and-release logic but with rounder, more relaxed letterforms suited to everyday American business writing; see the Spencerian alphabet guide for the specific letterform differences.

Bickham's book also included italic and chancery-style hands, the same broad-pen tradition covered in this site's italic and chancery hand guide and traced back further in the history of Ludovico Arrighi's chancery cursive, so the volume really did try to document the full range of respectable handwriting in one place, not just the business hand it is best remembered for.

Why Calligraphers Still Study the Universal Penman Today

The original 1730s plates would be hard to track down outside a rare-book library, but the book never really went out of circulation. In 1941, Dover Publications reprinted The Universal Penman in an affordable edition edited by Philip Hofer, and that reprint is still in print and still referenced by Copperplate and Spencerian instructors today. It remains one of the primary historical source books for anyone studying pointed-pen flourishing, because it shows the technique at the moment it was standardized for teaching, before later commercial copybooks simplified it for mass classroom use.

How to Study Historical Plates Like a Modern Calligrapher

You do not need Bickham's actual engraving tools to learn from his approach. A few practical habits translate directly into modern practice:

• Trace the pressure pattern, not just the letter outline: notice exactly where each stroke thickens and thins, since that rhythm matters more than the letter's exact shape.
• Study the flourished plates separately from the practical alphabets, the way Bickham presented them, so decorative swashes don't creep into everyday legible writing by accident.
• Compare several historical hands side by side, the same way The Universal Penman put round hand, italic, and text hand on facing pages, rather than committing to one style before seeing the alternatives.

The guide to calligraphy pens, nibs, ink, and paper is a good next stop if you want to match a flexible nib to the pressure-based technique Bickham's book was built around.

Try Georgian-Era Penmanship Styles for Yourself

You don't need a copper plate and an engraver's burin to see how an eighteenth-century business hand compares to the script you already write. Type a name or short phrase into the English calligraphy generator and try a few of the pointed-pen and chancery-style options descended from the same round hand tradition Bickham documented nearly three hundred years ago. If you want to build the skill by hand rather than generate it, the learning paths section has structured practice plans, and the name calligraphy generator is a fast way to preview how your own name would have looked on an eighteenth-century ledger, or engraved on a modern signature instead.