Review: Experiments with Handwriting
| Published date | 01 January 1930 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X3000300119 |
| Date | 01 January 1930 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
THE
POLICE JOURNAL
REVIEWS
EXPERIMENTS
WITH
HANDWRITING.
By
ROBERT
SAUDEK.
19z8.
18s. net. (Allen &Unwin.)
MR.
SAUDEK'S
book is of interest to the layman as well as to the expert.
The
general reader, for instance, can in it find many striking matters, such
as the attractive study of the way in which a child learns to
write;
the
results of the author's appeals to listeners-in; his illustrations of writing
with the left hand and with the
foot;
and the accounts of literary forgeries.
Those who think that details of a person's character can be gleaned from
an examination of his or her handwriting will appreciate the pages dealing
with Lord Grey, Signor Mussolini and others. As regards the first mentioned
statesman, as
Mr.
Saudek says, the character sketch which he gives agrees
with the general conception which Lord Grey's contemporaries hold of his
character.
Our
author also finds symptoms of a love of concealment which
are features described as ' a psychological complex of the diplomatic mental
attitude;'
but
surely it does not follow that one who often has to maintain
secrecy necessarily takes a pleasure in so
doing?
One gathers that employers may base their decision as to whether or not
they will engage a man, upona diagnosis of his character obtained in this way.
As
Mr.
Saudek points out, this might be most unfair to the applicant, and
one would be loth to accept any such opinion even if based on the ten groups
of graphic features which
Mr.
Saudek has constituted as a result of his very
careful investigations, and by which he claims that it is possible to recognize
with exactness, honesty or dishonesty.
The
consideration of these questions is usually called graphology, and
asharp line is drawn between delineators of character from handwriting,
and examiners of questioned documents.
Mr.
Saudek, however, would
include in the term the examination of handwriting in legal cases, as well as
the determination of character from it. At the outset both forensic hand-
writing experts and graphologists, in the accepted sense, come in for criticism,
and
Mr.
Saudek expresses the opinion that some of his colleagues may
quarrel with him because he will not accept any of their doctrines which
cannot be proved by experiment or statistical evidence.
Mr.
Saudek dismisses the examination of forgeries, other than whole
letters or long codicils to wills, and so on, as mere laboratory work, and
therefore it is only to such cases, apparently, that the student can expect to
look for help in this book. Nevertheless, as he goes on he will find many
little points of value to him. He is told, moreover, that if he cannot spend
a full week (or better fourteen half days) in testing the identity of two or more
manuscripts, he had better leave such judgments alone.
Mr. Saudek says that one of the principal aims of his book, and an
essential part of his life's work, is finally to depose the comparison of letters
from the position which it still enjoys as a proof of
identity-that
of primary
argument-and
to assign it to the only place which it
deserves-that
of
tertiary argument.
The
intentions are excellent,
but
does a scientific
handwriting expert to-day
put
the evidence which he can get from likenesses
between the shapes of letters upon the same level as that obtained from
similar habits of writing?
The
fact that the illustrations and their descriptions are bound in a paper
wrapper to form a separate pamphlet which has to be tucked under astrap on
the inside of the back cover renders reference to them inconvenient, and the
absence of an index is not made up for by a detailed table of contents.
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