Scribble

I had but litille thyng to done when I scrybled thys bille.

William Worcester may have had little else to do when he thus closed his 1456 letter, most likely addressed to Sir John Paston, complaining of a friend's behavior. That friend (believed to be Sir John Fastolff) argued with his servants, acted willfully and without counsel, and could barely be restrained. Such matters of deportment would have hardly been little things in the aspirant gentry world of the English fifteenth century. And yet Worcester ends by diminishing them, claiming, in effect, that this letter remains but a trifle in the larger world of epistolary self-making and self-regulation in the later Middle Ages. His is the earliest use of the word "scribble" offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, and whether this was a true lexical innovation or but the first appearance that survives, it is significant that it begins the entry for the OED—a bit of personal self-deprecation, a way of making Britishness itself a kind of pose of the offhand, the muddled-through. The entries in the OED present a story of emerging Englishness through contact with the scribble. There is the colonialist: "Most of these Obelisks are scribbled all over with Hieroglipics [sic]" (George Berkeley, 1717). There is the aristocrat: "The page found my lord's sheet of paper scribbled all over with dogs and horses" (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1852). There is the politician: "Today's free-speakers, who have been publicly scribbling, marching and even exchanging ideas with foreign journalists" (The Economist, 1978). In the dismissions of the scribble, one hears the voice of English condescension at its most exquisite.¹

But there is more to scribbling than the pooh-poohs of the patronizing. During the fifteenth century, as more and more men and women learned to read and write, and as the customs of epistolary exchange took hold, the writer could take on the pose of literate advisor—or, just as well, take on the false modesty of the scribbler. Once you learn to write, you learn to scribble. Once your writings take on meaning, you can use the pen or pencil to distract. Scribbling becomes a form of writing that deliberately presents itself as nonreferential. The scribble does not record the sounds of utterance or the conventions of decorum. It simply marks the hand at idle moment, when we have little things to do.

Everybody scribbles—or at least they used to. Some scholars think the ancient scratching on cave walls or bones were a kind of proto-writing, an attempt to make the language of a dead or distant speaker last. Such markings may, by contrast, simply be the tracings of the bored or the defacements of the child. Clay tablets, waxen boards, parchment, and later paper sheets survive with careful texts surrounded by scribbles. "There is scarcely a child," wrote the American painter William Morris Hunt in 1890, "whose first impulse is not to scribble on the wall or any fresh piece of paper." He continues, in a passage that appeals to me as both a parent and a pedant: "The child's scribbling on the margin of his school-books is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them. To him, the margin is the best part of all books, and he finds in it the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape."² The meaning of the scribble, here, is not a function of linguistic representation. It is, instead, a matter of desire. Hunt's child—indeed, his vision of childhood itself—is about marking the empty, about filling the space of margin with identity, of taking possession of a text and making it one's own.³

The English word "scribble" comes from Latin scribo—I write—with a diminutive ending tacked on. Certainly the Romans scribbled (we would know nothing of the daily life of Pompeii were it not for the graffiti that outlasted ash). And yet not all their scribblings were benign. Catullus writes of scribbling in a brilliantly angry vein, as his condemnation of the thief Thallus...