Garfield in 1881, there was a flurry of discussion about his penmanship. This is also the period in which handwriting gained a newfound aura thanks to the popularity of chirography and graphology: pseudoscientific attempts to find correspondence between a person’s moral character and the shape of their scribbled characters. It coincided, for instance, with the rise of transatlantic celebrity, the formalisation of signed cheques as a monetary instrument and an emerging market for the resale of signatures. Several arguments can be made in tandem for why autographomania arrived when it did. Only toward the end of the 19th century did the pastime turn pathological, when larger cultural and commercial forces vitalised what we now call autographs.
Bear in mind that ‘autograph’ in this context stands for any sample of handwriting, not solely the signature. Collecting in the US began in earnest during the 1810s, while 16th-century German students gathered specimens in dedicated autograph books. While it reached a fever pitch during the fin de siècle, autograph collecting is a much older tradition. Wilde’s hair surrogate went bald at an early age. The autographer supposedly developed a condition akin to carpal tunnel syndrome.
And, amid characteristically pithy correspondence, Oscar Wilde recounts how he employed three secretaries while travelling a similar route in the 1880s: one to receive flowers another to sign autographs and a final unshorn attendant to clip trimmings from his locks – something the writer’s fanbase desired. The English social reformer Laura Ormiston Chant received 1,307 autograph requests during her four-month tour through the US in 1890. One account, in an 1887 issue of the Leicester Chronicle, finds a fiend from Chicago impersonating a courier in order to penetrate the House of Commons, stuffing the members’ name cards into his pocket on the fly. ‘The autograph fiend’ was often portrayed as originating in the US. Those afflicted with signatures were a recognised type. Wodehouse wrote a tale for Punch about a man who ‘passed safely through a sharp attack of Philatelism’, or, stamp collecting, only to fall prey to ‘a rather nasty bout of Autographomania’. One person’s quaint pastime is another’s consuming infatuation. That both should employ the language of illness reveals what was at stake. Within months of Joline’s meditations, British illustrator Harry Furniss asked a question in the Strand Magazine: ‘Is there any inoculation possible to avert autograph fever?’ Another collector replied: ‘autograph fever clutches all sorts and conditions of men in its deadly grip’. Dwight diagnosed as ‘autographomania’: a collective obsession, which intensified in Britain and the US during the 1880s and 1890s, with the handwriting of both notable individuals and intimate familiars. He was not speaking of corgis and calicos, but of handwritten artefacts: ‘I look down upon them almost as one might upon children whom he must leave behind.’ Joline was one of many collectors suffering from what the 19th-century librarian Theodore F. Joline at the conclusion of his Meditations of an Autograph Collector (1902).
‘No one will ever be as fond of my pets as I have been’, lamented the American lawyer Adrian H.
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