(The
above text and images were used with permission from Michael Sull.)
Sara L Spencer
(1832-1923)
Sara
Louisa Spencer was born on December 17, 1832. She was the eldest daughter and
in the 1850's became her father's teaching assistant at Jericho. She also
taught in the first Spencerian College and aided Platt Rogers Spencer in his
commercial ventures prior to his death. She was superbly skilled in penmanship
and was considered the finest female penman of her day. Quoting from Art In
America (Summer, 1952):
She had
taught her father's system even before her brothers, serving as her father's
assistant in Pittsburgh, teaching under his direction in Chamberlin's
Commercial College in 1852, and again, later in Cleveland; and she taught
through much of her married life .... She served in a way as her father's
secretary during much of the latter part of his life, and she considered that
she thus had a particularly close and intimate understanding of his principles,
and she felt that she had important insights about the system that had been
overlooked by her brothers.
Sara's
opinion about there being aspects of Spencerian Script that yet needed to be
explained and taught, coupled with her dissatisfaction that the widespread
credit for the continuance of her father's work was given solely to her
brothers, caused her to develop an idea to write a new instruction manual. In
this venture she enlisted the support of her younger sister, Ellen. Sara's
intention was, as expressed in Art In America, to:
...
publish a modification of the Spencerian penmanship ... The new hand was to be
more 'feminine'. . and was to stimulate interest in penmanship at a time when
it was suffering from the development of the typewriter.... The plan and its
motivations are expressed in the dummy for a copybook ... entitled, 'The American
Anglo-Gothic Series of Copy Books. Arranged and Written by the Daughters of PR.
Spencer, Author and Master of the American Semi-Angular System of Penmanship.'
Sara and Ellen are given as the authors, and it is dedicated to their mother
and their three deceased sisters; that is, the father and all the women of the
family appear by name on the title page. Alternate names are given on
succeeding pages of the dummy.- The Columbian Gothic, The Gothic Spencerian;
The American Gothic, and The Spencerian Gothic.
Sara
went east in the later eighties for what she thought was to be the final
working out of the new system and completion of plans for publication, but
nothing came of this .... She felt that the brothers unjustly held back their
support, which in a way did not surprise her, but harder to bear was the
feeling that Ellen did not devote herself wholeheartedly to the venture, but in
the end lightly put it aside in pursuit of her own interests. Sara's proposed
manual was never published, and, disappointed, she continued to teach on her
own. In June, 1858, Sara married Junius Sloan,* an itinerant artist of some
renown at the time in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. For forty-two years she
taught penmanship while traveling with her husband as his life-long partner
until his death in 1900. Twenty-three years later, Sara Spencer Sloan died at
the age of ninety-one.
