The Crazy Historical Trend of Cross-Writing

Today most writing and correspondence is sent electronically, with old fashioned paper letter writing often characterized as a quaint hobby tailored to Luddites. Since we do almost everything on our phones or computers we have a lot functionality built in. Run out of space? Add some external storage. Don’t want your message intercepted? Use an encrypted program or interface. But, in the days of old some of these issues were “solved” in physical letter writing through a method called cross-writing.

As the name suggests you would write the letter in a normal way, then when you got to the end of both sides flip the page around 90 degrees and write across the words you had already laid down. This checkered writing made it harder to read, a fact that many recipients moaned about.

For those extremely skilled in the practice (and with great confidence in their recipients’ reading skills) a letter writer might then turn the page again to make a third plane of diagonal writing that crossed both other planes. It makes my eyes water just thinking about it!

This practice of cross-writing or “crossing” a letter was done in the 1800s and many have theorized that this saved on paper and thus on postage. In US postal costs were high, as were the costs in England during the earlier parts of the 19th century.

The fact that many people of great means used this method means there could be other reasons besides saving money why a person might do this.

Even if you were rolling in dough, sometimes paper wasn’t easy to come by back then, especially if you were traveling. So sving paper meant you could write more letters.

Another motivation could have been that for storing letters an economy of pages meant a more efficient storage system. And, back to the illegibility of the letters- it may well have dissuaded snooping readers from prying if the letter was a bit dizzying to read.

It does seem like it would make it rather difficult, but as Jane Austen pointed out in the 1816 novel Emma, reading a crossed letter is a skill, one that can be honed with practice.

So if you knew your recipient could it and it saved on postage and it cut down on the storage needed for letters then it becomes clear why some folks would have been cross-writing their letters. If a nosy aunt found it harder to read then all the better.

But, of course there were etiquette experts and authors who advocated against this practice as it was putting more work on the intended recipient to strain to read it. Remember this was long before electricity and even wealthy homes would not have always been well lit at night. I can imagine quite a few readers anxious of news from home squinting by candlelight to read one of the crossed or “cross-hatched” letters.