Get it write

Desks, once akin to instruments of torture for scribes, have become cherished repositories of memories and secrets. Matthew Dennison charts their evolution

- Matthew Dennison

WHEN Victorian novelist Mrs Henry Wood was a child, the curvature of her spine was so severe that it affected her musculature. Even as an adult, she was incapable of carrying ‘anything heavier than a small book or parasol’. She was also unable to sit at a desk or table to write, so the author of more than 30 novels, including her sensational tale of infidelity, murder and illegitimacy, East Lynne, wrote on her knee, in some discomfort, in a reclining chair.

Ellen Wood’s is an unusual, but not unique, case. Roald Dahl also wrote on a specially made writing board on his lap, again as a means of avoiding sitting at a desk, as wartime back injuries caused him lifelong discomfort. Yet, more often than not, throughout the centuries in which men and women have put pen or pencil to paper, depressed typewriter keys or tapped computer keypads, they have done so at a desk. In literate societies, the use of a desk is an almost universal experience, ubiquitous in schools and libraries, even if today’s child is more likely to finish their prep or wrestle with thank-you letters at the kitchen table, in space hastily cleared between yesterday’s post and an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

Half a millennium ago, desks were portable boxes, fitted with sloping lids above an enclosed compartment for writing materials —structures closer to the writing boards used by Wood and Dahl than the four-legged pieces of furniture popularised in the later 17th century. In August 1597, Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino, authorised payment of 20 scudi for a desk that may have been the ivory- and horn-inlaid walnut writing box, fitted with an internal ebony drawer, today in the collection of the V&A Museum.