Innovation: Typewriter

In April 1895, a photograph published in Cassell’s Family Magazine showed S.R. Crockett at his writing desk in Penicuik — pen in hand, as convention demanded, but with a Hammond No. 1 typewriter occupying a prominent corner of the desk. That machine tells a different and more surprising story about the kind of writer Crockett actually was.

This article traces the evidence for Crockett’s relationship with the Hammond typewriter from the early 1880s to 1906, drawing on seven key letters from the museum archive. It establishes that Crockett was among the earliest literary adopters of mechanical writing technology in Britain: typewriting before his ordination, composing personal letters entirely in Scots on the keyboard, dictating correspondence in bulk to a secretary, and endorsing the Hammond by name in 1901 after nearly two decades of use.

The evidence complicates the familiar caricature of Crockett as a backward-looking provincial writer. A man who composed intimate dialect correspondence on a cutting-edge American machine, who drafted and corrected at the keys, was not behind his times. He was, in his own way, thoroughly modern.

An article from the Reading Room of the S.R. Crockett Online Museum.