It is true that the beginning of industrial revolution lengthened the working day, instead of shortening it, & also conscripted many children among the first proletarians. To this day, children work as proletarians in fields, factories, etc. in poor nations (and also in some rich nations -- e.g., young migrant workers picking vegetables in the USA). Enjoyment of long periods of childhood & adolescence depends upon the rise of capitalism, industrial revolution, _& class struggles for the shorter working day, prohibition of child labor, etc._ (I'm afraid your long working day is a result of the backward character of class struggles in financial industries.)
For all that, it is industrial capitalism with its revolutionary productivity that has created the (as yet unrealized) potential for universalizing the enjoyment of long periods of childhood & adolescence. In economies based upon subsistence agriculture (except perhaps in a few areas perennially favored by natural abundance) few -- young or old -- could be exempted from work.
As for Elizabethan England & seventeenth-century Wales, let's not forget that England was the first to embark upon the path toward capitalism. The age of Shakespeare (1564-1616) probably was the threshold between declining feudalism & emergent capitalism. However, Shakespeare might have been a popular novelist instead of a popular playwright if Elizabethan England had already had a culture based upon mass printing, mass literacy, & mass readership.
***** Language Learning & Technology Vol. 4, No. 2, September 2000, pp. 43-58
CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES, CHANGING LITERACY COMMUNITIES?
Denise E. Murray NCELTR, Macquarie University, Sydney
...Medieval England
THE INTRODUCTION OF THE PRINTING PRESS
As with the introduction of alphabetic literacy in Ancient Greece, the introduction of the printing press has been considered a transformer of society. In two large volumes, Eisenstein (1979), a social historian, relates the effect of the printing press on Europe, claiming that, by mechanizing human memory, the printing press made food for thought more abundant, allowing cognitive energy to be used more efficiently--it could be used for thinking instead of rote memorization. Print, she says, provided us with fixed forms of reference, ways of categorizing, indexing, and making ideas permanent. Two qualities distinguish the press from handwriting: the capacity to duplicate texts in large numbers and the capacity to fix and preserve texts and images over centuries. According to McCorduck, a writer on computer technology, "mechanical printing acted as an artificial memory (as did writing,) but now the memory, a communal treasure, was greatly enlarged" (McCorduck, 1985, p. 34). The common view is that the invention of printing removed the power from the scholar-priests, replacing them with more democratic institutions. Many historians and populist writers claim that, because printed books were cheap and easily reproducible and therefore widely available, what began as a local quarrel between Martin Luther and his church was transformed into the Protestant Reformation. The claim is that the Reformation was possible because the Bible could be in the hands of the common people who no longer had to rely on the priests to interpret it for them. Similarly, the period in Europe referred to as the Enlightenment, with its ideas of individualism and nationalism, is attributed to the introduction of the printing press. McLuhan (1962), for example, who popularized this view of the printing press, credited it with the rise of science, industry, logic, capitalism, nationalism, and rationalism.
While such scholars and thinkers of the time and since have extolled the virtues of the advent of print, others have condemned it. Indeed, at the time, those who had control over written knowledge feared printing would weaken memory, the mind, and the spirit, and thus, their power. Pope Alexander VI, for example, declared,
It will be necessary to maintain full control over the printers so that they may be prevented from bringing into print writings which are antagonistic to the Catholic faith or which are likely to cause trouble to believers. (quoted in McCorduck, 1985, p. 23)
Johannes Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim, opposed print because he feared its impermanence, that paper would last but a short time, whereas parchment could last for a thousand years (see Clanchy, 1983). For Trithemius, the lasting nature of texts was vital because for Medieval clergy and scribes, the texts were divine, the word of God.
This common view of the Gutenberg revolution does not, however, reflect the realities of history. The technology itself did not cause the Reformation or the Enlightenment. Certainly there was immediate print production: In the 50 years after 1450, between 10,000 and 15,000 different titles were produced; legal codes were printed; vernacular Bibles were produced. However, print did not impinge on most people's lives and was not nearly as pervasive as some have claimed. For example, only about 200 copies of the Gutenberg Bible were ever produced (Cook, 1990). It was equally a product of the élite as were the earlier Bibles that were hand-scribed by priests and monks. Not only was it not distributed to the common people, but even if it had been, they could not have read it because well over 90% of the European population could not read (Pattison, 1982). Literacy was the province of the clergy, scholars, and some aristocrats--all men. In fact, even literacy among the aristocracy was very limited because they employed scribes. "Far from being revolutionary, Gutenberg's efforts reflected established social, religious, and economical (sic) institutions of his day" (Cook, 1990, p. 32). Even the Gutenberg Bibles themselves were not revolutionary; they were identical in form and function to scribal manuscripts, with the same thick letter forms, ligatures, and abbreviations, the same page layout, and even the same elaborate hand-drawn illuminations. In other words, the new technology initially changed the means of production only. Indeed, for long after the introduction of the printing press, scholars continued to copy texts by hand, often copying printed texts, either because such texts were readily available or because the scribe chose to excerpt only certain parts of a text or texts, thereby creating his own anthology--an activity similar to, but also very different from, instructors photocopying selected texts and patching together their own anthology!
The mass literacy campaigns of the German Protestant Reformers created a "significant population of readers that could take advantage of the pictures and texts that the printing press made available to them" (Tyner, 1998, p. 19). Even so, it was not until the end of the 18th century that illiteracy began to decline to near 50%, mostly as a result of the need for reading and writing at work, especially in trades that needed to keep records. It was only then that print culture became pervasive, being used for common articles like theater tickets, marriage licenses, and indentures (Kernan, 1989). The printing press merely facilitated changes already beginning to take place in Europe, especially a heightened sense of individuality and personality, of nationalism and secularism. These social changes, along with changes in supporting technologies over several centuries, brought about mass literacy in Europe--not the advent of the printing press. The printing press was not a necessary or sufficient condition. Its introduction in turn depended on technological advances in metallurgy. The widespread distribution of books available to the "common man" depended on supporting technologies that lowered production costs of books, including the cheap production of paper (produced from wood pulp), the invention of steam power, and the rolling press. Even more important were later social changes such as the introduction of public schooling and changes in work from agrarian to industrial (Cook, 1990; Tyner, 1998)....
[The full article is available at <http://llt.msu.edu/vol4num2/murray/default.html>.] *****
Yoshie