The Golden Thread by Ewan Clayton

Author:Ewan Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023505
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2018-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 48. The Talantograph, a fold-out (pl. 3) in Benjamin Franklin Foster’s Practical Penmanship being a development of the Carstairian system, Albany, 1832.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution

Though the long-term consequences were going to be incalculable in the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution there was little impact on the written word. Certainly one thing the Industrial Revolution did not depend on in these early years was an increase in the general population’s ability to read and write. In the 1790s and early 1800s, in the Midlands and northern England, regions that lay at the heart of the new coal-mining, iron-smelting and cotton-spinning and weaving industries, literacy rates actually fell back during the decades when the first phase of the Industrial Revolution was at its height.181 The impact of industrialization was particularly hard on children; some of the earliest factories were staffed almost exclusively by unpaid child apprentices brought in from parish poorhouses. The work was gruelling. It was not until 1819 that children’s work hours were reduced by Act of Parliament to a maximum of seventy-two hours a week. Some manufacturers and charitable associations set up evening schools, but many children were simply too tired to attend. Figures for the Lancashire market town of Chorley in the 1790s show that barely one-sixth of the Sunday school children took the evening writing class one day a week.182 Sunday schools themselves confined their activities to learning to read. A Manchester parson who appeared before the Factory Commission in 1833 said that many people who contributed to the schools objected to the pupils being taught to write. The evangelical Hannah More noted of her Mendip Charity schools, ‘I allow of no writing. My object is not to teach dogmas and opinions, but to form the lower class to habits of industry and virtue.’183

Mechanical interventions

Nonetheless, pressures on those who were already literate were increasing. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, experiments into the use of stencils for making multiple copies of handwritten documents had been made in France by the Dutch mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629–96) and at the Royal Society in London by Hooke and Wren.184 Huygens, a founding member of the French Académie Royale des Sciences, etched writing through a thin metal plate which was then printed by using a rolling press. From the first half of the seventeenth century, stencilled letters and notation seem also to have been used in large liturgical books in France and Germany, for monograms, even calling cards.185 Single letter stencils for public lettering would become a commonplace from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. But Huygens’s written stencils were never followed up – they were a one-off development, as was the first typewriter patented in 1714. Its inventor, the Englishman Henry Mill, described it as ‘an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters, singly or progressively one after another, as in writing, whereby all writing whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print’.

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