![]() ![]() ![]() For example, most of the salaried characters in Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair are army officers or British East India company bureaucrats and they usually show up when they get a year or two of leave. On the other hand, novels tend to be biased toward characters who have enough time off to converse and flirt, so it’s hard to say. ![]() In contrast, I never heard the word “summer” used as a verb - “Where did you summer?” - until I was about 22. My impression from reading 19th Century novels and biographies is that the comfortably salaried often did things like take the summer off. This is a complementary question to one that used to take up a lot of space in the brains of people a half century ago: how many hours per week did factory workers with bad jobs work in the Dark Satanic Mills of the early Industrial Revolution? In 1819, Robert Peel got through the British Parliament a law forbidding 9 year olds to work more than twelve hours per day, but it’s likely that limitation was widely ignored. How hard did people with really good office jobs work before, say, World War One? ![]()
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