But you have to realize…there was no TELEVISION then. They were bored out of there skulls, and politics, debates, and such were looked at as theatre…a chance to hear some jumping up and down oratory.
And of course Shakespeare’s plays are harder for us to understand, since they were written in the language of the time. Just because an average Japanese guy can understand a Japanese play better than I can doesn’t make him smarter. And you’ve got to consider that we remember Shakespeare’s plays because they were the absolute best of the time. There were hundreds of other plays written, how many do we remember today? If you picked 100 Oscar winning movies in a time capsule they’d think all our films were amazing. Of course, they don’t remember Species II, or Leprechaun, those movies don’t even exist as far as they know.
I think the Victorian education was more liberal and less practical. After all, how much use can you derive from a language long dead (Classical Greek is as dead as Latin) and from being well-versed in the classics? It is more useful to know job skills. I’m not disparaging liberal educations: I’m a man of the English language myself, and proud of my obscure and trivial knowledge, but I know that C++ helps me more than Chaucer. The Victorian standard of education was aimed at a very specific group: The Leisure Class. This group was born into money, and they looked down upon the nouveau riche climbers, most of whom still had to ::gasp:: WORK for their money. This group really didn’t produce much, and so had a surplus of time they gladly filled with worthless bits of knowledge. It goes back to Plato, actually, and his theories that the ‘real’ is bunk anyway and that an intelligent man should devote himself to ‘pure thought’ to the exclusion of anything practical. This makes for a stable class, as the wealthy were inventing nothing. The burgoise, however, were, giving them the impetus to accelerate society beyond the ancien regime of the Victorian Age into the Industrial Revolution, a situation that demanded a workforce that knew more than the agricultural techniques of their ancestors. So a more universal, and universally practical, education system was financially advantageous to the business class. So it happened, and we have public schools that teach things that actually relate to modern life.
JFTR, the Victorians could type, or at least could direct their manservants to do so for them. Typewriters appeared early in the 19th century, and the QWERTY layout appeared in 1873.
Tom Sawyer was the first novel written by typewriter. Twain was an early adopter.
That’s true; typing was for the lower classes. A man (and by the late 1800s, a woman) who could work a typewriter was able to earn a living at his trade about the same way a person who could run a punch press or a printing press would be.
It’s strange how this prejudice has held on. I remember teaching myself how to type when I was a child in the 1960s, writing little poems and stories and stuff, and my father looking askance at it. (Of course, he may have been experiencing the sinking realization that his only son was a sissypants fairy-ass who would never go out for football).
Even today, Titans of Industry, men in their 50s and 60s who live on Park Avenue and still wear neckties and navy blue suits, don’t surf the Web because they can’t type…weird.
“than x” is an adverbial clause, and “x” is its object. It therefore uses the objective case of the first person plural; namely, “us”. So it’s “smarter than us”.
Absolutely right; good catch. IIRC, “typewriter” originally referred to the human who operated the typewriting machine, not the machine itself, and I think I’ve read something by Twain that uses the word this way. At some point, the person became a “typist”.
