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Total and sudden transformations of a language seldom happen. This essay attempts to define a problem concerning printing history and cultural change that has intrigued and often baffled me for the past twenty-five years. I begin by describing a phenomenon that is literally minuscule: the gradual abandonment of pervasive capital letters (majuscules), as well as italics, in English books published during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. I attempt to relate this important change in printing practice to the roles of author, bookseller and printer during this period, to the growth (and diversification) of the reading public in England, and to other cultural phenomena of the 1750s – the publication of Johnson's Dictionary and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, in particular – with which these changes in the printing house might profitably be associated. My research suggests that such a fundamental shift in printing conventions was closely tied to a pervasive interest in refinement, regularity and even cultural conformity at mid-century. But such a change also reveals the conflicting emotions English men and women of the eighteenth century continued to harbour concerning their country's relationship to the rest of Europe. Samuel Johnson noted that ‘Our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people who commented on Württemberg – and indeed on Germany as a whole – during the first several decades of the nineteenth century drew attention to increasing pauperization and a widening split between those with enough resources to maintain independence and those involved in a desperate search for occasional sources of income. By 1828 the Neckarhausen pastor was expressing concern about the poor in the village outnumbering the propertied, and other observers were beginning to speak longingly of an earlier prosperity, visible still in the last generation. Until the 1820s, the older stratification system maintained its fundamental characteristics under the stress of an expanding population. Wealthy peasants extended political domination, and a growing underclass of farm laborers, village servants, and impoverished artisans found new niches for themselves in a “makeshift economy.” Although the village population rose from 516 to 738, or 43 percent, between the 1780s and 1820s, the proportion of independent agricultural producers – Bauern – declined from 36 percent to 24 percent, from well over a third to just under a quarter. By the end of the eighteenth century, the average artisan held only 40 percent as much property as the average Bauer, which amounted to a considerable decline throughout the century from an earlier figure of 75 percent. Individuals from the burgeoning group of farm laborers owned only 20 percent as much real estate as a typical Bauer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]