Leisure, the Work Day, and the Etymology of Lunch

I was reading a book by F.Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, and noticed that he always uses the word Luncheon instead of Lunch. I then began looking up the term, and found that lunch is actually a contraction of luncheon and also that dinner used to be the term for a noontime meal. I came across a short essay What Time is Dinner, by Sherrie McMillan, which attempts to provide a historical background for the shifting meanings of dinner and lunch. That dinner used to refer to what we now call lunch led me to suspect the existence of something like a siesta in medieval times, and the idea that some of our leisure time was lost with the emergence of manufactories. Wouldn't a large meal at noon require a sizable break from work?

Luncheon was a snack between dinner (then held at noon) and supper mostly for farm workers during long Summer days. Dinner was actually held at noon and supper just before sunset, probably out of convenience given the complications of not having electrical lighting and having to do everything at night by candlelight. McMillan suggests that technological advances inaugurated a culture of night life and leisure that increasingly included more and more of the masses: "Due to new developments in culture and technology," and the growths of "the middle class...mercantilism, trades, and manufacturing," candles became much more available and it was no longer a luxury to feast at night. In her analysis of the etymology of lunch and dinner I began to suspect that the loss of a substantial noontime meal could actually prove the opposite of her thesis.

Was it, as McMillan claims that "the middle and lower classes in Britain were quick to adopt this new meal when they could," and that "many people in the middle and lower class began to eat dinner in the evening as the nobles and gentry did”? Or, rather could one read into the shift in mealtimes as a gutting of leisure time in the context of the manufacturing revolution?

With the advent of the manufacturing revolution workers no longer owned their own time. Time was subject to strict scrutiny, so as to enable maximum productivity. Due to the enormous increases in efficiency that manufactories provided it seemed as if this technological shift could pave the way for shorter workdays and expanded leisure time. This was precisely what was prophesized by the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who articulated a technological utopianism that was embraced by capitalists and communists alike. The reality is of course that with all our technological advances and increases in efficiency, the average workweek is continually increasing, as our economy proceeds in a fitful state of exponential expansion. Thus every time workers dine in the evening they can mourn the bygone days when dinner time provided a leisurely break from work.