Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800 (review)

The authors of this interdisciplinary study of time-awareness argue against the view that pre-industrial cultures of 'natural time' succumbed to new social disciplines of 'clock time' in the course of the industrial revolution. They reject the notion that timekeeping in England in particular was transformed by the demands of industrial capitalism and the greater proliferation of time-pieces in the late eighteenth century. They tilt repeatedly at E.P. Thompson, whose 1967 work on "Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism" they recognize as one of the most influential essays of the past fifty years.¹ They claim instead that the early modern English, like their West European neighbors, enjoyed a circumstantial horological awareness, with attendant temporal competencies, going back to the fifteenth century or earlier. One did not have to own a watch or clock to know how to tell the time, since time-signaling, by sound as well as sight, was widely-established across both urban and rural environments. 'Clock time' was a complex of variable practices, not simply a matter of mechanics, and many of its manifestations pre-dated industrialization. Change came gradually, as clocks added the visual information of hands to the aural register of bells. Late seventeenth century improvements to pendulums, balance springs and escapements brought greater accuracy and reliability to machines that could mark hours, minutes, and even seconds. But technology, though important, was not determinative. Rather, the authors find a variety of temporal communities, or consumers of time-information, whose religious, domestic, economic, astrological and navigational activities ran by the clock.

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift are cultural geographers who work with historians at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences. They have ranged widely for examples and evidence, but their citations come more commonly from secondary sources than from archives. Their structure is episodic, deliberately eschewing a linear narrative. They write like a committee, frequently pausing to summarize, to reiterate, to repeat or explain themselves. The work is supported by 50 figures, 42 tables, and eleven plates on the temporal and spatial distribution of clocks and timekeeping practices. Though the work covers England and Wales, many of the maps stop at the borders of England.

Time awareness, for Glennie and Thrift, was so deeply naturalized that most people took it for granted. It depended less on devices than on practices. Their case-study of the availability and use of clock time in late-medieval and early-modern Bristol illustrates the multiple utilities of time-knowledge, earlier than and independent of the rise of industrial capitalism. From schoolboys to wage workers, civic leaders to market regulators, and across religious, business, and leisure activities, the authors find cultures of time-consciousness, independent of the ownership of clocks and watches. Time, it seems, belongs subtly and pervasively to the public sphere. The point is driven home by trawls through diaries, churchwardens' accounts, and both public and private records from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, in which chronological precision is casually noted. The temporal sophistication of pre-industrial England appears much greater than most followers of E.P. Thompson have allowed.

After Thompson, the next target for revision is Dava Sobel, whose 1995 best-seller Longitude appears naïve and misleading in matters horological. Sobel's subtitle is The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, and she presents John Harrison, the perfecter of the chronometer, as an outsider, remote from the business of clocks and clock-making. Part of the drama of Longitude depends on its hero coming from nowhere. Glennie and Thrift, however, in a chapter of fresh research and bravura speculation, relocate Harrison within the culture of time awareness, clock familiarity, and general horological competence that they have been at pains to describe. Harrison's achievement is by no means lessened, but it is given a much more plausible...