Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 1660-1785 (review)

Reviews Stuart Sherman. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 1660-1785. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. xv + 323pp. ISBN 0-226-75277-1. This is an important contribution to knowledge of relationships in England between literary forms and changing attitudes towards time induced by the increasing accuracy and availability of timekeepers during the seventeenth and eighteenth-century horological revolution. The story has often been told of how clocks and (especially) watches achieved hitherto undreamt of accuracy, portability , and omnipresence from the late seventeenth century forward. Studies of time and literature by Samuel Macey and others have investigated ways in which this aspect of the first industrial revolution altered traditional attitudes towards time, thereby encouraging writers to experiment with new topics, forms, and methods of characterization. No one, however, has focused as precisely and persuasively as Stuart Sherman on affinities between advances in mechanical timekeeping and the metamorphosis of diaries from private to public spheres. By attention to horology as well as to diaries and almanacs, Sherman provides better appreciation of the eighteenth-century periodical essay as "a new hybrid of genres." In sum: "The Spectator read like an essay, came out like a daily newspaper and looked like one too in its typeface and general design. From the vantage, though, of its first readers and of its putative author, its most 'surprising' innovations—its timing and persona—gave it the salient features of a diary, but a diary turned inside out: the work not of a public or social figure reposing a more secret version of the self in a single, sequestered manuscript [like Pepys], but of a wholly secretive sensibility imparting itself in print, to be read by a wide and varied public in the dirunal rhythm, and at the running moment, of its making" (pp. 113-14). This is eloquently and accurately put. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 3, April 1998 368 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:3 Taking Pepys's diary, the Spectator papers, and Boswell's journals as key texts, Sherman illustrates "the shaping—indeed the creation—of genres by the pressures of the new temporality" (p. 25). By "new temporality" Sherman means not only the new availability of portable timepieces, but the new prominence in daily life, thanks to their hitherto unparalleled accuracy, of such measures of small intervals as "minutes" and "seconds." We are now so used to these terms that it is something of a wrench to be reminded, as Sherman reminds us, that neither they nor the attitudes engendered by their use were always a part of common discourse. The tour de force of Sherman's book is his analysis of how such measures betray their existence in the form no less than the contents of Pepys's diary. Sherman's subtle introduction on "Chronometrie Innovation and Prose Form" and his two subsequent chapters centring on Pepys are the heart of this book for the new light they shed on the cultural significance of Pepys and of the new timekeepers. These chapters also demonstrate an effective way of analysing a literary form—the journal—which, as Sherman rightly remarks, critics have mainly dealt with as a source of background information rather than as a species of imaginative literature valuable in its own right and no less amenable to critical analysis than novels and biographies. As Sherman notes, there have previously been no books on Pepys's or Boswell's diaries, and only one on the Spectator. Sherman states his main thesis thus: "Pepys's diary inscribes a private account of the new time earlier, more assiduously, and more attentively than does any of its extant contemporaries; the Spectator takes diurnal, 'secret' time public , and establishes it as a social practice and cultural rhythm, so that readers as well as writers are encouraged to conceive and narrate their lives on this new template. The published travel journal extends and complicates this process. ... The novel absorbs the diary template more equivocally, in ways perhaps most fully documented in the works of Defoe (the first writer to incorporate a journal within a larger fiction) and Burney, whose assiduous practice of serial forms (journals and journal letters) and complex recasting of...