Watches and Watching Time in British Romantic Comedy

Time became secularized, as the hours of Church-defined collective activities (tolled by cathedral bells, for example) were replaced with mechanisms held by individuals (watches) and featured in domestic parlors (mantel clocks), and thus private and public forms of time intersected in ways that destabilized social structures and patterns of behaviors. Schedules of public activities, such as train arrivals and departures, were expected to operate with precision and predictability, as individual watches and public clocks ticked in unison. According to Stuart Sherman, clocks articulate time's meanings in and for the culture that produces them (be), and the Romantic period registered new meanings of time with particular acuity (Miller 3). When Romantic authors wrote the time the new watches and clocks told, they enabled readers to recognize, interpret, and inhabit the temporality by which the whole culture was learning to live and to work.