Paul Glennie, Nigel Thrift. Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv + 456 pp. Illustrations, maps. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-927820-6.

Reviewed by Dave A. Postles (University of Leicester)
Published on H-HistGeog (September, 2009)
Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew (University of Bristol)

Supping Hour

Supping Hours (John Donne)

[Pennyboy Junior] ....................'T strikes! One, two,

Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch,

Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest;

Would thou couldst make the time to do so too.

I'll wind thee up no more. The hour is come

So long expected!................[1]

There are two points initially to make about this book. First, it is inordinately stimulating; and second it needs to be assessed on its own terms, on the remit that the authors establish. In this respect, the title and subtitle are absolutely accurate, which is as it should be for a book about metrical time. So it is incumbent immediately to explain the authors' intentions: to rescue clock time from the technological and teleological metanarratives that have mechanically dominated the subject, that is, to disavow any unifying imperative of clock time; and secondly to challenge the Thompsonian notion of the imposition of clock time as a disciplinary device (factory/clock time) on a homogeneous working class as suggested by Edward (E. P.) Thompson, who presumed an imposition of an externally authorized and controlled clock time in factory industrialization.[2] The authors are thus in general concerned with the social and cultural experience(s) of clock time, that is, with phenomenologies of clock time. This point is made here explicitly so that readers should not anticipate evaluations of other notions of time, such as the eternal return or cyclical or cosmogenic time (as in the work of Mircea Eliade, Victor and Edith Turner, and Roy Rappaport) or reflections on and refraction of time through memory as narrativity (as in Paul Ricoeur's work) or the compression of time-space (distantiation) as enunciated by Tony Giddens and other sociologists (although the last is mentioned on pages 51-53).

Those two organizing ideas (if not principles) pervade the work. The Thompsonian notion is discretely undermined from a particular perspective: the argument of Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift maintains a long prior, quotidian acquaintance with and conformity to clock time (as a positive feature) before Thompson's disciplinary imposition. There are essentially three components of this proposition: provision of and access to clock time; practical understanding (practical literacy) of metrical time, as a quotidian, but purposive, skill or set of skills; and regulation and regularization of quotidian life by clock time (in its broadest sense of metrical times of the day).[3]

Technological questions are not completely eschewed. Throughout, the practical implications of timekeeping technologies are examined, explored, and, as importantly, explained. The second half of the book in particular is heavily concerned with instrumentation, but not merely or entirely for its technological components but for its implications for precision (punctuality, punctiliousness) as a social and cultural value before factory time. In the context of overall technological change, Glennie and Thrift perceive incremental advances, but not cataclysmic linear change. Their argument is to displace the technological determinism of, for example, Carlo Cipolla or David Landes. What is the impact of their ruminations on the "paradigm shifts" of Thomas Kuhn? One suspects that in rejecting a notion of a "horological revolution," the authors are disposing also of paradigm shifts.

It is incumbent on a reviewer to indicate the pathways through the book. Here, it may be excusable to simplify. In the first substantive chapters (chapter 2, "Clocks, Clock Times and Social Change"; and chapter 3, "Reconceptualizing Clock Time"), the authors contend, in largely theoretical terms, with the definition of clock times (in the plural, advisedly) and previous intellectual approaches, with the emphasis placed on its social importance. The succeeding chapters contain the material evidence upon which the historical arguments are constructed: chapter 4, "Clock Times in Medieval and Early Modern Bristol"; and then, somewhat anxious about the representativeness of that port city, chapter 5, "The Provision of Clock Time in Pre-Modern England." Chapters 6 ("Clock Times in Everyday Lives") and 7 ("Precision in Everyday Lives") consider the practical application of and adaptation to the precision of clock time. Two more chapters then illustrate timekeeping "communities of practice": chapter 8 on seafaring times and chapter 9 on the "pursuit of precision." The penultimate chapter (10) is essentially a detailed examination of the background, career, and achievements of a "provincial" clockmaker, John Harrison. So there are distinctly theoretical and empirical parts of the book.

As might be expected from the foregoing description, the book is replete with (exhaustive) theoretical projections about clock time, but nonetheless engages with empirical case studies of clock time in local conditions and within "communities of practice." Unsurprisingly, the authors hope that the empirical sustains the theoretical and the theoretical informs the empirical. How successful have they been? In the consideration of this reviewer, there is a coherent tie between the two, although there is here the fascinating, but unresolved, question of the authors' own "division of labor" (and time?).

While there is a cohesive overall structure to the book, then, there are also multitudinous important points that can be extracted. The authors might consider one of the most fundamental to be the wide existence of time instruments before the late eighteenth century, which is carefully documented (see further below). Another suggestion concerns the relationship between aural and visual time signals: that is, bells and clock faces. To a degree, we encounter a replication of the interrelationship between "orality" and "literacy" (discussed recently by Adam Fox and David Olson, among others). The one did not displace the other: "in other words, it is misleading to suppose a once-for-all transformation between 'aural' and 'visual' time" (p. 141). On the one hand, in different scenarios, and, indeed, the same context, the visual might complement or inform (or even confuse and complicate). The audibility of the bells might still have greater import. On the other hand, we should not imagine that reading the time was complicated or beyond the reach of all sections of society (and there are detailed descriptions of what was involved). One of the problems here, of course, is that there is no generally quantifiable lowest criterion of (time) "literacy," such as the ability to make one's signature (whatever that might mean, as discussed by, inter alia, David Cressy and Jonathan Barry).

A few words must be directed to the methodology. The chapters of empirical research encompass a comprehensive, indeed, exhaustive, range of sources, not only churchwardens' accounts and probate inventories, but also such categories as archdeaconry visitations (returns to articles of enquiry for the "infrastructure" of church clocks) and militia lists (for occupational data). The analysis here sustains the arguments about the prior existence of public time instruments, their density and penetration, and the commonplace regularization of time/life.

Highly interesting suggestions are advanced in these "empirical" chapters, ideas too numerous to review all of them here. The nuances about inferential time are especially significant, associated with "time cues" (or perhaps even "clues"). Clock time was sometimes more effectively disseminated through aural signals (bells). The signaling of time for a specific purpose was also used for general information: the morrow mass, the opening of the market, and the gleaning bell. We have a new analysis and mapping of the distribution of church clocks, in all their technical variety (described in detail). Evidence from probate inventories demonstrates the penetration of clocks into the houses of the vast proportion of the population, while pauper inventories imply that some of the poorest had domestic clocks. The time of events was deployed in depositions to establish credibility, which thus also reflects that such awareness of time was commonplace and expected.

A couple of issues are significant, but might not have been pursued to an ultimate conclusion. It is maintained that, since the predominant location of domestic timepieces was in the kitchen, there was no gender deficit in access to time. There is only passing reference to recent research complicating ideas about female access to the "public sphere," the "sexual division" of labor, and "separate spheres." The argument, as it stands, concentrates on the domestic sphere, not access to the "public" time instruments (except, of course, for the audible ones). More than that, however, one wonders about the intimately personal timepieces: watches. Did women--regardless of class or social group--have the same access to personal resources of time as men, and, indeed, to public time? Men might have had watches as a marker of masculinity, to demonstrate their male status, as heads of household and as men among men, as well as a symbol of belonging to an external "public sphere," and as bodily accessories and part of bodily comportment. If women experienced the public world outside the home less frequently, was their sight of time more constrained, more interrupted and intermittent, than men's? Were women then more reliant on the aural time signals of the public instruments than men with their personal visual signs of time? In other words, were women and men in that one respect different communities of practice in time? Did women also rely on inferred time cues--asking their men for the time? Perhaps Glennie and Thrift have here been too hasty in dismissing the gender deficit. The authors, nonetheless, are not oblivious to the potential of gender differences and do address them, not least in theoretical terms.

Quite rightly, the authors also wish to elide the differences between the "public" and the "private," which cannot, indeed, be demarcated but loosely, since they were "separated" by a porous "boundary." Again, however, we return to the watch: a symbol not only of masculinity

but also perhaps of social distinction (Pierre Bourdieu). What was the penetration of watches into the social world by 1800? Did such personal and intimate sources of access to time reinforce notions of social superiority, cachet, and honor, marking off and separating?

One of my few misgivings concerns the introductory case study of Galileo in the first few pages. Despite the authors' good intentions, the exemplar strikes me as somewhat detached and distant from the main focus of the book. Others will have a better understanding, however, and may perceive it differently.

The book has probably, moreover, arrived in the hands of a recalcitrant reviewer in one respect: "community." A constant and valuable refrain throughout the book is that different groups of people adapted to clock time in different ways because of their different needs: practical adaptation. Much attention is given to the notion of "communities of practice." In the final chapters, we encounter one of those "communities": seafarers. One sometimes feels, nonetheless, that the notion is implicit, not exactly defining the nature or composition of those "communities." That imputation may arise because of the authors' emphasis on the accessibility of clock time to all, but with different usages and practices by different constituencies. These groups are referred to as "communities of practice" and "temporal communities." No doubt the term "community" is deployed as a neutral collective noun. I wonder, however, how cohesive is a collectivity that has the single attribute of its approach to time? Without doubt, I am oversimplifying, since the attitude to time was informed by other collective attributes. Where awareness of technology is involved, could we substitute networks (as in strict Social Network Analysis) or, perhaps, even resuscitate Norbert Elias's notion of (con)figurations, figurational sociology? Others, however, will estimate that I am simply scratching one of my own itches to no conceivable purpose.

 We cannot leave the book without engaging with one of the underlying arguments that is signaled occasionally, but more generally is latent: the nonessentialism of clock time. It is implicit, of course, in the very reference to "communities of practice." Clock time is not an absolute; clock times are pervasive. Clock times belong to contexts, can even be contingent. There is no one practical understanding. Clock times are, to revert to the senses derived from Ferdinand de Saussure (although some will make the accusation of distortion), as much "parole" as "langue," as much event and process as structure. With that, we do return to the current debate between Penny Corfield and Alun Munslow.[4] In this context, we might envisage Glennie and Thrift located in a (positive) compromise position, a sort of structuration (Bourdieu rather than Giddens) rather than the radical poststructuralism of Munslow or the attenuated positivism of Corfield. To explain, although Glennie and Thrift renounce a single narrative about time, in their insistence on "communities of practice," they seem to adhere to a notion of a range of the "habitus" of Bourdieu, those (limited rather than limitless) repertoires of experience and understanding in which structure is negotiated by practices.

These questions simply illuminate and illustrate the immense stimulation of this book. It is an obligatory read for historical geographers (concerned with time as well as space/place), historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and students of the humanities (in several media, such as literature and film, for it has wide-ranging implications for "modernity"). We can summarize: stimulating and provocative? Indubitably, yes. Informative? Massively, both theoretically and in the empirical chapters. Timely? Not before time, not a moment too soon, on time. If the variety of practice in adaptations to clock time was not essentialist, this book is distinctly essential.

Notes

[1]. Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, in The Revels Plays, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 75, act 1, scene 1, lines 10-15.

[2]. E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (1967): 56-97.

[3]. A critique of Thompson from another angle is Leonard Schwarz, "Custom, Wages and Workload in England during Industrialization," Past and Present 197 (2007): 143-175.

[4]. Penny Corfield, Time and the Shape of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Alun Munslow, review of Time and the Shape of History by Penny Corfield, and Penny Cornfield, response to review, "Review Forum," Cultural and Social History 6 (2009): 231-236.

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Citation: Dave A. Postles. Review of Glennie, Paul; Thrift, Nigel, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300-1800. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. September, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25281

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