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

Abstract

A revolution in clock technology in England during the 1660s allowed people to measure time more accurately, attend to it more minutely, and possess it more privately than previously imaginable. In this text, Stuart Sherman argues that innovations in prose emerged simultaneously with this technological breakthrough, enabling authors to recount the new kind of time by which England was learning to live and work. Through readings of Samuel Pepys's diary, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's daily Spectator, the travel writings of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell and the novels of Daniel Defoe and Frances Burney, Sherman traces the development of a new way of counting time in prose - the diurnal structure of consecutively dated installments - within the cultural context of the daily institutions that gave it form and motion.

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