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

by Paul Glennie, Nigel Thrift

Timekeeping is an essential activity in the modern world, and we take it for granted that our lives our shaped by the hours of the day. Yet what seems so ordinary today is actually the extraordinary outcome of centuries of technical innovation and circulation of ideas about time.

Shaping the Day is a pathbreaking study of the practice of timekeeping in England and Wales between 1300 and 1800. Drawing on many unique historical sources, ranging from personal diaries to housekeeping manuals, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift illustrate how a particular kind of common sense about time came into being, and how it developed during this period.

Many remarkable figures make their appearance, ranging from the well-known, such as Edmund Halley, Samuel Pepys, and John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude, to less familiar characters, including sailors, gamblers, and burglars.

Overturning many common perceptions of the past-for example, that clock time and the industrial revolution were intimately related-this unique historical study will engage all readers interested in how "telling the time" has come to dominate our way of life.

Genres: History, History Of Science, Philosophy

480 pages, Hardcover

First published February 12, 2009

Reviews

[Ian Fraser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very worthwhile, interesting and useful social history of timekeeping though I thought the chapter on John Harrison was not up to the standard of the rest of the book. Indeed it appears that the authors did not refer to any of the published information about Harrison by experts like Jonathan Betts. John Harrison was, however, a highly specialised clockmaker, working to solve the longitude problem, so the weakness of this chapter and does not detract from the book's informative and approachable style and content.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely valuable criticism of E. P. Thompson's widely accepted thesis about time and work discipline in industrial capitalism. As Glennie and Thrift show, Thompson's account is distorted, at best. For anyone trying to think through the period in which clocks were emerging as tools for telling time but had not yet achieved the dominance they currently have, this is a must read.