From Nature’s Time To Clock Time:
A Legacy Of The British Industrial Revolution
Nancy Bader
Stillwater Area High School
Stillwater, MN
Time is not found in dead clocks and inert calendars, time is life itself; in ocean
tides and the blood in the womb, in every self-respecting child, in the land itself,
in every spirited protest for diversity and every refusal to let another enslave your
time, in the effervescent gusto of carnival life; life reveling in rebellion again the
clock.
Jay Griffiths, British Writer
New Internationalist, March 2002
Well aware of our dependence on the keeping of time, we in the modern world
rush to meet scheduled deadlines, determine the victor of a race to the smallest fraction of
a second, hurry to comply with arrival and departure times, and awaken most mornings to
an alarm set to a predetermined moment.
Western people are the most time conscious
of all humans and that consciousness is part of the legacy of the British Industrial
Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Seeing the Industrial Revolution as merely the transition from rural and
agricultural work to urban, industrial occupations would be misleading. The creation of
the urban work force was not the singular turning point. Just as important was the
transformation of inward notation and apprehension of time for those workers.
Transitioning from a naturally ordered day to one structured to mechanical time caused
cultural and psychological change for those forced to adapt to new rhythms of work and
play. People coming to the factory from their cottages and fields felt the “factory to be a
kind of jail, with the clock as the lock.” (Landes, 240) An object to which people
adjusted their entire lives, the clock and keeping of time demanded “regularity and steady
intensity in place of irregular spurts of work; accuracy and standardization in place of
individual design; and care of equipment and material in place of pride in one’s tools.
None of this came easily to the new workforce.” (Pollard, 181)
David Landes, in his Revolution in Time, believes that the clock is “one of the
greatest inventions in the history of mankind in its revolutionary implications for cultural
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values, technological change, social and political organization and personality.”
Assessing those social and psychological implications for one, or any number of workers
is an impossible task. It is possible, however, to examine the degree of change endured
by workers as they transitioned from pre-industrial life to mechanized regularity of work
that conflicted with tradition and one to which they were unaccustomed. That change
robbed them of many of their customs and much of their freedom.
In primitive peasant societies, organized in villages and dependent on agriculture
as well as domestic industry, time has an occupational definition. In other words, time
sense is task oriented and related to chores, primarily agricultural. Time follows natural
rhythms and is determined by the logic of need. Crops are planted in springtime and
gathered before weather interferes with the harvest, animals are put out to pasture in the
morning and brought back in as night falls. Life follows the natural sequence of warm
and cold, light and darkness, life and death. These natural rhythms make logical sense as
we all, in our most basic level, live according to nature’s clock. These “circadian and
circannual biological rhythms are stamped in our flesh and blood; they persist even when
we are cut off from time cues; they mark us as earthlings” and are basic to our nature.
(Landes, 13)
Such was true for pre-industrial England. For the English cottage laborer or
agricultural worker, there was personal control over the time, pace, and organization of
their production. A laborer worked long hours, but they were his own set hours. With
his wife and children working beside him, there was no alien power over his life
determining the schedule for his day. Work was seen as a collective task of the family, a
common responsibility with little demarcation between work and life, chores and
recreation. If her house became stifling, she could slip into her garden. If his hands
became sore from repeated motions, he could take time out to eat his lunch. The family
unit was a collective group, dividing and completing tasks to ensure survival for all and
work flowed naturally out of the passing of the day. A nostalgic, sweet view of preindustrial England doesn’t do justice to the hard work and precarious nature of the
laboring family’s life, but for the worker, the perception was that it was a life of their
own. (Hammond, 18)
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According to Clifford Sharp, in his book “The Economics of Time”, humans have
at their disposal “economic time.” That is, the time that a person allots between
alternative activities. In all situations time is a scare resource; there are only 24 hours in
a day, and the lives we live afford us a limited number of decades in which to participate
in our world. Also, we can’t do more than perhaps one or two activities at a time so how
we divide our time is an important personal decision and is a major factor in our personal
happiness and satisfaction.
With the development of industrial capitalism in England, and the growth of the
factory system, the traditional nature based task orientation of time sense had to change
and so did the locus of control over division of personal economic time. Specialization of
manufacturing tasks and changes in production methods “demanded greater
synchronization of labor and greater exactitude in time routines.” (Thompson, 80)
Instead of the laborer determining the flow of his workday, a clock-dominated
environment became predominant. His coming and going to work depended on the
coming and going of others. Time allotted to a specific work task for the factory worker
depended on the production rate of the other workers. The moving machinery and large
labor force required a new time discipline and as time went on, the worker became “more
encased by the time and tempo demands of his mechanized environment” and lost touch
with the self-determination of pre-industrial life. (Thompson, 71) That selfdetermination was minimized even more as the distinction between their employer’s time
and their “own” time became clear. With an uncompromising relentlessness, the clock
and keeping of time channeled human energy toward work and immediate result,
minimizing time for contemplative activity. The personal decisions that workers made
pertaining to their “economic time” became limited and in most cases, extinct.
The worker became part of an industrial way of life in which she was summoned
by the factory bell, had her life arranged by factory hours, and lost her freedom to
allocate time between labor and leisure as she wished. Either she “wholly submitted to
the requirements of the employers and worked the day and hours prescribed by the mill
owner, or she did not work.” (Mokyr, 90)
As the clock hand ticked away, people became more and more attentive to the
passage of time, to productivity, and performance. Workers, in effect, became “sellers of
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time” and time became currency, thus necessitating employer assurance that time was not
wasted. Time no longer “passed”, but was “spent.”
The hand on the clock was a
measure of time spent, used, wasted, and lost. As such “it was the prod and key to
personal achievement and productivity” and during the 18th century, nowhere was
demand for timepieces as large and growing as rapidly as in Britain. And since
timekeeping is essentially an urban concern, no nation was so time-bound in its activity
and consciousness as was Britain. (Landes, 238)
Convincing the workers to conform to this new inward notation of time proved to
be a difficult task. Not accustomed to a life dictated by the hands of a clock, workers
unfamiliarity with such a system was most frequently displayed in their reluctance to
arrive at work on time. Since workers didn’t spontaneously take to the new ways they
had to be forced by work discipline and fines. (Hobsbawm, 64) Thus, a new system of
discipline was developed to assure timeliness on the job. For the vast majority of
workers who owned no timepiece, factory owners sent around “wakers” to tap on
windows in the dark, early morning hours. Some workers had to rely on the bustle of
urban life to determine the time. Elizabeth Bentley, a young factory worker testifying to
the Committee on Factories Bill in 1832 stated
“I generally get to work on time because my mother has been up at 4 o’clock in
the morning; the colliers used to go to their work about 3 or 4 o’clock, and when
she heard them stirring she has got up out of her warm bed, and gone out and
asked them the time; and I have sometimes been at work at 2 o’clock in the
morning when it is streaming down with rain, and we have to stay till the mill was
opened.”
For those late to work, serious fines were imposed to discourage tardiness. In the
factories, pioneers like Richard Arkwright had the greatest difficulty “in training human
beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and identify themselves with the
unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.” He “had to train his workpeople to a
precision and assiduity altogether unknown before, against which their listless and restive
habits rose in continued rebellion.” (Pollard, 183). Without machinery to set the pace in
pottery manufacturing, Josiah Wedgwood instituted his own strict schedule of discipline.
Those who came late to his factories “should be noticed, and if after repeated marks of
disapprobation they do not come in due time, an account of the time they are deficient in
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should be taken, and so much of their wages stopt as the time comes to if they work by
wages, and if they work by the piece they should after frequent notice be sent back to
breakfast-time.” (Thompson, 82). The fines imposed were generally much more
considerable than the loss of time and such regulations were harsh for people
unconditioned to a mechanized, regimented way of life.
Such social change, for the workers, could only increase a sense of alienation and
powerlessness within their new industrial world .
“The machine cannot be challenged. It both creates and blots out, doing each
with glacial impersonality. It measures people in the same way it measures
money, and the growth of trees, the life span of the mosquitoes and morals, the
advance of time. And when the hour strikes on the Big Clock, that is indeed the
hour, the day, the correct time. When it says a man is right he is right, and when
it finds him wrong he is through, with no appeal. It is deaf as it is blind.”
(Fearing in Anderson, 58)
This time-consciousness and attitude of time-thrift was enforced throughout
society. Schools, for example, taught industry, frugality, order, and regularity while
education was seen as “training” in the habits of industry. Religious tracts railed against
idleness and taught that wasting time was a sin. Certainly such moral critiques were not
new and unique to the Industrial Revolution. The difference was that now those who
professed such beliefs were imposing their views on the working people.
In A Christian Directory, R. Baxter professed that “a wise and well skilled
Christian should bring his matters into such order, that every ordinary duty should know
his place, and all should be…as the parts of a Clock or other Engine, which must be all
conjunct, and each right placed.” Ironically, where once the pre-industrial family worked
together as a collective group, industrial workers were again considered collective but in
an all together difference sense. The analogy, in a time conscious mechanized world
became one of people as parts of a machine working together, coming and going with
perfect timing to maximize efficiency. It was not one of human interaction, relationship,
decision making, and freedom.
Wordsworth, in The Prelude, his poem on the growth of a poet’s consciousness,
spoke out against such a view, railing against
The Guides, the Wardens of our faculties,
And Stewards of our labour, watchful men
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And skilful in the usury of time,
Sages, who in their prescience would controul
All accidents, and to the very road
Which they have fashion’d would confine us down,
Like engines……
E. P. Thompson suggests that it is of little value to determine which way of life
was the better one; the pre-industrial task-oriented time consciousness or the industrial
time-discipline shift. He goes on to say that what historians can see is that the “historical
record is not a simple one of neutral and inevitable technological change, but is also one
of exploitation and of resistance to exploitation; and that values stand to be lost as well as
gained. (Thompson, 94.) If asked to what degree the Industrial Revolution shift in
mechanization and time-consciousness influenced the workers there can be only one
answer. Profoundly. And as we check our own watches and hurry through our scheduled
day we must recognize how the shift in time sense is still so prevalent in our own modern
world as a legacy of the British Industrial Revolution.
References
Anderson, N. (1961). Work and Leisure. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Ashton, T. S. (1968). The Industrial Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bentley, E. (1832). Testimony To the Committee on Factories Bill. June 4, 1832, Entry
lines 5206-5211, page 197.
Hammond, J. L., & Hammond, B. (1917). The Town Labourer. England.
Hobsbawm, E. (1999). Industry and Empire . New York: The New Press.
Landes, D. S. (1983). Revolution in Time. London: Viking.
Mokyr, J. (1999). The British Industrial Revolution. Boulder: Westview Press.
Pollard, S. (1965). The Genesis of Modern Management. London: Edward Arnold Ltd.
Sharp, C. (1981). The Economics of Time. New York: Halsted Press.
Thomas, K. (1965) . Work and Leisure. Past and Present, 30, 50-66.
Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past and
Present, 38, 56-97.