ABSTRACT

While the previous chapters have examined how specific time-telling devices were incorporated into literary texts, this chapter shows how literature occasionally exerted a potent influence over the way specific temporal signals were perceived and subjectively evaluated. Drawing upon recent work in the field of sensory history, literary descriptions of horological campanology are re-considered, and the most striking case is undoubtedly that of the curfew bell. At the start of the eighteenth century, this bell simply designated a particular temporal moment, but, by the early nineteenth century, it had become an evocative sound that conveyed a deep sense of solemnity and (ultimately) sublimity. The exploration offered here leads from Shakespeare, to Milton, to Thomas Gray, to the philosophers Hugh Blair and Archibald Alison. The literary-historical dimensions of auditory perception have rarely featured in mainstream critical studies.