ABSTRACT

This chapter summarises the main themes and topics that have been addressed in the preceding chapters. However, it then goes on to show how the same issues continued to be discussed and debated throughout the Victorian period. By focusing in turn on specific time-telling devices (e.g., sundials, sandglasses), the analysis reveals how these objects remained present in the literary imaginations of influential figures such as Charles Dickens and Alfred Tennyson. Inevitably, this leads to a discussion of Greenwich Meantime and railway clocks. However, significant advances in mechanical engineering meant that poetry-writing machines began to be created during the nineteenth century, and the clockwork properties of those devices reconfigured the contemporaneous understanding of mechanism and creativity.