ABSTRACT

This chapter examines literary responses to pocket watches by exploring the work of influential figures such as Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt, as well as less well-known authors such as Anne Steele and Francis Okely. Consequently, unexpected unfamiliarities soon emerge when it is shown that mechanical watches never acquired a stable set of symbolical associations in the literature of the long eighteenth century. Rather than merely being blandly polysemous, though, these intricate devices formed a nexus of diametrically opposed meanings, and therefore frequently risked destabilising the very literary arguments they were intended to reinforce. This characteristic is examined in relation to public and private spaces, ostentatious display and meditative isolation, mechanical reliability and inexactness, and gender-based dichotomies.