V Conceptual Luxury

Fig. 14, A young couple poses for their portrait in the cabinet card photographed by J. F. Rank of Van Wert, Ohio, 1874. 

Pocket watches were never merely jewelry for men. Its conspicuous consumption is stemmed precisely from its combination of machinery and ornament, that is, in the ability to claim chronometry. The pocket watch not only allows the man to carry a symbol of industrial evolution and contemporary scientific successes, but provides the capacity to suggest the owner possessed time and timekeeper. 

Private property of time entails private property of the chronological arrangement of his or her daily actions, such that the holder gains temporal independence from their surroundings. It kindles an indulging sense of self-acknowledgment, self-recognition. The watch becomes a reliable resource of the quantitative inquiry of the self’s motion through space and time, and with this a new notion of independent thinking is born. The watch as a commoditized portable property hence bestows not only material luxury, but conceptual luxury. In a study of the diary of a man named Pepys living in the 18^th century, there is a passage that describes his impressions of his newly obtained pocket watch, “Pepys takes pleasure in what the watch reveals to him about the secret rhythms of his motion.” Indeed, there is a dimension of intimacy in the pocket watch that falls into this conceptual privatization of time. 
Featured here (Fig. 14) is a portrait of a young couple, the man is sitting with a diploma (he most likely recently received) and his watch explicitly displayed as a means to reflect his status as a man of virtue (from the pocket watch, referring to punctuality) and ambitious future.