X A Western Daily

Fig. 21 Perrin Cuppy Huffman, Huffman and Barnard Studio, Frankville, Iowa, 1882. 

The privatization of time for both men and women meant a restructuring of the daily life. The watch introduced the possibility of arranging one’s life a way that was once reserved to regulating entire communities. The pocket watch meant the private property of aesthetic taste, of scientific feats, of intellectual agency, and finally of the diurnal. It was a luxury both in material and concept as it conspicuously announces the time and timekeeper. It is by nature a salient symbol of Western civilization. In 1711, Alexander Pope writes in his account An Essay On Criticism, “Tis with our judgments as our watches, none/Go just alike, yet each believes his own:” such individual privilege will inevitably incite excessive horological confidence and puffery, such that standard dictionary of commerce of the mid-18^th century writes “One should put little credence in the common notion most people have of the accuracy of their watches." It is key that literature, so early on, has noted some sort of alertness towards the private control of a chronological spectrum, and even more interesting to view the evolution of our relationship with time via writers. 

Marx puts it as such: “Through the subordination of man to the machine the situation arises in which […] time is everything, man is nothing, he is at the most the incarnation of time. […] Time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things,’” A mal-du-siècle arises in the romantic period, as a response to this restructuring of the diurnal: the virtuous qualities of owning time is put into question, are re-examined and re-defined.