The contrast of town and village life in laurence stern’s novels content: Introduction chapter I. The British novelist Laurence Sterne

The Curfew Bell
It is apparent, then, that horology had a profound impact on many aspects of the literature of the long eighteenth century, but it is less commonly acknowledged that literature sometimes had a potent effect upon contemporaneous time-telling practices and perceptions. This is evident in the pamphlet The Clockmakers Outcry against the Author of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760). This wry text, purportedly written by an anonymous clockmaker (but possibly by Sterne himself), bewails the deleterious impact the association of sexual intercourse with clock maintenance had had on the trade:
[t]he directions I had for making several clocks for the country are countermanded; because no modest lady now dares to mention a word about winding-up a clock, without exposing herself to the sly leers and jokes of the family, to her frequent confusion.⁵³
This may be pure satire, of course, but there are other less arch examples, and the discussion of Coleridge’s “Christabel” suggests one possible domain of inquiry, namely, the auditory aesthetics of temporality. Literary descriptions of the sounds produced by watches, clocks, and time-indicating bells reveal a great deal about the culture(s) that gave rise to them, and pioneering work in “sensory history” has recently shown the extent to which sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell have deep social dependencies.⁵⁴ This research has accorded a new centrality to auditory phenomena particularly, a shift prompted, in part, by a growing interest in the use of public clocks and bells as temporal markers. As Mark Smith has noted, “[t]hroughout towns, sounds served to coordinate civic, political, economic, and social life” by functioning as “semiotic systems, helping people to locate themselves in space as well as time, with familiar sounds and their timing helping to establish the idea of community,” and Alain Corbin has brilliantly reconstructed the sensory impacts of the church bells rung in rural France during the nineteenth century.⁵⁵ An additional layer of complexity is introduced, of course, when literary representations are scrutinized, and one surprisingly problematical sound merits careful attention, namely, the curfew bell.