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

2.3. Themes, motifs and symbols of the novel
When Thomas Percy included “The Ancient Ballad of Chevy-Chace” in his epochal Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), he claimed that the lines “[ … ] when they rung the evening-bell, / The battle scarce was done” referred to “the Curfew bell, usually rung at 8 o’clock.”⁵⁶ Joseph Ritson ridiculed this “egregious mistake,” and asserted that Percy had “confounded the vesper-bel with the curfew.”⁵⁷ Such disagreements were unavoidable given the curfew bell’s long and convoluted history. From at least the twelfth century onward, it had sounded in villages, towns, and cities, at some point between 8:00 p.m. or 10:00 p.m. (the precise time varied from place to place and season to season). Originally, it signaled that domestic fires should be extinguished or raked over with ashes, hence, the etymology from the Norman French couvre feu.⁵⁸ This inspired the long-held nationalistic conviction that the bell was “a badge of servitude.”⁵⁹ James Thomson’s poem Liberty (1734) describes how “[t]he shivering Wretches, at the Curfew Sound / Dejected shrunk into their sordid Beds,” and Thomson condemns this “so dead so vile submission.”⁶⁰ Similar themes emerged almost a century later in Hazlitt’s essay “On a Sun-dial” (1827): the curfew bell was “a great favourite” of Hazlitt’s because it recalled his childhood at Wem and brought to mind “the Norman warrior armed for the battle or in his festive hall, the conqueror’s iron rule and peasant’s lamp extinguished.”⁶¹ The sound caused his personal past to merge with a remote mythologized national past. However, the semantic import of the bell had changed drastically over the centuries. Rather than being oppressively cohortative, it came to denote merely one of “the boundaries of urban diurnal time,” and its role as a temporal marker is apparent in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁶² In King Lear, the pernoctations of “foul fiend Flibbertigibbet” are restricted temporally—“[h]e begins at curfew and walks till the first cock”—while, in Measure for Measure, Vicentio’s question “[w]ho call’d here of late?” elicits the response “[n]one, since the curfew rung.”⁶³ Such references became richer and deeper from the mid-seventeenth century onward, and temporal demarcation ceases to be the sole connotation. Although (to use Mark Smith’s terminology) the “production” of the sound remained constant during this period, the “consumption” of it altered as it accumulated undertones of mournfulness, solemnity, and mortality.⁶⁴ The assorted “elves” in The Tempest rejoice in “the solemn curfew” that indicates the approach of night (when their powers are most potent).⁶⁵ And Milton may have had this phrase in mind when he wrote in Il Penseroso (1645):

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  Oft on a Plat of rising ground,
  
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  I hear the far-off Curfeu sound,
  
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  Over som wide-water’d shoar,
  
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  Swinging slow with sullen roar [ … ]⁶⁶
  

Assuming the participle phrase in the last line modifies “sound” rather than “shoar,” then the curfew seemingly conveys solemnity.
These acquired connotations—of oppression, temporality, and solemnity—require us to listen again to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751):

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  The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
  
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  The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
  
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  The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
  
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  And leaves the world to darkness and to me.⁶⁷
  

The sound is instantly transformed into a passing bell, which was rung “at the Departure of a dying Person,” for reasons of (superstitious) sanctity: evil spirits were deterred when tintinnabulations disturbed the air.⁶⁸ Crucially, it did not signal an iterative periodic moment of time, so curfew bells and passing bells were semantically distinct, if acoustically similar—and this created the possibility for the analogical conflation.⁶⁹ This mingling aroused the ire of Gray’s more campanologically savvy readers. By the 1780s he was already being criticized for his “slight mistake,” while John Mitford fulminated that “‘toll’ is not the appropriate verb; it was not a slow bell tolling for the dead,” and complained that “a knell is not tolled for the