A Sideways Look at Time by Jay Griffiths

Author:Jay Griffiths
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

If ever an age forged the chains linking time and power, if ever an age watched time and enslaved it, it was the Industrial Revolution, an era which altered the experience of time more dramatically than any other. Work, work, work was the whip word. The watch-chained Victorians shrilly maintained that all hours were to be spent either building economic power or spiritual power, envisaging a system of “spiritual accountancy” whereby hours spent working or praying would accumulate future rewards, whereas playing, lingering, jelly-making, gambling or giggling were coins of hours badly spent—every trifling, whistling one of which would cost you dearly in the afterlife.

John Wesley, Methodist. The very word is like a fetter on time’s freedom. (At a Methodist Sunday school in York in 1819, teachers were fined for unpunctuality.) Methodist: austerity such that no hour can slip away in glee nor a body snooze away a fuggy morning. Here he is, Mr. Wesley, in a 1786 tract on The Duty and Advantage of Early Rising : “By soaking . . . so long between warm sheets, the flesh is as it were parboiled, and becomes soft and flabby. The nerves, in the mean time, are quite unstrung.” One Rev. J. Clayton wrote in a 1755 pamphlet, Friendly Advice to the Poor , of “that slothful spending the morning in bed: the necessity of early rising would reduce the poor to a necessity of going to Bed betime; and thereby prevent the Danger of Midnight revels . . .”

The rising middle classes, responsible for colonialism and stiff-upper-aspidistras, capitalism and the loss of play, could do one thing well; they could certainly get out of bed. Getting out of bed betimes, ah me, the hardest thing you have to do all day and you have to do it first. But they were not content with their own rising, their own useful productive time. They looked beneath them and saw the poor. What did poor people do all day? They slept in, they slept out, they slept around and they slept around the clock. They idled, they hummed, they chatted, they drank. They honored Saint Monday from Tuesday to Sunday, they had holidays all over the time, they ambled and they gambled. The middle classes purpled with a collective Mock Gothic rumble. John Foster, writing An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance (1820), bemoans the fact that manual workers had, after work “several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please . . .” As they please , if you please, as if their time were actually their own. The presumption!

Though the middle classes pretended that productive time use was about morality, it was actually about class politics and power, in such an age of power, trade power and colonial power. For the middle classes made their money out of other people’s time—it suited the ruling classes very well that those below them should use their time to work to increase the profits and power of middle-class capitalists.

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