Clock Time and Utopia's Time in Novels of the 1790s

Abstract

In his Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, To a Noble Lord (1796), the radical John Thelwall argues that the integrity of the principles of "equal rights, and equal laws" must be respected despite the "[e]xcesses and cruelties" of the Terror: "Is time unsteady, because my watch goes wrong? Is it not noon when the sun is in the meridian, because the parish dial is out of repair? Can principles, which are the sun of the intellectual universe, be changed in their nature or their course by the vile actions of a few ruffians?" 1 Thelwall's privileging of a naturally replete order of time over its artificial measure is not simply an occasional, if ingenious, metaphor. 2 For him, as for many radical writers of the period, natural and mechanical time had significant narrative correlatives. The "only means" of securing a future of exactly equal conditions, they believed, was through a "revolution of opinions" that would effect a comprehensive shift of consciousness. 3 Literary forms with the expressive power to make principles appear as constant and self-evident as 'steady' time or the meridian sun would contribute to the achievement of this goal. A radically different future would be made possible by present assertions of transcendent principles.