“His Numbering Clock”: Clockwork Men in Literary and Popular Culture

Abstract

Abstract The image of a man turning into a clock has haunted literary and popular culture for the last four hundred years. This essay surveys the trope of the clockwork man from Shakespeare’s Elizabethan age to the modernist era and beyond. I explore two modernist examples of the trope, E. V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man (1923) and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), before turning to the postwar example of a DC comic book supervillain named the “Clock King,” who adorns his costume with clock dials and whose traumatic backstory involves the failure of mechanical devices to accurately measure human existence. Bookended by two examples of “clockwork kings,” this essay charts the relationship between a persistent cultural trope and the technological/ sociocultural history of time measurement.