SOURCE: “Changing the Calendar,” in Eighteenth Century Life, Vol. VII, No. 2, January, 1982, pp. 1-18.

[In the following essay, Alkon comments on eighteenth-century attitudes toward time and changes in the calendar.]

In January 1796, Neville Maskelyne, astronomer royal at Greenwich, fired his assistant, Kinnebrook, charging him with an observational error of eight-tenths of a second. Kinnebrook's difficulty had started the previous August when his notations of stellar transit times began to differ by one-half second from those of Maskelyne, whose admonitions were to no avail, and whose patience was exhausted four months later upon seeing the discrepancy grow by another three-tenths of a second. To Maskelyne it was clear that Kinnebrook was incompetent for scientific work in a world whose timekeepers depended for accurate calibration upon observations which, so it then seemed, should be accurate to well within half a second. To historians, Kinnebrook's problem, now so famous in the annals of astronomy and experimental psychology, has acquired a very different significance as the episode which led Bessel, director of the Königsberg observatory, to investigate the hypothesis of individual variation in timing events, and to develop the notion of the personal equation: the average difference between two observers. This, Bessel thought, would be a way of allowing for such discrepancies as that between Maskelyne and Kinnebrook in order to determine the true moment of stellar transits despite human variability in recording small units of time. The catch, which Bessel also discovered, is that one cannot reliably calibrate the observer because there is variability in the personal equation. After intensive research culminating in the 1860s, astronomers were able to overcome this obstacle, but only with assistance from nineteenth-century refinements in mechanical time measurement: the chronograph and the chronoscope. This research, in turn, together with Helmholtz's discovery that nerve impulses are not instantaneous, resulted in two new areas of investigation: the complication experiment, concerned with the speed of response to input from different senses such as the eye and the ear; and the reaction experiment, concerned (especially in the laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt, where experimental psychology was founded) with measuring the times of mental processes such as stimulus discrimination. From this era of mental chronometry came the beginnings of our experimental dynamic psychology of motivation, a field which betokens recognition that for people, unlike their clocks, time measurement is in many crucial situations a psychological rather than a mechanical problem, involving expectation, preparation, and attention as well as those individual differences known as the personal equation. Had Maskelyne been a student of Augustine's Confessions instead of an especially arrogant product of what Professor Macey calls the horological revolution, perhaps he would have been able to consider that Kinnebrook differed in some essential way from his clock, and tried to deal as Bessel did on a scientific basis with the distinction between the timekeeping properties of human beings and their chronometers.¹

I start with this well-known incident because it shows how the eighteenth-century's dream of a perfect timekeeper, so nearly realised by Harrison and other master clockmakers, could deflect attention from the inescapable human element of all timekeeping systems. It is a happy irony of eighteenth-century attitudes toward time that Maskelyne's failure to integrate that human element within the newly available framework of precise machinery was a major stimulus to the development of a new human science: experimental psychology. In its connection with astronomy the incident at Greenwich is also a reminder that clocks are a refinement of—and means of refining—our other, more ancient, and equally indispensable timekeeping system, the calendar. Its human dimension has always been more apparent thanks to the way calendars serve as vehicles of both religious myth and scientific knowledge. Where astrology is concerned, the borderline between science, myth, and knowledge has often been indistinct, especially in that species of the calendar known as the almanac. Bernard Capp's fine book English Almanacs 1500-1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1979) has informed us on this topic. But there has been no comparable study of the role played by calendars in general throughout the eighteenth century. There is not even any discussion of the republican calendar in the latest edition of Richard Glasser's Time in French Life and Thought, trans. C. G. Pearson (Manchester: Manchester University, 1972).² Nor, except for what I call the twentieth-century myth of British time-riots in response to adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, have historians said much about English attitudes toward changing the calendar. Here I wish to consider some of those attitudes and their implications for literature. First I want to argue, on the basis of what happened during the French revolution, that calendars deserve no less attention than clocks as a significant measure of the impact of science and technology on cultural values, and vice versa.

I

The French revolutionary calendar, in its attempt to start time afresh, erase memory of the past, and rationalise the present, shows the aspirations of those who devised it and those who abolished it. Although failure of that calendric method for controlling political time deterred the Soviet Union from a similar effort in 1918, the French experiment is nevertheless one of our best illustrations of Orwell's lesson that for the modern state control of time is control of politics: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”³ This was also clear to Fabre D'Eglantine and his calendar committee, whose eloquent “Rapport Sur le Calendrier Républicain,” delivered to the Convention on the third of Brumaire in the year two (24 October, 1793), warrants closer consideration than it has received. The most general reason given there for reckoning time anew is really the least significant even though it is the most moving part of the report: “Nous ne pouvions plus compter les années où les rois nous opprimaient, comme un temps où nous avions vécu.”⁴ More noteworthy is D'Eglantine's insistence that achievement of greater precision in measuring time, though necessary, is not sufficient because of the ways (which he explains at length) in which the church had exploited the calendar to instill superstition: “il est donc nécessaire de substituer à ces visions de l'ignorance les réalitiés de la raison, et au prestige sacerdotal la vérité de la nature” (p. 174). Thus the calendar, which D'Eglantine identifies as the “livre le plus usuel de tous,” was to become an instrument of instruction for displacing myth by knowledge.

Above all, the French were to learn via their new calendar about the agricultural rhythms of the year, which they were thus to perceive instead of the religious cycle of festivals as the basis of their civilization and an object of their love:

Le calendrier étant une chose à laquelle on a si souvent recours, il faut profiter de la fréquence de cet usage pour glisser parmi le peuple les notions rurales élémentaires, pour lui montrer les richesses de la nature, pour lui faire aimer les champs, et lui désigner, avec méthode, l'ordre des influences du ciel et des productions de la terre.

(pp. 183-84)

No wonder Wordsworth found it bliss to be alive in the early days of the revolution. D'Eglantine's committee understood (as he also explains in detail) that, because of what he calls the empire of imagery over the human mind, it is memorable images—not abstract numerical concepts, no matter how novel or accurate—that would be necessary in order for a new calendar to seize the imagination (“frapper l'imagination par les dénominations, et … instruire par la nature et la série des images” [p. 178]). Each month was accordingly to have a name that would express the agricultural facts of life during its part of the year, so that ideally “par la seule prononciation du nom du mois, chacun sentira parfaitement trois choses, et tous leurs rapports, le genre de saison où il se trouve, la température et l'état de la végétation” (p. 180). There was also an attempt, less frequently satirised outside France than the new names of the months, to inculcate a sense of the dignity of rural labor by associating a relevant agricultural implement or product of the earth with each date. Such overt ideological intentions are less telling, however, than the equally overt effort to replace the subjective sense of time as a series of cycles with a sense that lived time is a linear progression during which it is always possible and necessary to locate onself along a time-line.

This was to be accomplished by renaming the days of the week, and it is in providing the rationale for that change that D'Eglantine makes his sharpest attack on the Gregorian calendar. Its greatest defect, even more serious in his view than bearing in the names of the weekdays an imprint of judicial astrology (another kind of mythology), is that the combination of the old names with numbers for the total of days in a month obscures one's sense of forward movement through time:

Le défaut du calendrier … est de ne signaler les jours, les décades, les mois et l'année que par une même dénomination, par les nombres ordinaux; de sorte que le chiffre I, qui n'offre qu'une quantité abstraite et point d'image, s'applique également à l'année, au mois, à la semaine et au jour, si bien qu'il a fallu dire, le premier jour de la première décade du premier mois de la première année; locution abstraite, sèche, vide d'idées, pénible par sa prolixité et confuse dans l'usage civil, surtout après l'habitude du calendrier grégorien.

(p. 181)

One may consequently lose track of temporal progress. In explaining this problem D'Eglantine remarks that each day participates in four complex movements which calendars should imprint on our memory and present to our thoughts in four distinct manners: the passage from one day to the next, the passage from week to week, the movement from month to month, and the annual passage through the four seasons:

Quant aux jours, nous avons observé qu'ils avaient quatre mouvements complexes, qui devaient être empreints bien distinctement dans notre mémoire et présents à la pensée, de quatre manières différentes. Ces quatre mouvements sont le mouvement diurne ou le passage d'un jour à l'autre, le mouvement décadaire ou le passage d'une décade à l'autre, le mouvement mensiaire ou le passage d'un mois à l'autre, et le mouvement annuel ou la période solaire.

(p. 181)

It was to reflect more clearly these passages that new names were provided for each of the ten weekdays of the republican calendar: names that are described by D'Eglantine as having the advantage of being numbers and yet different from numbers (“Tout à la fois, dans le même mot, et des nombres, et d'un nom différent des nombres” [p. 182]): Primdi, Duodi, Tridi, Quartidi, Quintidi, Sextidi, Septidi, Octidi, Nonidi, and Decadi. The theory was that with such names in combination with a ten-day week it would be easier to keep track of where you are in time because, for example, Tridi must be either the third or the thirteenth or the twenty-third of the month, easily figured out in a three-week month. And so for each of the other weekdays.

From our perspective it does not so much matter whether D'Eglantine was right. What matters is the attempt itself to grapple with the problem of shaping an entire population's subjective time-sense toward higher awareness of the scientific fact that time's arrow is unidirectional. In Mircea Eliade's terminology, one might say that we see here dramatic evidence of the impulse to reject primitive concepts of time as comprising most fundamentally only cycles of eternal recurrence.⁵ Of course this is far from the only such evidence in our period. Christianity embodies a deeply linear view of time. Still the French republican calendar stands out as a locus classicus of the eighteenth-century transition to our own most characteristic view of experienced duration as a series of moments marked off by passage along an externally and objectively defined time-line. The republican calendar is, I suggest, less significant because of its attempt to use time as an instrument of political control—that had been done before although not so explicitly—than because of the remarkable degree to which it was intended to take into account the importance of bringing each person's inner sense of time into line with the scientific picture of cycles emptied of mythological content and subordinated to the forward flight of time's arrow.⁶

II

Implementation of the French calendar committee's report is a reminder that at the end of the eighteenth century mechanical timekeepers had not yet come into their own, much less arrived at their present ability to incorporate on an everyday basis the functions of a calendar. On a more personal level, there is ample evidence that despite the impact of the horological revolution (whose importance I wish to put into context, not minimize)—a revolution that dramatically increased the accuracy as well as availability of watches—calendars retained a role no less significant in daily life. Remember that Robinson Crusoe, created in the heyday of the horological revolution, and set alone on an island to reconstruct civilization, never complains about the absence of a clock or a watch, but quickly makes a calendar. He uses it to order his activities as well as later to find a name for his servant, and then carefully checks its accuracy upon his return, when he discovers and tries to account for a missing day. Surely some of Defoe's readers took this partly as a dramatization of the eighty-ninth psalm: “O teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” Lemuel Gulliver, not conspicuous for wisdom, makes no calendar to number his days. Nor does inspection of his watch by the Lilliputian officers serve as anything but an occasion for Swift's laughter at our enslavement to time. When those other notable eighteenth-century castaways, the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, were discovered, Fletcher Christian's son Thursday October Christian had no use for the magnificent ship's chronometer made by Larcum Kendall for Bligh's voyage, and allowed it to be given away. But he inquired about the calendar, discovering that his father among other blunders had mistaken the day of his birth, and then changed his name to Friday October Christian.⁷

His was, to be sure, an unusual case insofar—but only insofar—as it is to my knowledge the only eighteenth-century situation outside Defoe's fiction when the calendar was used to provide a person's name. Pitcairn island is also an unusual setting, but then so is Crusoe's island. And just as for Defoe's archetypal Englishman, there is something touchingly ordinary—ordinary for the eighteenth century, that is—in Friday October Christian's Crusoe-like anxiety about squaring his relationship to the calendar and being sure that he had at least a correct calendar with which to do so. Among the English it was not only such scruffy castaways who wished to have the best available calendar. The British change in 1752 from the Julian or old style to the Gregorian or new style calendar was urged upon parliament by the Earl of Macclesfield, president of the Royal Society, and moved in the upper house by the man who instigated the change and who was most anxious to put right a whole country's relationship to calendric time: Lord Chesterfield.

The arguments most often advanced in favor of the change show how scientific and religious values converged in shaping attitudes toward time. On the question of moving the legal commencement of the year from 25 March to 1 January there was neither much debate nor any religious issue involved. Macclesfield remarked in his speech at the second reading of the calendar reform bill:

That, in one Part of this united Kingdom, the legal Commencement of the Year should differ, by the space of near Three Months, not only from the legal Commencement of the Year in another Part of the same Kingdom, but also from the general and common Usage throughout the Whole, is so glaring an Absurdity, and the Parent of so much Confusion and Disorder; that I am persuaded there is no Lord within this House, nor any one Person without doors, who does not wish and desire, that it may be removed.⁸

Macclesfield was right. But it was not only desire to eliminate confusion in business transactions which made this change appealing. Also involved was the eighteenth century's acute awareness of the future and its sensitivity to the need for conveying accurate historical records to posterity.

As early as 1735, for example, the anonymous author of The Remembrancer complained of errors in British records “Which he finds have been, in a great measure, owing to the Difference between the Old Stile and the New, and to our Lawyers Computation of the Year from the 25th of March, contrary to all other Nations; which [errors] have been, and must eternally be productive of gross Anachronism in History.” To illustrate this curious problem, more troublesome after than during the eighteenth century, The Remembrancer notes:

if the Reader look but two Years backward, he will find no less than three different Denominations of the Year of our Lord affix'd to three State-Papers that were publish'd in one week, viz … 1732-3 … 1732 … 1733, so that, if a Person meets with those Addresses some Years hence, he may well incline to think, that they were printed in two different Years, unless he happen to have before him at the same time, that very speech from the throne, to which they are both an answer.⁹

Synchronization of calendar systems within Great Britain and between that country and Europe was thus partly advocated as a secular convenience that would make life easier for merchants, diplomats, and future historians, for all of whose purposes, of course, it would not have mattered what system was adopted so long as it was consistent within the area of their concerns.

It is in the case made for the superior accuracy of the Gregorian calendar that religious and secular values coincide. Whereas Julius Caesar had undertaken his calendar reform in order to establish for utilitarian reasons a coherent relationship between the civil and solar years by making them correspond as closely as possible, Pope Gregory was motivated in 1582 by the desire to find a method for determining the date of Easter according to the precepts of the Nicean council. This entailed consideration of such matters as the time of the vernal equinox at the crucifixion, its date, and the importance of avoiding coincidence of Easter and Passover. Precise timing of the solar year was thus not sought primarily for the sake of scientific accuracy. Instead such accuracy was sought as a means of attaining greater theological correctness in dating the commemoration of supernatural events whose timing was impossible to decide without some leap of faith as well as recourse to reason and empirical evidence. What stands out in English discussions leading up to acceptance of the Gregorian calendar is the extent to which Protestant-Catholic differences, though still evident, had on this issue become insignificant. As in the other Protestant countries that anticipated England in switching, such differences were transcended by the desire to rationalize timekeeping systems for commercial purposes and by widespread acceptance of the calendric precepts laid down by the Nicean council, whose decisions in 325 figure prominently in eighteenth-century discussions.¹⁰ What also stands out in those discussions is the extent to which religious motives work powerfully to reinforce scientific concern for precision in timing the natural year.

In a 1751 London Magazine essay, for example, as in many other arguments for reform, readers learn that the Julian calendar had come to differ by eleven days from the Gregorian because “The true solar year consisting only of 365 days 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 16 seconds, there is an over-reckoning of 10 minutes and 44 seconds every year; which … has made a variation of one day, in every 134 years … by which means the vernal equinox … is now on the 10th of March, which in Julius Caesar's time was on the 24th.” Readers learn too that

The kalendar as rectified by pope [sic] Gregory XIII is much the best and correctest for regulating the moveable feasts, and will continue agreeable to the solar year for a long series of time, with but very little variation. … Therefore the moveable and fixt feasts being once set upon good footing, they will continue so for 60,000 years.¹¹

It was also noted in 1747, however, by way of a small dig at the Papists which Benjamin Franklin could not resist echoing later in Poor Richard's Almanac (after endorsing the change to their calendar), that

Notwithstanding the Gregorian Year is reduced to such a State of Correctness, yet it is far from being quite perfect; for in 4 Centuries, the Julian Year gains 3 Days, 1 Hour, 20 Minutes; but it is only the 3 Days which are kept out in the Gregorian Year, so that here is still an Excess of 1 Hour, 20 Minutes, in 4 Centuries, which in 72 Centuries amount to a whole Day.¹²

Another few quotations will illustrate the confluence of scientific and religious arguments for a more accurate calendar, as well as the fascination exerted by exact reckoning of time and by the technicalities involved in achieving such precision. Macclesfield recalls Genesis 1:14, as others also did, to enforce the legitimacy of timekeeping methods derived from astronomical observations:

We are told by the greatest Authority, that, besides many other Uses for which the Sun and Moon were originally intended, they were to be for Seasons and for Days and Years: And accordingly all Nations have, to the best of their Skill, adapted their Civil Year to the apparent Motion of the Sun, or of the Moon, or of both those Luminaries jointly.

This reminder introduces a survey of solar year calendars as used by Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians, Romans, and modern Europeans; of lunar year calendars as used by “Arabians, Saracens, & Mahometans” (systems, Macclesfield says, that are of too “variable and wandering a Nature”); and of the lunisolar calendar used by Jews and Greeks in antiquity and which “is still made use of for determining the Times of the moveable Feasts, as well by the Christians, as by the modern Jews.” All this, in turn, introduces an explanation of differences between the siderial and tropical years, the uses of each, and the introduction by Julius Caesar of the bisextile year for intercalating an extra day when necessary. After discussing the vernal equinox problem, Macclesfield also remarks that when the solar year has been rectified in Britain by changing to the Gregorian calendar, “Another correction, necessary to be made in our Calendar, is that of our Method of finding the Time of the Moveable Feast of Easter; and of the Places where the Golden Numbers, which we make use of for that Purpose, stand in our Calendar.” To explain how it comes that “the Golden Numbers appear to be very improperly placed in our present Calendar” Macclesfield outlines the establishment by Dionysius Exiguus and Meton of the nineteen-year lunisolar cycle “now known by the Name of the Golden Number of the Cycle of the Moon.”¹³

Such technical terms frequently turn up in discussions with a kind of “do it yourself” slant that suggests greater eighteenth- than twentieth-century interest not only in understanding how calendars are constructed by experts but also in being able to check out the results at home. Thus in the section on astronomy in The Universal Library: or Compleat Summary of Science, 2 vols. (London, 1712), along with technical explanations like Macclesfield's to the House of Lords, we learn that

To find the Cycle of the Sun by the Fingers, let 123, 24, 25, 26, or 27, be divided by 28, (which is the Cycle [of 28 years] “in which space is a change of all the Sunday Letters for every Year”) and that which remains is the Number of Joints which is to be accounted upon the Fingers, by Filius Esto Dei Caelum Bonum Accipe Gratis; and where the Number ends, that Finger shews the Year which is present, and the first Letter of each word in the Verse, shews the Dominical Letter. As, divide 123 by 28 for the Year, and Quotient is 4, and there remaineth 11, for which you must account 11 Words, Filius, &c. upon the Joints beginning from the first Joint of the Index, and you shall have the Answer.

(2:270)

Simple enough. In the Encyclopédie article “Calendrier” Diderot and D'Alembert also provide directions for calendric do-it-yourselfers, echoing their source, Chambers' Cyclopaedia, in stressing how easy it really is: “Ainsi la construction d'un calendrier n'a rien en soi de fort difficile, pourvû que l'on ait sous la main des tables des movemens célestes. V. ephémérides.” In Chambers' English: “Hence it appears, that the construction of a calendar has nothing in it of mystery, or difficulty; if tables of the heavenly motions be but at hand.”¹⁴

In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1752 there are “memorial verses Adapted to the Gregorian Account, or New Style” which allow armchair astronomers constructing their own calendars “To know if it be Leap Year,” “To find the Dominical Letter,” “By the Dominical Letter, to find on what Day of the Week any Day of the Month will fall throughout the Year,” “To find the Golden Number, Cycle of the Sun, and Roman Indiction,” together with (also in verse) “A General Rule for the Epact,” rules for finding “the Epact till the Year 1900,” for determining “Easter Limit, or the Day of the Pasch. Full Moon, from March 1, inclusive,” “To find Easter-Day,” “To find the Age or Change of the Moon,” and “to find the time of the Moon's coming to the South, and of High Water at London-Bridge.”¹⁵ So popular were these mnemonic verses, if we can accept the author's familiar-sounding excuse for their publication, that his private copy was stolen for an unauthorized printing. Whether that is true, appearance of the verses in the Gentleman's Magazine, with mathematical examples of their application but without any glossary explaining their terminology, is evidence of familiarity among the literate public—Johnson's common readers—with such highly technical terms as “dominical letter,” “golden number,” “epact,” and “indiction.”

Such terms were also encountered in The Book of Common Prayer. Among its preliminary material could be found tables assuming knowledge of how to make calendric calculations if given information about epacts, golden numbers, and Sunday-letters without definitions of those terms, whose meaning is taken for granted. Thus in an edition at the end of the century there is “A Table to find Easter-Day from the present Time, till the Year 1899 inclusive,” together with “Another Table to find Easter till the Year 1899 inclusive,” “A Table of the Moveable Feasts, according to the several Days that Easter can possibly fall upon,” “General Tables for finding the Dominical or Sunday-Letter, and the Places of the Golden Numbers in the Calendar,” and also a table showing relationships among the golden numbers, Sunday-letters, and dates of the “paschal full moon.” To these tables, which might alone seem ample evidence of a national obsession with making calendars and encouraging others to do so, there is added a column showing relationships among Golden numbers, days of the month, and Sunday-letters for the perhaps supererogatory purpose of providing a “Table to find Easter from the Year 1900, to 2199 inclusive.” Whether this exercise was undertaken by any residents of the eighteenth century, the invitation to make such calculations can only be taken as further evidence of a remarkably well-developed concern with the distant future.¹⁶

III

While there is no telling how many people actually made their own calendars or amused themselves by working out the dates when Easter would fall during the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second centuries, directions for such activities were sufficiently available throughout the first half of the eighteenth century to familiarize English readers with the vocabulary of calendric time-words and to allow their use along with related time-concepts in polite literature. In 1735, for example, Edward Cave took familiarity with that vocabulary for granted in publishing the following example of his favorite genre, praise of the Gentleman's Magazine:

To Sylvanus Urban on his Magazine
An EPIGRAM
Urban, in thy fam'd Magazines
An AERA of new Time begins:
A Period that will know no End,
Whilst wits know how their time to spend.
And Mortals have it in their pow'r
To live a month in half an hour.
Here time's redeem'd with little cost,
And not one precious moment lost:
You add, that Danger to prevent,
Intercalary SUPPLEMENT.
No computation here appears
By solar or by lunar Years;
No motions of sun, moon, or star
Rule thy perpetual Kalendar.
But months compleat their brightness owe
To luminaries here below,
Whilst oft thy cycle I revolve
I find one problem hard to solve:
No idle vacant space between
Successive months is to be seen,
And yet, so charming are thy pages,
Between each month there seem some ages.(17)

Here the words “era” and “period” are from the language of chronology, and the words “cycle” “intercalary,” “solar year,” “lunar year,” and “perpetual kalendar,” although also involved in chronology, are most closely associated with the language of calendars. Easily coexisting with these scientific terms in a way that posed no problem during the eighteenth century is a conceit based on a theological concept: redeeming the time. This poem is remarkable only as evidence—but I think good evidence—that literary notions of subjective time (living a month in half an hour with the aid of a book; an age seeming to pass between volumes) were not only afloat long before Tristram Shandy, but were as much associated with the vocabulary of chronology and the related vocabulary of astronomy dealing with calendar construction as with the philosophical discussions of duration based on Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

In the year of England's calendar change, Cave printed a longer poem praising the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine for his persistent campaign of essays in favor of that reform: “To Mr. urban, on compleating Vol. XXII of his Magazine, for 1752, the Year in which the Computation of Time by the New Stile took place in great britain, by the Authority of Parliament.”¹⁸ In the extended conceit of this panegyric, time befriends Cave; and, out of gratitude for his efforts to shorten time's path by urging the reform that eliminated eleven days, time spares the Gentleman's Magazine (but none of its rivals) to become the sole source of posterity's knowledge about the eighteenth century. Although the poem stresses time's reluctance to change style without authority from parliament, the author does not strike a nationalistic note. Attention to the role of parliament in controlling time simply invites recollection that the civil year is a legal matter. Cave, not Chesterfield or Macclesfield (let alone King George), is the hero. Other poems commenting on the change went only slightly further in appealing to national pride as a motive for accepting calendar reform. The Ladies Diary: or Woman's Almanac, for example, printed at the bottom of its page for September 1752 verses whose patriotism is more conspicuous but so hyperbolic as to shift attention to the poem's own wit, and thus undercut without entirely defeating its rhetorical purpose of forestalling objections to the change:

The Third of September the
fourteenth is nam'd
For which, British Annals will ever
be fam'd;
For by Wisdom and Art to the House made appear,
The Sun was reduc'd to attend
on the Year;
His Julian Vagaries long Time has
he known;
But has now got a new-bridal Year
of his own.

Similarly, in Henry Season's Speculum Anni Redivivum: or An Almanack For the Year of Our Lord 1752, the September entry includes reassuring verses:

Reader! more just now run Time's fleeting Sands,
Since Caesar has with Gregory shook Hands.
Shall Britons, fam'd for astronomic Light,
Still be reprov'd their Clock of Time's not right?
To mend that Fault, this Month is dock'd severe
Eleven Days, to rectify the Year.
With Gallic Tribes our future Time
we'll trace;
But, for their Worship, that we'll ne'er embrace.

Here too it is less a matter of presenting the reform as dictated by nationalistic motives than of providing assurance that all loyal Britons may welcome the change: it will be no reproach to a country “fam'd for astronomic light”—doubtless an allusion to Newton—to adopt the correct calendar, though not the faulty religion of its rival.

Among the essays printed by Cave to prepare public opinion for switching to the Gregorian calendar there was also little nationalistic rhetoric beyond an occasional appeal to patriotic shame at the way England lagged behind other Protestant countries in taking that rational step. Only one essay prior to passage of the calendar-reform bill beat the drum for an exclusively Georgian account of time that would be more accurate than the Julian calendar but nevertheless would not be synchronised with the Gregorian system. In this proposal, which is in fact a thoughtful one that also included suggestions for reforming the system of weights and measures, a thirteenth month would have been added and (following the precedents of July and August) named in honor of the ruler: it was to be called “Georgy.”¹⁹ I have found no evidence of any clamor in favor of this idea. Nor have I found significant opposition to the calendar-reform bill.

It easily passed through parliament. At their London meeting in 1751 the Quakers voted to conform their calendar to the new style.²⁰ Included in the bill and well publicized were provisions ensuring that no one would lose wages, have to pay debts earlier than contracted for, or in any other way suffer financially from the switch. Apparently no one did suffer. Anxieties among the unsophisticated rural population were addressed by P. Lloyd, curate of Roxwell in Sussex, in The New Style the True Style: Or, The Reasons for Altering the Style Laid Down in a Plain and Easy Manner: and the Objections to the New Style Answered, so far as Religion is concerned: A Sermon (London, 1753). Lloyd's sermon was chiefly intended for the “Unlearned” and was occasioned by discovery that “some” of his “Parishioners, and other Neighbours, expresed so great a Dislike to the Act for regulating the Calendar, because it changed the Time for observing the Festivals, that they talked of omitting their Duty on the Feast of the Nativity on that Account” (pp. 6, 3). Although Lloyd provides a variety of arguments designed “to remove the Prejudices of People against the New Style,” arguments that would have been quite familiar to readers of the Gentleman's Magazine or its rivals, he nowhere in the sermon suggests that even among the “unlearned” in his flock did such prejudices result in anything more than talk against the change. Literary response to the new calendar, apart from the poetry I have cited, consists mainly in some very mildly entertaining periodical essays (among them Johnson's Rambler no. 107) satirizing teenagers or country bumkins who were confused by the prospect of losing eleven days.²¹ Absent from the list of satiric targets in these essays is any hint of serious popular disorders occasioned by the reform.

IV

Although no one has accused parliament of resisting the calendar-reform bill, any student of this measure who now consults our best standard reference works will inevitably encounter intriguing allusions to what I can only call the legendary English time-riots. They have become a little topos among twentieth-century writers. Thus in the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica one learns from its otherwise superb entry “Calendar” that “There was much public misunderstanding, and in Britain rioters demanded ‘give us back our eleven days’.” In G. J. Whitrow's The Natural Philosophy of Time, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) we learn that “many people thought that their lives were being shortened. … Some workers believed that they were going to lose eleven days' pay. So they rioted and demand[ed] ‘Give us back our eleven days’!” (p. 381). Samuel A. Goudsmit and Robert Claiborn applaud Franklin's endorsement of the change while also noting by way of contrast to our colonial enlightenment that “This event touched off riots in London, where many, angry because they had been cheated out of 11 days' rent money, rioted to the cry, ‘Give us back our 11 days’” (Time [New York: Time-Life Books, 1966], p. 74). C. H. Stuart's revision of Basil Williams' The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962) tells us that “for some time the most popular cry in the country was ‘give us back our eleven days’! (p. 381). In A Whig in Power: The Political Career of Henry Pelham (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1964), John W. Wilkes implies that the clamor took place during debate over the calendar reform bill but was scorned by Pelham, Hardwick, Macclesfield, and Chesterfield: “With the ministers' help it easily passed parliament. Popular shouts to ‘return our eleven days’ were ignored because of the obvious merit of the plan” (p. 184). John B. Owen remarks in The Eighteenth Century, 1714-1815 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1974) that Chesterfield's reform “was carried through in 1751 despite the howls of the uninformed mob to ‘give us back our eleven days’” (p. 74). In addition to vagueness about the exact time and place of such outcries, these and similar passages share a tantalising lack of documentation.

In Stability and Strife: England 1714-1760 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1977) W. A. Speck points to the (undocumented) uproar as evidence of justifiable anxiety, charging also that such worries were exploited by almanac makers:

The resultant outcry “give us back our eleven days” is often dismissed as the blind reaction of an ignorant mob; but in fact the change gave reasonable grounds for concern at all levels of society, necessitating nice calculations about rents, leases, debts and wages, as well as superstitions about saint's days and holy days which were exploited by almanac makers, who devised calendars showing the “old” as well as the new days for some years ahead.

(p. 255)

Deferring the question of whether there was any such outcry and when it took place if it did, I must say that I do not understand how the calendar reform “necessitated” superstitions. Nor do I see how printing calendars showing new and old dates is exploitative. Quite the contrary. Almanacs that I have examined invariably account for the change and compare dates in terms calculated to encourage acceptance of the new calendar and make it easier to live with.²²

For the colonies Franklin printed a history of calendar reform together with the entire act of parliament on the subject, including those clauses designed to ensure against any financial loss from deletion of working days or premature claim of debts. In A Supplement to the Several Almanacks for the Year of our Lord God, 1752, 3 & c. (London, 1752), C. Brown provided a similar explanation together with quotations from the bill, adding a reminder

That this Act does in no wise effect the Quarter Days, although the Feasts on which they depend, are altered eleven Days sooner in the New Style, yet the old Days are marked in the Almanacks with Red Letters, and called Old Michaelmas, Martinmas, &c. which are to be observed in settling of Estates, Payments of Annuities, Rents, Bonds, Notes, &c. till such Accounts are become void, or agreed upon according to the New Style.

(p. 12)

The “old Days” were marked in red not to exploit or stir up supersititon but to guard against the possibility that anyone would be defrauded financially on account of the change. Brown goes on in his next sentence to reiterate that

No Act or Deed, done or made before the Commencement of the Reformed Calendar, and which are to contain [sic] in Operation or Force for a Term of Years, including the Aera of this Emendation, are in the least to be influenced by it; but the nominal Days in the Calendar are the same in the New as in the Old Style, to be observed in the Feasts and Fasts of the Church.

(pp. 12-13)

These are not the remarks of a superstition-monger. Almanac-makers deserve some credit for helping England accept a more precise calendar.

As for the occasions during which Londoners might be heard shouting “give us back our eleven days,” I am unable to say either that they took place or that they did not take place, much as I hope they did because time-riots would be such a colorful addition to our mental picture of mid-eighteenth-century mob scenes. It is hard to prove a negative, and it may very well be that I have not yet gone to the right place for the evidence which historians neglect to reveal but upon which they base such statements as I have just quoted. My best guess for now is that we are dealing with distant echoes of a passage in Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century that has been applied anachronistically by those whose memories have come under the sway of a vivid detail in Hogarth's powerful print of “An Election Entertainment”: the sign in the lower right-hand corner, identified by Hogarthians as a captured Tory banner, reading “Give us our Eleven Days.”

After reporting the calendar-reform bill's easy passage through parliament, Lecky remarks that “A widespread irritation was for a time aroused. Much was said about the profanity of altering saint-days and immovable feasts. At the next election one of the most popular cries against Lord Macclesfield's son was, ‘Give us back our eleven days’.”²³ Although one of Lecky's sources—Coxe's memoir of Pelham—vaguely places this cry as an exclamation that could be heard “at the period when the bill took effect,” Lecky makes no such claim.²⁴ He was apparently satisfied that Hogarth's print, to which he also alludes by way of evidence in the same footnote citing Coxe, merely records an aspect of the Oxfordshire election of 1754 rather than anything said in 1752. At some point that I have not yet tracked down, Lecky's acceptance of Hogarth's banner as accurate reportage of a 1754 Tory slogan escalates to the widespread assumption that what is written on the banner was actually said two years earlier during mob reaction against the calendar-reform bill. Perhaps so.

While I cannot yet exclude that possibility it seems equally likely that Hogarth is only (as Lecky interprets him) reporting a 1754 Oxfordshire Tory slogan or else even, as in many other details of the election series, not reporting but for satiric purposes inventing. Hogarthians are cautious on this point.²⁵ In John Trusler's Hogarth Moralized (London, 1768) there is only a passing reference to “The flag, on which is painted ‘Give us our eleven days,’ alluding to the alteration of the stile in the year 1752, which gave great displeasure throughout England” (p. 43). This hardly suggests an eighteenth-century tradition of taking the banner as an allusion to something actually said by anyone in 1752 during riots. Nor does any other eighteenth-century source that I have been able to consult mention such riots or that slogan. For now I must leave unresolved the nice problem of whether in putting the banner into his print Hogarth was converting something really seen in 1754 into an amusing satiric stroke or resorting as he so often did to creation of a striking fiction.

What I can say on the basis of the evidence surveyed in this essay is that in seeking to understand eighteenth-century attitudes toward time we should not neglect calendar changes. In France antagonism between science and religion led to clashes between a newer, more linear mode of timekeeping and an older essentially cyclical calendar (celebrating mythic patterns of recurrence) that ultimately prevailed. In England religion reinforced the quest for greater scientific precision within a traditional framework of time represented alike by the Julian and Gregorian calendars. But in both countries the net outcome of arguments for and against change, as of the changes themselves, was heightened awareness of time. In France there was a remarkably innovative, deliberate, and (despite the outcome) far from unsuccessful attempt by the state to manipulate each individual's subjective sense of time to create heightened consciousness of duration as progression along an objectively defined time line directing attention mainly toward the future. In England temporal awareness of a more conventional Janus-like cast was heightened by essays, prayerbooks, sermons, almanacs, enclyclopaedia articles, popularizations of astronomy, and parliamentary speeches, all of which when dealing with ancient or modern calendric systems encouraged individuals not only to understand calendars and perhaps agree to a change, but to make them as well. For the British isles Crusoe's self-constructed calendar has become more emblematic than Defoe could have guessed. And despite retention of a calendar that is by comparison with the French republican experiment oriented as much toward the past as toward the future, British debates about changing their calendar as well as the proliferation of directions for making one's own religious or secular calendar for a given year or for centuries to come directed the attention of English readers more strongly than ever toward the future. English readers were also familiarized with a vocabulary, often very technical, of calendric time-words and related scientific concepts that could be applied to imaginative literature in ways that warrant both greater recognition and further investigation.

Notes

1. For a more complete account of Maskelyne, Bessel, and the personal equation together with a bibliography on the topic, see Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1950), pp. 134-53. On the horological revolution, see Samuel L. Macey, Clocks and the Cosmos: Time in Western Life and Thought (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1980), pp. 17-62.

2. First published as Studien zur Geschichte des französichen Zeitbegriffs (Munich: Max Heuber, 1936).

3. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), p. 35.

4. “Rapport Sur Le Calendrier Républicain,” Oeuvres Politiques de Fabre D'Églantine, ed. Charles Vellay (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1914), pp. 173-203; p. 174. Subsequent references to this work will be given by page number in the text.

5. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University, 1971); first published as Le Mythe de L'éternel retour: archétypes et répétition (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).

6. For other aspects of the republican calendar and the story of its abolition see James Friguglietti, “The Social and Religious Consequences of the French Revolutionary Calendar” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard, 1966). This admirable study shows clearly how much trouble was caused simply by the clash between Sunday habits and the clumsy introduction of Tenth-day observances. For comments on the republican calendar and other calendar-systems from the perspective of sociology, see Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), esp. pp. 82-95.

7. Gavin Kennedy, Bligh (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1978).

8. [Macclesfield, George Parker, 2nd Earl] The Earl of Macclesfield's Speech in the House of Peers on Monday the 18th Day of March 1750 at the Second Reading of the Bill for Regulating the Commencement of the Year (London, 1751), p. 6.

9. [Anon.] The Remembrancer (London, 1735), Sig A2^r&v: “To the Reader.” This argument is echoed in the London Magazine 16 (1747): 173-74. And if we are to believe Maty on the puzzling matter of Lord Chesterfield's motives for taking up the cause of calendar reform, the desirability of transmitting unambiguous historical records to the future was a major consideration: see Miscellaneous Works of the Late Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield … [with] Memoirs of His Life by M. Maty, M.D., 2 vols. (London, 1777), 1:197-99.

10. Even in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine, 14 (1744): 652-53, criticising the Nicean rules for determining Easter and calling for another council to provide better regulations, Thomas Whiston remarks after surveying the astronomical issues involved that “It is well the world is not so religiously mad as it was at that time, when they not only excommunicated each other, but proceeded to more violent outrages against their Christian brethren for not observing the true time of Easter.”

11. London Magazine, 20 (1751): 116-17.

12. London Magazine, 16 (1747): 162-63. Cf. Poor Richard Improved for 1752 in Benjamin Franklin, The Complete Poor Richard's Almanacks, ed. Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., 2 vols. (Barre, Mass: Imprint Society, 1970), 2:148.

13. Macclesfield, pp. 9-17.

14. Encylopédie (Paris, 1751); E. Chambers, “Calendar,” Cyclopaedia 7th ed. (London, 1751).

15. Gentleman's Magazine, 22 (1752): 201-02.

16. The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1795). See also the earlier editions of 1717 and 1730. Each prints “A Table of the Moveable Feasts Calculated for Forty Years,” the earlier edition's table starting in 1717 and the later one starting in 1727. Both print a table showing how “To find Easter forever.” The forty-year tables are less future-oriented than comparable material in the 1795 Oxford edition. The 1717 edition, however, reveals the eighteenth century's persistent concern with do-it-yourself calendric activity by printing “A Circular Table to find all the Moveable Sundays in the Year.” This invites participation by readers who are to rotate a small circular table affixed by a pin within a larger circular table. One removes the pin and follows such instructions as these: “To find the Sundays that depend on Easter day. Put Easter day that is on the moveable circle to the day of the Month that Easter day falls on in the first circle, and all the Sundays which depend on Easter day will stand against the several days of the month they fall on. …”

17. Gentleman's Magazine, 5 (1735): 4.

18. See the preface to Gentleman's Magazine, 2 (1752). For some of the more notable items on calendar reform printed by Cave, see the Gentleman's Magazine, 5 (1735): 3; 14 (1744): 140 and 652-53; 15 (1745): 377-79; 17 (1747): 125-28; 21 (1751): 89, 105, 107, 167, 169, 170.

19. Gentleman's Magazine 15 (1745): 377-79. The author of this proposal, like D'Eglantine much later, stresses the need for a system to facilitate orientation along a unidirectional time-line, and for that reason would rather give the months numbers than names:

    As to the names of the 13 months, the Quaker method of numbering them … I think would be most proper; not indeed out of any consciencious [sic] scruple about the present names; but only because the numbering them thus would exhibit at once a clear idea of the part of the year in which we at any instant are, or wherein any occurrences happen, any transactions are registered, or any appointments are assigned (p. 378).

20. To the Quarterly and Monthly Meeting of Friends in Great Britain, Ireland, and America (n.d.), a pamphlet reporting “From the Meeting for Sufferings in London the Sixth Day of the Seventh Month, 1751.” See also for an account of the Quaker decision the Gentleman's Magazine, (1751): 475.

21. See, in addition to Rambler 107: The Inspector, no. 473 (15 Sept. 1752), rpt. Gentleman's Magazine, 22 (1752): 413-15; The World, no. 10 (8 Mar. 1753); The World, no. 82 (25 July 1754), which prints “The Tears of Old May-Day,” a heavyhanded anonymous satire that alone among calendric verse somehow achieved inclusion in Dodsley's Collection of Poems; and the London Magazine, 20 (1751): 506.

22. See The Ladies Diary: or, Woman's Almanack, For The Year of Our Lord 1752; The Gentleman's Diary, or the Mathematical Repository; An Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1752; Speculum Anni Redivivum: or, an Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1752, by Henry Season; An Almanack for the Year of Our Lord God 1752, by Vincent Wing; Merlinus Liberatus, by John Partridge; Remarkable News from the Stars: or, an Ephemeris for the Year 1752, by William Andrews; Parker's Ephemeris for the Year of Our Lord 1752; The Coelestial Diary, by Salem Pearse; Vox Stellarum: or a Loyal Almanack for the Year of Human Redemption 1752, by Francis Moore; The English Apollo: or Useful Companion, Assisting All Persons in the Right Understanding the Science of Time, Past, Present, and to Come. Particularly applied to this Present Year 1752, by Richard Saunders; Merlinus Anglicus Junior: or The Starry Messenger for the Year of Our Redemption 1752, by Henry Coley; and also the almanacs by Tycho Wing and by John Gadbury for 1752, all published in London. Even the satirical Poor Robin accommodated to the change without anything more than its customary title page strokes against the Gregorian system.

23. William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1882), 1: 289-90.

24. Lecky, 1: 290 n.1. All that is said about disorders by William Coxe, Memoirs of the Administration of the Right Honorable Henry Pelham, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829), 2: 179, is that “At the period when the bill took effect, the populace marked their disatisfaction, by exclaiming, ‘Give us back our eleven days!’ and by other tumultuary indications.” Coxe also remarks in a footnote to this passage that “Hogarth, in one of his satirical prints, humorously commemorates these popular ebullitions.” This too is vague. Lecky cites also Maty's life of Chesterfield (see note 9 above), which concentrates on parliamentary maneuvers for passage of the bill, and Philip Henry Stanhope (Lord Mahon), History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles 1713-1783, 3rd ed. rev., 7 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown 1853), 3: 340, where we are told:

    It was the endeavor of Chesterfield, by writing in some periodical papers of the day, to prepare the minds of the people for the change; yet their resentment was both deep and lasting. When, in 1754, Lord Macclesfield's eldest son stood a great contested election in Oxfordshire, one of the most vehement cries raised against him was “Give us back the eleven days we have been robbed of!”

    Mahon does not associate the slogan with events of 1752.

25. See Peter Quennell, Hogarth's Progress (New York: Viking, 1955), pp. 248-49; Hogarth's Graphic Works, ed. Ronald Paulson, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University, 1965), I: 226-29; and Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University, 1979), 2: 199-200. Quennell stresses the fact that Hogarth “did not attempt to provide a literal representation of Oxfordshire scenes or personages” and cites a number of discrepancies between the 1754 election and Hogarth's pictures, taking the banner as merely an allusion to a real person (Lord Macclesfield's son) decipherable as such because of our (undocumented) knowledge that the calendar reform in 1752 “both puzzled and dismayed the British proletariat; and the cry, ‘Give us back the eleven days we have been robbed of!’ was taken up by the conservative mob, who felt that eleven precious days had been wrenched out of their life-span.” Quennell concludes that “some of Lord Macclesfield's consequent unpopularity appears to have followed his son to Oxford,” judging this apparently from Hogarth's inclusion of the banner but without insisting that the banner is or is not accurate reportage of something seen in 1754. Paulson, in his suberb volumes, also stresses that while “The general tenor of the Election prints and the issues at stake derive from the notorious Oxfordshire election of 1754. … Hogarth's scene is … generalized” (Hogarth's Graphic Works, 1: 226-27). Paulson neither ascribes the banner's slogan to 1752 mob scenes nor takes it as photographic reportage.