Introduction: Secularities, Technologies, and Modern Temporalities

Abstract

Connecting the historiography of British secularization to two theoretical developments known as the material and temporal turns, this chapter shifts the focus from conceptualizations of religion and its negation, attending instead to the implicit assumptions about the nature of time underpinning specific modern socio-technological networks. Starting from Charles Taylor’s association of secularity with the temporal dimension of modern social imaginaries, the chapter argues that scholars of secular time tend to make three mistakes: conflating secular time with other kinds of time; assuming too much about the global reach and power of secular time based on the presence of certain technologies; and failing to operationalize the concept in specific case studies. This book offers a way to avoid repeating these mistakes and offers examples of how historians can operationalize secular time.

In 1904, Edward Cowell patented and published a pocket-size fold-out chart of ‘all the important cities of the world’, and suggested it would be particularly valuable to travellers, news editors, and bankers. On its centre page, 160 cities appeared as dots within a grid of vertical lines indicating global time zones. Readers could slip a loose ruler-like paper strip showing 24 hours into holes on either side of the page to be slid across the chart, enabling them to find the time in any of the cities, provided they knew the time in their own location. Cowell instructed his readers to

[set] the time (on the time strip) to your own local time (not Standard Time but to you own meridian). The correct time will then appear in all other cities. This chart also shows the DAY and DATE around the world; that is, it shows at a single glance what portion of the world is occupied by TOMORROW or YESTERDAY (that is, the day succeeding or preceding).¹

The cities were marked in an empty white space, their relative location determined solely by calculation of longitude and latitude, abstracted from actual topological variations. The little device represented the world as a blank surface on which travellers, news, and money could be imagined as circulating without friction so that their temporal location could be determined and predicted ‘at a single glance’, as the author put it (Image 1.1).

Image 1.1

Edward Cowell, Time Chart of the World: Instant Time in 160 Important Cities (London and Liverpool: George Philip & Son, Ltd in London; Philip, Son & Nephew in Liverpool, 1904). Bodleian Library, 22013 e. 6, whole chart

This was not all Cowell’s idea, of course. Something along these lines had been envisioned by the Canadian delegate to the International Geographical Congress in Venice in 1881, Sanford Fleming, who argued for adopting a ‘system of cosmopolitan time-reckoning’, which he thought would enable ‘absolute certainty about time’.² And Fleming’s proposal was only one of several expressions during the latter half of the nineteenth century of a growing European and North American concern with temporal coordination and standardization. Expanding networks of suboceanic telegraph cables forced attention to the notion of global simultaneity, as testified by the many international conventions debating the possible location of a common time meridian. To the Victorians, partly motivated by national pride (Britain was responsible for most of the 90,000 miles of submarine cables laid by 1880), the ‘annihilation of space and time’ effected by the expanding technological networks seemed for the first time to make conceivable in practical terms the century-old idea of a British global federacy.³ Commenting on the successful telegraphic connection between England and America, and pre-echoing the late-twentieth-century idea of a ‘global village’, the Times declared that ‘the world [was] fast becoming a vast city’.⁴ In 1884, the International Meridian Conference decided on the Greenwich Meridian as ‘official’, and during the early 1900s nations increasingly adopted the new standard time on domestic levels. The temporal standardization that made possible Cowell’s little time chart would become one of the great Victorian achievements.

But Cowell’s chart does more than exemplify a general fin-de-siecle concern with time and standardization. It makes explicit a fundamental idea that underpins the argument of this book, namely that there is a necessary conceptual connection between a particular kind of mobile entities such as travellers, news, and money, and the conception of time that makes it conceivable to predict their movement. The chart presents the entities as moving between spatial locations yet measures their flight not in spatial but in temporal terms. If the entities were to deteriorate or be interrupted along route, such temporal measurement would be impossible. On the one side of the conceptual coin, then, there are entities able to move without deterioration, and on the other, a time that is independent of their movement. Conceptually speaking, these two belong together.

This is the basic premise for what I am trying to do in this book. In the chapters that follow, I will describe three Victorian technological networks whose operation centred on moving specific entities in ways that made them impervious to change, and which therefore, I will argue, carried a particular concept of time. The Victorian railway network sought to move travellers without causing them psychological or physical harm. The networks related to daily news production and distribution moved information in the form of ‘news’ through long chains of translation without interruption. Networks connecting local banks to the Bank of England circulated paper notes meticulously made to embody the immutability of the abstract gold standard on which depended both the notes’ value and the state of the national economy. These networks functioned as intended if they were able to mobilize human skills and technologies to impart to the entities the joint properties of immutability and mobility, and maintain these properties throughout the entities’ passage. If this operation was successful, the entities’ movement could be traced and predicted using (for instance) time charts such as Cowell’s. And because entities moving without change have a conceptual connection to a time independent of their movement, we can say that to the degree these networked operations were successful, the networks mediated this kind of time.

Mediated is a key word here. It is not so much that Victorians explicitly discussed or believed propositions about the nature of time (though, of course, discussions of this topic are not exactly difficult to find in the sources). It is rather that the networks included collective practices and behaviours that only made sense on certain unspoken conditions. We could think of it as conditions of possibility, or ideas implicitly underpinning certain practices. Cowell’s chart was part of an extensive network which functioned on the condition that time was in a certain way—uniform and abstract, everywhere the same. The chart also served to install and maintain this particular time conception in the minds and embodied habits of people using it. In this way, the networks described in this book carried unarticulated ideas that gradually came to be taken for granted. This taken-for-granted-ness required active construction and maintenance. Travelling by train, engaging with current events through newspapers, or using cash—these were practices whose apparent simplicity belied the extent of work needed to make them appear so obvious and natural. In other words, the book is concerned with a level at once more material and more ‘subconscious’ than is perhaps common in most history books. What is at stake is not conscious ideas or experiences, but unarticulated assumptions and concepts embedded in material networks and their associated practices, together with the extensive work needed to achieve this embedding.

Challenging Secularization

Analysing and describing how certain networks of technologies and practices mediated this kind of time, the book aims to offer a new approach to the history of secularization. As a pragmatic point of departure, I have chosen the revised secularization narrative presented in philosopher Charles Taylor’s 2007 book A Secular Age—or at least some of its core tenets.⁵

Drawing on the work of Marcel Gauchet and Benedict Anderson, Taylor offers an analysis of modernization and secularization in terms of underlying assumptions about the nature of time.⁶ In A Secular Age, as in his earlier works Sources of the Self (1989) and Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), Taylor digs below notions of articulated ideas and seeks to excavate the very basic sense in which people imagine and perform their everyday ‘life-worlds’.⁷ He is interested in the ‘pre-theoretical’ assumptions that are always-already implicit in the embodied and habitual practices of human collectives.⁸ Though the 800-page book is about secularization, Taylor is less interested in belief or unbelief per se than their ‘shared conditions’ in modernity, that is, how belief and unbelief both take on new meanings on a common and constantly changing background. As he puts it, because ‘all beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit, and may even be as yet unacknowledged by the agent, because never formulated’, and because this tacit background changes over time, ‘belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500 and 2000’.⁹ For Taylor, then, to speak of modern secularity is to speak of ‘the new conditions in which belief and unbelief uneasily coexist, and often struggle with each other in contemporary society’.¹⁰

Taylor’s secularization thesis is sophisticated and comprehensive, and has been celebrated, discussed, and critiqued in several fora. For the purposes of this book, two specific elements of it are of particular importance, both of which historians of secularization have largely neglected—even those who have to some extent engaged Taylor’s work: firstly, his mentioned attention to the level of unarticulated assumptions implicit in collective embodied practices; and secondly, his explicit association of secularity with a specific kind of time embedded on this level. In combination, these two core tenets of his thesis offer to the historiography of British secularization a subtle challenge whose potential radicality historians in the field have yet to fully appreciate.

Historians of British secularization have typically focused their analyses on the level of beliefs, discourses, and identity formation, and assumed that the category of secularity is conceptually and necessarily tethered to ‘religion’. Whether construing secularization as a decline in conscious affirmation of Christian doctrine due to the impact of the natural sciences, historical criticism, or the erosion of any transcendent ground of morality,¹¹ or deploying case studies to counter such sweeping claims of an ‘unsettlement of faith’,¹² historians’ focus has generally remained on religious/nonreligious beliefs and their cultural or social dissemination and influence. Intellectual historians have shown that religious ideas continued to have a strong influence throughout the nineteenth century, not only in the morally charged Victorian domestic sphere but also in political and economic thought.¹³ Alongside the emergence of self-consciously ‘secular’ outlooks such as utilitarianism and ‘secularism’ (a term coined by George Jacob Holyoake in the 1850s),¹⁴ others have pointed to religious revivals and intense pastoral-promotional work across the spectrum of Christian denominations, not least the great profusion of domestic missions in cities like London and Manchester.¹⁵ While there certainly occurred something one could call a Victorian ‘crisis of faith’, where some widely publicized authors dismissed the particular Christian traditions in which they had grown up, the period equally saw a high number of (re)conversions to various religious orthodoxies among the same generation.¹⁶

Around the turn of the millennium, inspired by the 1990s’ historiographical debates over ‘postmodernism’, some historians shifted to a register of ‘discourses’ providing a repertoire of moral and gendered norms and narratives from which people receive and construct their identities.¹⁷ Prominent among these approaches was that of Callum Brown, whose 2001 book The Death of Christian Britain¹⁸ claims the latter was only fully secularized as late as the 1960s, when the force of certain narrative structures characteristic of Christian Evangelicalism (which until then had dominated popular discourse) went into abrupt and rapid decline. I shall not repeat his entire argument here, only note that for all his interest in religion’s collective and ‘discursive’ forms, Brown remains committed to an understanding of religion as primarily to do with belief. What makes religion such a difficult phenomenon to study, he writes, is that it ‘is founded upon faith—on belief—that is, by its very definition, without proof of its validity’. It is therefore only ‘the social and cultural significance of religion that we study’.¹⁹

In the wake of the emerging social scientific field of nonreligion and secularity studies in the 2010s,²⁰ Brown and other historians have increasingly returned to statistics, surveys, and interviews in order to account for the multiple varieties of atheistic, agnostic, free-thinking, sceptical, or otherwise nonreligious identities that have existed throughout history despite the image often perpetuated of ‘enchanted’ premodern pasts.²¹ The hope is to restore a sense of historical agency and identity to groups who have more often than not been ignored or neglected by mainstream historical accounts largely focused on religion and its complex development. ²²

Typically, the implicit understanding of ‘religion’ in these historiographies has been as a kind of universal and primordial human instinct (of which Christianity is sometimes assumed to be at once merely one expression among many and a prototype) whose essence nonetheless remains elusive to the rational scientist.²³ Hence, people can leave ‘religion’ yet still be ‘religious’, for instance. A few examples must suffice here. Historian Mark Smith discusses popular belief in witches and use of charms as expressions of ‘another religious world [than Christianity]’, which he calls ‘popular superstition’ and ‘traditional religion’.²⁴ Similarly, Simon Green states that after the mid-nineteenth century the British people ‘retained their religion […] but their religion ceased to be meaningfully Christian’.²⁵ Callum Brown discusses the appearance of what he considers ‘quasi-religions’ in twentieth-century Britain,²⁶ but what makes them merely ‘quasi’ is apparently their general lack of what (at least in this part of the world) has been considered traditional Christian features such as a set of creedal propositions or institutionalized forms of worship. Despite a certain widening of the concept of ‘religion’ and moving it to a level of discourse or identity formation, current histories of secularization have maintained this rather vague understanding of what ‘religion’ really means.

Throughout these shifts, historians of British secularization have tended to cast the secular as the negation of religion—whether they conceive the latter in terms of beliefs, discourses, or identities. Unfortunately this ignores discussions that have been going on for decades in the neighbouring halls of Religious Studies, where scholars have long been questioning whether such a distinction between religion and its ‘other’ can be meaningfully made. As anthropologist Talal Asad and many others have demonstrated, ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.’²⁷ Others have argued that to assume religion has an autonomous essence distinguishable from science, politics, or rationality is to presuppose the division in contemporary liberal societies between ‘faith’ and ‘politics’, a division representing a distinctly Western and modern paradigm with a murky colonial legacy.²⁸

Most historians of British secularization carry on as if these discussions never occurred. Dominic Erdozain—despite having written critically about the multiple definitions of ‘religion’ circulating in the historiography—emphasizes theological and doctrinal commitments and the ‘core beliefs’ that, for him, define the essence of what it means to be ‘religious’.²⁹ ‘Secularization’, he asserts, denotes ‘the moment when [religion] called on no resource beyond its own earthbound velocity [...] a shift [that] occurred within religious organizations, rather than outside them’.³⁰ For Callum Brown, when ‘a formerly religious people’ makes a ‘sudden plunge into a truly secular condition’, it simply means they no longer perform religion in any of its forms.³¹ Of course, some have contested the suddenness of this assumedly modern plunge, but for the present purposes the important point is that secularity still tends to denote a negative absence while the term ‘religion’ does most of the conceptual work.³² Secularity is only available as something occurring either within ‘religion’ (most often implicitly understood as Christianity in some form) or in opposition to a generic and ill-defined ‘religiosity’. Very rarely is secularity admitted any independent conceptual footing.

This tendency is evident in the field as a whole to this day, even as some historians seek to challenge it with ‘postsecular’ conceptual frameworks.³³ As Jeremy Morris has pointed out, the field remains characterized by a separation between the specifically ‘religious’ and the specifically ‘nonreligious’, in structural as well as theoretical terms: histories of the social aspects of religion are written with little regard for a/theological issues as such, while ecclesiastical or denominational histories are written within scholarly conclaves made up of sympathizers³⁴—a pattern I want to suggest is currently repeating itself in the emerging historiography of various ‘secularisms’.

To illustrate: in 2006, a year before Taylor published A Secular Age, a group of scholars employed his diagnosis of the late twentieth century as an ‘age of authenticity’ in a book titled Redefining Christian Britain—an obvious reference to Brown’s declared death of the same.³⁵ Arguing that ‘traditional’ church practices had not so much been rejected as consciously reconfigured to meet the modern criteria of ‘authentic’ performance, they provided a series of case studies highlighting how even after the 1960s religious belief has remained ‘a critical part of British identity’.³⁶ More recently, Sam Brewitt-Taylor has argued that the moral parameters of the assumed secular revolution of the ’Sixties’ in Britain were initially articulated by Christian radical clergymen.³⁷ From this perspective, it is as if the secularity associated with the 1960s’ radicalism and plurality of worldviews had been provided by Christianity all along and that all critique had always really been integral to the Christian tradition itself. On the other hand, historians less inclined to celebrate the flexibility of religious doctrines have sought to take Taylor and his interlocutors to task for their not always very subtle religious apologetics, arguing with Brown that ‘[t]he constant calibration from religion, usually Christianity, and, as in Taylor’s case, Catholicism, warps the possibility of envisioning secularity in anything like its potentials’.³⁸ Brown goes so far as to suggest that only historians who themselves identify as atheist could ever hope to get right the actual histories of atheistic and secular identities.³⁹ In his 2016 book Nineteenth-Century British Secularism, in a strange reversal of the religious apologetic approach described above, Michael Rectenwald referred to Taylor’s notion of a shared ‘background’ on which belief and unbelief coexist, arguing that this background—which for Taylor and his sympathizers has its roots in Christian theology and pietistic practice—was on the contrary first articulated as a conceptual possibility by none other than nineteenth-century self-identifying ‘secularists’.⁴⁰

First Challenge: The Material Turn

The structural and conceptual dichotomy between religion and secularity and the related concern with changes in people’s (non-)beliefs constitute two intertwined threads running through the entire historiography of British secularization. The central elements of Taylor’s thesis challenge both tendencies. First, as we have already mentioned, Taylor’ is concerned with a ‘deeper’ level than beliefs or identity markers. His analysis bypasses the question of belief versus unbelief because it addresses assumptions that remain unarticulated and implicit in embodied practices shared by large collectives. Even if the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of articulated ‘-isms’ and worldview identities, these nonetheless emerged and operated on a common background of shared, unspoken conditions. The question is not what people were able to express about themselves or others, or what identity markers were available to them in dominant discourses. At stake is not thoughts or words, but actions and things, not identities or narratives, but implicit conditions for practice and the technologies that mediate these conditions.

A key concept for Taylor here is what he calls social imaginaries,⁴¹ which he describes as a wide array of

ways in which [people] imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go [and ought to go] on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.⁴²

While the term ‘social imaginary’ easily connotes some sphere of fantasy or dreams, Taylor is in fact employing it to be more attentive to human bodies and their material surroundings. It denotes at once a set of unarticulated assumptions and the technologies and associated practices through which these assumptions are performed, and to which they lend a sense of legitimacy. Embodied collective practices carry an implicit and often unarticulated ‘know-how’, or as Taylor says, a certain ‘understanding implicit in practice’.⁴³ The concept of the social imaginary seeks to capture this seamless interaction between ‘the understanding that makes the practice possible’ and the ‘practice that largely carries the understanding’. Social imaginaries are realized only in and as embodied practice. ‘[B]ecause human practices are the kind of thing that makes sense’, he argues, ‘certain “ideas” are internal to them; one cannot distinguish the two in order to ask the question, which causes which’.⁴⁴

This renewed attention to embodied practices and the role of material things in mediating concepts can be developed even further by drawing on what some have called a ‘material turn’, a turn that most of the historiography of secularization seems to have missed. Since at least the mid-1990s, when historians of secularization discovered narratives and discourses, many social historians instead began examining how changing notions of rationality, freedom, subjectivity, and so on are embedded in and established through mundane technologies and associated practices.⁴⁵ Some, for instance, demonstrated how, during the nineteenth century, the use of everyday technologies such as sewers, street lights, and newspapers carried within itself emergent ideas of the ‘social’ as a sphere distinct from the ‘economic’ or the ‘political’.⁴⁶ Others described how a complex web of institutions and strategic practices associated with nineteenth-century liberalism cultivated precisely the kind of self-governing (and hence also ‘resisting’) subjects needed for the liberal state’s emerging and intensely self-critical mode of governance.⁴⁷

These historians draw on the work of thinkers such as Manuel de Landa, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and others,⁴⁸ who see human persons and inanimate things as equal participants in constantly shifting collectives.⁴⁹ As Patrick Joyce, one main proponent of this conceptual shift, summarizes: for historians taking this approach, ‘[i]nstead of viewing culture as for or around practice, culture is now located in practice, and in material forms’.⁵⁰ This means granting a sense of agency to non-human things, so that non-humans and humans stand on a more equal footing which does not have to be particularly controversial. As Daniel Miller puts it, ‘[w]here material forms have consequences for people that are autonomous from human agency, they may be said to possess the agency that causes these effects.’⁵¹ According to Joyce, it has become for historians ‘a matter of taking into account […] the distinctive kinds of effectivity that material objects and processes exert as a consequence of the positions they occupy within specifically configured networks of relations that always include human and non-human actors’. On this perspective, our ‘task of analysis involves following [distinct human and non-human entities in a network] and the networks themselves, particularly those that become “strategic” because of the number of connections they make possible in a highly contingent world’.⁵²

Some might protest that this is too theoretical and abstract. But in a sense, it is to invoke a stronger-than-usual kind of empiricism. When historians use surveys and interviews to measure and map historical changes in articulated non-/religious outlooks and identities, it is tempting to ask: since when has anyone been able to articulate their own fundamental assumptions, desires, or convictions? The problem is not (only) that historians lack access to people’s deepest-held beliefs, but (also) that people themselves enjoy no such access to their own subconscious depths. By contrast, pitching the analysis on the level of unarticulated and technologically mediated assumptions that allow certain networks to function and collective practices to make sense for participants means historians need not rely (as much) on what people say about themselves or each other. I want to suggest that attending to the unspoken premises that underpin collective technological practices allows historians to make as (if not more) precise assessments of implicit ideas than we could ever hope to make of explicit ones.

Most of the historiographical work following the ‘material turn’ focuses on modern state power in domestic and imperial contexts,⁵³ and has yet to pay any critical or sustained attention to the material mediation of secularity.⁵⁴ Especially if we understand the latter the way that Taylor proposes. This is the second crucial challenge his thesis poses to the historiography of secularization.

Second Challenge: The Temporal Turn

The challenge is this: For Taylor, the term secularity does not denote ‘unbelief’ as opposed to ‘belief’. Instead, he uses it in a way some might consider quite radical. He writes: ‘In spite of all the risks of confusion, there is a reason to use the term “secular” here because it marks in its very etymology what is at stake in this context, which has something to do with the way human society inhabits time’.⁵⁵

‘Secular’, as we all know, comes from saeculum, a century or age. When it begins to be used as one term in an opposition, like secular/regular clergy; or being in the saeculum, as against in religion (that is, some monastic order), the original meaning is being drawn on in a very specific way. People who are in the saeculum are embedded in ordinary time, they are living the life of ordinary time; as against those who have turned away from this in order to live closer to eternity. The word is thus used for ordinary against higher time. A parallel distinction is temporal/spiritual. One is concerned with things in ordinary time, the other with the affairs of eternity.⁵⁶

Secularity is a kind of time. This is the cornerstone of Taylor’s entire thesis: while premodern (or at least pre-Reformational) social imaginaries were characterized by a multiplex of ‘higher times’,⁵⁷ the processes of modernization involve, according to Taylor, a gradual purging : on the level of the social imaginary, all temporalities have eventually been pushed away or obscured by one singular kind of time: the saeculum, or secular time. One long-term consequence of this, according to Taylor, was that secular time gradually came to be seen as existing apart from the cosmic matrix that had initially granted it legitimacy. Secularization, then,

can be seen from one angle as the rejection of higher times, and the positing of time as purely profane. Events now exist only in this one dimension, in which they stand at greater and lesser temporal distance, and in relations of causality with other events of the same kind. The modern notion of simultaneity comes to be, in which events utterly unrelated in cause or meaning are held together simply by their co-occurrence at the same point in this single profane time-line … the move to … “secularity” is obviously related to this radically purged time-consciousness. It comes when associations are placed firmly and wholly in homogenous, profane time, whether or not the higher time is negated altogether, or other associations are still admitted to exist in it.⁵⁸

In modernity, secular time is ‘what to us is ordinary time, indeed, to us it’s just time, period’.⁵⁹ To be secular, then, according to Taylor, is not necessarily to be a-religious or nonreligious or disinterested in religion, but ‘to live in this ordinary time’⁶⁰—which is equally the case for believers and non-believers.

Taylor’s move is subtle, and its radical potential rarely acknowledged. By associating secularity directly with the temporal dimension of the social imaginary, he untethers the concept of secularity from the concept of religion. No longer cast as religion’s ‘other’, secularity denotes instead a kind of time carried as part of the shared background of unarticulated assumptions that underpin common practices in modernity. Throughout A Secular Age, Taylor repeatedly returns his readers’ attention to the etymology of the saeculum and its specifically temporal connotations. Indeed, it is the fact that modern collective practices implicitly mediate this concept of time that for him justifies labelling the modern age a ‘secular’ one.⁶¹

Taylor’s reformulation of secularity and the level on which it operates allows historians to repose the entire question of British secularization. At its heart is a concern with time, not only how it is theorized, but how it is technologically mediated and collectively performed. The material turn needed in the historiography of British secularization must be accompanied by a temporal one.

Taylor is not alone in associating secularization with changing conceptions of time; many scholars have sought, in the words of sociologist Richard Fenn, to ‘[retrieve] the notion of the secular to represent the experience of being temporal’, and propose that ‘the sheer subjection to the passage of time […] defines the experience of being secular’.⁶² Taylor explicitly relates secularization to the shift to a conception of time as ‘homogenous’—that is, as an empty container ‘which things and events contingently fill, rather than as constituted by what fills them’—and associates this with philosophies as different as Augustine’s theology and the scientific philosophy of Isaac Newton.⁶³ Taylor himself leans heavily on Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book Imagined Communities, which argues that the modern notion of the nation state rests on a new experience of time. Modern nations, claims Anderson, are ‘secular, historically-clocked, imagined communities’, a kind of ‘horizontal’ fraternities without reference to the divine, predicated on collective simultaneous experience of its individual members,⁶⁴ and mediated through, for instance, news media. Historians of early modern England have similarly related secularization in that context to the temporal periodicity characterizing emerging news networks, and the way this disciplined producers and consumers to ‘see the world in terms of an undifferentiated and secular time’.⁶⁵ In a similar vein, medieval historians have described a shift in time conceptions—from the ‘Time of the Church’ to the ‘Time of the Merchant’—as ‘the whole process of secularization of the basis and context of human activity: labour time, and the conditions of intellectual and economic production’.⁶⁶

These are only a few examples of works whose understanding of secularization draw on a common trope in narratives of modernization: namely to cast it as a unilinear progression, at once tragic and triumphant, of ‘empty, homogenous time’. And this is where Taylor’s thesis and the historiography of secular time of which it is a part needs to be thoroughly developed. Most of these narratives, in a move which goes back at least to the nineteenth century, cast this form of temporality as a monstrous, inauthentic, unnatural, and procrustean frame imposed on human communities. Technologies, and especially those used for measuring time and organizing collective disciplines in ways that can be cast as ‘modern’, play a vital role due to their assumed ability to structure societies independently of the ‘natural cycles’ that were crucial in the premodern world.⁶⁷ Even in literature arguing that postmodern relativity has thrown this modern time ‘out of joint’, the narrative of modernization as a process through which a singular temporality is technologically imposed on society has remained foundational.⁶⁸

Current scholarship is thoroughly questioning this understanding of modern temporality as homogenous and empty. Postcolonial scholars, for instance, have seen in it yet another master narrative serving to legitimize Eurocentric and imperialistic ideas of universal and progressive development, propagated through a range of technologies and practices, including academic history writing.⁶⁹ In his seminal book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Dipesh Chakrabarty describes how the ‘code’ of the modern historical disciplines emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

invokes a natural, homogeneous, secular, calendrical time without which the story of human evolution/civilization—a single human history, that is—cannot be told […] the code of the secular calendar that frame historical explanations has this claim built into it: that independent of culture or consciousness, people exist in historical time.⁷⁰

For Chakrabarty, the practices of academic history have an ‘abiding allegiance to secular, continuous, empty, homogenous time’, and subaltern voices need to be aware of how the latter structures the human sciences and modern state bureaucracies alike.⁷¹ On a similar note, Talal Asad takes his cue from Anderson (on this particular point), and says that ‘history’s linear temporality has become the privileged measure of all time’ because it is ‘integral to modern life in the nation-state’.⁷² For Asad, secular time is a monolithic and overly simplistic temporality characterizing (Western) modernity, whose imposed homogeneity does violence to the heterogeneous temporalities of the ‘many tradition-rooted practices’ of religious and cultural minorities.⁷³ ‘[T]here are other temporalities’, he reminds us, ‘immediate and mediated, reversible and nonreversible, by which individuals in heterogeneous society live and by which therefore their political responses are shaped’.⁷⁴

While some of these postcolonial accounts retain the understanding of Western modern temporality as monolithic and singular, and are primarily concerned with giving voice to its heterogeneous ‘others’,⁷⁵ others argue that neither modernity nor its characteristic temporality are as singular as often assumed, and that the notion of a modern inescapably homogeneous time is, as some have put it, simply a ‘myth’.⁷⁶ Homi Bhabha claims that modernity’s temporal logic rather consists of a ‘double temporality… [of] two incommensurable temporalities … that threaten [the imagined community’s] coherence’.⁷⁷ Smita A. Rahman puts it more succinctly:

The simultaneity that Taylor and Anderson espouse is actually the simultaneity of multiple complex temporal perspectives, which calls into question its assertion of homogeneity as the basis for community […] Even if secular time is stripped of its “high points” of religious significance [,] if a segment of [it] is made up of all the members experiencing the same instant, at that very moment, there exists a multiplicity of temporal perspectives, multiple pasts that are being called on and jostled into the present, multiple appropriations of the future that are pulled up by a diversity of expectations that impact the present.⁷⁸

In his 2011 book The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, Peter Osborne argues that modernity is founded on a distinction between the manifestations of historical qualities and the mapping of these manifestations along an ‘empty’ series of chronological time. In short, modernity acknowledges that the chronologically ‘next’ and the qualitatively ‘new’ are not necessarily the same and, on this basis, gives rise to a range of totalizing ‘politics of time’ which ultimately enables colonialism’s comparison between chronologically simultaneous yet geographically and culturally diverse societies as being non-contemporaneous.⁷⁹ Modernity is in other words constituted by a temporal dialectic: there are two distinct kinds of time in play here that are not simply coexistent, but dialectically interdependent as modernity’s constitutive contradiction. The homogenizing definition of an ‘empty’ simultaneous present is premised upon one differentiating move, which is then, in a second differentiating move, negated by associating certain elements within it with historical qualities belonging to a (usually) earlier present.

The postcolonial deconstruction of secular time and the role it plays in the writing of modern (Western) history have come together with increasing reflection among theoretically inclined historians on the temporal foundations of their discipline.⁸⁰ In the 1960s, Fernand Braudel famously put forward a theory of multiple temporalities on different scales—long term or short term—overlapping in people’s social life. ‘History exists at different levels’, he writes, ‘I would even go so far as to say three levels but that would be … simplifying things too much. There are ten, a hundred levels to be examined, ten, a hundred different time spans’.⁸¹ Similarly, in the 1980s, Reinhardt Koselleck theorized ‘sediments of time’—layers of past memories, present experiences, and future expectancies—entangled in any one particular location or moment.⁸² In these and other ways, historians have sought to challenge the notions of unidirectional progress and a singular capitalized History.⁸³

More recently these individual voices have merged into a chorus. According to the editors of one recent anthology, overcoming the modern understanding of historical time as a singular monolith is currently a ‘main challenge’ facing historians.⁸⁴ While not uncommon topics of interest for late twentieth-century historians, the number of academic historical publications dealing with temporality and related subjects such as memory have increased substantially since the early 2000s.⁸⁵ The modern assumption of capitalized History as unidirectional progressive improvement is cracking at the seams as historians analyse how different communities—including their own professional one—organize the relation between past, present, and future.⁸⁶ Some explore how the widely shared experience of social, political, and geographical dislocation following in the wake of revolutionary events in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries spurred new experiences of the meaning of living in history, loss and nostalgia for the world that was lost, and trepidation before an uncertain future. For others, the trauma of a painful past’s refusal to be left behind, and the associated impossibility of imagining a truly different future, has left modern culture stranded in an eternal present.⁸⁷ Some see instead the intrusion of a truly unprecedented future—of anthropogenic climate change, artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, and so on—exploding our long-held historical assumptions of continuity.⁸⁸ Others again find encouragement in how the realization that we have to actively construct the relation between the past, present, and future provides promising opportunities for our social identity and collective memory.⁸⁹

Many have pointed out the material dimension of these shifting and overlapping time regimes; again, the material and temporal turns go together. Modernity is haunted by the presence of objects and people(s) categorized as belonging in a past from which it was supposed to have made an absolute and irreversible break. As some have put it,

[t]he vestiges of historical pasts gone by subsist as material remains and are always in the here and now of the futures that follow. They can reappear in different forms or be put to different uses. They do not belong to the unilinear time of conventional history.⁹⁰

Material things might, for instance, serve as reminders of past pleasure or pain, but also as melancholic monuments to historical roads not taken. And they do so, paradoxically, here and now. Things are not just traces or residues of former presents, but effectively engaged in assembling and hybridizing periods and epochs. As durable matter, things make the past present and tangible; they constantly resist the regime that has subjugated time to the prevailing image of it as instantaneous and irreversible.⁹¹ As Graham Harmann puts it, paraphrasing Bruno Latour: ‘[a]ll countries are “lands of contrast”, mixing elements from different periods of history.’⁹² We might say that the existence of multiple material cultures also means the existence of multiple materially mediated times.⁹³

In short, there is an emerging consensus also among historians that the time of modernity is not as monolithic or singular as we assumed. ‘The dominant time conception has changed from a linear, irreversible, and progressivist time conception to a non-linear, reversible and non-progressivist one’, writes one main proponent of these shifts diagnosing the current state of play.⁹⁴ ‘[I]f we accept that there are innumerable times, but also that the phenomenological meanings of these times are relationally constituted, then it is not difficult to imagine that a given individual or community may move through/enact/experience several times simultaneously.’⁹⁵ As John Bender and David Wellbery summarizes:

The thematization of time in contemporary research draws to some degree on the insights of historicism and phenomenology, but is distinguished from those theoretical antecedents by the emphasis it places on plurality and complexity. Time … is not a single medium of consciousness or a unified movement in history. It is manifold. Numerous chronotypes intertwine to make up the fabric of time. The social and cultural processes of temporal construction rely on and also re-elaborate antecedent rhythms and articulations. These multiple times can become objects of contention because individuals experience them differently and because the bear ideological implications. Time asserts itself in contemporary inquiry less as a given than as a range of problems, the solutions to which are constantly open to renegotiation.⁹⁶

Deconstructing the notion of ‘an underlying and fundamentally singular modernity, modified by local circumstances into a multiplicity of “cultural” forms’, as so many variations upon a generic (Western) theme,⁹⁷ there are increasing calls for a ‘[r]adical polytemporality [that acknowledges] all the different modes of time […] that continuously give shape and meaning to human life’.⁹⁸ It is as if history itself is becoming less solid, more ‘liquid’,⁹⁹ so that the task facing historians interested in time will now consist in untangling and accounting for multiple temporal sediments’ constitution, respective directionality, and uneven rate of change.¹⁰⁰

Confusing Times

The point here is not to elaborate all the implications of the postcolonial analyses of the modern temporal dialectic and its global political, cultural, and social repercussions, but only to point out that the narrative of a singular monolithic modern temporality (of which Taylor’s secularization thesis is one version) fails to account for the temporal dynamics that together constitute modernity because it conflates several kinds of time into one. This conflation of times is equally evident (though largely unacknowledged) in the historiography of secular time. A few examples must suffice to demonstrate the ensuing confusion.

Sociologist Richard Fenn explicitly relates modernity to the experience of time, and writes: ‘By “modern” I simply mean the employment of an abstract, uniform, and continuous notion of time, typified by clocks and Newtonian physics.’¹⁰¹ Secularity as Fenn conceives it rejects transcendence, here understood as any attempt to stand outside of time’s passage. Therefore, ‘the social order itself, the state and the larger society, is itself too open and complex, too subject to uncertainty and change, to maintain the trappings of transcendence over time… the future is unpredictable and each moment may bring something new’.¹⁰² Note how Fenn defines secular time as at once the uniform and abstract time implied by the use of mechanical clocks and an unpredictable force generating new qualities. In the first instance, secular time transcends change (its abstract uniformity is what allows clocks to measure it); in the next, it is change itself. These two kinds of time should not be confused. The very premise of clocks’ function is that the kind of time with which they concern themselves is uniform and predictable and does not unexpectedly turn into something qualitatively different and ‘new’.

C. John Sommerville, describing the emergence of periodical news as disciplining the masses to ‘see the world in terms of an undifferentiated and secular time’,¹⁰³ similarly claims that the same temporality invoked by mechanical clocks is equally characterized by qualitative change and ‘newness’.

Work time, national holidays, the selling of time in the form of legal usury, the measurement of time in minutes and daily editions, all helped dispel sacred rhythms and sacred history. “Primitive”, “decade”, “progressive”, “epoch”, “century”, “contemporary”, “antiquated”, all date from this period. The term “new” became prevalent in book titles in the seventeenth century, as authors expressed secular restlessness. In short, change was becoming the only constant in England’s life.¹⁰⁴

It might be correct that these were important temporal terms circulating in the period. But, again, the all-encompassing ‘undifferentiated’ time of seriality cannot be the same kind of time as the one where ‘change’ is ‘the only constant’. In an empty and undifferentiated time, where would the sense of newness come from? There simply cannot be question of only one kind of time here.

Finally, Benedict Anderson describes how the modern ‘nation’ becomes conceivable as a community premised on a specific kind of temporality he calls (somewhat confusedly borrowing from philosopher Walter Benjamin) ‘homogenous, empty time’. But throughout his argument, he also calls it ‘serial’, ‘horizontal’, ‘transverse’, ‘historical’, ‘clocked’, ‘calendrical’, and ‘secular’. At first sight, these might all seem compatible. Surely we might understand the simultaneity necessary for what Anderson is describing as ‘transversing’ several layers of time moving in parallel. But is it these lines of development that are ‘serial’ and ‘horizontal’, or the otherwise ‘empty’ and ‘transverse’ intervals through which they move, and which measures their relative speed and direction? The term ‘historical’ connotes the generating of new qualities distinguishing historical periods from one another (which makes them not particularly empty or homogenous), while ‘calendrical’ at least partly suggests recurring cycles rather than linearity.

In summary, scholars (including Taylor) concerned with the concept of secular time have typically associated it with the kind of monolithic and all-encompassing temporality found in a form of modernization narratives that other scholars have for the past decades thoroughly dismantled. As historians, archeologists, social psychologists, and human geographers have now long demonstrated, modern temporality is not as singular as Taylor and his interlocutors make it out to be, not even on the level of the social imaginary. Far from an ‘empty, homogenous’ time, modernity’s temporalities—from modern imperialistic notions of ‘progress’ to individual bodies and their mundane habits—remain as multiple and materially mediated as ever.

This was certainly the case in nineteenth-century England. Victorians lived in as complex a temporal environment at the turn of the century as did anyone in the centuries before or after. In addition to the standardized, uniform time embedded in Cowell’s time chart and Fleming’s global time zones, Victorians shared a peculiar preoccupation with historical periodization and ‘progress’. They saw the establishment of a range of new sciences—uniformitarian geology, nebular astronomy, evolutionary biology, sociology, anthropology, and of course history—all fundamentally occupied with questions of time, change, development, and the marking of different ages, periods, or eras. ¹⁰⁵ Many were interested in the question of the inherent character of their own present ‘age’ being an age of this, an age of that. In their politics, arts, medicine, religion, and every other social domain, they invoked, in the word of one historian, multiple futures and multiple pasts:

In terms of the former, we find invocations of progress and immense future possibilities; in terms of the latter, increasingly elaborate recoveries of the past, from the discoveries of geology to new histories and idealisations of the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds. And what Jerome Buckley once termed the “triumph of time” was also manifest in new practices: among others, the advent of a public culture of museums and exhibitions; organised, professionalized archiving; and the growing popularity of personal autobiography and diary keeping.¹⁰⁶

Across Britain, as railway excavations made way for a new world, Victorians literally unearthed ancient strata of forgotten pasts, together with the alien creatures who had inhabited them.¹⁰⁷ Erasing former urban centres from the map or cutting through old farmlands, the railway could equally lead to unprecedented concern for local places and their potential futures, or inspire popular interest in the peculiar Victorian activity of heritage conservation.¹⁰⁸ The time of history did not, for the Victorians, progress linearly from savagery to civilization. Towards the end of the century, the temporal mapping of populations in colonies abroad as well as in urban areas at home seemed to reveal multiple civilizations progressing and regressing throughout history, and pockets of future, present, and ancient qualities folded into each other within the same population or people.¹⁰⁹ The temporal dimension of their social imaginaries was multilayered and full of paradoxes, times of varying intensities moving at different speeds in multiple, sometimes even opposite, directions.

Rethinking Secularization

What is the consequence of interjecting these transdisciplinary insights and theoretical turns into the historiographies of Victorian secularization? Does this mean that we can no longer speak of such a thing as secular time at all, but only a multiplicity of different times whose internal relation it now falls on historians to explicate?

I want to suggest that historians concerned with secular time must simply be more precise and less sweeping in our claims than we have typically been. Secular time certainly exists, but it has never been hegemonic in the way so many of our stories imagined. To properly account for its emergence and persistence will require locating it more accurately and tracing it more methodically, while acknowledging that it is just one of many modern times. This is an important diversion from Taylor’s secularization thesis: I am neither assuming nor arguing that other kinds of time were somehow peeled away as a result of secularization. No Victorian temporality disappeared simply because the networks described in the following chapters mediated a concept of secular time on a particular level. Offering no new ‘master narrative’ of secularization or its ultimate meaning, then, I assume instead that whenever and wherever secular time did emerge and persist, it did so amidst a multiplicity of other temporalities.

Few have summarized and sought to operationalize these theoretical perspectives as thoroughly as geographers Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift do in their 2009 book Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300-1800.¹¹⁰ Their topic is ‘clock time’, which is different from secular time, but there is still much to learn from their approach. Glennie and Thrift look to reconceptualize ‘clock time’ in line with the contention that multiple kinds of time emerge in multiple contexts of technologies and practices. In contrast to narratives of modernization as the oppressive imposition of a monolithic and universal temporal frame on human cultures, they seek to document ‘pockets’ of clock time, specific networks of temporal practices—often ‘with their own notions of what constitutes clock time’ in the first place—in various episodes and periods.¹¹¹ Clock times are communally constituted, they argue, and distinguished, for instance, by what skills, know-how and expertise are required for (and acquired through) participating in the associated practices.¹¹² This may range from understanding Einsteinian physics in order to time the arrival of a space shuttle on the moon, to the knowledge of the socially accepted delay for a dinner party. Clock times are as multiple as the collectives through which they are constituted, and they always operate in relation to other times emerging in overlapping collectives.

In a second point useful to my argument in this book, Glennie and Thrift maintain that clock times are constituted through embodied practices, and therefore precede consciously held beliefs or ideas. All temporalities, including clock time, stem from mundane practices and as such are ‘the result of vital behaviour’.¹¹³ In several case studies, they demonstrate how clock time has operated according to ‘a whole set of sensory registers that belong to the body’—sound, touch, and smell in addition to vision—often several at once. People learn to follow clock time not because they actively use clocks, but because the way they move in specific environments that tacitly encourage certain conducts incorporates (literally) clock time into ‘who they are’.¹¹⁴ When studying the history of various temporalities, we need, Glennie and Thrift suggest,

to consider the history of body practices which have a strong temporal element and which are an essential part of the history of many forms of clock time [and how these have been] gradually written into the very gait of the body, aided by changes in the [environement] which allow these gaits free range.¹¹⁵

One implication of this is that for Glennie and Thrift, clock time is no less ‘human’ or ‘natural’ than any other kind of temporality, since it is carried in bodily gaits, stances, and conducts that are performed collectively in habitual patterns, which again might change and mutate when new devices are introduced, or the network is otherwise interrupted. The effects of isochrony associated with clock time are produced inside the respective human-technological networks, not imposed from outside.

Finally, and in general agreement with the ‘material turn’ discussed above, Glennie and Thrift point out that the networks mediating clock times include non-human objects as well as humans, and that the notion of ‘agency’ should not be reserved for human participants alone. The mundane practices embedding various temporalities include technologies and devices that, while not deterministically, still assert a certain influence on the ‘conducts of time’ characterizing the network. These devices are not external instruments applied to a human sphere, but elements of the same ecology, ‘components of numerous material-semiotic networks [within which] particular understandings of time circulate according to the uses to which devices are put in particular practices with their own form of timekeeping expertise’.¹¹⁶

From this, we can summarize at least three points that together challenge the current historiographies of secular time, and provide, if not a complete theoretical framework, at least a set of useful navigational points for historians interested in secular time:

Firstly, the confusion in the historiography of secular time as to what exactly are its defining properties is untenable. It no longer suffices to list adjectives—‘empty’, ‘homogenous’, ‘calendrical’, ‘serial’, ’representational’, ‘transverse’, ‘clocked’, ‘linear’, ‘industrial’, ‘historical’, ‘uniform’, ‘chronological’, ‘standardized’, ‘singular’—and applying them to a single temporality claimed to exclusively characterize modernity. Moving forward, we need a more precise working definition of secular time that articulates its properties and what they entail, so that we can distinguish it from other modern temporalities.

Secondly, the historiography of secular time tends to jump too easily from the presence of technologies associated with timekeeping (clocks, factories, trains, calendars, communications media, and so on) to abstract concepts with an assumed global reach and power to subdue entire civilizations. We need instead to operationalize the concept of secular time so that it will be possible to trace precisely how and where it appears, and with what specific effects. While we conceive secular time as abstract and global, its realization is always a local and material achievement.

For this reason, thirdly, we must acknowledge that secular time is not singular, but varies somewhat between the material networks mediating it. The secular time mediated in one network might differ slightly from the secular time mediated in another. And yet, with a clear understanding of the concept’s defining properties, and a way of operationalizing it in case studies, we would be able to recognize the temporality we are tracing as distinctly secular.

Overview of the Book

In Chap. 2, I develop these three points, and offer what I consider a more precise definition of secular time, one which does a better job of articulating its characteristic properties so we can avoid confusing or conflating it with other kinds of time. Locating its conceptual roots in the theological and philosophical debates of late medieval scholasticism, secular time is best associated with the kind of time known as aevum, or indeed sometimes saeculum—a time independent of motion, placed somehow between the eternity of God and the multiple temporalities of the created world. While this medieval philosophical backdrop might not at first sight seem the most relevant to a book about modern history, the characteristics of this kind of time as the scholastics conceived it are very much so indeed. The scholastics described secular time as infinite and isochronic: always already everywhere and uniform. It was abstract and independent from the various temporal turbulences of the material world, constituting a sphere populated by immaterial creatures. The concept was a philosophical and theological response to questions surrounding the nature and properties of angels. In short, secular time was the kind of time that allowed angels to move without undergoing change.

This conceptual backdrop will not only be helpful in clarifying the properties of secular time. It is also useful on a practical level because it allows us to operationalize the concept in specific case studies. Drawing on some of the insights associated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT)—a theoretical and methodological approach developed in the 1980s and designed precisely to undermine the illusion of irreversible historical progress—the chapter argues that the concept of immutable mobiles captures the same characteristics as did the angels conceived in medieval scholasticism. Just as the scholastics inferred the presence of secular time from the (conceived) presence of angels, so we might infer the mediation of secular time in networks that centre on creating and supporting entities stable enough to endure rapid long-distance movement without deterioration.

This conceptual relationship between secular time and immutable mobiles is something of a cornerstone in the book’s argument. The second chapter prepares the ground for the following case studies, stating that the successful mediation of secular time is relative to the construction and maintenance of immutable mobiles in socio-technological networks. When a network aspires to make specific entities move without changing, and this operation is a premise for the network’s proper function, then to the degree that it succeeds in making and sustaining immutable mobiles, it also mediates a concept of secular time.

Chapters 3–5 explore three technological networks emerging in England during the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 discusses the development of the Victorian public railway system, arguing that its function centred on moving passengers without them undergoing physical or psychological change. Chapter 4 describes the rise of the Victorian public sphere, arguing that at the heart of its performance lay an intense pursuit of immediacy and temporal synchronicity, dependent on and relative to the frictionless long-distance transfer of news. Chapter 5 describes the emergence of state-sanctioned paper money from the Napoleonic Wars and through the gradual concentration of note issuing authority with the Bank of England, focusing on the latter’s effort to monopolize the ability to create inimitable notes able to circulate without losing value.

The three networks all saw an almost incredible growth in the number of people performing and taking part in their respective associated practices. At the beginning of the century, no one at all travelled by train, very few read daily newspapers (even if this includes listening to someone reading the paper aloud), and though people were forced to use paper money during the restriction period between 1797 and 1821, they did so with great reluctance. At the end of the century, however, people from every social class travelled by train, if not daily then weekly, daily newspapers had become ‘established as a part of the normal furniture of life for all classes’,¹¹⁷ and when the Bank of England printed their Currency Notes at the dawn of the Great War, these circulated everywhere barely prompting any questions.

All three networks, finally, were centred on the careful construction and maintenance of immutable mobiles, to the degree that their relative success in this regard determined whether they could function as intended. Turning travellers into immutable mobiles was the implicit goal of the public railway network, from the construction of a near frictionless ‘Newtonian road’ to the regular publishing of pocket size timetables. And what is ‘news’ if not particular events that are being translated and moved without deterioration through various mediating technologies from a distant place into the immediate presence of a consumer, who then experiences and observes the events as occurring simultaneously to them and their imagined community? Finally, the construction of the human-technological networks mediating Bank of England paper notes can be seen as centred on imparting to the notes the characteristic properties which had led people to consider gold an adequate substance for embodying a fixed standard of value—immutability, uniformity, divisibility, and mobility—hence allowing banknotes to pass as real money and anchor the entire national economy.

This will take us far from the dominant narratives of Victorian secularization and contemporary debates about the meaning of the secular. Though some readers are probably disappointed or confused by this, I believe this apparent diversion is a good thing. The historiographies of British secularization with their conclaves of scholars fighting over identity markers appear stuck in a conceptual deadlock. With this book, I am trying to offer a clear alternative without simply reworking old themes. By connecting the historiography to two theoretical ‘turns’ historians of secularity have until now neglected—one material, one temporal—and by offering a more rigorous definition of secular time together with a more precise way of locating it in technological-practical networks, I want to establish a new possible entry point for discussions both about Victorian concepts of time and the location of secularity in Victorian modernity.

Here the term ‘secularization’ does not denote a process characterizing an entire ‘age’, ‘era’, ‘period’, or ‘epoch’ (if after the temporal turn anyone is still speaking of such things). Neither is secular time seen as a defining feature of an imagined monolithic ‘modernity’ whose precise definition remains elusive. I am making no claim as to whether any all-encompassing process of secularization in such a sense began, culminated, or ended in Victorian England, simply because on the level with which this book is concerned it makes no difference.

To return to Cowell’s time chart: whether the users of the chart (or Cowell himself) identified as ‘secular’ is obviously irrelevant to the chart functioning as intended. Neither do we need any of them to consciously reflect on the nature of time, or poetically describe their experience of being encroached upon by a modern ‘homogenous, empty’ temporality. The concept of time implicit in Cowell’s chart is simply there, irrespective of anyone’s experience, belief, or intention. It is a condition of possibility, a basic assumption whose presence can be inferred from the fact that the chart ‘works’ only if certain entities—in this case travellers, news, and money—can be imbued, at least for a while, with both mobility and immutability. The following chapters will argue that such entities’ ability to move predictably between spatial points without deterioration presupposes and implies a time that is always and everywhere the same, abstract from material processes, and therefore able to measure their flight even while they are themselves at rest. A time independent of motion. A secular time.