THE HISTORY OF OWNERSHIP OF CLOCKS
While church and civic clocks permitted the public keeping of time in England, it is not until the eighteenth century that we see a marked increase in the private ownership of clocks, something that can be measured through probate inventories (which list the possessions of deceased individuals), which are a marvellous source for studying everyday life and the consumption of things.
In a comparative survey of Kentish and Cornish households in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was estimated that, in Kent, only I per cent of households owned a clock during the first half of the seventeenth century, but that by the 1740s over 78 per cent of households owned a clock. Cornwall, in contrast, yields only one example of a clock owned by the sampled households prior to the 1650s, and only about 12 per cent of households owning clocks by the mid-eighteenth century. This study shows that, in England, clocks were adopted on a large scale at the turn of the eighteenth century and also that the pattern varied from location to location.
Source ~ ‘History of Unexpected’ by Sam Wills and James Day Bell
Page: 111
