Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England

Stefan Fisher-Høyrem (PhD) is a historian and Senior Academic Librarian at the University of Agder, Norway.

• 1 Introduction: Secularities, Technologies, and Modern.- Temporalities.- Challenging Secularization.- First Challenge: The Material Turn.- Second Challenge: The Temporal Turn.- Confusing Times.- Rethinking Secularization.- Overview of the Book.- Bibliography.- 2 Secular Time: Origin Story and Operationalization.- Origins of the Saeculum.- Immutable Mobiles.- Victorian Networks.- Bibliography.- 3 Railways: Tracks, Trains, and Travellers.- Moving Bodies.- Local Time.- Branching Out.- Temporal Trauma.- The Transport Machine.- Tracks.- Trains.- Travellers.- Temporal Coordination.- Conclusion.- Bibliography.- 4 News: The Pursuit of Immediacy.- Temporality and Form.- A Printed Public Sphere.- Emerging Publics.- Environmental Resistance.- Expanding Networks.- Mobilization.- Insulation.- Printing.- Journalism Skills.- Conclusion.- Bibliography.- 5 Banknotes: The Money of Civilization.- Performing the Economy.- Gold Standard.- The State.- Policing the Standard.- The Bank of England.- A Networkof Notes.- A Combination of the Arts.- As Good as Gold.- Conclusion.- Bibliography.- 6 Conclusion: A New Approach to Secularization.- Bibliography.- Index.

“Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England offers a novel interpretation of the history of temporality in Victorian England. … Fisher Høyrem’s achievement in this book is to encourage historians of Victorian culture to think more carefully about the ways in which the nineteenth-century experience of time … . Rethinking Secular Time invites historians to think again about how to best approach a subject so fundamental, yet so perplexing, as the history of temporality.” (Joshua Bennett, Victorian Studies, Vol. 66 (3), 2024)