There is a close relation between public time and personal time, i.e., the subjective time experience is formed in the same way as the actual history of the period. In Waltrud Holl' s opinion, however, the linear time pattern, which governed the Victorians, explains only one part of social life:
Umfassende Bereiche sozialer Wirklichkeit kommen in dieser Form von Geschichte nicht vor. Es sind die individuell erfahrenen Bereiche sozialer Wirklichkeit, die fehlen. Das eigene Leben im Alltag, die eigene Lebensgeschichte, unser tägliches Handeln erfahren wir in den Rhythmen des Alltags, in den sich wiederholenden Prozessen der Lebenswelt. Diese alltäglichen Erfahrungen sind zyklisch. (Holl, 68-9.)
It seems then that the model of linear time incorporates a cyclical pattern of temporality. Everyday life with its perpetual repetition becomes the dominant time structure for the individual.
Some social historians say that in the nineteenth century ' cyclical' and ' linear' were categories which, with regard to time and history, did not alternate or exclude each other, but determined the reception of ordinary as well as global events together. I think, however, that this did not apply to industrial England. There, where everyday reality was dictated by the punctuality of the clock and the tirelessness of the machine, only one theoretical model could apply -- that of time as a straightforward continuity.
The experience of periodicity was characteristic of the agrarian ' Lebenswelt' , where life was structured by the regularity of the recurrence of the seasons or the sun' s movement. In pre-industrial societies human time and natural time were closely aligned by means of a common rhythmic base. In his book Modern Fiction and Human Time Wesley Kort calls ' rhythmic time' (Kort, 174.) the events constituting a cycle of fragmentation and reconstitution, depletion and renewal. Indeed the time awareness of rural cultures is determined by the natural rhythms. Being an agrarian land, nineteenth-century Bulgaria displayed these features: daily work depended on the length of the day, on the weather, etc.. Barkley also observes this and puts it down on paper in his accounts. The yearly ' pilgrimage' of the Albanians illustrates how much the inhabitants of the east European part of the Ottoman Empire depended on ' rhythmic time' :
The masons we chiefly employed on the line were Christians from Albania, who each spring swarm all over European Turkey, and return to their homes for the winter months. (Barkley, 156.)
In Dobrudja, unlike England, there was no time theory behind the people' s behaviour. For centuries life took its ordinary (cyclical) course. People were not aware of time in the sense they were in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution had abruptly changed the old route of affairs and the new order demanded a justification of the reason on which it was based. The new time consciousness together with new work ethic and social reorganisation were systematised by the Utilitarian ideologists [See also]. But the opposition between the linear theory in which Barkley believed and the cyclical life pattern the Ottomans followed contributes to the multiplicity of time layers, or climates of opinion, that make the text of the civil engineer rich and interesting.
Barkley, Henry C. Between the Danube and the Black Sea or Five Years in Bulgaria. London: Murray, 1877.
Holl, Waltraud, "Geschichtsbewußtsein und Oral History. Geschichtsdidaktische Überlegungen"in: Niethammer, L., Trapp, W. (edd.). Lebenserfahrung und Kollektives Gedächtnis. Der Praxis der Oral History. Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1985; pp.63-82.
Kort, Wesley A. Modern Fiction and Human Time. A Study in Narrative and Belief . Gainesville: South Florida Press, 1985.
Roach, Paul. "Bentham's Utilitarianism: Victorian England". Retrieved February 27, 1999 from the World Wide Web: www.gober.net/victorian/reports/utilitar.html.
Last modified 2001