In the second half of the nineteenth century domestic advice manuals applied the language of modern, public time management to the private sphere. This paper uses domestic advice and cookery books, including Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management to argue that women in the home operated within multiple, overlapping temporalities that incorporated daily, annual, linear and cyclical scales. I examine how seasonal and annual timescales coexisted with the ticking clock of daily time as a framework within which women were instructed to organise their lives in order to conclude that the increasing concern of advice writers with matters of timekeeping and punctuality towards the end of the nineteenth century indicates not the triumph of 'clock time' but rather its failure to overturn other ways of thinking about and using time.
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