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parting, but for the parted.”70 Despite such anxieties, Gray’s “Elegy” was widely anthologized from the 1750s onward, and its popularity ensured that other writers began to equate the acoustic and semantic qualities of the two bells. In The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius (1771), James Beattie considered “the long-sounding curfew” to be “[l]oaded with loud lament,” and similar connections are found in an anonymous 1783 poem that describes a funeral when “[n]o passing knell the solemn curfew rung.”71 Shakespeare and Gray are fashionably blended here, and “curfew” and “knell” quickly became strong collocators. One of the couplets in Thomas Penrose’s “The Hermit’s Vision” (1787) runs as follows: “[n]o tinkling fold, no curfew’s parting knell / Struck the sequester’d Anchoret’s ear,” while the anonymous lament “Alnwick’s Condolence: A Pastoral Elegy” (1787) refers to “the Curfew’s knell.”72 By the 1790s, then, the associative convention was firmly established, and the dense network of acoustic and semantic interconnections peaked during the first half of the nineteenth century. While Wordsworth’s treatment of oppression in “The Norman Conquest” signals an awareness of Thomson’s Liberty, his phrase “the Curfew’s knell” undoubtedly nods toward Gray.73
So, curfew bells began to evoke death and mourning, rather than a periodic moment of diurnal time, and this poetical convention had a lasting impact on auditory aesthetics. In 1783 Hugh Blair stated that “[t]he deep sound of a great bell, or the striking of a great clock, are at any time grand; but, when heard amid the silence and stillness of the night, they become doubly so”; and, in a subsequent lecture, he noted specifically that the sound of the curfew bell prompts ideas “of a melancholy kind.”74 Another Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, Archibald Alison, similarly stressed the importance of context and prior experience. He described how a picturesque landscape at sunset receives “an addition” from “the circumstance of the evening bell,” the potency of this sound coming from its “melancholy and sadness.”75 Familiarity, though, is essential:
They who are not accustomed to the Curfew, and who are ignorant of its being the evening bell, and, as such, associated with all those images of tranquillity and peace, which render that season of the day so charming, feel nothing more from its sound, than from the sound of a bell at any other hour of the day.76
The curfew becomes associated with the dusk, but a person unfamiliar with the convention finds the ringing unremarkable. Crucially, however, although the sound of a tolling bell is “uniformly the same,” Alison recognized that accumulated associations could cause it to have “very different expressions”, and of all tintinnabulations, “[t]he passing bell, and the funeral bell, alone are sublime.”77 This statement seems free from ambiguity—until it is juxtaposed with the following passage:
All sounds [ … ] are Sublime, which are associated with Ideas of Majesty or Solemnity, or deep Melancholy, or any other strong Emotion: the Sound of the Trumpet, and all other warlike Instruments,—the Note of the Organ,—the Sound of the Curfew,—the tolling of the passing Bell, &c.78
How can curfew bells be sublime if passing bells and funeral bells alone possess sublimity? The latter achieve sublimity via association with death, but curfew bells appropriate these qualities vicariously, due merely to homophony. Passing bells (to borrow Sherman’s description) had “nothing to do with chronometry,” yet the signals mingled easily.79 The acoustic similarities alone could not have prompted this, since the sounds themselves had remained unchanged for many centuries. Alison himself suggests that the shift was not due to auditory physiology or acoustics: “[t]o the peasant the curfew is only the mark of the hour of the evening.”80 Therefore the sound of that particular bell must have been subjectively/perceptually transformed by acquired cultural (and specifically literary) sensibilities.
In an age of sentiment and sentimentalism, the reading of literature inevitably engendered a more nuanced responsiveness to auditory stimuli (as well as those associated with other modalities). Widely read descriptions of time-telling sounds influenced the way readers heard and responded to them, whether perceived aurally or silently (re)imagined. An appreciation of the funereal solemnity and majesty of the curfew bell denoted refinement in the auditor, and therefore the sound gradually ascended the hierarchy of acoustical aesthetics, until it eventually acquired the elusive characteristic of sublimity. This is just one of many ways in which literature exerted a powerful influence upon particular time-telling practices and perceptions during the long eighteenth century. This important topic has been inexplicably neglected in critical studies to date, and therefore still awaits the scholarly attention it so richly deserves.
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