Attending to the multitude of temporal markers found in Clare’s poetry, this essay argues that his representation of time and his thematic and stylistic experimentation with temporality demonstrate his pivotal place in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century labouring-class poetry. Finding, having, and protecting time to write – asserting writing as an activity (whether conceived of as ‘work’ or as a pastime) for which one could have or take the time – was fundamental for Clare, his predecessors, and successors, to publish at all. Examining the burgeoning awareness of what E. P. Thompson has named ‘work-time discipline’, the essay traces how awareness and time anxiety impacts artistic self-fashioning for poets such as Robert Dodsley, Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and Robert Bloomfield among others. However, Clare’s work remains an important point of transition for understanding how plebeian poets shaped their artistic identities within increasingly constraining notions of work.

When Sterne (unsuccessfully) pitched to Robert Dodsley the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, he was directing his novel to the very man whose career had been built on writing and publishing texts which sat on generic boundaries, such as his play The Toy-Shop (1735). Through an analysis of experimental texts in this tradition, including novels such as Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding’s The Cry: A Dramatic Fable (1754) and Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which imported dramatic devices into mid-century prose, this chapter contextualises Sterne’s mise en page experimentation within a wider mid-century fascination with hybrid print forms. Sterne was arguably aware of the theatrical heritage of sermon punctuation when he displaced these typographic characteristics from his professional work into his fiction, where such visual markers appeared innovative and surprising. By analysing Sterne’s sermonic punctuation and linking it to his development of a mid-century aesthetics of typesetting the novel, I suggest that Sterne drew from Anglican works published from within his professional context while responding to a 1750s fashion for printing closet drama and dramatic novels.