The Possibility of a Politics of Time in The Seamstress

Chapter II of Reynolds' The Seamstress begins with the beginning of the work day, the narrator noting that "the clock of St. Paul's, Convent Garden, is now striking seven, as Virginia rises from her humble pallet (3)," placing both the time, and the time's importance to Virginia explicitly before the reader. The importance time has for Virginia is immediately tied to her working life, with the narrator informing the reader of Virginia's exhausted condition by noting that "for, after twenty-one hours and a half of continuous, unwearied toil, four hours and a half of slumber were but the veriest shade and mockery of rest (3)!" Virginia is not only working a tremendous amount of time with very little rest, but the great deal of time she is working has led all of her life, including the hours in which she rests, to be regulated by and thought of in terms of hours. Hours, opposed to days, is how she experiences her life, an experience of life directly resultant from the wage system under which she labors.
In this way, The Seamstress, by way of Virginia's experience, is able to depict a way of experiencing time which would seem vastly different from that of characters encountered in other novels, characters often drawn from classes other than the laborers. In many of the works we have read up until now, time was measured in days and months, characters shown planning in terms which did not seem to divide individual days into smaller units. The Seamstress, however, offers the reader a different view of time, by extension allowing readers to immerse themselves in and articulate a critique of the realities facing workers. By presenting a world in which time passing in hours rather than days, readers may be able to more fully understand the ways in which measuring the day, even beyond the time spent working, in hours, and see how this conception of time works itself as a form of exploitation.
This different understanding of time presented by the novel can be seen as reflected on the formal level in the very tense in which it is written. As seen in the above quotes, much of the novel is written in present tense, opposed to the past tense which we've encountered up until now. Time, measured in hours, is shown as a constant of Virginia's. The very present in which Virginia lives is already divided up and measured as part of time, rather than becoming inscribed in time retrospectively, when told in past tense, as is oft to happen when one is measuring in larger units, such as days or months. Over the course of days and months, time is allowed to fall from focus of characters, only placed within a narrative across time when recounted. In this way, the very style employed in the writing, as well as what is being written about, offers the reader a chance at analyzing the different ways in which time is divided as a reflection of one's situation in life, providing a site in which to analyze time as a political category.