Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector; this inner time is our wife.

J. B. Priestley’s epigraph, “Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector; this inner time is our wife,” sets the novel’s measurable public time against a private, intimate experience of time. Its decisive contrast makes time not merely a system that schedules and judges life, but also something lived inwardly and bound up with human attachment.

Source and Form

The line is attributed to J. B. Priestley’s Man and Time. It appears among the novel’s opening matter, before the title-page sequence continues into the words “The time will come.” Its placement gives the sentence the character of a framing proposition: before the narrative unfolds, it offers two unlike ways to understand time.

Public Time and Private Time

The first half groups clock time with a bank manager, a tax collector, and a police inspector. These figures evoke institutions that keep accounts, demand payment, and enforce rules; the list presents measured time as an external authority that monitors and constrains. The second half changes register abruptly. “This inner time” is not another official instrument but “our wife,” an image of intimate relationship. The juxtaposition turns a distinction between clock and inward duration into a contrast between public oversight and personal closeness.

Significance

The sentence’s compact parallel structure makes its shift especially forceful: a sequence of civic roles gives way to a single domestic figure. The possessive “our” links the inward experience to shared intimacy, while the image of a wife gives abstract inner time a human and relational presence. As an epigraph, the line supplies a lens for reading the novel’s concern with time without reducing time to clocks alone: external measurement and private experience coexist, but they do not carry the same emotional meaning.