My Watch – Class 11 English Chapter 21 Notes & NCERT PDF

Introduction to the Essays Section

This chapter opens the book's Essays unit. The introduction explains:

"My Watch" is an informal, humorous essay.

About the Author

Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), who wrote as Mark Twain, was an American humorist, short-story writer and novelist. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, had less than ten years of schooling, and worked as a printer's apprentice, steamboat pilot, prospector and journalist — experiences that gave him a wide knowledge of humanity. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer drew on his childhood; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, planned as a sequel, became a masterpiece narrated by an uneducated boy.

Summary

Part I — A perfect watch ruined

The author's beautiful new watch ran for eighteen months without losing or gaining time. He believed it "infallible". One night he let it run down, set it by guess, and next day took it to the chief jeweller to set the exact time. The jeweller said, "she is four minutes slow — regulator wants pushing up", and — though the author "danced around him in anguish" — pushed the regulator. This "human cabbage" had done "the shameful deed".

The watch began to gain: "Within a week it sickened to a raging fever and its pulse went up to a hundred and fifty in the shade." In two months it was "a fraction over thirteen days ahead of the almanac… away into November enjoying the snow, while the October leaves were still turning", hurrying up rent and bills.

A watchmaker — with "a look of vicious happiness" — said it needed cleaning, oiling and regulating. Afterwards it slowed so much that the author missed appointments and dinner and drifted "back into yesterday… into last week", until he felt "a sort of sneaking fellow-feeling for the mummy in the museum, and a desire to swap news with him."

Another watchmaker said the barrel was "swelled". Now the watch kept a fair average: for half a day it raced with "barking and wheezing and whooping and sneezing and snorting", then slowed until the clocks caught up.

Part II — From bad to worse

"But a correct average is only a mild virtue in a watch." The next watchmaker said the king-bolt was broken; the author, not wanting to appear ignorant, said he was glad it was nothing worse. Now the watch ran and stopped at its own "discretion", and "kicked back like a musket". The next repairer found that at ten minutes to ten the hands shut together "like a pair of scissors" and travelled together. Another fixed the bent crystal and crooked mainspring; now, after about eight hours, it would "buzz like a bee", the hands spinning like "a delicate spider's web", reeling off "the next twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes" before stopping with a bang.

The watch had cost two hundred dollars; the author had paid two or three thousand in repairs. The last "watchmaker" turned out to be an old acquaintance — a poor steamboat engineer — who said: "She makes too much steam — you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the safety-valve!" The author "brained him on the spot and had him buried at my own expense" — comic exaggeration of his fury.

Uncle William's wisdom: "a good horse was a good horse until it had run away once, and… a good watch was a good watch until the repairers got a chance at it." He wondered what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, gunsmiths, shoemakers, engineers and blacksmiths — the joke being that they become watch repairers.

Humour and Style

Themes

Word Power

Exam Focus

Q. What was the importance of the watch to the author?

Outline: It was his beautiful, perfectly accurate watch, which he considered "infallible" and grieved over when it ran down — it had practical and sentimental value.

Q. What attempts did he make to get it repaired, and why did he finally give up?

Outline: The jeweller (regulator), then a series of watchmakers (cleaning and oiling, swelled barrel, king-bolt, crystal and mainspring), and finally the ex-steamboat engineer. Each made it worse; after spending thousands, the absurd "too much steam" verdict ended his patience.

Q. Explain 'Within a week it sickened to a raging fever and its pulse went up to a hundred and fifty in the shade.'

Outline: Personification and hyperbole: the watch, now gaining time wildly, is described like a patient with a high fever and racing pulse.

Q. How is humour used?

Outline: Through personification, hyperbole, improbable images, self-mockery and a comic ending; the exaggeration exposes careless repairers.

Common Mistakes