by Jane Brox
Since the watch—and any travelers abroad—had no stationary street lighting to help them, what little light shone on the streets was portable. The torches and lanterns carried by the watch not only illuminated their way but also made them visible to others and recognizable as enforcers of order. Since any travelers without lights would have had an advantage—they could see the watch but could not be seen—anyone on the streets after dark was also required to carry a lamp or torch. Leicester, England: "No man [may] walke after IX of the belle be streken in the nyght withoute lyght or without cause reson-able in payne of impresonment." The city of Lyon: "Let no one be so bold or daring to go about at night after the great seral of Saint Nizar without carrying lights, on pain of being put in prison and of paying sixty sous of Tours each time he is found to have done so."
The wealthy—whom watchmen could distinguish from a distance by their dress—always traveled with servants to hold their lanterns and with guards to defend them. They were also exempted from nighttime restrictions that others were subject to. For instance, in many cities night travelers were forbidden to wear hoods or cloaks, and they could not carry weapons or gather in groups of more than three or four.
Almost everyone gladly left the streets to the thieves, the scurrying of rodents, and the lingering smells of the day—rotting food, old straw, and horses' sweat and dung: "It has been said in describing the conditions of the age of dark streets that everybody signed his will and was prepared for death before he left his home." Women would have been particularly vulnerable in the night, and any women on the streets after nightfall, save for midwives, would have been deemed to be prostitutes.
People who had to travel hoped that their business would coincide with a clear night and a full moon, which thieves often avoided. The full moon also gave travelers enough light to see the outlines of the landscape and the road ahead. The eye functions differently at night than during the day. In the dark, people see with their retinal rods rather than their retinal cones, and complete adaptation to night vision takes a full hour. Even then, human sight is much less acute at night, and the eye can't distinguish color. On a night with no moon or heavy cloud cover—a lantern or torch lighting the way only directly ahead—travelers relied on their other senses. Most knew the country intimately by day, and such familiarity would have helped in the dark. Although they could not see landmarks, they could orient themselves by the feel of the road underfoot—the gravel crunching with each step or the give of soft sand; by the sound of the wind soughing through the trees or rushing across an open field, or by church bells, falling water, or bleating sheep; by the smell of hay or freshly cut wood. Anything light-colored helped—a pale horse, a sandy path, snow. Still, people had to negotiate the curfew chains or the logs that were sometimes placed across the streets as barriers. On the uneven, muddy roads, they fell off bridges and into canals and coal bins; they stumbled over cobbles; they tripped on woodpiles and stones.
In an age of scarce and rarely squandered light, any substantial illumination at night would have been imbued with great meaning. At times it signaled a crisis: during conflagrations or conflicts, city officials required citizens to muster their lamps and candles as an aid to defense or firefighting. At other times, it signaled power: when royalty arrived in a city, they were often ushered in with displays of torches along the streets and on rooftops, or with bonfires: "On the twenty-sixth day of April 1430, the authorities of Paris had great fires lit, just as at Saint John in the summer ... and informed the people that it was for the young King Henry, who proclaimed himself king of France and England, who had landed at Boulognes, he and a great horde of mercenaries, to fight the Armagnacs, who were nothing to him." The church also marked its holy days with fire and used light extravagantly in its buildings. Of St. Mark's in Rome on Christmas Eve, one onlooker remarked, "A man would thincke it all on fire." While such light reinforced the church's eminent place in society, candlelit processions through the streets and squares also imbued those times with a sense of solemnity and mystery.
Even in the heart of a bustling city, night must have retained its age-old feeling of enormity, with the stars distinct above and people hiding in their homes. Over time, though, as cities grew and commerce between and within them increased, daily life inevitably extended more and more into the dark hours. By the late 1600s, authorities in large European and several American cities began to require householders to hang a lamp or place a candle on their street-facing windowsills for a few hours after winter sunset and during the dark of the moon. Like the lights required of travelers, the sill lights were meant to help the authorities. The lamp on the sill was also "a lamp that waits," notes Gaston Bachelard. "It watches so unremittingly that it guards." And it was regarded in return. There would always be something of the cold taste of order in public lighting.
The times and days set for lighting the lanterns remained variable for centuries—changing with the seasons, with the lunar phases, and with days of religious observance. Eventually, officials issued detailed schedules. In 1719, for example, a Paris district commissar required the following: "On 1 December a half candle (⅛ pound) is to be lit. From 2 to 21 December inclusive, whole candles (¼ pound) are to be used. On 22 and 23 December no candles are to be lit. On 24 December, Christmas Eve, twelve-pound candles are to be burned. From 25 to 27 December, no lighting is to be used at all."
Oftentimes citizens resented the obligation. In New York, for instance, "the magistrates—remarking on 'the great Inconvenience that Attends this Citty, being A trading place for want of Lights,'—ordered that every house have a light 'hung out on a Pole' from an upper window 'in the Darke time of the Moon.' When homeowners objected to the expense, the magistrates retreated to a requirement that only every seventh house need present 'A Lanthorn & Candle,' and only in winter, the cost to be shared by the owners of the other six." The duty was undertaken reluctantly, not only because of the expense but also because it was a fussy task—lights had to be constantly tended to keep them from guttering, smoking, or dying out. And if by chance a watchman spied a cold lantern, he would rouse the one responsible for it and make him tend it.
Those first lanterns and candles hardly figured in the dark. At best they were unsteady and faint, barely protected from wind and rain, and easily put out with a stick or stone. But they also marked the beginning of a new conversation with night, offering a little more freedom and time—maybe for work, maybe for the counter life that the night always offered: a chance for pleasure and the risk of transgression. And one after another down the streets, like channel markers, they staked the human community in the dark: here, here, here, here.
Light always seems to beget more light. As the nightscape grew livelier with comings and goings, with the sound of human voices leaking from taverns and coffeehouses, which had become common by 1700, with their late hours and their offerings of stimulants—tea and chocolate as well as coffee—keeping order became a more complex task for the authorities, and they required more, and more dependable, light to help them. On the corners of the largest streets in Boston, the night watchmen kept iron fire baskets filled and burning (there would not be streetlamps there until the late eighteenth century), and in London, Paris, New York, Turin, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam, authorities erected stationary streetlights to replace residents' sill lamps. Maintained by the cities and paid for with taxes, the lights not only shone more frequently in the winter but also were often lit during the summer and during all phases of the moon.
Even so, to the English writer William Sidney, the streetlamps in eighteenth-century London were "totally inadequate to dispel the Cimmerian gloom in which London was shrouded in the winter months." Sidney continued:
The light, such as it was, was derived mainly from several thousands of small tin vessels, which were half filled with whale oil of the worst quality that could possibly be procured, supplied with bits of cotton twist for wick and enclosed in globes of semi-opaque glass ... and served to shed a faint glimmer
of light, or rather to make the darkness visible at street corners and crossings from sundown to midnight, when they were religiously extinguished, if they had not in the meantime rendered this duty unnecessary by extinguishing themselves.
The lamplighters, who by then were employed to tend the lamps, were, according to Sidney, "greasy clodhopping fellows.... A distinguishing characteristic of these lamplighters was that of invariably spilling the oil upon the heads of those who passed them while they stood upon their ladders, and occasionally breaking a head by dropping a globe." The French writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier likewise complained about the lamplighters of Paris: "Another thing; they might as well keep some sort of watch on the lamplighters. These fill the lamps, as they call it, nightly; actually they allow so little oil that by nine or ten o'clock half are already out; only an occasional and distant glimmer reminds you of how the streets should look."
Officials in a few cities believed that streetlights actually abetted criminals. Yi-Fu Tuan notes, "Cautious citizens in Birmingham did not want to experiment with new lighting; they believed the crime rate in their city was lower than London's because their city was so dark." Likewise, officials in Cologne believed "that as the fear of darkness vanished, drunkenness and depravity would increase." They argued further that if street lighting became common, festive and ceremonial lighting would lose some of its wonder. But in most major cities, those in charge thought otherwise and attempted to light as many streets as possible, for if light was the mark of authority, dark neighborhoods would be uncontrollable, full of troublemakers who'd been chased away from well-lit streets. For this reason, the widespread practice of lantern smashing was punishable by imprisonment or worse: "In Vienna in 1688, authorities threatened to cut off the right hand of anyone caught damaging a street lantern."
Lights and more lights had unintended consequences, and it isn't always easy to distinguish the ways that they helped from the ways that they hindered. Under the lanterns, the streets grew rowdier. Frequenters of taverns didn't have to sit on the same stool all night; they could now make their merry way more easily from the Crown and Anchor to the White Horse and then to the Black Crow. And the pools of light interspersed with shadows were a great help to prostitutes, who in the Middle Ages had been largely confined to brothels and bathhouses. They now stood under the streetlamps to entice their customers, then quickly withdrew into the shadows for their assignations.
The night, always silent of the hawkers' cries for apples, cabbages, herring, and mutton that sounded through the day, was now filled with the calls of torchbearers—known as linkmen or linkboys, for the "links," or torches, they carried. They roved
the streets after ten at night, crying, "Here's your light." After supper is the best time for this cry, and these fellows go calling and answering one another, all night long, to the great prejudice of those whose bedrooms face on the street; they are to be found in clusters at the door of any house of entertainment.... The man lights you to your door, to your bedroom—if seven flights up, no matter—and this aid is of value when perhaps you keep no servant ... a plight not rare among smart young men, most of whose money goes in coats and theatre tickets. These wandering lights are a protection, besides, against thieves; and are in themselves almost as good as a squad of watchmen.... They are, in fact, hand in glove with the police; nothing is hid from them.... They go to bed at dawn, and make their report to the police later in the day.
Though linkmen were associated with authority in Paris, they were, according to William Sidney, akin to thieves in London. To engage a torchbearer there, he insisted, "was an undertaking attended with considerable risk: far more often than not these 'servants of the public' were hand in glove with footpads and highwaymen, and would rarely think twice on receiving a signal from such accomplices of extinguishing the link and slipping away, leaving the terrified fare or fares, as the case may be, to their tender mercies."
Still, the linkmen and linkboys did a brisk business among the well-to-do, who dined out and attended performances and plays. In earlier times, theatrical productions had been staged during the afternoon in the open air or in theaters with large windows or open roofs, and sounds often had to suggest changes in daylight: a cock's crow stood for sunrise, an owl's hoot for night. Now, in evening performances in enclosed theaters, the control of darkness onstage could hide some of the ropes and supports, as well as changes of scenery. Artificial light suggested natural light, and also emotion. In sixteenth-century Italy, it was "a custom, both in ancient and modern times, to light bonfires and torches in the streets, on the housetops, and on towers as a sign of joy; and hence arises this theatrical convention—the imitating of such festive occasions. The lights are put there for no other purpose but to imitate ... this mood of gaiety."
The candles and lanterns employed as footlights and spotlights, and the bozze —candles backed by burnished metal disks and fronted by glass globes filled with tinted water—allowed for a variety of effects. But their presence also meant the illusion had to be ruptured now and again. "Until he himself was snuffed out by the universal employment of gas," wrote one theater historian, "the candlesnuffer had perforce to obtrude himself in the midst of the traffic of the scene to fulfil his humble office. Guttering tallow dips called for immediate attention.... When the stage lights began to flare or flicker out the gods commonly set up a cry of 'Snuffers! Snuffers!'"
Sometimes the night city itself could seem like a vast public interior walled in by the dark of the countryside beyond. On a clear evening in eighteenth-century Vienna, one observer noted, "These beautiful lights are laid out so prettily that if one looks down a straight lane ... it is like seeing a splendid theater or a most gracefully illuminated stage."
Of course, the longer night hours weren't for everyone. The advantages of streetlights went mostly to the young and the wealthy. Many ordinary workers, obligated to rise with the sun, were unable to truly enjoy the extension of the day that streetlights brought. "Night falls," Mercier wrote, "and, while scene-shifters set to work at the playhouses, swarms of other workmen, carpenters, masons and the like make their way towards the poorer quarters. They leave white footprints from the plaster on their shoes, a trail that any eye can follow. They are off home, and to bed, at the hour which finds elegant ladies sitting down to their dressing-tables to prepare for the business of the night." And although ordinary citizens were no longer required to supply sill lights, they felt resentment still, since they were taxed for them.
In time, those tax dollars paid for improved lighting. Artist Jan van der Heyden developed streetlights for the city of Amsterdam in which currents of air washed over the interior glass of the lanterns and kept soot from accumulating. By the mid-eighteenth century, the simple lanterns on the streets of Paris that hung from cables strung across the way were replaced with réverbères, oil lanterns with double wicks and two reflectors to augment the brightness of the flame: one reflector above the flame to direct the light downward, another concave reflector beside the flame to direct the light outward. "In the old days, eight thousand lanterns, their candles askew, or guttering, or blown out by the wind, nightly adorned the city, a feeble and wavering illumination broken by patches of treacherously shifting darkness," wrote Mercier. "Now twelve hundred of these oil-lamps suffice, and the light they throw is steady, clear and lasting." But Mercier also claimed that even lamps and linkmen couldn't guarantee enough light in Paris:
I have known fogs so thick that you could not see the flame in [the] lamps; so thick that the coachmen have had to get down from their boxes and feel their way along the walls. Passers-by, unwilling and unwitting, collided in the tenebrous streets; and you marched in at your neighbour's door under the impression that it was your own.... One year the fogs were so dense, that a new expedient was tried; which was, to engage blind men, pensioners, as guides ... for they know Paris better than those who have made our maps.... You took hold of the skirt of the blind man's coat, and off he started, stepping firmly, while yo
u more dubiously followed, towards your destination.
Perhaps no city had a more complex relationship with street lighting than Paris. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, lantern smashing—once simply a rogue's pastime—became not only a symbol of defiance but also a strategy in the rebellion against the state. "The darkness that spread as lanterns were smashed created an area in which government forces could not operate," notes historian Wolfgang Schivelbush. "Lantern smashing erected a wall of darkness, so to speak." Or returned the streets to their old dark.
And streetlights took on even greater significance in the days after the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. Before the revolutionists adopted the guillotine for retribution—"the clanking of its huge axe, rising and falling there, in horrid systole-diastole"—they chose not signposts or trees on which to hang French officials, but the lanterns. "In the summer of 1789, the meaning of the French verb lanterner changed," notes Schivelbush. "Originally, this word meant 'to do nothing' or 'to waste one's time.' At the beginning of the Revolution, it meant 'to hang a man from a lantern.'"
Charles Dickens suggested that "the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long as to conceive the idea of improving upon his method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition." Lantern cables were meant to carry the weight of one small light. During the hangings, "not infrequently, the hapless offender had to be taken to four or even six réverbères before a rope strong enough to survive this treatment was found." Hangings were not confined to the lanterns strung across the streets on cables. Those in the city's squares, which could not be spanned by a rope, were affixed to the walls, and it was in such a square that Joseph-François Foulon de Doué, controller general of finances under Louis XVI, was hung. Foulon—who had suggested that if the people were hungry, they could browse on grass—was "whirled across the Place de Grève, to the 'Lanterne' ... pleading bitterly for life,—to the deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice still pleaded) can he be so much as got hanged! His Body is dragged through the streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass: amid sounds ... from a grass-eating people."
