At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  Turner, Diary——David Vaisey, ed., The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754–1765 (Oxford, 1985)

  UM——Universal Magazine

  US and WJ——Universal Spectator, and Weekly Journal (London)

  Verdon, Night——Jean Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, trans. George Holoch (Notre Dame, Ind., 2002)

  VG——Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg)

  Watts, Works——George Burder, comp., The Works of the Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts . . . , 6 vols. (London, 1810)

  Weinsberg, Diary——K. Höhlbaum et al., eds., Das Buch Weinsberg, Kölner Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, 5 vols. ­(Leipzig-­Bonn, 1886–1926)

  Wilson, English Proverbs——F. P. Wilson, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (Oxford, 1970)

  WJ——Weekly Journal (London)

  WMQ——William and Mary Quarterly

  Wood, Life——Andrew Clark, comp., The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695 ... , 5 vols. (Oxford, 1891–1900)

  Woodforde, Diary——John E. Beresford, ed., The Diary of a Country Parson, 5 vols. (London, 1924–1931)

  WR or UJ——Weekly Register, or, Universal Journal (London)

  York Depositions——Depositions from the Castle of York, Relating to Offences Committed in the Northern Counties in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1861)

  PREFACE

  1.Tryon, Wisdom’s Dictates: Or, Aphorisms & Rules . . . (London, 1691), 68.

  2.Middleton, A Mad World, ... (London, 1608); Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York, 1979), 133. Among the first in modern memory to note the lack of historical attention to night was George Steiner, who in 1978 observed, “To an extent often unnoticed by social historians, the great mass of mankind passed a major portion of its life in the varying shades of opacity between sundown and morning” (A Reader [New York, 1984], 351). Indeed, the subject of nighttime continues to be ignored in historical studies on all levels, from surveys of Western culture to academic monographs. Among the best accounts, despite its age and obscurity, is Matthiessen, Natten. Other early explorations included Maurice Bouteloup, “Le Travail de Nuit dans la Boulangerie” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris, 1909); A. Voisin, “Notes sur la Vie Urbaine au XV. Siècle: Dijon la Nuit,” Annales de Bourgogne 9 (1937), 265–279; Bargellini, “Vita Notturna.” More recently, scholars have begun to probe selected aspects of nocturnal life, though night in its totality, in the form of a broad social or cultural history, has remained unexplored. See Elisabeth Pavan, “Recherches sur la Nuit Vénitienne à la Fin du Moyen Age,” Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981), 339–356; Peter Reinhart Gleichmann, “Nacht und Zivilisation,” in Martin Caethge and Wolfgang Essbach, eds., Soziologie: Entdeckungen im Alltäghchen (Frankfurt, 1983), 174–194; Silvia Mantini, “Per un’Immagine Della Notte fra Tercento e Quattrocento,” Archivio Storico Italino 4 (1985), 565–594; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley, Calif., 1988); Corinne Walker, “Esquisse Pour une Histoire de la Vie Nocturne: Genéve au XVIIIe Siècle, Revue du Vieux Genève 19 (1989), 73–85; Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Chicago, 1989), 92–102; Robert Muchembled, “La Violence et la Nuit sous l’Ancien Régime,” Ethnologie Francaise 21 (1991), 237–242; Mario Sbriccoli, ed., La Notte: Ordine, Sicurezza e Disciplinamento in Età Moderna (Florence, 1991); Janekovick-Römer, “Dubrovniks”; Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfried Imhof and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London, 1998); Paul Griffiths “Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England,” Seventeenth Century 13 (1998), 212–238; Bryan D. Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (New York, 2000); Pitou, “Coureurs de Nuit”; Schindler, “Youthful Culture”; Verdon, Night; Schindler, Rebellion; Koslofsky, “Court Culture.”

  3.G. C. Faber, ed., The Poetical Works of John Gay ... (London, 1926), 204; Edward Ward, The Rambling Rakes, or, London Libertines (London, 1700), 58; Christopher Sten, “‘When the Candle Went Out’: The Nighttime World of Huck Finn,” Studies in American Fiction 9 (1981), 49. Of “season,” the Bible famously declares, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (Ecclesiastes III, 1).

  4.Michael McGrath, ed. and trans., Cinnine Amhiaoibh Ui Shuileabháin: The Diary of Humphrey O’Sullivan, 4 vols. (London, 1936–1937); Émile Guillaumin, The Life of a Simple Man, ed. Eugen Weber, trans. Margaret Crosland (Hanover, N. H., 1983); Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (1891; rpt. edn., London, 1993), 18.

  5.Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1976), 419.

  SHUTTING-IN

  1.Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, Fifty Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1679), 217.

  2.Lorus Johnson Milne and Margery Joan Milne, The World of Night (New York, 1956), 22; Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1880; rpt. edn., London, 1993), 19; Nov. 5, 1830, Michael McGrath, ed., Cinnine Amhiaoibh Ui Shuileabháin: The Diary of Humphrey O’Sullivan (London, 1936), II, 355–356; John Florio, comp., Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues (London, 1611), 79. Cries of the screech owl were traditionally thought to foretell death. Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (London, 1994), 142–143; Brand 1848, III, 209–210.

  3.Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, V, 1, 124, and Measure for Measure, IV, 1, 56–57.

  PART ONE

  PRELUDE

  1.Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York, 1983), 26.

  2.Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; rpt. edn., New York, 1971), 272–281; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 397–398.

  3.Juliette Favez-Boutonier, L’Angoisse (Paris, 1945), 134–150.

  4.The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1992), 338; Kevin Coyne, A Day in the Night of America (New York, 1992), 35; Richard Cavendish, The Powers of Evil in Western Religion, Magic, and Folk Belief (New York, 1975), 88–89; Geoffrey Parrinder, Witchcraft: European and African (London, 1970), 123–124; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York, 1975), 206–207.

  5.Psalms 23:4; John 1:5; Matthew 27:45; Cavendish, Powers of Evil, 87–91; Ernst Cas-sirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, 1964), 98–99.

  6.Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970), 212; Lucy Mair, Witchcraft (New York, 1969), 42–43; B. Malinowski, “The Natives of Mailu: Preliminary Results of the Robert Mond Research Work in British New Guinea,” in Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South Australia 39 (1915), 647–648; Parrinder, Witchcraft, 134–146; John Middleton and E. H. Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa (London, 1969), passim.

  7.Rolfe Humphries, trans., The Satires of Juvenal (Bloomington, Ind., 1966), 43–44; Mark J. Bouman, “Luxury and Control: The Urbanity of Street Lighting in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” JUH 14 (1987), 9; Hazel Rossotti, Fire (Oxford, 1993), 59; O’Dea, Lighting, 14–16, 220.

  8.Richard M. Dorson, ed., America Begins: Early American Writing (Bloomington, Ind., 1971), 280, 282; Theodore M. Andersson, “The Discovery of Darkness in Northern Literature,” in Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr., eds., Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope (Toronto, 1974), 9–12.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1.Nashe, Works, I, 345.

  2.J. P. Arival, The Historie of this Iron Age: Wherein is Set Down the True State of Europe as It Was in the Year 1500 ... , trans. B. Harris (London, 1659), 2; George Herbert, Jaculum Prudentium: or Outlandish Proverbs ... (London, 1651), 70; “Quid Tunc,”
SJC, Aug. 29, 1767; Honoré de Balzac, The Human Comedy (New York, 1893), II, 6; William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts, eds., Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester, 1997).

  3.Richard Steele, The Husbandmans Calling ... (London, 1670), 270; Shakespeare, Henry V, IV, 0, 4; Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, 764–767; Anthony J. Lewis, “The Dog, Lion, and Wolf in Shakespeare’s Descriptions of Night,” Modern Language Review 66 (1971), 1–11; Anthony Harris, Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Manchester, 1980); Jean-Marie Maguin, La Nuit dans le Théâtre de Shakespeare et de ses Prédécesseurs, 2 vols. (Lille, 1980).

  4.John Hayward, Hell’s Everlasting Flames Avoided ... (London, 1712), 30; Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV, 3, 252; Thomas Granger, The Light of the World ... (London, 1616), 29; Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lucinda Byatt (University Park, Pa., 1991), 42; Nashe, Works, I, 346; John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Oedipus (London, 1679), 27; Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, XIVe-XVIIIe Siècles: Une Cité Assiégée (Paris, 1978), 97; Robert Muchembled, “La Violence et la Nuit sous l’Ancien Régime,” Ethnologie Francaise 21 (1991), 241.

  5.Anthony Synnott, “The Eye and the I: A Sociology of Sight,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 5 (1992), 619, 618; Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (New York, 1993), 58.

  6.Maria Bogucka, “Gesture, Ritual, and Social Order in Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-century Poland,” in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 191.

  7.See, for example, US and WJ, July 9, 1737.

  8.Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford, 1981), 192.

  9.Mill, A Nights Search: Discovering the Nature and Condition of all Sorts of Night Walkers ... (London, 1639); Herberts Devotions . . . (London, 1657), 231; Mark Warr, “Dangerous Situations: Social Context and Fear of Victimization,” Social Forces 68 (1990), 892–894.

  10.R. B., “A Serious Address to the Common Council of the City of London,” G and NDA, July 16, 1768; Thomas Middleton, The Wisdome of Solomon Paraphrased (London, 1597); July 18, 1709, Cowper, Diary. See also Henry Chettle, Piers Plainnes Seauen Yeres Prentiship (London, 1595); Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, II, 1, 77.

  11.Lavater, Spirites, 10.

  12.Richard Jackson, June 7, 1656, York Depositions, 74; Heywood, Diaries, III, 187.

  13.Mar. 3, 1727, “The Diary of George Booth,” Journal of the Chester and North Wales Architectural Archaeogical and Historic Society, New Ser., 28 (1928), 38; Perpetual and Natural Prognostications ... (London, 1591), 27; T. F. Thiselton-Dyer, Old English Social Life as Told by the Parish Registers (1898; rpt. edn., New York, 1972), 233; Heywood, Diaries, II, 218; Sara Schechner Genuth, Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton, 1997).

  14.1719, Lewis, Diary, 25; June 5, 1742, “Diary of Rev. Jacob Eliot,” Historical Magazine and Notes and Queries ... , 2nd Ser., 5 (1869), 34.

  15.May 21, 1668, Pepys, Diary, 208; Walter L. Strauss, ed., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1550–1600 (New York, 1975), III, 968–969; T. Platter, Journal, 217; Heywood, Diaries, II, 232; Steven Ozment, Three Behaim Boys Growing up in Early Modern Germany: A Chronicle of Their Lives (New Haven, 1990), 52.

  16.M. de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. H.A. Hargreaves (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 130; Charles Stevens and John Liebault, Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme, trans. Richard Surflet (London, 1616), 30; Thomas B. Forbes, “By What Disease or Casualty: The Changing Face of Death in London,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31 (1976), 408; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 296–297.

  17.Niccols, A Winter Night’s Vision ... (London, 1610), 831; Francis T. Havergal, comp., Herefordshire Words & Phrases ... (Walsall, Eng., 1887), 13; Francois Joseph Pahud de Valangin, A Treatise on Diet, or the Management of Human Life ... (London, 1768), 275; High Court of Justiciary, Small Papers, Main Series, JC 26/42–43, passim, Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh; JRAI, passim.

  18.Laurent Joubert, The Second Part of the Popular Errors, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1995), 280–282. For a similar critique, see The Second Lash of Alazonomastix ... (London, 1655), 234.

  19.Owen Feltham, Resolves, a Duple Century (1628; rpt. ed., Amsterdam, 1975), 211. See also Denham, The Sophy (London, 1642), 20.

  20.Camporesi, Fear of Hell, 13; Thomas Dekker, The Gull’s Hornbook, ed. R.B. McKerrow (New York, 1971), 23; Jan. 12, 1706, Cowper, Diary; Caufurd Tait Ramage, Ramage in South Italy ... , ed. Edith Clay (London, 1965), 6; J. Churton Collins, ed., The Plays & Poems of Robert Greene (Oxford, 1905), II, 249; Angelo Celli, The History of Malaria in the Roman Campagna from Ancient Times, ed. Anna Celli-Fraentzel (London, 1933), 130–154.

  21.Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, trans. John Trevisa (Oxford, 1975), I, 540; Thomas Amory, Daily Devotion Assisted and Recommended, in Four Sermons . . . (London, 1772), 15.

  22.Leon Kreitzman, The 24 Hour Society (London, 1999), 90–91; Solomon R. Benatar, “Fatal Asthma,” New England Journal of Medicine 314 (1986), 426–427; Sharon A. Sharp, “Biological Rhythms and the Timing of Death,” Omega 12 (1981–1982), 17.

  23.Hanway, Domestic Happiness ... Calculated to Render Servants in General Virtuous and Happy

  . . . (London, 1786), 101; Mary J. Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (New York, 1997), 247, 252; Pounds, Culture, 239, 245–246.

  24.Anna Brzozowska-Krajka, Polish Traditional Folklore: The Magic of Time (Boulder, Colo, 1998), 115.

  25.Francis B. Gummere, “On the Symbolic Use of the Colors Black and White in Germanic Tradition,” Haverford College Studies 1 (1889), 116; John Fletcher, The Nightwalker, or the Little Theife (London, 1640); Daniel Defoe, A System of Magick . . . (London, 1727), 380–381; Normal Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York, 1975), 66.

  26.C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation and Rural Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–1603 (Cambridge, 1996), 191; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 472, 473–477; Nashe, Works, I, 346; George C. Schoolfield, The German Lyric of the Baroque in English Translation (New York, 1966), 199.

  27.Nashe, Works, I, 346, 348; Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse (Oxford, 1990), 91; Jacob Bauthumley, The Light and Dark Sides of God ... (London, 1650), 29.

  28.Hale, A Collection of Modern Relations of Matter of Fact, Concerning Witches & Witchcraft ... (London, 1693), 16, 12–13; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 472.

  29.SAS, XIII, 652; Le Loyer, Specters, fo. 78; July 1, 1712, Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator, (Oxford, 1965), III, 572; Essex People, 1750–1900: From Their Diaries, Memoirs and Letters (Chelmsford, Eng., 1972), 32.

  30.Brand 1777, II, 430–431; A View of London and Westminster: or, the Town Spy, etc. (London, 1725), 1–2; Robert Holland, comp., A Glossary of Words Used in the County of Chester (1886; rpt. ed., Vaduz, Liecht, 1965), 182; Brand 1848, II, 507–512; Minor White Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare (1930; rpt. edn., New York, 1972), 219–262.

  31.Georgina F. Jackson, comp., Shropshire Word-Book ... (London, 1879), 117; Samuel Butler, Hudibras, the First Part (London, 1663), 19.

  32.Mr. Pratt, Gleanings through Wales, Holland, and Westphalia (London, 1798), 142, 136; T. Campbell, Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland ... (London, 1777), 280; Archaeologia: or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (London, 1814), 144; R. D. Heslop, comp., Northumberland Words ... (London, 1892), I, 257; Brand 1777, II, 359.

  33.A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (London, 1985), 107–108; Lewis, Diary, 17; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 587–606.

  34.Thomas Alfred Spalding,
Elizabethan Demonology ... (London, 1880), 54; WJ, Nov. 5, 1726; John Holloway, ed., The Oxford Book of Local Verses (Oxford, 1987), 215–216; Cannon, Diary, 134; Jean Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago, 1998), 185; Nov. 29, 1667, Pepys, Diary, VIII, 553; Brand 1777, II, 430.

  35.John Carr, The Stranger in Ireland: or, a Tour in the Southern and Western Parts of that Country in the Year 1805 (1806; rpt. edn., Shannon, Ire., 1970), 264–265; Anne Plumptre, A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France ... (London, 1810), III, 179; Craftsman (London), May 20, 1732; Dietz, Surgeon, 166–167; Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Régime: French Society 1600–1750, trans. Steve Cox (London, 1973), 280; Caroline Frances Oates, “Trials of Werewolves in the Franche-Comte in the Early Modern Period” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of London, 1993); Le Loyer, Specters, fo. 101.

  36.Scott, Witchcraft, 29; Geert Mak, Amsterdam, trans. Philipp Blom (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 48; E. S. De Beer, ed., The Correspondence of John Locke (Oxford, 1976), 421–422; Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary (1787; rpt. edn., Menston, Eng., 1968), 17.

  37.Saint Basil, Exegetic Homilies, trans. Sister Agnes Clarke Way (Washington, D.C., 1963), 26; Ellery Leonard, trans., Beowulf (New York, 1939), 8, 5; Martha Grace Duncan, “In Slime and Darkness: The Metaphor of Filth in Criminal Justice,” Tulane Law Review 68 (1994), 725–801; James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (New York, 1996), 15; Cavendish, Powers of Evil, 87, 96–97; Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 207–210.

  38.Muchembled, “La Nuit sous l’Ancien Régime,” 239–241; Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 177; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 455; Harris, Night’s Black Agents, 25–26, 33; Nancy Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture,” PP 152 (1996), 3–45; Pierre Jonin, “L’Espace et le Temps de la Nuit dans les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes,” Mélanges de Langue et de Littérature Médiévals Offerts à Alice Planche 48 (1984), 235–246.