At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  55.Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium (Totowa, N.J., 1975), 118; James Orchard Halliwell, ed., The Autobiography and Personal Diary of Dr. Simon Forman ... (London, 1849), 8–9; The Princess Cloria: or, the Royal Romance (London, 1661), 530; Dec. 15, 1710, Cowper, Diary.

  56.Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago, 2003), 77–78; OBP, Sept. 10–16, 1755, 309; G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1979), 73; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996), 156.

  57.The English Rogue ... (London, 1671), Part III, 31; David P. French, comp., Minor English Poets, 1660–1780 (New York, 1967), III, 318; Elias, Civilizing Process, trans. Jephcott, I, 161; Maza, Servants and Masters, 184.

  58.J. C. Ghosh, ed., The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems, and Love-Letters (Oxford, 1968), II, 340; Joanna Brooker, Nov. 21, 1754, Suffolk Court Files #129733b, Suffolk County Court House, Boston.

  59.Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Avon, Ct., 1974), 440–441; George Morison Paul, ed., Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston (Edinburgh, 1911), 56; Jan. 1, 1663, Pepys, Diary, IV, 2; Nov. 29, 1776, Charles McC. Weiss and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778 (New York, 1970), 62; Dec. 28, 1780, Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782 (New York, 1977), 281.

  60.Joshua Swetman, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward [sic], and Unconstant Women ... (London, 1702), 43–44; May 11, 1731, Clegg, Diary, I, 118; Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago, 1999), 232; The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, trans. Elisabeth Abbott (London, 1959), 22–24, 72–84.

  61.Edward Jerningham, The Welch Heiress (London, 1795), 70; Diary of John Eliot, 1768, 3, passim, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford; July 21, 1700, Diary of John Richards, Dorsetshire Record Office, Dorchester. See also Autobiography of the Rev. Dr Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk ... (Edinburgh, 1860), 545.

  62.P.J.P. Goldberg, Women in England, c. 1275–1525: Documentary Sources (Manchester, 1995), 142; Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), 227; Boston Post-Boy, Aug. 17, 1752; NYWJ, Dec. 12, 1737.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1.C. e. roybet, ed., Les Serees de Guillaume Bouchet Sieur de Brocourt (Paris, 1874), III, 154.

  2.William C. Dement, The Promise of Sleep (New York, 1999), 101.

  3.Adventurer 39, Mar. 20, 1753, 228; Christof Wirsung, Praxis Medicinae Universalis; or a Generall Practise of Phisicke ... (London, 1598), 618.

  4.T. D. Gent, Collin’s Walk through London and Westminster ... (London, 1690), 43; Shakespeare, Macbeth, II, 2, 35; William Mountfort, The Injur’d Lovers ... (London, 1688), 49.

  5.Sylvain Matton, “Le Rêve Dans les <>: Spirituels, Kabbalistes Chrétiens et Alchimistes,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 83 (1988), 160; Adventurer 39, Mar. 20, 1753, 229. Of course, in Greek mythology “sleep” (hypnos) and “death” (thantos) were considered twin sons of “night.”

  6.J.C. Smith and E. De Selincourt, eds., Spenser: Poetical Works (London, 1969), 606; Burton E. Stevenson, ed., The Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases (New York, 1948), 2134; Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella ... (London, 1591); Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore, 1965), 906.

  7.Joshua Sylvester, trans., Du Bartas: His Divine Weekes and Workes (London, 1621), 465; Shakespeare, King Henry V, IV, 1, 264–267; Verdon, Night, 203–206. The belief that “the sleep of a labouring man is sweet” is found in Ecclesiastes V, 12.

  8.George Laurence Gomme, ed., The Gentleman’s Magazine Library: Being a Classified Collection of the Chief Contents of the Gentleman’s Magazine from 1731 to 1868: Popular Superstitions (London, 1884), 122; July 22, Feb. 13, 1712, Cowper, Diary; Oct. 4, 1776, Charles McC. Weiss and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778 (New York, 1970), 39.

  9.Jean-François Senault, Man Become Guilty, or the Corruption of Nature by Sinne, trans. Henry Earle of Monmouth (London, 1650), 243; Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African Americans, circa 1600–1780,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 206; Nov. 16, 1664, Oct. 6, 1663, Pepys, Diary, V, 322, IV, 325.

  10.Nashe, Works, I, 355; July 22, 1712, Oct. 12, 1703, Cowper, Diary; Dement, Promise of Sleep, 17.

  11.Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595; rpt. edn., Amsterdam, 1969).

  12.Herbert’s Devotions ... (London, 1657), 1; Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Francis Quarles (New York, 1967), II, 206; Apr. 4, 1782, Journal of Peter Oliver, Egerton Manuscripts, BL; Benjamin Mifflin, “Journal of a Journey from Philadelphia to the Cedar Swamps & Back, 1764,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 52 (1928), 130–131.

  13.Kenneth Jon Rose, The Body in Time (New York, 1989), 87–88; Jane Wegscheider Hyman, The Light Book: How Natural and Artificial Light Affect Our Health, Mood and Behavior (Los Angeles, 1990), 140–141; Gay Gaer Luce, Body Time (London, 1973), 151, 178.

  14.November 21, 1662, Pepys, Diary, III, 262; May 25, 1709, Cowper, Diary; OED, s.v. “spitting”; SAS, XI, 124–125; Jan. 1, Feb. 21, 1706, Raymond A. Anselment, ed., The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–1714 (Cambridge, 2001), 84; Hyman, Light Book, 140–141; Mary J. Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), 242, 252–253; Carol M. Worthman and Melissa K. Melby, “Toward a Comparative Developmental Ecology of Human Sleep,” in Mary A. Carskadon, ed., Adolescent Sleep Patterns: Biological, Social, and Psychological Influences (Cambridge, 2002), 74.

  15.Charles Severn, ed., Diary of the Rev. John Ward ... (London, 1839), 199; Sept. 24, 1703, Oct. 18, 1715, Cowper, Diary; Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford, 1995), 5; Henry Vaughan, Welsh Proverbs with English Translations (Felinfach, Wales, 1889), 85; Legg, Low-Life, 9.

  16.Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 1938), 597; Bräker, Life, 82; Nov. 28, 1759, James Balfour Paul, ed., Diary of George Ridpath ... 1755–1761 (Edinburgh, 1922), 288; Oct. 1, 1703, Cowper, Diary; Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 245.

  17.Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Chicago, 1989), 64; John Wilson, The Projectors (London, 1665), 18; Lydia Dotto, Losing Sleep: How Your Sleep Habits Affect Your Life (New York, 1990), 157.

  18.M. Andreas Laurentius, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight ... , trans. Richard Surphlet (London, 1938), 104, 96; Dagobert D. Runes, ed., The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush (New York, 1974), 200; Hyman, Light Book, 87, 96–97, passim.

  19.Thomas Overbury, The “Conceited Newes” of Sir Thomas Overbury and His Friends, ed. James E. Savage (1616; rpt. edn., Gainesville, Fla., 1968), 262; Henry Nevil Payne, The Siege of Constantinople (London, 1675), 51; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London, 1990), 83–84; Luce, Body Time, 204–210.

  20.Stevenson, ed., Proverbs, 2132; Henry Bachelin, Le Serviteur (Paris, 1918), 216; Nov. 6, 1715, William Matthews, ed., The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716 (London, 1939), 105; May 20, 1624, Beck, Diary, 99. See also Jan. 30, 1665, Pepys, Diary, VI, 25.

  21.Heaton, “Experiences or Spiritual Exercises” (typescript), 4, North Haven Historical Society, North Haven, Ct.; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 465; Barbara E. Lacey, “The World of Hannah Heaton: The Autobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Connecticut Farm Woman,” WMQ, 3rd Ser., 45 (1988), 284–285.

  22.M. A. Courtney and Thomas Q. Couch, eds., Glossary of Words in Use in Cornwall (London, 1880), 39; OED, s.v. “nightmare”; Edward Phillips, The Chamber-Maid . . . (London, 1730), 57; The Works of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616), 951.r />
  23.Joseph Angus and J. C. Ryle, eds., The Works of Thomas Adams ... (Edinburgh, 1861), II, 29.

  24.Charles P. Pollak, “The Effects of Noise on Sleep,” in Thomas H. Fay, ed., Noise and Health (New York, 1991), 41–60.

  25.Wilson, English Proverbs, 169; R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Philadelphia, 1977), 59; Luce, Body Time, 141.

  26.Thomas Shadwell, Epsom-Wells (London, 1672), 83; The Works of Monsieur Boileau (London, 1712), I, 193–194, 200–201; The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown in Prose and Verse ... (London, 1708), III, 15; Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999), 52–71. Of course, some early modern noises, Francis Bacon observed, aided sleep, including trickling water and soft singing. James Spedding et al., eds., The Works of Francis Bacon (London, 1859), II, 579–580.

  27.Joseph Leech, Rural Rides of the Bristol Churchgoer, ed. Alan Sutton (Gloucester, Eng., 1982), 70; Mar. 16, 1706, Cowper, Diary.

  28.Oct. 24, 1794, Oct. 19, 1796, Drinker, Diary, II, 610, 853.

  29.William Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, ed. Robert J. Gemmett (Rutherford, N.J., 1972), 165; Robert Forby, comp., The Vocabulary of East Anglia (Newton Abbot, Eng., 1970), I, 43; June, 15, 1800, Jack Ayres, ed., Paupers and Pig Killers: The Diary of William Holland, a Somerset Parson (Gloucester, Eng., 1984), 38.

  30.P. Hume Brown, ed., Tours in Scotland, 1677 & 1681 ... (Edinburgh, 1892), 33; Donald Gibson, ed., A Parson in the Vale of White Horse: George Woodward’s Letters from East Hendred, 1753–1761 (Gloucester, Eng., 1982), 37; Nov. 26, 1703, Doreen Slatter, ed., The Diary of Thomas Naish (Devizes, Eng., 1965), 51; Pounds, Culture, 364–365; Smith, Acoustic World, 71–82.

  31.Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fashions in Old New England (1893; rpt edn., Detroit, 1968), 128; LEP, Jan. 12, 1767; Dec. 19, 1799, Woodforde, Diary, V, 230; Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York, 2000), 113–147; Stanley Coren, Sleep Thieves: An Eye-Opening Exploration into the Science and Mysteries of Sleep (New York, 1996), 164.

  32.Legg, Low-Life, 4; John Ashton, comp., Modern Street Ballads (New York, 1968), 51; Stevenson, ed., Proverbs, 280; Lynne Lamberg, Bodyrhythms: Chronobiology and Peak Performance (New York, 1994), 111–112; Remarks 1717, 193–194; Aug. 3, 1774, Edward Miles Riley, ed., The Journal of John Harrower: An Indentured Servant in the Colony of Virginia, 1773–1776 (Williamsburg, 1963), 52.

  33.Torrington, Diaries, III, 317; Evelyn, Diary, II, 507; Robert Southey, Journal of a Tour in Scotland (1929; rpt edn. Edinburgh, 1972), 91–92.

  34.John Locke, The Works . . . (London, 1963), IX, 23; Coren, Sleep Thieves, 160–161.

  35.Apr. 4, 1624, Beck, Diary, 71; Lawrence Wright, Warm and Snug: The History of the Bed (London, 1962), 199–200; Oct. 22, 1660, Pepys, Diary, I, 271; Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948), 195; F.P. Pankhurst and J. A. Horne, “The Influence of Bed Partners on Movement during Sleep,” Sleep 17 (1994), 308–315.

  36.A. Aspinall, ed., Lady Bessborough and Her Family Circle (London, 1940), 111–112; John S. Farmer, ed., Merry Songs and Ballads Prior to the Year a.d. 1800 (New York, 1964), I, 202–203; Lawrence Wright, Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom & the Water Closet ... (New York, 1960), 78; Pounds, Culture, 366–367.

  37.See, for example, Thomas Brewer, The Merry Devill of Edmonton (London, 1631), 44; OED, s.v. “urinal”; Mar. 27, 1706, Sewall, Diary, I, 543; Jonathan Swift, Directions to Servants ... (Oxford, 1959), 61; Burt, Letters, II, 47.

  38.James T. Henke, Gutter Life and Language in the Early “Street” Literature of England: A Glossary of Terms and Topics Chiefly of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (West Cornwall, Ct., 1988), 51; Sept. 28, 1665, Pepys, Diary, VI, 244; John Greenwood, Mar. 9, 1771, Assi 45/30/1/70; Paroimiographia (Italian), 16.

  39.Cibber and Vanbrugh, The Provok’d Husband; or a Journey to London (London, 1728), 76.

  40.Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior 1400–1600 (New York, 1991), 248, 249–251, and Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France, and Holland (New Haven, 1978), 324–326, 328.

  41.Boileau Works, I, 201.

  42.Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York, 1987), 1121–1122; Feb. 16, 17, 1668, Pepys, Diary, IX, 73, 75; Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, ed., Quebec to Carolina in 1785–1786: Being the Travel Diary and Observations of Robert Hunter Jr. ... (San Marino, Calif., 1943), 278–279; Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800, trans. Allan Cameron (New Haven, 2002), 122.

  43.July 9, 1774, Philip Vickers Fithian, Journal & Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773–1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish (Williamsburg, 1943), 178.

  44.Nicholas James, Poems on Several Occasions (Truro, Eng., 1742), 13; Herbert’s Devotions, 223; Sarah C. Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, N.J., 1983), 183 n. 61. The working-class author John Younger later derided “toddy-noodled writers of gentle novels” for “describing the happy ignorance of the snoring peasantry without any real knowledge of such people’s matters” (Autobiography of John Younger, Shoemaker, St. Boswells ... [Edinburgh, 1881], 133).

  45.Pollak, “Effects of Noise,” 43.

  46.Apr. 13, 1719, William Byrd, The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (Oxford, 1958), 256; Oct. 9, 1647, Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Durham, Eng., 1875), I, 67; Coren, Sleep Thieves, 72–74, 286. Little wonder that among the lower classes in early modern Europe the mythical “Land of Cockaigne” exerted broad appeal. In addition to other delights in this utopian paradise, men and women rested in “silken beds,” and “he who sleeps most earns the most” (Piero Camporesi, The Land of Hunger, trans. Tania Croft-Murray [Cambridge, Mass., 1996], 160–164).

  47.Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 24; James Scholefield, ed., The Works of James Pilkington, B. D., Lord Bishop of Durham (New York, 1968), 446; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” PP 38 (1967), 56–97.

  48.Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 68–69; Coren, Sleep Thieves, passim.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1.Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (Princeton, N.J., 1959), 20.

  2.Herbert’s Devotions ... (London, 1657), 236; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Cevennes Journal: Notes on a Journey through the French Highlands, ed. Gordon Golding (Edinburgh, 1978), 79–82.

  3.For the term “first sleep,” I have discovered eighty-three references within a total of seventy-two different sources from the period 1300–1800. See the text for examples. For references to “first nap” and “dead sleep,” see A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” AHR 106 (2001), 364. The fewer references to segmented sleep I have found in early American sources suggests that this pattern, though present in North America, may have been less widespread than in Europe, for reasons ranging from differences in day/night ratios to the wider availability of artificial illumination in the colonies. Two sources—Benjamin Franklin, “Letter of the Drum,” PG, Apr. 23, 1730, and Hudson Muse to Thomas Muse, Apr. 19, 1771, in “Original Letters,” WMQ 2 (1894), 240—contain the expression “first nap.” See also Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 364.

  4.I have found twenty-one references to these terms within a total of nineteen sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 364).

  5.For “primo sonno” and “primo sono,” the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano database of early Italian literature, furnished by the ItalNet consortium (Web: www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/OVI/), contains fifty-seven references within a total of thirty-two texts from just the fourteenth century.

  6.For “
primo somno” or some slight variation like “primus somnus” or “primi somni,” for which I have discovered nineteen references within sixteen texts, half of the latter before the thirteenth century, see, for example, Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 364–365. For “concubia nocte,” see D. P. Simpson, Cassell’s Latin Dictionary (London, 1982), 128.

  7.Mid-Night Thoughts, Writ, as Some Think, by a London-Whigg, or a Westminster Tory ... (London, 1682), A 2, 17; William Keatinge Clay, ed., Private Prayers, Put Forth by Authority during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1968), 440–441; OED, s.v. “watching.”

  8.Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Avon, Ct., 1974), 403; William Baldwin, Beware the Cat, ed. William Ringler, Jr., and Michael Flachmann (San Marino, Calif., 1988), 5.

  9.George Wither, Ivvenila (London, 1633), 239; Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), 589. See also Francis Peck, Desiderrata Curiosa ... (London, 1732), II, 33. For references to the “first sleep” of animals, see, for example, James Shirley, The Constant Maid (London, 1640); Samuel Jackson Pratt, Harvest-Home ... (London, 1805), II, 457.

  10.Raimundus Lullus, Liber de Regionibus Sanitatis et Informitatis (n.p., 1995), 107; Harrison, Description, 382. See also Crusius, Nocte, ch. 3.11.

  11.The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant (New York, 1964), III, 75; J. Irvine Smith, ed, Selected Justiciary Cases, 1624–1650 (Edinburgh, 1974), III, 642; Taillepied, Ghosts, 97–98; Richard Hurst, trans., Endimion: An Excellent Fancy First Composed in French by Mounsieur Gombauld (London, 1639), 74; Shirley Strum Kenny, ed., The Works of George Farquhar (Oxford, 1988), I, 100.

  12.Governal, In this Tretyse that Is Cleped Governayle of Helthe (New York, 1969); William Bullein, A Newe Boke of Phisicke Called y Goveriment of Health ... (London, 1559), 90; Andrew Boorde, A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Health ... (London, 1547); André Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight ... , ed. Sanford V. Larkey, trans. Richard Surfleet ([London], 1938), 190.