Book Read Free

At Day's Close

Page 53

by A. Roger Ekirch


  COCK-CROW

  1.GM 25 (1755), 57.

  2.M. De Valois d’Orville, Les Nouvelles Lanternes (Paris, 1746), 4; May 10, 1797, Drinker, Diary, II, 916; R.L.W., Journal of a Tour from London to Elgin Made About 1790 ... (Edinburgh, 1897), 74; Hans-Joachim Voth, Time and Work in England, 1750–1830 (Oxford, 2000), 67–69.

  3.Elkan Nathan Adler, ed., Jewish Travellers: A Treasury of Travelogues from 9 Centuries (New York, 1966), 350; Robert Semple, Observations on a Journey through Spain and Italy to Naples ... (London, 1808), II, 83; Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (New York, 1985), 115; Boston Newsletter, Feb. 27, 1772; Duke de la Rochefoucault Liancourt, Travels through the United States of North America ... (London, 1799), II, 380.

  4.PA, July 15, 1762; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 650–655; James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (New York, 1996), 229–230, 257–275, 290–293; Alan Macfarlane, The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford, 1987), 79–82, 100–101.

  5.DUR, Sept. 4, 1788; SAS, XII, 244; “Your Constant Reader,” and “A Bristol Conjuror,” BC, Feb. 17, 1762; “Crito,” LEP, Mar. 15, 1762; Jonathan Barry, “Piety and the Patient: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth Century Bristol,” in Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge, 1985), 160–161.

  6.Diary of James Robson, 1787, Add. Mss. 38837, fo. 9, BL; Winslow C. Watson, ed., Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including Journals of Travels (New York, 1856), 96; Bryan Edwards, “Description of a Nocturnal Sky, as Surveyed Nearly Beneath the Line,” Massachusetts Magazine 7 (1795), 370; “Valverdi,” Literary Magazine 7 (1807), 449; Macfarlane, Culture of Capitalism, 80–81, 102–103. For the popularity of telescopes, see, for example, Nov. 12, 1720, The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, M.D. ... (London, 1882), I, 75; Sept. 30, 1756, J. B. Paul, ed., Diary of George Ridpath (Edinburgh, 1910), 92; June 22, 1806, Drinker, Diary, III, 1940.

  7.M. D’Archenholz, A Picture of England ... (London, 1789), I, 136; Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789–1790 ... (New York, 1957), 181, 268; Mr. Pratt, Gleanings through Wales, Holland, and Westphalia (London, 1798), 167; Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), 22, 34.

  8.Torrington, Diaries, II, 195, 196, I, 20; John Henry Manners, Journal of a Tour through North and South Wales (London, 1805), 64; Gary Cross, A Social History of Leisure since 1600 (State College, Pa., 1990), 59.

  9.James Essex, Journal of a Tour through Part of Flanders and France in August 1773, ed. W. M. Fawcett (Cambridge, 1888), 2.

  10.Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Régime: French Society, 1600–1750, trans. Steve Cox (London, 1973), 223; William Edward Mead, The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1972), 222, 359; Christopher Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450–1750 (London, 1995), 25.

  11.Midnight the Signal: In Sixteen Letters to a Lady of Quality (London, 1779), I, 147, passim; Koslofsky, “Court Culture,” 744; Barbara DeWolfe Howe, Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America during the Revolutionary Era (Cambridge, 1997), 217; Pinkerton, Travels, II, 790.

  12.US and WJ, Oct. 13, 1733; A Humorous Description of the Manners and Fashions of Dublin (Dublin, 1734), 5; The Memoirs of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pollnitz ... (London, 1739), I, 411; Robert Anderson, The Works of John Moore, M.D. ... (Edinburgh, 1820), 171; Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York, 2000), 435–436; Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000).

  13.British Journal, Sept. 12, 1730.

  14.Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Middletown, Ct., 1988), 231; LC, Sept. 9, 1758, Mar. 19, 1785; J. Hanway, Letter to Mr. John Spranger ... (London, 1754), 34; Fréderique Pitou, “Jeunesse et Désordre Social: Les ‘Coureurs de Nuit’ à Laval au XVIIIe Siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 47 (2000), 70; G & NDA, Nov. 27, 1767; Horace Walpole, Correspondence with Sir Horace Mann, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (New Haven, 1967), VIII, 47; Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker, “The State, the Community and the Criminal Law in Early Modern Europe,” in V.A.C. Gatrell et al., eds., Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980), 38; J. Paul De Castro, The Gordon Riots (London, 1926); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (Oxford, 1971), 300–303.

  15.DUR, Nov. 30, 1785; Borsay, Urban Renaissance, passim; Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History (London, 1983), 256–259.

  16.9 George II. c.20; “Mémoire sur Necessité d’Éclairer la Ville, Présenté par Quelques Citoyens au Conseil,” Jan. 26, 1775, Archives Geneve, Geneva; J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), 221–223; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 9–14.

  17.Times, May 14, 1807; “F. W.,” LM, Jan. 6, 1815; Jane Austen, Sandition (Boston, 1975), 221; O’Dea, Lighting, 98; Pounds, Home, 388; Brian T. Robson, Urban Growth: An Approach (London, 1973), 178–183; John A. Jakle, City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore, 2001), 26–37.

  18.LC, Jan. 17, 1758; “Case of the Petitioners against the Bill, for Establishing a Nightly-Watch within the City of Bristol,” 1755, BL; PA, July 15, 1785; Alan Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge, 1979), 71; Ruff, Violence, 88–91.

  19.BC, Aug. 11, 1762; David Philips and Robert D. Storch, Policing Provincial England, 1829–1856: The Politics of Reform (London, 1999), 63; Beattie, Crime, 67–72; Elaine A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720–1830 (Stanford, Calif., 1998); Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 1988), passim; David Philips, “‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’: The Institutionalization of Law-Enforcement in England 1780–1830,” in Gatrell et al., eds., Crime and the Law, 155–189; James F. Richardson, Urban Police in the United States (Port Washington, N.Y., 1974), 19–28.

  20.“Night Hawk,” Mechanics Free Press (Philadelphia), Nov. 7, 1829; Louis Bader, “Gas Illumination in New York City, 1823–1863” (Ph.D. diss., New York Univ., 1970), 334; Mary Lee Mann, ed., A Yankee Jeffersonian: Selections from the Diary and Letters of William Lee of Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 37; Pounds, Home, 388; Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization (London, 1992), 150, 176–178. For the salutary impact of street lighting, in general, on crime, see Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961), 41–42; Kate Painter, “Designing Out Crime—Lighting, Safety and the Urban Realm,” in Andrew Lovatt et al., eds., The 24-Hour City ... (Manchester, 1994), 133–138.

  21.Maurice Rollinat, Oeuvres (Paris, 1972), II, 282. Allan Silver, “The Demand for Order in Civil Society: A Review of Some Themes in the History of Urban Crime, Police and Riot,” in D. Bordua, ed., The Police: Six Sociological Essays (New York, 1967), 1–24; Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845 (New York, 1987), 118.

  22.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York, 1983), 1067; Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfried Imhof and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London, 1998), 287; Mark J. Bouman, “The ‘Good Lamp Is the Best Police’ Metaphor and Ideologies of the Nineteenth-Century Urban Landscape,” American Studies 32 (1991), 66.

  23.The Journeyman Engineer, The Great Unwashed (London, 1869), 199; A. H. Bullen, ed., The Works of Thomas Middleton (1885; rpt. edn., New York, 1964), VIII, 14; A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” AHR 10
6 (2001), 383–385; Thomas A. Wehr, “A ‘Clock for All Seasons’ in the Human Brain,” in R. M. Buijs et al., eds., Hypothalamic Integration of Circadian Rhythms (Amsterdam, 1996), 319–340; Thomas A. Wehr, “The Impact of Changes in Nightlength (Scotoperiod) on Human Sleep,” in F.W. Turek and P.C. Zee, eds., Neurobiology of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms (New York, 1999), 263–285; P. Lippmann, “Dreams and Psychoanalysis: A Love-Hate Story,” Psychoanlytic Psychology 17 (2000), 627–650. Of dreams, Roger Bastide has written: “In our Western civilization, ... the bridges between the diurnal and nocturnal halves of man have been cut. Of course, people can always be found—and not only in the lower classes of society—who consult dream books, or who at least examine their dreams and assign to them a role in their lives. But such vital functions of the dream remain personal and never become institutionalized. On the contrary, far from constituting regularized norms of conduct they are considered aberrant; they are classed as ‘superstitions’; sometimes it is even suggested that people who look for significance or direction in dreams are not entirely all there” (“The Sociology of the Dream,” in Gustave Von Grunebaum, The Dream and Human Societies [Berkeley, Calif., 1966], 200–201).

  24.R. W. Flint, ed., Marinetti: Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York, 1979), 56.

  25.Frederic J. Baumgartner, A History of Papal Elections (New York, 2003), 191; Rev. Dr. Render, A Tour through Germany ... (London, 1801), II, 37. Although the year is wrongly given as 1816, the Zeitung article, “Arguments against Light,” is translated in M. Luckiesh, Artificial Light: Its Influence upon Civilization (New York, 1920), 157–158.

  26.Schlör, Nights in the Big City, trans. Imhof and Roberts, 66; Christian Augustus Gottlief Goede, A Foreigner’s Opinion of England ... , trans. Thomas Horne (Boston, 1822), 47; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), 365; Garnert, Lampan, 126; Schindler, Rebellion, 221; Eugen Weber, France Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 54.

  27.Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (New York, 1887), II, Pt. 1, 313–316; Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 105, 97–114, passim; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “The Policing of Street Lighting,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987), 73, 61–74, passim; Eugène Defrance, Histoire de l’Éclairage des Rues de Paris (Paris, 1904), 104–106; Garnert, Lampan, 123–129.

  28.Joseph Lawson, Letters to the Young on Progress in Pudsey during the Last Sixty Years (Stanningley, Eng., 1887), 33; [Charles Shaw], When I Was a Child (1903; rpt. edn., Firle, Eng., 1977), 37; Silvia Mantini, “Notte in Città, Notte in Campagna tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna,” in Mario Sbriccoli, ed., La Notte: Ordine, Sicurezza e Disciplinamento in Età Moderna (Florence, 1991), 42; Pounds, Culture, 420–423; James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976), passim; Judith Develin, The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1987).

  29.George Sturt, Change in the Village (1912; rpt. edn., Harmondsworth, Eng., 1984), 121, 8.

  30.Dagobert D. Runes, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (New York, 1948), 232; Ekirch, “Sleep We have Lost,” 383–385; Patricia Edmonds, “In Jampacked Days, Sleep Time is the First to Go,” USA Today, April 10, 1995; Andree Brooks, “For Teen-Agers, Too Much to Do, Too Little Time for Sleep,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1996; Amanda Onion, “The No-Doze Soldier: Military Seeking Radical Ways of Stumping Need for Sleep,” Dec. 18, 2002, Web: www.abcNEWS.com. For explorations of nighttime in modern life, see Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World after Dark (New York, 1987); Kevin Coyne, A Day in the Night of America (New York, 1992); A. Alvarez, Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams (New York, 1995); Christopher Dewdney, Acquainted with the Night: Excursions through the World after Dark (New York, 2004).

  31.Montague Summers, ed., Dryden: The Dramatic Works (1932; rpt. edn., New York, 1968), VI, 159; Arthur R. Upgren, “Night Blindness,” Amicus Journal 17 (1996), 22–25; David L. Crawford, “Light Pollution—Theft of the Night,” in Derek McNally, ed., The Vanishing Universe: Adverse Environmental Impacts on Astronomy (Cambridge, 1994), 27–33.

  32.Warren E. Leary, “Russia’s Space Mirror Bends Light of Sun into the Dark,” NYT, Times, Feb. 5, 1993; “Russian Space Mirror Reflector Prototype Fails,” Boston Globe, Feb.5, 1999.

  INDEX

  Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations

  Adamites, 229

  Adams, John, 85, 189, 190

  Adams, Thomas, 292

  Addison, Joseph, 109–10, 216

  adultery, 191, 193–94, 314

  Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, The (Smollett), 306

  Aeneid (Virgil), 303

  African cultures, 4, 303, 320

  Agostinetti, Di Giacomo, 170

  Alan of Lille, 268, 302

  Alberti, Leon Battista, 96, 124

  Albertus Magnus, 76

  alcohol, see drinking

  ale, 25, 161, 164, 188, 235

  alehouses, 25, 46–47, 116, 187–90, 208, 330

  clientele of, 188

  displays of strength in, 190

  female patrons of, 190, 192

  furnishings of, 187

  libertines in, 218, 219, 220, 222–23

  male companionship in, 187, 189–90

  murders in, 46

  as night-cellars, 236, 250, 251, 252

  prostitutes in, 190, 223, 244

  All Hallow’s Eve, 140

  Allison, Jane, 305–6

  almanacs, 129

  Alorese people, 320

  America, 5, 10, 26, 28, 30, 35, 44, 91, 95, 110, 112, 145

  almanacs published in, 129

  aristocratic gangs in, 217

  arson in, 55

  bundling in, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202

  candlewood in, 109

  cesspool emptying in, 166

  corn huskings of, 177–78

  courtship in, 191

  crime in, 33

  curfews in, 256

  drunkenness in, 25

  fire-hunting in, 241

  fire-priggers in, 55–56

  fires in, 49–50, 51–52, 55–56

  game laws of, 241

  indentured servants in, 233

  lookouts in, 77

  mishaps in, 28

  mosquitoes in, 294

  nightwatch in, 76, 79, 81, 250

  nightwatch’s weapons in, 77

  prostitution in, 244

  punishment for burglary in, 87

  removal of dead bodies in, 167

  robberies in, 35

  tallow candles in, 106

  taverns in, 189, 190, 192–93

  trained police force and, 80

  wolves in, 30

  women’s nocturnal labor in, 163, 177

  youth gangs in, 233

  see also slaves

  American Revolution, 257

  “Aminta One Night had Occasion to Piss,” 296

  Amory, Thomas, 14

  Amphitryon (Dryden), 338–39

  Amsterdam, 20, 50, 112

  alehouses in, 46

  aristocratic gangs in, 224

  canal barriers in, 64

  drinking houses of, 236

  height of buildings in, 26

  lantern lighting mandated in, 67

  Leidsegracht canal of, 26

  nocturnal labor in, 157

  streetlights in, 72

  tavern brawls in, 47

  watchmen in church towers of, 77

  watchmen’s weapons in, 77

  amulets, 98, 99, 142

  Anabaptists, 228–29

  Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 289

  andat
ores di notte, 32

  Angel of Darkness, 4

  animals, see livestock; wild animals

  Antigua, 257–58

  Antioch, 5

  apparitions, celestial, 10

  Appleyard, Walter, 198

  apprentices, 81, 232–35, 281

  beds of, 277–78

  curfews on, 256

  lying-out by, 232–33, 255

  nocturnal excursions of, 234–35

  pilfering by, 240

  runaway, 234

  in youth gangs, 222, 245, 247, 249, 252, 253

  ar cannerez, 19

  Archer, Isaac, 115, 272

  Ardennes Forest, 30

  Arkwight, Sir Richard, 327

  Aristotle, 119, 205, 263, 313

  Armageddon, 15

  Arrais, Amador, 307

  arson, 37, 52–55, 63, 238, 257

  of burglars, 54

  “fireraising,” 54–55

  motives for, 55

  punishments for, 48–49, 53, 54

  threats of, in anonymous letters, 54

  Artemidorus of Ephesus, 313

  Arthur, Mary, 282

  artificial illumination, 332–39

  bogwood, 108–9

  broken sleep and, 303–4, 334–35

  candlewood, 104, 108–9, 162, 236

  carrying of, as legal mandate, 67, 129

  of Church festivals, 70–71

  costs of, 73, 162, 295

  electric lighting, 6, 104, 110, 337

  eyesight affected by, 207

  fires caused by, 51–52

  in the home, 100–111

  of military engagements, 68–69

  navigating in darkness vs., 110

  of noble entertainments, 210, 211, 212

  of nocturnal excursions, 124–27, 131

 

‹ Prev