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By Root 1989 0

to be based entirely on the presumption that anyone deprived of robust illumination would be driven by frustration to retire. In fact, it appears that most people didn’t retire terribly early—nine or ten o’clock seems to have been standard for most people in the days before electricity, and for some, particularly in cities, it was even later. For those who could control their working hours, bedtimes and rising times were at least as variable then as now and appear to have had little to do with the amount of light available. In one of his diary entries, Samuel Pepys records rising at four in the morning, but in another he records going to bed at four in the morning. The writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson famously stayed abed till noon if he could; generally he could. The writer Joseph Addison routinely rose at three on summer mornings (and sometimes even earlier), but not till eleven in winter. There certainly seems to have been no rush to bring the day to a close. Visitors to eighteenth-century London often noted that the shops were open till ten at night, and clearly there would be no shops without shoppers. When guests were present, it was usual to serve supper at ten and for company to stay till midnight or so. Including conversation beforehand and music after, a dinner gathering could last for seven hours or more. Balls often went on until two or three in the morning, at which time a supper would be served. People were so keen to go out and stay up that they didn’t let much get in their way. In 1785 a Louisa Stewart wrote to her sister that the French ambassador suffered “a stroke of the palsy yesterday,” yet guests turned up at his house that night anyway “and played at faro, etc., as if he had not been dying in the next room. We are a curious people.”

Getting around outside after dark was hard. On the darkest nights it was not uncommon for the stumbling pedestrian to “run his Head against a Post” or suffer some other painful surprise. People had to grope their way through the darkness, although in some cases they simply groped: lighting in London was still so poor in 1763 that James Boswell was able to have sex with a prostitute on Westminster Bridge—hardly the most private of trysting places. Darkness also meant danger. Thieves were at large everywhere, and as one London authority noted in 1718, people were often reluctant to go out at night for fear that “they may be blinded, knocked down, cut or stabbed.” To avoid smacking into the unyielding, or being waylaid by brigands, people often secured the services of linkboys—so called because they carried torches known as links made from stout lengths of rope soaked in resin or some other combustible material—to see them home. Unfortunately, the linkboys themselves couldn’t always be trusted and sometimes led their customers into back alleys where they or their confederates relieved the hapless customers of money and silken items.

Even after gaslights became widely available for city streets in the mid-nineteenth century, by modern standards it was still a pretty murky world after nightfall. The very brightest gas streetlamps provided less light than a modern 25-watt bulb. Moreover they were distantly spaced. Generally, at least thirty yards of darkness lay between each, but on some roads—the King’s Road through London’s Chelsea, for instance—they were seventy yards apart; thus, they didn’t so much light the way as provide distant points of brightness to aim for. Yet gas lamps held out for a surprisingly long time in some quarters. As late as the 1930s, almost half of London streets were still lit by gas.

If anything drove people to bed early in the pre-electric world, it was not boredom but exhaustion. Many people worked immensely long hours. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers “must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night”—giving an eighty-four-hour workweek. At the same time, it is