At Home - Bill Bryson [61]
What unquestionably consolidated long working hours was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the factory system. In factories, workers were expected to be at their places from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Saturdays, but during the busiest periods of the year—what were known as “brisk times”—they could be kept at their machines from 3:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.—a nineteen-hour day. Until the Factory Act of 1833, children as young as seven were required to work as long as adults. In such circumstances, not surprisingly, people ate and slept when they could.
The rich kept gentler hours. Writing of country life in 1768, Fanny Burney noted: “We breakfast always at ten, and rise as much before as we please; we dine precisely at two, drink tea about six and sup exactly at nine.” Her routine is echoed in countless diaries and letters from others of her class. “I will give an account of one day and then you will see every day,” a young correspondent wrote to Edward Gibbon in about 1780. Her day, she wrote, began at nine, and breakfast was at ten. “And then about 11 I play on the harpsichord, or I draw; at 1 I translate and 2 walk out again, 3 I generally read, and 4 we go to dine, after dinner we play at backgammon, we drink tea at 7, and I work or play on the piano till 10, when we have our little bit of supper and 11, we go to bed.”
Lighting was of many types, all pretty unsatisfactory by modern standards. The most basic form was rushlights, which were made by cutting meadow rushes into strips about a foot and a half in length and coating them in animal fat, usually mutton. These were then placed in a metal holder and burned like a taper. A rushlight typically lasted fifteen to twenty minutes, so a good supply of rushes and patience was required to get through a long evening. Rushes were gathered once a year, in spring, so it was necessary to work out with some care how much illumination was needed over the coming twelve months.
For the better off, the usual form of lighting was candles. These were of two types—tallow and wax. Tallow, made from rendered animal fat, had the great advantage that it could be made at home from the fat of any slaughtered animal and so it was cheap—or at least it was until 1709, when Parliament, under pressure from the chandlers’ guilds, enacted a law making it illegal to make candles at home. This became a source of great resentment in the countryside and probably was widely flouted, but at some risk. People were still permitted to make rushlights, though this was sometimes a largely notional freedom. Because rushlights required a supply of animal fat, and during times of hardship peasants generally didn’t have animals to slaughter, they often had to pass their evenings not only hungry but in the dark.
Tallow was an exasperating material. Because it melted so swiftly, the candle was constantly guttering and therefore needed trimming up to forty times an hour. Tallow also burned with an uneven light, and stank. And because tallow was really just a shaft of decomposing organic matter, the older a tallow candle got, the more malodorous it grew. Far superior were candles made of beeswax. These gave a steadier light and needed less trimming, but they cost about four times as much and so tended to be used only for best. The amount of illumination one gave oneself was a telling indicator of status. Elizabeth Gaskell in one of her novels had a character, a Miss Jenkyns, who kept two candles out but burned only one at a time, and constantly, fussily