Why You Should Read At Day's Close
One of my favorite history books is not about a battle or disaster or any other event. It has no central character at its core. And yet ever since a professor recommended it to our graduate history seminar more than a decade ago, I’ve read it more times than almost any nonfiction book. I’ve looked to it for entertainment and for a model for my own work. I even read it to my wife on a car trip.
At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch, a history of nighttime behavior in Europe and the American colonies during the early modern period (about 1500 to 1750), is a book you should read. It is enjoyable, but it also has more significant qualities. It allows the reader to experience the past, and it sets the past in historical context.
My shallow reason for liking At Day’s Close is that I find night appealing to think about, especially since I do much of my pleasure reading after dark. I must admit that reading about night at night makes me feel cozy. But a topic or the state of the reader alone does not make a book worth reading. Most of this book’s effectiveness lies in what Ekirch did with the topic.
At Day’s Close also satisfies some of my desire to experience the past and know how worlds of the past worked. Despite that desire, since the past is not my home I am certain that even if I could somehow obtain a time machine danger and discomfort would probably soon send me scurrying back to the present. At Day’s Close allows me to tour the past from a safe vantage point. Ekirch drew on a vast number of sources, including diaries, travelogues, memoirs, fictional writing, court records, and even proverbs to let the reader see what went on in the dark. Ekirch took up a wealth of subjects related to night, including the night watch, how people made their homes secure, sources of indoor light and heat, nocturnal acts of service, means of travel, recreation, lack of social control, illegal or stigmatized behavior, sleep schedules and rituals, and causes of wakefulness.
He made night come alive with vivid writing, concrete detail, and apt choices of quotations. One reason night was frightening was its sounds, including “bangs,” groaning, and music, and its astronomical sights, such as comets and eclipses. Cities and towns were perilous because they were usually organized into “a rabbit warren of narrow streets and alleys – cramped, crooked, and dark” where people often dumped chamber pots out the window. Commenting on the use of manure for fuel, an English person cracked, “The cows shit fire.” Residents of the Shetland Islands made lamps of the bodies of stormy petrels because their innards were full of oil. This world was much darker than our own. A few people who lacked even a speck of illumination traveled by crawling so they could feel the ground and not speed into danger. “Resurrection men” made a living by taking bodies from graves by night then selling them to medical students. Every night, King Henry VIII of England had a servant stab his mattress to be certain that no assassin lurked there. Many people kept animals in the home at night, a practice that could have quite disgusting results. In the Hebrides, people often cleaned up the animals’ urine but removed their excrement only annually. The cost, fire danger, and technological limitations of lighting meant that homes were either totally dark or people only enjoyed light’s “faint presence in the blackness.” These are only a few of the striking details of At Day’s Close.
Ekirch’s book has drawn more attention for his discovery that early modern people “on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness” than for anything else. This was probably the result of having little artificial light and going to bed early. During their wakeful hour, people worked, urinated, thought, chatted, had sex, prayed, and committed crimes.
Discussion of conditions in the past without connection to the setting that established those conditions reduces the past to trivia, but Ekirch avoided that trap. He recognized that night touched on many parts of life, so a book about night related to critical features of the early modern world.
The study of night contributes to the study of early modern government. Government regulated townspeople at night in various ways such as shutting city gates, banning the possession of weapons and the shrouding of the face, and, at the start of the early modern era, requiring people to put out their fires and stay off the streets after a certain hour. In the century after 1650, many cities and towns began lighting some streets at least some nights as the result of a number of changes, including new lamp technology and increasingly powerful states.
Economic change affected people’s experiences of night. Increasing amounts of trade led to more night work. Domestic amenities connected to night, including sumptuous beds, improved in quality and became more available. One reason was the increasing affordability of consumer goods in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
And night had connections to other matters relating to the early modern period. Religious beliefs, the economy, society, city planning, and the construction and decoration of homes all limited privacy, but night counteracted these constraints. Night’s fearsomeness was rooted in widespread belief in a supernatural world that included Satan and witches, the lack of development of the landscape, and these centuries’ higher rates of violent crime, which was concentrated at night. One reason some people slept badly was the unusual cold caused by the era’s Little Ice Age. Historians have argued that many people worked with little intensity during this era because of “a preindustrial work ethic,” but Ekirch suggested that it was likely instead the result of getting too little sleep because of all the impediments to good sleep faced by the lower classes. During this period, the upper classes spent increasing amounts of time awake at night as urban growth made socializing easier and more powerful states allowed them more of a focus on leisure.
This night world was the product of conditions that melted away from 1730 to 1830. People began to spend more time outside the home after dark for a variety of reasons. The Enlightenment diminished belief that malevolent spiritual forces were most powerful at night. Improvements in transportation and communication fueled further economic growth, leading to more socializing and pleasure-seeking abroad, work, and shopping by night. Economic growth also, along with migration to the cities and more lethal military technology, brought the era of walled cities to a close. Cities became less dark as authorities lit more of the streets and technological improvements, such as coal gas lamps, provided better light. Cities also reinforced their police forces and trained them better. Homes became brighter because lighting technology improved and because builders began making homes out of material less likely to burn, which reduced the fear of using light. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, people less and less often woke up for substantial periods halfway through the night because the night became better lit and they chose to spend less time in bed. The old nighttime culture survived in rural areas and small towns until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was dispelled by not only gas but also electric light and people’s willingness to accept changes that led to more nocturnal urban culture.
At Day’s Close leaves the reader grateful for improved lighting but also wishing to live in a much dimmer world for at least one night.