At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (review)

We citizens of the technologically advanced societies have largely forgotten what the night is like. We have passed our nights in electric light, sometimes weak but always present, since the last decades of the nineteenth century, and gaslight and oil lamp light for several generations before that. Many of us have never actually seen the Milky Way. Many of us do not know from personal experience that the cliché about the night being so dark that "you couldn't see your hand in front of your face" can be quite precise.

A. Roger Ekirch has rescued us from our glaring ignorance with a whole book on night. It is the product of immense research and it is charmingly written. He apparently has read everything published in Europe and North America in the past half-millennium, sifting through hundreds of history books and articles, diaries, letters, law cases, criminal trial records, and medical accounts for bits of information. This is a book that is constructed, well-constructed, of bits because very few of us have written about the night per se. We have written about drunken riots at midnight, about seductions in the wee hours, about assaults on castle walls just before the dawn, but only rarely about the quality of the light while we carried out such antics. At Day's Close is not a narrative; it is a description of what went on in the dark among the peoples of Western civilization from the Renaissance to well into the nineteenth century.

Ekirch pelts us with descriptions of rushlights, candles of various kinds, and lamps burning whale oil and, eventually, coal gas; with descriptions of the means of obtaining light as well as warmth from such fuels as manure, wood, peat, and ultimately coal. We learn a good deal about beds and bedclothes, where to relieve oneself on a winter night without leaving the bedroom, and what to do with the wastes—perhaps chuck them out the window onto the street and whomever might be there. The premise is that night, until modern times, was more than the absence of light. It was another category for human behavior. Night was dangerous: authority retreated with the sun. The night-watch calling out that it was midnight and all was well was far from being a police department. Prostitution was rampant at night. Burglaries, assaults, and arson were much more common. Gangs, beggars, and bravos roamed the streets and their extracurricular activities could leave you dead. The smart thing to do was go to bed until dawn, but locks were untrustworthy and as a practical matter your house lay open to all determined invaders, especially while you slept. Advice: get a gun and sleep lightly.

Night was also a time for fun. In the dark we gathered for festivals, for pub crawls, for pagan shenanigans. Courting was often performed at night, and of course this included sex. Where the youth of the twentieth century retreated to the back seat of their automobiles, our ancestors "bundled," which was much more sensible and safer. Bundling, Ekirch informs us, was not restricted to New England but was widely practiced on both sides of the Atlantic. While it is good to know all this, I wish he had spent more time discussing the discovery by Dr. Thomas Wehr that our post-Edisonian standard of eight hours of unbroken sleep per night is not necessarily recommended or normal—or at least it wasn't until the last few centuries. Our forebears slept for a few hours, woke up, got up, and puttered about for a while or stayed in bed and daydreamed—no, night-dreamed—and then went back to sleep for a few more hours. What do the neuroscientists think about the change in our sleep habits, or do they even know about it?

Unlike nearly every one of our ancestors since the very beginning, we live in at least weak light all the time. That means that...