In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930, and: Evening’s Empire: A History of Night in Early Modern Europe (review)

As strange as it might seem, historians have not paid much attention to time. Dates, yes, and eras certainly, but for all the emphasis on studying change over time, most histories seem set in an ever-present noon. Two new books—Baldwin’s In the Watches of the Night and Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire—suggest that this trend may be changing. By drawing attention to night as a space made in time, rather than time itself, these books show how the contested struggle to divide, reinvent, and control night spaces for more than four centuries radically changed the sunlit world as well.

Koslofsky organizes his study around a shift in representation and practice during the early modern (northern) European night that he calls “nocturnalization,” whereby respectable European elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to extend their authority and activities into and against a night previously claimed by the young, the criminal, and the poor. Chapter 6, the best, most thoroughly researched section of Evening’s Empire, seeks to explain how this elite attempted to “coloniz[e] the urban night” and how its native inhabitants of servants, young people, and thieves attempted to resist. Yet it was a new class of respectable citizens, the bourgeoisie, who most forcefully began to create and identify themselves in these newly colonized night streets. Koslofsky persuasively reveals the centrality of the coffee houses that proliferated in this new urban night for both bourgeois class formation and the creation of a public sphere in the manner of Habermas’ “public of private individuals who join in debate on questions of politics and letters” (174).¹ The absolutist states that made this public sphere possible in an attempt to combat crime, drunkenness, and religious heresy had never intended that the new night would give rise to an increasingly antagonistic bourgeois politics; they often found themselves fighting radical coffee-house ideas as fiercely as they did crime.

Koslofsky’s argument is convincing, but it also seems incomplete. Although he explicitly denies trying to write a comprehensive history of the night, a study that seeks to explain the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in the early modern night should provide at least some analysis of night work and working-class formation. That this analysis is almost entirely absent reinforces the simple idea that a primitive and unchanging night was conquered and settled by a new unhappy marriage of bourgeoisie and absolutist state. A more comprehensive treatment of how and why growing numbers of the working poor were migrating to European cities and how they changed the urban night, as active participants rather than merely victims of “nocturnalization,” would have been welcome. Scholarship on this subject must address the dynamic social relations of work and class.

Baldwin’s book is an example of just how rich and revealing an exploration of night in terms of work, practice, and power can be. Extensively researched, In the Watches of the Night weaves diaries, newspapers, government documents, travel guides, and more into a complex new picture of life and labor during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American urban night. As bourgeois efforts to divide the times and spaces of the city into work and play took an increasingly rigid shape during the nineteenth century, most workers encountered night as a concentrated and contested terrain of leisure. Employers squeezed leisure out of the day, and police, gaslights, and moralizing middle classes attempted to preserve the energy of labor for the workshops by regulating such nighttime working-class “dissipations” as drinking, gambling, and whoring. Bourgeois anxieties notwithstanding, Baldwin shows that young working men (and, to a lesser degree, women) continued to make the night...