At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (49 page)

COCK-CROW

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Ghosts and witches, at present, rarely make their appearance. A better philosophy has laid those spirits, and rendered our churchyards far less dreadful.

GENTLEMAN’S MAGAZINE,
1755
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B
EGINNING IN THE
eighteenth century, nighttime in cities and towns changed dramatically. “THE REIGN OF THE NIGHT is finally going to end,” proclaimed a Parisian in 1746. No previous time in Western history experienced such a sustained assault upon the nocturnal realm as did the period from 1730 to 1830. Not only did people stay up later, but, more importantly, growing numbers after dark ventured outdoors in search of pleasure and profit. Evening strolls became a popular pastime in their own right, both solitary walks and public promenades to showcase one’s wealth. “I greatly love to walk out on a moon light night,” Elizabeth Drinker commented at the turn of the century. Where curfew bells yet tolled, in small and large communities, their plaintive knell paid homage to a bygone age. In the remote Scottish town of Elgin, a passing visitor observed in 1790, “The curfew still tolls, but it seems rather a signal to light than put out the candle.” Even the term “night season,” denoting the distinctiveness of nocturnal hours, gradually faded from everyday speech.
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It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this remarkable transformation in urban life. Especially for the middle classes, hours once dominated by darkness became more familiar. The public spaces that people shared were larger and more crowded. Just as coaches and pedestrians filled major avenues, so did squares and plazas become hubs of commotion and activity. Time and again, observers commented on the liveliness of city streets at night. Of the
Pont Neuf
across the Seine, a visitor to Paris reported in 1777, “All through the night, without ceasing, pedestrians are wending their way over it.” In Naples, Robert Semple found the main street “thronged” with people past sunset. “Life awake at all hours of the night,” a person observed of London in 1801. Early American cities experienced expanded traffic of their own. “There is hardly any one,” remarked a letter in the
Boston Newsletter
, “who is not obliged to be frequently abroad in an evening, either on the calls of friendship, humanity, business, or pleasure.” A visitor in 1796 found Philadelphia’s streets after dark full of “commotion.”
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The origins of this nocturnal revolution were diverse. Certainly, it owed much to the rapid spread of scientific rationalism during the early stages of the Enlightenment. By the first years of the eighteenth century, learned men and women on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly rejected the preindustrial worldview of centuries past. Coupled with advances in literacy, mounting clerical hostility, and the growth of capitalism, Enlightenment beliefs steadily led to the “disenchantment” of the Western world, as Max Weber famously postulated. Among the propertied classes, reason and skepticism triumphed over magic and superstition. On the Continent, witchcraft prosecutions almost everywhere subsided by the late 1600s, as they did in colonial America. The final trial in England occurred in 1712, with Parliament formally repealing its statute against witchcraft twenty-four years later. Observed the
Public Advertiser
in 1762, “We experience every day, that as science and learning increases, the vulgar notions of spirits, apparitions, witches and demons, decrease and die of themselves.”
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True, false alarms still arose from time to time. During the eighteenth century, London, Bristol, and Dublin all experienced well-publicized encounters with “evil spirits.” The infrequency of such incidents contributed to their sensationalism. Best known was London’s Cock Lane Ghost in 1762, which, after an investigation led by Samuel Johnson, proved to be an elaborate hoax. By 1788, a newspaper could report, “Not a single building in all London is perhaps now to be heard of, which bears the repute of being an haunted house.” London had given up the ghost. About the same time, a Scottish minister affirmed that “ghosts, goblins, witches, and fairies have relinquished the land.”
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With the decline in magical beliefs, nighttime for most urban households became less menacing. Like the natural world generally, darkness lost much of its aura of terror and mystery. Formerly a source of fear within educated circles, night even became, for some observers, an object of awe and admiration. The very air at night, once thought perilous, now appeared sweet and refreshing. Celestial spectacles such as comets inspired rapture rather than dread, as unprecedented numbers delighted in using telescopes. Artists, travelers, and poets all celebrated night’s beauty and grandeur. Visiting the Continent in 1787, a London bookseller exulted, “The evening was still & tranquil & the sky perfectly serene, enriched with millions of stars shining in perfect beauty.” Similarly, a traveler in France opined, “Nothing could be more delightful than this journeying by moonlight, in a serene night.” A growing number of essayists dilated upon night’s “peculiar beauties.” No praise was too effusive. “Transcendentally beautiful,” proclaimed a writer in 1795. Indeed, claimed “Valverdi” in the
Literary Magazine
, “Day, with the resplendent sun flaming along the glowing heavens, in all the pomp of splendour, is inferior in touching beauty to the milder glories of night—soft, but not insipid; glorious, but not glaring; beautiful, but yet sublime.”
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If nighttime appeared less sinister, it also became, during the eighteenth century, more profitable. More and more, darkness fell subject to consumerism and nascent industrialization, both fueled by a commercial revolution sweeping Britain and much of the Continent. Improved road and river systems along with innovations in communications spurred expanding markets at home and abroad. Within northwestern Europe, a rising middle class in urban areas, swollen in size and wealth, contributed in the 1700s to a wave of domestic consumption. Craftsmen, shopkeepers, and clerks set their sights on purchasing luxury goods in addition to basic necessities. In many cities and towns, bustling shops, markets, and arcades stayed open well past nightfall. “All the shops are open till ten o’clock at night, and exceedingly well lighted,” remarked a visitor to London in 1789. At a fair in The Hague, shopkeepers displayed their wares past midnight, relying upon moonlight and lamps. The Palais-Royal was Paris’s principal center for evening consumers. “Just picture a beautiful square palace,” wrote a traveler, “and beneath it arcades, where in countless shops glitter treasures from all the world”—all “wonderfully displayed and illuminated by bright, dazzling lights, of many colors.” Night, declared the commercial classes, was open for business.
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Meanwhile, early manufacturers, with heavy capital investments in mills and machinery, achieved gains in productivity from operating around the clock. In the Midlands, Sir Richard Arkwight’s cotton mills, a passer-by wrote in 1790, “never leave off working.” “When they are lighted up, on a dark night,” he marveled, they “look most luminously beautiful.” And, too, a growing number of iron foundries blazed, sending smoke and flashes of light across the sky. At the famed site of Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, a visitor commented, “The fires from the furnaces were bursting forth in the darkness.”
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Not least, commerce increasingly coursed through the evening hours, as goods flowed to inland markets and farmers brought livestock and produce to cities. Wagons and carriages crisscrossed the countryside, as did, by the mid-1700s, postal riders and mail-coaches. Lying at an inn overnight in the Kent town of Sittingbourne, James Essex complained in 1773, “Much disturbed all night by the chaises and coaches which were going from thence or coming in at all hours.”
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Philip James de Loutherbourg,
Coalbrookdale by Night
, 1801.

It bears noting that trade, coupled with urban sprawl and advances in military technology, rapidly rendered urban walls obsolete. Originally designed to repel one’s foes, these immense fortifications proved an impediment to commerce, particularly at night once gates were shut. By the end of the eighteenth century, most cities and towns across Europe had either abandoned or demolished their walls. Of Bordeaux’s ramparts, a contemporary reflected in 1715, “They are a relic of the past, overtaken by the expansion of the faubourgs and hampering the development of the port, and condemned by economic necessity and the growth of the town as much as new strides in the art of war.” Where walls yet remained, they often served as little more than promenades for pedestrians and carriages. In Paris, where more than half of its outer wall still stood in the eighteenth century, coaches could be seen along the ramparts.
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Of parallel importance was the leisured affluence of urban households. Assemblies, pleasure gardens, masquerades, gaming, and theatres, now more than ever, adorned the evening hours of the beau monde. “Fashionable hours” only drew later. In London, a critic wrote in 1779, “The nightly entertainments, which used to begin at six in the evening, are now begun at eight or nine.” York and Bath became famed for assemblies, with numerous provincial towns, from Scarborough to Tunbridge Wells, following suit. Elsewhere in Europe, genteel amusements, if anything, reflected greater opulence. In Naples, gatherings did not break up before five in the morning. Declared a German journal in 1786, “The pleasures of the evening and night . . . are the ruling fashion in every large city, where luxury and the need for entertainment constantly increase.” Even on the Isle of Man, there were frequent card-parties and assemblies in the town of Douglas. And in America, which experienced its own surge of prosperity in the 1700s, a southerner boasted, “We have constant assemblys & many other amusements.”
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Where aristocrats once claimed such gatherings to themselves, well-to-do bourgeois families eagerly emulated their betters. New wealth and dreams of gentility altered traditional haunts and habits. A London newspaper noted in 1733, “Traders, instead of amusing themselves of an ev’ning as we did over a pipe and a dish of coffee, are running to the play, the opera, or the ridotto.” The following year, “people of all ranks” reportedly flocked to Dublin theaters, while in Venice a visitor in 1739 discovered that masquerades were the “favorite pleasure both of the grandees and the commonalty.” In fact, to judge from upper-class complaints, mounting numbers of upstarts gained entrance to aristocratic diversions. Because many of these—playhouses, assemblies, and pleasure gardens—were commercial in nature, access was difficult to restrict. Playhouse audiences in London became largely middle-class. Excluded from private parties, bourgeois families in Frankfurt am Main held “assemblies of the same kind among themselves.” Immensely popular, too, were clubs, of which there was an explosion in England and colonial America. Serving a variety of interests and occupations, these afforded members a private setting for fellowship and drink, with many clubs reserving taverns and coffeehouses for meetings. Most famous was the Lunar Society of Birmingham, whose founders in the late 1760s included Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, and Josiah Wedgwood. Devoted to scientific progress, the Society acquired its name, ironically, from holding its monthly meetings when the moon was full and travel safest.
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II

Were the whole body of lewd offenders attack’d at once, in the street, and out of the street; were all the publick houses that entertain them obliged to shut them out; all noted brothels, bawdy-houses and night-houses shut up, and well guarded, the streets and dark retreats thoroughly scour’d, and well lighted; and all disorderly persons taken up and punish’d, as the law directs . . . vice would be even harras’d out of the town.

BRITISH JOURNAL
, SEPT. 12,
1730
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