At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (50 page)

There was, then, all the more reason, with the rise of wealthy leisure classes, for growing public alarm over the nocturnal disorder long plaguing cities and towns. If evil spirits fled urban haunts during the eighteenth century, theft, vandalism, and violence remained persistent dangers. Crime seemed to spread on both sides of the Atlantic. Population growth, large-scale unemployment, and rising food prices contributed among the lower orders to widespread hardship, particularly in Europe. Although homicide rates actually declined in England over the 1700s, property crime was rampant. The poor “starve, and freeze, and rot among themselves,” wrote Henry Fielding, “but they beg, steal and rob among their betters.” A newspaper warned, “The common people, especially the inhabitants of London, are more abandoned than their fore-fathers.” Whether or not perceptions of mounting crime were always correct, at stake, in the view of civic functionaries, was the sovereignty of the public arena. Who at night should rule: thieves, prostitutes, and other urban riffraff, or, instead, their natural superiors, including members of the burgeoning middle class? “What insolences people are exposed to in the evening, and at night, even in so public a place as the Strand,” the social reformer Jonas Hanway moaned in 1754. In French cities, it was commonly complained that
coureurs de nuit
“insult and maltreat” citizens “who are obliged to be abroad in the streets during the night about their affairs.” Urban centers from Geneva to Philadelphia feared rising lawlessness, but arguably none experienced the profound anxiety that gripped London. So crime-ridden was the capital and its environs that in 1774 even the prime minister, Lord Frederick North, was robbed. On top of everything else, the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots rocked London in 1780, resulting in nearly three hundred deaths, and the city suffered an epidemic of theft and violence during the decade following the American Revolution. “We can neither travel abroad, nor sleep at home in our beds,” exclaimed a resident in 1785.
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Authorities in London and other beleaguered cities took a variety of steps to impose greater discipline. Most of these measures were designed to pacify public spaces, already the focus of efforts to improve sanitation and paved streets. The late hours kept by alehouses became a favorite target for government regulation. A newspaper in 1785 urged that night-houses be closed altogether—“the actual receptacles of all the male and female villains who prey nightly on the public, and disturb its peace.”
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Of greater importance, however, were two more sweeping offensives, which in many cities proceeded on parallel paths. The first called for improvements in public illumination. A widespread symbol of progress during the eighteenth century, light had enormous potential as a weapon of social control. In 1736, London received nearly five thousand oil lamps, to be lit at all hours of the night during every season of the year. The preamble to Parliament’s act for “better enlightening the streets” cited London’s “frequent murders, robberies, burglaries,” and other “felonies” in the “night season.” Advances in urban lighting, fueled in cities on both sides of the Atlantic by oil from the whaling trade, gained momentum over the century. “What man has so little experience to ignore that crimes are almost always committed by night,” pleaded Geneva petitioners in 1775 for better lighting. The introduction in London of Argand oil lamps in the mid-1780s featured a radically redesigned wick that burned at higher temperatures. That innovation, coupled with a new glass cylinder enclosing the lamp’s flame, produced a notably brighter light.
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Still more significant, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, was the introduction of street lamps that burned coal gas. After an initial display along London’s Pall Mall in early 1807, the Times exclaimed, “There is nothing so important to the British realm, since that of navigation.” Indeed, the light emitted from a lone gas mantle was ten to twelve times as strong as that from a candle or an old-fashioned oil lamp. As lamps spread throughout the principal arteries of the city, frosted glass became necessary to soften the glare. By 1823, nearly forty thousand lamps lit more than two hundred miles of London’s streets. Many British cities and towns quickly followed in London’s path, as did foreign cities like Paris, Berlin, and Baltimore. Such was the burgeoning popularity of gas lighting, the
Liverpool Mercury
proclaimed that “daylight” would soon “prevail in our streets and shops all night round.” Gas, affirmed Sidney Parker in Jane Austen’s
Sandition
(1817), “was doing more for the prevention of crime than any single body in England since the days of Alfred the Great.”
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Equally important to public safety was the reformation of law enforcement. As the
London Chronicle
asserted in 1758, “Light and a watch are the greatest enemies to villains.” Over the course of the eighteenth century, nightwatches grew in size and competence. With the creation of separate forces for firefighting, watchmen concentrated instead upon combating crime. Paris, in fact, already relied upon a force of trained police, the
garde
, as did several other European cities. Less enthusiastic were English localities, which traditionally opposed reliance on authoritarian forces. Critics of a parliamentary bill reforming Bristol’s watch in 1755 complained of the heightened power that constables and watchmen would enjoy to apprehend nightwalkers, by which “the liberty of the best citizens may be endangered.” No less emphatic, a writer in the
Public Advertiser
protested the creation of night patrols, on the order of the French police, “to shock us at every corner.”
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Thomas Rowlandson,
A Peep at the Gas Lights in Pall-Mall
, 1809. Among other comments, a prostitute declares, “If this light is not put a stop to—we must give up our business. We may as well shut up shop.” To which a pedestrian responds, “True, my dear: not a dark corner for love or money.”

All the same, public sentiment slowly shifted in the face of rising crime, and London gradually revamped its watch. An early proponent of a “regularly established police” for London wrote in 1762, “Our houses would be secure from fire, and our persons from the attack of robbers; idle ‘prentices would not be suffered to scour the streets, nor the daring strumpet to delude the unwary.” First in Westminster, then elsewhere, patrols grew more regimented, more numerous, and more aggressive, ultimately culminating in the creation in 1829 of the Metropolitan Police, followed several years later by parliamentary authorization for provincial police. The foremost proponent of the Metropolitan Police, Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, wrote the prime minister, “I want to teach people that liberty does not consist in having your house robbed by organized gangs of thieves, and in leaving the principal streets of London in the nightly possession of drunken whores and vagabonds.”
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During the nineteenth century, gas lighting and professional police transformed nocturnal life on both sides of the Atlantic. By blurring the boundaries between day and night, they altered the pace and scope of people’s lives. Ironically, in some areas afflicted by industrial pollution, nights grew brighter just as smoke and soot darkened streets by day. More than ever, there was greater freedom of movement at night, temporally and spatially, in cities and towns. And with larger numbers of pedestrians, streets and squares appeared safer. Already, a visitor to London in 1829 reported:

Thousands of lamps, in long chains of fire, stretch away to enormous distances. The display of the shops, lighted up with peculiar brillancy, and filled with valuable merchandise, which to decoy the customer, are rendered oftentimes more brillant by the reflection of numerous mirrors, is most striking in effect. The streets are thronged with people, and thousands of elegant equipages roll along to the appointed dinner-hour party, or to listen to the strains of Pasta. The night-watch, too, is going on, headed by some modern Dogberry. Two and two they set out for their beat from the Parish watch-house, well coated, lanterned, and cudgelled; big with their brief authority, and full of ferocious determination to keep the King’s peace.

A resident of New York echoed in 1853, “The facilities for going abroad in the evening have been greatly increased, and in many streets it is as safe and agreeable to walk out in the evening as by daylight.” Then, too, domestic lighting became both brighter and safer. Declining reliance upon candles, coupled with less flammable building materials, dramatically reduced the number of urban fires, thereby encouraging families, even more, to illuminate their homes in the evening.
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Whether lives were consistently enriched by pushing back the darkness is less evident. Besides emitting a nauseating smell, coal gas was a growing source of pollution. Critics complained that the light was too harsh. Shift labor expanded in factories, as did industrial surveillance by owners. If night became more accessible, it also became less private, on the job and off. Not only could the human eye now see a farther distance, but there were infinitely more eyes in public by which to be observed, including, first and foremost, those belonging to the police. Urban centers became policed communities, insofar as authorities grew better equipped to enforce their will. All persons faced greater scrutiny at night, occasionally with embarrassing consequences. In a minor cause célèbre in 1825, a London barrister, George Price, was charged with indecent exposure after urinating near a streetlamp in Maiden Lane—though such behavior in the darkness of night had been customary. By necessity, personal conduct in public grew more repressed. Drunkeness, brawling, all forms of rowdiness fell prey to social oversight. Sexual liaisons, even romantic gestures, needed to be more circumspect, as did control of one’s bodily impulses. “All these mysteries,” wrote a French poet of illicit behavior, “have for witnesses, the street lights from the bad corners.”
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Advances in lighting and professional police created a tension between public safety and personal privacy. No one framed the conflict as elegantly as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who observed, “As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.” Often, in English cities, not only did police departments maintain street lights, but the lamps themselves became known as “police lamps.” Even domestic interiors, owing to improved lighting, grew more visible to passersby, some of whom took evening strolls just to scrutinize their neighbors. With little exaggeration, the author of
Berlin Becomes a Metropolis
remarked in 1868, “Since the invention of gas light, our evening life has experienced an indescribable intensification, our pulse has accelerated, nervous excitation has been heightened; we have had to change our appearance, our behaviour and our customs, because they had to be accommodated to a different light.”
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As did patterns of sleep, which became more compressed as persons lengthened their days. Equally important, sleep for increasing numbers became seamless. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, divided slumber gradually grew less common in cities and towns, first among propertied households, then, more slowly, among other social ranks due to later bedtimes and improved illumination. Heightened exposure to artificial lighting, both at home and abroad, altered circadian rhythms as old as man himself. By the mid-1800s, only people unable to afford adequate lighting, in all likelihood, still experienced segmented sleep, particularly if forced to retire at an early hour. The working-class author of
The Great Unwashed
, for example, remarked in 1868 that laborers who had “to turn out early in the morning” were “already in their first sleep” at night when the streets of his town were “still in a state of comparative bustle.” Altered, too, was the relative importance of nocturnal dreams. No longer did most sleepers experience an interval of wakefulness in which to ponder visions in the dead of night. With the transition to a new pattern of slumber, at once consolidated and more compressed, increasing numbers lost touch with their dreams and, as a consequence, a traditional avenue to their deepest emotions. It is no small irony that, by turning night into day, modern technology has helped to obstruct our oldest path to the human psyche. That, very likely, has been the greatest loss, to paraphrase an early poet, of having been “disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies.”
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III

Now we want electric lamps brutally to cut and strip away with their thousand points of light your mysterious, sickening, alluring shadows!

FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI,
1912
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