Performance
A social historian reconstructs preindustrial night: segmented sleep, work, prayer, danger, sociability, intimacy, and the spread of artificial light.
The modern belief that our ancestors at least slept soundly is likely wrong. Fire risk, strange noises, bad smells, shared beds and uneven diets broke rest often, probably more than today. The well-off blamed their own worries for bad nights, while the poor carried their own mental burdens.
Rulers largely accepted night as a natural force that neither courts nor constables could change, and met it with fatalism rather than control. The night watchmen who did patrol were widely held in contempt. So people fell back on defending their own homes, barring doors and bolting shutters at nightfall.
Candles lit only a small circle and left most of a room black, and lighting was too costly to use freely. People memorised their homes down to the number of stairs on every flight. With sight weakened, hearing, touch and smell mattered more, and these stir the emotions more strongly.
The dark made an intimate setting where words of affection came more easily. Many people also spent an hour or more alone in thought each night. The book argues this built greater self-awareness and a stronger sense of the individual.
As lighting spread from the mid-1700s, belief in night spirits faded, and city evenings filled with theatres and pleasure gardens. But bright light also brought what one observer called 'pitiless publicity', pitting public safety against personal privacy. The author mourns that round-the-clock society lost darkness as a refuge for privacy, intimacy and reflection.
Before industrial life and cheap lighting, people commonly slept in two stretches, a first sleep and a second sleep, with up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness in between. The book treats unbroken eight-hour sleep as a recent habit with a social history, not a timeless human default. This rests on historical testimony, not clinical evidence, and is not health advice.
The gap between the two sleeps was not experienced as insomnia but as ordinary time to fill. People sewed, smoked, told stories, made love, visited neighbours, pilfered firewood, and thought over their dreams.
Night lay partly beyond the reach of masters, employers and officials, so it became a second world with looser rules and its own customs. Servants, the poor, the enslaved and gangs of young people could act with a freedom the daytime denied them. Even owners admitted that people held as slaves all day were not wholly so at night.
People rarely stopped to admire sunset. They called nightfall 'shutting-in', saw it as the start of danger from crime, fire and spirits, and believed every village and churchyard was haunted. Towns marked the coming dark with bells and horns as if warning of an attack.
Ordinary families once slept several to a mattress, guests included, and whole peasant households sometimes shared one bed. As beds improved, the upper classes came to despise shared sleeping. The bed was where a growing taste for personal privacy showed most plainly.