Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (37 page)

By 1700 a new literary formula was emerging. Authors embellished the age-old comparison between urban and rural life with a new contrast between the nights of the city and those of the countryside. In 1714 Alexander Pope (1688–1744) penned an “Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation.” Addressing “some fond Virgin, whom her mother’s care / Draggs from the town to wholesome country air,” Pope describes the fate of Miss Blount in the country:

She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks,

Old-fashion’d halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks:

She went from Op’ra, park, assembly, play,

To morning walks, and pray’r three hours a day:

To part her time ’twixt reading and bohea,

To muse, and spill her solitary tea,

Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,

Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon:

Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire,

Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire;

Up to her godly garret after sev’n,

There starve and pray, for that’s the way to heav’n.
¹³⁶

The daily rhythms of country life seem especially deadening here, with dinner at noon and bedtime not long after seven.

Were the urban and rural nights truly drifting apart? Pope’s comments clearly reflect the divergence of city and country time as a literary theme, but also reveal a real shift in patterns of daily time. In the
Tatler
of December 12, 1710, Richard Steele mentioned “an old friend … being lately come to town” from the countryside. “I went to see him on Tuesday last about eight o’clock in the evening,” continued the author, “with a design to sit with him an hour or two and talk over old stories”:

but upon inquiring after him, his servant told me he was just gone up to bed. The next morning, as soon as I was up and dressed, and had dispatched a little business, I came again to my friend’s house about eleven o’clock, with a design to renew my visit; but upon asking for him, his servant told me he was just sat down to dinner.

Clearly, London and the country are out of step in this case. Steele continued:

In short, I found that my old-fashioned friend religiously adhered to the example of his forefathers, and observed the same hours that had been kept in his family ever since the Conquest.
¹³⁷

When the Newcastle curate Henry Bourne published his thoughts on
Antiquitates vulgares; or, the antiquities of the common people
(Newcastle, 1725) he sought to give “an account of several of their opinions and
ceremonies.” The common people are in his understanding country folk (and there is nothing new in this assumption), but Bourne’s comments suggest that he sees a different daily rhythm in the countryside. Discussing the belief that the evil spirits of the night are banished by cockcrow, he notes

that in Country-Places, where the Way of Life requires more early Labour, they always go cheerfully to Work at that time [i.e. cockcrow]; whereas if they are called abroad sooner, they are apt to imagine every Thing they see or hear, to be a wandering Ghost.
¹³⁸

Rural folk also spend their long winter evenings differently, as Bourne notes in his tenth chapter, “Of the Country Conversation in a Winter’s Evening: Their Opinions of Spirits and Apparitions.” Bourne claims that “Nothing is commoner in Country Places, than for a whole family in a Winter’s Evening, to sit round the Fire, and tell stories of Apparitions and Ghosts.”
¹³⁹
Physician and poet Mark Aikenside’s
The Pleasures of the Imagination
(1744) presents a similar scene:

Hence finally, by night

The village-matron, round the blazing hearth,

Suspends the infant-audience with her tales,

Breathing astonishment! of witching rhymes,

And evil spirits …

of shapes that walk

At dead of night, and clank their chains, and wave

The torch of hell around the murderer’s bed.
¹⁴⁰

The connection these authors make between the absence of nocturnalization and the belief in ghosts and witches plays a key role in the disenchantment of the night discussed in the next chapter. By creating the stereotype of rustic superstition at night, these commentators reflected a new divergence of daily schedules between city and village. In the cities, nocturnalization was promoted by the state on one hand, and by a deepening public consumer culture on the other – a powerful combination of discipline and distinction.
¹⁴¹
Both forces were attenuated in the countryside.

The spread of street lighting and festive illuminations in cities also created a new contrast with the night in the countryside. In a 1745 pamphlet celebrating the birth of a Habsburg prince, two “peasants from the highlands” view the illumination of Vienna (see
Figure 7.6
). The first is astounded: “wherever I look, wherever I go, lights shine without end / and the houses all around are like the heavens.” The
other adds “in our village there’s never been a church fair (‘kermes’) like this!”
¹⁴²

Figure 7.6
Two peasants marvel at an illumination in Vienna.
Curioses Gespräch: zwischen Hänsel und Lippel zweyen oberländischen Bauern bey der den 14.Märzen in … Wien … gehalten Illumination
(Vienna, 1745), fo. 2.

Ekirch has shown that the age-old pattern of segmented sleep was disrupted by artificial light beginning in the late seventeenth century (coincident with the rise of street lighting, better domestic lighting, and coffeehouses). “Divided sleep,” he argued, “would grow less common with the passage of time, first among the propertied classes in the better-lit urban neighborhoods, then slowly among other social strata.”
¹⁴³
References to segmented sleep are absent from the diaries of elite men because their daily life was extended well past sunset by artificial lighting, indoors and out. The nights of townspeople, compressed by artificial light into a single sleep of seven or eight hours, began to diverge from the age-old pattern of segmented sleep found everywhere else.

By the middle of the century, the well-born might encounter early rising and rural daily time as something “new.” In 1740 Anne Donnellan (
c
. 1700–62), daughter of a chief baron of the Exchequer, discovered rising with the sun during a visit to Spa. Writing to Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Donnellan explained:

I like Spa exceedingly; ’tis a mere country village, with a very romantic country about it. I like the way of living, which is new to me; we are all out by six in the morning in our chaises, and go three miles to the Geronstere waters; we come home at nine, and take a cup of chocolate, dine between twelve and one, go to the assembly at four, where there are all countries, and all languages, half a dozen card tables, and no crowd; from the assembly we take a walk in the Capuchin’s garden; all are in before eight to supper, and to bed at ten.
¹⁴⁴

In her reply Elizabeth Robinson imagines herself at Spa and seems quite touched by the “new” country schedule of rising by 6 a.m.:

I like the manner of living, it is quite new, and the place so romantic! I cannot say I am fond of such early rising, or that I delight in cards, but custom would, in a week’s time, make the first easy, and I suppose for the other it is not worse than Bath.
¹⁴⁵

In the summer 6 a.m. would be just after sunrise, which would have scarcely seemed early to the sixteenth-century ancestors of these women.

Summing up these developments in 1786 the fashion writer Friedrich Justin Bertuch explained that “an entirely new order of things” had supplanted the traditional rhythm of daytime for work and night for rest and sleep.
¹⁴⁶
As discussed in
chapter 5
, Bertuch regarded the change as self-evident and presented numerous examples drawn from the courts and cities of Northern Europe, noting that people of quality in England had shifted their mealtimes and sleeping times later by about seven (!) hours over the past two centuries.
¹⁴⁷
This nocturnalization was inevitable: “the occupations of the day begin ever later, the more society is refined and luxury increases.”
¹⁴⁸
This refinement was perceived and presented as urban and European: “the king of Yemen, ruler of Arabia Felix, dines early at nine for a midday meal, at five for the evening [meal], and goes to sleep around eleven,” whereas “the pleasures of the evening and night are the ruling fashion in France and England, and indeed in every great city.”
¹⁴⁹
The shift to later hours does not include the rural population.
¹⁵⁰

By the eighteenth century the temporal markers of daily life – the traditional times for labor, meals, and sleep – in the two sites were slipping out of step as townspeople used artificial lighting, indoors and out, to shift their daily schedule into the night. The nightward shift of daily times for dinner (i.e., the main, “midday” meal), supper, and sleep by social class is underscored by the view from Napoleon’s Paris:

Two hundred years ago the Parisians had their dinner at noon: today the craftsman dines at two o’clock, the great merchant at three, the clerks at four, the parvenu, the businessman, and the exchange agent at five o’clock; the minister, the legislator, the rich bachelor, at six, and the last usually leave the dinner table at the time when our fathers sat down for their last meal of the day.

Emphasizing the late hours of the city’s well-to-do, the author continued, “those who do have supper sit down at the table at eleven o’clock, and in the summer they go to bed when the worker rises.”
¹⁵¹
In the
Tatler
essay quoted above, Steele elaborated on the development by creating a contrast with rural life:

For this reason I desired a friend of mine in the country to let me know, whether the lark rises as early as he did formerly? and whether the cock begins to crow
at his usual hour? My friend has answered me, that his poultry are as regular as ever, and that all the birds and beasts of his neighborhood keep the same hours that they have observed in the memory of man.”
¹⁵²

Steele recognized that waking, dining, and sleeping hours were now dictated by location and class as they had not been a generation earlier. Moral commentators like Steele may have criticized the nocturnalization of urban daily life, but they were too invested in social discipline and social distinction to actually challenge the process. The resulting tensions between urban and rural time persist to this day, as rural resistance to daylight savings time suggests.

In 1658 the peasant Michl Bruckhay sued the Jewish livestock dealer Hudel Hitzig before the Imperial Aulic Court (
Hofgericht
) in Rottweil. Both men lived in the village of Kriegshaber, near Augsburg, and as the dispute moved through the imperial legal system, Bruckhay’s son and his son’s friends lashed out against their Jewish neighbor. On the night before Easter 1659 they threw a pig in Hitzig’s well and broke his windows. The local authorities did not condone this nocturnal assault, levying a 45-gulden fine on Michl Bruckhay for his son’s actions.
¹⁵³
Little had changed between the invasion of Barthel Dorfheilige’s inn at Wanfried in 1603 and this incident in 1659, and young men would continue to serve as the “guardians of disorder” in villages through the end of the Old Regime.

When darkness fell over the early modern countryside, the characteristic ambivalence of the night emerged. Fear waxed alongside pleasure, leisure merged with labor, and limitations created opportunities. An intense combination of discipline and distinction drove nocturnalization at courts and in cities. From a rural perspective, however, the illuminated courts and cities resembled another vitreous innovation of the seventeenth century, the greenhouse. The concentrated administrative energy and dynamic conspicuous consumption at courts and in large cities produced an exotic bloom of night life. This growth could not be sustained in the early modern countryside, where rural folk instead tended hardy, native nocturnal traditions. Attempts to colonize the rural night were fewer and less successful. At the end of the eighteenth century the spinning bees had endured,
rural publicans and customers continued to ignore closing hours, and the night remained a time and place for youth, especially young men. The expansion of respectable night life at the expense of the nocturnal elements of traditional youth culture in cities created a new contrast between city and country nights.