Adventures in Research - 4
Adventures in Research 3
Who Turned out the Lights?
At one of the 18th-century homes I visited on my most recent research trip back East – it was a couple of years ago now, so I don’t have a clear recollection: it might have been Paul Revere’s or Abigail Adams’s – one of the docents pointed out a notch cut in the bannister of the stairway, about a foot back from the newel-post at the end. He (or she?) said, “That’s to warn someone coming down in the dark, that they’re about to come to the end of the stairs.”
The invention of gas lighting at the beginning of the nineteenth century changed the world in a way that we in the twenty-first can’t wholley comprehend. Previous to that time, when night fell it was dark and you went home. You can’t run a factory by candle-light. Once gas-lighting was invented, workers were given the option of selling their rest-time for a couple cents extra per night, which of course they had to take, though that isn’t the topic of this entry. I've always suspected that this was one reason why the dinner-hour got moved back at about this time from three or four in the afternoon to seven or eight: because there was better lighting in the kitchen. (Suppers had always been prepared by oil-lamp, at least in the city where supplies of oil were more easily available – there’s a reason, in all those Regency novels, that people talk about “keeping country hours” and eating while it’s still light.)
This is something I try to keep in mind while writing historicals. That when night falls, it’s bloody well dark.
(And it’s something I have to work to remember, because in every movie Hollywood puts out, it ISN’T dark at night, not really, because we, the audience, have paid a ridiculous amount to see Mr. Depp’s handsome countenance. So I suspect several generations have grown up not realizing how LITTLE light a single candle – or even a single gas-jet – sheds).
Be that as it may. As a writer, I always have to keep in mind just how much light IS there in a scene, and where is it coming from? The moon? Big difference between full-moon and new-moon light. (The U.S. Navy, of all people, put out a website that gives phases of the moon for any year back to 1800 or so. Hugely useful, because I can never keep them straight). And even in the full moon, my heroine had dang well not be able to “see by his expression the doubt in his heart…” because she couldn’t. Ditto for, “He saw a flush of anger spread over her cheekbones.” Not by moonlight, he didn’t. Double ditto for indoors by candle-light. Try it sometime.
Candles smelled. Tallow candles especially. (For which reason beeswax were preferred; there are different words in French for a tallow candle and a beeswax one.) They also dripped wax like crazy, unlike the modern dripless variety – long accumulations of wax down the sides were called “winding-sheets” after the cloth used to wrap up the bodies of the dead. And they had to be fussed with, because the braided cotton wicks didn’t burn efficiently and had to be constantly trimmed with candle-snuffers – little scissors with a box built onto one blade – and the wick pricked up to stand up straight. (In New Orleans, for whatever reason, the French Creoles were noted for preferring the use of candles to the use of lamps – yet another thing I need to keep in mind).
Servants generally collected all the lamps in the house in the morning, hauled them into the lamp-room where the chimneys were cleaned of soot and the reservoirs re-filled with oil. That was part of morning chores. Then they were all set on a shelf until “lamp-lighting time”. You didn’t want oil-filled lamps sitting around in the parlors a minute before they had to be. Same for candles. Clean the candle-stands. The servants got to use the half-burned stumps of the old candles. Any left over got sold to the rag-and-bone man who came around nice neighborhoods for exactly that purpose: traditionally, the housekeeper got the money from re-selling the half-burned candles, and God help the parlormaid that pilfered a few to sell on her own. Candles were hugely expensive. And you didn’t leave them standing around in the rooms by day, because wax was edible, and would draw mice.
And, when your heroine leaves the room… Blow out the candle. Open flame is NOT the sort of lighting you want to walk out and leave unattended.
It’s why I habitually use those chintzy LED candles they sell at Christmastime for my own home lighting after dark.
