The widespread belief that people in the pre-electric world went to bed at nightfall seems to be based entirely on the presumption that anyone deprived of robust illumination would be driven by frustration to retire. In fact, it appears that most people didn’t retire terribly early—nine or ten o’clock seems to have been standard for most people in the days before electricity, and for some, particularly in cities, it was even later. For those who could control their working hours, bedtimes and rising times were at least as variable then as now and appear to have had little to do with the amount
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