By TIM BLANNING [TLS] – Gradually European towns and cities became safer places when the sun went down, and this security promoted forms of social activity beyond whoring, brawling, gambling and drinking. As Koslofsky very reasonably argues, almost all the work on the public sphere has concentrated on locations and institutional forms, and has neglected time. Coffee houses were open all day, of course, but it was at night that they came into their own. As the London pamphlet Character of Coffee and Coffee-House claimed in 1661, “they borrow of the night”. Most served alcohol and many were frequented by prostitutes, but in general they served as respectable meeting places for the upper and middle classes. Moreover, as well as promoting a critical body of public opinion, they could also on occasion be the focus of more concerted political agitation. It was at the Turk’s Head coffee house in New Palace Yard at Westminster that James Harrington’s Rota Club met nightly in 1659–60 to discuss the future of the Commonwealth. Charles II tried to close coffee houses in 1675 for being “the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons”, a verdict echoed by the patrician town council of Frankfurt am Main in 1703 when taking action against their own political opponents.

If educated urban men certainly benefited from this colonization of the night, it is much less clear how women fared. On the one hand, greater security encouraged them to go out at night. In 1673, Madame de Sévigné described an evening spent chatting with her friends until midnight at the home of Mme de Coulanges, after which she escorted one of the party home, even though this involved a journey across Paris. She wrote that “We found it pleasant to be able to go, after midnight, to the far end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain”, adding that the new street lighting had made this possible: “we returned merrily, thanks to the lanterns, safe from thieves”. In John Vanbrugh’s unfinished play A Journey to London (written in the early 1720s), Lord Loverule grumbles that his wife, Lady Arabella, was in the habit of staying out until the small hours despite knowing that he liked to retire at 11. She replies tartly that: “my two o’clock speaks life, activity, spirit, and vigour; your eleven has a dull, drowsy, stupid, good-for-nothing sound with it. It savours much of a mechanic, who must get to bed betimes that he may rise early to open his shop, faugh!”. Her husband’s further observation that early to bed and early to rise is healthy attracts the crushing rejoinder “beasts do it”.

Continued at the Times Literary Supplement | More Chronicle & Notices.