Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 231.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "Koster, Jo" <kosterj@exchange.winthrop.edu> (45)
Subject: RE: 15.228 reading in bed
[2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (37)
Subject: levels of light
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2001 07:12:43 +0100
From: "Koster, Jo" <kosterj@exchange.winthrop.edu>
Subject: RE: 15.228 reading in bed
Jim and all:
I would suspect that reading in bed is a function of safe
internal lighting: candles and cloth furnishings are, in general, a poor
mix. In the Middle Ages and early Modern period, the bed was usually an
enclosed structure with curtains, often in a room where other activities
were going on; thus the curtains were used to shut out light and sound.
Not a likely candidate for bedside reading; I can't remember an example
in either period, nor a MS illustration of a reader in bed. In the 17th
century, perhaps. But Pepys usually ends his diary entries, including a
description of his reading, with a phrase like "And so to bed"--this
again suggesting that reading and bed were not synonymous. There is a
17th century feature called the closet--a small room with desk, books,
reading chair--this seems to be where more private reading took place.
I've been trying to think of period architecture and furnishings, and
when the bedside commode begins to hold books and papers instead of just
the 'night furniture'; I think it's late-eighteenth or early 19th
century. Still, even in Jane Austen's time, people took one single
candle upstairs to light their way to bed--again not suggesting that the
lighting was conducive to bedside reading. I think a few clandestine
letters are read over in bed in Austen--but that's not a book.
It's been too long since I read Trollope or Dickens or any of
the Victorian household novelists to remember if bedside reading shows
up there. The first examples that came to mind when you raised this
question were Oscar Wilde and Alice James, actually; so somewhere after
1850? Again, that's where you have gas lighting laid on in middle class
homes, allowing better illumination, and also when the "canopy style" of
bed goes out of fashion, and the central ceiling light fixture begins to
appear in architecture.
If the Furness Library is still as good as it was when I was at
Penn (late 70s), somewhere in the art and design collections there you
might find an answer....
Cheers,
Jo
--*--*--*--*--*--
Jo Koster (formerly Tarvers), Ph.D.
Department of English
Winthrop University
Rock Hill, SC 29733-0001 USA
phone (803) 323-4557
fax (803) 323-4837
e-mail kosterj@winthrop.edu
on the web http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj
"I always wanted to be somebody. I guess I should have been more
specific." --Lily Tomlin
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2001 07:29:45 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: levels of light
I take Jim O'D's point, in the previous dispatch of Humanist, that candles
and the like did not put out much light -- by our standards, which is to
say, to our eyes. We are so accustomed to what from an historical
perspective would be considered quite high (and in some countries
astoundingly constant) levels of illumination that we find it difficult to
imagine comfortable reading by candle-light. Is there not evidence
somewhere that the sensorium has over time adjusted to accommodate what we
find necessary or desirable to sense?
So I am thinking that levels of light are not the problem. The canopied bed
would present a difficulty, though would the drapes necessarily make
illumination too dangerous or difficult? Under circumstances in which they
would be drawn to keep in whatever warmth, rather than to provide privacy
(esp before the invention of corridors to link rooms), they would not
necessarily have to be drawn immediately, and might not, I am supposing, in
warmer weather. Then there's the relationship between ability to read,
social class and sleeping arrangements. To what degree did families sleep
in the same bed out of necessity? and so on.
I suppose that the historiographical point here is in puzzling out what the
world was like without our knowledge of what it was going to be like. I
keep thinking of how we reach an understanding, even across such a short
and relatively shallow abysm of time, of artefacts and practices that
computing has affected. We are, for example, amazed at the number of
letters various well-known and presumably busy people, like Jung, were
known to have written each day, so completely have other means of
communicating affected us. To say nothing of how corrupted out minds have
become by the thrill of links, to the degree that when we encounter a
footnote or other reference what we tend to see is proto-hypertext
struggling to be liberated from its confines in print.
Is there any reason to think that to any degree we tend to read in bed for
historically contingent reasons, whatever the changes in convenience and
safety?
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer /
Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London /
Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Sep 08 2001 - 02:57:55 EDT