Lifestyle and Medicine in the Enlightenment by James Kennaway Rina Knoeff

Author:James Kennaway, Rina Knoeff [James Kennaway, Rina Knoeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429879241
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Part 4

Sleep and wakefulness

8  “That venerable and princely custom of long-lying abed”

Sleep and civility in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century urban society1

Elizabeth Hunter

“Early to bed and early to rise, and you never meet any prominent people.” This ironic twist on a familiar English proverb was attributed to the American writer George Ade in 1928 (Miner and Rawson, 2006, p. 307); but it would have been appreciated in eighteenth-century London where the upper classes and their imitators gained notoriety for excess and late-night revels. A certain degree of night-time socialising was necessary for the purposes of business and social advancement, and it also formed part of an Enlightenment ideal of a cultured and connected society. The excessive pursuit of leisure during the hours of darkness, however, and the period of sleeping during morning hours that inevitably followed, were seen by some as ruinous to the health of the individual and nation. This was not an entirely new concern. As one of the six non-naturals, attention to hours of sleeping and waking was well established in European culture as a way of maintaining health and living to an old age. However, in the midst of anxiety that the old rhythms of day and night were being eroded, popular health manuals, such as those of the famous physician George Cheyne, insisted upon the unnaturalness and unhealthiness of late-night entertainment more strongly than in previous centuries.

This chapter explores how these health concerns became interwoven with debates about proper conduct and masculine identity. Historians of gender and culture have identified the long eighteenth century as a period in which modern concepts of politeness, civility, masculinity and the identity of the “gentleman” were being developed. In particular, a number of historians have detected in this period a shift in the concept of genteel masculinity. Whereas in previous centuries landownership was crucial to a gentleman’s identity, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the emergence of the bourgeois gentleman, who made a living through trade, or the professions, and whose claim to gentlemanly status was based in the respectability of his social interactions and domestic arrangements (Bryson, 1998; Harvey, 2005, pp. 296–311; Tosh, 2014, pp. 219–220). Sleeping habits became a defining factor, distinguishing the “beau” and the “rake” from the “man of business.” For some, maintaining a position in urban society, while also remaining healthy and avoiding dissolute company, was a difficult balancing act that was not always achieved. Others deliberately flouted the advice of physicians and conduct books, revelling in the excess associated with wealth and status.

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