When day becomes night
Mapping Time: Night and day in the nineteenth-century city
Peter Baldwin
Dreamer in Landscape by John Craxton
“Even a brief glance at a panoramic map dispels any illusion of accuracy. Likewise, the writers who tried to map urban time aimed for effects that had only a casual connection to reality. Whitman was cataloguing the occupational diversity of New York, Bunner was mocking status pretensions, and Talmage was warning young men against temptations. Their crude depictions of urban time, in some sense, replicated the pre-modern habit of dividing time into night and day, paying little attention to the invisible laborers and highwaymen, the midwives and nursing mothers or the toiling seamen for whom night was anything but a time of sleep. Nonetheless, their chronologies highlight real patterns: the precise opening and closing times in the industrial city, the long hours demanded of laborers, the tides of commuting along rail lines, the expansion of commercial entertainment, and above all the growth of nighttime activity…Modern lighting and transportation had opened the night city to adult men, but had not reproduced the relatively safe atmosphere of daytime. The persistence of immoral forms of nightlife, the skewed gender profile of night work, and, finally, legislation combined to keep night distinct from day. Instead, a new schedule of nocturnal life was visible in the streets. Different sorts of people could be seen at distinct, predictable hours, from the parade of late-evening commuters, through the shift workers and revelers at midnight, to the marketmen and street sweepers before dawn. ‘Before these ghostly cleaners have done their task,’ Whitman observed, ‘the circuit of the hours is over, and the endless procession … begins again.’”
From the October issue of Common-place (via)