The Dangers of Reading in Bed

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From The Atlantic:

Lord Walsingham’s servants found him in bed one morning in 1831, burnt to a crisp. According to a notice in The Spectator, “his remains [were] almost wholly destroyed, the hands and feet literally burnt to ashes, and the head and skeleton of the body alone remained presenting anything like an appearance of humanity.” His wife also suffered a tragic end: Jumping out of the window to escape the fire, she tumbled to her death.

The Family Monitor assigned Lord Walsingham a trendy death. He must have fallen asleep reading in bed, its editors concluded, a notorious practice that was practically synonymous with death-by-fire because it required candles. The incident became a cautionary tale. Readers were urged not to tempt God by sporting with “the most awful danger and calamity”—the flagrant vice of bringing a book to bed. Instead, they were instructed to close the day “in prayer, to be preserved from bodily danger and evil.” The editorial takes reading in bed for a moral failing, a common view of the period.

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Writings from the 18th and 19th centuries frequently dramatize the potentially horrifying consequences of reading in bed. Hannah Robertson’s 1791 memoir, Tale of Truth as well as of Sorrow, offers one example. It is a dramatic story of downward mobility, hinging on the unfortunate bedtime activities of a Norwegian visitor, who falls asleep with a book: “The curtains took fire, and the flames communicating with other parts of the furniture and buildings, a great share of our possessions were consumed.”

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In practice, reading in bed was probably less dangerous than public reproach suggested. Of the 29,069 fires recorded in London from 1833 to 1866, only 34 were attributed to reading in bed. Cats were responsible for an equal number of fire incidents.

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Until the 17th and 18th centuries, bringing a book to bed was a rare privilege reserved for those who knew how to read, had access to books, and had the means to be alone. The invention of the printing press transformed silent reading into a common practice—and a practice bound up with emerging conceptions of privacy. Solitary reading was so common by the 17th century, books were often stored in the bedroom instead of the parlor or the study.

Meanwhile, the bedroom was changing too. Sleeping became less sociable and more solitary. In the 16th and 17th centuries, even royals lacked the nighttime privacy contemporary sleepers take for granted. In the House of Tudor, a servant might sleep on a cot by the bed or slip under the covers with her queenly boss for warmth. By day, the bed was the center of courtly life. The monarchs designated a separate bedchamber for conducting royal business. In the morning, they would commute from their sleeping-rooms to another part of the castle, where they would climb into fancier, more lavish beds to receive visitors.

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People feared that solitary reading and sleeping fostered a private, fantasy life that would threaten the collective—especially among women. The solitary sleeper falls asleep at night absorbed in fantasies of another world, a place she only knows from books. During the day, the lure of imaginative fiction might draw a woman under the covers to read, compromising her social obligations.

The celebrated soprano Caterina Gabrielli was presumably reading one such novel when she neglected to attend a dinner party among Sicilian elites at home of the viceroy of Palermo, who had been intent on wooing her. A messenger sent to call on the absent singer found her in the bedroom, apparently so lost in her book, she’d forgotten all about the engagement. She apologized for her bad manners, but didn’t budge from bed.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic