ancient cities

564 Nightlife
Vauxhall at first, but it was gradually extended to
the bourgeoisie, who used a late night to distinguish
themselves from those who had to retire
early to recover for work, like Thorstein Veblen’s
late nineteenth-century leisure class. (Although
these classes were usually time-segregated, rarely
meeting each other because of the different lengths
of their working days, they sometimes met at daybreak,
one heading off to work, the other heading
home.)
The English licensing laws reflect these distinctions.
The plebeian beerhouses established in 1830
were made to close on weeknights 30 years before
pubs had to close, whereas the private clubs and
restaurants of the wealthy were subject to much
more lenient legislation. Yet, these attempts to
enforce a clear end to the night were not always
successful, as Schlör points out. In Berlin in the
1870s, the police admitted that drinking places
that were meant to close at 11 p.m. were often
open until midnight, and by 1900, observers noted
that the city’s nightlife seemed never to slacken
or end.
The opening up of the streets, and the bright
lights of late-opening cafés and theaters intensified
the association of the city night with pleasure and
possibility. The excitement of nightlife was always
tinged with danger, the unpredictability of urban
life exacerbated by the shadows of the night. From
Vauxhall in the 1730s to the Palais Royale in the
1780s, Coney Island in the 1900s, and Berlin in
the 1920s, the city at night was an exaggerated
version of its daily self, with a heightened sense of
loneliness and sociability, fear and pleasure. The
successful nighttime economies that established
themselves in many cities during the nineteenth
century were based on this complex knot of
connotations.
This boom saw the number of premises licensed
to sell alcohol in England and Wales outstrip
population growth: In 1820, there were about
35,000 pub licenses, but by 1870, there were
nearly twice as many, plus nearly 50,000 beerhouse
licenses. Similarly, W. Scott Haine tells us
that there were 4,500 cafés in Paris by the late
1840s and 22,000 by 1870; by the end of the century,
this figure was closer to 30,000, giving the
city more drinking places per head of population
than London or New York. Other attractions also
boomed, like the music hall, of which there were
perhaps as many as 300 in London in the 1850s,
or the cinemas of the early twentieth century.
The Night Economy
This nighttime economy was founded, as Erika
Rappaport suggests, on the parallel development
of shopping districts like London’s West End, so
that an evening out naturally followed a day’s
shopping. It was also based on a successful balance
between pleasure and profit, like Joseph Lyons’s
description of his restaurant business as a “free
trade in pleasure.” Music hall managers, fair owners,
and other entrepreneurs cleaned up the livelier
aspects of their businesses not because they had to,
but because ultimately it meant higher profits.
Other forms of entertainment, like the Victorian
pub, resisted temperance and government efforts
to close or regulate them for decades because there
was so much money in drink. The breweries and
publicans were checked only by the slow growth of
a more home-centered working-class culture
toward the end of the century. In many cases, the
cleanup of nightlife was due to commercial pressures
rather than state regulation.
The bright lights did not illuminate every corner,
obviously. Crime, sedition, prostitution, and
drunkenness were not restricted to the nighttime
but seemed to flourish after dark, and the development
of gas streetlights coincided with the rise of
the modern police and a passion for the investigation
of urban life by journalists, statisticians,
reformers, and pleasure seekers. They often sought
out problem areas after dark, and as a result, the
nineteenth-century rediscovery of the city and its
problematic masses was also usually a rediscovery
of the night. One of Gustave Doré’s illustrations
from 1872, “The Bull’s-eye,” sums this up neatly;
a policeman holds up the lantern of the title to
illuminate the dark corners of London.
This fascination not just with the problems of
the modern city but with their nighttime manifestations
prompted efforts to curb the excesses of
nightlife. Control over closing time, the curfew on
drinking and entertainment places, has already
been discussed. Other campaigns, driven by a mix
of genuine concern, fear for the health of the workforce,
and moralizing disgust, sought to control
prostitution, crime, homelessness, and drunkenness
by regulating the places where these activities