Our miserly candle burning ancestors

I've been reading a very interesting book recently entitled At Days close: Night in Times past by Roger Ekirch. It's a fascinating look at how people conceptualized nighttime in the recent past, mostly focusing on Europe from 1300-1800 . I'm enjoying it because I think of night as so familiar yet there are so many ways in which we experience night differently than our ancestors. Particularly in the small details.

I was reading the section on candles last night. I tend to think of candles as illuminating a large area because when someone lights a candle in the movies, they turn the set lighting up and it appears that the candle illuminates everything. When I've used candles in the house, they are mostly for mood lighting so I don't think of them as used for lighting up a room. The book pointed out that candles and lanterns provide exceptionally poor illumination. The candles we burn today would be considered the finest candles if made 200 years ago. Many candles were home-made from animal fat and flickered while they burned. The light they provided was enough to make you realize how dark it really was.

They were also, as a rule, expensive to buy or time consuming to make, and were thus considered very valuable. So much so that people never lit candles until the sun had completely set and twilight was finished. It was considered a waste of a candle to use it if there was any light at all in the sky! It was also considered wasteful to light a candle at night so most people, when they got up in the night to go to bathroom or get a nosh did so completely in the dark.

I think about how dependent we are on electric lights and how wasteful we would seem to our ancestors. I turn on the lights as soon as it starts to get dark and keep many lights burning until I go to sleep. If I wake in the night, I think nothing of turning on lights. But for us, it's easy to get new bulbs (thankfully) and the electricity is plentiful and relatively cheap.

I wonder, as we continue into the 21st century with dwindling fossil fuels and the probability of electrical costs skyrocketing, if we are going to return to the miserly ways of our ancestors.

I recommend the book as it provides insight into the day to day details of times past that make me realize how much society has really changed in modern times, and how hard it is for us to really understand times past.