Sleep: A Revisionist Perspective

by Liberty and Power

I strongly recommend Jo Revill's essay on sleep, in which she discusses Jim Horne's new book, Sleepfaring: The Secrets and Science of a Good Night's Sleep (Oxford University Press) at some length. I found her account very interesting, not least for fascinating insights into how people slept in past times.

"Throughout the ages, humans have regulated their sleep according to their working lives. Five centuries ago Britons enjoyed something known as 'fyrste slepe', an early evening nap. Supper usually followed, then a period of prayer or talking. People would then stay awake until the early hours of the morning, then had a five to six-hour sleep.

"'It seems to me that a night of between seven and eight hours' sleep is a fairly modern western development, which is clearly linked to industrialisation,' said Horne. 'Human beings are very adaptable, and we should keep that in mind because we tend to think of these hours as sacrosanct, when in fact we are far more flexible than we like to think.'"

"The phrase 'hangover' does not come from some alcohol-related source but from the bedtime tradition in Victorian workhouses. Workers lined up along a bench and a rope was tied from one end to the other, allowing them to sleep by draping their arms over the rope which they 'hung over' as it supported them."

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Andrew D. Todd - 4/13/2006

About "Hang-Over's":

I have in front of me an edition of Gustave Dore's illustrations (Gabriele Forberr, _Gustave Dore: Das Graphische Werk_, Rogner & Bernhard, Munich, 1975) which includes the illustrated plates from Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold, _London: A Pilgrimage_, 1872. There are a lot of pictures of beggars sleeping sitting in park benches when they can find them, or else sitting on the ground with their backs against walls. There is a picture of a ward in what I think would be a homeless shelter (the editor uses the German term, 'Nachtasyl'). This might be a step up from a "workhouse," which is technically something different. The men are sleeping on slanted wooden platforms, say twenty or thirty feet long, six feet deep, about a foot off the floor at the aisle, and two feet off the floor at the back wall. An earnest sort of clergyman is standing in the aisle, reading the bible. In another illustration, the overseer is superintending a compulsory bath.

I understand from another source that such benches as those in the homeless shelter are useful for drunks. You put the drunk face-down, with his head at the low end, so that he cannot strangle on his own vomit.

There is a picture of a "Coffeehouse in Whitechapel," a cellar filled with booths, and a couple of policemen moving phalanxlike down the aisle. Finally, Dore provides a picture of a children's hospital, which at the time would have catered only to the desperately poor. However, there is a little bed, or crib, for each child, and there seems to be a recognizable "Nightingale Nurse" running the ward (*).

(*) Florence Nightingale was a great organizer, and set up all the institutions behind modern professional nursing.

I have run across a reference to a "hang-over," but in a quite different context.It seems to be associated with sailors on a spree. I suspect that, to someone who had learned to hang onto a rope while swinging back and forth a hundred feet above the deck of a ship in the wild weather of the Southern Ocean (Cape of Good Hope, Cape Horn), a rope in a cellar would be second nature, something he could do even when dead drunk.

http://www.csit.fsu.edu/~burkardt/fun/wordplay/weird_words.html

William Marina - 4/9/2006

That's why the "siesta" was invented!
I used to have fun pointing out to my female students that studies show that men sleep about an hour less than women per night. Add these hours together over a lifetime, and men "live" as long as
women, if by that one means hours awake.
The feminists were appalled by such reasoning!