At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime - Hardcover

'...there are so many good stories here which do not usually find themselves between the same covers...Ekirch has compiled in a great tradition.' (Jonathan Mirsky LITERARY REVIEW (June 2005) )

'Ekirch's profound understanding of the period provides such enlightening details...this engrossing book illuminate[s] the darker recesses of the past.' (Philip Hoare SUNDAY TELEGRAPH (19.6.05) )

'[a] comprehensive acount of nightlife in Britain, Europe and America before the advent of bright artificial light, bursting with esoteric and well-sourced information about everything from candles and curfews to church bells and chamber pots...[an] extraordinary book.' (Johnathan Ree EVENING STANDARD (20.6.05) )

'His book reads like a huge card-index of nocturnal thoughts and incidents , gathered from 20 years of combing through court records, diaries, meditations and travellers' accounts from all over Europe and colonial America. To an extent it is a record of human helplessness and ignorance - a world well lost.' (John Carey SUNDAY TIMES (26.6.05) )

'a triumph of social history. Almost every page contains something to surprise the reader...the great achievement of At Day's Close is precisely its invasion of privacy: it shines a torch through the curtains of our ancestors and gives us a glimpse of them at their most vulnerable. Watching them blink back is one fo the most enjoyable literary experiences of the year.' (Damian Thompson MAIL ON SUNDAY (10.7.05) )

'the book is especially engaging on the social significance of the night, the moral meanings projected into the dark.' (Brian Dillon FINANCIAL TIMES ((16.7.05) )

'an absorbing social history of nighttime in pre-industrial society from the Balkans to the British colonies of North America...a wonderful revelation of a vanished age of darkness.' (Raymond Carr SPECTATOR (23.7.05) )

'Ekirch's command of his material is impressive as he raids chapbooks and sermons, poems, plays and fables for reference to the night. It is truly a labour of love.' (Ian Pindar GUARDIAN (30.7.05) )

'a charming teller of vivid tales - and now, as then, it's the sex and violence that really fascinates...An intriguing account of fear, mishief and bad behaviour.' (Paul Fairclough TIME OUT (10-17 August) )

'entertaining and scholarly...At Day's Close is a splendid book...great entertainment, and to social historians it will be of immense value.' (THES (7.10.05) )

AT DAY'S CLOSE charts a fresh realm of Western culture, nocturnal life from the late medieval period to the Industrial revolution. The book focuses on the cadences of daily life, investigating nighttime in its own right and resurrecting a rich and complex universe in which persons passed nearly half of their lives - a world, long-lost to historians, of blanket fairs, night freaks, and curtain lectures, of sun-suckers, moon-cursers and night-kings. It is not only the vocabulary that has disappeared., AT DAY'S CLOSE will restitute many facts which have been either lost or forgotten (for example, that our ancestral sleepers slept in two phases during the night with an active waking period in-between). It is a significant and newsorthy contribution to social history, filled with substantial research, stories and new discoveries. Ekirch uses a wide range of sources to reconstruct how the night was lived in the past : travel accounts, memoirs, letters, poems, plays, court records, coroner's reports, depositions and laws dealing with curfews, crime and lighting. He has analysed working-class autobiographies, proverbs, nursery rhymes, ballads and sermons, and folklore, as well as consulting medical, psychological and anthropological papers. The result is a truly fascinating overview of an unknown slice of history.