tfw you’re a young woman in the mid-nineteenth century who’s causing your parents consternation due to how many wax candles you burn so you can read in bed after dark, an expensive and dangerous activity associated with frivolous literature widely read by youth, ladies, and the lower classes, and commonly believed to cause ill health of various kinds
how is it an expensive activity and yet associated with the lower classes? Try again
just joking that was a lukewarm take I’m sorry everyone
1. wax candles weren’t only one thing that would have been used to do this–rushlights and tallow candles (though these latter gave off more smoke & poorer light) were cheaper & more commonly used by the lower classes
2. accounts of unpleasant physical symptoms associated with reading in bed (dandruff??) and writing about what a terrible habit it was arguably had less to do with the actual expense or danger of reading in bed (deaths caused by fire resulting from this were in fact quite rare) than with a sort of moral panic. this panic was tied into the belief that women & the (newly literate) lower classes couldn’t be trusted to read without being supervised, lest they confuse romance and reality, be corrupted by the “wrong” kind of literature, or read without proper moral perception. this coincided with a) an increase in privacy for some aka the wealthy, with people sharing beds less often, and b) (as far as we can tell) a relative increase in reading as a solitary activity, as opposed to what it had been in the 18th century–a communal activity where e.g. the father in a household would read select religious & secular literature to assembled family & servants. so the newfound ability of a woman to be alone in bed while reading potentially racy literature is….. well you see where that’s going.
thus the conversation about (as one writer for Punch put it) the “deleterious practice, so common with young ladies, of reading trash in bed” is (as that quote suggests) more about who reads what, how they read it, whether they should be allowed to read those things in that way, etc., than about the actual physical action of reading in bed
