After Dark

ENGLISH NIGHTLIFE (150 pp.)--Thomas Burke--Scribner ($3.50).

During London's 1941 blackout, when going out or staying home was more perilous than it had ever been before, Thomas Burke set out to write a history of what Londoners have done to kill time after dark for the past 600 years. Burke, who died in 1945, had been encouraged by the fact that even in London of the blitz "the Won't-Go-Home-Till-Morning spirit was never extinguished."

In earlier times, it was a spirit that terrified decent citizens. Beating up the night watch was for centuries an accepted sport. Breaking windows and starting brawls for the fun of it was standard fun for young men of good family. Up to the first years of the 19th Century, wrote Burke, "the Prince [later George IV] was an example of the men of his time; gamesters, drunkards, haunters of the lowest dens, careering about the streets at midnight . . . and having with it all a number of accomplishments, informed minds, sound scholarship, and taste in literature."

By the 16th Century, gambling dens and houses of assignation were flourishing. Some of them, "as in Mayfair today," were luxurious places that featured excellent free dinners. The fancy houses offered "refreshment of a special kind with a view to its effect--as stewed prunes . . . oyster pies; muscadine; raw eggs; wine with a sprig of bugloss." For those who could not afford the "stewed-prune" houses, there were "strolling damsels."

The Learned Coal Man. For entertainment of another kind, London music lovers in 1678 went to a small room above a coal shop in Jerusalem Passage. There, every Thursday night for 40 years, Thomas Britton, "the Musical Small-Coal Man," gave the capital's best concerts. He hawked coal by day in the streets, once a week saw his loft "filled with rank and fashion; every distinguished foreigner who came to London was treated to one of Thomas Britton's concerts . . . scholars, famous musicians and dilettanti were glad to sit with him and enjoy the taste and learning displayed in his talk." One Thursday night, a kidding ventriloquist told Britton to "prepare to meet his God." Britton, a strong believer in spirits, died two days later.

London's 18th Century "bored and witless fashionables" delighted in the lectures of a quack named "Doctor" Graham. For his lecture on The Female, Graham used a half-clad model called the Goddess of Health (she was the beauty who became Lady Hamilton). For another, on Earth-Bathing, he sat naked in a pit of earth while explaining how much better it made his skin and blood feel. The big feature was the Celestial Bed, which would "rectify such physical impediments as impotence and sterility." To use it for a night, with unascertained results, a childless duke paid Graham a fee of 500 guineas ($2,555).

The theater, during the early 19th Century, took orders from the audience, and "bad acting, like bad singing at La Scala, Milan, was punished on the spot with hoots and hisses, often with apples, oranges and sticks. Sometimes . . . the manager would bring the offender forward, and he would humbly apologize and promise to do better next time." When famed Theater Manager John Philip Kemble raised his prices at the new Covent Garden, rioting theatergoers forced Kemble to restore the old prices. Actor Macready had to apologize for appearing in a part that did not suit him.

Author Burke traces briefly the history of clubs, dining out, music halls, other popular and sometimes transient pastimes ("For a small fee you could be fastened by the neck in the pillory and be kissed in that position by one of the girl attendants"), and comes down hard on today's substitutes. Writing of the early 20th Century movies, he observes that "the cinematograph was then in its infancy. It has stayed there ever since." He bitterly regrets the day "the male and female crooner, or moaner, began to trouble the night air. . . . 'Craziness' in entertainment . . . is still the general note today. Nothing must mean anything--a reflection, no doubt, of the general life of this age. Bat's wings, bat's eyes, and bat's brains."

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