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half filled with whale oil of the worst quality that could possibly be procured, supplied with bits of cotton twist for wick and enclosed in globes of semi-opaque glass ... and served to shed a faint glimmer of light, or rather to make the darkness visible at street corners and crossings from sundown to midnight, when they were religiously extinguished, if they had not in the meantime rendered this duty unnecessary by extinguishing themselves.
    The lamplighters, who by then were employed to tend the lamps, were, according to Sidney, "greasy clodhopping fellows.... A distinguishing characteristic of these lamplighters was that of invariably spilling the oil upon the heads of those who passed them while they stood upon their ladders, and occasionally breaking a head by dropping a globe." The French writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier likewise complained about the lamplighters of Paris: "Another thing; they might as well keep some sort of watch on the lamplighters. These fill the lamps, as they call it, nightly; actually they allow so little oil that by nine or ten o'clock half are already out; only an occasional and distant glimmer reminds you of how the streets should look."
    Officials in a few cities believed that streetlights actually abetted criminals. Yi-Fu Tuan notes, "Cautious citizens in Birmingham did not want to experiment with new lighting; they believed the crime rate in their city was lower than London's because their city was so dark." Likewise, officials in Cologne believed "that as the fear of darkness vanished, drunkenness and depravity would increase." They argued further that if street lighting became common, festive and ceremonial lighting would lose some of its wonder. But in most major cities, those in charge thought otherwise and attempted to light as many streets as possible, for if light was the mark of authority, dark neighborhoods would be uncontrollable, full of troublemakers who'd been chased away from well-lit streets. For this reason, the widespread practice of lantern smashing was punishable by imprisonment or worse: "In Vienna in 1688, authorities threatened to cut off the right hand of anyone caught damaging a street lantern."
    Lights and more lights had unintended consequences, and it isn't always easy to distinguish the ways that they helped from the ways that they hindered. Under the lanterns, the streets grew rowdier. Frequenters of taverns didn't have to sit on the same stool all night; they could now make their merry way more easily from the Crown and Anchor to the White Horse and then to the Black Crow. And the pools of light interspersed with shadows were a great help to prostitutes, who in the Middle Ages had been largely confined to brothels and bathhouses. They now stood under the streetlamps to entice their customers, then quickly withdrew into the shadows for their assignations.
    The night, always silent of the hawkers' cries for apples, cabbages, herring, and mutton that sounded through the day, was now filled with the calls of torchbearers—known as linkmen or linkboys, for the "links," or torches, they carried. They roved
the streets after ten at night, crying, "Here's your light." After supper is the best time for this cry, and these fellows go calling and answering one another, all night long, to the great prejudice of those whose bedrooms face on the street; they are to be found in clusters at the door of any house of entertainment.... The man lights you to your door, to your bedroom—if seven flights up, no matter—and this aid is of value when perhaps you keep no servant ... a plight not rare among smart young men, most of whose money goes in coats and theatre tickets. These wandering lights are a protection, besides, against thieves; and are in themselves almost as good as a squad of watchmen.... They are, in fact, hand in glove with the police; nothing is hid from them.... They go to bed at dawn, and make their report to the police later in the day.
    Though