Lord Walsingham’s servants found him in bed one morning in 1831, burnt to a crisp. . . . His wife also suffered a tragic end: Jumping out of the window to escape the fire, she tumbled to her death.The metaphorical danger was less gruesome but perhaps more interesting. Moralists distrusted reading in bed and regularly preached against it:
The Family Monitor assigned Lord Walsingham a trendy death. He must have fallen asleep reading in bed, its editors concluded, a notorious practice that was practically synonymous with death-by-fire because it required candles. The incident became a cautionary tale. Readers were urged not to tempt God by sporting with “the most awful danger and calamity”—the flagrant vice of bringing a book to bed. Instead, they were instructed to close the day “in prayer, to be preserved from bodily danger and evil.” The editorial takes reading in bed for a moral failing, a common view of the period.
People feared that solitary reading and sleeping fostered a private, fantasy life that would threaten the collective—especially among women. The solitary sleeper falls asleep at night absorbed in fantasies of another world, a place she only knows from books. During the day, the lure of imaginative fiction might draw a woman under the covers to read, compromising her social obligations.Who knew what a woman alone in bed with a book might be thinking or doing?
As Mavrody explains, this connects to a whole range of social and cultural changes: the spread of literacy and cheaply printed books, the rise of the novel, architectural changes that made the bedchamber a more private place, and the Romantic fascination with the imagination, especially the imagination of one person alone.