Bright Lights and Late Nights in Nineteenth-Century Budapest

• In Event: Discourses of Liberation in Hungarian Nightlife, Popular Entertainment, and Mass Media, 1800-1940s

Abstract

Like many other emerging metropolises, Budapest in the 1800s was seen as a place where one could – and should – stay up late. The all-night drinking spree, the coffeehouses that never closed, and the lax morals of this nocturnal world all became familiar journalistic and literary topics. This paper will look at some of the often overlooked developments that helped create this nightlife, including the introduction of street lighting, the end to required closing times for coffeehouses, and the expansion of nighttime trams. While some contemporaries found this “conquest of the night” liberating, many others worried about the effects of these changes on the wider urban population and proposed measures to limit the harm they could do.

Author

• Robert Nemes, Colgate U