I’m on vacation with 23 of Jeff’s relatives in a 5-bedroom beach house, and daytime is fun but nobody’s sleep is going especially smoothly.
Even in crowded situations, modern families are likely to use separate air mattresses and the like, while in the past communal sleeping was pretty common. (And still is in some places.) When I imagine what would have seemed reasonable to me 200 years ago, I find it hard to guess how much it seemed fine to people who were used to it and how much it was actively unpleasant.
Group beds made economic sense — fabric and mattreses were more expensive, and houses were smaller, so fewer larger beds were more efficient than each person having their own. With no central heating, sharing warmth would often have been a plus.
Travelers shared beds into the 19th century. The Great Bed of Ware was a 16th century tourist attraction at an English inn. It’s 10 feet by 11 feet and could supposedly hold 4 couples.
John Adams and Ben Franklin once shared a bed in an inn and argued about whether it was healthier to have the window open or shut. Adams recalled that Franklin won out but still “began a harangue upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration. I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together.”
In the children’s song “She’ll be coming round the mountain,” one of the verses is “She’ll have to sleep with Grandma when she comes.” It’s hard to imagine anybody now putting any kind of a visitor in bed with their grandma.
Even after it stopped being common to share beds with strangers, novels and memoirs describe what sound to me like extremely crowded family beds.
Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes about his family getting their own one-room place in Limerick in the 1930s:
“We had a table and three chairs and a bed, which Mam said was the biggest she had ever seen. We were glad of the bed that night, worn out after nights on floors in Dublin and in Grandma’s. It didn’t matter that there were six of us in the bed . . . . Dad and Mam lay at the head of the bed, Malachy and I at the bottom, the twins wherever they could find comfort.”
In The Color of Water, James McBride describes life with his seven siblings in New York in the 1960s:
“Mommy put us to bed each night like slabs of meat, laying us out three and four to a bed, one with his head to the headboard, the next with his feet to the headboard, and so on. “Head up, toes down,” she called it as she kissed us good night and laid us out in the proper position. The moment she left the room we’d fight over who got to sleep next to the wall. “I got the inside!” I’d shout, and Richard, the brother above me and thus my superior, would shake his head and say, “No, no no. David sleeps on the inside. I have the middle. You, knucklehead, have the outside,” so all night I’d inhale David’s breath and eat Richie’s toes, and when I couldn’t stand the combination of toes and breath any longer I’d turn over and land on the cold cement floor with a clunk.”
My favorite bed-sharing scene is in Moby Dick. Ishmael stays at an inn where all the beds are spoken for but the landlord offers to let him join the bed of another renter. Ishmael is reluctant: “No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply.”
The landlord vouches for both the roommate and the bed itself:
“It’s a nice bed; Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There’s plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it’s an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldn’t do.”
(They do end up sharing — Ishmael gets over his initial prejudice toward his Pacific Islander roommate, and the scene is hilarious.)
When I think of communal sleeping, which isn’t very often, The Three Stooges always come to mind… https://c.tenor.com/QbayGd01K7oAAAAd/three-stooges-sleeping.gif
One night my family and mother-in-law shared a bedroom in a hotel near the Denver airport. One of my daughters shared a bed with her grandmother, who snored so loudly that I couldn’t sleep. I ended up making a pallet on the bathroom floor and sleeping in there (which proved to be awkward when my M-I-L came in to use the John). Meanwhile, my daughter somehow slept through the racket all night.
Have you read the book “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” by historian Roger Ekirch? It discusses this topic (among others) and is a fascinating read.
My profession involves a lot of travel and doesn’t pay very much, so it’s common for us to share beds in hotel rooms with co-workers we don’t know all that well. This has come to seem normal to me, and it’s always a bit jarring when I offer to share a bed with someone and they seem weirded out by that.
Winnie (Jeff’s grandmother) told of sleeping on a kang in China, a big stone padded platform with a fire underneath to keep it warm. Many people would sleep on it, that was normal, but if you were in the middle and got too hot you were stuck for the night.
We don’t come from much here in Asia and so sleeping together as a family is very common. I grew up with it even when we moved abroad. If it’s not frequent, it’s nice. Makes you feel “this is my family, I love them all and we’re happy to share a bed”. There is a minigame of trying to sleep as soon as possible though. If you lose, you have to try to sleep to what sounds like a party of different animals, especially during large family gatherings. Though it can be dangerous if there’s a mismatch of body type or age. My brother once pushed me into the wall while sleeping and my head bleed. To be fair, I did wet the bed a lot, haha.