Cross-text multiple matching

Cross-text multiple matching

You are going to read four extracts from reviews of a popular history book about sleep. For questions 1-4, choose from the reviewers A-D. The reviewers may be chosen more than once.

A

Tobias Wren’s The Broken Night sets out to persuade us that our ancestors routinely slept in two shifts, rising around midnight to pray, talk or tend the fire before returning to bed. Readers of social history will have met this claim before; Wren dresses it up handsomely but adds little that is new. More troubling is his handling of sources. A handful of diary entries and a couple of court records are made to carry an argument about whole centuries, and counter-examples are quietly left out. That said, Wren writes beautifully: his sentences are clean, unhurried and often very funny, and the book is a pleasure to read in a single sitting. And for anyone lying awake at three in the morning, there is real comfort in learning that waking in the night may be less a disorder than an inheritance. Few self-help manuals manage to be as genuinely soothing.

B

The notion of ‘segmented sleep’ is hardly news to historians, and Wren is candid that he is building on earlier scholarship rather than overturning it. Where he excels is in the archive. He has worked through hundreds of letters, medical manuals and parish records, and the cumulative weight of this material is hard to resist; when he does generalise, he has earned the right to. I was less taken with the prose. Wren cannot resist a digression, and chapters that begin with candle-making in Norfolk wander off into folk remedies and nursery rhymes before finding their way back, if they do at all. Readers hoping the book will cure their insomnia should look elsewhere. Wren is a historian, not a doctor, and he is careful, perhaps too careful, to offer no advice beyond the observation that worrying about sleep rarely improves it.

C

Every so often a book makes you see something utterly familiar as strange, and The Broken Night is one of them. Wren’s claim that unbroken sleep is a recent invention, a by-product of artificial light and factory hours, struck me as genuinely original, and I suspect it will reshape the field. He supports it with an impressive range of evidence, from ballads to legal testimony, and he is scrupulous about where it runs out. My reservation concerns the manner rather than the matter. Wren’s whimsy, charming at first, becomes wearing: every chapter seems to need its anecdote about a sleepwalking vicar, and the argument is often buried beneath them. Nor should anyone expect practical help. The book diagnoses a modern anxiety brilliantly but leaves the anxious reader with nothing much to do about it.

D

Wren’s central thesis, that pre-industrial people commonly woke for an hour or so in the middle of the night, has circulated in academic circles for decades, and it has long since found its way into popular magazines; anyone expecting a revelation will be disappointed. Nor is the case as solid as Wren believes. Too much rests on a few vivid sources, which are quoted at length while awkward evidence from other regions is passed over in silence. Yet it would be churlish to deny the book’s pleasures. Wren is a disciplined, lucid stylist who never lets an anecdote outstay its welcome. Whether the book offers anything to the sleepless is another matter. Knowing that a seventeenth-century farmer also lay awake at two in the morning is interesting, but it is unlikely to get anyone back to sleep.

1. Which reviewer has a different view from the others on how original the book’s central argument is?

2. Which reviewer shares A’s opinion of the way Wren uses historical evidence?

3. Which reviewer has a similar view to C about the way the book is written?

4. Which reviewer takes a different view from the others on whether the book will help people who have trouble sleeping?