Thackeray, in his novel of “The Virginians,” has some very apposite remarks upon the limited state of illumination in which our ancestors were content to dwell.  “In speaking of the past,” he writes, “I think the night-life of society a hundred years since was rather a dark life.  There was not one wax-candle for ten which we now see in a ladies’ drawing-room:  let alone gas and the wondrous new illuminations of clubs.  Horrible guttering tallow smoked and stunk in passages.  The candle-snuffer was a notorious officer in the theatre.  See Hogarth’s pictures:  how dark they are, and how his feasts are, as it were, begrimed with tallow!  In ‘Mariage a la Mode,’ in Lord Viscount Squanderfield’s grand saloons, where he and his wife are sitting yawning before the horror-stricken steward when their party is over, there are but eight candles—­one on each table and half-a-dozen in a brass chandelier.  If Jack Briefless convoked his friends to oysters and beer in his chambers, Pump Court, he would have twice as many.  Let us comfort ourselves by thinking that Louis Quatorze in all his glory held his revels in the dark, and bless Mr. Price and other Luciferous benefactors of mankind for abolishing the abominable mutton of our youth.”

The first gas-lamp appeared in London in the year 1809, Pall Mall being the first and for some years the only street so illuminated.  Gradually, however, the new mode of lighting made way, and stole from the streets into manufactories and public buildings, and, finally, into private houses.  The progress was not very rapid however; for we find that gas was not introduced into the Mall of St. James’s Park until the year 1822.  It is difficult to fix the exact date when gas foot-lights appeared upon the stage.  But in the year 1828 an explosion took place in Covent Garden Theatre by which two men lost their lives.  Great alarm was excited.  The public were afraid to re-enter the theatre.  The management published an address in which it was stated that the gas-fittings would be entirely removed from the interior of the house, and safer methods of illumination resorted to.  In order to effect the necessary alterations the theatre was closed for a fortnight, during which the Covent Garden company appeared at the English Opera House, or Lyceum Theatre, and an address was issued on behalf of the widows of the men who had been killed by the explosion.  In due time, however, the world grew bolder on the subject, and gas reappeared upon the scene.  Some theatres, however (being probably restricted by the conditions of their leases), were very tardy in adopting the new system of lighting.  Mr. Benjamin Webster, in his speech in the year 1853, upon his resigning the management of the Haymarket Theatre after a tenancy of fifteen years, mentions, among the improvements he had originated during that period, that he had “introduced gas for the fee of L500 a-year, and the presentation of the centre chandelier to the proprietors.”