So far, the twenty-first century has been characterized by what some scientists and commentators have called an epidemic of sleeplessness, one that is no more strikingly apparent than in the United States. There, in the year when Hannah Huber’s Sleep Fictions appeared, Forbes magazine reported that more than one in three US adults is deprived of sleep. As Forbes’s interest in the matter implies, the impact of this epidemic has been felt not simply by ordinary people suffering from disrupted sleep patterns, in part no doubt because of their reliance on or addiction to smartphones, but by companies and corporations, the profits of which are necessarily susceptible to the fluctuating or declining productivity levels of their employees. ‘Insomnia is one of the most pressing and prevalent medical issues facing modern society,’ the North American neuroscientist Matthew Walker has recently written. And this has commercial implications as well as consequences for public health. Furthermore, the problem is itself not merely a concern to business but a business concern. “That the ‘sleep aid’ industry, encompassing prescription sleeping medications and over-the-counter sleep remedies, is worth an astonishing $30 billion a year in the US,” Walker points out, “is perhaps the only statistic one needs in order to realize how truly grave the problem is.” These days, everyone is implicated in the economy of sleep and sleeplessness. In the timely Conclusion to Sleep Fictions: Rest and Its Deprivations in Progressive-Era Literature, Hannah L. Huber notes both that “wakefulness-prolonging drugs” have recently been peddled at working-class Americans and that “neurological and nervous system stimulants” have been readily consumed by students and Silicon Valley executives hoping “to excel in academic and corporate settings” (160).

At the turn of the twentieth century, too, there was panic about disrupted sleep patterns in the US. The germs of the current epidemic, so to speak, lie in the late nineteenth century, when rapidly increasing processes of industrialization and urbanization, and the acceleration of technologies such as the electric light and the telegraph, created social conditions that were popularly understood to be detrimental to the sort of sleep simplistically associated with more settled rural societies. Thus newspapers in the US ascribed the cause of a series of suicides in the final decade of the nineteenth century to insomnia. In June 1896, for example, the New York Times reported that J. H. Terrell, chief engineer of the steamship Yorktown, owned by the Old Dominion Steamship Company, killed himself “by cutting his throat with a razor”: “He was a victim of insomnia, and when seen by officials of the line several days ago he said that his nerves had been completely unstrung by loss of sleep.” And in June 1898, under the heading “Found Sleep of Death: Richard T. Fussell Driven to Suicide by Insomnia,” the Washington Post carried the story of a “well-known and highly esteemed business man” who had gassed himself in a hotel room. “It was learned that he has been a great sufferer from insomnia,” the reporter noted, “and this had undermined his health and broken down his nervous system.” He added that Fussell “had been frequently known to sit up all night, reading or killing time in other ways, in a vain endeavour to induce slumber.” Here were the makings of a moral panic. Killing time like this was killing people. Huber draws attention in her Introduction to the numerous late-nineteenth-century scientific studies of “exhaustion-induced sleep phenomena, including somnambulism and neurasthenia” (7).

In her timely but scrupulously researched book on “the turn of the century obsession with wakefulness” (4), Huber analyses the response of various writers both to an acutely restive cultural environment and to the chronically restless subject it shaped. In the writings of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Charles Chesnutt, she identifies characters whose sense of self is vitiated by their conscious or unconscious battle with the conditions of modernity; characters for whom “sleep is no solace” because what she calls “respite in the bedroom” – that supposedly private space which is in fact intensely vulnerable to the ongoing transformations of public space – “is impeded by artificial light, traffic commotion, and the social pressures of round-the-clock activity” (5). Huber is conscious that, mainly because of these factors, sleeplessness afflicted people across class divides. But the significance of her monograph lies in her claim that, in the judiciously selected narratives on which she focuses, “marginalized figures are the most vulnerable” since “they are constantly compelled by the cultural clock and stress over their bodily limitations within an increasingly mechanized world” (5). In her Introduction, which opens with a perceptive reading of Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening (1899), Huber skilfully sketches the ways in which – exacerbated by the sexist and racist biases of the medical discourse of this time – “sleep disparities result from the bodily impact of class-, race-, and gender-related oppression” (13).

The book’s substantive chapters centre on close readings of Roderick Hudson (1875), The House of Mirth (1905), Gilman’s self-published journal the Forerunner (1909–16) and, most originally, in chapter 2, Chesnutt’s “Uncle Julius” tales (1887–1900), which she convincingly claims disrupt “a postwar cultural mythos linking Blackness with somnolence” (60). But Huber also engages in some distant reading. Each chapter contains a series of figures in which, deploying the tools of Google Ngram, Scalar and Voyant, she tabulates quantitative research into, for example, the frequency of words associated with sleep and sleeplessness not simply in her principal texts but also in larger repositories of contemporaneous print culture. These and other figures feature on the website to which Huber, who has curated an extremely useful digital archive of the material relevant to her research, points readers of her monograph (sleepfictions.org). There, indeed, the figures are far easier to understand than they are on the printed page, where those such as myself who are relatively unfamiliar with the theories and practices of the digital humanities might find them difficult to decipher. Huber is, it seems, a generous scholar as well as a sensitive reader of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prose fiction, and the combined material and virtual components of this research project will interest cultural historians as well as students of Progressive Era literature. Those curious to identify a genealogy for our current “obsession with wakefulness” will also be richly rewarded.