Modern media has a tendency to portray pre-electrified rooms in a fashion much brighter than a contemporary person living at that time would have experienced while moving about in them. Indeed, by modern standards, the average dining room or ballroom of the 18th century would have been vastly underlit, especially if one applied the illumination of that period to the relatively spartan décor of today. The designers therefore employed a sleight of hand when creating their rooms: almost every surface was reflective in order to amplify the light.

The first recognisable chandeliers appeared sometime during the early reign of Louis XIV and were, themselves, an evolution of the candelabra, a type of portable candlestick that contained several arms (typically six) versus a standard chamberstick consisting of a single light that would have been used by an individual in a private setting, such as reading, going to the bathroom or other nocturnal activities that require a source of light. They were also technologically different from earlier large hanging light fixtures by virtue of the intensity of light they gave off, thereby making a cohesive plan for lighting a room possible. These early chandeliers were invariably made of parcel gilt wood and ormolu or, in the case of the Sun King himself, out of sterling or gilt silver in order to better amplify illumination in the room. This light would have then bounced off several other reflective surfaces such as sterling silver flatware and hollowware -- itself an improvement upon the earlier and less reflective pewter of a generation prior -- brass fixtures, gilt ornament and any other object that could scatter the light. What modern eyes therefore view as a riot of rococo excess, an explosion of gold and silver detailing on walls, would have been far more muted when experienced in person under candlelight. In some cases, guests arriving at night could not be expected to make out paintings at all.

Jules Hardouin Mansart, the court architect to Louis XIV, ran into this precise problem when he was charged with displaying a set of massive tributary and allegorical paintings of Louis XIV in the Grande Galerie of the Palace of Versailles. These paintings, created by the Sun King’s favourite painter Charles Le Brun, could not be seen by arriving guests and Mansart was charged with undertaking this technical challenge. The issue of light soon began to plague Mansart as he struggled with the challenge of illuminating the ceiling of a cavernous room: after lowering the ceiling twice (it is about two yards shorter than the actual roofline) and blowing out the windows to three times their original size in order to let in sunshine and starlight, the paintings could still not be seen in detail by observers below. Mansart’s final innovation, an extraordinarily costly wall of mirrored windows set perpendicularly to a concave roof vault, did the trick and made the Grande Galerie into one of the most famous rooms of all time. When Louis XIV first launched his fete to inaugurate the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, he spent nearly 117,000 livres on the party – a third of the annual cost of running the vast chateau – and spectators were awed by how bright the room was, an effect compounded by the king’s use of fireworks outside. Indeed, the room is quite literally more vivid at night when fully illuminated by candles than it is during the day when its details are lit by modern LED lighting, as can be seen from this picture from the Hall of Mirrors' 2007 renovation. (While the thought of any sort of active fire in the Hall of Mirrors would undoubtedly make a docent scream, the modern lights are made of historically accurate wax and designed to approximate the effect of being lit by candle.) In short, not only was light expensive, it could also be dazzling in every sense of the word, a demonstration of the host’s taste, power and refinement. Candles were, relatively speaking, cheap. But the other accoutrements required to really make a room shine were not.

By the mid-19th century, chandeliers were composed of two forms: the solid metal chandelier and the lead crystal chandelier. The latter was naturally brighter by virtue of its thousands of delicate pieces, called pendants, made from lead crystal and then faceted in order to increase the scattering of light in the room. The fashion for these lead crystal sconces and chandeliers reached their height in the late Victorian era – the cultural trope of the French chambermaid and her featherduster comes from the Victorian propensity for dusting everything – but the cleaning process for both is relatively straightforward. Household staff would clear the room of furniture and lower the chandelier via an internal pulley system in the wall onto a drop cloth lain down on the floor of the room for disassembly. The individual pieces would be marked, boiled in batches in order to remove any errant wax and washed in soap and water. They were then put together using cotton gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints.

In most cases, the wax was less of a problem than you’d think as long as the candle stood upright in its nozzle. In this case, a little bit of wax was actually welcome. Footmen or maids would insert a small piece of sticky material, typically beeswax comb, onto the bottom of nozzles in order to allow the candle to stand perfectly upright. During the course of an evening, the candle wax would empty out into the drip tray, which would have to be removed and boiled every few days in order to accommodate wax buildup. In some brass chandeliers, especially those used in commercial or industrial settings, the drip tray could be quite large in order to accommodate a bigger candle and to clean them less often.

Servants would often replace a candle before it became a sticky mess for this reason. They obviously could not do it during an event, but illuminatory candles generally had some staying power. British East India Company employees experiencing culture shock are a good source of material about burning times. In Europe, the best wax candles burnt for somewhere in between four to five hours. The average Indian candle could burn for upwards of ten and were allegedly imported to Britain in enormous quantities prior to shifting some production back to the metropole. At any rate, the candles and wax never went to waste.

Senior household staff were generally expected to have their pick of remaining (but used) candles for their own personal use. Leftover wax in drip trays, especially if the candles were made of beeswax, were popular items for polishing furniture and floors. Wax, especially the paraffin wax candle patented by James Young in 1856, could be resold due to the petroleum-based nature of these products, but more often than not wax that couldn’t be used domestically was simply dumped along with other refuse in the cesspools. In Georgian London, these were cleared of their “night soil” every four to eight months by workers. This is where most of the remaining wax ended up.

Sources

Picon, Guillaume. “Versailles: A Private Introduction”. Rizzoli, Paris. 2011.

Jaffer, Amin. ”Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum.” Victoria and Albert. London, 2001.

edit: grammar and repetition

ETA: Thank you for the award! Everything on here was so fun to read.