Not my specific area of expertise, but I do study depictions of sensory stimuli in various time periods. There are clear parallels in the ways people experienced sonic, visual, and even olfactory changes to their environment during the industrial revolution. You may find your answer in the ways people discussed these changes in their own country or urban setting OR in the ways travelers who became desensitized to the change experienced the absence of these sensory stimuli while in a country that hadn’t modernized completely.

I’m sure there are depictions of areas that had much less light than others. You might check out the book “Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination” edited by Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty, and Dietrich Neumann. There’s a great quote in the opening chapter on the city of Istanbul (chapter by Ipek Türeli), it’s not the area you are interested in, but it might help to describe how people who were experiencing sensory changes, like the addition of gas lamps (which required new occupations like lamplighters), experienced the world after the technology was introduced. The author quotes an English architect and traveler to the city of Istanbul in the 1830s, a time by which most of London would have been illuminated by gas lamps or would have been in the process of constructing them. The architect, Thomas Allom, calls Istanbul “the darkest city in Europe” and describes the city in the following way:

“...no lamps to illuminate the city at night; no shops blazing with the glare of gas; no companies flocking to or from balls; or parties or public assemblies, of any kind, thronging the streets after nightfall, and making them as popular as noonday... at sunset all the shops are shut up, and their owners hurry to their respective residences; and when the evening closes in, the streets are dark and silent as the grave.”

Clearly there are political motivations in this statement, architects were among the most outspoken voices in pushing for social changes in the built environment. His preference for the “civilized” world of England comes across in his mention of the absence of balls and other social activities that had become more common through the development of the technology. That’s not to say those events didn’t happen at night, candles have been around for a long long time, but the frequency in which they occurred was likely affected by the lack of steady illumination. You also have to couch his statement by considering how much insider knowledge he might have had about the city of Istanbul. A local perspective would give a more accurate depiction of how people really interacted with one another as the sun went down, but is often more difficult to locate.

All this to say, people likely conducted business and held parties and stayed up late in major urban areas before the invention of the gas lamp, but the frequency in which large portions of the population were doing this was likely much lower pre-lamps.