Bad planning or to save on electricity? They probably took a candle to bed anyway, you could blow those out without stepping out onto the cold floor. My uncle Sam was such a miser. He used his supply as little as possible. We lived a few doors down the terrace, and he complained like billioh when the street's clockwork coal gas-light right outside his bedroom window got removed back in the mid sixties and replaced with a modern sodium lamp standard 100 yards up the road!
Sam d. 1972 aged 90. Strangest cause of death ever? Intoxicated by a now banned patent stomach-medicine he was hooked on that contained morphine, he fell down the stairs in the dark and drowned in the guzzundah.
Here's the very stuff!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorodyne 
