My 19th-century “blogger” is today displaying a fine sceptical mind on the claim that a sign of “great men” is their ability to sleep under even massive pressure. (Her Victorian male editor, however, has swallowed the myth wholesale, in his gushing collection of notes.)
Miss Williams Wynn discusses the tales of Pitt (the Younger, I think) and the Duke of Wellington apparently being able to fall asleep under the greatest of pressures. She says:
This is called a proof of greatness of mind. I am more inclined to believe that youth, health, and fatigue produce a sort of absolute necessity for sleep, which no mental excitation can remove; and I am confirmed in this opinion by hearing that, in his after days, and especially in his last illness, poor Pitt never could sleep. The Duke of Wellington is always brought forward as the most extraordinary instance of a person who, under the most violent excitations of his eventful career, could always, and at all hours of the day or night, get sleep during any repose, however short it might be, that circumstances allowed. Perhaps great bodily fatigue enabled him to find ‘ tired Nature’s sweet restorer.’ I wonder whether he is a good sleeper now.
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