Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/cambridge-university-press-publishing-update-following-technical-disruption
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
‘It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale.’ I This line from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit encapsulates the common view that the nineteenth-century Sabbath was a tedious, gloomy and tiresome institution that embodied the full weight of Victorian Britain’s old-fashioned, sombre and somewhat hypocritical evangelical piety. Taking such contemporary portrayals at face value, historian John Wigley, whose thirty-year-old monograph remains the only full treatment of the subject, depicted the Victorian Sabbath as ‘a day which had a funereal character, notorious for its symbols – the hushed voice, the half-drawn blind and the best clothes’. Sabbatarianism, he argued, ‘appeared to consist of a perverse reluctance to enjoy oneself on Sundays and a determination to stop other people enjoying themselves too’.
1 Harrison, J. F. C., Late Victorian Britain, 1875–1901 (Abingdon, 2000), esp. 113–14.Google Scholar
2 Wigley, John, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester, 1980), 185 Google Scholar. For other aspects of the Victorian Sabbath debates, see Harrison, Brian, ‘The Sunday Trading Riots of 1855’, HistJ 8 (1965), 219–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Religion and Recreation in Nineteenth-Century England’, P&P, no. 38 (1967), 98–125 Google Scholar; Ellis, George M., ‘The Evangelicals and the Sunday Question’ (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1952)Google Scholar; Rennie, Ian, ‘Evangelicalism and English Public Life, 1823–50’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1962), 211–34.Google Scholar
3 Wigley, , Rise and Fall, 2–3.Google Scholar
4 Rosman, Doreen, Evangelicals and Culture (London, 1984), 111 Google Scholar; Atherstone, Andrew, ‘The Undergraduate Diary of Francis Chavasse’, in Smith, Mark and Taylor, Stephen, eds, Evangelicalism in the Church of England, c.1790 - c.1900 (Woodbridge, 2004), 109–282, at 135–6.Google Scholar
5 Sizer, Susan S., Gospel Hymns and Social Religion (Philadelphia, PA, 1978), 129.Google Scholar
6 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (ser. 3), vol. 113, col. 588 (31 July 1850).Google Scholar
7 For a contemporary bibliography of Sabbath literature, see Cox, Robert, The Literature of the Sabbath Question, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1865).Google Scholar
8 MacLehose, James, Memoirs and Portraits of One Hundred Glasgow Men (Glasgow, 1886), 159–60 Google Scholar, online at <http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/mlemen/index.html>, accessed 8 June 2010.
9 Henderson, John, ed., The Christian Sabbath, Considered in its Various Aspects, by Ministers of Different Denominations (Edinburgh, 1850).Google Scholar
10 Jordan, John, ‘Sabbath Essays by British Workmen’, Evangelical Christendom 4 (1850), 281–7, at 282.Google Scholar
11 Ibid. This article also contained a list of the occupations of 700 of the essayists. It found the best represented profession to be ‘that of joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers’. Of those that stated a denominational allegiance, English Independents were best represented (in essays), followed by the Church of England (76 essays) and the Scottish United Presbyterians (74 essays).
12 Jordan, , ‘Sabbath Essays’, 285 Google Scholar. Birth and death dates for the prize essayists are provided in this article where available.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Working Man’s Charter [hereafter: WMC], August 1848, 35.Google Scholar
16 Ibid. 38.
17 Younger, John, ‘The Light of the Week’, in [Quinton, John Allan, Younger, John and Farquhar, David], The Workman’s Testimony to the Sabbath (London, 1851), 77–116, at 88.Google Scholar
18 WMC, August 1848, 9.Google Scholar
19 WMC, October 1848, 69 Google Scholar; Jordan, , ‘Sabbath Essays’, 284.Google Scholar
20 Ibid.
21 A list of all published essays appears in Jordan, , ‘Sabbath Essays’, 285–7.Google Scholar
22 Coleridge, , ‘The Three Graves’, in The Poems of S.T. Coleridge, 3 vols (London, 1848), 1: 284.Google Scholar
23 Poems by Coleridge, Hartley, 2 vols (London, 1851), 2: 340.Google Scholar
24 Barton, Bernard, ‘Sabbath Days’, in Cundell, Joseph, ed., Sabbath Bells Chimed by the Poets (London, 1856), 43–4.Google Scholar
25 Jordan, John, ‘Introduction’, to [Quinton, Younger and Farquhar], Workman’s Testimony, 9–18, at 15–16.Google Scholar
26 Greet, John, ‘The Pilgrim’s Arbour on His Way to Glory’, in WMC, Supplemental Series, 245–60, at 249 Google Scholar. The monthly supplements to The Working Man’s Charter (1848–9) provided a forum for the publication of the prize essays. The supplements were issued without a volume number, but with consecutive page numbers. In the British Library, the supplements and the journals are bound together and catalogued as The Working Man’s Charter.
27 Poulet, George, ‘Timelessness and Romanticism’, JHI 15 (1954), 3–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sabbath literature exemplified the time-hauntedness, prevalent in much nineteenth-century literature, caused by the speed of Victorian social and industrial change: see Buckley, Jerome H., The Triumph of Time (Cambridge, MA, 1966), viii, 5–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 Browning, John, ‘The Universal Treasure’, WMC, Supplemental Series, 119–38, at 122.Google Scholar
29 Gittins, Florence, ‘God’s Holy Day, Not Man’s Holiday’, in Leicester Prize Essays on Sunday Amusements (Leicester, 1857), 11 Google Scholar. Each essay in this volume is paginated separately.
30 Maxwell, David, ‘Labour’s Great Charter’, WMC, Supplemental Series, 67–84, at 72.Google Scholar
31 Cunliffe, Keith, ‘Recollection and Recovery: Coleridge’s Platonism’, in Baldwin, Anna and Hutton, Sarah, eds, Platonism and the English Imagination (Cambridge, 1994), 207–16, at 214–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
32 Quinton, John Allan, ‘Heaven’s Antidote to the Curse of Labour’, in Workman’s Testimony, 19–78, at 74.Google Scholar
33 Younger, , ‘Light of the Week’, 91.Google Scholar
34 Farquhar, David, ‘The Torch of Time’, in Workman’s Testimony, 125–76, at 154.Google Scholar
35 Goldsmith, Oliver (1730–74)Google Scholar.
36 ‘Essay I – By a Porter, Formerly a Gardener’, in Prize Essays on the Temporal Advantages of the Sabbath to the Labouring Classes (London, 1849), 3–30, at 30.Google Scholar
37 ODNB, s.n. ‘Graham, James (1765–1811)’, online edn, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11229>>Google Scholar, accessed 25 November 2010.
38 Arthur, William, The People’s Day (London, 1855), 8.Google Scholar
39 Jordan, , ‘Sabbath Essays’, 282.Google Scholar
40 WMC, August 1848, 18.Google Scholar
41 ‘Essay I - By a Porter, Formerly a Gardener’, in Prize Essays on the Temporal Advantages, 14.Google Scholar
42 Quinton, , ‘Heaven’s Antidote’, 16–18.Google Scholar
43 Davies, Thomas, ‘The Lever in Possession, and How to Use It’, WMC, Supplemental Series, 27–46, at 30.Google Scholar
44 Ibid. 38.
45 Prize Essays on the Temporal Advantages, x.Google Scholar
46 Wigley, , Rise and Fall, 183.Google Scholar
47 ‘Sabbath Observance’, North British Review, May 1868, 66–76, at 67.Google Scholar
48 Jordan, , ‘Sabbath Essays by British Workmen’, 284 Google Scholar; Farquhar, Barbara H., The Pearl of Days (London, 1850), xiii.Google Scholar
49 Ibid. 28.
50 Ibid. 74.
51 Brown, Thomas, ‘The Sabbath, Britain’s Best Bulwark’, in WMC, Supplemental Series, 101–18, at 105.Google Scholar
52 Browning, John, ‘Universal Treasure’, 118.Google Scholar
53 For an exploration of the evangelical conversion narrative, see Hindmarsh, Bruce, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a description of Victorian interest in autobiography in general, see Buckley, Jerome H., The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
54 Brown, Callum G., The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2001), 70.Google Scholar
55 Peterson, Linda H., Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven, CT, 1986), 16.Google Scholar
56 Browning, , ‘Universal Treasure’, 119.Google Scholar
57 Farquhar, , ‘Torch of Time’, 124.Google Scholar
58 Smith, George, ‘The Weekly Springtime’, in WMC, Supplemental Series, 309–24, at 311 Google Scholar. He was quoting Wordsworth, William, ‘Personal Talk’ (1807).Google Scholar
59 Coffey, John and Chapman, Alister, ‘Introduction: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion’, in Chapman, Alister, Coffey, John and Gregory, Brad S., eds, Seeing Tilings Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, IN, 2009), 1–23, at 16.Google Scholar
60 John, Richard R., ‘Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture’, Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990), 517–67, at 518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
