No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
‘Idle Reading’? Policing the Boundaries of the Nineteenth-Century Household
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
In April 1805 the Christian Observer reviewed George Burder’s Lawful Amusements, a sermon preached earlier that year in London and recently published. Burder was a leading Independent minister, ‘a serious man, employed about serious things’, his son later recalled, and the Christian Observer might have been expected to approve. Yet it was clear that the reviewer thought he had gone too far. The sermon, he complained, ‘might more properly be entitled “Unlawful Amusements’”, given that only one out of its thirty-eight pages told readers what they could do with their leisure hours. Walking, riding, reading biography, history and natural philosophy, and music ‘in moderation’ were the only permissible pursuits. ‘Visiting the sick and poor in their abodes of penury and pain’ was, in Burder’s eyes, lawful, but the reviewer doubted whether it was, strictly speaking, an amusement. Nevertheless, to see Burder’s comments as symptomatic of a joyless religiosity in which every recreational minute was a minute wasted is to misunderstand them. For, as Evangelicalism gained a foothold in the Church of England during the 1780s and 1790s and came to thrive among well-heeled Nonconformist congregations, there was a growing consensus that leisurely pursuits were permissible and even necessary. However, not everyone agreed as to where the boundaries lay. Those who wrote for the Christian Observer, for instance, were clearly more relaxed about pastimes, but took a very dim view of Burder’s earthy vehemence. Indeed, one of the reviewer’s chief complaints about Lawful Amusements was the saltiness of its language, especially its ‘very strong, as well as coarse, Philippic against the theatre’, from which the reviewer fastidiously declined even to quote.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014
References
1 Burder, H. F., Memoir of the Rev. George Burder (London, 1833), 222.Google Scholar
2 Christian Observer [hereafter: CO] 4 (1805), 234.
3 Ibid. 235.
4 Stott, Anne, Witherforce: Family and Friends (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar is the most recent work on the subject, while Rosman, Doreen M., Evangelicals and Culture (London, 1984)Google Scholar remains the fullest and most comprehensive treatment. See also Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987), 149–92, 317–96 Google Scholar; Tosh, John, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, 1999).Google Scholar
5 Davidoff, and Hall, , Family Fortunes, 357–75.Google Scholar
6 Jekyll, Joseph, Correspondence of Mr Joseph Jekyll with his Sister-in-law, Lady Gertrude Shane Stanley (London, 1894), 147.Google Scholar
7 [Stephen, James], ‘The Clapham Sect’, Edinburgh Review 80 (1844), 251–307.Google Scholar
8 Stott, Anne, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford, 2003), 169–90.Google Scholar
9 St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), 268–92.Google Scholar
10 Gatrell, V. A. C., City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006), 415–547.Google Scholar
11 Bickersteth, John, Brief Memoir of a Wife (London, 1831), 14.Google Scholar
12 Bickersteth, Edward, Works of the Rev. E. Bickersteth (New York, 1832), 159.Google Scholar
13 Prov. 22: 6.
14 [Fry, Thomas], Domestic Portraiture; or, the Successful Application of Religious Principle in the Education of a Family (London, 1833), 2.Google Scholar
15 Babington, Thomas, A Practical View of Christian Education in its Earliest Stages (Boston, MA, 1818), 157.Google Scholar
16 Ibid. 69-71.
17 Ibid. 105.
18 Hoare, Louisa, Hints for the improvement of early education and nursery discipline, 2nd edn (London, 1819)Google Scholar; Jerram, Charles, Tribute of Parental Affection (London, 1823)Google Scholar; Taylor, Isaac, Home Education (London, 1838)Google Scholar. A classic text, Philip Doddridge’s Sermons on the Religious Education of Children (1732), was reprinted in 1811.
19 Tosh, Man’s Place, 5.
20 Babington, Christian Education, 74-9.
21 Bowdler, Thomas, The Family Shakspeare [sic], 10 vols (London, 1818), 10: x.Google Scholar
22 Cited in Stott, , Wilberforce, 157.Google Scholar
23 Bickersteth, Memoir, 61.
24 Babington, Christian Education, 148.
25 More Hannah, , Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 11th edn, 2 vols (London, 1811), 1: 213.Google Scholar
26 Tolley, Christopher, Domestic Biography: The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth-Century Families (Oxford, 1997), 39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Evangelical Magazine 8 (1800), 526.
28 CO 21 (1822), 241.
29 St Clair, Reading Nation, 201.
30 CO 24 (1825), 164.
31 Ibid. 21 (1822), 163-72, 237; 33 (1834). 731.
32 Stott, Wilberforce, 186-8.
33 Elizabeth, Charlotte, Personal recollections, 3rd edn (London, 1841), 25–9, 38–41, 62–5.Google Scholar
34 White was a protege of Charles Simeon: Rosman, Evangelicals, 177-8.
35 Ibid. 166-202.
36 Ibid. 169-71.
37 Grenby, M. O., The Child Reader, 1700-1840 (Cambridge, 2011), 268–71.Google Scholar
38 Evangelical Magazine n.s. 5 (1827), 342.
39 Evans, Robert Wilson, Scripture Biography, 3 vols (London, 1834–48), 1: 4.Google Scholar
40 CO 24 (1825), 168.
41 Cited in Tolley, Domestic Biography, 117.
42 ODNB, s.n. ‘Richmond, Legh (1772-1827)’, online at: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23595=, accessed 26 July 2013.
43 Oxford, Bodl., MS Bickersteth, Ms.Eng. c.6397, fol. 5, Edward Bickersteth to Robert Seeley, [c. February 1832].
44 Yonge, Charlotte M., What Books to Lend and What to Give (London, 1887), 5.Google Scholar
45 Fischer, Benjamin L., ‘A Novel Resistance: Mission Narrative as the Anti-Novel in the Evangelical Assault on British Culture’, in Clarke, Peter and Methuen, Charlotte, eds, The Church and Literature, SCH 48 (Woodbridge, 2012), 232–45, at 233, 240.Google Scholar
46 Vivienne Westbrook, ‘Mid-Victorian Foxe’, in The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), Editorial commentary and additional information, online at: <http://www.johnfoxe.org=, accessed 26 July 2012.
47 Foster, John, A Brief Memoir of Miss Sarah Saunders (London, c. 1850)Google Scholar, endpaper.
48 Price, Leah, How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ, 2012).Google Scholar
49 Bickersteth, Edward, The Christian Student (London, 1829), 526.Google Scholar
50 Cavell, Janice, Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818-1860 (Toronto, ON, 2008), 92–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
51 Tosh, Man’s Place.
52 Ibid. 174-5.
53 Walsh, John D., ‘The Magdalene Evangelicals’, CQR 159 (1958), 499–511 Google Scholar, at 508.
54 Jay, Elisabeth, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 1979).Google Scholar
55 Hindmarsh, D. Bruce, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mack, Phyllis, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2008).Google Scholar