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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’.
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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
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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
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