A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (25 page)

Controversy of this sort, the more bitter for the strength and sincerity with which views were held, continued throughout the century. Scottish churchmen, fiercely proud of their national form of Christianity (‘Our Zion’), no doubt looked with alarm at the revival of ritual, and were wary of any perceived attempt to spread the infection to their own congregations. In this they largely failed, at least in terms of a number of small gestures that gradually crept in. Boyd described how:

Dr Robert Lee, of Old Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh, had asked his congregation to kneel at prayer instead of standing, or rather lounging, and to stand at praise instead of sitting. He likewise introduced instrumental music, and began to read his prayers. Now all these things [he was writing in 1892] and more, are found everywhere, it is strange to think how ferociously (no other word will do) they were opposed much less than thirty years since.
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His attempts to reform the practices in his own church had begun at about the same time, but he had been surprised at the calm with which his parishioners had reacted:

It was on July 25th 1869 that I first ventured to suggest to the congregation that it would be decorous and might be helpful if on entering and leaving church they paused for a minute in silent prayer. The Scottish practice was to do neither. And while pronouncing the blessing, one used to see the men smoothing their hats and opening the pew doors, to the end that with the last word a rush might be made as though the building were on fire.
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The established Church of Scotland (as opposed to the Free Church, which retained the traditional, purer form of Calvinism and saw itself as a Church of the people rather than the landed gentry) therefore became gradually more liberal as the Victorian era went on, the services in many congregations coming to have more and more in common with Low Church Anglicanism. This was evidenced by the fact that Boyd, during his thirty-four-year tenure as minister, successfully inducted a number of prominent Anglicans, including Dean Stanley and Bishop Wordsworth, to preach or take part in services in his parish.

The gloom of a Victorian Sunday has passed into legend, especially through the memories of those who had to endure them as children. Almost everything that gave pleasure seemed to be forbidden, and only improving reading matter was allowed. Ernest Shepard remembered:

When we got back [from church], Cyril and I were horrified to find our playroom had been tidied up, the toys and games had been put away in a cupboard, and the order had gone forth that we must spend the afternoon in the drawing room. No old
Punch
or
Illustrated London News
volumes to look at: instead,
The Sunday Magazine, Leisure Hour
, and
Sunday at Home. .
.

As the afternoon wore on, the only cheerful sound was the ringing of the muffin man’s bell as he came round the Square. But, alas! he was allowed to pass unheeded.
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Molly Hughes provides a fuller account of what sparse pleasures could be found, especially if one’s parents were not too strict themselves in their observance of convention:

The afternoons hung heavy. It seemed to be always three o’clock. All amusements, as well as work, was forbidden. It was a real privation not to be allowed to draw and paint. However, an exception was made in favour of illuminated texts, and we rivalled the old monks in our zeal for copying Scripture, with the same kind of worldly decorations that they devised.

Naturally, our main stand-by was reading, but here again our field was limited by Mother’s notions of what was appropriate for Sunday.
Tom Brown, Robinson Crusoe
, Hans Andersen’s
Tales
, and
Pilgrim’s Progress
were permitted, but not the
Arabian Nights
, or Walter Scott, or indeed any novel. We had to fall back on bound volumes of
Good Words for the Young
, which were not so bad as the title suggests, and contained plenty of stories.

Sunday newspapers did exist, but were not respectable. How horrified my father was on discovering that the servants had been reading little bits to me out of
Lloyd’s Weekly
! My father’s Sunday efforts weakened towards evening, and after tea he liked to read aloud to us from books that sounded quite well, but afforded some chance of frivolity. Of course Shakespeare is Shakespeare.
Ingoldsby Legends
were always in demand, and above all the
Misadventure at Margate
, which we knew almost by heart.
Pickwick Papers
, by some blessed workings of Mother’s conscience, did not come under the head of novels. They were ‘papers’. She herself led the laughter. Often my father would read us things that he loved.
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Charles Russell, who grew up in Ireland, similarly suggested in his memories of childhood that not everything about a Sunday need be dull:

No cooking that might be done on Saturday was allowed. After dinner each of us had to read a chapter of the Bible aloud, while
mamma and dada listened respectfully. The piano was never heard, except to accompany a hymn; no game of cards was allowed; but all sorts of childish games, such as riddles, conundrums, stories, etc. made our evening cheerful.
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William Tayler, the footman, described what must have been for him a fairly typical Sunday in 1837, on which his elderly employer split the difference between respectability and enjoyment, social duty and relaxation:

This Sunday a wet, boisterous day. Been to church of course. Our old lady is got quite well, thinks of little else but playing cards and paying visits all the time. When I went to take lunch up, she was making matches or candlelights. When I took lunch away, she was reading a novel with the Bible laying beside her, ready to take up if any body came in. She had a lady to dine with them. During dinner, the conversation turned on wordly [i.e. worldly] affairs – nothing relating to religion. At tea time, she was talking about china, how much was broke in our house and what it would cost to replace it again. I think these were excellent ideas for an old lady near eighty years of age on a Sunday, but for all this she is not a bad one in the end.
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For those who were as concerned with social ritual as with religious duty – or indeed even more so – the Sunday walk was an established routine. During the Season, fashionable families in London walked to the only place it would occur to them to visit – Hyde Park. Even there, it was necessary to be very discriminating about where one went, as the biographer of one young woman recorded:

On Sundays [the highest Society] stayed indoors or were out of town. But the rest, all those who, without being right at the top, were very near it, might be seen sitting on garden chairs or walking up and down a relatively small area of the lawns in the southern and south-eastern part of the Park. The exact spot was determined by fashion, too: ‘We went to the grass just beyond the Achilles statue, which is now the thing.’
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Clearly, even if there was a broad consensus among society that Sundays should be treated as a day of rest, opinions varied about how strict its observance should be.

It must be remembered that at this time many people worked six days a week. Sunday was not
half
of their weekend but the whole of it. There was not time to cram it with many of the things that for us fill the gap between Friday night and Monday morning. As a result, Sunday was a genuine day of rest whose differences – such as the eating of the week’s most elaborate meal and the chance to doze in an armchair afterwards – could be savoured. Where the church was the centre of a family’s social life, it provided – as it does to this day – the opportunity to see friends with whom one was not in touch during the week. Because it offered, through its services and social events and choir practices, the company of the opposite sex in surroundings of irreproachable respectability, it featured prominently in the courting of many Victorian couples. Even children, though often imprisoned in starched and uncomfortable Sunday dresses or sailor suits, could enjoy certain pleasures. There was available an extensive variety of magazines and journals, with titles like
The Quiver
and
Sunday at Home
, which were intended for family reading on Sunday afternoons and which filled the long afternoon hours with stories, puzzles and games. If the Sabbath must be devoted to worthy thoughts and pursuits, there was at least no shortage of
advice available on how to make the most of what was allowed.

Many published memoirs of childhood, like Ernest Shepard’s, relate to the last twenty years of Victoria’s reign. The older – and often elderly – relatives who dictated their behaviour were therefore products of an earlier mindset rather than typical of current attitudes. By the time the Queen died, the rigidity with which Sunday had been observed in the mid-century seemed more and more of an anachronism. Society, led by the example of the Prince of Wales, had created the ‘weekend’, for the railways had long since made it possible to travel to country houses far outside London. These gatherings began later – on Saturday afternoon – than would be the case in future generations, and were known as ‘Saturday to Mondays’. They gradually popularized the notion that this part of the week could be spent entirely on pleasure. Another factor was that there was simply more to do. New sports and new facilities provided a host of temptations that had not existed, or been so obvious, in the early and middle decades. For those who lived in the burgeoning suburbs there were golf clubs, and for those in town who wished to visit the country there were bicycles. The Sabbath closing of museums was no longer as strictly carried out as in the days of Dickens’ Arthur Clennam. The British Museum, if that may be taken as a national litmus test, began opening on Sunday afternoons in 1895.

For those who were fond of music – even if they did not, like Molly Hughes, have the resources of a mighty cathedral to entertain them – there was much about a church service to enjoy. Prior to the nineteenth century there had been hymns of beauty that could inspire, but to a large extent the custom had
been, in a world of widespread illiteracy in which hymnbooks would have been superfluous, that throughout the service the Bible Clerk would read aloud each line of a hymn or psalm and the congregation would repeat it. This could, of course, be extremely long-winded and uninspiring. The Wesleys and their movement had provided more rousing and memorable hymns, but it was not until religious revival hit its stride in the nineteenth century that there was a flowering of this type of church music, for the Victorians, as it were, mass-produced them. The printing of music became cheaper and easier and this, added to the popularity of sacred subjects, brought a flood of new hymns. One man – H. J. Gauntlett, who wrote the music for
Once in Royal David’s City –
allegedly produced 10,000 hymn tunes.

A glance through the Church of England’s indispensable
Hymns Ancient and Modern
, itself a Victorian publication (its first edition appeared in 1861 ), will reveal how many of them – and how many of the great and stirring hymns that are popular even with non-believers – were written at this time. The list includes
Fight the Good Fight, Crown Him with Many Crowns, Alleluia, Sing to Jesus
and
Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow
, as well as such Christmas favourites as
In the Bleak Midwinter, As with Gladness Men of Old, Shepherds in the Fields Abiding
and
O Little Town of Bethlehem
. Among the mission halls and revival meetings, at which the singing was a good deal less genteel and more hearty, there was similarly a wealth of rousing, inspiring music in the form of ‘choruses’, many of which are still doing duty in churches today. As William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once put it: ‘Why should the Devil have all the best tunes?’ The act of worship was rendered much more enjoyable by this outpouring of spiritual creativity.

Religious observance was not simply for Sundays. The reading of Scripture or the saying of prayers was a fixture of the daily life of many households, serving several purposes. It was an important part of the Victorian ethos that the servant-keeping class reinforce their authority by setting a good example. For the master of the house to do this by leading worship was seen to add to his dignity and enhance his status. The short service also enabled the household to assemble and begin the day together – no doubt as soon as the devotions were over, the master would use the opportunity to give instructions to the servants, or to speak to any particular one if it were necessary. The mistress could well be inspecting the housemaids’ appearance and demanding adjustments if necessary. The cook might be in the habit of staying behind to go over the day’s menu. It was, in other words, a small-scale version of a school’s morning assembly, and served the same purpose – to provide a formal start to the day by bringing together everyone in the community, and to combine this with an opportunity to sort out the day’s administration. In the British Army a daily gathering of a regiment’s officers and NCOs to hear the colonel’s instructions is still often referred to as ‘morning prayers’.

Edith Buxton, the daughter of the missionary C. T. Studd, recalled the formality of this ritual, at which the family was joined – in strict hierarchical order – by the housekeeper, butler, footman and maids:

The morning began with family prayers. If it was winter a bright fire would be burning in the grate, which reflected in the brass eagles on either side. They held the tongs and poker, and the steel and brass shone to distraction. My Father sat at the table, already spread for breakfast, with the Bible open. There
would be the sound of the fire crackling, and the rustle of Mrs Miles’ starched dress and apron as she led the way in, followed by Ryall and Charles, then Jenkins and Roland, the housemaids. There followed the droning of Father’s voice, and far away the intermittent sounds of Bayswater Road.
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