The Sabbath World (27 page)

This is not to give short shrift to the unquantifiable hours of straight textbook learning that have gone on—and still go on—on the Sabbath. If you are at all like me, you grew up thinking of Sunday schools (or Saturday schools, for that matter) as infinitely tedious places, taught by prigs eager to produce more prigs. (I spent as much as possible of my teenage religious education behind the synagogue with fellow would-be rebels while leaning on a cinder-block wall, one foot up in that “fuck you” way.) You think that, in part, because of the satirical or dark depictions of the Sabbath and its pedagogy written by nineteenth-century novelists still read today, such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (who wrote in the twentieth century about her childhood in the nineteenth). In
Little House in the Big Woods
(1932), Wilder describes her grandfather’s and great-aunts’ and great-uncles’ Sunday schooling in the 1820s: They kept their eyes fixed on the preacher, afraid to turn their heads to look out the window; ate a cold lunch; and after lunch studied their catechism till the sun went down. Charles Dickens’s
Little Dorrit
(1855–1857), probably the most anti-Sabbatarian novel in history, opens in London on a gloomy Sunday evening, when “maddening
church bells” were clanging and there was “nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it—or the worst, according to the probabilities.” The dour cityscape leads the novel’s hero, Arthur Clenham, to reflect on the Sundays of his youth, and his Sunday education, conducted at first by his obsessively Puritanical mother: She “would sit all day behind a Bible—bound, like her own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards.” (Naturally, she turns out not to have been his mother at all, but a wicked impostor.) Later he was subjected to a “picket of teachers” who marched him to chapel “three times a day, morally handcuffed to another boy” so he could listen to “indigestible sermons” that he would have happily traded “for another ounce or two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh.”

Mark Twain, in his 1875 “Story of the Good Little Boy,” offered up the opposite spectacle—that of Jacob Blivens, a model boy who “never was late at Sabbath school,” “wouldn’t play marbles on Sunday,” had “read all the Sunday-school books,” and “had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday-school book.” Naturally, nothing in Jacob’s life turns out the way it does in Sunday-school books: Jacob rushes to the rescue of a blind man who, instead of blessing him, cracks him over the head with a cane. The boy tries to warn some boys in a sailboat that they’re breaking the Sabbath and will drown; instead, he nearly drowns himself. The story ends when he is blown to bits by a nitroglycerine can meant to be tied to the tail of a dog while he is admonishing the boys who are about to tie it.

These works reflect the rise, in the nineteenth century, and on both sides of the Atlantic, of a sardonic anti-Sabbatarianism. It emerged partly as a response to the unusual strictness of the English and American Sunday compared to Sundays elsewhere in the world; partly out of the irritated sense that Sabbath legislation had become hypocritical, anti–working class, and antimodern; and partly because of a growing revulsion at moral and religious legislation of any kind. English and American Sabbath sentiment and lawmaking had waxed and
waned in the two centuries since the heyday of Puritan power in the seventeenth century, but its social effects and legislative apparatus remained largely in place. In England, for instance, decades after Oliver Cromwell and his largely Puritan Parliament had been ousted from power and the English monarchy and the anti-Sabbatarian Anglican Church had been restored, the average citizen felt that to engage in, or permit, sports and recreation on Sunday went against the will of God. Sunday travel and retail trade were also prohibited. Many in the middle classes kept the day in the Puritan manner, with minimal heat and hot food and few activities other than praying and reading holy texts. Samuel Johnson, for instance—who as an adult became an ardent defender of a less severe Sabbath—recollected the Sundays of his childhood as a grim time when “my mother confined me” and “made me read
The Whole Duty of Man,”
a dull devotional work outlining man’s responsibility to man and God, “from a great part of which I could derive no instruction.”

By the mid-eighteenth century, British Sunday legislation had relaxed its grip, especially in the cities, where it regulated only the hours of service and left the rest of the day to the population’s discretion; even in the countryside, where magistrates still forced people into churches and forbade trade on Sunday, the middle classes began to brighten up the day with a large midday meal. (The Sunday activities of the urban upper and lower classes in that period are vividly described in a pamphlet published in 1755 by one Thomas Legg, titled “Low Life, or One Half of the World Knows Not How the Other Half Lives.” Sunday, to Legg’s rakish eye, gave the upper classes extra time to engage in their usual activities, that is, drink, make merry, and get fleeced; gave the criminal classes an extra opportunity to fleece; and gave the serving classes a reason to work harder than usual. Among those who broke the Sabbath in the early hours of Sunday morning were the rich, who frequented “Gaming-Tables, Night-Houses, Bawdy Houses, Geneva Shops, and other Places of Resort which are contrary to Acts of Parliament.” Among those who violated the Fourth Commandment during the day were “Taylors, Shoe-Makers, Stay-Makers, Mantua Makers, Milliners, Glove-Washers,
Hoop-Petticoat and Capuchin Makers,” as well as prostitutes, barbers, and, of course, servants and other service providers: “Footmen in the Back-Back Kitchens of Nobility and Gentry, cleaning of such Plate as will be necessary for the ornamenting the Buffet and Side-Board”; “Poor Women and Lame Men, whose Bread depends chiefly on sweeping the Passages to Churches, Chapels, and Meetings”; “Shoe-Blackers and Hackney Coachmen”; “Gardeners who live at Gentleman’s Houses near London, mowing and sweeping the Grass-Plats, and rolling the Gravel-Walks, to make them fit for the Reception of their Masters and Mistresses.”)

Sabbath legislation resurged in England and America at the beginning of the nineteenth century, largely because of the rise of evangelicism on both continents—Nonconformism in England (the Nonconformists did not conform to the principles of the official Church of England) and the Second Great Awakening in the United States (from which we got revivalism and camp meetings). Sabbatarians formed societies (today we’d call them lobbies). Parliamentarians and senators commissioned studies and introduced bills to promote, as one such bill put it, “the Better Observance of the Lord’s Day.”

In dispute were the new technologies and cultural institutions that were transforming the rhythms of daily life—trains, post offices, and museums—and the degree to which they would be subject to Sunday regulation. Factions representing business interests battled factions representing religious interests over such matters as Sunday railroad travel, Sunday postal service, Sunday trade, Sunday newspapers, and Sunday amusements.

In 1810, the U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring mail to be delivered and post offices opened on Sundays, spurring a furious backlash among ministers and congregations and initiating one of the biggest political battles in U.S. history. The historian Richard R. John writes, “The protest was unprecedented. Never before had the federal government interfered so directly with the rhythms of everyday life. Never before had so many Americans formally challenged the authority of their elected representatives to legislate on matters touching on deeply held religious beliefs.” In 1852, a Kulturkampf broke
out in London over the Crystal Palace, an enormous glass and iron building in Hyde Park that housed fourteen thousand exhibitors during a Great Exhibition celebrating technology and progress. The Sabbatarians ultimately won the fight to keep it closed on Sunday, which so infuriated the anti-Sabbatarians that they agitated for opening the British Museum on Sundays and allowing military bands to play in the parks on Sunday afternoons. A similar battle was fought over the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

Progressives and radicals in both countries (including Karl Marx, during his early years as a journalist reporting on English affairs) began demanding that the worshipful Sunday be replaced by the educationally and culturally enriching kind, arguing that this would especially benefit immigrants (in the United States) and the working classes (in both countries). Activists founded societies to promote the openings of museums and libraries on Sunday and to encourage Sunday lecture series and Sunday concerts. Sabbatarians accused those anti-Sabbatarians of trying to foster a “Continental Sabbath,” the laxer Sabbath of Catholic Europe, where Sunday afternoon, at least, was a time for recreation. In the United States, if you were an Anglo-Saxon Protestant who happened to dwell in a city where immigrants also lived, you might see them keeping that kind of Sabbath—strolling about, laughing, drinking, enjoying street theater—and it smacked suspiciously of foreignness. The Sabbatarians bolstered their counterargument by claiming that stronger Sunday laws would help the working classes by protecting them from Sunday labor. The anti-Sabbatarians replied that Sabbath laws were no substitute for real labor legislation, especially the kind that limited the length of the working day and week. They attacked the Sabbatarians as hypocrites for outlawing Sunday fun while allowing Sunday drinking, for exempting their servants from the Fourth Commandment, and for justifying several other forms of service as acts of necessity and mercy. Each side worked up its own clichés. Sabbatarians painted nostalgic portraits of idyllic Sundays in quaint villages. Anti-Sabbatarians made ample use of the figure of the bored child fidgeting the day away, in the thrall of some pedantic Sunday schoolmaster.

Many such children surely existed; they may well have been in the majority. But it’s worth remembering that it was the Sunday pedagogical tradition that made it possible to envision more revolutionary kinds of Sunday education. When Sunday schools first came into existence in England, to take an example, they helped to transform the lower classes they served. Set up largely by the intellectuals and activists of the evangelical revival of the late eighteenth century (many of whom later became abolitionists) in order to keep the children of the desperately poor from breaking the Sabbath by running wild on the streets, these schools gave many such children the only education they’d ever have. Sometimes they gave it to their parents and grown siblings, too.

The Sunday schools for the poor came along at a time when such opportunities were rare, at least for children whose parents couldn’t spare their help or wages long enough to send them to weekday schools, or couldn’t afford to send them for more than a year or two. The historian Thomas Laqueur, in a study called
Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850
, argues that these schools offered not just escape from poverty but also a venue for what we would now call community organizing, as well as job training for graduates who often began illustrious careers by teaching in the schools. Some of them would go on to become the leaders and educators of emerging working-class political parties. The early Sunday school was a nursery of piety, yes, but it could also be a cradle of working-class self-awareness.

Not all of them proselytized, either. Many of the early schools were interdenominational—a lack of funds required them to affiliate with all the churches in town, not just with one—which meant that they had to refrain from advancing a particular doctrine. Too strict a theology could kindle controversy. Their mission, instead, was literacy. Most schools taught at least two of the three Rs, reading and writing, and some taught the third, arithmetic; the texts studied were catechisms and Scripture, but the skills taught could be transferred to other endeavors. (Schools that didn’t teach the basics soon found themselves short of students.) Going to school one day a week wasn’t
as good as going five or six days a week, as the other working-class schools (the “charity schools”) required. Nonetheless, as Laqueur points out, the Sunday school featured a very long day—three to five hours—and students went for an average of four years, and the Sunday-school movement wound up having “a significant impact on the creation of mass literacy in nineteenth-century England.”

Skeptics dismiss nineteenth-century British Sunday-school instruction as opium for the masses, or, more precisely, as a cynical means of divorcing peasants and artisans from their casual, seasonal approach to labor by teaching them a work ethic underscored by a fear of damnation. The schools’ ambition, by these lights, was to turn rural folk into industrial drones through what one nineteenth-century historian called “religious terrorism.” The cautionary tales of bad boys and girls who met dire fates that were found in the Sunday-school primers amounted to “psychological atrocities,” the socialist historian E. P. Thompson wrote in his 1963
Making of the English Working Class
. Thompson quoted the author of a “Satanic” book called
Philosophy of Manufactures
(1835) that offered this advice to factory owners: Make sure that workers receive a sound spiritual education, because “the neglect of moral discipline” leads to “the disorder of the general system, the irregularities of the individual machines, the waste of time and material.”

The founders of the Sunday schools, however, saw themselves as reformers fighting for a progressive cause. Everyone from bishops to local squires opposed them, and they had to refute the widespread belief that educating the poor would turn them into dissatisfied rabble-rousers, otherwise known, in a reference to the French Revolution, as Jacobins. The reformer Hannah More, for instance, told worried farmers in the town of Cheddar that Sunday school would improve, not harm, their laborers’ behavior: “I … said that I had a little plan which I hoped would secure their orchards from being robbed, and their rabbits from being shot, their game from being stolen, and
might
lower the Poor Rates.” But privately she told a friend (William Wilberforce, the politician who led the British abolitionist movement) that she came up with these arguments only to secure the support
of a rich local “Despot” and all the other “petty Tyrants” of Cheddar who feared that bringing religion to the poor would make them “lazy and useless.”