Writing the Sabbath: The Literature of the Nineteenth-Century Sunday Observance Debate

‘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 an...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. VerfasserIn: Spence, Martin (Verfasst von)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
Verfügbarkeit prüfen: HBZ Gateway
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Veröffentlicht: 2012
In: Studies in church history
Jahr: 2012, Band: 48, Seiten: 283-295
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Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:‘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’.
ISSN:2059-0644
Enthält:Enthalten in: Studies in church history
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0424208400001388