Life, liberty and leisure: Sunday observance in England and the cultural ideology of modern leisure

My dissertation analyzes the relationship between work and leisure cultures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. I trace the origins of the contemporary Anglo-American preoccupation with work to the Evangelical response to the French and Industrial Revolutions. Specifically, I focus on the eighteenth-century controversy surrounding leisure taken up by the Rational Dissenters and, in the nineteenth century, the Sabbatarian struggle to replace the rough and often bloody leisure activity of the urban poor with a stricter religious observance. I argue that nineteenth century debates on leisure were radically different from the Dissenters' liberal ideology and practice. Responding to the crisis of the post-revolutionary era and the effects of the Industrial Revolution, Evangelical Sabbatarianism helped form a strict leisure culture that sought to replace working class recreation with family oriented, “respectable” religious practice. This culture was shaped by the introduction of the idea of work, as a model for self-improvement and progress, into the language of salvation.; In the conclusion of my dissertation I argue that Sabbatarianism also shaped a new work ethic by infusing Victorian ideals of work with religious meaning. Hard work became a means of salvation and a measurement of righteousness and respectability. This attempt to redraw the Victorian social map did not go uncontested, and as a result, London saw not only vocal protests from radical liberals such as Henry Mayhew and John Stuart Mill, but also the worst riots of the post-Chartist era. Nonetheless, the new Evangelical emphasis on individual salvation influenced many secular and religious customs. While the specifically religious aspect of this rationale disappeared, our legacy from these debates has been a self-centered, work oriented approach to leisure.