Ed West ruminates on the phenomenon of boring British Sundays and explains how they got that way:
Nietzsche thought that this was the whole idea, that the English designed Sundays that way in order to encourage people to appreciate the working week. In Beyond Good and Evil, he described how “The industrious races complain a great deal about having to tolerate idleness: it was a masterpiece of the English instinct to make Sunday so holy and so tedious, a form of cleverly invented and shrewdly introduced fasting, that the Englishman, without being aware of the fact, became eager again for weekdays and workdays.”
There may be some truth in this, so that before the Industrial Revolution there was the “Industriousness Revolution”, with a new emphasis on work rather than leisure. This is something which Joseph Henrich noted from studying reports from the Old Bailey between 1748 to 1803, and “spot-checks” observations about what Londoners were doing at a particular moment:
The data suggest that the workweek lengthened by 40 percent over the second half of the 18th century. This occurred as people stretched their working time by about 30 minutes per day, stopped taking “Saint Mondays” off (working every day except Sunday), and started working on some of the 46 holy days found on the annual calendar. The upshot was that by the start of the 19th century, people were working about 1,000 hours more per year, or about an extra 19 hours per week.
Before the Industriousness Revolution it was common for people to enjoy a number of saints’ days as holidays, including the three-day weekends offered by these “Saint Mondays”. That all changed with the arrival of Protestantism, with its scepticism towards saints’ days, William Tyndale arguing that these were only celebrated by convention and that there wasn’t anything special about them.
While they were keen to abolish holidays, the reformers also believed in making the Sabbath more godly, and so the Boring English Sunday was invented. This followed from a growing sense that leisure time was wasted time, but it was also the case that many of the Protestant reformers just didn’t like people having fun. In God is an Englishman, Bijan Omrani noted how “From the end of the 1500s, Puritan preachers condemned the way people generally spent their Sundays: ‘full heathenishly, in taverning, tippling, gaming, playing and beholding bear-baitings and stage-plays, to the utter dishonour of God'”.
Theologian William Perkins believed that Sunday “should be a day set apart for the worship of God and the increase in duties of religion”. Lincolnshire cleric John Cotton said in 1614 that it should be unlawful to pass Sunday without hearing at least two sermons; the idea of going to church twice would have filled my ten-year-old self with intense horror.
Hugh Latimer asked: “What doth the people do on these holidays? Do they give themselves to godliness, or else ungodliness … God seeth all the whole holidays to be spent miserably in drunkenness, in glossing, in strife, in envy, in dancing, dicing, idleness, and gluttony”.
Latimer also disliked holidays for quite modern-sounding reasons related to social inequality, noting that “in so many holidays rich and wealthy persons … flow in delicates, and men that live by their travail, poor men … lack necessary meat and drink for their wives and their children, and … they cannot labour upon the holidays, except they will be cited, and brought before our officials”.
The reverse argument is now made against allowing supermarkets to drop Sunday trading hours – that it pressures working people into excessive toil so that Waitrose shoppers don’t suffer any inconvenience. Although, reading Latimer, I can’t help but suspect that his real objection was to people having fun.
The reformers won, and English Sundays became notably dull. Banjani quoted children’s writer Alison Uttley, who said of Sundays that “Nobody ever read a newspaper or whistled a tune except hymns”.
