The Sabbath World (28 page)

Once gathered in the schools, students and teachers organized ambitious programs to improve their quality of life. They formed sick societies (a rough form of health insurance), benefit societies (unemployment insurance), and funeral societies (life insurance, of sorts), along with “clothing clubs” (to which people donated their used clothing) and employment exchanges (that is, communal employment agencies). Because the schools were voluntary rather than compulsory, they were obliged to be enjoyable, and alotted more time to festivities—outings and graduation ceremonies and holiday parties—than ordinary schools did, even if the fun was unduly prim for its day (Sunday-school celebrations tended to feature milk instead of beer, a more popular refreshment). The act of dressing up for Sunday school could open a student’s eyes to a more salutary way of life. Laqueur quotes Charles Shaw, a pottery worker whose attendance at Sunday school led to him to become a preacher:

There were surely many stultifying Sunday-school teachers to go along with all the bored students. But the teachers of the Sunday schools for the poor seem to have been capable of providing a different kind of experience and of communicating less conventional and non-condescending ideas to their students. Charles Shaw says that Sunday school taught him about “two different worlds—one belonging
to God and Father I read about in Sunday school every Sunday; and the other belonging to the rich men, to manufacturers, to squires and nobles, and all kinds of men of authority. These I supposed made the world of men what it was, through sheer badness in treatment of all who had work.” George Holyoake, a socialist who invented the term
secularist
, learned logic and mathematics and cooperative socialism from his teachers at a Unitarian Sunday school. Rowland Detrosier, a working-class radical, started out as the superintendent of a Swedenborgian Sunday school in Hulme, England. He taught himself natural history, astronomy, electricity, and mechanics, among other subjects, because his students wanted to learn about them. “Let our Sunday schools become the UNIVERSITIES OF THE POOR,” he declared.

These Sunday schools didn’t stay interdenominational for long; bitter jockeying among the different churches prevented that. They didn’t stay under the control of lay teachers, either. By the middle of the nineteenth century, few of the schools still taught writing; religious officials with a stricter construction of Sabbath propriety thought that was breaking the Sabbath. Nonetheless, the idea of a Sunday school as a source of values different from the ones observed the rest of the week lingered on. As long as religious Sunday schools had a working-class flavor, secular and political Sunday schools—labor-union schools, communist schools—failed to thrive. When Sunday schools got too righteous, socialists in both England and America seized the opportunity to found a slew of what one happy student called rebel factories, complete with songs, arts and crafts, games, and plays that taught lessons on capitalism, exploitation, and worker solidarity. Few of these schools survived the Red scares of the 1920s, but in their heyday there were dozens in England and nearly a hundred in the United States.

A
S THE
S
ABBATH STARTED
to shed its religious meanings, it began to be seen as a day of personal and social improvement. This, too, was in
part an effect of the association between the Sabbath and pedagogy. If you wanted to identify the remains of a Sabbatarian sensibility in our view of the weekend today, you might start with the sense that we are obliged to use it to better our condition. We think of Saturday and Sunday as time not merely for resting but for trying to become the kind of people that work prevents us from being. We catch up on our reading. We try to get our children to spend some time playing out of doors. All this was learned in the nineteenth century, when people began to reconceive of Sunday variously as an opportunity to refresh their parched spirits, to return to a natural world from which they felt increasingly cut off, and to rediscover lost connections with those around them.

In his writings on the Sabbath, Dickens didn’t only attack Sabbatarian hypocrisies; he also advocated the use of Sunday for restorative outings, and in so doing helped release a torrent of literature arguing that Sunday should be a day for promoting mental well-being and improving moral character. Call this the Hygienic Sabbath. In 1836, during his time as a reporter on parliamentary affairs, Dickens published a pamphlet attacking a piece of proposed legislation that would have strengthened Sunday closing laws. In the pamphlet, he contrasts the stifling Sundays of the urban poor, who get bored and drunk and commit crimes because they are kept from exercise and recreation by Sunday-closing laws, and the expansive Sundays of those who are free to enjoy the sun, the wind, and Sunday outings. Dickens’s description of one healthful Sunday is by far the most vivid of its kind, so I’ll quote it at length:

If today we think of the weekend as a time for communing with nature, that, too, was the doing of nineteenth-century writers. In the hands of poets, novelists, and intellectuals, the Sabbath became a lyrical and pastoral notion, a weekly haven from the burgeoning industrial order. You might think of the turn toward nature as a swerve away from theology, and it was, but since the swerve was made under the sway of poets, God was never far from their thoughts. Nature, to them, was God’s true abode, and they considered gamboling or wandering outdoors a holier pastime than confining their limbs to a pew or desk. “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—,” wrote Emily Dickinson in 1861. “I keep it, staying at Home— / With a Bobolink for a Chorister— / And an Orchard, for a Dome—.” And so: “instead of getting to Heaven at last— / I’m going all along.”

If you were going to trace the natural Sabbath back to one man in particular (a dubious exercise, I know), it would probably be Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, the autobiographer, novelist, philosopher, and political theorist who simultaneously inspired the French Revolution, the Romantic return-to-nature movement, and various forms of radical pedagogy. “Childhood is unknown” is how Rousseau opened his prescient if rather strange book
Emile, or On Education
(strange because of Rousseau’s many strange opinions, such as his conviction that children should not be allowed to read made-up stories). Rousseau’s views on pedagogy were the exact opposite of the Sabbatarian practice of it. The Puritans had treated children as little adults. They had dressed their babes in grown-up clothes and taught them grown-up theology and made them conform to grown-up manners, especially in church. But Rousseau insisted that children amount to a foreign species hidden in plain sight, with their own logic and modes of cognition. Moreover, child and nature are one, which means that child and nature and God are one, too, and all are good. The child, closer to nature than the adult, is holier than adults, too, since human institutions, including most forms of schooling, are unnatural and corrupting. Therefore, the place for children to learn about God is not in church on Sunday, but out of doors. They can deduce his existence from the workings of nature and thereby cultivate the divine within themselves.

I should say that Rousseau never wrote about the Sabbath. Nor did he keep it. If he had, I feel certain that he would have spent it strolling through the countryside, investigating botanical specimens. In the fifth of his
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
, for instance, Rousseau described as the happiest period of his life two months spent on a remote island in a Swiss lake called, evocatively, Lake of Bienne
(Bienne
evoking, to the French ear,
bien
, which means “well”), to which he had fled after his books
Emile
and
The Social Contract
had been condemned by the French Parliament and his house pelted with stones. On his island refuge, cut off from the outside world with all its demands, he engaged in the “precious
far niente,”
the doing of nothing, and lost himself for hours each day in the study of blades of grass, bits of moss, lichen.

Rousseau, in that essay, helped define the modern idea of
time off
. He sketched out the notion of a time out of time that, though not religious per se, is prelapsarian—that is, as whole and non-alienated as the time before Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden. “What, then, was this happiness, and in what did this joy consist?” asked Rousseau. Part of it was the relief of not having to live up to expectations, part of it was the delight of investigating flowers and plants, and part of it was giving himself over to reverie. But part of it had to do with a novel yet very old sense of time, time experienced as he imagined babies experience it, as plenitude and sensation and living in the moment. Grown-up time, Rousseau declared, is absent from itself. We fall into it as we fell from Eden, yet we never occupy it. We dwell in the past and the future but never in the present. At no one moment of existence is there anything “solid enough for the heart to attach itself to.” But now, as he sat at the Lake of Bienne, sometimes rocking in a boat, sometimes waiting on the shore of the lake when the water happened to be rough, he rediscovered a way of being in time “that, as long as it lasts, could be called happy.”

This was the first inkling of what I’d call the Romantic Sabbath, an unpressured, serendipitous, nostalgic experience of time in which the soul finds “a seat solid enough to rest itself there completely and to gather together all its being without needing to recall the past or to straddle the future.” This idea was developed by William Wordsworth in his epic,
The Prelude
(1799–1805), the tale of how nature formed him as a poet—its full title is
The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem
. In the poem, Wordsworth touches only glancingly on the Sabbath, but he has a great deal to say about time and how it shaped his identity, and the Sabbath plays a more important role than its brief mention would seem to imply.

Wordsworth begins the poem by fleeing the city for a stroll in the Lake Country, during which he tries to begin writing his great poem in his head. Instead of plunging in, he finds himself lounging in the shade of a tree, “slackening my thoughts by choice.” He tries to start the poem again: “my soul / once more made trial of her strength.”
Once again he fails. Finally, he realizes that he must cease his striving and accept the need for silence. He must not “bend the Sabbath of that time / To a servile yoke.” Giving in to the Sabbath and the nonproductivist side of his nature, to what his fellow Romantic John Keats called his negative capability, Wordsworth strays about “Voluptuously, through fields and rural walks”; he asks “no record of the hours, resigned / To vacant musing, unreproved neglect / Of all things, and deliberate holiday.”

This “holiday” from the work of composition, this starting, stopping, then wandering off, will leave its stamp on
The Prelude
, which curls, shaggy and undulating, “mazy as a river,” in critic Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase, back and forth between present and past and through the twists and turns of Wordsworth’s slow maturation. The “Sabbath of that time” is the moment (or perhaps the anti-moment) that allows the poet to break through to another order of time—“spots of time,” he calls them elsewhere. In these spots, “our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired.” As in, say, the psychoanalytic session (an idea not unaffected by Wordsworth, or at least by Romanticism), memories reawaken and joys and traumas are lived and felt again and understood perhaps for the first time.

Wordsworth, of course, is the quintessential nature poet; we imagine him hiking up mountains and strolling along shores in the English Lake District. And yet nature, for Wordsworth, had its own temporality as well as its own geography. E. P. Thompson would have called Wordsworth’s idea of natural time “preindustrial,” and it’s true that in
The Prelude
Wordsworth makes much of a shepherd who lived an entirely seasonal life and worked “for himself, with choice / Of time, and place, and object.” But Wordsworth’s natural time was not merely the antithesis of industrial time. It had its own rhythms. At one point, for instance, Wordsworth gives heartfelt thanks that he had one of those free, outdoor, unsupervised childhoods that seems to have been rare even in the eighteenth century. Nature saved him, he writes, “from an evil which these days have laid / Upon the children of the land”—the evil of being tightly scheduled and oppressively supervised,
“hourly watched, and noosed, / Each in his several melancholy walk / Stringed like a poor man’s heifer at its feed, / Led through the lanes in forlorn servitude.”