Sunday Under Three Heads

On a summer Sunday in London, families hurry towards the river with baskets of food, dressed for the one day they can call their own. Dickens watches them crowd onto steamers and head for green fields beyond the city. In this short political pamphlet, published in 1836 under the name Timothy Sparks, their day out becomes the centre of an argument about who gets to enjoy leisure, and who gets to decide whether that enjoyment is respectable.

The immediate target is Sir Andrew Agnew’s campaign to enforce stricter Sunday observance. Dickens brings its proposed penalties down to the scale of an ordinary afternoon: a father calls a waiter over, orders a drink, then asks for a biscuit for his child. Under the bill, each small transaction could become another offence. Meanwhile, people with their own carriages and servants would keep comforts that poorer families could only hire or buy. His anger grows out of these practical differences, and his humour gives them a wonderfully awkward visibility.

There is plenty of the London observer here: crowded boats, public eating places, fashionable worshippers inspecting one another’s clothes. But the friendly companion can turn sharply on anyone who mistakes deprivation for virtue. Reading him in this argumentative mood brings you close to the impatience behind his sympathy for working people. He asks what rest actually means to someone with cramped lodgings and six days of work behind them, and makes a trip into the fresh air feel like something worth defending.