England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century; Sunday
The two young people who have just crossed the road, and are following
this happy couple down the street, are a fair specimen of another class
of Sunday—pleasurers. There is a dapper smartness, struggling through
very limited means, about the young man, which induces one to set him
down at once as a junior clerk to a tradesman or attorney. The girl no
one could possibly mistake. You may tell a young woman in the employment
of a large dress-maker, at any time, by a certain neatness of cheap
finery and humble following of fashion, which pervade her whole attire;
but unfortunately there are other tokens not to be misunderstood—the pale
face with its hectic bloom, the slight distortion of form which no
artifice of dress can wholly conceal, the unhealthy stoop, and the short
cough—the effects of hard work and close application to a sedentary
employment, upon a tender frame. They turn towards the fields. The
girl’s countenance brightens, and an unwonted glow rises in her face.
They are going to Hampstead or Highgate, to spend their holiday afternoon
in some place where they can see the sky, the fields, and trees, and
breathe for an hour or two the pure air, which so seldom plays upon that
poor girl’s form, or exhilarates her spirits.
I would to God, that the iron-hearted man who would deprive such people
as these of their only pleasures, could feel the sinking of heart and
soul, the wasting exhaustion of mind and body, the utter prostration of
present strength and future hope, attendant upon that incessant toil
which lasts from day to day, and from month to month; that toil which is
too often protracted until the silence of midnight, and resumed with the
first stir of morning. How marvellously would his ardent zeal for other
men’s souls, diminish after a short probation, and how enlightened and
comprehensive would his views of the real object and meaning of the
institution of the Sabbath become!
The afternoon is far advanced—the parks and public drives are crowded.
Carriages, gigs, phaetons, stanhopes, and vehicles of every description,
glide smoothly on. The promenades are filled with loungers on foot, and
the road is thronged with loungers on horseback. Persons of every class
are crowded together, here, in one dense mass. The plebeian, who takes
his pleasure on no day but Sunday, jostles the patrician, who takes his,
from year’s end to year’s end. You look in vain for any outward signs of
profligacy or debauchery. You see nothing before you but a vast number
of people, the denizens of a large and crowded city, in the needful and
rational enjoyment of air and exercise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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