The ‘Red Mall’ in the Metro Centre in Whickham, just across the Tyne from Newcastle. The Sunday Trading laws proposed in 1855 were particularly hard on the urban working class, who relied on being able to pick up essential items every day, as there was no refrigeration and deliveries of fresh food to cities from the countryside were not dependable. Moreover, wages were paid on a Saturday night, and wives had to spend them in shops before husbands spent them in the pub. Sunday observance became a lot easier with refrigeration and the expanding railway network: see How the British Invented Cool and The Iron Horse and the Iron Cow.
THERE are two public bodies remarkable for knowing nothing of the people, and for perpetually interfering to put them right. The one is the House of Commons; the other the Monomaniacs. Between the Members and the Monomaniacs, the devoted People, quite unheard, get harried and worried to the last extremity.*
Is it because the People is altogether an abstraction to them; a Great Baby, to be coaxed and chucked under the chin at elections, and frowned upon at quarter sessions,* and stood in the corner on Sundays, and taken out to stare at the Queen’s coach on holidays, and kept in school under the rod, generally speaking, from Monday morning to Saturday night?
Is it because they have no other idea of the People than a big-headed Baby, now to be flattered and now to be scolded, now to be kissed and now to be whipped, but always to be kept in long clothes, and never under any circumstances to feel its legs and go about of itself? We take the liberty of replying, Yes.*
For background, see The Brewery History Society. Dickens’s outspoken criticism of Sunday observance laws was developed at length in ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, in which he contrasted Sunday as it is now, as the reformers would have it, and as it should be. He held that bad habits came from idleness and boredom, and that the right solution was to encourage wholesome Sunday recreations (following Church) such as countryside walking, outdoor sports, making music and visiting museums — all of which required society to function on a Sunday more than the badly-framed legislation allowed.
The Quarter Sessions were courts traditionally held four times a year to hear all but the most serious criminal and civil cases. They were replaced in 1972 by the Crown Courts.
Dickens was of course opposing only nannying state interference, not the principles of a day of rest or of Sunday observance. See our extract The Economic Case for Time Off, in which the great Scottish economist Adam Smith warmly encourages employers to impose their own generous working time limits.
Précis
After riots in Victorian London protesting against an attempt to restrict Sunday trading hours, Charles Dickens wrote an outspoken column in ‘Household Words’ accusing Parliament of being disconnected from the public, and treating them like a ‘great baby’ to be cosseted, schooled or scolded, but never trusted to make their own decisions like adults. (54 / 60 words)
