'Idle Reading'? Policing the Boundaries of the Nineteenth-Century Household. (4th January 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Atkins, Gareth
• Is Part Of: Studies in church history. Volume 50(2014)
• Page Start: 331
• Page End: 342
• Publication Date: 2016-01-04
• Subjects: 270
• DOI: 10.1017/S0424208400001819
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0424-2084

Abstract

Abstract : In April 1805 the Christian Observer reviewed George Burder's Lawful Amusements, a sermon preached earlier that year in London and recently published. Burder was a leading Independent minister, 'a serious man, employed about serious things', his son later recalled, and the Christian Observer might have been expected to approve. Yet it was clear that the reviewer thought he had gone too far. The sermon, he complained, 'might more properly be entitled "Unlawful Amusements'", given that only one out of its thirty-eight pages told readers what they could do with their leisure hours. Walking, riding, reading biography, history and natural philosophy, and music 'in moderation' were the only permissible pursuits. 'Visiting the sick and poor in their abodes of penury and pain' was, in Burder's eyes, lawful, but the reviewer doubted whether it was, strictly speaking, an amusement. Nevertheless, to see Burder's comments as symptomatic of a joyless religiosity in which every recreational minute was a minute wasted is to misunderstand them. For, as Evangelicalism gained a foothold in the Church of England during the 1780s and 1790s and came to thrive among well-heeled Nonconformist congregations, there was a growing consensus that leisurely pursuits were permissible and even necessary. However, not everyone agreed as to where the boundaries lay. Those who wrote for the Christian Observer, for instance, were clearly more relaxed about pastimes, but took a very dim view of Burder's earthy vehemence. Indeed, one of the reviewer's chief complaints about Lawful Amusements was the saltiness of its language, especially its 'very strong, as well as coarse, Philippic against the theatre', from which the reviewer fastidiously declined even to quote.