The Peculiar Life of Sundays

321 Pages·2008·0.9 MB·English

by  Stephen Miller

The Peculiar Life of
S U N D A Y S

The Peculiar Life of
S U N D A Y S
S T E P H E N M I L L E R
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2008
Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Stephen, 1941–
The peculiar life of Sundays / Stephen Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-674-03168-5 (alk. paper)
1. Sunday. 2. Sabbath. 3. Rest—Religious aspects. I. Title.
BL595.S9M55 2008
2639.3—dc22 2008027460
To Eva, Katherine, and Elizabeth

Acknowledgments
This book bene fited from discussions with many people, including
Jeff Field, Claudia Anderson, Achsah Guibbory, Tony Kaufman,
Barbara Wilson, Joe Shattan, and Sandy Kaiser. I am grateful to Jane
Caden, Kevin Caden, Karen Seehausen, Arline Youngman, Sarah
Courteau, Christine Rosen, and Walter Connor for telling me about
the Sundays of their childhood.
I want to thank Barton Swaim for his careful reading of a draft of
the first chapter. I am indebted to David Mikics for his many sugges-
tions for improving the manuscript. The recommendations of my
editor, John Kulka, have been invaluable. I am grateful to Maria As-
cher for her excellent copy editing. This book relies on the work of
many outstanding scholars. It also could not have been written with-
out the encouragement and support of my wife, Eva Barczay.

Contents
1. Sunday Gladness, Sunday Gloom 1
2. Sunday in Antiquity 24
3. Sunday in Elizabethan and Jacobean En gland 55
4. Sunday in Eighteenth-Century En gland
and Scotland 84
5. Varieties of Sunday Observance:
Boswell and His Contemporaries 109
6. The Rise and Decline of the Victorian Sunday 129
7. Four American Writers and Sunday:
Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman 172
8. Sunday Nostalgia, Sunday Despair:
Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell 212
9. Sunday Now:
Sacred and Profane 248
Notes 273
Index 299