pleasant Sunday

A lot of times on Mondays people might think to themselves, "Where did the weekend go?" because the time goes fast, & many times the plans and ideas we have for what to do on the weekend exceed the time and energy we realistically have to do them....

Instead of "Where did the weekend go?" author Witold Rybczynski discusses

"Where did the weekend come from?"

in his 1991 book, Waiting for the Weekend.  {Viking Penguin, New York}

[excerpt]----------------- Saint Monday was a reflection of old habits, but it was also a premonition of what was to come.  The "small holiday" prepared the way for the weekend.  First, because it accustomed people to the advantages of a regular weekly break that consisted of more than one day.  Second, because it served to popularize a new type of recreational activity -- travel for pleasure.

Until the coming of the railway in the 1830s, modes of travel had been basically unchanged since ancient times.  Short distances were covered on foot; longer trips were undertaken on horseback (although only by young and fit males) or in a horse-drawn carriage.  Both involved bad roads, mishaps, and, for a long time, the perils of highwaymen.  By the early 1800s, the last was no longer a problem, but travel continued to be something undertaken out of necessity, rarely for amusement. 

In Jane Austen's Emma, Mr. Knightley frets about the "evils of the journey" that he and his family are about to undertake from London to Highbury, and about the "fatigues of his own horses and coachmen."  The modern reader is surprised to discover that the journey is a distance of only sixteen miles.  But sixteen miles, by coach, took almost four hours, and it would have been an exceedingly unpleasant and uncomfortable four hours, swaying and bumping over rutted, muddy country roads.*

{footnote:  *Emma was written in 1816.  It wasn't until the 1830s that metaled roads became common, at least between major cities, and coach travel, in turn, became somewhat more comfortable and more rapid.  On a good road, with frequent change of horses, a coach could attain the unprecedented speed of ten miles per hour.}

In the same novel Emma's father, Mr. Woodhouse, has a horror of carriages and hardly ever travels -- except on foot; Emma's sister visits Highbury from London, but she does so infrequently.  Most houseguests in Emma stay at Highbury for at least a week or two, since the slowness and discomfort of coach travel makes shorter visits impractical.

The time involved, as well as the expense, ensured that travel was a luxury, if not exactly enjoyed by, then at least restricted to, the moneyed and leisured classes.  But the railway and Saint Monday changed all that.  According to Douglas A. Reid a historian at the University of Birmingham in England, cheap railway excursions in that city began in the summer of 1841. 

The custom established itself quickly, and in 1846, twenty-two excursions (many organized by workers' clubs) took place; more than three quarters of them occurred on a Monday.  The train furnished the workingman and his family with a rapid and cheap means of travel, and the weekday holiday provided an entire free day to indulge it.  "Eight hours at the seaside for three-and-sixpence," announced a contemporary advertisement.  The Sunday-to-Monday holiday also meant that people could leave on a trip one day and return the next.  This was not called "spending a weekend," but it differed little from the later practice. 

It only remained to transpose the holiday from Monday to Saturday.

The energy of entrepreneurs, assisted by advertising, was an important influence not only on the diffusion and persistence of Saint Monday but on leisure in general.  Hence a curious and apparently contradictory situation:  not so much the commercialization of leisure, as the discovery of leisure -- thanks to commerce.  Beginning in the eighteenth century with magazines, coffeehouses, and music rooms, and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, with professional sports and holiday travel, the modern idea of personal leisure emerged at the same time as the business of leisure.  The first could not have happened without the second.

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Saint Monday had many critics.  Religious groups actively campaigned against the tradition which they saw as linked to the drinking and dissipation that, in their eyes, dishonored the Sabbath.  They were joined by middle-class social reformers and by proponents of rational recreation, who also had an interest in altering Sunday behavior. 

They wanted their countrymen to adopt the so-called Continental Sunday, a day on which French and Germans of all classes mingled together in easy and decorous intimacy in promenades and pleasure gardens -- the kind of civilized Sunday in the park that was depicted a little later by Seurat in [the painting] Grande Jatte. 

These were the sorts of Sunday activities that were promoted by such improving societies as the newly founded Young Men's Christian Association, the Sons of Temperance, and especially by the P.S.A., or Pleasant Sunday Afternoon.  For all these groups, Saint Monday, and the popular working-class entertainments of which it was an integral part, was an enemy.*

{footnote:  The religious reformers and the proponents of rational recreation were not always on the same side, however, for the latter called for Sunday museum openings and band concerts, which were anathema to the Sabbatarians.}

----------------------- [end excerpt]
Oh! - the wild and crazy behavior displayed by those museum-goers and concert-listeners!  What will society come to?!

(It's like the old joke: 
Q.  What is the definition of a Puritan?
A.  A person who goes through life troubled by a persistent, nagging suspicion that -- somebody, somewhere, is having a good time. ...)

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