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