Agnew v Dickens

One hundred and eighty eight years ago, Charles Dickens published an essay "Sunday Under Three Heads", an attack on Sir Andrew Agnew and his repeated attempts to introduce a strict Sabbath Observance Bill in the House of Commons.

Agnew was Member of Parliament for Wigtownshire, 1830–1837. He stood as a moderate reformer, but soon became deeply attached to the cause of Sabbatarianism, and pressed for the banning of all secular labour on Sunday. For this purpose he introduced no less than four Sabbath Observance Bills in the Commons, none of which passed.[1] It was the third attempt which drew on him the wrath of Charles Dickens, whose essay Sunday Under Three Heads (1836) is very largely a personal attack on Agnew,[2] whom he described as a fanatic, motivated by resentment of the idea that those poorer than himself might have any pleasure in life.

One of Dickens' many criticisms was that the Bill would clamp down on the poor but not the rich, even though Sunday was often the only day of rest available to the poor. A comparison with Net Zero is obvious - the Puritanical suppression of working people for spurious reasons of spurious virtue. 

With one exception, there are perhaps no clauses in the whole bill, so strongly illustrative of its partial operation, and the intention of its framer, as those which relate to travelling on Sunday.  Penalties of ten, twenty, and thirty pounds, are mercilessly imposed upon coach proprietors who shall run their coaches on the Sabbath; one, two, and ten pounds upon those who hire, or let to hire, horses and carriages upon the Lord’s day, but not one syllable about those who have no necessity to hire, because they have carriages and horses of their own; not one word of a penalty on liveried coachmen and footmen.  The whole of the saintly venom is directed against the hired cabriolet, the humble fly, or the rumbling hackney-coach, which enables a man of the poorer class to escape for a few hours from the smoke and dirt, in the midst of which he has been confined throughout the week: while the escutcheoned carriage and the dashing cab, may whirl their wealthy owners to Sunday feasts and private oratorios, setting constables, informers, and penalties, at defiance.  Again, in the description of the places of public resort which it is rendered criminal to attend on Sunday, there are no words comprising a very fashionable promenade.  Public discussions, public debates, public lectures and speeches, are cautiously guarded against; for it is by their means that the people become enlightened enough to deride the last efforts of bigotry and superstition.  There is a stringent provision for punishing the poor man who spends an hour in a news-room, but there is nothing to prevent the rich one from lounging away the day in the Zoological Gardens.

Charles Dickens - Sunday Under Three Heads (1836)

What particularly seemed to rile Dickens was how blatant it all was. As blatant as we see today with rich proponents of Net Zero flying around in private jets. The similarity is difficult to miss.