Written when Dickens was just twenty-four, this passionate pamphlet reads like a young man seething with righteous fury at class cruelty. He defends the working class of London against the moralizing zealots who would deny them even simple pleasures on their one day of rest after backbreaking labor. Through three incisive sections, Dickens exposes the hypocrisy of wealthy Sunday observers who lecture the poor about piety while enjoying privileges invisible to them. He renders vivid scenes: the exhausted laborer forbidden a walk in the countryside, the family denied a moment of joy, the joyless austerity imposed by those who've never known a week of grinding work. This is early Dickens, before the novels that would make him immortal, but already possessed of that furious compassion for ordinary people and that deadly wit aimed at the self-righteous. It reads less like a formal essay and more like a polemical broadside, urgent and angry and deeply humane.
