3-066-097 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Children's Day in the Country: Preliminaries, 1881. A '...clergyman saying grace, before they sit down in the field to tea...[during a summer excursion] for children of the schools attached to parish churches...[which] send forth several vans loaded with happy boys and girls...to some field or park in the Home Counties, or even to the seaside, where five or six hours can be passed in hearty enjoyment of fresh scenes and sports of an innocent kind. The fresh pure air, the liberty of romping on the grass, the delight of coming into the presence of rural nature, for which all city-bred youth must yearn with an intense longing, scarcely to be allayed by getting now and then into the London Parks, are calculated to do them an infinite amount of good. It is pleasant, also, for their teachers, including those who undertake the voluntary and gratuitous task of Sunday-school religious instruction, to have the opportunity of presiding over these wholesome but rare pleasures of the little folk to whom they minister in Christian education'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.