workingclasshistory:

On this day, 24 June 1855, crowds gathered in Hyde Park, London against the Sunday Trading Bill introduced to close shops, public transport and pubs on the Sabbath. The rich were unaffected by this proposed bill but for the poor Sunday was the only day off.
Printed bills from “A ratepayer of Walworth” declared: “New Sunday Bill prohibiting newspapers, shaving, smoking, eating and drinking and all kinds of recreation and nourishment, both corporal and spiritual, which the poor people still enjoy at the present time. An open-air meeting of artisans, workers and ‘the lower orders’ generally of the capital will take place in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon to see how religiously the aristocracy is observing the Sabbath and how anxious it is not to employ its servants and horses on that day”.
Karl Marx was there, and reported that at least 200,000 people attended. According to Marx, a Chartist named Finlen addressed the crowd, and referenced the ongoing Crimean War, complaining that “Six days a week we are treated like slaves and now Parliament wants to rob us of the bit of freedom we still have on the seventh. These oligarchs and capitalists allied with sanctimonious parsons wish to do penance by mortifying us instead of themselves for the unconscionable murder in the Crimea of the sons of the people.”
Marx also described the sound of the protest as like an improvised concert: “what a devil’s concert it was: a cacophony of grunting, hissing, whistling, squeaking, snarling, growling, croaking, shrieking, groaning, rattling, howling, gnashing sounds! A music that could drive one mad and move a stone. To this must be added outbursts of genuine old-English humour peculiarly mixed with long-contained seething wrath.”
The crowds grew over the next two Sundays and culminated in a riot on 1 July.

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Pictured: a protest in Hyde Park, 1866 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2018662724985534/?type=3