Leisure in the Industrial Revolution by Hugh Cunningham

Author:Hugh Cunningham [Cunningham, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Modern, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781317268741
Google: ST2TDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-07-01T16:17:32+00:00

5

THE MAKING OF LEISURE, c. 1850–c. 1880

There is widespread agreement that a new phase in the history of leisure opens in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘The leisure patterns of modern industrial urban mass society now begin to take shape’, writes Geoffrey Best of the mid-Victorian period. Nor is it only in leisure that these years seem a turning-point. They mark in general the end of the crisis period of the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of an era when in political, economic and social behaviour the working class begins to accept the permanence of industrial capitalism, and to seek small gains within it rather than its overthrow. The Great Exhibition of 1851, when all classes dutifully admired the artefacts of capitalism, was a symbol and sign of the coming of this new era. In visiting the Crystal Palace the working class seemed at last to be responding to the message of rational recreation; and amongst other things the Great Exhibition was celebrated as a vindication of the gospel that leisure, properly organised, could be civilising.

Within this general framework other events seem to reinforce the notion of a turning-point around 1850. New technology, in the shape of the railway, begins to make a marked impact on leisure habits. The self-proclaimed foundation of music-hall by Charles Morton with the opening of the Canterbury Hall in Lambeth in 1851 seems to open a new era of capitalist entrepreneurship in leisure. More profoundly this in turn is seen as based on a greater quantity of leisure time at more regular intervals for the mass of the people, the majority of whom were now urban dwellers, and higher wages which people were willing to spend on leisure goods. Leisure became more clearly demarcated from work, while at the same time still closely bound to it as the compensation for work.1

My argument will be that while these years were indeed a turning-point, they were no more than that. And they were a turning-point not in the sense of being a 90° still less a 180° turn, but rather a curving and permanent shift of direction, the outcome of which was the end of that popular culture which we identified in Chapter 1 and its supersession by a culture of leisure which was more remote from and less controlled by its participants. And whereas from the perspective of 1880, 1780 seemed a totally different and distant world, towards the end of the nineteenth century there had emerged a world of leisure recognisable and familiar 100 years later.

Our task then in this chapter is to assess the degree and timing of change and the relative weight of the different factors that went into the making of leisure. And those factors, I shall argue, were not simply the market forces of supply and demand. Important as the latter were they were modified by the attachment of the working class to the forms of leisure created in the first half of the century, by the provision of facilities by government and charity, and by that ideology of leisure which we explored in the last chapter.

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