An illustrative example is the proliferation of research about leisure during the industrial revolution. This subject that has been for a long time overlooked by historians is in the contemporary era gaining a prominent place in the world as well as English societys transformation which was mainly as a result of the Industrial Revolution. It is necessary to pay attention to rational leisures obscured revolution, its great transition and its reconstruction. As such, no longer can Victorian Englands balanced history omit leisure as a factor. Consequently, a review of recent literature regarding the subject is necessary.
An Obscured Revolution
In 1838, William Howitt postulated that a mighty revolution was in the making within common peoples sports as well as past times. For Howitt, this revolution primarily had to do with loss of traditional forms of recreation to reformers hands in addition to urban necessity. Little could Howitt foretell that a growth in the quantity of time an individual was set free from duty together with new patterns of spending together with modes of recreation would prompt future historians to assume the perception that there was a virtual leisure revolution in Victorian England (Howitt, 1838). This notion was in the distant future.
The initial Industrial Revolution historians paid special emphasis on factories, machines, investments, demographic change, transportation, questions of hours, food supply and housing as well as conditions of work. What comes out here is the fact that industrialized man existed solely on bread. Homo faber as opposed to Homo ludens reigned supreme in Industrial Revolutions economic historians minds (Dean, 2000). Their offspring, urban historians, during the middle of the sixties did less to reshape this focus. Ass Briggs in Victorian Cities (1965) ignored sport, leisure and recreation in their totality except for a short reference to overall interest in sport among all the population sections in Melbourne which was deemed different altogether from English cities by Briggs. Dyos, (1966) drew an Agenda for Urban Historians to the initial international conference about the new Urban History Group. Like Briggs, Dyos never gave reference of leisure activities (Dyos, 1968). A massive two-volume analysis of The Victorian City Images and Realities that Dyos and Michael Wolff edited appended politics, urban religion together with the plight of the poor to the traditional themes of demographic patterns ,statistical growth, transport systems and physical facilities but just like their predecessors they never devoted even a single paragraph to leisure (Dyos, 1968).
Leisure researchs cutting edge does not have its basis in aristocracy. Historians concern with change naturally gravitate them toward historical groups and scenes that are a representation of departures from the past. The Industrial Ages aristocracy was not inflexibly trans-fixed in its traditional patterns of leisure wealth and status. Its alterations, on the contrary, were relatively limited, and more on an evolutionary order as opposed to revolutionary change (Thompson, 2002). More dramatic was the process by which the masses of the industrial age, the middle class together with working class folk, had their life styles and attitudes turned upside down. The leisure revolution an aspect of which they were the primary figures, has finally attracted the attention of historians in the past few years. The historians have produced meticulously researched as well as rationally refined assessments of Victorian women and men both at work as well as at play. This has not only sought political representation, economic stability as well as social mobility but amusement as well.
The Great Transition
Leisure revolution in the industrial age bereft of an acquaintance with its modernization under Industrial Revolutions inspiration as well as Britains ancient regime of popular culture makes little sense. As urban growth and industrialism began eroding customary rural life patterns in early nineteenth century, antiquarians set to work whereupon they began recording age-old amusements and customs. The most famous of all those collectors is undoubtedly Joseph Strutt (Cox, 1998). However, it is worth noting that other antiquarians of his day were much in the same light exhaustive and diligent in recording traditional pastimes.
Contemporary amateur historians for instance Norman Wymer, Christina Hole, as well as John Armitage following in their footsteps make much of pre-industrial pastimes and sports (Hole, 2001 Wymer, 1999 Armitage, 1997). Scholars that have been trained for the task on their part as well have not surrendered the field to popularity seekers. Isolated publications in out-of-the-way compendiums and journals deal with themes that range from ancient plough festivals to medieval Sunday amusements, as well as eighteenth- century popular festivals to Stuart and Georgian sports.
Their variety of subjects together with quality notwithstanding, these researches had a common inadequacy. They lacked an analytical framework whereupon they were all inadequate in relating play to pre-industrial lifes staple (village work). Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian turned his attention to this problem in 1964, in his article Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society which was published in Past Present. Thomas made use of anthropology in the service of history and postulated that leisure and primitive work could not be distinguished. According to him, both concepts were collective activities that mixed utility and pleasure. As such no clock signaled for the other to be put to an end so as to give the other an opportunity to start. Time, prior to the Industrial Revolution, was taken in terms of seasons as opposed to contemporary periods concept of hours. European and rural English communities customarily enjoyed sports and games, wakes and ales in agrarian cycles slack seasons. However, even work itself featured sociability, competition and delight, features now associated basically with leisure and sport (Thomas, 1964).
Sport and Society Elizabeth to Anne by Brailsfords (1969) is wrought with distant echoes of the pre-industrial mixture of work with play. Despite the fact that Brailsford was primarily concerned with physical education theories as opposed to popular practices, his handling of Puritan assaults on long-established games and sports was what illumined him into mass recreational activities (Brailsford, 2004). Malcolmson, for a more comprehensive review of that field, collected a huge bundle of documentation for a doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick overseen by E.P. Thompson. He then turned the thesis into a book which he titled Popular Recreation in English Society 1700-1850. From a host of ephemeral literature as well as old journals, local newspapers, manuscript diaries and notes in addition to parliamentary reports, Malcolmson recreated plebeian leisure traditional life and death.
Despite assault at the hands of Puritans in both Stuart and Elizabethan England, villagers recreational culture lived on and thrived. Festive fairs, parish feasts, blood sports as well as athletic contests were all deeply rooted in industrial ages traditional society whose work and play tempo had been fixed accordingly with ancient religious holidays for instance May Day, Shrovetide, Whitsuntide, Easter and Christmas. Yet the Church, though at a peripheral length was involved with play. Good sense of business inspired local publicans to come up with card games, bowls, skittles and quoits games as well as cockfights, animal-baiting and dances. Additionally, their also was cudgeling, football, cricket matches and wrestling. Gentlemen from the countryside traditionally patronized such activities and more often paid for the drinks and food in celebrations marking the end of sheep-shearing as well as agricultural harvests. They also patronized baptisms and local weddings as well as national events such as coronations, royal birthdays, elections, declarations of peace following wars and military victories.
However, the second half of the eighteenth century saw with it radical changes in the social context, an aspect that undermined traditional amusements. To a significant extent, the fundamental causes were demographic and economic. A process that had started several centuries earlier dubbed the enclosure movement, continued with the withdrawal of village greens and open fields from public recreational use. The growth of cities in the Industrial Age not only eradicated rural people from the context of traditional rights and holidays but also eliminated their playing space. The concern for efficient labor discipline which had its origin in the need for improving agricultural landlords, all the while, made an easy and swift transition to the urban captains of industry. The Evangelical movement on its end, through promoting propriety and morality, nailed the last nail into the coffin of traditional rustic pleasures.
The Reconstruction of Leisure
Three recent monographs exemplify the reconstruction of leisure in the Industrial age. Firstly, there is Mellers Leisure and the Changing City, 1870 1914. This monograph pays special attention to the city of Bristol as well as its middle-class citizens who were purported to have responded in a specific and self-conscious manner to the fresh challenges that frequented them in the wake of urbanization through providing leisure as well as cultural facilities (Meller, 1996). The ink of Mellers book was scarcely dry before Lowerson and John Myerscough published a most readable and serious treatment of Time to Spare in Victorian England. This book was based on a series of broadcasts for British Broadcasting Corporations Radio Brighton with most evidence retrieved from Sussex County. Finally, Baileys text titled Leisure and Class in Victorian England Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830 1885 is a far much detailed as well as closely-reasoned analysis of both working-class as well as middle-class transformation of leisure patterns, with particular reference to a new industrial town in Lancashire, Bolton.
These three books, despite their emphases, time frames and distinct styles, share several common features. Rather than being antiquarian, all three texts are historical dealing with connections and contexts, change as well as continuity. Each text is focused on a specific city or locale, drawing its general conclusions from particular cases. Additionally, all three texts highlight the historians present stock-in-trade, the notion of social control to the theme of Victorian leisure. To Meller, leisure was perceived as part of the social question to which philanthropists from Bristol together with religionists responded with a mission of civilizing the poor.
According to Lowerson and Myerscough, Victorian leisure revolution as a problem was not the contemporary nightmare of an empty hour abyss that was hard to fill, but on the contrary the hardship of making sure proper exercise of moral responsibility among all developing activities occupy this free time. As suggested in Baileys subtitle, leisure in the nineteenth century was one of the primary social change frontiers, and like all frontiers, it was a territory subject to dispute. For the Victorian periods middle class, leisure was a concept immensely clouded with self-doubt on one end as well as social anxiety on the other. Leisure, viewed from above, constituted a problem whose solution called for the building of a fresh social conformity, primarily, a play discipline to offset work discipline, the principal means of gaining control in a social context in an industrial capitalist society.
The Leisure Industry
Victorian leisure in the last two decades of the nineteenth century entered a take-off period similar to a former economic expansionist stage of the Industrial Revolution. In Baileys words, the similarity is peculiarly fitting for technologys widening impact as well as the quickening of commercialization made up the forces that altered the periods leisure and popular culture most profoundly. A composite analysis of technological innovations regarding the leisure industry is yet to be written. Presently, one depends on strewn references to individual topics histories for information on the several city transport means, enhanced equipment for the printing press and techniques, journalistic exploitation of the typewriter, sewing machines, pneumatic tires for bicycles, application of new rubber-making techniques to inflatable footballs and golf balls as well as the use of steel for making golf-shafts, bicycle frames and (more importantly) for stadia construction.
Similar to the technology of leisure, commercial enterprise that underlies late Victorian leisure industry is a field that is yet to be explored to its fullest. Bailey observes that the smell of big money in the music hall enterprise that inspired investment by publicans with capital attained from food and drink catering business and sports promotion was outmoded in the 1890s by the dramatic capitalist with the assistance of his accountant (Bailey, 1998). Bailey also reasonably arrives at a conjecture regarding the social status, wealth and motivations behind owners of football club but the subject needs more analysis and documentation, the kind practiced by Korr in an article in the Journal of Contemporary History. In this article Korr drew his assessment from West Ham Uniteds board meeting records as well as press releases to exemplify the professional games entrepreneurial foundations in the East End of London. Victorian Englands football mania was an issue of both spontaneous enthusiasm as well as business management (Korr, 1978).
Conclusion
A modern understanding of leisure is critically entrenched in the Victorian story. As Lowerson and Myerscough postulated, the basis of our own recreational beliefs and practices about leisure is to be found in the nineteenth century (Lowerson and Myerscough, 1996). Despite this fact, a broad analysis of Victorian leisures history is yet to be documented. While Baileys monograph stops sooner than expected, the monograph by Meller on the other end begins way too late in the period. Moreover, the latter restricts her vision to Bristol while Lowerson and Myerscough focus largely on Sussex, with Bailey narrowly focusing on Bolton. One, nevertheless, must quibble with Baileys cry that a broad leisure history of the era is still a long way of. As a result of the quality of craftsmanship doubled with the interest borne in Mellers, Baileys as well as Lowerson and Myerscoughs works, a decisive and full history of Industrial Revolutions leisure is forthcoming in the near future.
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