REVIEW ARTICLE

L E I S U R E AND R E C R E A T I O N

LEISURE AND CLASS IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND: RATIONAL RECREATION

AND THE CONTEST FOR CONTROL, 1830-1885. By Peter Bailey. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1978. x + 260 pp. f5-75.
THE SPICE OF LIFE: PLEASURES OF THE VICTORIAN AGE. By Patrick Beaver.
London: Elm Tree BookdHamish Hamilton. 1979.132 pp. f7.95.
THE ENGLISHMAN’S CHRISTMAS: A SOCIAL HISTORY. By J. A. R. h l o t t .
Hassocks: Harvester Press. 1978. 230 pp. f5.95.
THE LIFE AND ART OF ANDREW DUCROW and THE ROMANTIC AGE OF THE
ENGLISH CIRCUS. By A. H. Saxon. Hamden, COM.: Archon Books.
1978. 511 pp. $25.00.
THE BLACKF’OOL LANDLADY: A SOCIAL HISTORY. By John K. Walton.
Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1978. x + 229 pp. f5-95.
LEISURE AND SOCIETY 1830-1950. By James Walvin. London: Longman.
1978. ix f 181 pp. f6-50 cloth; f2.95 paperback.
In 1841 The Times assessed the opening of Regent’s Park to the public as
an encouraging move in ‘the redemption of the working class through
recreation’. Peter Bailey’s book demonstrates that this was no editorial
idiosyncrasy but part of a general middle-class attempt to refashion the
working class in its own sedate behavioural image, an attempt generated
largely by fear of the disaffection displayed during the Chartist period.
Taking his cue from contemporaries (although with strangely little actual
quotation of the phrase) Bailey labels this reforming impulse ‘rational
recreation’, and he uses it to characterize the continuation into the 1860s,
, ’80s of attempts to ‘improve’ working-class recreations, the most
’ ~ O Sand
notable of which was Henry Solly’s Working Men’s Club and Institute
Union. Dr. Bailey’s book represents the fruit of considerable research in
the Victorian periodicals (and in the archives of Bolton-‘a typical new
industrial town’), and his articulation of the ideology of the recreational
reformers is impressive. However, he is forced to the conclusion that their
efforts had achieved little. Why? There was working-class resentment of
patronage; trade unionists were suspicious of hostile employers sponsoring
the Club movement, and capitalist benevolence at the workplace was often
inconsistently applied, and, Bailey believes, diminished in importance as
the century progressed (although one would have liked more evidence oq
this than he presents). Furthermore, rational recreation was basically
didactic, setting out through clubs and lyceums, libraries, parks and
museums, concerts and organ recitals, to instruct and to improve, and often
imposing conditions (concerning dress or temperance) which militated
against its appeal. Finally-and this is new and original-the middle-class
ideologues of leisure received very little support from their own class,
whose own frank acceptance of greater leisure-prominently evidenced by
excursions and by athleticism-itself posed problems to moralists and
ideologues. Would the gospel of work, which had distinguished the hard-
working bourgeois from the corrupt aristocrat, survive the manufacturer’s
son ‘stretching his legs under the governor’s mahogany’? The solution was
to approve of ‘re-creation’ vis-h-vis ‘leisure’; but young professional,

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middle-class men ignored the call to associate with the working class in
order to elevate it, preferring to maintain their social status by an exclusiv-
ity in sport which (after 1867) could no longer be maintained in politics:
‘no base mechanic arms need be suffered to thrust themselves in here’, as
The Times put it in 1880.
Nevertheless, the gentlemanly version of football was effectively sub-
verted by the development of a mass spectatorship and the consequent
professionalization of the game, in the course of which a new breed of
hard-nosed, self-serving, self-made men sought prestige in industrial com-
munities by patronizing and appropriating control of the sport. Similarly, in
the world of music hall (and Bailey has written one of the best introduc-
tions to the subject) a breed of entrepreneurs of leisure contrived to screw
down much of the spontaneity of the halls in the pursuit of efficient profit-
taking. In the course of this process, however, much that was objectionable
to the improvers of leisure-the sexual innuendoes, the drink, the occa-
sional political comment-was curtailed, so that the captains of the emerg-
ing leisure industry played their part-for reasons of commerce, and partly
as a defence in the climate of opinion created by the recreational
reformers-in ‘improving’ the content of popular leisure.
This is a stimulating theme, and Bailey makes a contribution both to the
history of leisure activities and to the general history of English society.
Particular regard will undoubtedly be paid to his concluding argument that
the ‘respectability’ which was the embodiment of the rational recreational-
ists’ ideal has been seen too much hitherto through stereotyping Victorian
spectacles and that too little attention has been paid to the behavioural role
being fulfilled by seemingly respectable historical actors: thus respectabil-
ity should not be seen as a cultural absolute but as ‘an undemanding role to
play [for instance, in connection with a church football team] for working
men who possessed the minimal apparatus of dress, speech and demeanour
required to match its standardized public image’. Thus, he argues, ‘the
differentials of class’ were more potent than those of respectability. Unfor-
tunately, Bailey never makes explicit his model of class structure and class
relations; despite some caveats, it seems pretty largely the basic three-class
model, which is inadequate, especially if local variations are not described.
The author underplays the amount of working-class involvement in
attempts to bring about improved or rational recreation: he mentions
Lovett’s ‘Knowledge Chartism’ and the Owenite Halls of Science only in
passing, and gives very little attention indeed to the recreations of church
and chapel goers. Perhaps his ‘modest running case study’ of Bolton was a
little too modest in this respect. But the final word on Bailey should not be
one of criticism but of praise, for this densely-woven, well-packed book
will assuredly hold an honoured place in the field for many years to come.
James Walvin has written a very different kind of book: it ranges over a
much wider period, it has no central thesis t o propound and it has a greater
commitment to telling ‘a previously neglected story’ than to complex
analysis; nevertheless, it is no mean feat to impose order on a mass of
disparate material and he ‘tells his story’ very, very well. He begins by
painting a picture of almost unrelieved bleakness in the industrial towns in
the 1830s and 1840s (one might contrast this with Bailey’s stress on the
vitality and adaptability of popular recreations in the early Victorian
54 LEISURE AND RECREATION
town), but his initial thesis is undeniable: ‘The new urban society required
new games for a new type of people, just as it needed new attitudes to
work’. Similarly, he demonstrates the profound influence of the
railways-promoting change through excursions to inland and seaside
resorts and to race meetings, while actually shoring up prize-fighting and
the carnivals surrounding public hangings. There follow two chapters in
which Walvin admirably sums up the literature on such diverse aspects of
leisure time activity as drink, prostitution, Sunday schools, and popular
literature. (Some eyebrows may be raised at a definition of leisure which
includes prostitution.)
As Dr. Walvin’s other books testify (especially The People‘s Game and
Beside the Seaside), he is an excellent synthesizer, and he analyses with
great clarity the paradox that leisure, ‘as a natural aspiration of life’,
catered for by nothing-less-than a major industry, was becoming a major
feature of a society which was also becoming aware of the massive extent of
poverty. Priestley pointed to this contrast in the thirties. Walvin has estab-
lished it as characteristic of the period since real wages began to rise
appreciably in the 1870s. Sport and the seaside, of course, played the
largest part in the expansion of recreational activities, and here Walvin is
summarizing themes he has made his own (though John Walton’s Black-
pool Landlady will now have to be reckoned with).
Two most interesting chapters on music and on children’s games follow.
Walvin draws close to Bailey’s theme in arguing that music was par excel-
lence an edifying and purifying force, a ‘rational recreation’, yet, here as
well, working men broke out of the mould of sponsored recreation and
created a brass-band movement, and a choral festival movement (which,
incidentally, provided ‘one of the few forms of Victorian leisure in which
women could participate on equal terms with men’) of great vitality. While
music had followed the common pattern of recreations from a pre-
industrial revolution ‘folk’ basis to a highly organized movement with rich
pickings for the music publishers, the instrument makers and the music hall
companies, children’s games (despite the horrors of child labour) kept alive
the cultural heritage of several centuries-as Shrove Tuesday, April Fool’s
Day, Halloween and Guy Fawkes demonstrate. Indeed, J. A. R. Pimlott’s
book on Christmas quotes Robert Southey to the effect that children kept
Christmas celebrations alive in the lean days of the early nineteenth cen-
tury. (Walvin doesn’t say much about Christmas, and says nothing about
Easter.)
Despite the children and despite some popular resistance-
Bartholomew Fair and others hardly just ‘simply disappeared‘-leisure
activities in general and sport in particular became functionally compatible
with industrial capitalism, and especially in the twentieth century, ‘the
combination of consumer power and commercial pressure’ has provided
the main dynamic for changes in the forms of leisure activity. Walvin’s
references to American influence on fairgrounds, on music, and on cinema
are interesting here.
The lack of footnotes is a disappointment; no doubt the author is hoping
to ‘hit the jackpot’ with the non-academic book-buying public, but the
absence of footnotes seems irresponsible when one considers that (on its
own merits, as well as in the absence of any competition) this book will
 REVIEW ARTICLE 55
immediately take its place as the textbook for the history of modern leisure.
Some students or teachers may conclude that the subject is not worthy of
serious academic consideration, when Bailey and R. W. Malcolmson et. al.
have demonstrated precisely the opposite. (Walvin’s comprehensive bib-
liography helps scholars but not students.)
John Walton has ‘tried to write a work of serjous history which can be
enjoyed by the general reader‘. His fully-referenced book is a most attrac-
tive social history which skilfully interweaves the development of Black-
pool with the history of the landladies of the town, demonstrating that the
one cannot be fully understood without the other. Blackpool’s successful
expansion from a third-rate regional watering-place to ‘the pioneer large-
scale working-class resort’ (‘the worlds most highly-specialised holiday
town’ in 1911) depended above all on its hinterland of Lancashire mill-
towns, with their relatively high-earning working-class families, who, by
the 189Os, had achieved a wakes’ week holiday. And they went to Black-
pool rather than elsewhere because it was there that they could find the
right range of lodgings, a tolerant attitude towards working-class visitors,
most of the attractions of a w a k e - o n the beach, plus a spectacular show of
water washing right over the promenades. Surprisingly (c.J Walvin) the
railway companies did not so much stimulate travel to Blackpool as strug-
gle to keep pace with its expansion.
The landlady, then, played a very important role in the growth of the
town and Walton sympathetically explores her origins, social mobility,
family relationships, financial stability, and social outlook. He calculates
that if the boarding-house provided an independence for only about a
quarter of its hopeful married entrants at any given time, on the other hand
it did provide a means of emancipation for the unhappily married women-
in 1871 nearly 10 per cent of landladies were husband-less married
women. They came to a town whose landholding structure was fragmented
and therefore, in contrast to Southport and Lytham, high-class estate
development and a select resort could not easily evolve. This did not mean
that Blackpool became an entirely working-class resort for, away from the
railway station and the town centre, more select areas were developed.
The case of the South Shore will be of particular interest to students of the
urban development process, for there, Walton claims, a number of small
businessmen promoted a select residential area without any oversight by
the original large landowner, rather on a basis of shared values with the
residents. The existence of such an area provided a beacon to those land-
ladies who sought ‘respectability’, the counterpart of the back-street,
cram-’em-in, touting-for-business brigade. Walton does not directly con-
front this issue of ‘respectability’, although his book is full of material
germane t o the theme. For instance, it seems that most of the earlier
working-class holiday makers were of the ‘respectable’ type, but that from
the 1890s they were ‘swamped by a more boisterous, rough-and-ready
crowd who threatened the social tone of large parts of the established
trade, and who-by patronizing an amusement park-destroyed the select
seclusion of South Shore.
The core of Walton’s book is his analysis of the pre-1914 period;
nonetheless he presents an interesting account of the resort’s development
and its landladies’ problems in the twentieth century. Strangely enough, he
56 LEISURE AND RECREATION
locates the ‘golden years’ of the landlady in the 1940s, during World War
11: the billeting of troops in the town, the closure to visitors of East Coast
rivals, high wartime wages and the government’s acceptance that holidays
were a necessary stimulus to war effort, constituting the causes of this
boom. Otherwise, the development of twentieth-century Blackpool has
been a fairly predictable story of accommodation to wider changing leisure
patterns, but it is good to have some of this social history documented.
J. A. R. Pimlott’s enjoyable book represents the posthumous culmina-
tion of a distinguished career in the Civil Service and in historical writing.
His The Englishman’s Holiday (first published in 1947) was for long a
lonely pioneer and is still a basic book on the theme. In The Englishman’s
Chhimas Pimlott again displays the fruits of extensive research and his
gift for clear, elegant exposition. His central purpose was to trace the
development of Christmas as a social institution, and there is no doubt that
his book will form the standard account. Although information was scanty,
he was able to distinguish the pagan and Christian elements (mainly pagan)
which were to make the Twelve Days into the ‘main annual holiday’ of the
medieval and Tudor period. Puritan critics attacked its ‘Popish’ and supers-
titious associations, and by a famous Act of Parliament Christmas Day was
declared abolished in 1652. Despite some serious resistance and much
non-compliance with the Puritan regime, it seemed to late-seventeenth and
early-eighteenth-century writers that Christmas observance and festivities
had received a damaging blow: the talk was of decline and decay. Pimlott
certainly accepted that there was a decline in great house hospitality at
Christmas, but he noted signs of continued vigour in the foundation of new
Christmas charities, and of the mummers’ play of St. George. What is quite
certain is that Christmas suffered along with all other holidays by the
rationalization of ‘anachronistic conditions’ at the beginning of the
nineteenth century: in 1797 the Customs offices closed on six of the 12
days of Christmas, in 1838, on only one. A routine meeting of the Carlton
Club was held on 25 December in 1833. Special workhouse dinners were
abandoned. Some factory masters became Dissenters in order to have an
excuse for ‘persuading’ their workers to come to work during this ‘supers-
titious’ festival. Like May Day, Christmas had ‘shrunk‘.
How remarkable then that this decline should be transformed into the
sentimental and popular high Victorian Christmas! Pimlott rightly places
Prince Albert and Charles Dickens in perspective as popularizers rather
than generators of a transforming movement of opinion: a movement of
opinion which reacted deeply against utilitarian capitalism, which saw
Christmas as a residue of the rapidly disappearing values of uncalculated
neighbourliness and goodwill, as well as a symbol of the continuity of
family life (an essentially evangelical theme). Pimlott described A Christ-
mas Carol as being ‘almost religious in its impact’, though it does seem a
little off the mark to describe ‘the new Christmas . . . as essentially a
Christian Socialist institution’. In any case, there were soon large commer-
cial interests involved. Present-giving shifted forward from the traditional
time of New Year’s Day to Christmas Day in the second half of the
nineteenth century. The rest of the book is a working out of the theme of
‘how we got from there to here’, with respect to Christmas trees, carols,
Father Christmas, crackers, cake, and nativity plays; it is full of interesting
 REVIEW ARTICLE 57
information, and ends with a spirited defence of the modern institution.
The history of leisure is evidently producing some significant and serious
contributions to wider social history, but Patrick Beaver‘s The Spice of Life
is hardly in this category. It is a straightforward descriptive account of
pantomime, clowns, circuses, fairgrounds, music halls, and the early
cinema. As a descriptive account it is clear without any pretensions to
depth, and it has a bibliography; it may perhaps be recommended for light
reading and occasional reference. A. H. Saxon’s Life and Art of Andrew
Ducrow on the other hand is a work of exhaustive research and exhausting
detail by a man with a Ph.D. in Theatre History from Yale. It tells the tale
of perhaps the greatest equestrian entertainer in circus history, (floruit
1793-1 842), but it makes almost no effort to explain his success in terms of
the society in which he lived-this is no ‘Life and Times’. It is a great pity
that most theatre historians make so little effort to look outside the internal
development of the art, the actor or the theatre in question in order to help
to explain their subjects; they would surely gain, and social history would
gain-after all, theatre and circus were undoubtedly popular leisure
activities, with some significance for urban popular culture. Historians of
leisure still have plenty of scope.
University of Hull DOUGLAS REID