ABSTRACT
This chapter delineates a brief historiography of the Industrial Revolution and how twentieth-century economic and social historians had split into two opposing camps – optimist and pessimists – as regards the famous ‘standard of living debate’. It notes that this bifurcation extended into, and pointedly influenced, the works of social, leisure and cultural historians as they confronted the relative claims of change and continuity in the making of modern leisure. It notes, in particular, Hugh Cunningham’s identification of those two apparently contradictory processes at work between around 1750 up to the 1850s both have seemingly impacted severely on the emergence of football across the nineteenth century.
