ABSTRACT
The economic and social history of leisure has recently commanded the attention of a number of scholars. It is clear from an overview of the historiography that most of the research has been concerned with the changes and modifications in spare time and ways of using that spare time during nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization. The economic and social history of leisure, obviously related to wider themes of modernization, has therefore given rise to a fair degree of argument and polemical debate. The 1920s and 1930s were once considered to have been plagued by industrial stagnation, mass unemployment, and general gloom and pessimism. Moreover, many research projects need to be undertaken before all the facts are known. It may well be the case that when the groundwork has been carried out, a further study would provide a more considered integration of theory and the historical critique.
