ABSTRACT
Just as they revolutionized work and industrial production, so too did the Victorians transform leisure, play and consumption. There were significant elements of continuity and adaptation, conflict and resistance, but change and modernity predominated. George Eliot lamented the passing of ‘Old Leisure’, its familiar, unhurried pleasures supplanted by a modern appetite for novelty and sensation. Contemplating a dramatically transformed new leisure world The Times discerned ‘a great revolution … great displacement of masses, momentous changes of level’. Leisure was now frontier territory, provoking both wonder and disquiet in a lengthy discourse on the ‘problem of leisure’, played out across the unsettling passage from a more traditional to a modern capitalist mass culture in a democratizing urban industrial society. What did the older leisure landscape look like and did it really die; how, when and by whom or what did major changes come about; how did they affect social life and popular experience, and with what consequences for the larger issues of cultural politics and the quality of life (Bailey 1999; Borsay 2006)?
