ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the degree and timing of change and the relative weight of the different factors that went into the making of leisure and argues, were not simply the market forces of supply and demand. It explores the Importants of the latter were they were modified by the attachment of the working class to the forms of leisure created in the first half of the century, by the provision of facilities by government and charity, and by that ideology of leisure. The leisure patterns of modern industrial urban mass society now begin to take shape', writes Geoffrey Best of the mid-Victorian period. The strength of popular demand was such that many direct efforts to control leisure failed, yet that demand was contained within a world of commercialised leisure which provided its own controls. If the mid-nineteenth century is to be established as a turning-point we may expect to find more regular work patterns, a clearer demarcation between work and leisure.
