Hugh Cunningham - Time, work and leisure: Life changes in England since 1700

Time, work and leisure

STUDIES IN

POPULAR

CULTURE

General editor: Professor Jeffrey Richards

Already published

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Time, work and leisure

Life changes in England since 1700

HUGH CUNNINGHAM

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright Hugh Cunningham 2014

The right of Hugh Cunningham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7190 8520 8 hardback

First published 2014

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STUDIES IN

POPULAR

CULTURE

There has in recent years been an explosion of interest in culture and cultural studies. The impetus has come from two directions and out of two different traditions. On the one hand, cultural history has grown out of social history to become a distinct and identifiable school of historical investigation. On the other hand, cultural studies has grown out of English literature and has concerned itself to a large extent with contemporary issues. Nevertheless, there is a shared project, its aim, to elucidate the meanings and values implicit and explicit in the art, literature, learning, institutions and everyday behaviour within a given society. Both the cultural historian and the cultural studies scholar seek to explore the ways in which a culture is imagined, represented and received, how it interacts with social processes, how it contributes to individual and collective identities and world views, to stability and change, to social, political and economic activities and programmes. This series aims to provide an arena for the cross-fertilisation of the discipline, so that the work of the cultural historian can take advantage of the most useful and illuminating of the theoretical developments and the cultural studies scholars can extend the purely historical underpinnings of their investigations. The ultimate objective of the series is to provide a range of books which will explain in a readable and accessible way where we are now socially and culturally and how we got to where we are. This should enable people to be better informed, promote an interdisciplinary approach to cultural issues and encourage deeper thought about the issues, attitudes and institutions of popular culture.

Jeffrey Richards

It was in the 1970s that leisure became a major subject of investigation for social historians. One of the most important books to emerge from that interest was Hugh Cunninghams Leisure in the Industrial Revolution c. 1780c. 1880 (Croom Helm, 1980). Returning to the subject thirty years on, he set out to remedy what he now sees as deficiencies in the study of leisure as it was written in the 1970s and 1980s. He singles out in particular the neglect of womens experience of work and leisure, the over-concentration on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the failure to address time-use generally rather than spare time in particular. He also seeks to address the now highly topical subject of worklife balance and the changes in the use and valuation of time over the past three centuries.

Beginning with changes in the perception of time in the eighteenth century and taking in such diverse but related topics as oil lamps, sleep patterns, almanacs, clocks and watches, and the Christian calendar he goes on to consider leisure and class, leisure and gender, leisure preference, and leisure and its critics. Under these broad headings and ever alert to changes in the relationship of work and leisure, he examines the conflict between rational and irrational recreation, the commercialisation of leisure and the emergence of the leisure industries, the attempts of central and local authorities to regulate leisure, the changing shape of the week, the redefinition and extension of childhood and the development of the concept of retirement.