LEISURE

The historical development of attitudes toward leisure mirrored many of the larger currents of change witnessed by Europeans in the epoch separating the French Revolution from World War I. Indeed Europe's industrializing economy, shifting contours of class identity, rising sense of national consciousness, and commodifying market and cultural forces shaped the world of "free time" just as markedly in the long nineteenth century as they did the everyday worlds of work and domestic life. Almost without respect to geography or social position, what villagers, city folk, and anyone in between would have done—or certainly dreamt of doing with leisure—by 1914 was fundamentally far removed from what would have been the case in 1789.

background

Voltaire's (1694–1778) "age of Enlightenment" had cajoled its citizens in the direction of the cultivated garden, both metaphorically and literally. Still, for country people and urban artisans alike, when the pressing calendar of work relented—whether because a day was marked off as one of the many allocated to forms of festive recreation or simply because a raucous weekend was so often followed by a Saint Monday's hangover—it was the familiar rhythms of hearthside and well deserved time with one's mates that structured leisure far more than anything offered by the philosophes as counsel regarding the rational use of time away from work. In this order of leisurely things, which Samuel Smiles (1812–1904), Mathew Arnold (1822–1888), Émile Zola (1840–1902), and so many other nineteenth-century commentators of varying ideological persuasions would see as slothful and even degenerative, humble workers of the land and their artisan counterparts were scarcely without aristocratic peerage. Blessed with abundant leisure as compared to their toiling contemporaries, the socially privileged of eighteenth-century Europe hardly excelled in avoiding what later moralists of the middle class would decry as an over-interest in measuring up to some very Bacchanalian standards. As the rules of social conduct and comportment posted at Bath in the generation before the novelist Jane Austen's (1775–1817) visits there reveal, not only was the gentry's leisure deemed needful of a reformation, but indeed its practitioners were themselves largely willing to cede over governance of their time at the spa to Beau Nash (Richard Nash; 1674–1762), the English gamester and social arbiter, and to the town's other well-known social figures.

The quest for a transparent, ideological purity, installed briefly by the radical phase of the French Revolution, sought to reform and in some cases eradicate practices of leisure long associated with the different strata of social life in France and wherever else the tenets of 1789 and after held sway. But if political club meetings and a new calendar of festive days could be culturally installed or govern-mentally decreed, no political mapping of reformed ideas about leisure onto social life could alter fundamentally the salient and inherently conserving attributes of ideas and experiences of leisure: that people tended to travel very little; that they tended to be their own performers and entertainers; that they took their cues and clues about leisure from church, village, guild, and regional patterns; and that their great, great grandparents would have felt just as much at ease living their descendant's leisure as they had lived their own.

new time

The industrialization and urbanization of Europe during the nineteenth century—exhaustively chronicled by contemporaries and only more intensely scrutinized since by scholars—ushered in a changed encounter with the concept of time. Long pegged to an agrarian calendar and the routines of seasonal farm and proto-industrial labor, conceptions of time were already being infused with the new imperatives of the industrial clock by the later 1820s. Not only did workers now need to devote a predetermined and agreed on amount of time to their jobs, but also the steady rise of mechanized production brought with it efforts to calibrate very precisely how much work a given producer could be expected to accomplish in a given day of labor. Being on time for work now mattered, just as a new hierarchy of bosses and factory rules combined to zealously monitor comportment, productivity, and the time allotted for pausing from one's work.

Even more generally, however, cultural forces well removed from the economic dictates of the factory helped to frame a new sense of time. Clocks were installed on town halls and churches all over Europe, just as the pocket watch would become to the bourgeoisie of the 1840s and after what Zola's working-class would later see in the bureau clock: a symbol of success, self control, and thrift.

The rise of factory time and the ubiquitous timepiece were matched in social importance by

other alterations in the way that people lived with time. The full festive calendar of days off from work, by the decades around the middle of the nineteenth century, had been replaced by a very few vacation days for most workers. England's five bank holidays represented a more curtailed version of this change than Continental Europe's Catholic and less quickly industrialized countries would see early in the era, but the constricted experience of holidays was a reality everywhere. Replacing the traditional array of feast and rest days were new arguments for a day away from work. Birthdays, anniversaries, honeymoons, and other personal uses for leisure were placed on the new time's calendar coincidentally with days that the state deemed critical for rest, reflection, or festive participation.

the vacation

Aristocrats had always had access to an experience of extended leisure that might be rightly called the proto-vacation. So did to some degree the pilgrims who sojourned all over Europe to visit Rome, Santiago e Compostela, Canterbury, and other sites of devotional interest. But new conceptions of time in the nineteenth century joined together with the rising force of the industrializing economy to mark a radical shift in who could vacation, how it was that vacationers did what they did, and where it was that they went. Improved transportation was paramount in opening up the possibilities of the vacation. Carriage travel from Paris to the watering places and spa towns favored by the seventeenth and eighteenth-century aristocracy was a venture that took days to execute. The arrival of the railroad altered this fact dramatically and immediately.

England's Blackpool and Brighton were just two of many cities whose explosive growth in the middle decades of the nineteenth century bore witness to what the railroads could efficiently deliver by way of day tripping or weekending passengers. London's Sunday trains, already by the early 1840s, were packed to Brighton and back with working-class and middle-class trippers who eagerly sought the distractions of Brighton and its famous seaside piers over another day spent in the congestion of the city. The capacity to choose a day in Brighton, whether that meant entering one of its rickety bathing machines to be dragged some distance from the shore for a trap-door drop into the cold waters or just a lazy day taking in the sights and the odd entertainers who flocked to the coast, the seaside town was something nobody's parents had grown up being able to easily visit.

Meanwhile, the more affluent, who could pay for taking longer trips away from home, flooded the great spa towns of Europe, where civic leaders fought to secure train connections and build better train stations than their rivals could boast. It was not just improved transportation, however, that drove the growth of the vacation industry in the nineteenth century. The dream of the vacation and the things one would do while vacationing had first to be crafted and well inculcated in the mentality of those who would travel for leisure. Hardly a simple matter, this, considering the negative and even terrible associations some of Europe's greatest vacation destinations had historically endured. The great Mont Blanc, for example—whose ardent English admirers would spur a veritable cult of alpinist worship that would more or less chronologically match the great dates of Romanticism as a literary and artistic genre (1795–1840)—was only "discovered" in the eighteenth century, when scientifically minded explorers tamed the mountain's fierce isolation first by mapping and measuring and then, only late in the century, by conquering the giant itself.

The same processes would colonize, safeguard, and then popularize the many beaches, including those on the French Norman coast and the Côte d'Azur, and inland watering places—or spas—of Europe. Long understood as a treacherous borderland between the safety of the shore and the turbulence of the otherworldly sea, beach areas enjoyed a tremendous cultural reformation, compliments largely of doctors, whose writings about the health benefits of sea bathing helped spur local developers to build hotels and other amenities. Not only did this partnership of doctors and developers create resort towns, but also it gave order and a cultural imperative to what one did while at these places. Would-be vacationers among Europe's bourgeoisie, in particular, had largely internalized their century's mantra of productivity by its middle decades. In the highly medicalized organization doctors gave to the beach vacation, travelers experienced a rejuvenating stay by the sea whose rhythms were carefully calibrated to produce a more healthful and hence productive person. All the while, of course, any mystery related to what one would do while on vacation was replaced by the certainty of medical authority. Spas were likewise developed by alliances between medical authorities and civic leaders, partnering guidebook writing with cleaned up bathing facilities, carefully scripted water cures, and the pleasures of exciting casinos and verdant walking parks. The success of these efforts was obvious to any observer by 1900, a year when more than half a million people in France alone were employees of the spa industry. Around the same time, more than a million annual visitors went to Lourdes on its pilgrim trains, and slightly fewer than that went to spas.

leisure and gender

If experiences of leisure varied across the social spectrum, gender was also a categorical organizer of time-off for Europeans. For women and men of the working classes, leisure was more equally understood than was the case among the bourgeoisie and middle class. Factory employees had cafes, pubs, public parks, and the emerging places of mass cultural amusement—such as the wax museum and the café concert—where men and women were welcomed, even if even sympathetic writers like Zola would take literary pains to point out how drinking and working-class lives could intersect with tragic results. For women of the middle class and bourgeoisie, however, it was a social ideal by midcentury and after not to be associated with work outside of the home on a remunerative basis. Charity work and the almost endless tasks of making the home a representative attribute of a family's claims to social standing and respectability were taken to be more than enough work indeed. Piano playing, novel reading, working on hand-crafts, hosting social functions, and embarking on well supervised spa trips loomed large among the more accepted performances of leisure among these women. So, in the latter decades of the century among the younger women of this group, did the burdensome role cast for them as invalids whose physiology as women was said to leave them prone to hysteria and other disabling nervous maladies. While tubercular beauty was depicted in countless canvases hung on the walls of bourgeois homes and made manifest in the sick rooms set up for girls of this class, the last years of the century also witnessed a pronounced interest on the part of many younger women in enjoying the social spaces and cultural places of the modernizing city. The so-called new woman—whether she went to a spa for three weeks with her girlfriends and a domestic servant as chaperone or otherwise sought out the fun of society in public with her peers—was eager to enjoy the life that her family's money and her own leisure could support.

mobility and democratized leisure

If the long nineteenth century was ushered in to the sound of plodding horse hooves and a view of the world that for most people was limited to a farmstead, a hamlet, or a particular city, the years before World War I echoed with the hiss of steam engines taking people to the mountains, the sea, and everywhere in between. Mobility had been fused together with dreams of seeing new places and doing new things with leisure. Among workers, the great cry for "eight hours for what we will" was already current, even if the reality of the tripartite day—eight hours for work, and eight each for sleep and leisure—was still years away. Horse-racing, tennis, golf, and the bicycle would all come to compete for the leisure not just of affluent Europeans but also—over time—that of the middle class and its working counterparts. Auto racing, national bicycle contests, and the like were quickly becoming important spectator sports, together with football matches and sundry other ways of watching professionals perform either in sport or as entertainers. Package tours of southern France or the Scottish Highlands or the German Black Forest would become an international business, complete with tour brokers and veteran leisure enthusiasts from all classes who had been to places or done things with their time away from work that their grandparents might have understood but that would have seemed inexplicably strange to anyone from generations earlier.

See alsoBourgeoisie; Industrial Revolution, First; Railroads; Seaside Resorts; Secularization; Tourism.

bibliography

Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London, 1978.

Baranowski, Shelley, and Ellen Furlough, eds. Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America. Ann Arbor, Mich., 2001.

Cunningham, Hugh. Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1770–c. 1880. New York, 1980.

Mackaman, Douglas Peter. Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France. Chicago, 1998.

Douglas P. Mackaman