Leisure cultures in urban Europe, c.1700–1870

A transnational perspective

Peter Borsay, Jan Hein Hein Furnee, Peter Borsay, Jan Hein Hein Furnee

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719089695
• eBook ISBN: 9781784996420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This collection of essays examines the history of urban leisure cultures in Europe during the transition from the early modern to the modern period. Bringing together research on a wide variety of activities – from the theatre and art exhibitions to spas, seaside resorts and games – it develops a new scholarly agenda for the history of leisure, focusing on the complex processes of cultural transfer that transformed urban leisure culture from the British Isles to the Ottoman Empire. How did new models of urban leisure pastimes travel throughout Europe? Who were the main agents of cultural innovation, appropriation and adaptation? How did the increasingly entangled character of European urban leisure culture impact upon the ways men and women from various classes identified with their social, cultural or (proto-)national communities? These are some of the questions explored by this accessible and wide-ranging collection, which looks at leisure from a long-term, interdisciplinary and transnational perspective.

1

Introduction

PETER BORSAY AND JAN HEIN FURNÉE

As early as 1801 the English antiquarian, engraver and historian Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) declared:

in order to form a just estimation of any particular people, it is absolutely necessary to investigate the sports and pastimes most generally prevalent among them. War, policy, and other contingent circumstances, may effectively place men, at different times, in different points of view; but, when we follow them into their retirement, where no disguise is necessary, we are most likely to see them in their true state, and may best judge of their natural dispositions.¹

Strutt’s exhortation to study leisure is one that historians have generally speaking been reluctant to follow; ‘war, policy and other contingent circumstances’ have always and continue to attract the lion’s share of the historical community’s attention. Yet Strutt had a point. If we want to get under the skin of a people and their past, it may be best to catch them off-guard, at leisure and in ‘their retirement’. Far from being a superficial facet of a person’s life, studying leisure may allow us to reach parts of the human experience – in particular culture – inaccessible through more obvious channels such as politics or even work.

Although most European historiographical traditions seem to lack an established term to identify leisure history as a subdiscipline (equivalents such as ‘Freizeitgeschichte’ or ‘histoire des loisirs’ are relatively little-used), it is not too difficult to delineate its field of inquiry. Indeed, whether primarily originating from social history (such as in Britain),² from the history of mentalities (as in France),³ from Alltagsgeschichte (as in Germany)⁴ or from cultural history and the history of cultural institutions (as in Italy), it is exactly at the intersection of these different historical approaches that a history of leisure finds its most challenging and fruitful questions. How did various social classes, generations, ethnicities and men and women identify themselves and relate to each other in their spare time activities? What ideas, mentalities and daily routines structured their changing social behaviour and their cultural tastes and experiences? What role did entrepreneurs, artists and various authorities, but also the spatial settings of leisure institutions and recreational artefacts themselves play in shaping and changing the ways in which people enjoyed their leisure time and how they felt part of larger social, cultural or national communities?

This volume aims to advance the historical research on European urban leisure cultures in three different yet interrelated ways. First, it aims to juxtapose and integrate the historical research on a wide variety of leisure activities and institutions that are usually studied in isolation: ranging from visiting theatre, concert and opera performances, attending art exhibitions and residing in spas and seaside resorts, to enjoying sports and games, walking, promenading, attending balls and frequenting coffeehouses and restaurants. A more integrated approach will not only show interesting contrasts and similarities between various leisure experiences, but also help to get a better understanding of the underlying social, economic, political and spatial processes that linked them together. Second, the volume seeks to counter the still persistent practice in the majority of historical research on leisure of focusing exclusively either on the early modern or modern periods. This has led to an overemphasis on innovations at the expense of continuities, and has severely hampered any well-informed understanding of long-term developments. Third and finally, the volume aims to bridge the gap between national research traditions, which in many ways are still locked in their national or even nationalistic frames of reference. In this endeavour, our objective is not only to juxtapose and compare historical developments in various European countries, but also to focus on processes of cultural transfer and appropriation. The history of leisure cultures in urban Europe in the period 1700–1870, we would like to argue in this volume, is fundamentally a transnational history.

Leisure history: some problems and challenges

From the onset, one of the principal problems facing those who study the history of leisure has been its multifaceted nature. Leisure necessarily embraces a wide range of human activities, such as music, theatre, visual art, sport, tourism and popular culture and customs, all of which have become associated with distinct disciplines such as art history, musicology and theatre and folklore studies, or at least with specialist academic fields. To develop a genuinely holistic view, the historian of leisure needs to be able to accommodate all these different perspectives. Understandably this has proved difficult. Disciplinary borders are notoriously difficult to cross, each discipline having its own modes of discourse and language, so that although there are some excellent studies of the history of particular forms of recreation – such as horseracing, the seaside holiday and the music hall in Britain – the truly panoptic perspective is rarely to be found. One effect of this is often to fail to notice the interconnections between various forms of leisure but also the differences.⁵ Why, for example did some recreations become commercialised and modernised more rapidly than others, or why did some cross national boundaries more easily than others? In drawing on the expertise not only of the social, cultural and urban historian, but also the art historian, musicologist and theatre historian, the essays in this volume will attempt to provide something of the interdisciplinary mix that allows a broader vision to be developed.

While the first interdisciplinary challenge of this book will appear quite self-evident (which is not the same as easy to tackle), the second one deserves a little more explanation. Next to the work done within the disciplinary boundaries of art history or music and theatre studies, the majority of historical research on leisure culture has tended to focus either on the early modern period – especially in the French and German traditions of the history of mentalities or Alltagsgeschichte – or on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – notably in British historiography but also elsewhere. The fundamental assumption underlying much of this divide, and indeed influencing the majority of work on the modern period, has been that large-scale industrialisation, and the associated urbanisation, would have created the need and means for the very phenomenon that we now call leisure, particularly through the generation of wealth surplus to the basic necessities of life, and the introduction of new technologies. In pre-industrial society, the argument follows, the line that divided work from recreation was blurred, particularly in relation to time,⁶ and the vast majority of the population did not have the means to engage in any sustained way in unproductive pastimes; in other words, there was no demand or market for leisure as we understand it, especially in its commercialised forms. Although, in the short-term, industrialisation may have reduced the time, resources and opportunities for leisure for many, over the longer-term it initiated a process of modernisation that changed the nature of work (accentuating the dividing line with play), and began to realise its full potential with the accession of the employed male working class into the rewards of economic growth (with the rise of real incomes) in the late nineteenth century, reflected in the emergence of mass spectator sports and holidays at this time.

Although there can be little doubt about the long-term transformative effects of large-scale industrialisation and urbanisation on people’s patterns of recreation, it would seem implausible to argue that leisure in the broadest sense did not exist in pre-industrial society – although there has been a debate as to whether it was ‘invented’ in the early modern period, or can be traced back to the medieval era.⁷ But was it of such a different character as to be a qualitatively different phenomenon? As early as a lecture of 1972, J.H. Plumb drew attention to the increasing commercialisation of leisure in the 1690s, and argued that by the 1750s leisure was becoming ‘an industry with great potentiality for growth’.⁸ Much of Plumb’s paper was taken up with the growth of print culture, but he also included gardening, shopping, theatre, concerts, dancing, sport and spa visiting, concluding ‘the middle class culture which this commercialisation of leisure brought about expanded greatly in the nineteenth century, modified maybe, but not essentially changed, and lasted until our own time.’⁹ Plumb’s lecture was subsequently reprinted in an influential volume of essays, written with Neil McKendrick and John Brewer, The Birth of a Consumer Society: the Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982), which declared that the period saw a ‘consumer revolution’,¹⁰ and which stimulated a series of studies demonstrating the vibrancy of consumer culture (of which recreations were a part) in the long eighteenth century.¹¹ Simultaneously, research on what was coined the ‘English urban renaissance’ in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revealed the emergence, well before the classic period of the Industrial Revolution, of a leisure economy in the modern sense, based on towns.¹² It was a pattern also to be seen in parts of Europe, notably seventeenth-century Netherlands and Italy, and eighteenth-century France and Germany. All this suggests that in the search for the emergence of modern leisure, the spotlight has at the very least to be trained back to the start of the eighteenth century, and focused on the urban world. It was in the eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century that the origins of what we consider ‘modern’ leisure are to be found, as the essays in this volume argue.

This also brings us to the hotly debated issues of class and gender. Leisure history in the 1970s, in Britain but also elsewhere, mainly focused on working-class leisure, reflecting the prevailing ideological perspective of social historians, one that emphasised the overarching role of class in determining social interactions and processes of change. With the rise of the ‘cultural turn’ and post-modernism, and the declining influence of Marxist thinking, the dominance of the class model was undermined. Culture became a force in its own right, not necessarily tied to specific economic and social structures. The inclusion of the eighteenth century as the period that saw the emergence of modern leisure had tended to reinforce this trend, because compared to the nineteenth century many historians have seen it as a relatively classless society. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the increasing numbers of visitors to theatres, concerts, parks or coffeehouses can at least partly be explained by their pleasure at expressing – or even sense of need to assert and confirm – their social status and group identities. The skilful tactics of cultural entrepreneurs and indeed of town authorities to capitalise on these social aspirations can even be regarded as one of the key explanations of the expanding world of urban leisure. Although most of the chapters in this volume primarily focus on the social and cultural worlds of urban elites, we can regard this new leisure culture at the same time as ‘popular’ and ‘mass’ culture in the sense that it catered for increasing numbers of visitors, was often highly commercial in its character and in many ways lacked the educated and individualistic refinement often – although sometimes unfairly – associated with elite leisure culture. To reintegrate the notion of class and social status in the long-term history of leisure is one of the challenges that several chapters address.

Although the ‘cultural turn’ has tended to downplay the role of class, it has undoubtedly had the benefit of recognising the role of leisure in mediating a range of identities other than class, especially gender. In the field of leisure, the construction of class and gender identities and relations were obviously closely interconnected. Aristocratic, bourgeois and working-class identities were to a great extent constructed on the basis of shared ideals of manliness and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Studies in Popular Culture
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of Contributors
• General editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• I Charting the flows: institutions and genres
• II Processes of selection and adaptation: actors and structures
• III Towards an ‘entangled history’ of urban leisure culture
• Select bibliography
• Index