Leisure & Recreation

This is a selection of some of the most recent work on working-class leisure, recreation and popular culture as well as some classic studies. Please contact Helen Rogers [email protected] with suggestions for additions.

Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Content for Control, 1830-1885 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980)

Bailey, Peter. Popular Performance and the Victorian City Cambridge: CUP, 1998.

Barton, Susan. Working-Class Organisations and Popular Tourism, 1840–1970. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005.

Beaven, Brad, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850-1914 Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005

Bourke, Joanna. Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity London: Routledge, 1994

Bowan, Kate and Paul A. Pickering. “’Songs for the Millions’: Chartist Music and Popular Aural Tradition.” Labour History Review 74.1 (2009) 44 – 63. DOI: 10.1179/174581809X408393

Crone, Rosalind. Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012.

Cross, Gary and John K. Walton. The Playful Crowd. Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century. New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2005

Curzon, Lucy. “Another Place in Time: Documenting Blackpool for Mass Observation in the 1930s” History of Photography 35.3 (2011) 313 – 326. DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2011.560447.

Davies, Andrew.  Leisure, Gender and Poverty. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992.

Gammon, Vic. Desire, Drink and Death in English Folk and Vernacular Song, 1600-1900. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Hakala, Taryn. “A Great Man in Clogs: Performing Authenticity in Victorian Lancashire” Victorian Studies 52.3 (2010) 387 – 412. DOI: 10.1353/vic.2010.0007

Harrison, Leigh Michael. “Factory Music: How the Industrial Geography and Working-Class Environment of Post-War Birmingham Fostered the Birth of Heavy Metal” Journal of Social History 44.1 (2010) 145 – 158. DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2010.0015.

James, Robert. “Popular Film-Going in the Early 1930s” Journal of Contemporary History 46.2 (2011) 271 – 287. DOI: 10.1177/0022009410392359.

Jones, Stephen G. Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure, 1918-39. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.

Matthews-Jones, Lucinda.

McKibbin, Ross. The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 Oxford: Oxford University Press,1990.

Peddie, Ian. “Playing at Poverty: The Music Hall and the Staging of the Working Class” The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain ed. Krishnamurthy, Aruna. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 235 – 254.

Pritchard, Ian. “’Beer and Britannia’: Public-House Culture and the Construction of Nineteenth-Century British-Welsh Industrial Identity”. Nations and Nationalism 18.2 (2012) 326 – 345. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00524.x

Roderick, Anne Baltz, ‘The Importance of Being an Earnest Improver: Class, Caste, and Self-Help in Mid Victorian England’ Victorian Literature and Culture 29 2001, pp. 39-50.

Russell, David.  Popular Music in England, 1840-1914 Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Stedman Jones, Gareth. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Tebbutt, Melanie. Women’s Talk? A Social History of Gossip in Working–Class Neighbourhoods, 1880-1960. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.

Tebbutt, Melanie. Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.

Todd, Selina, ‘Young Women, Work and Leisure in Interwar England.’ Historical Journal 48.3 (2005): 789-809.

Walton, John K. Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870-1940. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992.