Pleasures & pastimes in Victorian Britain

It was a paradox of nineteenth-century Britain that while work was the bedrock upon which the Victorian vision of progress was constructed, the years between 1837 and 1901 also saw the greatest upsurge in leisure pursuits hitherto witnessed.

Pamela Horn sets the various activities enjoyed by the Victorians in the context of growing leisure time, the transformation of occupational structures, and the increasing concentration of people in urban society.