The Victorian Era

How Did Victorians Spend Their Leisure Time?

Article · History & Overview · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Victorians enjoyed a wider range of leisure activities than any previous generation of Britons. The new transport of the period, the new mass media of the period, the new commercial entertainments of the period, and the new shorter working hours of the period all combined to create a much richer leisure culture than had existed before. The leisure patterns of the Victorians were heavily influenced by class. The upper and middle classes enjoyed the seaside resort, the country house, the opera, the concert, the art gallery, the museum, the lecture, the cricket match, and the regatta. The working class enjoyed the music hall, the public house, the football match, the seaside trip, the bank holiday outing, the boxing match, the dog track, and the street market. Yet there was a great deal of common ground, and many leisure activities, including the seaside trip, the bank holiday, the Christmas dinner, the music hall song, and the public house, were enjoyed by almost everyone. The history of leisure in the period is examined in Victorian Daily Life and Society and in Victorian Entertainment and Leisure.

The Bank Holiday and the Saturday Half-Holiday

The most important institutional change in the working-class leisure of the period was the Bank Holiday Act of 1871. The act, introduced by the Liberal politician and banker Sir John Lubbock, created four new public holidays in England, Wales, and Ireland: Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August (the August Bank Holiday, popularly known as “the Glorious Twelfth” in some places), and Boxing Day. Boxing Day had long been observed in practice, but the act gave the new holidays the force of statute. The Scottish bank holidays were different, including New Year’s Day, Good Friday, and the first Monday in May. The act was a landmark in the social history of the period, because it gave working people a statutory right to four days of paid holiday a year.

The half-day Saturday, the “Saturday half-holiday”, became common in the 1850s and 1860s. The Early Closing Act of 1872 allowed local authorities to require shops to close on one weekday afternoon, and the Saturday half-holiday was widely adopted. The Wakes Weeks, the annual summer holidays of the Lancashire mill towns, and the Bank Holiday excursion trains, the special cheap trains to the seaside organised by the railway companies, were both products of the new leisure pattern. Thomas Cook, the founder of the modern package tour, organised his first conducted railway excursion from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841, and his first tour to the Continent in 1855.

The Seaside Resort

The seaside resort was the great Victorian invention in the field of leisure. The first seaside resort, Scarborough, had been established in the seventeenth century, and Brighton had become fashionable in the late eighteenth century, but the great expansion of the seaside trade was a product of the Victorian era. The new railways made the seaside accessible to the working class, and the new bathing machines, the new piers (Brighton Chain Pier, 1823; Margate Jetty, 1835; Blackpool North Pier, 1863), the new bandstands, the new promenades, the new hydropathic hotels, and the new entertainment arcades made the seaside attractive to all classes.

The principal seaside resorts of the Victorian period were on the south coast, including Brighton, Eastbourne, Hastings, Folkestone, and Bournemouth; on the east coast, including Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Felixstowe, and Margate; on the west coast, including Blackpool, Morecambe, Southport, and the Welsh resorts of Llandudno and Rhyl; and on the south-west coast, including Torquay, Teignmouth, Dawlish, Sidmouth, and Exmouth. The history of the seaside is examined in Victorian Entertainment and Leisure.

Sport

The Victorians were passionate about sport. The great public schools of the period, including Rugby, Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, and Charterhouse, codified the modern rules of football, rugby, cricket, rowing, and athletics, and they exported the games to the rest of the world. The Football Association was founded in 1863, the FA Cup was first played for in the 1871–72 season, the Football League was founded in 1888, the first county cricket championship was held in 1890, the first Test match between England and Australia was played in 1880 (the Ashes being born from the Sporting Times’s mock obituary of 1882), the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896, the Derby has been run at Epsom since 1780, and the Grand National has been run at Aintree since 1839. The first Varsity Match between Oxford and Cambridge was played in 1872, and the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race has been rowed since 1829, with the professionalisation of the crews beginning in the 1850s. The Amateur Athletic Association was founded in 1880, and the Lawn Tennis Association was founded in 1888.

The principal sports of the Victorian period were cricket, football, rugby, horse racing, rowing, boxing, fencing, athletics, cycling, swimming, and tennis. The sports were patronised by the upper and middle classes, who played and watched them, and they were attended by the working class, who paid to watch them. The great sporting venues of the period, including Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Oval, Henley-on-Thames, and Ascot, were the centres of the sporting world.

The Music Hall

The music hall was the great working-class entertainment of the Victorian era. The first music halls, which were developed from the tavern concerts of the 1830s and 1840s, became a major form of commercial entertainment in the second half of the century. The music halls were large, gas-lit (and later electric-lit) auditoriums, in which a varied programme of songs, dances, comic turns, acrobatic acts, and animal acts was performed. The great music hall artists of the period, including Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley, Albert Chevalier, and Gus Elen, became national celebrities, and their songs entered the popular culture of the period.

The music hall was not just entertainment. It was also a social institution, in which the working class of the great industrial cities gathered to enjoy a few hours of laughter, song, and release. The music hall was, however, a controversial institution. The Puritan reformers of the period objected to the music hall’s association with drunkenness, with sexual impropriety, and with the corruption of the working class. The Theatres Act of 1843, the Disorderly Houses Act of 1751, and a long series of local acts attempted to regulate the music hall, and the great campaign against the music hall, led by the reformer Laura Ormiston Chant, was one of the major social campaigns of the late Victorian period. The history of the music hall is examined in Victorian Entertainment and Leisure.

The Public House

The public house, the pub, was one of the central institutions of Victorian life. The pub was the place where the working man drank his beer, where he met his friends, where he read the newspaper, where he played darts, and where he formed his opinions of the world. The pub was regulated by a succession of licensing acts, including the Wine and Beerhouse Act of 1830, the Sale of Beer Act of 1853, the Wine Licence Act of 1860, and the Licensing Act of 1872, and the great brewing firms of the period, including Bass, Whitbread, and Guinness, were among the largest businesses in the country. The history of drinking in the period is examined in Victorian Food and Dining.

The temperance movement was a major force in the Victorian era. The United Kingdom Alliance, founded in 1853, campaigned for the prohibition of the sale of intoxicating liquors, and the temperance movement had a significant effect on the drinking patterns of the working class. The principal temperance organisations of the period, including the Band of Hope, the Independent Order of Rechabites, the Sons of Temperance, the Good Templars, and the Salvation Army, all promoted the cause of total abstinence. The political history of the temperance movement is examined in Victorian Morality and Social Reform.

The Theatre

The theatre was one of the great entertainments of the Victorian period. The Victorian theatre evolved from a marginal, disreputable entertainment into a respectable mass medium. The Licensing Act of 1737 had restricted the performance of legitimate drama to the two patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and to a small number of licensed houses, but the Theatres Act of 1843 abolished the patent theatres’ monopoly, and the great Victorian theatre boom began. The principal actors of the period, including Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Charles Kean, Samuel Phelps, and Madge Kendal, became national celebrities, and the long-run system of Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre, where he played for over 250 nights in some productions, was a landmark in the history of the commercial theatre. The history of the theatre is examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama.

The museum and the art gallery were great Victorian inventions in the field of public entertainment. The British Museum had been established in 1753, the National Gallery in 1824, and the South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1852. The new museums and galleries of the period, including the Natural History Museum (opened in 1881), the Science Museum (founded in 1857), the Tate Gallery (founded in 1897), and the Imperial War Museum (founded in 1917, but with roots in the late Victorian period), were all products of the late Victorian era. The new institutions were free, they were open to all, and they were designed to educate as well as to entertain. The history of the great exhibitions is examined in Famous Victorian Buildings and Landmarks and in the page on the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Reading and the Press

Reading was one of the great Victorian pastimes. The reading public expanded enormously in the period, helped by the Education Acts of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, by the cheap reprints of the novels of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, and by the new mass-circulation newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph (founded in 1855), the Daily Mail (founded in 1896), and the Daily Express (founded in 1900). The principal magazines of the period, including Punch (founded in 1841), The Strand Magazine (founded in 1891), and The Illustrated London News (founded in 1842), all had circulations in the hundreds of thousands. The history of reading is examined in The Victorian Novel and in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.