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    Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
    Unavailable
    Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
    Unavailable
    Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
    Ebook949 pages16 hours

    Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

    By Judith Flanders

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    About this ebook

    A delightful and fascinating social history of Victorians at leisure, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of nineteenth-century men and women, from the author of the bestselling ‘The Victorian House’.

    Imagine a world where only one in five people owns a book, where just one in ten has a knife or a fork – a world where five people out of every six do not own a cup to hold a hot drink. That was what England was like in the early eighteenth century. Yet by the close of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had brought with it not just factories, railways, mines and machines but also fashion, travel, leisure and pleasure.

    Leisure became an industry – a cornucopia of excitement for the masses – and it was spread by newspapers, advertising, promotions and publicity – all of which were eighteenth-century creations. It was Josiah Wedgwood and his colleagues who invented money-back guarantees, free delivery and celebrity endorsements. New technology such as the railways brought audiences to ever-more-elaborate extravaganzas, whether it was theatrical spectaculars with breathtaking pyrotechnics and hundreds of extras – ‘hippodramas' recreating the battle of Waterloo – or the Great Exhibition itself, proudly displaying 'the products of all quarters of the globe' under twenty-two acres of the sparkling 'Crystal Palace'.

    In ‘Consuming Passions’, the bestselling author of ‘The Victorian House’ explores this dramatic revolution in science, technology and industry – and how a world of thrilling sensation, lavish spectacle and unimaginable theatricality was born.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateOct 1, 2009
    ISBN9780007347629
    Unavailable
    Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
    Author

    Judith Flanders

    Judith Flanders is the author of several critically acclaimed and bestselling books: A Circle of Sisters (2001), which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award; The Invention of Murder (2001), shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-fiction; The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed(2003); The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London (2012), shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year; The Making of Home (2014), Christmas: A History (2017) and A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (2020). In her copious leisure time, she also writes the Sam Clair series of comic crime novels.

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    Reviews for Consuming Passions

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      BookCrossing 31 Jul 2010 (bought from Connected charity shop for BC purposes)A look at Victorian leisure and pleasure, the themed chapters (shopping, reading, theatre, sports...) stretched in fact from the 18th to the early 20th century, and fascinating they were too. Each chapter could have been a book in its own right and was meticulously researched, referenced and footnoted, and I learnt a lot. Excellent illustrations, both within the text and on the plates, and superb cross-referencing. This long book was actually quite a quick read, and I recommend it to any lovers of social history. Why was the copy-editing only good until p. 101, though?
    • 5/5
      Are you a dedicated shopper? Have you ever wondered how this marvellous pastime developed? This then is the book for you. Its brilliant, packed with detail about the rise and rise of consumerism, shops, department stores, and so on. It begins with a dazzling description of the Great Exhibition in London and how so much of what we recognise today as essential leisure pastimes developed from that event. Apart from the impressive level of research, the text is written in an easy, conversational style which makes you want to read just one more page, then maybe one more. Don't miss it!