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6 - Leisure and culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
H. Cunningham
Edited by
F. M. L. Thompson
F. M. L. Thompson
Affiliation:
University of London
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Summary

TIME FOR LEISURE

The most obvious way of providing some parameters for the history of leisure is to regard leisure as time; it is the time which is left over after work and other obligations have been completed. Any hope, however, that such an approach will provide clear and unambiguous statistics of the changes in the amount of leisure time available to the population must, for a number of reasons, be discounted. First, there were always jobs in which working hours contained within them periods of leisure of an episodic or more or less regular character; examples include the workshop trades of the nineteenth century, such as printing, in which there was time for drinking and other workshop pranks, and in the twentieth century ship building where the scale of the enterprise made it impossible for supervisory staff to prevent card-playing at work. Secondly, there were jobs in which the working hours were never rigorously defined by the clock, and for which it is difficult to establish accurate figures for hours of work; such jobs, whose hours varied according to the day of the week and the season of the year, included agriculture, and all small workshop and domestic work. Significantly women were a large part of the workforce in many of these jobs. Thirdly, figures for hours of work exclude overtime, and until the 1920s there are no statistics to facilitate an accurate assessment of its extent; what is certain, however, is that overtime working has increased in the twentieth century and to that extent eaten into the apparent growth in leisure time.

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The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 , pp. 279 - 340
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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