George Eliot in Adam Bede (1859) captured the awkward situation of leisure at the moment when Victorian Britain, the world's first mature industrial society, gave birth to what is now called mass or modern leisure. The word itself trailed connotations of exclusivity and wealth – the privilege of an elite free to do whatever they wished whenever they wished. ‘Leisure’ is an elevated Anglo-Norman word unlike ‘work’, its demotic Anglo-Saxon antonym. Viewed from this elite perspective, ‘mass leisure’ flirts with oxymoron. While leisure never fully entered common parlance, it has made itself comfortable in the lexicon of social analysis,

Victorian Britain, the first predominantly urban nation, saw the wrenching process of industrialisation at last yield a significant improvement in the standard of living – a rise in real wages and fall in hours worked – for the majority of labourers. The result – modern leisure – was an unexpected and not entirely welcome phenomenon. Leisure is not just time spent not working, which obviously is nothing new, but time fully at one's disposal – time to spend doing as one likes largely independent of traditional community controls and expectations. It is free time. But the question ‘free to do what?’ created anxiety. It was also empty time: Eliot's metaphor would have reminded her scientifically literate readers that nature abhors a vacuum. Anxiety was also the orthodox Christian response to leisure – ‘The Devil makes work for idle hands.’ Victorian Britain prided itself on being the most Christian nation. Britain was also a literate nation. Most of its adults could read to a degree, and the literacy rate was rising sharply. The price of the printed word was plummeting due to new technologies and the abolition of government taxes: its cheap distribution was sped by a burgeoning railway network. Clearly, much of Victorian Britain's new leisure would be spent in reading.