The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a transformation in the nature of British leisure habits. Cookery books and instruction manuals for the kitchen had been in circulation for some time, reaching back to the sixteenth century at least, and in the eighteenth century one of the best-known examples was Hannah Glasse, The art of cookery, made plain and easy. A number of bibliographies of cookery and household management books have been published and their long lists of titles indicate the wide range of publication in this area. The eighteenth-century Romantic philosophy of gardening held that it was the living representation of landscape painting but the Victorians scaled down this ambition to suit the more limited landholdings and means of the upper-middle and middle classes. While cookery and gardening could be seen in the Victorian period as either hobbies or mandatory activities to keep household and property in order, interest in music could be seen as an entirely leisure pursuit.