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Claire Langhamer, Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain, 1850-1945. By Brad Beaven., Twentieth Century British History, Volume 18, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 265–267, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwl031
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Extract
This wide-ranging and informative book is a welcome addition to the historiography of British leisure. Whilst recent work has pointed to the heterogeneity of working-class leisure experience, foregrounding cleavages of gender, generation and poverty, Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain unashamedly deploys class as its key conceptual category. Through a fluent interrogation of men's active yet contested participation in popular culture, Beaven demonstrates that ‘class continued as a principal determinant in the nature of working-class leisure between 1850 and 1945.’ (p. 237) Working across the customary periodization for the field, this book identifies significant continuities in working-class men's leisure experiences as newly emergent commercial forms and established informal practices dovetailed within a distinctively working-class male culture. The book is conceptualized around the historically shifting and dynamic relationship between leisure and notions of responsible citizenship. This framework helps to explain just why male leisure was consistently deemed to be a ‘problem’ across these years; it also ensures that popular culture is consistently located within its broader political, social and economic context. Beaven draws on a wide range of source material including institutional records, contemporary publications, life history texts, newspapers, journals, trade directories and local and national government records. Like many studies of leisure, the book employs a running local case study, but in marked contrast to existing works the focus is neither the North-west of England nor London. Instead the focus is the Midlands with particular reference to Coventry.
