Robert Snape

Tracing the evolution of social thought on leisure in Britain from the industrial revolution to the present day, this book documents an alternative and almost totally ignored discourse of leisure as a field of welfare. Investigating evolving understandings of leisure in social philosophy, the nascent social sciences and welfare economics, it explores the ways in which leisure became a field of individual and social welfare in terms of personal growth, cultural democracy and social citizenship. While the social philosophy of ancient Athens remained a reference point, new modern meanings of leisure were forged in the intellectual and political cross-currents of late Victorian and Edwardian political economy, the 'new' liberalism and social ethics. In terms of welfare economics, the book's pivotal figure is John Hobson, a self-declared economic heretic, who adopted Ruskin's idea of intrinsic value as the basis of a new political economy in which leisure would be crucial to individual and social well-being. Providing a unique contribution to the historiography of leisure and welfare and to current debate around wellbeing and work, this is a timely and interdisciplinary book.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century modernizing interpretations of leisure became of interest to social policy makers and cultural critics, producing a discourse of leisure and voluntarism that flourished until the Second World War. The free time of British citizens was increasingly seen as a sphere of social citizenship and community-building. Through major social thinkers, including William Morris, Thomas Hill Green, Bernard Bosanquet and John Hobson, leisure and voluntarism were theorized in terms of the good society. In post-First World War social reconstruction these writers remained influential as leisure became a field of social service, directed towards a new society and working through voluntary association in civic societies, settlements, new estate community-centres, village halls and church-based communities. This volume documents the parallel cultural shift from charitable philanthropy to social service and from rational recreation to leisure, teasing out intellectual influences which included social idealism, liberalism and socialism. Leisure, Robert Snape claims, has been a central and under-recognized organizing force in British communities.

Whereas most histories of the British public library have focused upon its development as an institution primarily concerned with education, this book argues that the leisure function of the public library between 1850 and 1914 was not only its predominant aspect in quantitative terms but was also crucial to its popularity and survival. Based on the author?s doctoral research it demonstrates that the potential of public libraries to provide a socially acceptable form of leisure in urban areas was a powerful argument in the campaign for the 1850 Public Libraries Act and that fiction provision lay at the core of the public library service.
By far the largest proportion of the books issued from public libraries was occupied by novels which were commonly found in both lending and reference departments. However, the provision of popular fiction in response to an almost overwhelming demand was controversial not only in the library profession but in wider society. The Great Fiction Question, as this debate became known, was actually two questions: should public libraries provide any fiction at all, and if so, what type of fiction? Some librarians wished public libraries to abandon fiction altogether, often because it was seen to undermine their professional credibility, while in both national and local political circles the notion of ?fiction on the rates? was a widely encountered form of attack. However, given that most public libraries provided fiction from the outset, the more pragmatic approach to the Great Fiction Question was to adopt an approach which would allow the purchase of literary and morally uplifting fiction while declining to purchase romances, sensation novels and cheap adventure stories. Although many librarians wished to follow this path they were often powerless to do so as library book purchases were, in most towns, chosen by a sub-committee of the town council. Using case studies of the public libraries of Blackkburn, Wigan and Darwen, this book shows that public library fiction provision was heavily influenced by the socio-political composition of the library committee and that responses to the Great Fiction Question ranged from the supply of as much popular fiction as possible in response to demand to attempts to refuse to purchase any novel considered by the selection committee considered to have no literary merit.
The book also discusses the ways in which a perceived obligation to improve the cultural standard of fiction reading led the library profession to develop advisory and guidance services and also, in some areas, to work in co-operation with the National Home Reading Union. It also discusses other leisure elements of early public libraries which included games and smoking rooms