Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

摘要

In Consuming Passions, Judith Flanders traces the commercialization of leisure from the 18th to the late 19th century, guiding the reader through this complex terrain with an easy and companionable narrative style. The chronological scope of the book allows the Victorian period to be assessed in a broad context, with Flanders critiquing both excessively pessimistic and overly optimistic interpretations of the era, emphasizing continuities as well as change. There are no groundbreaking theoretical approaches to life in Victorian Britain here; indeed, the main weakness of the book is a failure to pick up on some of the most interesting developments in scholarship, particularly with regard to themes of gender, race and empire. Nevertheless, this is an impressive and highly readable synthesis of a mass of printed primary and secondary material. Aimed at the educated general reader, it should also be of interest to an academic audience.