While work and leisure have attracted increasing study in the half-century efflorescence of social and cultural history, they have mostly been treated as separate phenomena rather than integral to whole ways of life, mutually conditioned by the shifting determinants of time. In this most timely of studies, Hugh Cunningham, author of a previous landmark history of leisure in the industrial revolution in England, extends and deepens his perspective over some three centuries of changing relationships between work and leisure, a challenging dualism handled here with impressive aplomb. Thus we move from the porous and elastic time zones of a largely traditional society, on through the more exclusive and instrumental “time blocks’” constituting the work and leisure landscapes of a modern industrialized world, to today's rejection of such often oppositional categories in the would-be more humane and fulfilling search for a “work-life balance.” Cunningham looks beyond the limiting sampling of the working population in much historiography as adult male waged workers of fixed occupation to explore a fluctuating range of work and leisure destinies, including those of women and children, the latter a constituency on which he has also written with distinction.

In the early eighteenth century we meet a typical male work force supposedly motivated by a potent “leisure preference,” the sociologists’ usage, over the fruits of higher earnings. Suggesting a modern condition of open-ended choice, such language is little help with historical reality when plebeian leisure, as Cunningham demonstrates, was greatly prescribed by calendar and custom and, as with work, much curtailed by the limits of the seasons and natural light. Yet workers in the trades sustained a keen appetite for multiple holidays and pub pleasures, which together with a rise in real wages generated the rosy folk memory of “pudding time.” From the 1760s, artificial light, mechanization, and the clock-time rigors of industrial capitalism extended and intensified work at the expense of leisure time and energy.

Here Time, Work and Leisure offers a judicious update of the standard of living debate and the long-running prize fight between optimists and pessimists. Cunningham's book revalidates E. P. Thompson's classic account of the wrenching impact of the new work discipline, demurring from Jan de Vries's more benign thesis of an “industrious revolution.” Thus, individual households generated greater effort prioritizing increased income over leisure, collectively self-driven rather than collectively exploited. Cunningham is similarly skeptical of claims for a consumer revolution in the later eighteenth century, a further willing sacrifice of leisure time for the richer purchasing power of wages in a new world of consumer goods. A reconsidered pessimism prevails over a neo-Whiggish optimism.

By this account, class remains a powerful vector at work and play. As the working class endured the bleak age of early industrialization, leisure time became a more benign prospect for the “middling sort” who could afford the goods and services of an emergent leisure industry catering to growing claims to a distinctive social identity. If this was modeled on the douceur de vivre of the aristocracy, it was tempered by a bourgeois concern for the spiritual necessity of work and the restraints of respectability. This middle-class ethic generated a reform offensive against unruly popular pleasures, compensated by schemes of “rational recreation” offering more measured, temperate pastimes as a recuperative complement to the new work regimes. Cunningham reanimates this well-worked territory while emphasizing the growth of commercialized leisure amid the undoubted rigors of the period. From the 1830s, hours of work began a long decline reaching almost to the present, secured primarily by workers’ organizations—a prominent claim of the book.

This is a story of gains and losses. As working hours were reduced, employers strained for greater productivity through the intensification of labor. Further mechanization meant deskilling and the erosion of craft satisfactions. Yet male workers realized a sustaining sense of identity in workplace subcultures, extended in a more bounteous leisure time of clubs, pubs, teams, music halls, excursions, and hobbies. Late Victorian commentary was exercised by the “problem of leisure” as a new mass culture threatened the realization of civilized ideals of the good life for all. The debate persisted into the twentieth century, as the mass press, film, and television were charged with further debasement of working-class character. Meanwhile the middle classes negotiated a fuller, morally acceptable, socially self-satisfying leisure model together with higher claims of their work as brainwork. Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption identified leisure as the potent engine of enhanced status for wealthy aspirants to a new aristocracy. Yet as leisure time (and retirement) became more assured for the majority and its offerings more numerous, its demands and expectations brought unleisurely stress with time as the harasser rather than liberator, the concluding note of Cunningham's rich and searching historical journey.

Cunningham holds capitalism's market economy as primarily responsible for transformations in work and leisure within a mesh of other variously complementary and contesting social and technological forces. This thesis might have been pushed further, for while capitalism's time-sensitive impact in the industrialized workplace is well attested here, that of its comparable leisure industries remains underexposed. By the early twentieth century, if not before, the disciplined producer was further remade (in part by modern advertising) into the disciplined consumer in corporatized entertainment, catering, and retail, their attractions exalted by modern advertising, yet measured in their dispensation. Thus, the music hall industry imposed a regime of packaged entertainment in controlled allotments of time (and space), offering the ultimate “good time” in a carefully managed exercise of simultaneous stimulation and half-cocked containment, a trope soon familiar to the modern leisure consumer. In this important text, Cunningham attends to the nature of experience of time, work, and leisure as well as their objective delineations, but the role of the subjective—the emotional and psychic economy as much as the market economy—has to be a necessary consideration in this important and contentious field.