In Palaces of Pleasure, Lee Jackson examines the “invention of mass entertainment” (2) in Victorian Britain. Focusing on institutions that sought to make a profit by expanding the shared experience of leisure, Jackson describes how a nascent leisure industry had formed by the late nineteenth century, providing cheap amusement for all social classes. This was achieved through the creation of shared leisure spaces as entrepreneurs devised attractions with cross-class appeal, while simultaneously ensuring that the degree of class intermingling was not so great as to discourage any wealthier customers who might be tempted to enter. In this process, new leisure venues and facilities emerged in which ever-larger audiences could be accommodated in the same place to enjoy the same thing. The examples discussed here include the gin shop, music hall, dancing room, pleasure garden, exhibition ground, seaside resort, and football ground. While some of these were new, others built upon existing institutions, and Jackson explains in considerable detail how entrepreneurs opened up new markets by extending the scope and reach of existing venues or in some cases (for example the Crystal Palace and Blackpool Tower), building new ones.

Several historians of leisure have suggested that commercialization rather than rational recreation resolved what is sometimes referred to as the Victorian leisure problem, and Jackson's narrative tends to support this view. This is not to say, however, that the embryonic entertainment industry was a model of business propriety and respectability, as success often depended upon the wits and abilities of chancers and sharp businessmen who might have been diligent in the payment of taxes but were only too willing to test the boundaries of licensing laws. The gin house of the late eighteenth century, for example, is shown to have evolved into the gin palace through the introduction of elaborate gas lighting and trappings of affluence, paying duty to the Exchequer but earning the opprobrium of magistrates. Whereas pubs separated classes of customers by division of interior space and a hierarchy of rooms, gin palaces had just one room with no seating, creating a more economical shared space through selling smaller drinks. Their expanded space also widened the market, as it was easier for women to go to a gin palace than it was to negotiate the subdivisions of male and female spaces within a pub. The gin palace set the evolutionary pattern that marked the growth of other forms of entertainment. The major development of the period was the music hall, which derived from the saloon theater of the 1830s as a hybrid concert room and theater; essentially, it was a pub concert room with a stage. Attempting to avoid the cost of a theater license on the grounds that no charge for admission was made, landlords placed themselves at the mercy of local magistrates, often forced to argue that the song and dance routines they offered did not constitute drama. However, Jackson explains how in 1849 an injunction against unlicensed entertainment led to a reappraisal of the licensing system and a reliable regulatory oversight of London's music hall boom of the 1850s. Jackson is right to point out that the first known music hall was Thomas Sharples's Star Theatre, founded in Bolton in 1840 and not, as many historians have thought, London's Canterbury Hall in 1854. This observation is not, however, further developed.

A declared but nevertheless limiting feature of the book is Jackson's focus on the growth of entertainment in London. Scotland and Ireland are barely mentioned, and only in its coverage of the growth of the seaside resort and spectator football does the narrative shift significantly to include the midlands and the north of England. Neither of the chapters dealing with these is innovative, and the failure of football to develop in the capital as quickly as in the north is not discussed. While the discussion of the ways in which entrepreneurs sought to combine entertainment with informal education is of interest, these ventures were often short-lived; the ill-fated attempt in the late 1880s to remodel Blackpool along the lines of the North American Chautauqua Assembly might have served as an illustrative example of the fact that education rarely came out well when it competed with commercial interests. Critically, there is little attempt to engage in current debate on the history of mass entertainment. As Jackson notes, the more popular commercial entertainment venues became, the more the upper and middle classes withdrew from them. The extent to which this seems to undermine the idea of mass entertainment might have been discussed in greater detail; when or how did popular culture come to be seen as “mass”?

Overall, Jackson's narrative is appropriately entertaining, adding much colorful detail to a fairly well-known history. His proposal that the new leisure institutions he discusses amount to a nascent leisure industry is reasonable; as he observes, the freedom with which managers and proprietors moved between different branches of entertainment and the use of joint-stock companies to fund ventures via share offerings clearly reveal a new understanding of leisure as a business proposition. The text is supported by a set of highly informative illustrations, many in color, and by detailed endnotes.