While leisure is well-trodden territory for historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Robert Snape looks at this topic from a new angle in Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939. Snape is not interested in commercial forms of leisure; instead he focuses on those who saw leisure, particularly through voluntary associations, as a means of producing “a more harmonious and democratic society” (1). Snape argues that leisure played a larger role than has heretofore been recognized in discussions of social reform and idealistic plans for a more civilized society. His book certainly succeeds in illustrating the wide variety of contexts in which leisure was incorporated into visions of a better society.

Snape acknowledges that those who promoted leisure as a social good had little impact on the state, which was not heavily involved in leisure provision in the period covered, but he argues that the idea of leisure as a social good had an impact on a wide variety of voluntary organizations. These organizations, he contends, used leisure to advance their own values and promote visions of more harmonious communities, in opposition to what they saw as the inequalities and injustices of industrial Britain.

The structure of the book is largely chronological, with early chapters providing a kind of pre-history that begins in the mid-nineteenth century and examines attitudes toward leisure in organizations such as temperance societies and working-men's clubs. The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to the interwar period, and it is clear that this is the area of Snape's greatest interest. While Snape consistently follows an organizational structure that divides each chapter into brief discussions of various movements and organizations that incorporated leisure into their work, he does more in the sections on the interwar period to contextualize these examples and provide a stronger sense of the wider forces that shaped them.

The chief strength of the book is Snape's remarkably wide-ranging discussion of the various types of organizations that took an interest in using leisure for social improvement—a list that includes the settlement movement, the Clarion clubs, youth organizations, and the National Council of Social Service. Each chapter contains useful discussions of these various manifestations of the wider interest in leisure. Snape successfully shows how this interest was present across a remarkably diverse range of activities. In chapter 8, for example, he usefully contrasts discussions of leisure among those interested in the rebuilding of rural communities with debates about the role of leisure in interwar housing estates.

The threads that might tie these various sections together, however, are not always as evident as they might be. Snape piles example on example, but the larger goal of these examples is not always clear. To be sure, themes emerge, but they are not always highlighted and explored. For example, Snape occasionally mentions the tension between those who believed that leisure should improve those who participated in it and those who argued that leisure should simply be a source of enjoyment. How important this issue was in the various examples discussed, however, is often left unexamined.

Snape acknowledges the increasingly prominent role of commercial leisure in British society, particularly in the interwar period, but often leaves the reader wondering about the influence of the theorists and practitioners of socially conscious leisure that he discusses. In the conclusion, he states that “social idealism” failed to produce significant changes in leisure, but argues that there “are grounds for suggesting that voluntary action in leisure exercised some positive influences on social change” (149). This seems a rather half-hearted conclusion given the exhaustive nature of the discussion that precedes it.

In his conclusion, Snape refers to “a complex and slowly evolving debate in which the social meaning and function of leisure was debated, defined and re-defined” (148), but the book does not consistently illustrate the evolution of this debate. Snape argues that there was a shift from a moralizing attitude toward leisure to a more social-scientific approach, but the body of his work could have done more to build to this conclusion. In sum, this book is filled with interesting vignettes about specific organizations and their view of how leisure fit into their goals of social reform, but while these individual trees have value, a clear view of the larger forest remains elusive.