ally
Ally Sloper's Half Holiday
Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday
Category=JHM
Category=NHTB
Catling
Children's Literature Research Collections
Children’s Literature Research Collections
cultural history Britain
Derby
Disreputable Pleasures
Edwardian Public School
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Frank Cass
gender and sport
half
Harriers Clubs
hedonism in nineteenth century
Held
Hess Collection
holiday
John Lowerson
JOHN SPRINGHALL
Late Victorian Britain
leisure studies
lloyds
Man About Town
Marlborough College
newspaper
newspapers
Notoriety
papers
Penny Dreadful
Penny Dreadfuls
Popular Sunday Newspapers
Rugby Football
Scottish Sport
sloper's
social class boundaries
Sporting Cartoons
sunday
Victorian male leisure practices
Victorian masculinity
Victorian Music Hall
weekly
Working Class Players
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9780714653631
- Weight: 660g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 26 Aug 2004
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Many historians have claimed that respectability was the sharpest line of social division in Victorian society, even that the line between the 'respectable' and 'unrespectable' was more significant than between rich and poor. This irreverent and revisionist collection argues that they have over-polarised Victorian attitudes and challenges the conventional view that middle-class Victorian leisure had a respectable and serious purpose and approach.
Disreputable Pleasures explores the more sinful and unrespectable Victorian male sporting pleasures, demonstrating the complex interrelationships between such value as manliness, muscularity and machismo, or sensuality, virility and hedonism. It sheds light on the ways in which the public rhetoric of Victorian respectability could be rendered problematic by the practical pursuit of private pleasures. It shows that Victorian leisure was much more contested cultural space than has been recognised, a battleground whose contestants ranged from the rational recreationalist to the avowedly hedonistic, and from the sacred to the profane.
Disreputable Pleasures poses a powerful challenge to the accepted public image of Victorian society and will greatly add to our present understanding of Victorian Britain.
Mike Huggins is former head of postgraduate teacher training at Lancaster University, now retired. Now a sports history writer and researcher, he lectures at St. Martin's College, Lancaster. He is also the author of Flat Racing and British Society, 1790-1914: A Social and Economic History, which won the prestigious North American Society for Sports History Prize for sports history book of the year in 2001.
J.A. Mangan is former Director of the International Research Centre for Sport, Socialisation and Society at the University of Strathclyde, UK. He was founding Chairman of the British Society of Sports History and founding editor of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
