Consuming Passions

Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

By Judith Flanders

2006

First Published

3.89

Average Rating

448

Number of Pages

13H40M

Audio Length

A delightful and fascinating social history of Victorians at leisure, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of 19th-century men and women from the author of the bestselling 'The Victorian House'.Imagine a world where only one in five people owns a book, where just one in ten has a knife or a fork - a world where five people out of every six do not own a cup to hold a hot drink. That was what England was like in the early eighteenth century. Yet by the close of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had brought with it not just factories, railways, mines and machines but also brought fashion, travel, leisure and pleasure.Leisure became an industry, a cornucopia of excitement for the masses. And it was spread by newspapers, by advertising, by promotions and publicity - all eighteenth, not twentieth century creations. It was Josiah Wedgwood and his colleagues who invented money-back guarantees, free delivery, and celebrity endorsements. New technology such as the railways brought audiences to ever-more-elaborate extravaganzas, whether it was theatrical spectaculars with breathtaking pyrotechnics and hundreds of extras, 'hippodramas' recreating the battle of Waterloo, or the Great Exhibition itself, proudly displaying 'the products of all quarters of the globe' under twenty-two acres of a sparkling 'Crystal Palace'.In 'Consuming Passions', the bestselling author of 'The Victorian House' explores this dramatic revolution in science, technology and industry - and how a world of thrilling sensation, lavish spectacle and unimaginable theatricality was born.

Avg Rating

3.89

Number of Ratings

193

5 STARS

27%

4 STARS

41%

3 STARS

24%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Judith Flanders

Author · 17 books

Judith Flanders was born in London, England, in 1959. She moved to Montreal, Canada, when she was two, and spent her childhood there, apart from a year in Israel in 1972, where she signally failed to master Hebrew. After university, Judith returned to London and began working as an editor for various publishing houses. After this 17-year misstep, she began to write and in 2001 her first book, A Circle of Sisters, the biography of four Victorian sisters, was published to great acclaim, and nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2003, The Victorian House (2004 in the USA, as Inside the Victorian Home) received widespread praise, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards History Book of the Year. In 2006 Consuming Passions, was published. Her most recent book, The Invention of Murder, was published in 2011. Judith also contributes articles, features and reviews for a number of newspapers and magazines.