The title of this dissertation, The Problems of Leisure in the Industrial-Era US, riffs on a phrase that became common amongst American academics in the 1970s: “the problem of leisure.” For the industrial-era American bourgeoisie, however, leisure wasn’t a problem but many problems. The crystallization of leisure in its modern form—clearly defined, regularly recurring, and commercially exploitable periods of free time—created a host of fears and desires that, in turn, precipitated many different responses, including the two that I examine in this project: mid-nineteenth-century liberal efforts to control working-class uses of leisure time by “improving” working-class tastes, and the later efforts of modernists to distinguish their own uses of leisure from the purportedly more commercialized and degraded leisure practices of others, especially other within the middle class.
The former efforts were spearheaded by William Ellery Channing, whose gospel of culture did two critical things. First, it insisted that culture, which Channing defined as the development of our God-given powers, required spiritual, as opposed to economic, forms of wealth. This argument helped to neutralize what I claim was the anti-capitalist potential of culture, the way it, more so than the older bourgeois conception of legitimate leisure (recreation), had the capacity to inspire a critique of the division of labor and of industrial capitalism more generally. Second, Channing’s gospel posited the spread of “the means of culture” (“Self-Culture” 22)—in the forms of parks, picture galleries, lectures, and other publically provisioned, non-commercial forms of leisure—as the most effective solution to the amusement problem, the problem of working-class people consuming commercialized forms of pleasure that social reformers deemed morally degrading and socially disruptive.
But my case studies of two other writers, Henry Thoreau and Ernest Hemingway, suggest that, as the demand for culturally sanctioned forms of pleasure spread, and as culture itself was popularized and commodified, many middle-class authors felt the need to reduce—rather to expand—accessibility to their favorite uses of leisure. They insisted that their travels and other pleasures were more adventurous than those practiced by the rest of the middle class, and sometimes they also insisted that their adventures were enabled by unique forms of spiritual “capital” (“Walking” 594) that, unlike Channing’s “means of culture” (“Self-Culture” 22), were off limits to all but a predestined and elite few. This desire for spiritual distinction was even expressed by Thoreau, who elsewhere radicalized Channing’s gospel by insisting that, contra Channing, relative freedom from the division of labor and a radical expansion of leisure time are essential for the cultivation of human potential.
In short, my cases studies suggest that, over the course of the industrial era, the dominant impetus with respect to culture shifted from liberal inclusion to modernist exclusion. And the exclusionary project often relied on new conceptions of cultural capital that maintained Channing’s hierarchical division between the spiritual and the economic but that, unlike Channing, figured the spiritual as a form of grace.