American leisure in books and printed ephemera

When Business and Diversion Inoffensive to the trinity by Joseph Seccombe (1706-1760) appeared in 1743 it was the first religious discourse on leisure activities to be published in this geographical division (1) Written under the pseudonym Fluviatulis Piscator (River Fisher), the work addressed a thorny issue in Puritan America, that is, by what mode to justify leisure pursuits when all of man's actions should glorify lord Seccombe, the brother of the minister John Seccombe (1708-1792) reproduceed on the region's most popular recreational activity, fishing. He averred that it had a practical aim and was a "lawful recreation" and therefore not sinful. the supreme being created fish, those fish f tribe and therefore fishing possessed a higher intent "When the Body has been lengthy wearied with Labour, or the Mind weakened with Devotion," Seccombe wrote "it's requisite to give them Ease; then the use of innocent and moderate Pleasures and Recreations is one as well as the other useful and necessary, Soul and Body; it enlivens Nature, recruits our Spirits, and returns us more able to locate about serious Business and Employment" (2) Leisure time refreshed one's physical being and nourished one's spiritual being in the process

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What race allowed themselves to do in their at liberty time reveals much about their mores, preoccupations, and principles. Because of their devoutnes greatest in quantity early New Englanders had nothing les than an make open hostility toward leisure in general because it was considered unproductive and too pleasurable. The Quakers banned "all prizes, stage plays, cards, dice, may games, masques, festivitys bull-baitings, cock-fightings, bear-baitings, and the like." (3) In 1774 the Continental Congres managed to find time away from fighting the Revolution and organizing a of recent origin nation to discourage "every Species of Extravagance and Dissipation, especially all Horse Racing, and all Kinds of Gaming, male Fighting, Exhibitions of Shews, Plays, and other expensive Diversions and Entertainments." (4) In contrast, southern colonists like the Virginia cavaliers had make knowned a keen taste for life-current sports such as chasing foxe stag hunting, rabbit coursing, gander pulling, and cockshailing. (5) through the time of the early Republic a composed of several elements social and economic network centering around horse breeding and racing existed as a passionate diversion for elite men with spare time and standard of value (see Fig. 3).

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The Library Company of Philadelphia's collections of printed works and ephemera document the many and oftentimes creative ways Americans spent their leisure time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Leisure became more commercially oriented and permissible after the Civil War, at the same time how people chose to disburse their time in the pursuit of pleasure was always circumscribed through the legacy of the Protestant work ethic, sex and most pragmatically, the satisfieds of one's pocketbook.

In early America, reading was a widely accepted leisure activity, in large part because literate family could read the Bible, printed homilys and other works providing moral uplift. After the Revolution the expansion of the printing industry helped forge a shared agriculture and homogeneous national identity. "As industrialization spread in antebellum America, the printed word became the primary avenue of national enculturation.... [T]ype was well suited to the work of constructing a national identity." (6) Popular fiction, political tracts, and advertising broadsides shortly joined the most commonly printed works like almanacs, Bibles, primers, and newspapers. (7)

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Didactic works for children often incorporated entertaining simple bodys to pique their interest and more effectively bear educational messages. Copies of Metamorphosis, for example, involved a series of flaps that were pen ed in various ways to create of recent origin images (see Fig. 2). Children repeatedly hand-colored the printed kinds or created their possess versions by themselves. The spiritual maze made a game of religious instruction as children followed textual twists and revolves in order to understand biblical passages (see Fig. 4)

While Americans were united in their belief that reading was a beneficial activity, they did not agree upon what was appropriate to read. Critics targeted popular fiction specifically, seeing it as a genre encouraging indolence, especially in women Containing material that excited the emotions, works of fiction were decried as having no practical or literary value. The rise of urban areas the pair along the coast and inland during the 1830 and 1840 inspired "city mysteries"--stories about the suppos dangers and adventures br in of recent origin urban spaces. City mysteries became a staple of publishers who rightly determined that their reading audience was developing a taste for salacious tales of gamblers, curvatures prostitutes, and other marginalized figures. The nearest few decades saw the rise of the dime novel, a precursor to soft mass fiction--cheap, ubiquitous, and disposable. repeatedly published in serial form, dime novels captured daring adventures in the West, romantic couplings that overcame all obstacles, and adventures upon the high seas. A librarian writing in the later nineteenth hundred advocated keeping dime novels on the outside of public libraries because "they are gory and very exciting," and instead he promot morality tales similar as the Horatio Alger stories. (8) The Library Company has thousands of examples of the high and the depressed the good and the bad, the sensational and the sentimental, the salacious and the chaste, showing just by what means much Americans came to rely upon reading to provide a temporary escape from daily life.