The Two Longest Reigns Part II: Work and Leisure in the Reigns of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II

TALK: The Victorians are often credited with inventing leisure. The demands of the average workday at the beginning of the reign precluded the vast majority of people from enjoying leisure pursuits; by its end all but the poorest were able to attend sporting events and professional entertainments. In the workplace, conditions improved from the horrors of indentured child labour to the new employment opportunities afforded to women by the telegraph, the telephone and the typewriter. In Queen Elizabeth’s reign we were also to see striking changes, with the decline of manufacturing, but the rise of service industries made possible by the computer; and a leisure scene that saw the growth of mass tourism, the spread of restaurant chains that allowed all classes to ‘eat out’,  the opportunity for sporting heroes and heroines and popular musicians to acquire hitherto undreamed of wealth and status, and the decline of the movies and live entertainment as television took its dominant role in our everyday lives.

SPEAKER: Patrick Hickman-Robertson, OBE, is the author of a number of best-selling books on social history and on cinema. He has broadcast and lectured on these topics on both sides of the Atlantic. Co-founder and a former chairman of the Ephemera Society, he has a special interest in ‘the minor transient documents of everyday life’ as evidence of the past we all share.

His first lecture for us in 2022 was very popular and he now returns for another look at “The Two Longest Reigns”.