American leisure in books and printed ephemera

Magazine Antiques, August, 2006 by Wendy A. Woloson

When Business and Diversion Inoffensive to God by Joseph Seccombe (1706-1760) appeared in 1743, it was the first sermon on leisure activities to be published in this country. (1) Written under the pseudonym Fluviatulis Piscator (River Fisher), the work addressed a thorny issue in Puritan America, that is, how to justify leisure pursuits when all of man's actions should glorify God. Seccombe, the brother of the minister John Seccombe (1708-1792), expounded on the region's most popular recreational activity, fishing. He averred that it had a practical purpose and was a "lawful recreation" and therefore not sinful. God created fish, those fish fed people, and therefore fishing possessed a higher purpose. "When the Body has been long 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 both useful and necessary, Soul and Body; it enlivens Nature, recruits our Spirits, and renders us more able to set 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 people allowed themselves to do in their free time reveals much about their mores, preoccupations, and principles. Because of their devoutness, most early New Englanders had nothing less than an 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, revels, bull-baitings, cock-fightings, bear-baitings, and the like." (3) In 1774 the Continental Congress managed to find time away from fighting the Revolution and organizing a new nation to discourage "every Species of Extravagance and Dissipation, especially all Horse Racing, and all Kinds of Gaming, Cock Fighting, Exhibitions of Shews, Plays, and other expensive Diversions and Entertainments." (4) In contrast, southern colonists like the Virginia cavaliers had developed a keen taste for blood sports such as chasing foxes, stag hunting, rabbit coursing, gander pulling, and cockshailing. (5) By the time of the early Republic a complex social and economic network centering around horse breeding and racing existed as a passionate diversion for elite men with spare time and money (see Fig. 3).

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The Library Company of Philadelphia's collections of printed books and ephemera document the many and often creative ways Americans spent their leisure time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Leisure became more commercially oriented and permissible after the Civil War, yet how people chose to spend their time in the pursuit of pleasure was always circumscribed by the legacy of the Protestant work ethic, gender, and most pragmatically, the contents of one's pocketbook.

In early America, reading was a widely accepted leisure activity, in large part because literate people could read the Bible, printed sermons, and other works providing moral uplift. After the Revolution the growth of the printing industry helped forge a shared culture 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 soon joined the most commonly printed works like almanacs, Bibles, primers, and newspapers. (7)

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Didactic books for children often incorporated entertaining elements to pique their interest and more effectively convey educational messages. Copies of Metamorphosis, for example, involved a series of flaps that were folded in various ways to create new images (see Fig. 2). Children often hand-colored the printed kinds or created their own versions by themselves. The spiritual maze made a game of religious instruction as children followed textual twists and turns 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 on 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 both along the coast and inland during the 1830s and 1840s inspired "city mysteries"--stories about the supposed dangers and adventures bred in new 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, crooks, prostitutes, and other marginalized figures. The next few decades saw the rise of the dime novel, a precursor to pulp fiction--cheap, ubiquitous, and disposable. Often published in serial form, dime novels captured daring adventures in the West, romantic couplings that overcame all obstacles, and adventures on the high seas. A librarian writing in the later nineteenth century advocated keeping dime novels out of public libraries because "they are bloody and very exciting," and instead he promoted morality tales such as the Horatio Alger stories. (8) The Library Company has thousands of examples of the high and the low, the good and the bad, the sensational and the sentimental, the salacious and the chaste, showing just how much Americans came to rely on reading to provide a temporary escape from daily life.