“In opposition to the ‘gospel of work,’” writes John Stuart Mill in 1850, “I would assert the gospel of leisure,” as “human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labour.” Through a range of methodological and theoretical approaches considering class, gender, race, and narrative form, this panel illuminates how the Victorian work ethic encounters Victorian leisure. As Mill’s “gospel of work” implies, the Victorians were consumed by ideals of productivity, just as a growing middle class was offered increasing access to periods of rest and recreation. Much like our contemporary transfiguration of relaxation into exclusive forms of so-called wellness, Victorian leisure was often coded with markers of social status and justified as self-improvement, or even patriotic duty. At the same time, unproductive periods of rest and play, including through reading and writing fiction, also offered emancipatory release from a culture fixated on efficiency and progress—an escape, however, not equally afforded to everyone.

This panel of early-career scholars takes its place in a long lineage of interest in how work and leisure shape Victorian literature: from Raymond Williams (1958) and Catharine Gallagher (1985; 2005), to, more recently, Elisha Cohn’s exploration of the power of fiction’s leisurely pauses (2015) and Rebecca Richardson’s study on self-help and the Victorian novel (2021). We put these nineteenth-century literary concerns in conversation with twenty-first century thinking that promotes rest and relaxation as forms of social and political resistance (Jonathan Crary [2013], Tricia Hersey [2022]).

Charlie Tyson will open the panel by theoretically framing the distinctions between leisure and idleness in the industrialized Victorian period. “Leisure is gone,” George Eliot’s narrator reflects in Adam Bede (1859), “gone where the spinning-wheels are gone ... and the slow wagons.” In the absence of leisure, we have “idleness”: stretches of empty, unprofitable time. Tyson argues that despite these connotations, leisure persists, and resists, as a site of fantasy and aspiration. Victorian leisure is more than a set of practices such as recreation, consumption, and tourism. It is also a zone of contemplation, tranquility, and aesthetic reverie—a way of living imperilled by the gospel of labour.

Elizabeth Weybright then brings a unique interdisciplinary lens with a discussion of music, gender, and fiction. “Maggie Plays Études: On Musical ‘Leisure’ in the Victorian Novel” considers piano playing in Eliot’s The Mill on The Floss; Weybright argues that the young protagonist’s languorous music-making blends the bourgeois connotations of femininized leisure and courtship (which music scholarship has often emphasized) with ideals of edification, where piano-playing becomes a training ground for self-discipline. Weybright argues that Victorian fiction both explores music as a pleasurable escape for the mind and body and considers it as a tool for the reification of Victorian ideals of gender and class.

In “Gawker’s Paradise: Reflections at the Westminster Aquarium,” Ryan Stafford considers class, material culture, and entertainment in late-Victorian London. Through a reading of the discourses surrounding the Aquarium, as well as the architecture of the building itself, Stafford analyzes the discomfort with which middle-class Victorians regarded the working-class consumption of the often-eroticized displays of suffering, endurance, and danger put on by the Aquarium’s performers (human and otherwise). Stafford argues that the Westminster Aquarium represents Victorian working peoples’ often-underestimated thirst for both knowledge and entertainment, challenging the moralized ideals of science and sport that were upheld as essential to a British democracy.

Finally, Nicole Dufoe’s “‘Invalids and Pleasure Seekers’: Self-Help, Leisure, and the Victorian Vacation” close reads travelogues and advertisements from Britain and the West Indies. Dufoe argues that the salubrious marketing of the islands—contrasting the racially-charged narrative of the tropics as unhealthy for the white European—marks an extension of the Victorian obsession with individual and national progress, exemplified by Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859). In the post-abolition period, and the aftermath of the Morant Bay Rebellion (among other sites of resistance), British tourism becomes not only, as one advertisement puts it, a “most refreshing” experience, but also a “patriotic duty”—an attempt to reaffirm a colonial hold on the islands not through labour but through leisure.

These papers have been chosen for breadth, but also depth; 10-12-minute presentations will leave time for discussion. Together, we show how conceptualizations of leisure in the nineteenth century often promote an exclusionary ethos of self-improvement, individualism, and progress, while at the same time offering alternative models of rest, play, and human flourishing—a tension that continues to shape rest and recreation today.