Free Time is an academic journey through two-and-half millennia of leisure options. The central question put by the historian Gary Cross, is: why do we not have more free time, and when we do, why do we waste it, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, on ‘fencing, dancing and bear-baiting’ or their modern equivalents?
We start with ancient Greek philosophers, including Socrates and Aristotle, who reckoned that life was all about free time. We should work to fulfil our basic needs and then use our leisure for scholé (self-improvement): for culture and reflection. The vita contemplativa was superior to the vita activa (though Socrates was also fond of a boogie – a fact Cross does not mention).
People spent their free time at festivals and religious rituals. Skip a few centuries to the Middle Ages and we find there was still a surprising amount of leisure time – bacchanals alternating, as in pagan days, with weird rites and the contemplation of God and beauty. The Reformation dealt the first blow to this tradition with its attack on the old festive culture. Puritans considered fun to be practically satanic and certainly Popish, and banned bear-baiting, theatres, maypoles, dancing, saints’ days, football and all types of ecstatic, carnivalesque activity. This laid the ground for the later ‘work ethic’, which promised salvation through toil rather than leisure. It was a convenient philosophy for the new class of greedy mill owners: it made them money.
Then drugs, Cross shows, helped the working world go round. In the 18th and 19th centuries, sugar and tobacco were processed in appalling conditions in the colonies, to be shipped and eventually consumed in very different surroundings back home. But in England, too, children worked 12-hour days seven days a week in the unregulated cotton mills.
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