Disreputable Pleasures (2004, Hardcover)

This irreverent and revisionist collection challenges the conventional view that middle-class Victorian leisure had a respectable and serious purpose and approach. It explores the more sinful and unrespectable Victorian male pleasures, demonstrating the complex interrelationships between such values as manliness, muscularity, and machismo, or sensuality, virility, and hedonism. It sheds light on the ways in which the public rhetoric of Victorian respectability could be rendered problematic by the practical pursuit of private pleasure. It shows that Victorian leisure was a much more contested cultural space than has been recognized. It was a battleground whose contestants ranged from the rational recreationalist to the avowedly hedonistic, and from the sacred to the profane.