Eric Hobsbawm on the rise of the working class holiday in the 1880s & the Easter Holiday
In his book Worlds of Labour Eric Hobsbawm has a chapter on the making of the working class 1870-1914, an echo of E P Thompson’s book on the Making of the English Working Class which covered a period up to the later 1830s. Hobsbawm’s point is that the working class was made not in the 1830s but the 1880s.
Hobsbawm identifies the 1880s as the decade which saw the rise of distinctive working class leisure. One example was football matches, and the professionalisation and proletarianization of the game exemplified by Blackburn beating the Old Etonians (1883 FA Cup Final 2-1).
Another indicator was the rise of the working class holiday. Hobsbawm quotes Herapath’s Railway Journal of 1884 which looked at holiday traffic:
Year by Year the holiday traffic at Easter, Whitsun and August is growing in importance. Its dimensions have not yet swelled so far as to seriously effect dividends, but it is easy to forsee a time when this will this will be the case.. We may never turn Easter into a carnival, but our toiling masses seem determined to turn it to account as a substantial holiday
Hobsbawm cites the example of Blackpool where the Winter Gardens were started in 1878 and the Tower was in place by 1889.
Leave a Reply