10.10 Leisure and Recreation
One social historian, Bonnie Huskins, has shown how public feasts became opportunities to link the middle-class element with a larger world while, at the same time, instructing citizens in the rules of good behaviour. After the French Revolution and the dispersal to other capitals of Parisian chefs, cuisine became a novel matter. The upper classes promoted its diffusion but it was really the middle classes, with their dense networks between cities in North America and Europe, who were best positioned to adopt and promote the styles associated with high-style feasting. Multi-course meals, the paring of wines with meats and fish, and even the banqueting halls themselves — not to mention the embryonic beginnings of something truly new, the restaurant — were standard features, and they were reproduced faithfully from one city to the next. A banquet of community leaders in Saint John was purposely as similar to one in Toronto or Bristol as possible so as to demonstrate a belonging to the Victorian bourgeoisie.[1] Conformity was a good thing.
The notion of leisure time took on new meaning in the 19th century. “Old money” — the wealth that used to be the monopoly of the very powerful — always enjoyed leisure, but the people of the cities and towns and farms expected very little leisure time. The middle classes experienced increased leisure first, as they found themselves in a position to hire others to do tasks that freed them up to indulge in interests outside of work.
A Night at the Opera
Middle-class British North America was, in some regards, an extension of new middle-class values spiralling outward from Europe from the late 18th century on. One can chart, for example, the spread of opera houses around the Atlantic rim in these years as an indicator of how high culture or high style was emerging from palaces and manor houses and into public facilities (usually operated with a profit in mind). Theatres and music halls are further examples of this expression of bourgeois values.
These venues provided opportunities to people to show off their disposable wealth and the availability of leisure time; they were also a way to promote civic and cultural values. Halifax’s two Grand Theatres first appeared in the 1780s and were known for their productions of West End farces from London, only tending toward more serious stuff 50 years later. In 1825 a grocer and a merchant in Montreal convinced John Molson to join them in building the city’s first theatre, the Theatre Royal, where Shakespearean drama predominated.[2]
Similarly, public museums began to appear. Abraham Gesner (a physician, geologist, New Brunswick’s first provincial geologist, and the inventor of kerosene) established the Museum of Natural History, now the New Brunswick Museum, in Saint John in 1842. It was, significantly, part of the Mechanics’ Institute building, a landmark in most British North American towns of any size, one dedicated to the educational uplift of