Respectable and Disreputable describes how Montgomerians spent their increasing leisure time during the four decades preceding the Civil War. Everyday activities included gambling, drinking, sporting, hunting, and voluntary associations--military, literary, self-improvement, fraternal, and civic. The book also includes seasonal activities--religious and national holidays, fairs, balls, horse racing, and summering at mineral springs. Commercial entertainment, which became more prominent in the late antebellum period, included theater, opera, circuses, and minstrel shows. Historian Jeffrey Benton describes not only those everyday, seasonal, and commercial activities, but also shows how antebellum society debated the moral and philosophical questions of how leisure time should be spent. Woven throughout the book are comparisons between Montgomery and other cities and towns in antebellum America. Although the United States may have been increasingly divided economically, on rural-urban experiences, and of course on the issue of slavery, it seems that antebellum Americans--at least those living in or with easy access to urban areas--shared very similar leisure time activities.

Many historians have claimed that respectability was the sharpest line of social division in Victorian society, even that the line between the 'respectable' and 'unrespectable' was more significant than between rich and poor. This irreverent and revisionist collection argues that they have over-polarised Victorian attitudes and challenges the conventional view that middle-class Victorian leisure had a respectable and serious purpose and approach. Disreputable Pleasures explores the more sinful and unrespectable Victorian male sporting pleasures, demonstrating the complex interrelationships between such value 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 pleasures. It shows that Victorian leisure was much more contested cultural space than has been recognised, a battleground whose contestants ranged from the rational recreationalist to the avowedly hedonistic, and from the sacred to the profane. Disreputable Pleasures poses a powerful challenge to the accepted public image of Victorian society and will greatly add to our present understanding of Victorian Britain.

Challenging the respectable image of Victorian society, this irreverent, revisionist collection explores the sinful side of middle-class Victorian leisure, highlighting the problematic relationship between public respectability and private pleasure.