Disreputable Pleasures

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.

Mike Huggins is former head of postgraduate teacher training at Lancaster University, now retired. Now a sports history writer and researcher, he lectures at St. Martin's College, Lancaster. He is also the author of Flat Racing and British Society, 1790-1914: A Social and Economic History, which won the prestigious North American Society for Sports History Prize for sports history book of the year in 2001. J.A. Mangan is former Director of the International Research Centre for Sport, Socialisation and Society at the University of Strathclyde, UK. He was founding Chairman of the British Society of Sports History and founding editor of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

List of illustrations, List of tables, Prologue: All mere complexities, Part 1: The privileged pursuit of dubious pleasures, Part 2: The power of print: the media and respectability, Part 3: Vice, violence and virility across Victorian Britain, Epilogue: The dogs bark but the caravan moves on, Notes, Select bibliography, Index