'People mutht be amuthed,' says the lisping Mr Sleary in Dickens’s Hard Times. 'They can’t be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they ain’t made for it.' Palaces of Pleasure demonstrates in dazzling multiplicity the truth of this view, as Lee Jackson investigates the 19th-century 'invention' of the public house, the gin palace, the music hall, the dancing-room, the palace of varieties, the exhibition ground, the seaside resort and the football field ... The author is a serious academic, his researches oceanic and his arguments exhaustive, his subject as much economic as social history. But he delights in examples of Victorian idiocy ... A giddy delight sometimes breaks through Mr Jackson’s sober researches, as if he is personally entranced by the Victorians’ passion for amusement ... Readers of this scholarly but intoxicating book will share the author’s glee.
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