An English Chautauqua: the National Home Reading Union and the development of rational holidays in late Victorian Britain

Abstract

The success of the Chautauqua Assembly in providing educational holidays in North America in the final quarter of the nineteenth century raised interest in the development of a similar type of holiday in Great Britain. Following the establishment of university extension summer schools, which were themselves influenced by the example of Chautauqua, the Congregationalist social reformer John Brown Paton organised such a holiday in 1889 under the auspices of the National Home Reading Union in Blackpool, a popular seaside resort in the north of England. Adopting the values and practices of the Chautauqua Assembly, this combined informal education, non-conformist Christian morality and socially respectable leisure activities. Although not successful in establishing an English Chautauqua in Blackpool, Paton later mediated the Chautauqua ideal through his sponsorship of the Co-operative Holidays Association, a pioneer organisation in the development of rational holidays. It is argued that both the Chautauqua movement and the National Home Reading Union exercised a crucial influence on the development of rational and respectable holidays in Britain that has not previously been fully recognised.