Man Of Leisure Research Articles

A Month of Delta Summer: The Work of Leisure in The Diary of Li Rihua

Leisure is not doing nothing: it involves complex signifying practices that communicate social status and have to be performed to be legible to others. The practice of leisure fills the pages of the eight-year diary of Li Rihua (1565–1635), an artist and art collector of the late Ming who devoted an extended mourning sabbatical to building a major art collection and socializing with like-minded colleagues. For someone outside government service, leisure was an organized project absorbing time and money. Its apparent goal was pleasure, but it was also about accumulating objects and the value and status they conferred. As a man of leisure, Li achieved a prominent place within the regional gentry elite without ever having to return to office, but also without challenging the state's foundation of status.

William Barlow (1845–1934): Speculative builder, man of leisure and inspired crystallographer

In the history of physical science in the twentieth century, it is rare for anyone to conduct experiments or conclude hypotheses whilst an amateur, and rise to become an established name in science, later a Fellow of the Royal Society. One who did achieve this was William Barlow, a Londoner, born in 1845 into a family where his father was a speculative builder and building surveyor. This occupation enabled William to take a private education, but he preferred to accompany his father in the building trade, constructing new homes in the rapidly expanding areas of north London. When his father died in 1875, William and his elder brother inherited a fortune and William, from then on, was not required to work for a living. With this freedom he was able to indulge in his passion of crystallography, in which he had a remarkable ability to spatially visualize atomic structures in three dimensions. Using this ability, he initially looked at the possible structures of well-known compounds and was eventually able to deduce that for all compounds there are just 230 different kinds of symmetry arrangements which form the basis for crystal structures. These arrangements of symmetry elements are known as space groups. Though he was beaten to publication by a Russian and a German, Barlow's explanation, when it was published, showed a novel way of arriving at the same conclusion. It was this kind of novel approach which was Barlow's trademark. In 1908, he was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society and, in 1915, became President of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain, a post he held for three years. Barlow also postulated on some structural models, which were later shown to be essentially correct when X-ray diffraction analysis, developed by Sir W. Bragg at Cambridge, enabled the internal structure to be studied. Barlow died in 1934 at his home in Stanmore.

Shedding New Botanical Light on Joseph Wright's "Portrait" of Brooke Boothby: Rousseauian Pleasure versus Medicinal Utility

Joseph Wright's 18th-century work Portrait of Brooke Boothby (Tate Britain, London) hints at a deliberate irony related to the increasing polarity between the pleasure and utility of botanical study. Boothby was a young aristocrat, amateur botanist, poet, and the friend and confidant of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the portrait, his attire is unusually fashionable in the context of his countryside location, but it is also strange when one considers the painting's function as commemorating the publication of Rousseau's text Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques because Boothby, as a man in nature, is so much at odds with the idea of the Rousseauian man of nature. Moreover, the identification of several medicinal plants in the painting is at odds with both Rousseau's advocacy of botany for the idle and contemplative man of leisure and his praise of Linnaeus for having removed botany from the realms of pharmacology and medicine to the advantage of natural history. Wright's portrait is therefore subtly ironic because it highlights a tension between the Physiocratic and medicinal utility of botany and the leisured, pleasurable study of plants.

‘For Ireland's good’: The reconstruction of rural Ireland in Bram stoker's ‘the snake's pass’

In 1890, 'The Snake’s Pass' was published in serialized form in the periodical 'The People'. It is the story of Arthur Severn, an Englishman who has inherited wealth and a title through an aunt who took him under her wing to the exclusion of closer relations. His inheritance includes land in Ireland, and now that he is a man of leisure, he decides to tour the west of Ireland. As Bram Stoker’s first full-length novel, 'The Snake’s Pass' is a heady blend of romance, travel narrative, adventure tale, folk tradition, and national tale. This early novel shows that, long before Dracula, Stoker used the genre of the novel to engage with questions of identity, gender, ethnic stereotype, and imperialism.

The academic ethos

University teachers hold an intermediary position between those who are self-employed and those who are employed. Like doctors or lawyers they can determine their own working hours. Nobody cares whether they work six or 60 hours. But unlike doctors or lawyers they do not earn their income proportionately to the time they devote to their work. They are employed by the university or the state, but enjoy the freedom of a leisured class. Because of this intermediate position, they have always been watched by the layman with a strange mixture of respect, envy and mistrust. Even today the opinion is widespread that a professor has to teach only six classes a week, can take a three-month holiday in summer, may hold and is paid for his position until he is 70 years of age, andas not only children put it does not work but just sits at his desk. Should the professor finally be taken in hand like other employeeshave shorter holidays and account for his activities hour by hour and day by day? University teachers are practically unique in the amount of time at their disposal, free from specific prescriptions as to how they should use it. What arrangements or conditions could ensure that this leisure is not misused, but is used for study and research which contributes effectively to the education and training of students and to the advancement of knowledge? In 1965, in my inaugural address as the newly appointed rector of the University of Frankfurt, I apostrophised the social role of a university teacher as that of a permanently appointed man of leisure.1 Aristotle attributed the highest value to leisure; it was leisure which made possible the bios theoretikos } Probably as a consequence of his study of Aristotle, Karl Marx in Deutsche Ideologie 3 took up this concept of leisure in his famous vision of the future which pictured man as relieved from alienated work. In the current discussions about reduced working hours, an increased amount of leisure, and the simultaneous assurance of the individual's future by the social-welfare state, visions of the future develop in which not only the university teacher is a permanently appointed idler.4 Leisure, as a necessary rest on the march to certain goals, contributes to the overcoming of

Prof. F. O. Bower, F.R.S

FREDERICK ORPEN BOWER was born at Ripon in Yorkshire on November 4, 1855. He came of a long-established Yorkshire family. His father, Abraham Bower, J.P., was a man of leisure and his mother, Cornelia, was daughter of Rear-Admiral Henry Gage Morris. They had a family of three girls and two boys.

Success and Failure of Adult Probationers in Wisconsin

The practice of probation in this country began in the State of Massachusetts. It was started as the result of the interest of a volunteer in the young men who were being sentenced to prison in the Boston courts. In 1848 a Boston shoemaker named John Augustus became interested in some young men who had got into trouble with the law and asked the court to suspend sentence and place them in his charge. With the death of John Augustus no one else seemed to be sufficiently interested to keep up the practice and therefore it was not until about 1870 that an old gentleman known familiarly as Father Cook, a man of leisure, became interested in the youths who were being brought before the criminal courts of Boston. He regularly attended the criminal courts and when he found young men arraigned there whose offenses were due to circumstances rather than to a depraved character, who were not yet hardened in crime, and who might under proper guidance reform, he asked that the court suspend sentence upon these young people and commit them to his care. He seems to have had a genius for this kind of work and frequently the judges accepted his judgment on the case and placed these young men in his charge. He took pains to investigate each case and was so successful in this work that he made a place for himself with the court as an unofficial adviser. Thus, scores of boys in the course of years were saved from entering prison and through his friendly and understanding influence were restored to self-respect and usefulness. Partly as the result of this voluntary work, the State of Massachusetts in 1878 passed a law requiring the appointment of a probation officer for the City of Boston. Fortunately for probation, the first

More Light for Competition

Each group of students shovvs a bias toward the occupations for which the school in which they are enrolled trains. Thus engineering is ranked fifth by engineers but seventh and eighth by other schools; farming is ranked fifth by agricultural students, but seventh and ninth by other groups. The manufacturer is ranked fifth by textile students, but fifth and sLxth, and eighth by the other groups. The business and science students rank the banker second, whereas the other groups place him fourth. The fact, however, that each of these groups place three professions namely, clergyman, physician and professor ahead of their own vocations, indicated the prevalence of the traditional attitude favoring the so-called professions, with the exception of law, which is ranked nine, nine, nine, six respectively or seventh by the whole group. The bias in favor of their own types of work causes lawv to experience this drop. Students in the School of Science and Business deviate slightly from the other groups in their rating of some of the occupations. They show the lowest correlation of any school, o.9805 of the occupations. They rate the clergyman, school teacher, machinist, carpenter and the factory operative lower than the other schools. They rate the banker, manufacturer, merchant, machinist, salesman, baseball player, and man of leisure higher than the other groups.