Conclusion

The chapter reflects on how the history of emotions of Victorian and Edwardian holidaymaking can offer a better understanding of leisure consumption and of the entanglement of emotions, morality, and economy more generally. The book asserts that medical conceptions of emotions were imperative to the popularization of holidaymaking and to the transformation of its main objective from physical cure to emotion management. Nonetheless, the emotional economy model reveals that medical thought was by no means the only sphere of knowledge production significant for holiday culture; rather, heterogeneous bodies of knowledge all contributed to the formation of both the meaning of ‘the emotional’ and its commercial experience. The book illustrates the blurred lines between commercial and political, healthy and moral, as well as the overlapping roles of the producer, the advertiser, the doctor, and the holidaymaker. Addressing the different conceptions of emotional and moral economy, the chapter reflects on the theoretical potential of these models and offers guidelines for a comprehensive use of the concept of the ‘emotional economy’. Specifically, it elaborates on the need to account for the conceptual history of emotions, the performative dimensions of emotional experience and consumer behaviour, and the interaction between multiple spheres of knowledge production. Looking ahead to the central place of tourism in twenty-first-century societies and its relation to stress and burnout, the chapter calls on future research of past and present leisure cultures to take emotions seriously, and to rethink common notions of rationality, authenticity and agency.