How people spend their free time

During the first 20 years of the 20th century, attendance at professional baseball games doubled.

Reading was also popular in the 19th century. In 1841 Edgar Allen Poe published the first detective story The Murders In The Rue Morgue. The first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Many middle class people also enjoyed musical evenings when they gathered around a piano and sang.