“The fact that our nineteenth-century forebears did not spend all their evenings speechlessly gazing at a moving version of their magic-lantern does not mean that they were as bored as we may be when deprived of the monotonous, habit-forming, visual diet that we accept as entertainment. Hopefully a happier and more enlightened generation of the future, having rediscovered that it is satisfying for man to do things for himself, may wonder how we endured entire evenings gazing at coloured lights.”
I found the preceding quote maligning television as a form of entertainment in a book written in 1974 by Patrick Beaver entitled Victorian Parlor Games. Beaver was making the point that while we might sometimes look back on the Victorians and think they must have led incredibly stuffy and boring lives, they would not have thought so themselves. In his book, Beaver describes a collection of different parlor games played during the Victorian era that ,reveal that the Victorians did actually enjoy having fun.