LIKE MANY BRITISH DELUSIONS OF moral grandeur, CRICKET’s took hold in the Victorian era. Few sporting myths have been more endearing than the notion that the game depicted in Tom Brown’s Schooldays was created ex nihilo.
In fact, as the author Derek Birley puts it, the game was “snatched from rustic obscurity by gentlemanly gamblers”; and no sooner had it done service as both “symbol and synonym” for British imperialism, the twin forces of urbanisation and democracy made it part of the leisure industry, with all the capitalist imperatives that attend such a description.
There’s always been a YEARNING FOR A GOLDEN AGE that never existed; a line of influence that runs from the Victorian poet Francis Thompson recalling “oh my Hornby and my Barlow long ago”, to the hissing MCC…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2024