‘His Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote’: The incidence and influence of cricket in schoolboy stories

Book excerpt: For a hundred years, from about the 1850s to the 1950s, schoolboy stories were voraciously read by the vast majority of boys and a high proportion of girls. A huge proportion of these ‘ripping yarns’ were school-based stories – and cricket was an invariable element, From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to the ‘Red Circle’ tales of the Hotspur comic, older children of all classes were inducted into a culture in which cricket was admired as the ideal sport. Inevitably, this led to generations of parents and, importantly, teachers inculcating this concept into their offspring and pupils respectively. The chief relevant authors were self-proclaimed protagonists of the faith of Muscular Christianity; there was no accident about the creed they preached in their stories, inclusive of the righteous role of cricket in pursuit of their ideals. This text describes the sheer weight and longevity of cricket in this type of literature and the background and beliefs of its major progenitors. That also analyses the cultural and social impact of this intense volume of schoolboy cricket tales. The author’s controversial conclusion is that, in brief, it was good for cricket but bad for the nation’s education system. Here is a book, then, that will appeal not only to cricket fans but to those interested in children’s literature, social history and the development of today’s schools.