Critical Survey

In the early Victorian period, sporting literature found a new audience among the young century's industrialists and prosperous merchants who, enabled by the growth of the railroads and increased access to the countryside, chose to use their increased leisure time to experience English rural life and to hobnob on equal terms, at least superficially, with the rural ancien régime. The New Sporting Magazine, established in 1831, positioned itself to speak both to the existing devotees of sport and to the middle-class audience which was about to make its presence felt in the field. The parallel refinement of English sport and its print discourse is described by and exemplified in the two best-known sport writers of the early Victorian era: Robert Smith Surtees and Charles Apperley ('Nimrod'). Surtees and Nimrod, though highly professional and well remunerated, habitually put forward their own work as 'correspondence', contributing to the illusion that the magazine was a playground for gentlemen of leisure. The careful blend of the conservative and modern in the New Sporting Magazine thus extends to its contributors as well: in this magazine's pages the eighteenth-century culture of the gentleman correspondent was beginning to merge with the culture of the paid celebrity author that would become such a force in the mass literary environment of the nineteenth century.

Thomas Hughes's idealised vision of life at Rugby public school is one of the best-known novels in the English language. It was regarded from the outset as a founding text of 'muscular Christianity'. Contrary to the intentions of its author, it helped to inaugurate the cult of 'manly' athleticism that swept through the English public schools in the second half of the nineteenth-century. I argue that the novel reveals tensions around gender and sexuality that were in play among public schoolboys during the second half of the nineteenth century. These tensions exploded into full public view in the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and were instrumental in helping to establish a structure of homophobia within homosocial settings that has lasted through to the present day.

Charles Reade's sensation novel Hard Cash (1863) ostensibly divides the qualities of athletic and intellectual prowess between its two main male characters, the Oxford rower Edward Dodd and the more academically inclined Alfred Hardie. Their contrasted pairing iterates the sensation genre's trope of doubled identities, while Reade's depiction of their respective aptitudes draws heavily on Classical ideals of male beauty and philosophical learning. Complicating the dichotomy, Alfred increasingly comes to embody the need for cohesion of body and intellect, thus illustrating Reade's vision of Oxford as a 'modern Athens' that 'cultivates muscle as well as mind.'

Croquet took fashionable circles in England by storm in the 1860s and 1870s and then suddenly disappeared, replaced in large part by the new sport of lawn tennis. When interest in croquet rekindled in the 1890s, croquet found itself transformed into a 'safe' old-fashioned game that didn't threaten domesticity or women's supposedly established positions. Such a view, this article argues, belies the revolutionary potential of croquet and the debates over women's duties as good citizens, wives, and mothers that surfaced in the 1860s among those who grappled with the idea of croquet mallet-wielding women and girls. Through a consideration of works by Charlotte Yonge, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), along with discussions of croquet and womanly duty on display in periodicals and manuals, this article explores the symbolic status of croquet and the ways in which the surrounding discourse uses it to advocate for a national notion of female citizenship dependent on 'womanly' duty even while offering critiques of manners, morals, and social order frequently dependent on 'womanly' ideals.

The following article discusses the way in which the sporting spectacular melodramas of Irish playwright and master of the genre Dion Boucicault presented theatre audiences of the 1860s with an incarnation of the sportsman that differed from other popular constructs of this figure in the Victorian popular imagination. If, following the changes to the sporting sphere brought about by the Industrial Revolution, public discourse often worked to craft a sportsman who was healthy and heroic, Boucicault's Flying Scud; or, a Four-Legged Fortune (1866) and Formosa, the Most Beautiful; or, The Railroad to Ruin (1869) present a critique of this ideal by placing the sportsman in situations that challenge and temporarily subdue his manly energies. The plays both illustrate the limits of the sportsman and offer audiences reformulations of the figure that are better able to cope with the increasingly problematic urban environment in which sport was taking place. When confronted with the challenges presented by the Victorian city, the sportsman may stumble, but he does not fall; in Boucicault's spectacular sporting melodramas he is a figure of resilience.

In the years between 1860 and 1914, more women than ever pursued equestrian activities throughout Britain. A study of riding manuals for ladies shows why these pursuits became so popular and how female equestrians used sports such as fox-hunting to revise, but not reject, traditional gender roles. Well before the First World War, many British women practised and encouraged the masculine style of riding astride rather than the traditional feminine style of riding sidesaddle. As women riders worked to make this style both acceptable and respectable, they helped to redefine social roles and ideas about proper feminine behaviour which directly or indirectly contributed to the women's rights movement. In these ways, British women were able to use their participation in equestrian activities to advance strong, independent identities for themselves while also helping to create and reinforce a specifically British national identity through horse sports.

Nettie Honeyball and Florence Dixie founded the British Ladies Football Club (BLFC) in 1894 with the aim to provide football-playing opportunities for girls and young women, but also as a means of making money. Theirs, in effect, was an attempt to create a professional football league for women. Public interest in 'the lady footballers' was enormous, at least in its early stages, and generated considerable attention from the press. Overall, press coverage of the BLFC was negative (football is a man's sport; football is a working-class sport; women are physically incapable of playing the game; women shouldn't appear publicly in bifurcated garments, etc.), with only a few notable exceptions. Did the stance adopted depend on the political leaning of the newspaper? Or were the reporters simply reflecting the social and economic realities of their time, struggling to 'explain' a marginal group - women athletes, or more specifically, middle-class women football players - engaging in a working-class male game? This article examines the press coverage of the BLFC. The double standard evident in the newspaper coverage was, on the surface, as one might expect: if a woman played well, she was a freak, possibly a man in disguise; if she didn't play well, it proved that women shouldn't play football. But on closer examination, the double standard was actually rather nuanced: if she played well and looked the part of a woman, she could be subject to praise; yet if she played well and didn't conform to the standard of feminine beauty, she faced ridicule, and her gender called into question.

In much of his work, H. G. Wells consciously criticises the conservativeness of contemporary sports such as cricket and emphasises cycling as a recreational sport which contributes to the democratisation of social class and gender. This stance is apparent in Wells's first social novel, The Wheels of Chance (1896) which captures the fin-de-siècle passion for cycling but also its social impact. For Wells, Victorian team/spectacle sports such as rugby, football, horseracing, and boxing are overtly competitive, promoting gentlemen's amateur sportsmanship and masculinity. This essay argues that The Wheels of Chance, by featuring recreational cycling as the main motif and casting an unfit draper as the protagonist, is an indirect criticism of gentlemen's sporting activities. It creates a space of amusement where strict rules are shunned in favour of casual pastime, generating carnivalesque games and performances in the Bakhtinian sense. It explores the author's will to change the social order through the carnivalesque, in the ambivalent depiction of Mr Hoopdriver's bi-cycling as play.

Notes for Lighting a Fire by Gerry Cambridge (Fife, Scotland: HappenStance Press 2012), 64 pp., hardback, ISBN 978-1-905939-71-8, £10.00.

Notes on Contributors