Cricket and the Victorians.

I have been in England many times during the summer test matches and have many friends who have tried to explain the game to me (one read Kipling and W. G. Grace aloud during dinner). I am embarrassed to admit that I still fail to really understand the finer points of cricket. While I cannot say that I appreciate the rules of the game any better after reading Sandiford's study of Victorian cricket, I can confidently say that I now both understand and appreciate the importance of the pastime to the English.

Sandiford's book attempts to, "assess the meaning and role of cricket in Victorian life." (p. 12) It is the author's intent to focus on the individual sport as a means to better understand nineteenth-century social attitudes, economic development, religious and nationalist sentiments, and the direct link between politics and the sport. He is very successful in using the game to reflect particular changes in cultural attitudes throughout the nineteenth century - a tool by which the reader can appreciate how the transformation of work, education, social standing, and nationalism permeated through society to all Britons, no matter where or how they lived.

Cricket, Sandiford argues, was clearly a reflection of Victorian values. A close relationship existed among religion, public education, civic responsibility, and the development of "muscular Christianity." The sport was a "safety valve" for excess energy of youth, as well as the sedentary factory worker. It was a vehicle for instruction about ethics, values, and morals, and rewarded the self-improvement of the individual as well as the participation in a community or group endeavor. The game taught discipline and loyalty to the team.

Such skills and attitudes were increasingly important in the newly growing economy and its accompanying class distinctions throughout the process of English industrialization. Cricket, like everything else, became professionalized and players became commodities. As the level of skill escalated, the status of the player fell. Sandiford argues that, "the professional's status was no higher than that of a labourer." (p. 83) He received a wage, rather than a salary, and faced concerns over labour organization, professional friendly societies, wages, pensions and disability and retirement compensation. While professionals received support from the gentlemen-amateurs, Sandiford describes such assistance as "old-fashioned snobbery and benevolent paternalism...." (p. 106)

Likewise, cricket spectators reflected socio-economic changes in nineteenth-century Britain. With the increase in wages and reduction in hours for the working classes, there was a development of mass leisure activities in the nineteenth century. Whereas other sports, soccer for example, became spectator sports, cricket became the pastime of active participants. With that came new facilities, new organization, new teams, and a new way for spectators and fans to appreciate the sport.

The division of the game into professional and amateur camps reflected another important feature of the age - the development of a conscious sense of belonging to a group and representing the interests of the group, rather than the independent individual. Impacted by Victorian notions of social Darwinism, xenophobia, militarism and jingoistic nationalism, professional (and even amateur) cricket evolved into a national competition among virile athletes whose professional lives depended upon their fitness in order to survive, much like English business and colonial forces.

Sandiford's argument is compelling as well as very enlightening about both the game and the Victorians. With industrialization, the creation of class distinctions, and organized leisure, his interpretation of the sport and the society which refined it helps to explain why cricket was (and is) "not a mere game ... nor a commercial enterprise. It was a valued and ancient institution, like the church and the Crown...." (p. 141) The Victorians revered that institution with the fierce affection for the original Georgian game which they protected from Victorian advancements in science, technology, and commercialization. Sandiford's careful and detailed examination of the game and the Victorian society which loved and played it, helps us understand cricket as the phenomenon was, and still is. Cricket's "peculiar Englishness" made it then - and still makes it - a national symbol. For the Victorians, that symbol was a mark of cultural supremacy as well as economic and colonial domination. For contemporaries, it is a symbol of the best of the English character - moral, yet powerful; competitive, but polite and refined. Cricket represented the best the English could be, and can be - on the field and in national spirit.

Nancy LoPatin University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point