A Sport-Loving Society: Victorian and Edwardian Middle-Class England at Play

by Mangan,J A

• ISBN13: 9780714682297
• ISBN10: 0714682292
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-02-16
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In a time of unprecedented political and economic transformation, the middle classes of Victorian and Edwardian England became principal players in a new social order. Nowhere did their culture, values and identity gain clearer expression than in their sports, and their influence is still felt in the way we organise, play and think of sport today. A Sport-Loving Societypresents a selection of groundbreaking essays from the journals which have defined sport history over the past three decades. These essays explore the role of the social institutions and issues of the Victorian and Edwardian periods in shaping the sports of the English middle classes, including: education the emancipation of women religion culture and class diplomacy and war. Showcasing the work of prominent sport historians, this book demonstrates the value of sport as a vehicle for the study of wider social change.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	x
Series editor's foreword	xii
Middle-class memorials	xiv
Introduction: complicated matters	1	(10)
J.A. MANGAN
Prologue – setting the scene: second-class citizens? English middle-class culture and sport, 1850-1910 a reconsideration	11	(32)
MIKE HUGGINS
PART I Sport and schools	43	(48)
1 The other side of the coin: Victorian masculinity, field sports and English elite education	45	(20)
J.A. MANGAN AND CALLUM McKENZIE
2 English elementary education revisited and revised: drill and athleticism in tandem	65	(28)
J.A. MANGAN AND COLM HICKEY
PART II Sport, universities and colleges	91	(52)
3 'Oars and the man': pleasure and purpose in Victorian and Edwardian Cambridge	93	(26)
J.A. MANGAN
4 Athleticism in the service of the proletariat: preparation for the English elementary school and the extension of middle-class manliness	119	(26)
J.A. MANGAN AND COLM HICKEY
PART III Sport and emancipation	143	(34)
5 The social construction of Victorian femininity: emancipation, education and exercise	145	(8)
J.A. MANGAN
6 The 'lady blue': sport at the Oxbridge women's colleges from their foundation to 1914	153	(26)
KATHLEEN E. McCRONE
PART IV Sport and religion	177	(40)
7 Sport and the Victorian Sunday: the beginnings of middle-class apostasy	179	(19)
JOHN LOWERSON
8 To pray or to play? The YMCA question in the United Kingdom and the United States, 1850-1900	198	(21)
WILLIAM J. BAKER
PART V Sport and recreation	217	(38)
9 Culture, class and respectability: racing and the English middle classes in the nineteenth century	219	(20)
MIKE HUGGINS
10 Of pride and prejudice: the amateur question in English nineteenth-century rowing	239	(16)
ERIC HALLADAY
PART VI Sport, war and diplomacy	255	(42)
11 'No business of ours'? The Foreign Office and the Olympic Games, 1896-1914	257	(17)
MARTIN POLLEY
12 Sportsmen and the deadly game	274	(23)
DEREK BIRLEY
Epilogue rounding things off: sport and middle-class culture - some issues of representation and identity before 1940	297	(16)
JOHN LOWERSON
Index	313