ABSTRACT
This chapter presents more new, original and compelling material on the size and scale of Britain’s football culture outside of the Public schools, this time from 1841–1859, using the British Library’s digitization project of nineteenth-century newspapers. This does not mean, though, that football was a particularly popular sport in this period compared to the last quarter of the century. However, given the immense upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, it is remarkable that any form of ongoing sports culture survived in mid-century, particularly amongst the geographically mobile young working class. Overall, though, this chapter adds incontrovertible evidence of the cultural continuity of the game, and, significantly, undermines the ‘dominant paradigm’ in the ‘origins of football’ debate by adding an expanding narrative of sport, culture and society in the nineteenth century. The second central pillar of the standard history of football is steadily demolished.
