ABSTRACT
When C. L. R. James, the distinguished Caribbean intellectual, reflected on the world in which he had grown up and come of age – colonial Trinidad at the beginning of the twentieth century – he saw it primarily through the vista of what he considered to be an unvarnished Victorianism. In his memoir, Beyond a Boundary, James described his aunt Judith as ‘the English Puritanism incarnate’ (2005: 14) and his mother, who had been brought up by Wesleyans, as an adherent to ‘a moral non-conformism’ with ‘a depth and rigidity, which at times far exceeded Judith’s’ (ibid.: 21). The moral economy of this world and the rules that governed everyday practices from reading to sports was determined by the precepts and vocabularies that had come to shape the long nineteenth century. Cricket and the Victorian novel provided the prism through which James saw his world, leading him to conclude that it was not by accident that he had worshipped at the shrine of Puritanism, the public school code, and sports, a temple of culture whose pillars were W. G. Grace, John Bunyan, and Vanity Fair: ‘They were a trinity, three in one and one in three, the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Matthew being the son of Thomas, otherwise called Arnold of Rugby’ (James 2005: 26). Later, reflecting on the emergence of West Indian literature in the 1930s, James would note that his outlook was shaped by the ‘atmosphere of the literature of Western Europe’: ‘In my youth we lived according to the tenets of Matthew Arnold; we spread sweetness and light, and we studied the best that there was in literature in order to transmit it to the people’ (James 1980: 237).
