ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century witnessed a growth in the spread of organised sport and physical recreation brought about by a wide variety of social, political and economic factors and yet little evidence was produced to place it in a cultural context. A notable exception was the volume on sports and pastimes edited by Anthony Trollope, a fanatical fox hunter, in 18684 which made some attempt at social commentary, an approach he continued with considerable venom in The New Zealander, a posthumously published work criticising upper-class hypocrisy. Such criticism lay in a long English tradition of argument and reasoned dissent which stemmed from humanitarian rather than political motivation, but the widening franchise led to a new class of politically aware writers whose aims included further extentions of franchise, education and leisure time endorsing Marx's dictum in Capital that 'man deprived of leisure is dulled in mind and broken in body'. Despite centuries of punitive laws banning the lower order from hunting, playing football and gambling, society had entered an era in which the struggle for leisure became an overtly political act with the role of women assuming greater importance with the first steps in their educational enfranchisement being taken. Females of the lower orders had to wait another half century to enjoy the freedom that the upper-class Victorian and Edwardian lady experienced as of right and not until relatively recent times have they begun to take part in sport to the same extent. Lady Greville in her Gentlewomen's Book of Sports of 1880 made the point that it was only then for the first time that females could indulge in formerly 'unladylike' sporting activities like rowing, and from this period onwards they played no little part in sporting cultural history. S
The pervading atmosphere of this period, despite many outward manifestations to the contrary, was one of radical change: behind the magnificence of royal and state occasions, the general pomposity of artistic culture and the flamboyance of dress and manners lay an enormous underclass of people whose expectations of life were changing for the better. Much of the radicalism stemmed from Christian groupings whose religious teaching often resulted in the growth of social aspirations producing social movements which affected every aspect of life from politics to popular culture. This in turn prompted virulent reactions from the middle and upper classes who felt threatened by the mass incursions into previously privileged areas of society. In the realm of sport the process had been put in motion by the gradual commercialisation of competition during the eighteenth century which produced during the following century a class of professional sportsmen whose very existence threatened the nature of sport and
the position of its regulative bodies. Professionalism became the subject of interminable reports in metropolitan and provincial journals in which writers extolled the nobility and cleanliness of sport untainted by the 'greed for gold' .
