1st Edition
A Sport-Loving Society Victorian and Edwardian Middle-Class England at Play
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 Society presents 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.
Series Editor’s Foreword Middle Class Memorials Introduction J.A. Mangan Prologue: Setting the Scene Second-Class Citizens? English Middle-Class Culture and Sport, 1850-1919: A Reconsideration Mike Huggins Sport and Schools 1. The Other Side of the Coin: Victorian Masculinity, Field Sports and English Elite Education J.A. Mangan and Callum McKenzie 2. English Elementary Education Revisited and Revised: Drill and Athleticism in Tandem J.A. Mangan and Colm Hickey Sport, Universities and Colleges 3. ‘Oars and the Man’: Pleasure and Purpose in Victorian and Edwardian Cambridge J.A. Mangan 4. Athleticism in the Service of the Proletariat: Preparation for the English Elementary School and the Extension of Middle-Class Manliness J.A. Mangan and Colm Hickey Sport and Emancipation 5. The Social Construction of Victorian Femininity: Emancipation, Education and Exercise J.A. Mangan 6. The ‘Lady Blue’: Sport at the Oxbridge Women’s Colleges from their Foundation to 1914 Kathleen E. McCrone Sport and Religion 7. Sport and the Victorian Sunday: The Beginnings of Middle-class Apostasy John Lowerson 8. To Pray or to Play? The YMCA Question in the United Kingdom and the United States, 1850-1900 William J. Baker Sport and Recreation 9. Culture, Class and Respectability: Racing and the English Middle Classes in the Nineteenth Century Mike Huggins 10. Of Pride and Prejudice: The Amateur Question in English Nineteenth-Century Rowing Eric Halladay Sport, War and Diplomacy 11. ‘No business of ours’?: The Foreign Office and the Olympic Games, 1896-1914 Martin Polley 12. Sportsmen and the Deadly Game Derek Birley Epilogue: Rounding Things Off Sport and British Middle-Class Culture: Some Issues of Representation and Identity before 1940 John Lowerson
Biography
Professor J.A. Mangan is former Director of the International Research Centre for Sport, Socialisation and Society at the University of Strathclyde, UK. He was founding Chairman of the British Society of Sports History and founding editor of The International Journal of the History of Sport. He is author of the acclaimed Athleticism and the Victorian and Edwardian Public School and has written and lectured extensively on sport, culture and society
