Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

38 especially for children, the Evangelical tendency was very active. It was to the fore in humanising state policy on justice. The number of often-brutal executions declined rapidly from over 500 in the years 1816-1820 to just 51 in the years 1836-40. This was in part because of judicial reforms, such as the abolition of many capital offences, but also in part because of a fall in the number of offenders in a less raucous national community. Public executions were banned from 1868. The chief reason was not out of kindness for the guilty party – a hanging behind closed prison doors was possibly more frightening – but to avoid the barbaric debasement of a vitiated mob. The distinguished historian of the 19 th century, Sir Robert Ensor, has asserted that ‘no one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate’ that, among civilised communities, it ‘was one of the most religious the world has known’. 3 This is certainly true in so far as attendance is concerned. After the indolence and apathy of the 18 th century, the earnestness of the Victorian, in piety as in other matters, was distinct. It had a major behaviourial facet. The Victorians took the trappings and tokens of religion very seriously indeed. Thomas Arnold’s model of ‘the virtuous gentleman’ is a lucid illustration of this solemnity of purpose – and it is important to underline how this affected both sides of the class barrier. His son the poet and critic Matthew Arnold said of the new breed of working men that they were ‘at one in spirit with the industrial middle class.’ Literary images of these two kinds might be observed in Elizabeth Gaskell’s remorselessly upright mill-owner John Thornton in North and South (1854/55; and the only classical novel with the same title as a cricket fixture) and Charles Dickens’ faithfully moralistic mill-hand Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times (1854). A Census of Religious Worship showed that on Sunday 30 March 1851 11m people in England and Wales attended one of the nation’s 35,000 places of worship, almost a half of them of the Anglican persuasion. There was one place of worship for every 700 of the population. What the Liberal politician John Morley was to call the ‘ecclesiastical’ effect, that is, the emphasis on the buildings, the funding and the membership of the church, rather than on the more purely religious element, was very pronounced. Churches were markedly involved in running schools but they also became engaged in recreational affairs of a musical, dramatic and sporting – cricket not least among these – nature. The other element – Chivalry – mixed well with this Evangelical primness. Out of it grew the prototype of the decent and polite English gentleman. Literary references abound. One might cite Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel (first staged in 1903, prior to publication in a novel sequence) or Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg in his Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Cricketing aphorisms – it’s not cricket, play a straight bat, keep the left elbow well up – are resonant of that ideal. Bruised by the rigours and discomforts of industrialism, the Victorians looked for solace in a largely non-existent pastoral past, one imbued with the quaint emblems of medievalism. Renaissance; The Revitalisation Of Cricket