Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

5 Prologue In 1849 began the serialisation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield . Like Dickens before him at the behest of his father John Dickens, the eponymous hero was forced as a ten year old to work for a time in a blacking factory. He was horrified, finding this much more shocking than his ill-treatment at, literally, the hands of his stern step-father Edward Murdstone or his cruel teacher Mr Creakle. The commentator Arthur Calder-Marshal, writing of Dickens’ similar distrait experience, aged eleven, asserted that one cannot understand the depth of this feeling ‘unless one realises the social barrier at that time between the artisan class...and the educated class to which John Dickens belonged. The artisan had to remain in that ‘state to which God had called him’: the educated could rise (as Charles Dickens did rapidly later) to the social heights.’ 1 David Copperfield took flight, sought out his great-aunt Betsy Trotwood in Dover and overnight was restored to the rank of young gentleman, schooled under the gentle rein of the scholarly Dr Strong. Charles Dickens, too, had been released from his brief conscription into the artisan ranks, moving on to Wellington House Academy, Mornington Place, London, an establishment which, although somewhat in the Creakle tradition, rendered him once more one of the ‘educated class’. Yet he never forgot but rarely mentioned this agonising subject, apart from seeking catharsis through writing David Copperfield. In particular, he remained pained throughout his life that his mother Elizabeth Dickens had been, as he termed it, ‘warm’ for him to continue working in the blacking factory. The six shillings he earned weekly were of inestimable value for one whose husband was impecunious and debt-laden – but, such was the then social mind-set, John Dickens suffered little stigma from being cast in Marshalsea debtors’ prison, while his son was temporarily branded contemptible lower class for sticking labels on blacking bottles alongside ‘common boys.’ It was in that kind of social atmosphere that cricket, having reached something of a nadir in the Regency years and thereafter, was in the ascendant, heading inexorably towards being a comprehensively national sport and entertainment. Like all other enterprises and institutions, it had to come to terms with the prevailing class system. It did so by formalising the nascent practice of distinguishing fairly rigidly as between the gentry or those who aspired thereto and the paid players and other cricketing help-meets such as groundsmen who were all indubitably artisan in styling. As a gentleman you could potter in your own garden and/or pay for a gardener – but you couldn’t be seen doing someone else’s garden for money. The same with cricket. If help was hired, it was from a tradesman, not a ‘professional’, using that ambiguous word in its later ‘white collar’ sense. However, as with much else in that society, strategems were found