Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

129 in question-time, freely and happily confessed to falling into this category and thanked me for providing him with a concise phrase – Permanent Adolescence - to describe his personality. He also confessed to still reading a lot of cricket stories in schoolboy literature. In summary, with cricket the king of Athleticism, with cricket the revered Imperial game and with cricket the chosen mode of sustaining ‘eternal boyhood’, the contiguity of ‘the Holy Game’ and the literature which so fondly cherished it, is distinctly demonstrated. For the most part, authors themselves representing the credentials of ‘puer aeternus’ were energetically celebrating in their often eloquent tales these very virtues, with many a cricket match deployed as an attractive metaphor thereof. Sources Bratton JS Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction 1981 Castle K Britannia’s Children; Reading Colonialism through Children’s Books and Magazines 1996 Hamilton, James ‘The Great Masturbation Panic’ The Garroteer 2012 Hayhurst, Keith The Story of a Stained Glass Window Keith Hayhurst 2016 Howarth, Patrick ‘Play Up and Play the Game’;The Heroes of Popular Fiction 1973 Lofts WOG & Adley DJ The Men Behind Boys’ Fiction 1970 McKenzie JM (ed) Imperialism and Popular Culture 1986 Mangan JA Athleticism in Victorian and Edwardian Public Schools 1981 Midwinter, Eric ‘The Holy Game’ Cricket Lore issue 8 vol. 4 2001 Orwell, George ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ in Collected Essays 1961 Quigley, op cit Samways GR The Road to Greyfriars 1984 Turner ES Boys will be Boys 1957 Of England, Home and Beauty; the Image of England in Victorian and Edwardian Juvenile Fiction Williams, Jack ‘Churches, Sport and Identities’ in J Hill and J Williams (ed) in Sport and Identity in the North of England (1996) The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching