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

18 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays remain obdurately suspicious. Thomas Arnold seems to have turned a blind eye to this apparent blemish, perhaps because of an urgent belief in his calling to produce Christian gentlemen of a certain social class in a kind of mini-state isolated from the mundane distractions of the general community – which brings us fluidly to the other area of ambivalence. Secondly, Thomas Arnold was a ‘broad’ churchman in the Erastian tradition, mindful of the need for the state to be church-orientated. ‘Religious society’, he said, ‘is only civil society fully enlightened’. Had he turned up in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers , published in 1857, the same year Tom Brown made his appearance, he would have fallen part-way between the bleak ‘low’ church narrowness of Obadiah Slope and the gentlemanly ‘high’ church laxity of Archdeacon Grantly. No sentimentalist, he believed that ‘a society formed exclusively of boys’ was ‘evil in the mass’. ‘My object’, he pronounced, ‘will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make’. He went about his crusade fearlessly but, of importance in relation to this text, sport played no integral part in his wholly theological schedule, whereas, with cricket to the fore, it was to be a dominant factor in the reformed public schools system thereafter. Indeed, it is likely that in preference to Tom Brown’s Schooldays he would have chosen another well-known book as closer to his educational principles. Among the many upbeat tales of Muscular Christianity that were to follow in the wake of TomBrown’s exploits, one noteworthy downbeat tale would have appealed to Dr Arnold. This was Frederic Farrar’s Eric, or, Little by Little , published in 1858, almost as if as a counter-blast to Tom Brown. Farrar (1831-1903) used his experience as a pupil at King William’s College, Isle of Man, master at Harrow and headmaster of Marlborough College to give authenticity to his sobering tale of Eric Williams at Roslyn School. Eric, while not basically evil, is weak in the face of temptation. At school and in his adult life at sea, he takes one step forward and two steps back