The enduring tradition of cricket literature regards the game as a quintessentially English—more precisely, Anglo-Saxon—institution. In this view, cricket encapsulates the values of an eternal England unsullied by the forces of modernity. This literary tradition was inaugurated in the early nineteenth century, at the very moment when industrialization was profoundly transforming the English landscape. Over time, the idea of cricket as a national sport centred in the countryside and devoid of class tensions became deeply entrenched. The historian GM Trevelyan even suggested that ‘If the French nobility had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.’
Duncan Stone’s meticulously researched and passionately argued book is a coruscating critique of this founding myth. Class, he contends, is central to understanding the history of English cricket. The argument is not an entirely new one, of course. Previous writers—among them CLR James, Rowland Bowen, Derek Birley, and Mike Marqusee—highlighted the hypocrisy and contradictions that informed English cricket’s self-image as a consensual, ‘classless sport’.