Abstract
As early as 1868 Anthony Trollope warned that sports
have a most serious influence on the lives of a vast proportion of Englishmen of the upper and middle classes. It is almost rare to find a man under forty who is not a votary of one of them; — and among most men over forty the passion for them does not easily die out. (5)
It would be a fallacy, then, to suggest that sports, games, and play were primarily Edwardian occupations. Certainly games and sports have been played for centuries, and historians such as Neil Tranter, Mike Huggins, and Richard Holt rightly point to the growth of sports throughout the Victorian era. Yet while Victorians presided over a tremendous growth in sports and games, it was Edwardians who saw their apotheosis. As Andrew Horrall observes about the sport of cycling alone, ‘though the first amateur cycling club was founded in 1869, it was three decades before the sport boiled over in sensation’ (54).
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© 2009 Michelle Beissel Heath
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Heath, M.B. (2009). Playing at House and Playing at Home: The Domestic Discourse of Games in Edwardian Fictions of Childhood. In: Gavin, A.E., Humphries, A.F. (eds) Childhood in Edwardian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595132_6
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