“More Mighty than the Bat, the Pen…”: Culture, Hegemony and the Literaturisation of Cricket

Abstract

The quotation forming part of the title of this article is taken from ‘Alleviation’, a poem first published in 1898 in a collection of cricket verse and prose entitled Willow and Leather. Its author, E.V. Lucas, was one of several English cricket belletrists working at this time whose oeuvre nevertheless went well beyond the boundary of cricket to include biography, travel writing, articles on food and drink, arts criticism and fiction. In this modest octet Lucas wistfully contrasts his youthful cricketing exploits with the more mundane realities of his work as a professional writer. Typical of so many English cricket lyrics in its nostalgic evocation of youth, Lucas’s cricket field figures a lost past that is nevertheless somehow retrievable. In this sense it is not merely an imaginative refuge from the everyday demands of his literary work, but a metaphor of England itself, a generic space of memory, an always and everywhere available ‘spot of time’ that draws the reader into a shared discourse of English remembrance. But equally significant is the opening line in which two images, the bat and the pen, through the logic of synecdoche, figure two cultural fields, those of cricket and literature, fields that have played particularly privileged and significant roles in the historical construction of Englishness. Taken, admittedly, somewhat out of context, this opening line hints at a fundamental question about the relationship between cricket and literature. Is there somehow a unique but unequal relationship between cricket and the literary field, a relationship in which the representation of a sporting practice has a peculiarly significant role in defining its cultural meaning? Indeed, is there truth in that irresistibly idiosyncratic historian Benny Green’s view that, ‘Not