In another week when England won an exciting Test Match against India I am returning to the subject of cricket’s connection with the Arts as described in Echoing Greens by Brendan Cooper.

In the 18th century as cricket became more commonplace various artistic giants of the era turned to cricket. William Blake had a vision of cricket which he expressed in ‘The Ecchoing Green’ and this reflects a distinctly romantic reverence for childhood’s spiritual purity. For Blake play was far from a trivial matter. All round him every day - in the grime and toil of London – he witnessed the crushing effects of childhood poverty. chronicling in famous lyrics such as ‘London’, ‘Holy Thursday’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ from Songs of Experience.  As an emblem of escape from the pain of a cruel world, play could not have been any more important.
Another artistic giant of the era, who turned to cricket more than once, was J. M. W. Turner. A game features in his magnificent early watercolour of Wells Cathedral. The grandeur of the cathedral's west front dominates the scene. and there is a scattering of people in the foreground. They're playing two different games - one group plays hoop, while the other plays cricket. Turner offsets the monument of the cathedral and the game of cricket against each other, in a counterbalancing of the enduring and the everyday.
William Wordsworth travelled to France shortly after the revolution. But he became disillusioned with the brutality of Robespierre’s reign of terror and then in 1802 after returning from Calais he wrote ‘Composed in the Valley near Dover, on the Day of Landing’. The lines fondly describe the landscape and character of England and refer to the boys playing cricket ‘in white sleev’d shirts’ which is distinctively, archetypally English.

John Keats made several references to cricket in his letters. Like Wordsworth Keats pictured cricket as a symbol of England. His brother George emigrated to America. Keats found this transatlantic separation painful and he took comfort in the thought of his far-away brother playing a game of cricket in a tender dream of his return.

By far the most celebrated cricketer amongst the great romantic poets was Lord Byron. He actually played for Harrow against Eton in 1805 in the first of the legendary annual fixtures still played to this day, and he recorded the experience in some of his earliest verse. He played cricket and other sports as a display of determination in the face of a badly deformed right foot. In the Eton versus Harrow cricket match he was able to play but needed to bat with the aid of a runner. He somewhat exaggerated the contribution he had made in the match claiming that he had scored eleven runs in the first innings and seven in the second “which is more than any of our side except Brockman and Ipswich could contrive to hit” but actually the records show he scored just seven in the first innings and two in the second. In terms of runs this was only the 7th best effort in the team. The Harrow captain J. A. Lloyd wrote afterwards that ‘Byron played very badly… he should never have been in the XI had my counsel been taken.’ This was the first fixture of this kind and evidence suggests that the game was not officially organised by the schools’ authorities but the boys themselves.  The original challenge was dispatched from the Harrow side: ‘The gentlemen of Harrow School request the honour of trying their skill at cricket with the gentlemen of Eton on Wednesday the 31st of July at Lord's Cricket Ground. A speedy answer, declaring whether the time and place be convenient, will oblige.’ Byron did get a bowl - contributing with one wicket, clean bowling Kaye for seven. His side, though, were hammered by an innings and two runs. ‘We played the Eton and were most confoundedly beat,’ he admitted.

An early round arm bowler George Knight was the nephew of a writer by the name of Jane Austen. There is a suggestion that Austen herself may have had a background role in the development of round-arm bowling and certainly cricket characters make an appearance in her novels. In Northanger Abbey a young Catherine Morland is more interested in cricket than girls’ usual pursuits: ‘She was fond of all boys’ plays and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a Canary bird or watering a rose-bush.’ In the 2007 biopic Becoming Jane, Austen (played by Anne Hathaway) marches into the field during a local cricket match to belt the winning runs. ‘You've played this game before,’ sighs opposition bowler and would-be love interest, Tom Lefroy, as she turns away with the bat rested on her shoulder.

The essayist William Hazlitt was an avid cricket fan and cricket features in several of his essays.  Here is a description by Hazlitt of cricket that oozes with nostalgia. ‘There is no place where trap-ball, fives, prison-base, football, quoits, bowls are better understood or more successfully practised; and the very names of a cricket bat and ball make English fingers tingle. What happy days must ‘Long Robinson’ have passed in getting ready his wickets and mending his bats, who, when two of the fingers of his right hand was struck off by the violence of a ball, had  a screw fastened to it to hold the bat, and with the other hand still sent the ball thundering against the boards that bounded Old Lord’s cricket ground! What delightful hours must have been his in looking forward to the matches that were to come, in recounting the feats he had performed in those that were past! I have myself whiled away whole mornings in seeing him strike the ball (like a countryman mowing with a scythe) to the farthest extremity of the smooth, level, sun-burnt ground; and with long, awkward strides count the notches that made victory sure.’

‘Long Robson’ here is Robert Robinson, renowned batsman of Hambledon and Surrey. He was the first player to experiment with both cricket pads and spiked shoes. His deformed hand injured not by a ball, as Hazlitt suggests, but in a childhood fire - forced him to craft a modified bat together with a highly unorthodox, left-handed technique

At some point between 1828 and 1830 Turner produced a sketch of Cricket on Goodwin Sands. A series of blurry figures play a game of cricket on the beach, in a tranquil delicate, tableau. A calm flat blue sea forms the backdrop to the contemplated stillness of the game. The players are little more than shafts of light, almost part of the sand itself. The sun is only a smudge of white in a peaceful bath of grey. Here is cricket, preserved in the safety of a dream-world far away from the harsh reality of things.

Charles Dickens had a wide-ranging love for sports and games and according to his daughter who wrote a memoir about her famous father, cricket she notes was a source of particular joy:

‘Outdoor games for the simpler kinds delighted him. Battledore and shuttlecock was played constantly in the garden at Devonshire Terrace, though I do not remember my father ever playing it elsewhere. The American game of bowls pleased him, and rounders  found him more than expert. Croquet he disliked, but cricket he enjoyed intensely as a spectator, always keeping one of the scores during the matches at ‘Gad’s Hill’.
This was Dickens’ final home and it became the site of regular charity matches organised by Dickens himself played in the field directly behind his house. Dickens would personally contribute a guinea if the first ball in a match was hit to the boundary.  In one biography it was said that he ‘was never a good little cricket player’ as a boy but in adulthood he grew phenomenally active. Specimens of his cricket accomplishments might be scarce but in a letter to his friend the journalist W.H. Wills in 1861 he allowed himself a brief boast about some recent heroic feats: ‘Cricket came off, and the “Governor” your present correspondent got a hit high over the apple tree for which he scored three, and which covered him with glory.’

 George Dolby, manager of his reading tours, verified that ‘Mr Dickens was a great lover of cricket, and in the summer of 1866, he would often hurry back to Gad’s Hill after a visit to town, in order to be present at a cricket match in the field at the back of his house.’
 Inside his home there were several cricketing pictures hung on the walls and in one of them a familiar figure is depicted preparing to bowl. It is a painting of a Gad’s Hill match happening just yards away from the very wall where the painting hung. The bowler here is Mr Charles Dickens himself. On several occasions his passion for cricket made itself present in his writing. Its most famous appearance in his fiction - arguably the most famous scene of cricket in any fiction - is from The Pickwick Papers. There is a full description of a cricket match but also the other things that go with a cricket match - that is drinking and dining. A game of cricket is where revelry happens -a gateway into indulgence and pleasure. In the rest of Dickens’ work cricket is repeatedly associated with the joys of the countryside. In Oliver Twist it is a motif of escape from the crime of the city. A wounded Oliver, shot in the arm in a bungled burglary, is nursed back to health by the intended victims. When summer comes round they take Oliver out to the cottage in the country.  ‘When the birds were made all spruce and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of charity to execute in the village; or failing that, there was rare cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that there was always something to do in the garden, or about the plants to which Oliver… applied himself with hearty goodwill.’

Cricket is also featured in The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, and in Dickens’ final unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.