Output details

"Romanticism and sport" and "A New Style of Literature: Charles James Apperley ('Nimrod') and Late Georgian Sporting Biography"

I edited a special number of Romanticism, the leading British journal in the field, on the subject of ‘Romanticism and Sport’, which contains six essays dealing with the relationship between late Georgian sports (in this case boxing, early forms of cycling, fox-hunting, mountaineering, physical education and skating) and Romantic literature in both poetry and prose. The first essay included here, ‘Romanticism and Sport’, is an essay which sounds a new note in Romantic criticism in seeing links between what has hitherto been viewed as two very different cultural forms. First, it tracks the traces of sport in canonical English Romanticism, for example in William Wordsworth’s descriptions of climbing and skating in the Two Part-Prelude (1799), a work as near to the heart of canonical Romanticism as it is possible to be. Secondly, it examines the neglected literary subculture of late Georgian sport in such works as Piers Egan’s history of pugilism Boxiana (1812), arguing that such writings engage with a slew of issues which are hugely important in contemporary Romantic studies, including masculinity, nationality, war, childhood, and race. I have combined this piece with my second essay in the sports issue of Romanticism, ‘Charles Robert Apperley (‘Nimrod’) and Late Georgian Sporting Biography’, as the second essay is a practical example of the theoretical positions articulated in the first. It examines Apperley’s biographical writing about fox-hunting, in his The Life of John Mytton, Esq. (1835), the first best-selling sports biography, reading the book as a picaresque rural tragedy which echoes Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ (1800) as a tale of ruination and decay and examining Apperley’s conservatism, pastoral nostalgia and proto-ecological concern.