Games, Greek and Pluck

Public school education in the second half of the nineteenth century was completely dominated by classics and sport. Rejecting the view that these were competing strands resulting in friction between aesthetic scholars and athletic philistines, this book shows how classicism and athleticism were closely entwined. Using primary sources, such as school magazines and memoirs, it considers how classical ideas shaped the elite British male’s view of his place in the world and his attitudes to masculinity, gender, race, class and duty. At the heart of this process were a comparatively small number of classically-educated men who influenced the reorganisation and reform of games between 1850 and 1914 laying the foundations for modern sport. This book explores their overlapping social networks, and the ways in which they sometimes co-opted ancient history, as they tried to retain control of the sporting landscape and promote an ‘amateur ideal’ based on a past that never really existed.