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.191 Artists were often present at sporting events, even prize-fights, and both Marshall and Ackermann made fortunes from painting and producing prints of horses.192 It was a lucrative business, and disputes sometimes resulted in legal actions.The most prosperous sport was fox-hunting, the embodiment of ‘respectability’.A combination of Nimrod’s prose and cheap mass-produced pictures, cultivated a mythic world of daring jumps and breathless riding, a fantasy milked to the full by Ainsworth in his epic account of Dick Turpin’s ride to York, in Rockwood.193‘Ringwood’ observed the reality: ‘Don’t let the uninitiated suppose that the crowd would charge these fences abreast, as they could sheep-hurdles.No such thing: they diverge right and left, and get through corners or gates’.As for the elite world of Melton Mowbray, ‘these exclusive notions have in great measureevaporated’.194 Modernity, typified by the railway and urban life, was rejected and the most successful sporting prose of the period – Nimrod’s hunting tours andThe Sporting Press53Mill’s evocations of old England – were pure escapism.195 By contrast, Surtees enjoyed little critical or commercial success.His novels presented the reality of the hunting field, a place where fences were rarely jumped and hunts consisted of small tradesmen dependent on ‘bag foxes’ to avoid blank days.196The growing division of sports into respectable and unrespectable increasingly determined their treatment by both the press and outside observers.The spectre of corruption tainted public perceptions of many competitors.Consequently, pugilism, the sport which had enjoyed the most attractive image of all during the Napoleonic wars, declined in public estimation.Many writers, regarded the growing expertise in the sport as being completely overshadowed by its corruption:[T]o the present school the merit of having perfected the Science, let us also recollect that they have brought an almost indelible disgrace upon it, by their immoral andunprincipled conduct.197After 1830 the robust slang that had animated boxers into heroes was often replaced by a cynical and sarcastic eye.This was embodied by the great classic of pugilism, Boxiana, the first three volumes of which had been written by Egan, who, while noting his subjects’ faults, revealed a sport that was full of heroism.By contrast, the fourth and final volume was written by Bee, an embittered outsiderwho focused on the most disreputable aspects of the sport, especially corruption.198Public perceptions of boxers had changed, and it was appropriate that the nearest approximation to a contemporary national hero, Tom Spring, had his name improperly used for both a sweepstake and a newspaper: in essence he was treated as a commodity.199Far from impeding the demise of the hero, the art of biography accentuated it.Although there was a profound need for credible figures who could reconstruct sport’s image, writers proved to be either unwilling or unable to present them.Biographers were quite clear about the genre’s aim: The Sporting Magazine was typical when it declared that:Every life contains some useful precept, and every human circumstance has its moral.The biography which publishes the fair truth, still loses its full purpose if it not beattended with a comment that may prove serviceable to others.200The resulting biographies displayed a robust frankness concerning their subject.The world which they revealed was a very harsh one, as was made clear in, for example, the obituary of Richmond.201 They were not, however, sensationalist, even drawing a polite veil over the disreputable activities of Beardsworth, a sporting promoter who indulged in every kind of fraud and deception, dismissingthem with the curt declaration that much matter was ‘better left in oblivion’.202They also showed a desire to limit the scope of their inquiry, restricting their considerations of aristocrats to their sporting deeds, rather than their activity, or54Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture in Britainlack of, in politics.203 Cumulatively, the only insight they provided readers with concerning the correct image of sport, was that the days of sport’s nobility were long dead.The obituary of the boxer Jackson was characteristic: the loss of such a man at such a season is a matter of serious import, as with him may seem to have passed away the last link of the chain by which the sympathies of the greatwere attached to the destinies of British boxing.204That of Cribb was a eulogy to the past, contrasting it sadly with contemporary corruption:Now, alas!, all such concert is at an end, and although a few may be disposed to cling together as the enemies of disorder, still the great majority keep aloof, and therefore pickpockets and ruffians put all control at defiance.205This attitude was pervasive.In 1838, though displaying an affectionate sympathy for medieval times, when ‘men were ignorant of all other cares’, Howitt had extolled the progress of the modern age.Twelve years later, he regarded modernity as empty, declaring that England was ‘rich but joyless’.206 While the pessimism concerning the future that was expressed by sporting writers anticipated an aesthetic genre from slightly later in the period, the stance simply reflected the popular appetite for nostalgia, embodied by the Young England movement.207 This was a tone that was untypical of most popular literature, which tended to stress the resolution of difficulties and regarded the future with considerable optimism [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]