Croquet. “By our energetic Contributor.”Source: Fun (1 August 1868): 222. Courtesy of the Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Here, decades before Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, the author's persona presents himself as a bored member of the wealthy classes who clearly doesn’t have to work or do anything particularly serious but who sees himself set part, observing the activities of those, like gymnasts, or participants in track and field, who exert themselves a great deal — apparently primarily for his pleasure, or at least that’s the way the speaker describes participants in these activities. Of course, like Wilde, the actual author of this playful praise of croquet, who might be W. S. Gilbert, here works pretty hard to make deadlines and thus secure his daily bread. He may possess the classical learning of someone who attended Oxford or Cambridge, and may in fact have done so, but he’s hardly a member of the landed, leisurely classes, and neither are his readers. This commentary, like some others in Fun, are rather humorous versions of Silver Fork novels, such as Disraeli’s Young Duke. — George P. Landow
There is only one way of overcoming the terrible lassitude which many people seem to experience as the result of the present magnificent weather, and that is thoroughly to identify one's self with one or other of the noble athletic sports which have made England and Englishmen what they are. Cricketing, boating, rifle practice — even the gymnasium, when the trapeze and climbing frame are in the open air; billiards I will not say much about, except at very dull country houses, where there are no pretty girls and so lawn to speak of, and the host has not heard of that superb combinative, intellectual, invigorating, suggestive, and I was almost about to say devotional amusement, adapted alike to the serious spinster, the passive widow, the administrative matron, the ferocious flirt, the demure ingénue, the fair cynic of society. Need I aay that I refer to croquet ?
To occupy the comfortably cushioned seat at the and of a well-built wherry, where I could devote myself to mingling the proper ingredients for shandygaff as the athletic rowers plowed their silvery furrows, and the light breeze wafted beneath the shadow of the overhanging trees and stirred the scented tresses of our fair companions, has been to me the blissful occupation of many an hour when I have sought in such strenuous efforts to banish the ennui and dissipate the enfeebling influences of the slothful life passed in grant towns.
To sit, easily clad, and airily balanced on a camp stool beneath the wind-flapped canopy of a commodious tent, and there with the inevitable accompaniments of a “Henry Clay" and a purling tankard of “Bass” newly released from the ice chest, to calcalute the score pulled off by the athlutic team who go in for the honour of winning in one of the most stirring contests that the world can produce, has not seldom fallen to my happy lot when, in the free and untrammelled exercise of that activity which is the common gift of Nature to us all, I have retired from the slifling atmosphere of drawing-rooms to feel myself once more a child of nature.
To stand, or what is better, to lie down, reasonably attired in thin flannel canvas shoes, on the green sward, and take the part of a connoisuer and critic in those feats of muscular force ind trained ability for which the golden youth of our seminaries of learning are now so proudly distinguished: — to watch the gyrations of the trapezist, the admiramble endurance of the hurdle racer, the hardy determination of the performer on the horizontal bar, have brought to my mind a sense of serene and exquisite enjoyment which the mmore ignoble struggles of a giddy warld of fashion and frirolitv never could afford. But there yet remains a higher and a more delightful pursuit — one in which the claims of muscularity are abated though not enervated by the presence of beauty: where the pleasing arts are united with the art of pleasing, and Hercules lays aside his club (precious hot the clubs are this weather!) for the mallet and the hoop of Venus.
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Last modified 15 March 2016