More about cricket and Blake

And what should they know of England who only England know?—KIPLING

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?—JAMES

By the 1770s the game of cricket had reached a high level of development. It had recognized, accepted rules or—this being the eighteenth century—laws. It was played by teams sufficiently well known to attract large and enthusiastic crowds, and to arouse passionate local loyalties. In 1765 a crowd of 12,000 was reported to have attended a match of Dartford against Surrey at the Artillery Ground in Chiswell Street. The number of players was usually the same—eleven a side—though matches were sometimes played that involved fewer or more than that number. Bowling was underarm, and before the 1760s the ball came skimming at the batsman with only minimal bounce. Batting was no easy matter on the primitive, rough pitches that were the norm.

The bat was curved like a hockey stick, and it was only during the great days of the Hambledon club, in Hampshire, in the 1770s and 1780s that bowlers developed the knack of making the ball kick up at the batsman. This, as well as the addition of the third stump to the two widely spaced ones previously used, made it necessary to switch to the “straight” bat, more easily used with precision. The expression was later to become something like a metaphor for cricketing virtue.


William Blake included in his Songs of Innocence the lovely poem “The Ecchoing Green”, a nostalgic recollection of childhood pastimes, and surrounded the two pages of the verses with emblematic illustrations in which boys with cricket bats are a prominent feature. The most interesting of these figures appears in the illustration on the second page. This figure belongs to a group of three children, accompanied by a mother holding an infant and leading a small boy, who are being shown the way home by the “old John, with white hair” of the poem. The day is drawing to an end and it is time for repose:

Such such were the joys.
When we all girls & boys,
In our youth-time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.

Till the little ones weary
No more can be merry
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end:
Round the laps of their mothers,
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest;
And sport no more seen,
On the darkening Green.

Songs of Innocence (copy I), plate 29: “The Ecchoing Green”.




Songs of Innocence (copy I), detail showing curved cricket bat.




Songs of Innocence and of Experience (copy Z), plate 7: “The Ecchoing Green”.




Songs of Innocence and of Experience (copy Z), detail showing straight bat.

Songs of Innocence first appeared in 1789, and the relief-etched illustration to “The Ecchoing Green” shows the boy cricketer has a curved bat, such as would have been in use in Blake’s own childhood. In 1794, however, Blake reissued Songs of Innocence with the addition of his Songs of Experience. The curved bat was now completely out of use, and in a later copy of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience Blake now represented the boy with a straight bat, thus reflecting one of the major developments in cricket in the late eighteenth century.

How was this done? It may be that he just painted over the curved bat and inked in a straight bat. (I think this is what he did—after all that is clearly how he created a larger bunch of grapes in the same image.) Alternatively, Blake could have wiped clean the area surrounding the curved bat on the inked plate before printing and leaving a gap in the printed image. And then drew in the straight bat on the resulting print. Without examining the original, this seems too complicated.

Blake’s alteration of the hooked bat into a straight bat was first spotted by Simon and Smart, writing on the art of cricket. As far as I am aware it has not been noticed by Blake scholars.

What do they know of William Blake who only Blake know?


Sources and further reading

Stanley Gardner.—Blake’s ‘Innocence’ and ‘Experience’ retraced.—London; New York : Athlone Press; St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
Reprinted London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Gardner locates “The Ecchoing Green” and its cricketers at Wimbledon.

C.L.R. James.—Beyond a boundary.—London : Stanley Paul & Co., 1963.
50th anniversary edition.—Durham NC : Duke University Press, 2013.
James was the first writer to place the game of cricket in a broader arena of political, economic and social influences. The quotation at the start comes from his “Preface” (unnumbered page).

Rudyard Kipling.—“The English Flag”.
First published in the St. James’s Gazette (3 April 1891), with the title “The Flag of England”. Much reprinted.
The flag of the poem is the Union Jack. (There’s a silly affectation which insists on it being referred to as the Union Flag—see the Daily Telegraph, passim. If Union Jack was good enough for Kipling it’s good enough for me.) Kipling, from his time as a young journalist in India, was keenly aware of the fact that Indian and Irish nationalists drew analogies between each other's colonial situation to make the case for self-government and to oppose British misrule. The occasion for the poem was an incident in which an Irish crowd applauded the burning of the flag. Kipling’s repeated emphasis on Irish participation in the Raj (the Irish in India in Kipling's fiction include Terence Mulvaney in Soldiers Three and, of course, Kim) can be seen as a powerful “imperialist” counter-representation to these subversive analogies.

Robin Simon & Alastair Smart.—The art of cricket.—London : Secker & Warburg, 1983.
Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Fine Art Society Galleries in London, the York Art Gallery, and the University Art Gallery at Nottingham.
My thanks to Ted Ryan for supplying this reference.

David Underdown.—Start of play : cricket and culture in eighteenth-century England.—London : Allen Lane, 2000.
Underdown traces the origins and development of cricket in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire from the early eighteenth-century until the mid-nineteenth. He shows how a peasant game was gradually appropriated by the upper classes and eventually developed into a commercial sport based in London.