New Moral Worlds

Abstract

Chapter 6 brings the history of modern sport and the modern school together. In the Uppingham School Archives there’s a photograph of the school cricket team gathered round its ambitious and reforming headmaster Rev. Edward Thring. At this moment (1858) Thring was involved in painful disputes with these boys, trivial struggles that confirmed in his mind if not theirs the need to build a network of powerful schools committed to reforming the character of elite young men. He and his brother headmasters spent their lives reinventing these so called ‘public’ schools as new moral worlds. Chapter 6 looks also at the Girls Public Day School Company (1872) and its work towards the proper education of middle-class young women. Sport and gender was vital to both campaigns although how vital rather depended on the extent to which girls won a new independent voice and the boys retained their old one. Public schools were seen by their inventors as new moral worlds but they could be new immoral worlds as well. Or, to put it another way, the schools were reconfigured as closed institutions deliberately designed to influence the character and behaviour of the young. By the beginning of the twentieth century the leading public schools were seen as uniquely successful enterprises, obsessed with the athletic body, significant and forceful in the definition of what a ‘school’ should be, stately and beautiful, and surrounded almost by definition by playing fields. A new set of national icons had been created.