Andy Carter

Andy Carter

The Use and Abuse of Ancient History in Victorian Sport

  • Registration: PhD
  • Principal supervisor: Prof Dave Day
  • Other supervisors: Dr Jason Crowley
  • Start and end dates: September 2019 to September 2022

Background and aims

Sport underwent a major transformation in the latter part of the nineteenth-century, largely as the result of the rise of an athletic games cult in British public schools which, in turn, triggered an intense period of codification and administrative activity that ultimately produced the modern sporting landscape.

The schools in which these sports arose were almost wholly devoted to the teaching of Greek and Latin, and it was from classical culture that the fathers of modern sport took their ideas of manliness and masculinity. However, they also drew parallels between modern sport and sport in ancient Greece and Rome, interpreting the distant past in order to try and shape their present.

My research looks at the way in which ancient ideas were reused, and sometimes wilfully misinterpreted, in order to influence Victorian and Edwardian notions of who should and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in sport, and on what terms.

Publications

Book
  • Carter, A (2020) Beyond the Pale: Early Black and Asian Cricketers in Britain, 1868-1945, Troubador
Articles
  • Carter, A (2020) ‘At Home at Oxbridge’: British and Irish Literature on Ancient Sport 1749-1974’, Sport in History, May 2020

A further three articles are currently going through editorial review with History of Education, Playing Pasts and Sport in History.

Conference presentations

  • ‘Athleticism and Classics in Victorian Britain: Exclusivity and Exclusion’ to the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar conference on Struggle, Upheaval and Transformation. January 2021

Contacts