The rising Victorian middle class invented its own culture through sport and schooling

Evidence

The class of the population that seems to have contributed least was the class destined to appropriate the game and convert it into a national institution. This was the solid Victorian middle class. It was accumulating wealth. It had won its first political victory in the Reform Bill of 1832 and it would win its second with the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. It was on its way. More than most newcomers it was raw… . The Victorian middle classes read Dickens, loved Dickens, worshipped Dickens as few writers have been before or since. It is a very bold assumption that they did not understand what Dickens was saying… . Dickens saw Victorian England always with the eyes of a pre-Victorian. His ideal England was the England of Hazlitt and of Pickwick. Man of genius as he was, the Victorians were more perspicacious than he. They were not looking backwards. They wanted a culture, a way of life of their own. They found it symbolized for them in the work of the three men, first in Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby, secondly in Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and lastly in W. G. Grace. These three men, more than all others, created Victorianism, and to leave out Grace is to misconceive the other two. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1247

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to E.P. Thompson’s working-class formation thesis mentioned in the next paragraph; the middle class’s cultural self-invention mirrors the working-class cultural mediation.
• DEFINE: Establishes Victorianism as a cultural project of the middle class, not a natural inheritance.