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INTRODUCTION Victorian sports? An oxymoron? The Victorians, whose dominant middle- class social ethos was shaped by industrial capitalism, are characteristically known as the exponents of values that seem the antithesis of sports. Did a soci- ety that espoused work, seriousness, utility, duty, distrust of leisure, and rationality, have the time and motivation to play, much less to exalt sport into a new religion, making it a central part of its culture and way of life? That is indeed what the hardworking, serious-minded Victorians did. They reshaped their traditional sports, eliminating some while modernizing others, and cre- ated new sports, with their games so penetrating all layers of their society, that the English became known throughout the world as a sports-playing nation. What makes the history of sports in nineteenth-century England so fasci- nating is the way the Victorians were able to use sports to promote their dis- tinctive bourgeois ethos, even as sports subverted those values. The evangelical and utilitarian shapers of these values saw in competitive physical games a means of promoting their goals of virtuous straitlaced living, but in so doing, they inadvertently endorsed an ethic of play that was enjoyed for its own sake. Sports were used as markers of class, but when sports drew par- ticipants from mixed economic levels, class segregation lessened. In a society focused on maintaining strictly differentiated gender personalities and roles, sports were used to define masculinity, but as women increasingly by the end of the century began kicking balls and picking up rackets, the definitions of masculinity and femininity were forced to change. Finally, imperial adminis- trators and soldiers used sports as an emblem of their distinctive and presumed superior culture and their right to rule, but when the colonized peoples took up the English games, they challenged English superiority on the playing field even as some would do on the battlefield. Sports are an important and intriguing subject of study in most cultures, but especially so in nineteenth-century England. Sports provide a prism through