"God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast and when I run, I feel his pleasure."
Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590-1914,
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Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590-1914, E and S Yeo ed, 1981. Anthony Delves: Popular recreation and social confict in Derby, 1800-50
This is a review of one chapter in the book, not the entire book.
The chapter is an account of the suppression of street football in Derby and the hostility to popular recreation by Christian churches. A game of football was played annually from time immemorial on Shrove Tuesday by men and on Ash Wednesday by boys, always hundreds in or thousands took part in a game lasting six or more hours. There had been several attempts to stop it for example 1731, 1746, 1797 and again 1830s.
The author reports that evangelicals had stopped the races in Derby from 1835. (Page 100)
Their motivation was a belief that "temporal pleasures worth stumbling block to salvation, the flesh which mortifies the spirit and, apparently, working-class souls in particular". (Page 107) and "race meetings, even more than football were said to represent all that was regressive and degenerate in popular recreation, 'evil and only evil'". Page 109
It is further suggested that the impetus within evangelicalism came from sabbatarian and temperance movements. (Page 113)
Their charge is well summarised in the words of a local Wesleyan minister in the Derby Mercury 16 Feb 1845. "Races are cruel and inhuman as it respects animals, they are the fruitful source of profligacy and vice, drunkenness and debauchery, fraud and theft, personal degradation and domestic misery. It is impossible to devise anything more mischievous in its tendency of more subversive of the morals of the people" (Page 109).