John Nyren's *The Young Cricketer's Tutor* — First Major Cricket Book, 1833

Cricket had been written about in the press for a century, in instruction sheets since the 1740s, and in newspaper match reports since the 1780s. Nothing of book length, however, had attempted to combine the technical and the historical. The Hambledon club had broken up in 1796 and most of its leading men were dead by the early 1830s; Nyren's recollections were the last chance for first-hand testimony.

Cowden Clarke, who lived near Nyren in north London, recognised that the old man's stories were a literary resource. He took down the recollections in conversation, drafted the instructional sections from Nyren's dictation, and persuaded Effingham Wilson — the radical Royal Exchange publisher who had also issued early Tennyson — to take the book on.

John Nyren, born at Hambledon in 1764, was the son of Richard Nyren — landlord of the Bat and Ball Inn on Broadhalfpenny Down and the captain of the Hambledon club in its great years. The younger Nyren had grown up among the Hambledon players: David Harris the bowler, John Small the batsman, Tom Walker, William Beldham 'Silver Billy', Lord Frederick Beauclerk's predecessors. By 1833 he was nearly seventy and the last surviving link to that vanished cricketing world. Charles Cowden Clarke, a literary friend (later Keats's biographer and a Shakespeare scholar), persuaded Nyren to dictate his recollections, edited them into shape, and prefixed a short instructional manual on the techniques of batting, bowling and fielding as Nyren remembered them. The result was published in April 1833 as *The Young Cricketer's Tutor; comprising full directions for playing the elegant and manly game of cricket; with a complete version of its laws and regulations: by John Nyren, a Player in the celebrated old Hambledon Club, and in the Mary-le-bone Club. To which is added 'The Cricketers of My Time'*. The instructional pages were unremarkable, much like contemporary fencing manuals. The memoir at the back — *The Cricketers of My Time* — was unprecedented. Nyren wrote with affection and precision about his father's eleven, the matches against All-England on Broadhalfpenny Down, the characters and quirks of the Hambledon men. It was the first time anyone had written about cricket as if it had a literature.

“How those fine brawn-faced fellows of farmers would drink to our success! And then what stuff they had to drink! Punch! — not your new Ponche a la Romaine, or Ponche a la Groseille, or your modern cat-lap milk punch — but good, unsophisticated, John Bull stuff — stark! — that would stand on end — punch that would make a cat speak!”

“It is a thoroughly English book about a thoroughly English subject, and the world has nothing to compare with it.”

The book sold steadily and was reprinted several times in the nineteenth century. Nyren died in 1837. Cowden Clarke went on to literary fame as Keats's biographer and Shakespeare commentator. The text has remained continuously in print since the 1840s and is the bedrock source for everything subsequently written about Hambledon.