Richard Tomlinson is the author of
Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG, a biography of W.G. Grace, widely considered one of cricket's greatest-ever players. At the
Guardian Tomlinson tagged ten top cricket scenes in fiction, including:
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (1836-37)
Dickens’s match between Muggleton and Dingley Dell remains one of the best satires on how cricket appears to the uninitiated. After Mr Tupman is accidentally shot in the arm, Mr Pickwick declares he is keen to watch a game “in which the impotent effects of unskilful people do not endanger human life” – precisely the danger faced by early 19th-century batsmen on unprepared pitches. Nobody gets killed during Muggleton v Dingley Dell, but the game is so tedious you could easily die of boredom. In the end, Dingley Dell simply give up when they recognise Muggleton’s “superior prowess”. It is all rather pointless, which is probably Dickens’s point.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
Also see:
Shehan Karunatilaka's top ten books on cricket.
The Pickwick Papers also appears on John Mullan's lists of
the ten best elections in literature and
ten of the best ice-skating episodes in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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