Cricket and the Masculine Middlebrow in Interwar Britain

According to various contemporaneous critics, London’s literary world in the 1920s was dominated by a cabal of bad male writers. But why, in seeking to discredit these writers’ literary abilities, did their critics regularly cite the fact that they played cricket together? Seeking to historicise this campaign of highbrow gatekeeping and reappraise the writers concerned, this article reexamines Britain’s interwar battles over cultural and literary merit. Cricket embodied group solidarity and masculinity among a set of leading middlebrow writers. In particular, this insight expands our understanding of two literary cricket captains and middlebrow spokesmen, J.C. Squire and J.B. Priestley.