Cricket, cultural cachet and creativity: J.M. Barrie’s team and late nineteenth-century networking

J.M. Barrie ran a cricket team comprised of notable writers, a fact that has never previously been taken seriously in scholarship. Yet a study of the team enriches the history of British culture, literature and sport in the 1880s and 1890s. A brief survey of British culture in those decades, particularly London literary culture, contextualises the emergence of Barrie’s Allahakbarries team and demonstrates the historical forces to which the team was responding. The cricket team relied on humour to facilitate bonding, and it was highly effective in enabling its members to accrue social and cultural capital. Beginning as an arriviste set of struggling young writers and artists, the team helped them reinvent themselves as a successful network of rising stars. When Barrie’s co-founder threatened the Allahakbarries’ status, Barrie rewrote the team’s mythology to exclude him. The influence of the Allahakbarries can even be detected in the values and creative processes of the team’s three most famous nineteenth-century writers: Jerome K. Jerome, Arthur Conan Doyle and Barrie himself. Their cricket exploits seem to have helped these writers develop themes that were fundamental to their literary contributions: access to the countryside; the growing self-assertion of the lower-middle classes; Englishness; and enchantment.