Origins of baseball the hand. Another early print reference is Jane Austen's novel "Northanger Abbey", originally written 1798-1799. In the first chapter the young English heroine Catherine Morland is described as preferring "cricket, base ball, riding on horseback and running about the country to books". About the same time, Austen's cousin Cassandra Cooke mentioned baseball in her novel "Battleridge". In her 1820s "Village Sketch" "Jack Hatch", author Mary Russell Mitford wrote: In 1828, William Clarke of London published the second edition of "The Boy’s Own Book", which included rules for rounders (the oldest known use of that name), and contains the first printed
Northanger Abbey Irvine also notes that the first chapters in the novel satirize the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, whom the novel ostensibly praises, as it does the Gothic novels. An early sign that Henry Tilney is the hero while John Thorpe is not can be seen in the former's liking to read books while the latter does not. The story begins with the narrator remarking that the heroine is not really a heroine, with the narrator saying Catherine was not especially clever, nor a great beauty, and good without being virtuous. The narrator goes to say the reader was