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 "The Monk". Isabella Thorpe gives Catherine a list of seven books that are commonly referred to as the "Northanger 'horrid' novels"; these works were later thought to be of Austen's own invention until the British writers Montague Summers and Michael Sadleir re-discovered in the 1920s that they actually did exist. The list is as follows: All seven of these were republished by the Folio Society in London in the 1960s, and since 2005 Valancourt Books has released new editions of the 'horrids', the seventh and final being released in 2015. The most significant allusion, however, is to Ann Radcliffe's "The