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 those who read novels. It is also made clear in this text that those who are considered "good" and well-educated read novels, such as Henry and Eleanor Tilney. John Thorpe, for example, who does not read novels, is the cad of the text. Furthermore, there is a distinction made between Catherine's imagination and childishness that encourages her fantasy of a murderous General Tilney, rather than it being a direct fault of the novel genre. "Northanger Abbey" is fundamentally a parody of Gothic fiction. Austen turns the conventions of eighteenth-century novels on their head, by making her heroine a plain and