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 match between Catherine and Henry is implied as both smart and fitting. Tenille Nowak has noted that critics and editors of "Northanger Abbey" often suggest that the names Laurentina and St Aubin appearing in the text are misrememberings of character names from "Udolpho"; Nowak observes that due to there being very few copies of "The Orphan of the Rhine" available these critics did not realise that the names actually appear in their exact form Sleath's novel. Nowak observes other instances where Sleath's novel is echoed by Austen, particularly in her descriptions of place. A passage from the novel appears