The sport of cricket has long held a special place in Anglophone culture, and a specialised niche in English literature. Cricket is the official summer sport in England, and it is widely known as the "gentleman's game", owing to the unique culture of the sport and its emphasis on ideals such as grace, sportsmanship, character and complexity. Cricket has therefore often attracted the attention (and in some cases, fandom) of the literati – Lamb, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt were all players of the game – and some of the greatest English writers have written about cricket. This was particularly true in the era before the Second World War, for example, during the Edwardian era, and in the 1920s and 1930s. Victorian literature An early chapter of Dickens's famous first novel The Pickwick Papers, serialised as early as 1836, features a brief description of a cricket match between the All-Muggleton team and the Dingley Dell Cricket Club. Mr Pickwick watches as Mr Jingle provides a running commentary on the game ("Capital game—smart sport—fine exercise—very" is a typical Jingle comment.) Cricket also plays a prominent part in Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), Thomas Hughes' classic novel of life at Rugby. A century after Hughes's book, the school's bully Flashman (and his cricket career) were resurrected by the novelist George MacDonald Fraser (see below). Anthony Trollope also wrote occasionally about cricket. E. W. Hornung wrote a series of short stories about the adventures of the gentleman thief A. J. Raffles, who was a fine cricketer. In The Field Bazaar, a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson discuss Watson's history as a cricketer and his plans to help the University of Edinburgh raise money for a new cricket pavilion. Cricket in pre-WWII literature There have been several famous cricket matches in post-Victorian literature, notably the village cricket match which forms the centrepiece of A. G. Macdonell's minor classic England, Their England (1933). Another well-known example comes from the work of Siegfried Sassoon. In 1928, Sassoon, by then a famed war poet, published Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the first volume of his George Sherston trilogy. The book, ostensibly a novel, is in effect a lyrical love-letter from the author to his vanished Edwardian childhood, set in the dreamy English countryside. The Butley flower show match is a classic evocation of cricket on the village green. Cricket played a role