Shrove Tuesday Football at Kingston, 1865

The old game in the market place, two years after the new one wrote its laws.

Work: newspaper engraving
Maker: Unknown engraver
Date: 1865
Ground: Market place, Kingston upon Thames
Era: The Victorian game · 1870–1900
Source: Penny Illustrated Weekly News, 18 March 1865 · via Wikimedia Commons

The laws were new; the game was immemorial.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

Shrove Tuesday in Kingston upon Thames, the old market town on the river south-west of London. This engraving ran in the Penny Illustrated Weekly News on 18 March 1865, page 636, and the paper’s text said the ball had received its first kick at the market place there “through time immemorable”. Games like this one, played each year before Lent with few rules and a good deal of chaos, are counted among the ancestors of every modern code of football. Two years earlier the Football Association had written its first laws in London. Ten miles up the river, Kingston was still playing the old way, in the street.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

Shrove Tuesday Football at Kingston, 1865, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

Shrove Tuesday Football at Kingston, 1865 framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of newspaper engraving — Unknown engraver, 1865 — from the copy held by Penny Illustrated Weekly News, 18 March 1865 · via Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same hand