Lawn Tennis
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Scholars studying the history of tennis and the evolution of modern sports rules
- Experienced players curious about early tennis techniques and equipment
- Students and researchers in sports history and leisure history
- Collectors of public-domain sports literature who prefer original texts
Not a good fit for
- Beginners wanting to learn modern tennis technique
- Readers expecting a modern, illustrated instructional manual
- General readers unaccustomed to nineteenth-century English prose
Reading tips
- Start with the rules chapters that differ most from modern tennis, then return to the technique descriptions; comparing past and present is more rewarding.
- Keep a concise table of modern tennis rules at hand and, as you read, mark which old rules persist and which have been abolished.
- Excerpt the descriptions of equipment and courts into notes; they can serve as primary-source quotations for writing sports history.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Can this book be used to learn to play tennis?
How does the author's background help in understanding the book?
What if the old English edition is hard to read?
Comments
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About the author
James Dwight (1852–1917) has left very limited information about his life in publicly available sources; all that is currently known is that one work by him survives. That work is entitled Lawn-tennis, indicating that his writing was closely connected with the early development of the sport. Judging from the title, the book was likely a practical guide to the rules, court, and techniques of lawn tennis, intended for enthusiasts and beginners of the time. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lawn tennis gradually grew in popularity in Europe and America, and handbooks of this kind helped spread knowledge of the game and standardize how it was played; Dwight's work can be understood in this context. As no reliable records of his birth and death dates, nationality, or profession have been found, further research into the details of his life is still needed, and no speculation is offered here.
