\.
41
A CULTURAL HI ST
KASIABCDDf
BOXING
A CULTURAL HISTORY
KASIA BODDY
REAKTION BOOKS
For David
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London eciv odx
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2008
Copyright © Kasia Boddy 2008
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in China
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Boddy, Kasia
Boxing : a cultural history
1. Boxing - Social aspects - History
2. Boxing - History
I. Title
796.8'3'o9
ISBN 978 1 86189 369 7
Contents
Introduction 7
1 The Classical Golden Age 9
2 The English Golden Age 26
3 Pugilism and Style 55
4 'Fighting, Rightly Understood' 76
5 'Like Any Other Profession' 110
6 Fresh Hopes 166
7 Sport of the Future 209
8 Save Me, Jack Dempsey; Save Me, Joe Louis 257
9 King of the Hill, and Further Raging Bulls 316
Conclusion 367
References 392
Select Bibliography 456
Acknowledgements 470
Photo Acknowledgements 471
Index 472
Introduction
William Roberts, The Boxing Match, Novices, 1914.
The symbolism of boxing does not allow for ambiguity; it is, as amateur mid- dleweight Albert Camus put it, 'utterly Manichean'. The rites of boxing 'simplify everything. Good and evil, the winner and the loser.'1 More than anything, the boxing match has served as a metaphor for opposition - the struggle between two bodies before an audience, usually for money, representing struggles between opposing qualities, ideas and values. In the modern works that this book considers, those struggles involve nationality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and different versions of masculinity. As light heavyweight Roy Jones, Jr. once said, 'if it made money, it made sense.'2 But the conflicts dramatized in modern boxing also rework the fundamental oppositions set up in the very earliest texts: brawn versus brain; boastfulness versus modesty; youth versus experience. In literary and artistic terms, the clash is also often one of voices and styles. In the Protagoras, Plato even likens the moves and countermoves of Socratic debate to a boxing match.3
Boxing, it seems, has been around forever. The first evidence of the sport can be found in Mesopotamian stone reliefs from the end of the fourth millen- nium bc. Since then there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or ungloved fists to one other. William Roberts's 1914 watercolour The Boxing Match, Novices conveys the relentless succession of contenders, champions and palookas that makes up the history of boxing. Throughout this history, potters, painters, poets, novel- ists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of the bruising, bloody confrontation. 'For some reason,' sportswriter Gary Wills remarked, 'people don't want fighters just to be fighters.'4
Writing about boxing is often nostalgic, evoking a golden age long since departed. Today the period most keenly remembered is that of the late 1960s and early '70s, a time dominated by Muhammad Ali, a time, as a recent docu- mentary would have it, 'when we were kings'.5 Not long before, however, many were sure that the 1930s and '40s represented the peak of excellence, and lamented the arrival of televised sport as the end of a 'heroic cycle'.6 Further
back still, early twentieth-century commentators considered the Regency as the time when pugilism flourished as never since; while for Regency writers, true glory and prowess resided in the sport's original manifestations in classical Greece. In the third century ad, Philostratus looked back to the good old days before 'the energetic became sluggards, the hardened became weak, and Sicil- ian gluttony gained the upper hand'.7
Although this book is about boxing in its modern form, myths about the golden ages of classical and Regency boxing have had such a lasting impact on ways of thinking about the sport that I begin with them. The first two chapters chart the early history of boxing and the establishment of ideas about courage and honour, ritual and spectatorship, beauty and the grotesque that are still in use today. The third chapter explores what pugilistic style meant to Regency painters and writers.
The golden age of English boxing was over by 1830. Nevertheless, the sport continued to hold sway over the popular imagination throughout the nineteenth century. Chapter Four considers the divide between (dangerous, illegal) prize fighting and (honourable, muscular Christian) sparring in the Victorian era, and the appeal of each to writers as different as George Eliot and Arthur Conan Doyle. The fin de stick rise of professional boxing (and its association with the development of mass media such as journalism and cinema in America) is the subject of Chapter Five. Women (welcome participants in the eighteenth cent- ury) now re-entered the arenas as spectators. Chapter Six shifts the focus to questions of race and ethnicity, investigating the ways in which boxing was associated with assimilation for young Jewish immigrants and the ways in which black American boxers struggled against the early twentieth-century colour line. The career and enormous cultural impact of Jack Johnson, the first of the twentieth-century's great black heavyweights, is explored in some detail. Another iconic presence, Jack Dempsey, dominates Chapter Seven. The chapter considers the sports-mad twenties and argues that many of modernism's styles were self-consciously pugilistic.
The final two chapters take us to the end of the twentieth century. Chapter Eight discusses mid-century representations of boxing and the ways in which the sport now featured largely as a metaphor for corruption and endurance - that is, until a young fighter called Joe Louis emerged on the scene. Finally, Chapter Nine examines the era of Muhammad Ali, television, Black Power, and further compensatory white hopes. The conclusion brings the story up to date, taking into account, among other matters, Mike Tyson and hip hop, conceptual art's glove fetishism and the enduring appeal of sweaty gyms.
1
The Classical Golden Age
Looking back nostalgically from the third century ad to the glorious athletic past of Classical Greece, Philostratus claimed that the Spartans invented boxing.1 In fact, activities resembling boxing and wrestling were recorded much earlier, in third millennium bc Egypt and Mesopotamia. By the late Bronze Age (1600-1200 bc) images of pugilists could be found across the Eastern Mediterranean - some, like the figures on a Mycenean pot from Cyprus, are fairly sketchy (illus. 2); oth- ers, like the fresco of the young Boxing Boys from Thera (illus. 43), are striking and detailed.2 In both cases, the boxers adopt an attitude similar to that found in Greek vase paintings 1,000 years later. The earliest of Greek literary works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in the eighth century bc, describe athletic games held at the time of the Trojan war, traditionally dated around 1200 bc.
The funeral games for Patroclus in the Iliad (c. 750 bc) include the 'first re- port of a prize fight' in literature.3 The games come late in the war, and in the penultimate book of the poem. Anthropologists and classical scholars have long debated the role of sports on such occasions. While some suggest that the fun- eral games simply served to celebrate the courage of the dead warrior, others argue that they were religious festivals and that sport was linked to ritual sacrifice. 4Discussions of the symbolic role of boxing and other forms of violent combat sport often draw on Clifford Geertz's essay on Balinese cockfighting, and Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred. Geertz argues that the cockfight should not be seen merely as a form of popular entertainment, but as a blood sacrifice to the forces threatening social order. 'Deep play', a term that Geertz adopts from Bentham, is a game whose stakes are so high that, from a utilitar- ian point of view, it is irrational to play; this does not make the game unplayable, however, but elevates it. Instead of merely demanding the calculation of odds, the game works symbolically to represent the uncertain gamble that is life itself.5 The competitors involved in such contests are simultaneously derided and honoured, acting, as Girard put it, as 'substitutes for all the members of the community', while 'offered up by the community itself.'6 'The winner symbol- ically "lives" by winning the ritual contest, the losers "die"', and the spectators are vaccinated 'with the evil of violence against the evil of violence'.7
Two boxers on a fragment of a Mycenaean pot from Cyprus, c. 1300-1200 BC.
The games described in the penultimate book of the Iliad certainly do more than simply provide more entertaining fight scenes. Most commentators read the funeral games for Patroclus as one of the poem's 'representative moments'; that is, they encapsulate the issues of honour and reward that the poem usually dramatizes on the battlefield.8 For some commentators, their function is to 'pu- rify' combat - that is, to imitate it but conceal its true deadly character.9 For others, though, the real point is that, to the watching gods, the horrors of war (involving such dramatic moments as Achilles' pursuit of Hector) is itself like an athletic spectacle.10 Prize-giving - the nature and function of reward - forms the topic of much debate. The boxing contest is preceded by Achilles giving Nestor a two-handled bowl 'simply as a gift', for now 'old age has its cruel hold' upon him. He accepts it, acknowledging that 'now it is for younger men to face these trials'. The prizes for the boxing match are then set forth: the winner will receive 'a hard-working mule', signifying endurance, the loser a two-handled cup. Prefiguring the boasts of Muhammad Ali, Epeios claims the prize before any competitor has even stepped forward:
I say I am the greatest ... It will certainly be done as I say - 1 will smash right through the man's skin and shatter his bones. And his friends had better gather here ready for his funeral, to carry him away when my fists have broken him.11
Finally someone steps forward, Euryalos, another 'godlike man' of noble lineage, though we hear little about him. It seems to be an even match, but Homer
presents it in very general terms - a 'flurry of heavy hands meeting', a 'fearful crunching of jaws', followed by a knockout blow to Euryalos's collarbone. All that matters is that Epeios's boasts are justified - he is the greatest (after all, he is also the man who designed the wooden horse). 'Godlike', he is also described as 'great-hearted' because, despite his threats, he does not kill his opponent, but lifts him to his feet. Symbolic conflict acts as the transition between combat with consequences and combat with none, between narrative complication and closure. It quarantines real violence (the crunching of jaws) by enfolding it be- tween two layers of symbolic violence (the bloodthirsty boast, the raising of the vanquished). Boxing, here, is the ultimate deep play.
Justified boastfulness also features in the Odyssey (c. 725 bc). In book eight, the Phaeacians seek to impress the travel-weary Odysseus with a display of their athletic prowess. All goes well until Laodamas, son of the prince and a champion boxer, urges their guest to participate, telling him, 'there is no greater glory that can befall a man living than what he achieves by speed of his feet or strength of his hands'. When Odysseus declines, arguing that home is all he can think of, Laodamas rashly counters, 'You do not resemble an athlete.' Such a challenge does not go unanswered by the 'darkly resourceful Odysseus'. He grabs a heavy discus, and then offers to take on anyone at boxing, wrestling or running, 'ex- cept Laodamas / himself, for he is my host; who would fight with his friend?'12 The crisis is averted when the prince intervenes with music and dancing. Odysseus is less successful in avoiding a fight when, ten books later, disguised again, he returns home to Ithaca. There, Iros, a large and greedy beggar, insults him gratuitously. Egged on by Penelope's suitors, Iros rejects Odysseus's claim of solidarity between beggars and demands a 'battle of hands'.13 The suitors enjoy this tremendously and offer prizes. Here we find the first instance of spec- tators as villains in a boxing story: unwilling to fight themselves, but vicariously enjoying the risks someone else will run, and gambling on the outcome.14 Al- though Odysseus is outweighed and does not fight at full capacity (he is still anxious to conceal his identity), he manages to break some bones in Iros's neck, and as a final humiliation drags his opponent's prostrate body to the foot of the courtyard wall. Survival is the issue here, not prize-winning. The contest is 'a street fight that happens to involve a very skilful athlete in disguise'.15 If the Iliad reminds us of Ali's theatrical boasting, the Odyssey anticipates his resilience.
Such pragmatism was of no use to subsequent idealizations of pugilism's golden age. As Tom Winnifrith points out, 'there is not in Homer the belief that behaving well somehow wins matches and battles'.16 However reluctant Odysseus is to fight, when persuaded he does not hold back. Honour and restraint, however, were central to the Virgilian ethos of the Roman Empire. It was Virgil, not Homer, who was evoked by the nineteenth-century muscular Christians, and the founding of the modern Olympics in 1896 was 'fired by Virgilian en- thusiasm'.17 Greater honour, paradoxically, was accompanied by even greater brutality. This is apparent if we compare the gloves used in Greek and Roman times.18 Today, boxers tend to use eight- to ten-ounce gloves in competition and
anything up to eighteen-ounce gloves for sparring. Heavier gloves give greater protection both to the hands of the person striking the blow, and to the face and body of the blow's recipient. Until around the end of the fifth century bc, strips of leather of between ten and twelve feet long were used as 'soft gloves' (himantes). These protected the knuckles rather than the opponent's face. They were replaced by caestus, 'sharp gloves', lined with metal, which could maim and even kill an opponent (illus. 3). Dryden translated Virgil's caestus as:
The Gloves of Death, with sev'n distinguish'd folds, Of tough Bull Hides; the space within is spread With Iron, or with loads of heavy Lead.19
This sounds like the kind of excessive violence, much more than sufficient to its purpose, that Odysseus tried hard to avoid.
The fact that boxing gloves were made of bull hide may have been the rea- son that boxers and bulls were often compared with each other. In theArgonau- tica, Apollonius likens Amycus and Polydeuces to 'a pair of bulls angrily disput- ing for a grazing heifer', while Virgil, in the Georgics, describes a young heifer as he trains for a fight, learn [ing] to put / Fury into his horns' and 'sparring with the air'.20 The link between boxers and bulls continued into the twentieth cen- tury with men fighting under names like 'El Toro' and 'Bronx Bull', and their op- ponents figured as matadors. Hemingway admired the way a particular animal used his left and right horn, 'just like a boxer', while for Mailer, it was George Foreman's ability to use his gloves like horns' that made him so dangerous.21
The funeral games for Anchises staged in the Aeneid (19 bc) recall, and to some extent imitate, those of the Iliad. But Virgil's structure is more intricate and his tone is quite different from Homer's easy exuberance.22 The boat and foot races over, Aeneas sets out prizes for the boxing - a bullock for the victor, and a sword and helmet for the loser. As in the Iliad, one man comes forward immediately. Here is it Dares, the Trojan, 'who stood there with his head held high to begin the battle, flexing his shoulders, throwing lefts and rights and thrashing the air. They looked around for an opponent, but no one in all that company dared go near him or put on the gloves'. Thinking there is to be no contest, Dares goes to collect the bullock as his prize. Only then does Entellus, spurred on by Acestes, come forward.
Dares is obviously modelled on the brash and youthful Epeios, but while Homer simply confirms that Epeios is 'godlike' with a straightforward victory, Vir- gil makes both character and action more complicated. Entellus is not presented as just any opponent (as Euryalos had been in the Iliad); he is motivated less by a desire for prizes or boastfulness than by a complex mixture of emotions. Acestes' words have roused his sense of honour; he feels indebted to his teacher, the god Eryx; he does not want to be thought a liar, or a coward; he feels himself a repre- sentative of Sicily against Troy. In all things Entellus is the antithesis of Dares:
Three types of early boxing glove.
Dares had youth on his side and speed of foot. Entellus had the reach and the weight, but his knees were going. He was slow and shaky and his whole huge body heaved with the agony of breathing. Blow upon blow they threw at each other and missed. Blow upon blow drummed on the hollow rib cage, boomed on the chest and showered round the head and ears, and the cheekbones rattled with the weight of the punches.
Dares begins well, knocking Entellus down; the giant man falls 'as a hollow pine tree falls, torn up by the roots on great Mount Ida' - a common simile in clas- sical, and subsequent, depictions of fights. But, as we might expect, this only spurs on Entellus:
He returned to the fray with his ferocity renewed and anger rousing him to new heights of violence. His strength was kindled by shame at his fall and pride in his prowess, and in a white heat of fury he drove Dares before him all over the arena, hammering him with rights and lefts and allowing him no rest or respite. Like hailstones from a dark cloud rattling down on roofs, Entellus battered Dares with a shower of blows from both hands and sent him spinning.23
Dares may have the strength, youth and confidence of a young animal, but Entellus, armed with psychological demons as well as mere muscles, is a true force of nature - falling like a pine tree and retaliating with blows like hailstones. Nature, or 'savage passion', must, however, be controlled, and so 'Father Aeneas' intervenes and ends the fight. This is one of the first fight stories in which the restraining referee is the hero.24 Aeneas tells Dares to acknowledge that 'the
13
divine will has turned against you', while Entellus ritually slaughters the bull he has won in honour of Eryx, and retires from boxing. The two men play no further part in the poem: boxing itself seems like a relic from some long-gone mythic age. The values of Augustan Rome have been made clear: piety is the basis for power and success; temperance and restraint the mark of a military leader.25
In years to come, the fights described by Homer and Virgil would provide models for many writers. Both tell stories of drama and suspense, but each has a different emphasis. In Homer, fighting may come as a last resort but when it does, no punches are pulled, and there is no need to be modest about one's prowess. Virgil's fighters are equipped with lethal gloves, but checked by the need to govern their anger, and by vanity.
BOXING BY ANALOGY
Homer and Virgil both compare conduct in games to that in war. It is not always the case that the same man is good at both activities, merely that they are anal- ogous. In the Iliad, Epeios's boast begins, 'Is it not enough that I am less good in battle? ... a man cannot be expert in all things'.26 Less expert at boxing, but more so at battle, is Achilles, yet he shares with Epeios a firm belief in his own ability. He boasts that no one is a match for him, and we soon see that no one can chal- lenge his 'invincible hands'.27 And in theAeneid, we are reminded of Dares and Enthellus when later we come to compare the behaviour of Turnus and Aeneas in a real fight to the death.28 The relationship between pugilism and war is also at the forefront of many of Plato's references to boxing (three of his dialogues are set in the gymnasium and palaestra). In the Laws, he argues for the necessity of training soldiers to be prepared for war by comparing them with boxers training for fight ('if we were training boxers . . . would we go straight into the ring unpre- pared by a daily work-out against an opponent?'); in the Republic the analogy is extended further - as 'one boxer in perfect training is easily a match for two men who are not boxers, but rich and fat', so a well-prepared Athens could go to war against wealthier and more powerful enemies.29
Boxing similes were not only used in discussions of war and its attendant virtues and risks. They can also be found, for example, in debates about the qualities needed for successful political debating (Plutarch) and ways of dealing with the dishonest in everyday life (Marcus Aurelius).30 Aristotle evokes boxing in the Nicomachean Ethics (c. 330 bc) when he wants to explain the nature of pain and pleasure in courage. Men who withstand painful things, he writes, are brave, while those spurred on by passions such as revenge are 'pugnacious but not brave'. Sometimes, however, there is a gap between the pleasant end 'which courage sets before itself and the painful 'attending circumstances'. This is the case in athletic contests:
the end at which boxers aim is pleasant - the crown and the honours - but the blows they take are distressing to flesh and blood, and painful,
14
and so is their whole exertion; and because the blows and the exertions are many the end, which is but small, appears to have nothing in it.31
Boxers are brave because, in the heat of the fight, it is not prizes but virtue (courage) that motivates them. Courage, like all Aristotelian virtues, operates as a mediating strategy between other qualities; here, confidence and fear. Too much confidence, or too little fear, and no courage is needed; too much fear or too little confidence, and one is paralyzed.
The use of boxing analogies to discuss virtue was not restricted to class- ical philosophy. The nature of courage required for religious struggle (and the importance of keeping your eyes on the prize) was one of the subjects of the First Letter to the Corinthians (c. 48 ad). There Paul insists that he is a genuine fighter rather than a shadow boxer ('one that beateth the air', in the King James version). Moreover, he goes on, in a phrase that would prove res- onant for muscular Christianity, 'I keep under my own body, and bring it into subjection.'32
AT THE GAMES
Boxing played an important part in the games of ancient Greece; both in the four great Panhellenic festivals - the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian - and in the numerous local games held in individual cities. The most presti- gious Games, the Olympic, began in 776 bc, and boxing was introduced in 688 bc.33 The festival spanned five days; the first and last were reserved for cere- monies and celebrations; boxing tookplace on the fourth day at midday so that neither competitor had the sun in his eyes. The sport was similar to modern boxing to the extent that each competitor attempted to injure or exhaust his opponent by punching him. There were, however, no rounds, rest periods, weight classes or points systems. There was no rule against hitting an opponent when down and no confined ring. Boxers were paired by lot; a single elimination format was used. A winner was declared when one boxer was no longer physi- cally able to continue (illus. 4). Although the Olympic ideal has long been evoked as a model of fairness and sportsmanship, often in contrast to modern corruption, Pausanias's Guide to Greece (170 ad) reveals that fight fixing actu- ally began at the 98th Olympics:
Eulopos of Thessaly bribed the boxers who entered, Agetor of Arkadia and Prytanis of Kyzikos, and also Phormion of Halikarnassos, who won the boxing at the previous Olympics. This is said to have been the first crime ever committed in the games, and Eulopos and the men he bribed were the first to be fined . . .34
The Romans were generally disdainful of the Greek love of the gymnasium, but boxing also played a part in the Ludi Romani. According to Suetonius, 'none
15
Boxers with prize tripod in back- ground, fragment of Black-figure vase, mid-sixth century bc.
of Augustus's predecessors had ever provided so many, so different, or such splen- did public shows'. He goes on to detail wild-beast hunts, mock sea-battles and gladiatorial shows of all kinds, but says that Augustus's 'chief delight was to watch boxing, particularly when the fighters were Italians - and not merely professional bouts, in which he often used to pit Italians against Greeks or Africans against each other, but slogging matches between untrained roughs in narrow city alleys' (illus. 5).35The boxers in these contests used the oxhide caestus, and injuries were severe. This perhaps accounts for Augustus's introduction of a series of regula- tions as to who could take part (a senatorial decree banned persons 'of good family' from events such as boxing) and who could watch such contests.36 Suetonius notes that whereas 'men and women had hitherto always sat together, Augustus confined women to the back rows even at gladiatorial shows':
No women at all were allowed to witness the athletic contests; indeed, when the audience clamoured at the Games for a special boxing match to celebrate his appointment as Chief Pontiff, Augustus postponed this until early the next morning, and issued a proclamation to the effect that it was the Chief Pontiff 's desire that women should not attend the Theatre before ten o'clock.37
In a reassessment of Plato's Laws, Cicero argued that the theatre should be kept free from the bloody sport of the Games, but it is clear that some infiltration took place.38 Horace complained of crowds calling out for boxers or bears in the middle of a play, while Terence attributed the failure of one his plays to the rival attraction of boxing.39 A couple of millennia later, Bertolt Brecht was to make a new theatre out of such infiltrations. While Brecht felt that boxing fans viewed the sport with cool objectivity and rationally judged the performance
16
African boxers; terracotta, second or first century bo
of each participant, the more common view (exemplified in every Hollywood fight film and first expressed in another classic work of the late Roman Empire, St Augustine's Confessions) was that boxing degrades its audience as much as its participants. St Augustine tells the story of a reluctant visit to the gladiator- ial arena by his pupil, Alypius. At first Alypius closes his eyes, but he cannot close his ears. When the crowd roars, he is unable to contain his curiosity and so opens his eyes. Immediately, and dramatically, he is corrupted by what he sees: 'he fell, and fell more pitifully than the man whose fall had drawn that roar of excitement from the crowd'.40
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ODES TO VICTORY
The funeral games of Homer's and Virgil's epics provide one enduring model for depicting sporting events. Another can be found in the odes, known as epinicians (epi-Nike-ans), written by the fifth-century bc poets Pindar and Bacchylides, in celebration of the victors in the athletic games.
To the lyre the Muse granted tales of gods and children of gods, of the victor in boxing, of the horse first in the race, of the loves of swains, and of freedom over wine.41
Pierian Muses, daughters
of Zeus who rules
on high, you are famed for your
skill with the lyre: strum
and weave for us then intricate
songs for Argeius, the junior boxer,
the Isthmian games' victor.42
If epic poetry memorialized battles that spanned decades and had national significance, the epinician celebrated the fleeting triumphs of sport, giving last- ing form to the deed of the moment.'43
I look for help to the Muses
with their blue-black hair,
to bless my song of how, in this life,
contingent, ephemeral,
a few things somehow endure.44
The victories of the athletes were often represented as imitative of the bat- tle victories of epic heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus, whose triumphs in turn were compared to those of the gods.
Let Hagesidamos
Who has won in the boxing at Olympia,
Thank Illas as Patroklos thanked Achilles.
One born to prowess
May be whetted and stirred
To win huge glory
If a God be his helper.45
Also located within this hierarchy of kinds of victory was the poet himself, with- out whom all heroes would be forgotten, and whose memorializing skill was itself worthy of praise (and medals).46 A different notion of honour emerges,
18
one less directly attached to the virtues necessary for combat and having more to do with those essential to art. According to Richmond Lattimore, it was the 'very uselessness of . . . [the athletic] triumphs which attracted Pindar': 'A victory meant that time, expense, and hard work had been lavished on an achievement that brought no calculable advantage, only honour and beauty.'47
Father Zeus, ruler on Atabyrion's ridges, Honour the rite of Olympian victory,
And a man who has found prowess in boxing.
Grant him favour and joy
From citizens and strangers.
For he goes straight on a road that hates pride,
And knows well what a true heart
From noble fathers has revealed to him.48
The odes of Bacchylides and Pindar, which firmly connect the activities of the poet with those of the athlete, were echoed in Roman times by Horace and by neo-classical poets in the eighteenth century.49 It might be argued that epinician tradition also lies behind some of the more extravagant claims made by sports- writers in modern times.
THE BODY, BEAUTIFUL AND VULNERABLE
Today classical Greek athletics continues to fascinate us, not simply because of the sporting principles it initiated, but because of the language it provides for talking about the human body, and, particularly, its glories. Training, and the culture of the gymnasium, are treated widely in Greek literature, and much writ- ing about that culture focuses on the beauties of the naked bodies displayed there. Disapproving of the violence of the Roman gladiatorial contests, Dio Chrysostom sets up an alternative in the gentler, more philosophical, world of the Greek gymnasium where his ideal boxer Melancomas 'did not consider it courage to strike his opponent or to receive an injury himself, but thought this indicated a lack of stamina and a desire to have done with the contest'. Melan- comas's unblemished beauty is directly linked to his moral virtues - his disci- pline, courage, modesty and self-control. Dio compares Melancomas to his closest rival, Iatrocles, whom he remembers in training.
He was a very tall and beautiful young man; and besides, the exercises he was taking made his body seem, quite naturally, still taller and more beautiful. He was giving a most brilliant performance, and in so spirited a way that he seemed more like a man in an actual contest. Then, when he stopped exercising and the crowd began to draw away, we studied him more closely. He was just like one of the most care-
19
fully wrought statues, and also he had a colour like well blended
50
If Melancomas's beauty reveals his inner virtue, that of Iatrocles exists on the surface only.51
The comparison of (stationary) athletes with statues would prove endur- ing and later commentators were less inclined to worry about the gap between outer and inner beauty. Boxing's revival in the eighteenth century coincided with a revival of interest in the classics, and much writing about the male boxer, then and later, drew on notions of statuesque perfection as exemplified by Greek athletes. In 1755, for example, the German Hellenist, Winckelmann, famously argued that the excellence of Greek art was, in some part, due to the availabil- ity of fine models:
The gymnasia, where, sheltered by public modesty, the youths exer- cised themselves naked, were the schools of art. These the philosopher frequented, as well as the artist. Socrates for the instruction of a Charmides, Autolycus, Lysis; Phidias for the improvement of his art by their beauty. Here he studied the elasticity of the muscles, the ever vary- ing motions of the frame, the outlines of fair forms, or the contour left by the young wrestler in the sand. Here beautiful nakedness appeared with such liveliness of expression, such truth and variety of situations, such a noble air of the body, as it would be ridiculous to look for in any hired model of our academies.52
Gymnasia were, of course, also places of seduction and athletic statues often highly eroticized, but Winckelmann insisted that 'ideal beauty' was about estab- lishing a connection to 'something superior to nature; ideal beauties, brain- born images' - what James Davidson defines as 'the sculptural complement to the idealism of Platonic philosophy'. 'The ideal body is not at all earthly or earthy: it provides an accurate material reflection of the heavenly, the insub- stantial and the divine.'53
There was, however, one undeniable difference between artistic and real life bodies. Whereas art is long, the real bodies exemplifying physical perfec- tion, were, of course, perishable. Pindar's odes capture the fleeting moments of an ideal physical state as well as those of victory. The very transience of the ideal body is made all the more poignant by the less than perfect bodies that sur- round it. This phenomenon is foregrounded in boxing - and not in other Olympic sports such as the discus or running - by the fact that while the processes of training are all about perfecting the body, and while at the moment of triumph, the body may move beautifully, the sport itself is all about damag- ing (and making ugly) the body.54 Apollonian form could only temporarily con- tain Dionysian energy. The odd exception only serves to prove the rule. Dio Chrysostom praises Melancomas - 'although boxing was his speciality, he
Etruscan engraved bronze; probably Polydeuces training with a punch bag, with Amycus to his right; late fourth century bc.
remained as free from marks as any of the runners' - while, much later, the thought of 'pretty boy' Janiro's unmarked face fuels Jake La Motta's paranoia in Martin Scors- ese's Raging Bull.55
The damaged body of the boxer appeared in literature and art as early as its beautiful counterpart. A popular model for later writ- ers, Theocritus's version of the mythical fight between Polydeuces and Amycus in the Idylls (third century bc) was based on real fights he had seen in the stadium. His account is alert to technical detail and strat- egy, but perhaps even more memorable are his graphic descriptions of the wounds that fighters carry and inflict.56 While searching for the legendary golden fleece, Castor and Polydeuces - sons of Leda and Zeus, and brothers of Helen of Troy- are shipwrecked on Bebrycia. There, in a grove, Polydeuces,
an Olympic champion, encounters Amycus, the King of the Bebryces, brother
of the Cyclops and 'a giant of a man' (illus. 6):
He was an awesome spectacle: His ears were thickened
By blows from leather mitts, and his huge chest and broad back swelled
Like the iron flesh of a hammered statue. Where his shoulders and hard arms
Met, the muscles jutted out like rounded boulders, polished smooth
By the whirling onrush of a winter torrent.
One thing leads to another and soon the 'son of Zeus' has challenged the aggressive and inhospitable 'son of Poseidon' to a fight, the loser agreeing to become the winner's slave. The description that follows relishes the damage done to 'this huge / Mound of a man':
A loud cheer rose from the heroes, when they saw the ugly wounds Around Amycus' mouth and jaw, and his eyes narrowed to slits in his Swollen face. . .
Another punch and Amycus's nose is skinned; a few more and his face is 'smashed' into 'a dreadful pulp. / His sweating flesh collapsed, and his colossal form shrank in on itself. Finally, Polydeuces finishes off the fight with a blow to his opponent's mouth, head and left temple ('The bone cracked open, and the dark blood spurted out'). With Amycus lying 'near to death', Polydeuces, clear- skinned and with limbs enlarged', walks away.57 He lets his opponent live.58
The contest between modern Greek speed, skill and 'guile', and mythic bulk has proved unsatisfyingly one-sided.59 The main purpose of Theocritus's description seems to be to dwell on the damage done, a purpose not unheard-of in sub- sequent representations of pugilism.
Not all depictions of a boxer's injuries are marked by such gruesome relish. Many are simply documentary; vase paintings often depict blood streaming from the boxer's nose as well as from cuts on his cheeks. A more sophisticated realism can be found in the fourth-century statue of a battered boxer, some- times known as 'The Pugilist at Rest' (illus. 7).61 In a 1993 short story of that title, the American writer Thorn Jones describes it:
The statue depicts a muscular athlete approaching his middle age. He has a thick beard and a full head of curly hair. In addition to the telltale broken nose and cauliflower ears of a boxer, the pugilist has the slanted, drooping brows that bespeak broken nerves. Also, the forehead is piled with scar tissue . . .
The pugilist is sitting on a rock with his forearms balanced on his thighs. That he is seated and not pacing implies that he has been through all this many times before. It appears that he is conserving his strength. His head is turned as if he were looking over his shoulder - as if someone had just whispered something to him. It is in this that the 'art' of the sculpture is conveyed to the viewer. Could it be that some- one has just summoned him to the arena? There is a slight look of befuddlement on his face, but there is no trace of fear . . . Beside the deformities on his noble face, there is also the suggestion of weariness and philosophical resignation.62
The sculpture is notable for the acute detail in its rendering of wounds both long-accumulated and from the immediate fight. Scars are visible all over the body but especially on the face, the nose is broken, the right eye swollen. More- over, the bronze statue has red copper inlaid in order to indicate fresh facial wounds and blood that has dripped down on to the right arm and thigh. Attention is also drawn to the athlete's tangled hair, his finger and toenails, weary face and sagging muscle. 'No other work of art from antiquity,' writes Harris 'takes us into the stadium with such intimacy as this statue.'63
The destruction of the boxer's body, and in particular his face, also provides the basis of much gruesome humour in Lucilius's debunking epigrams:
Your head, Apollophanes, has become a sieve, or the lower edge of a worm-eaten book, all exactly like ant-holes, crooked and straight . . . But go on boxing without fear, for even if you are struck on the head you will have the marks you have - you can't have more.64
With loss of face comes loss of identity:
The Pugilist at Rest, also known as the Terme Boxer, bronze copy, 1st century ad, of a signed 4th-century sculpture by Apollonius.
■
When Ulysses after twenty years came safe to his home, Argos the dog recognized his appearance when he saw him, but you, Stratophon, after boxing for four hours, have become not only unrecognizable to dogs but to the city. If you will trouble to look at your face in a glass, you will say on your oath, 'I am not Stratophon. 5
23
Narcissus died because he fell in love his own reflected image. By this reckoning, however, the vanity of boxers is likely to prove short-lived:
Having such a mug, Olympicus, go not to a fountain nor look in any transparent water, for you, like Narcissus, seeing your face clearly, will die, hating yourself to the death.66
While ancient literature and art have provided models for subsequent depic- tions of the boxer as an exemplar of either statuesque beauty or grotesque injury (often contrasted as the ideal and the real), it is worth remembering that the figure that most appealed to aficionados was neither. Philostratus notes that while the best fighters have small bellies, 'such people are light and have good respiration', a big-bellied boxer also has a certain advantage, 'for such a belly hinders blows at the face.'67
BOXING AGAINST EROS
The body was never, of course, merely a sign of temporal vulnerability and meta- physical dissolution. The palaestra was also the setting for homoerotic admir- ation and seduction, where the vulnerable as well as the statuesque body proved attractive:
When Menecharmus, Anticles's son, won the boxing match, I crowned him with ten soft fillets, and thrice I kissed him all dabbled with blood as he was, but the blood was sweeter to me than myrrh.68
Although most writing about exercise focuses on men, women also used gym- nasia and, in Greece, participated in women's games.69 This fuelled heterosex- ual fantasies, particularly among nostalgic Romans. One of Ovid's Heroides, a series of imaginary letters from mythical figures to their lovers, is a letter from Paris to Helen. In it he describes the power of her beauty and imagines Theseus coming upon her competing in ihepalaestra, 'a naked maiden with naked men'. 'I revere his act, I can only wonder / why he ever let you be returned.'70 Another Augustan love poet, Propertius, also evokes Helen in recalling the glory days of Spartan athletics. Particularly commendable was the Spartan practice of having naked men and women competing together. Propertius waxes lyrical about naked women 'covered in dust' at the finishing-post, and with swords strapped to 'snow-white thighs'. Even the binding of 'arms with thongs for boxing' excites him, and he imagines two bare-breasted Amazons resembling Pollux and Castor '(One soon to be prize boxer, the other horseman)/ Between whom Helen with bare nipples took up arms.' Roman women, in contrast, pay 'boring attention to perfumed hair'.71
If pugilism had its erotic qualities, erotic love could also be seen as a poten- tially pugilistic activity:
24
Bring water, bring wine, O boy, and bring me the flowery Crowns. Bring them, since I am indeed boxing against Eros! (Anacreon)
Whoever challenges Eros to a match
Like a boxer fist-to-fist, he is out of his wits.
(Sophocles)72
Multiple contests are possible: the lover struggles against the conventional re- sistance of the beloved; rival lovers compete; the lover's desire struggles for ex- pression. Boxing might even be easier than love. In another epigram by Lucilius, sexual yielding is more devastating than any acknowledgment of defeat in the stadium:
Cleombrotos ceased to be a pugilist, but afterwards married and now has at home all the blows of the Isthmian and Nemean games, a pug- nacious old woman hitting as hard as in the Olympian fights, and he dreads his own house more than he ever dreaded the ring. Whenever he gets his wind, he is beaten with all the strokes known in every match to make him pay her his debt; and if he pays it, he is beaten again.73
But love and pugilism are not only comparable as amateur sports; in some ways the analogy works better on the professional level. Thomas F. Scanlon notes that athletes and courtesans are paired in many poems, and describes a fifth- century bc column-krater which places on opposite sides, and in near-identical poses, an athlete and a courtesan. 'The pun may be interpreted on several levels,' he writes: 'she is "athletic"; he is a "courtesan" whose prizes are her payment; both place a premium on the beauty of the body; both possess erotic attraction.'74
In the classical era, then, boxing was the literal or metaphoric subject of a great variety of representations, many of which will recur in the chapters which follow. More often than not, whether it is Homer describing the contest be- tween Epeios and Euryalos, or Aristotle defining courage, or Pindar the function of poetry, or Lucilius marriage, the representations turn on a violence which is at once actual and symbolic. It is the inextricable mixture in pugilism of high decorum and low cunning, of beauty and damage, of rhetoric and bodily fluids, which has made it for so long and so productively a way to imagine conflict.
25
The English Golden Age
There is some evidence, from thirteenth-century legal records and fourteenth- century psalters, that sports resembling wrestling, cudgelling and boxing existed in Britain in the Middle Ages (illus. 8).1 These references, however, are fleeting; fighting with hands and sticks was a plebeian rather than an aristocratic activity, and as such did not feature in medieval art and literature to the same extent as sports such as jousting, archery or hunting. By the sixteenth century, British box- ing's Greek origins had been largely forgotten and if the sport was considered at all, it was grouped with other rowdy rural pastimes such as cock-fighting and bear- baiting; all were outlawed under the Puritan government of Cromwell.2 When the Restoration brought a relaxation of public morality, many traditional rural sports became popular in the expanding cities, 'supported by city nobles, local squires migrating to the commercial centers, and growing numbers of working- class men.'3 In the cities these sports began to change. Between 1500 and 1800, Peter Burke notes, 'there was a gradual shift taking place from the more sponta- neous and participatory forms of entertainment towards the more formally-organ- ised and commercialised spectator sports, a shift which was, of course, to go much further after 1800'.4 Samuel Pepys's diary for 5 August 1660 notes (in one short paragraph) a trip to the doctor to fetch an ointment for his sick wife, dinner at Westminster, attending Common Prayer at St Margaret's church, and, undoubt- edly the highlight of his day, 'a fray' at Westminster stairs between 'Mynheer Clinke, a Dutchman, that was at Hartlib's wedding, and a waterman, which made good sport'.5
The first boxing-match recorded in a newspaper, The Protestant Mercury , took place in 1681 in the presence of the Duke of Albemarle, with the winner, a butcher, already recognized 'the best at that exercise in England'.6 The trades- men who most depended on upper-body strength - watermen, butchers and blacksmiths - were the ones most frequently associated with pugilism in the days before the sport became 'scientific'.
In 1719, James Figg opened an indoor arena, or, as he called it, Amphi- theatre', and school near Adam and Eve Court off London's Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), where he taught boxing along with quarterstaff, backsword and
26
MM*
ittittujgimf
Two men wrestling, flanked by spectators, one of whom holds a pole surmounted by a cockerel, a prize for the winner; Bas-de-page scene, detail from the Queen Mary Psalter, c. 1310-20.
Anonymous printmaker, Figg's Card, c. 1794.
cudgelling. A promotional card (once attributed to Hogarth) was distributed at Figg's booth at Southwark Fair, and his advertisements promised that the booth was 'fitted up in a most commodious manner for the better reception of gentle- men' (illus. 9). Samuel Johnson's uncle, Andrew, ran a similar booth at Smithfield meat market.7
Although boxing matches were frequently advertised as 'trials of manhood', women as well as men could often be found fighting at the booths and bear- garden (illus. 10). 8 In August 1723, The London Journal noted that 'scarce a week passes but we have a Boxing-Match at the Bear-Garden between women'.9 It would not have been unusual, while browsing the newspaper, to come upon a challenge and reply such as this (from 1722):
CHALLENGE
I, Elizabeth Wilkinson of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Hyfield, and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me upon the stage, and box me for three guineas, each woman holding half a crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops the money to lose the battle.
ANSWER
I, Hannah Hyfield, of Newgate-market, hearing of the resoluteness of Elizabeth Wilkinson, will not fail, God willing, to give her more blows than words - desiring home blows, and from her no favour; she may expect a good thumping!10
Most reports of women's fighting (all are written by men) focused on the scanty dress rather than the skill of the participants. Foreign visitors to London were particularly intrigued. Recalling his visit to London in 1710, von Uffenbach described a fight between two women 'without stays and in nothing but a shift', while Martin Nogiie's Voyages etAventures (1728) reported matches between girls and women 'stripped to the waist'; William Hickey, meanwhile, described com- ing upon two women boxing near Drury Lane in 1749, 'their faces entirely cov- ered in blood, bosoms bare, and the clothes nearly torn from their bodies'.11 Pierre Jean Grosley was particularly outraged to see a fight between a man and a woman in Holborn: 'I was witness to five or six bouts of the combat; which sur- prised me the more, as the woman had, upon her left arm, an infant a year or two old, which was so far from crying out, as is natural for children to do even in circumstances of less danger, that it did not so much as seem to knit its brow, but appeared to attend to a lesson of what it was one day to practice itself.'12
The quality of English fighting women received patriotic endorsement in the anonymous Sal Dab Giving Monsieur a Receipt in Full of 1766 (illus. 11). Sal bloodies the nose of a dandyish Frenchman who, despite his general hopeless- ness, has managed to lay bare her bosoms; another woman, meanwhile, applies a lobster to his naked bottom. A pub-sign above advertises 'The Good Woman'.13
28
Butler Clowes (after JohnCollett), The Female Bruisers, 1770, mezzotint.
Boxing began to flourish in the early eighteenth century, at the expense of other sports such as quart erstaff and backsword, by attracting the support of the wealthy and powerful. In 1723 a ring was erected in Hyde Park 'by order of his Majesty' George I, and the next champion of note, a former Thames waterman called John Broughton, secured the patronage of the Duke of Cumberland. The early patrons supported their fighters in training and wagered huge sums on their fights; The Gentleman's Magazine reported in one instance that 'many thousands depended' on the outcome of a fight.14 Without the eighteenth-century love of gambling, argues Dennis Brailsford, 'pugilism . . . would have been unthinkable', and with large bets came a need for rules to limit disputes.15 The great Enlighten- ment project of systemization and law-making thus extended to pugilism, with the first written rules of prize-fighting published under Broughton's name in 1743. l6 Although the rules were intended simply to regulate his own establishment, they were soon widely adopted. 'No one sport', claims Brailsford, 'owed more for its be- ginnings to one man than boxing owed to him' (illus. 12). ly
The rules specified how a round would begin and end; how the seconds and umpires should conduct themselves; how the money should be divided; and that a fight was over when one man could not be brought back to the scratch line in the centre of the ring. After 1746, English gamblers adapted the notion of
29
Sal Dab Giving Monsieur a Receipt in Full, 1766, mezzotint.
horse handicapping and began dividing boxers into light, middle, and heavy- weight classes (there was, however, only one 'champion' who tended to be the heaviest). By 1838, these rules had developed into the 29 English Prize Ring Rules. Wrestling holds, such as the cross-buttocks, remained a part of boxing until the Queensberry rules abolished them in the 1860s.
Champion from 1734 to 1750, Broughton promoted bareknuckle bouts at his Amphitheatre near Marylebone Fields, including Battles Royal in which a champion took on up to seven challengers at a time. The fights took place on an unfenced stage with several rows of seating for gentlemen; these rows were sep- arated from the platform by a gap where the other spectators stood, their eyes level with the pugilists' feet.
30
Broughton's Rules, 16 August 1743.
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Broughton capitalized on the popularity of prize-fighting with the upper classes by offering tuition for 'persons of quality and distinction' at his school in the Haymarket. What was offered differed from prize-fighting in many respects: the exclusion of women, the absence of gambling, and the lack of police intervention. The most important difference, however, was the style of fighting involved, and in particular the introduction of large padded gloves, or mufflers. Broughton's advertisement promised, in order that 'persons of quality and distinction may not be debarred from entering a course of those lectures':
31
they will be given the utmost tenderness, for which reason mufflers are provided that will effectively secure them for the inconveniency of black eyes, broken jaws and bloody noses.18
Sparring with mufflers was different enough from bareknuckle prize-fighting to be deemed a separate sport, albeit one that was parasitic on the rough glam- our of its ancestor. The journalist Pierce Egan described sparring as 'a mock encounter; but, at the same time, a representation, and, in most cases an exact one, of real fighting' (which of course remained the Platonic Form).19 Whether or not he attended prize-fights, a modern urban gentleman who exercised gently with his padded gloves could believe himself in touch with an older, and somehow more authentic, England.
'fists AND THE MAN I sing'20
Broughton advertised his academy with a quotation from the Aeneid, urging that Britons who 'boast themselves inheritors of the Greek and Roman virtues, should follow their example and [encourage] conflicts of this magnanimous kind'. James Faber's classically styled portrait of the fighter was accompanied by a verse comparing him to the 'athletic heroes' celebrated by Pindar.21 Such connections were not unusual. For over a hundred years classical precedent had been used to describe, and justify, British pugilism. In 1612, Robert Dover reinvented the annual Cotswolds sports as 'Olimpick Games' in an anti-Puri- tan gesture and an attempt to marry English country and classical traditions.22 In 1636 a group of Dover's friends, including Ben Jonson and Michael Dray- ton, produced the Annalia Dubrensia, a collection of poems celebrating the games as a revival of the 'Golden Age's Glories', and defending their 'harm- lesse merriment' from Puritan censure. John Stratford's poem lists many class- ical sports including boxing (he alludes to Virgil's Eutellus, who 'at Caestus, had the best / In mighty strength surpassing all the rest') before noting that 'the old world's sports' are 'now transferred over / Into our Cotswold by thee, worthy Dover.'23
Poetry itself is understood as a kind of sport, and sport as a rival to poetry, in another poem of this period, John Suckling's 'A Session of the Poets' (1646). Apollo must decide which poet deserves to be Laureate. Each comes forward to compete until it is the turn of Suckling himself. Apollo is told that he is not present:
That of all men living he cared not for't, He loved not the Muses as well as his sport;
And prized black eyes, or a lucky hit
At bowls, above all the Trophies of wit . . .24
Apollo is not amused, and issues a fine.
32
A desire to evoke classical boxing led Figg, and Broughton after him, to de- scribe their schools as 'amphitheatres', and Jonathan Richardson to depict Figg in a 1714 portrait as 'the Gladiator ad Vivum'. Travellers on the Grand Tour began to collect classical and Renaissance sculptures of boxers, and these were carefully studied by modern artists.25 But emulation soon led to (mock heroic) competition and to frequent claims that English sport was best. In Moses Browne's 'A Survey of the Amhitheatre' (1736), the mild English version comes out ahead of the 'dread' Roman. In Rome, fighters 'met to kill, or be killed, / But ours to have their pockets filled.'26 John Byrom's 1725 'Extempore Verses Upon a Tryal of Skill between the Two Great Masters of the Noble Science of Defence, Messrs. Figg and Sutton' develops, at some length, the contention that modern English boxers (and books) have surpassed their ancient models:
Now, after such Men, who can bear to be told
Of your Roman and Greek puny Heroes of Old?
To compare such poor Dogs as Alcides, and Theseus
To Sutton and Figg would be very facetious.
Were Hector himself, with Apollo to back him,
To encounter with Sutton - zooks, how he would thwack him!
Or Achilles, tho' old Mother Thetis had dipt him,
With Figg - odds my Life, how he would have unript him!
By the mid-eighteenth century battles of boxers and books such as this had be- come commonplace (although sadly not all rhymed 'Theseus' with 'facetious', or asked whether Figg should 'be pair'd with a Cap-a pee Roman, / Who scorn'd any Fence but a jolly Abdomen?).27
Christopher Anstey's The Patriot (1767) - A Pindaric Address to Lord Buck- horse', the nom de guerre of Broughton's sparring partner, John Smith - burlesqued the tendency to describe prize-fighters in such elevated terms. Something of a classical hodge-podge, it intersperses quotations from Homer, Theocritus, Virgil, Lucian and others with calls for aid from the muses:
Bid coo quit her blest Abode,
And speed her Flight to Oxford-Road,
Adore the Theatre of broughton,
And kiss the Stage his Lordship fought on . . .
Buckhorse's 'Patriotic Virtues' are celebrated at a time when 'Albas warlike Sons of Yore' have been displaced by 'Meek Cardinals' wielding undue influence upon the 'Tender Minds of Youth'. Buckhorse is called upon to found a Cambridge col- lege, and thus 'form a Plan of Education / To mend the Morals of the Nation.'28 Eleven years previously, in 1756, Anstey had (anonymously) published a little- known work entitled Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse, a picaresque satire of the metropolitan world of 'Bucks, Bloods and Jemmys' into which, he imagines, the
33
boxer is initiated. 'He learned to swear very prettily, lie with a good Grace, flatter and deceive, promise anything, and perform, - as great People generally do.'29 Much of the humour here, as in The Patriot, comes from imagining the working- class prize-fighter as a Lord, a society figure who wields influence as well as his fists. After two volumes of adventures, the Memoirs end with Buckhorse, tired of waiting for his friends to secure him a position in the Army, resolving to 'turn patriot'. This allows an extended joke on a version of patriotism that entails 'rail[ing] against the Ministry' and 'seasoning] his Discourses with Bribery, Corruption, and Hanover.^0
'no weapons but what nature had furnished him with'
Henry Fielding began Tom Jones in 1747, the year that Broughton opened his academy, and the novel reflects contemporary interest in the sport and its clas- sical origins.31 Broughton's advertisement is even quoted in a footnote.32 Field- ing's take on the subject is characteristically 'prosai-comi-epic'.33 Chapter Eight of Book One, for example, is entitled A battle sung by the muses in the Home- rican style, and which none but the classical reader can taste'. The battle sung features 'our Amazonian heroine', Molly Seagrim, against many opponents, most notably Goody Brown. Fielding's exploitation of the comic potential of women's boxing had begun in 1741, when, in Shamela, he has Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews end a letter to her daughter with the apology, 'You will excuse the shortness of this scroll; for I have sprained my right hand, with boxing three new made officers. - Tho' to my comfort, I beat them all.'34
In the case of Molly Seagrim and Goody Brown, we are treated to a full description of women at 'fisticuff-war'. The women begin, cautiously, by merely tearing at each other's hair, but soon move onto each other's clothes so that 'in a very few minutes they were both naked to the middle.'35 Goody has the advan- tage of having no bosom; her breasts are 'an ancient parchment, upon which one might have drummed a considerable while without doing her any damage'. Molly is 'differently formed in those parts' and therefore susceptible to 'a fatal blow had not the lucky arrival of Tom Jones at this point put an immediate end to the bloody scene'. Tom now fights Goody (perhaps, Fielding suggests, he for- got she was a woman; perhaps he couldn't tell) and the surrounding mob.
For Fielding, the language of boxing was as open to mockery as the lan- guage of classical poetry. In Joseph Andrews (1742), we are momentarily anxious for Parson Adams when his opponent concludes '(to use the Language of fight- ing) that he had done his Business; or, in the Language of Poetry, that he had sent him to the Shades below; in plain English, that he was dead'}6 Plain English is of course the language of the narrator, and the novel - Fielding's 'new province of writing'37 - which may include, and absorb, the mock-heroic and the colloquial, but whose character is, above all, democratic, excluding no reader by resort to the language of the coterie. Plain, and reasonable, English would have prevented yet another altercation in Tom Jones: when the classically educated school-
34
teacher, Partridge, uses the phrase 'non sequitur', the sergeant mistakes it for an insult - 'None of your outlandish linguo ... I will not sit still and hear the cloth abused' - and he formally challenges Partridge to fight.38
As the novel progresses, Tom has many opportunities to display his boxing skill, and employs all the latest techniques including 'one of those punches in the guts which, though the spectators at Broughton's Ampitheatre have such ex- quisite delight in seeing them, convey little pleasure in the feeling'.39 One oppo- nent is even convinced he must be a professional prize-fighter: 'I'll have nothing
more to do with you; you have been upon the stage, or I'm d nably mistaken',
to which the narrator adds: 'such was the agility and strength of our hero that he was perhaps a match for one of the first-rate boxers, and could with great ease have beaten all the muffled graduates of Mr. Broughton's school'.40
Tom is superior to the 'muffled graduates' because of his willingness to fight bare-fisted; Bonnell Thornton and George Colman later mocked that 'most of our young fellows gave up the gauntlet for scented gloves; and loathing the mut- ton fists of vulgar carmen and porters, they rather chose to hang their hands in a sling, to make them white and delicate as a lady's'.41 More fundamentally, fight- ing for Tom is a matter of 'appetite' rather than education. Tom has many appetites - for fighting, for food, for drink, but mainly for sex. These are seen to be equally natural, and often one appetite leads to another. Broughton promised that learning to box would bring his pupils success with women, evoking his exhibition sparring partner, the famously ugly Buckhorse, whose 'ruling passions' were said to be 'love and boxing, in both of which he was equally formidable; . . . neither nymph nor bruiser could withstand the violence of his attack, for it was generally allowed he conquered both by the strength of his members, and the rigour of his parts'.42 Christopher Anstey's novel Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse also gets much mileage out of its hero's reputation as a ladies' man. Many women praise his 'manly Beauties' and three marry him.43 But Tom needs no lessons in either love or boxing. Consider, to take only one of many examples, the 'Battle of Upton', which takes place at the inn where Tom and a 'fair companion' are lodg- ing. In this case, the key intervention is that of the chambermaid, Susan, 'as two- handed a wench (according to the phrase) as any in the country'.44
Fights in Fielding's novels are often the means by which moral worth is re- vealed. He disagreed strongly with Samuel Richardson's view that virtue is a state of mind, arguing that the Actions of Men seem to be the justest Interpreters of their Thoughts, and the truest Standards by which we may judge them'.45 Many fights begin with the excuse of defending feminine honour. Parson Adams, in Joseph Andrews, for example, refutes an argument about the nature of courage in a single blow by instinctively leaping to the defence of a young woman in trou- ble. Adams, the first muscled if not muscular Christian, proceeds with 'no weapons but what Nature had furnished him with', and, it seems, some surrep- titiously acquired technical knowledge.46 But given that the women are often as adept as the men with their fists - Mr Partridge is certainly no match for Mrs Partridge - many of the situations presented seem primarily to furnish excuses
35
for a good punch-up. Fighting (like sex) is ubiquitous in Fielding's novels; some- thing that English men and women just like to do. It is an activity natural to all classes and all professions - chambermaids, squires, landladies, schoolteachers, army officers and the aptly named Reverend Mr. Thwackum all pitch in.47 The very ubiquity of fights throughout the novels is comically conservative, as if Field- ing is asking, 'what else can you expect from human nature?'48 There may be lots of bleeding, and preferably some female nudity, but the conclusion of a boxing match, for Fielding, is also comic, and conservative in its effect (a jovial hand- shake with the balance of power unchanged), rather than tragic and radical (epit- omized by the deadly Jacobite duel).49 After knocking out Blifil, for example, Jones immediately reaches over to see if he is alright, and soon Blifil is back on his feet. Fielding interrupts his narrative to talk about the significance of this incident with a seriousness that is evident from his plain English:
Here we cannot suppress a pious wish that all quarrels were to be de- cided by those weapons only, with which Nature, knowing what is proper for us, hath supplied us; and that cold iron was to be used in digging no bowels, but those of the earth. Then would war, the pastime of monarchs, be almost inoffensive, and battles between great armies might be fought at the particular desire of several ladies of quality, who, together, with the kings themselves, might be actual spectators of the conflict. Then might the field be this moment well strewn with human carcasses, and the next, the dead men, or infinitely the greatest part of them, might get up . . .5°
Some years later the prize-fighter Daniel Mendoza approvingly cited this pas- sage, and used it to justify his profession.51
Broughton advertised boxing as a 'truly British Art', claiming that its study would prove an antidote to 'foreign Effeminacy ', as well as, of course, enabling practitioners to be able 'to boast themselves Inheritors of the Greek and Roman Virtues'. Broughton, and his followers, seemed to find no contradiction in these two claims. 'Britishness' was, however, as Christopher Johnson notes, a 'highly contentious' notion in 1747, only a year after the bloody Battle of Culloden which had ended the Jacobite Rebellion; French troops had supported the Young Pre- tender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, against the Hanoverian King George 11 (for whom both Tom Jones, and Broughton's patron, the Duke of Cumberland, fought). Exactly contemporary with Tom Jones, William Hogarth's The March toFinchley (1749) memorializes the soldiers who had travelled north to meet the Jacobites three years earlier. The exuberant crowd that Hogarth depicts seems, as Jenny Uglow puts it, to be celebrating a public holiday rather than facing a national emergency. On the left of the scene, a crowd has gathered outside the boxing booth of Broughton's rival, George Taylor, to watch a fight. Uglow interprets this as representing either 'the murderous rivalry of Cain and Abel now trans- lated into civil war' or 'the natural fighting spirit of the people, cheered on by an
36
excited crowd'.52 To define Britishness, as Broughton did, in the pseudo-military vocabulary of 'championism' (a concoction of pugnacious Protestanism, egali- tarianism, national pride and moral righteousness) would, presumably, not have found favour with many northern and Catholic Britons. Championism represented a quite particular form of Englishness.
Throughout the eighteenth century, French visitors to England had observed the 'well-known taste of the English for combats of men and animals, and for those horrible scenes of slaughter and blood, which other nations have banished from their theatres.' 'Any Thing that Looks like Fighting, is delicious to an Englishman,' concluded Misson in 1719. 53 After a visit to London in 1766, during which he seemed to trip over 'street-scufflers' at every corner, Pierre Jean Grosley recorded that boxing was a 'species of combat' not merely 'congenial to the character of the English' but 'inherent in English blood'.54
While Grosley was appalled by the ubiquity of street-fighting, and the casualness with which it was undertaken, James Boswell relished a scuffle. His diary entry for 13 June 1763 describes a trip to Vauxhall Gardens as 'quite deli- cious' not despite, but because of, a 'quarrel between a gentleman and a waiter':
A great crowd gathered round and roared out, A ring-a ring,' which is the signal for making room for the parties to box it out. My spirits rose, and I was exerting myself with much vehemence. At last the constable came to quell the riot. I seized his baton in a good-humoured way which made him laugh, and I rapped upon the people's heads, bawling out, 'Who will resist the Peace? A ring, a ring.'55
Boswell's enthusiasm recalls that displayed by Samuel Pepys a hundred years earlier. He obviously had a fondness for critical, and social, pugilists as well. Boswell's portrait of Samuel Johnson depicts a man who, while hot-tempered, is quick to reconcile and apologize. Pierce Egan relates the tale of Johnson's hav- ing a 'regular set-to with an athletic brewer's servant, who had insulted him in Fleet-street' - he 'gave the fellow a complete milling in a few minutes' - and con- cludes that Johnson was 'striking proof of pugilism being a national trait'. Mrs Thrale describes him as 'very conversant in the art of attack and defense by box- ing, which science he learned from his uncle Andrew'.56 More importantly, Johnson included definitions (illustrated by literary quotations) of 'box' and 'boxer' and 'to box' in The Dictionary of the English Language (1755).57
In 1750, an ill-prepared Broughton was finally defeated and blinded by a Norfolk butcher, Jack Slack. His patron, the Duke of Cumberland, who lost a £10,000 bet, accused Broughton of throwing the fight and angrily withdrew his support. Within months, Broughton's Amphitheatre closed and prize-fighting was officially, if not effectively, outlawed. A more striking demonstration of the dependence of the sport on aristocratic patronage can hardly be imagined. Con- tests continued to be staged, but gradually moved away from the metropolitan centres.58 Ten years earlier, as Paul Whitehead had observed in 'The Gymnasiad',
37
anti-boxing legislation had been 'dormant'. Now bailiffs woke up to its existence and fighters were increasingly likely to be arrested.59
In 1754, 'Mr Town' (Bonnell Thornton and George Colman, members of the satirical Nonsense Club) joshed that Broughton's defeat was a 'public calamity'. They imagined the 'professors of the noble art of Boxing' forming a 'kind of dis- banded army' and inevitably turning to crime. 'Some have been forced to exercise their art in knocking down passengers in dark alleys and corners; while others have learned to open their fists and ply their fingers in picking pockets.'60 But not every- one was unhappy at the prospect of the boxing academies closing. An apprecia- tion of boxing was, for some, less the classless mark of an honest man, as Fielding had suggested, than yet another empty indulgence practised by wealthy London- ers. In The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), for example, Oliver Goldsmith presents the rakish young squire Thornhill as a corrupting influence on the innocent country vicar and his family. Thornhill visits his tenants frequently and 'amuses them by de- scribing the town, with every part of which he was particularly acquainted'. He even sets the vicar's two little boys to box, 'to make them sharp, as he called it'. Thornhill's cowardice is later revealed when he sends another brother to fight duels on his behalf, and he is finally declared 'as complete a villain as ever disgraced humanity'.61 In 1751, Hogarth published a series of prints entitled The Four Stages of Cruelty, 'in the hopes of preventing in some degree the cruel treatment of poor An- imals' on the streets of London. The Second Stage includes a man whipping a horse and a sheep being beaten, and, on the wall, notices advertise cock-fighting and an up-coming match between George Taylor and James Field at Broughton's Amphitheatre. Field is also named in the last print of the series, 'The Reward of Cruelty' - his name is engraved above a skeleton which overlooks the dissec- tion of an executed criminal. Field had recently been hanged for robbery and his life-story was circulated in a pamphlet that ran to several editions, The Bruiser knock'd down.62 Boxing had changed its meaning for Hogarth. Whereas previously he had presented the sport as one of many manifestations of exuberant Englishness, in 1751 he aligns it with the cruelties of cock-fighting, execution and dissection.
A NOBLE ART AND A SCIENCE
English pugilism's revival (and, for many, the beginning of its golden age) began in the 1780s, when once again the highest echelons of the aristocracy, including the Prince of Wales, became interested in the sport. As war with France loomed, this was due partly to boxing's reputed association with a particularly English form of courage, and partly to a highly publicized series of fights between Richard Humphries and Daniel Mendoza.
Daniel Mendoza's Memoirs (1816) may have been the first ghost-written sports autobiography. Whoever wrote it, the book provides a vivid picture not only of the prize-fighting world but of late eighteenth-century London life more generally. The story is of a man who tries to make a living in various respectable trades - as a greengrocer, tobacconist or glazier - but whom circumstance,
38
usually involving the honour of women or Judaism, continually compels to resort to his fists.
The names of Mendoza's first opponents - Harry the Coal-heaver, and Sam Martin, 'The Bath Butcher' - suggest their weighty force. Relatively small at 5ft 7in and 160 pounds (he would now be classified as a middleweight), Mendoza, often known simply as 'the Jew', defeated them with a combination of speed, agility and technique. One of his 'prominent traits', noted Pierce Egan, was to exhaust the strength of an opponent who 'depended upon that particular cir- cumstance to stamp him a formidable boxer', by 'acting on the defensive till the assault in turn could be practised with success'. Previously, pugilistic fighting was somewhat static as opponents stood toe to toe and exchanged blows. It was considered unmanly to move, so blows were blocked rather than avoided by footwork. John Godfrey, for example, described Broughton's style:
broughton steps bold and firmly in, bids a Welcome to the coming Blow, receives it with the guardian Arm; then with a general Summons of his swelling Muscles and his firm Body, seconding his Arm, and sup- plying it with all its Weight, pours the Pile-driving Force upon his Man.63
Mendoza introduced a style of fighting which relied on footwork, jabs, and defence rather than simply pure brute force. Although most commentators (including the Prince of Wales) praised his style as elegant, sophisticated and, perhaps most important, wonderful to watch, some complained that 'there was something cowardly about a fighter who frequently retreated and relied on superior agility and speed to win rather than standing up in true British bulldog style and hammering away doggedly until he or his opponent dropped'.64 'The Jew', the anti-Semites said, was 'cunning'.65
In 1788, Mendoza embarked on a highly publicized series of contests with Richard Humphries, 'The Gentleman Fighter' (illus. 44). Tapping into late eight- eenth-century English anxieties about its burgeoning Jewish population, the fights attracted large crowds. Mendoza and Humphries were the first boxers whose careers were successfully marketed in terms of ethnic hostility.66 Men- doza lost the first fight and immediately wrote to a popular newspaper com- plaining about his opponent's deviousness and lack of courage. Thus began a prolonged battle of words between the two fighters, which boosted sales of The World considerably, and which is reprinted in full in the Memoirs. Letter fol- lowed letter like punch and counterpunch, with the result that the inevitable rematch between the two men was a guaranteed sell-out, with both men profiting. Mendoza decisively won the second and third fights and became a celebrity; his face was reproduced on commemorative coins and beer mugs and his name was incorporated into the texts of contemporary plays.67 He claimed the title of champion when Big Ben Brain retired in 1791 and confirmed it with victories over Bill Ward in 1792 and 1794. The following year, he lost the cham- pionship (in dubious circumstances) to John Jackson.
39
One of the most interesting aspects of Mendoza's memoirs is the light it sheds on the commercial side of pugilism.68 Like most prize-fighters then (and since), Mendoza used his high-profile victories as a springboard to other, more lucra- tive, enterprises - exhibitions at London's Lyceum theatre, tours of Britain and Ireland, and a successful boxing academy. He eventually became a publican.69
By 1795, according to G. M. Trevelyan, 'scientific pugilism' had become the 'chief national interest'.70 This is overstating things, but, in certain quarters, boxing had become very fashionable. Spoken of as both a 'science' and a 'noble art of self-defence', pugilism could be studied from books such as Mendoza's 1787 The Art of Boxing, and numerous 'sixpenny teachers', as well as at the more expensive and exclusive academies in London, and beyond. Mendoza's school was in the City, Humphries catered particularly for the pupils of Westminster School, and, on gaining the title, John Jackson retired immediately to set up rooms in Bond Street. In 1807, the fictional narrator of Robert Southey's Letters from England, Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, observed, in a letter on the 'Fash- ionables', that 'the Amateurs of Boxing . . . attend the academies of the two great professors Jackson and Mendoza, the Aristotle and Plato of pugilism'.71
A typical amateur was Joseph Moser's 1794 creation, Timothy Twig. Twig's adventures in modish London (related back to Wales in comic verse letters) in- clude the study of 'matter and motion': 'I'm deep in philosophy at the Lyceum'. Twig praises Mendoza, Humphries and others 'for shewing the town, / The gen- teel method to knock a man down.'72 A 1788 advertisement for Humphries's school promised that 'Such gentlemen as are prevented by weak constitution from taking a lesson may be qualified for polite Assemblies with artificial Bloody Noses and Black Eyes' (illus. 13). Another drawing, by Rowlandson, detailed the 'six stages of marring a face' (illus. 14).
Wm*' >V %_'^*' *-»**t J-h* F**"* «""vtH-* tL «* «!.*-». i f-uT- n
kl an »l*^i 1 fevJ* H- ■&] ^»J*Jl 1 Uj"J»»W U • • AH. V*. >■ M 4 h fci£ itlla)
r.V
# _
13
School for Boxing,
1788.
40
14
Thomas Rowland- son, Six Stages of Marring a Face, May 1792, etching.
SIX S&SES <if iM.WUttG A EICE .
The ars pugnandi had much to recommend it to the young gentleman about town. For a start it was an art that would 'promote health', 'give courage to the timid', and 'repress insolence'. But more importantly, Mendoza promised, it would enable 'men to stand in their own defence' (and that of their property) on the streets of the growing metropolis. It would provide them with the means to resist 'the assaults they are daily exposed to'.73 Furthermore, it would enable them to defend their honour without resorting to the potentially more deadly practice of duelling which was, in any case, considered French. In one of the ear- liest published references to boxing in 1709, Richard Steele had advocated the use of 'wrathful Hands' as an alternative to 'that unchristian-like and bloody Custom of Duelling', and Fielding, as we have already seen, preferred the comic- conservative boxing match to the tragic and radical duel.74 In the introduction to his 1816 Memoirs, Mendoza argued that if boxing were abolished, men would not forget their injuries but instead 'adopt other modes of revenging their wrongs, either by resorting to the dreadful practice of duelling, or by schemes of secret machinations against each other'.75
Finally, because it was based on natural strength and the mastery of tech- nique rather than the ownership of weaponry, boxing, it was claimed, would allow men of all classes to fight on equal terms. 'Fair play' was much spoken of and admired, and again considered a particularly English and democratic virtue.76 In 1698 a French visitor, Henri Misson, had noted, with some surprise, the sight of the Duke of Grafton and his coachman 'at Fisticuffs, in the open street', 'the very widest Part of the Strand'. The coachman, he reports, was 'lamb'd most horribly'.
41
In France, we punish such Rascals with our Cane, and sometimes with the flat of our sword: but in England this is never practis'd; they use neither Sword nor Stick against a Man that is unarm'd: and if an unfor- tunate stranger (for an Englishman would never take it into his head) should draw his Sword upon one that had none, he'd have a hundred People upon him in a Moment that would perhaps lay him so flat that he would hardly get up again until the Resurrection.77
Misson notes that, 'If the Coachman is soundly drubb'd, which happens almost always, that goes for Payment; but if he is the Beator, the Beatee must pay the Money about which they quarreled.' Should his readers worry about the impli- cations of such seeming democracy, he adds, in a footnote, 'A Gentleman seldom exposes himself to such a Battel, without he is sure he's strongest.'
Fair play was also much admired in professional contests. In 1790, during their final fight, Mendoza had Humphries in such a helpless state that he could have injured him at will, but he famously 'laid down' his opponent on the ground. (Egan reports this 'truth' in the face of anti-Semitic 'prejudice' which al- lows 'good actions' to be 'passed over'.78) In an 1805 fight Hen Pearce (the Game Chicken) forced Jem Belcher against the ropes. At this stage of his career Belcher only had the use of one eye, and the crowd feared that Pearce would deliber- ately blind him. Instead, Pearce is supposed to have pulled back out of a punch, saying, 'I'll take no advantage of thee, Jem; I'll not hit thee, no, lest I hurt the other eye.' He repeated this behaviour in a later round, and the audience was lost in admiration'.79
'the pugilistic honour of the country was at stake'
William Windham, a friend of Samuel Johnson and a protege of Edmund Burke, was elected to Parliament in 1784 and by 1792 became one of the most ardent sup- porters of the government's fearful and repressive legislation against 'aliens' and 'seditious' meetings; in 1801, he opposed preliminary moves to peace with France; in 1806, his career peaked when he served as Secretary for War and Colonies. Wind- ham was also a vocal supporter of pugilism, recording attendance at more than twenty fights in his diary, along with regret on one occasion at letting himself 'be drawn by Boswell to explore . . . Wapping, instead of going when everything was prepared, to see the battle between Ward and Stanyard, which turned out a very good one'.80 That was in 1792. Six years earlier, 'Fighting Windham' (his Eton nick- name) noted his first 'excursion' to a fight, between Sam Martin and Humphries, ('Richard I think'), after a journey on which the talk was much of 'foreign wars and foreign politics'.81 By the end of the century, evangelical reformers increasingly con- demned pugilism as a 'detestable traffic in human flesh', on par with the slave trade, but Windham retorted that it was only such 'cruel sports' that protected the 'Old English character' from the threat of Jacobinism.82 By 1809 he was making the connection between war and sport explicit, writing indignantly to a friend:
42
A smart contest this between Maddox and Richmond! Why are we to boast so much of the native valour of our troops at Talavera, at Vimeira, and at Maida, yet to discourage all the practices and habits which tend to keep alive the same sentiments and feelings? The sentiments that filled the minds of the three thousand people who attended the two pugilists, were just the same in kind as those which inspired the higher combatants on the occasions before enumerated. It is the circum- stances only in which they are displayed, that makes the difference . . . But when I get on these topics, I never know how to stop.83
If sparring was, in Egan's terms, 'a representation' of prize-fighting, prize-fight- ing in turn had become a representation of war.
'The cult of heroic endeavour and aggressive maleness that was so pro- nounced in patrician art and literature at this time', notes Linda Colley, 'was just as prominent in popular ballads and songs.'84 Pierce Egan's Boxiana is cer- tainly full of songs and poems about 'Boney' and what will be done to the 'little upstart King'. 'A Boxing We Will Go', for example, was often 'sung at the con- vivial meetings of the Fancy':
Italians stab their friends behind, In darkest shades of night; But Britons they are bold and kind, And box their friends by light.
The sons of France their pistols use, Pop, pop, and they have done; But Britons with their hands will bruise, And scorn away to run.
Since boxing is a manly game,
And Briton's recreation;
By boxing we will raise our fame,
'Bove any other nation.
A fig for Boney - let's have done With that ungracious name; We'll drink and pass our days in fun, And box to raise our fame.85
'It seems probable,' writes Colley, 'that some Britons at least volunteered [for the army] not so much because they were anxious to fight for anything in particu- lar, but simply because they wanted to fight - period.'86
Unfortunately for British fight fans, there was no possibility of a French fighter coming forward to allow a symbolic 'flooring' of Boney. Although
43
matches were frequently organized to enact and illustrate anxieties about new immigrant populations (Jewish and Irish), no foreigner had challenged an English champion since 1733. 8y Since then, as Egan put it, the champion cap had passed from 'the nob of one native to another'.88 By 1810, however, the desire was strong for a foreign opponent against whom British courage and valour could be expressed. If France was not willing, perhaps a surrogate battle could pitch Britain against another very recent enemy, the United States (illus. 45).
A peace treaty had been formally signed between Great Britain and the United States in 1783, but relations between the two countries remained strained in the years that followed. Finally the British policy of intercepting merchant ships on the high seas, in order to prevent neutral trade with France, provoked the United States into declaring war in 1812. Two years later, what some have termed the Second Revolutionary War ended after the British suffered substantial losses. It is in the context of these events that the championship fights between Tom Cribb and Tom Molineaux in 1810 and 1811 should be understood.89 Rounds one and two of Britain versus the United States were complicated only by the fact that Molineaux was black, a former slave from Virginia.
Throughout the eighteenth century, young Virginians were frequently sent to England to complete their education. There, some witnessed prize-fights and attended boxing academies. In a 1785 letter Thomas Jefferson complained that in learning 'drinking, horse racing and boxing' ('the peculiarities of English education') young Americans might also acquire 'a fondness for European luxury and dissipation, and a contempt for the simplicity of [their] own country'.90 Boxing may have been un-republican, but it was certainly popular among slave- owners, many of whom, in search of gambling opportunities, trained their slaves to compete with those from other plantations, sometimes rewarding those who earned them money with their freedom.91
Whether or not some slaves did obtain manumission, it is certainly true that the first professional boxers in America were free blacks. Some ended up in England. Before Molineaux, the most famous was Bill Richmond. Brought to England in 1777 at the age of fourteen as a servant to the Duke of Northum- berland, Richmond first trained as a cabinet maker and, after a reasonably successful career as a pugilist, continued to promote fights and train fighters while managing a tavern next door to the Fives Court. In 1805 Richmond had been defeated by a young Tom Cribb and, according to legend, he wanted a protege to exact revenge.
Thought to have been born a slave in Virginia, Tom Molineaux arrived in New York at the age of twenty as a freeman and began to fight at the Catherine Street market. Four years later, he set sail to England with the plan of challeng- ing Cribb, by then champion of England (which at that time also meant cham- pion of the world). The fight that took place between the two men on 18 December 1810, at Capthall Common, Sussex, is one of the most mythologized events of the Regency (illus. 15 and illus. 16). Pierce Egan recalled the fever- ish atmosphere of the day:
44
^^k ^
15
Staffordshire portrait figure of Tom Cribb, c. 1810-15.
16
Staffordshire portrait figure of Tom Molineaux, c. 1810-15.
The pugilistic honour of the country was at stake . . . the national laurels to be borne away by a foreigner - the mere idea to an English breast was afflicting, and the reality could not be endured - that it should seem, the spectators were ready to exclaim -
Forbid it heaven, forbid it man!92
After nineteen rounds in driving icy rain those spectators did more than exclaim; they rushed into the ring and broke one of Molineaux's fingers in the scrimmage. Nevertheless, the American continued to dominate and at the beginning of the 28th round, Cribb seemed unable to rise. At that point his second leapt up and accused Molineaux of hiding lead bullets in his fists. By the time this charge had been refuted, Cribb had recovered enough to continue. Molineaux's bad luck continued when he hit his head on one of the stakes at the corner of the ring, and in the 39th round he conceded the fight. Egan's report is equivocal. He is careful not to claim a breach of fair play, but concedes that it was Molineaux's 'colour alone' which 'prevented him from becoming the hero of that fight'.
A few days later Molineaux published an open letter to Cribb: 'Sir, - My friends think, that had the weather on last Tuesday, the day upon which I contended with you, not been so unfavourable, I should have won the battle'. He challenged
4r>
Cribb to a second meeting, 'expressing the confident hope, that the circumstance of my being a different colour to that of a people amongst whom I have sought protection will not in any way operate to my prejudice.'93
The following year (before a crowd estimated at 15-20,000) Cribb, who had spent eleven weeks with the noted trainer, Captain Barclay, defeated an ill- prepared Molineaux in what the Times described as a 'most obstinate and san- guinary combat'.94 Once Cribb was safely champion, the fans could once more become magnanimous, and soon songs were sung about Molineaux's bravery - Tho' beat, he proved a man my boys, what more could a man do' - and he too was co-opted into imaginary contests with Boney.
The blurring of the language of war and the language of sport was not restricted to those who watched from the sidelines. Wellington himself famously described Waterloo as 'a pounding match' and said of its opposing armies, 'both were what the boxers call gluttons'.95 The war ended in 1815, and Thomas Moore's 'Epistle from Tom Cribb to Big Ben, Concerning some Foul Play in a Late Transaction' (1818), satirically compares the conduct of the allies in exiling Napoleon to St Helena to kicking a man when he is down.
'Foul! Foul!' all the lads of the Fancy exclaim - Charley Shock is electrified - Belcher spits flame - And Molyneux - ay, even Blacky cries 'shame!' Time was, when John Bull little difference spied 'Twixt the foe at his feet, and the friend at his side; When he found (such his humour in fighting and eating) His foe, like his beefsteak, the sweeter for beating.96
In the years that followed, although Boney remained in St Helena, pugilistic jingo- ism showed no signs of abating. 'In the mythology of the Ring,' writes Peter Bailey, 'the fist was England's national weapon and the skilful and courageous wielding of it in public kept alive the spirit of Waterloo.'97 Many found it useful to recall foreign enemies in the period of increased civil unrest that followed the war's end.
'having the luck to be born an englishman'
A rhetoric of nationalist masculinity was not new to the Napoleonic period, but what was new, perhaps, was the anxiety, and urgency, with which it was deployed. The spectre of effeminacy was constantly evoked. Boxing was not merely British and democratic, but, in its direct physicality, a more masculine way of fighting than relatively at-a-distance foreign methods (the dagger and knife) mentioned in popular songs such as 'A Boxing We Will G0'.98 Works such as 'Defence of Box- ing' (a 'political view of the subject'), by Windham's friend, William Cobbett, make much of supposed links between effeminacy and tyranny. Boxing, Cobbett claimed, could stave off 'national degradation' and help prevent 'submission to a foreign yoke'. 'Commerce, Opulence, Luxury, Effeminacy, Cowardice, Slavery,'
46
he maintained, 'are the stages of national degradation.' By threatening to replace 'hardy' sports by those 'requiring less strength, and exposing the persons engaged in them to less bodily suffering', Britain was already showing symptoms of effeminacy and edging dangerously towards 'national cowardice'.99 And if the effeminate nation then turned to undemocratic weapons such as the knife or the dagger, a decline into slavery was practically inevitable.100
But while Cobbett saw in boxing an unambiguous solution to the threat of national effeminacy, others were less certain both about nation and about mas- culinity. In Boxiana, the Protestant Irish Pierce Egan sometimes claimed box- ing for England and sometimes for Britain. In 'The Two Drovers' (1827), Walter Scott kept the distinction clear; boxing is an English sport. The story is set in the 1780s, and presents a conflict between two friends - a Highlander, Robin Oig, and an Englishman, Harry Wakefield - two different forms of combat - the sword and the fists - and two versions of masculinity.101 The drovers are phys- ically very different. Robin Oig was 'small of stature, as the epithet Oig implies, and not very strongly limbed'; on the other hand, he was 'as light and alert as one of the deer of his mountains'. Harry Wakefield was 'nearly six feet high, gal- lantly formed to keep the rounds at Smithfield, or maintain the ring at a wrestling match; and although he might have been overmatched, perhaps, among the regular professors of the Fancy, yet, as a yokel or a rustic, or a chance customer, he was able to give a bellyful to any amateur of the pugilistic art.'102
The men quarrel over who has the right to graze his sheep in a particular field, just on the English side of the Border. Harry wants a 'turn-up' and even offers to wear gloves. But Robin prefers the broadsword - 'I have no skill to fight like a jackanapes, with hands and nails'. Neither is a gentleman, but both are anxious to claim that status - Robin by evoking the Highland and European traditions of sword-fighting; Harry by boasting prowess in the fashionable English 'puglistic art'. They start with Harry's game, at which he beats Robin 'with as much ease as a boy bowls down a nine-pin'. In victory, Harry offers dubious consolation to his friend:
'Tis not thy fault, man, that not having the luck to be born an English- man, thou canst not fight more than a school-girl.'
'I can fight,' answered Robin Oig sternly, but calmly, 'and you shall know it. You, Harry Waakfelt, shewed me today how the Saxon churls fight - 1 shew you now how the Highland Dunniewassal fights.'
He seconded the word with the action, and plunged the dagger, which he suddenly displayed, into the broad breast of the English yeo- man, with such fatal certainty and force, that the hilt made a hollow sound against the breast-bone, and the double-edged point split the very heart of his victim.
Both men are aware of the physical intimacy of fighting. Harry had hoped that the boxing match would end up with a clasping of hands and the two men
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'better friends than ever'; it would be a 'tussle for love on the sod'. Although Robin suggests that boxing, a form of fighting 'with hands and nails', is unseemly, even animalistic, in its intimate physicality, his later plunge of the dirk into his friend's heart might be read as a more complete consummation of their uneasy relationship; it is certainly more suggestively phallic than the mere touch of hands.103 Slurs of effeminacy (fighting like a schoolgirl, etc.) have given way to something else. 'The Two Drovers' ends with Robin Oig on trial, and with the judge reflecting on the cultural relativity of codes of honour. This has been, after all, a tale of the Borders.
A rather different interpretation of effeminacy, one with personal rather than political implications, is also introduced in Cobbett's essay when he refers to the prize-fighter Jem Belcher. Egan had described Belcher as having a 'prepossessing appearance, genteel and remarkably placid in his behaviour'.104 He was generally thought to be a bit of a dandy, and wore 'immaculate dark clothes, set off by a vivid and extravagant neckcloth (usually blue with white spots)' which became known as a 'belcher' (illus. 17). los Cobbett, however, did not refer to Belcher's rep- utation for elegance (perhaps because he believed that 'women . . . despise personal vanity in men) and instead characterized him as 'a monster, a perfect ruffian'.106 Nevertheless, there is 'scarcely a female Saint, perhaps, who would not, in her way to the conventicle, or even during the snuffling there to be heard, take a peep at him from beneath her hood. Can as much be said by any one of those noblemen and gentlemen who have been spending the best years of their lives in danc- ing by night and playing cricket by day?' No wonder, Cobbett - the ex-soldier - added, women like soldiers. Effeminacy in this passage seems simply to mean sexual unattractiveness; war is forgotten in the face of more pressing issues. A little monstrous manliness would get you the girl.
Sometimes it would also get you the guy. References to boxers' groupies or 'macaronis' can be found in several eigh- teenth-century poems. 'Macaroni' was a derogatory label for young men who had travelled to France and Italy and came back with long hair and a taste for foreign food. In June 1770 the Oxford Magazine noted that 'a kind of animal, neither male not female, a thing of the neuter gender' had 'lately started up amongst us. It is called a Macaroni. It talks without mean- ing, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion .'107 Three years
17
Benjamin Marshall, James Belcher, Bare- Knuckle Champion of England, c. 1803, oil on canvas.
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later, mAuldReikie, his poem of Edinburgh life, Robert Fergusson describes the drunken procession of the presumably beef-eating 'Bruiser' and the 'feckless Race o' Macaronies' who pursue him.108 Christopher Anstey's burlesque The Patriot (1767) expressed the hope that Buckhorse's 'manly Strength' might 'greatly discompose':
The Features of our modern Beaux, And from their Macaroni Faces Send packing all the Loves and Graces;109
By the early nineteenth century, raucous descriptions of men pursuing boxers and women participating in fights (both, for eighteenth-century men, unfail- ing sources of comedy) had ceased; fighting was now a serious manly business and women largely featured as imaginary witnesses to this manliness. (Many historians have argued that from the 1770s onwards there was an increased cultural insistence on separate spheres for women and men.110) Sometimes descriptions of women spectators contain the frisson that Cobbett seems to experience in imagining the 'female Saint' peeping at the boxer from beneath her hood, but most often women are evoked precisely to show how alien their presence would be in the manly world of the Fancy. B. W. Proctor, for example, speculated in 1820 that 'if women were to attend the prize-fight how charming might it become':
With what an air would our boxers strike, did they know that bright eyes were looking on them! How delicately would they 'peel!' and with what elegant indifference would they come up to 'the scratch!' The con- sciousness in question would generate the finest feeling amongst them : honour would ever be upper-most in their thoughts, even in a fall.111
Proctor clearly thought that any feminine involvement would ruin boxing. Not everyone agreed. After reluctantly attending a fight in 1818, Thomas Moore noted in his diary that it was not as 'horrid' as he had expected; indeed, 'had there been a proportionate mixture of women in the immense ring formed around, it would have been a very brilliant spectacle'.112
GENTLEMAN JACK, PROFESSOR OF PUGILISM
John Jackson became Champion of the Prize Ring in 1795 when, in a clear breach of the rules - grabbing and pulling an opponent's hair was not permitted - he de- feated Daniel Mendoza. A shrewd businessman, Jackson soon retired to join forces with fencing instructor Harry Angelo in his rooms at 13, New Bond Street. As one boxing historian put it, this initiated a new era in the 'gymnastic education of the aristocracy. Not to have had lessons of Jackson was a reproach. To attempt a list of his pupils would be to copy one-third of the then peerage.'113 All the young
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nobility flock to his standard,' proclaimed Eaton Stannard Barrett in 1817, 'and, after a few months, find, with great delight, that they are matches for any drayman in town.'114 Pupils included the Prince Regent, who had been a fan of Jackson's since watching him fight in Croydon in 1788. In 1821, the Prince turned to Jackson to provide eighteen prize-fighters as ushers at his coronation. Their presence had more than ceremonial purpose, for when George's estranged wife, the notorious Queen Caroline, arrived at Westminster Abbey to claim her position as Consort, the pugilists rushed to the door. William Cobbett was affronted, 'When she got to the door, and made an attempt to enter, she was actually thrust back by the hands of a common prize-fighter.'115
A less demanding, but no less devoted, pupil of Jackson's was George Gordon Byron, whose 1811 poem 'Hints from Horace' instructed that 'men unpractised in exchanging knocks / Must go to Jackson ere they dare to box.'116 On leaving Cam- bridge in 1806, Byron took up boxing with great passion, initially as part of a rig- orous regime of exercise and dieting; he quickly lost 31/ stone. When he moved to London in 1808, he spent a great deal of time in Jackson's company (Thomas Moore's Life features some of Byron's rather bossy letters to Jackson from that time) and later visits to the capital always included a trip to the New Bond Street rooms.117 On 17 March 1814, for example, he noted that he had 'been sparring with Jackson for exercise this morning, and mean to continue and renew my acquain- tance with my muffles'.
My chest, and arms, and wind are in a very good plight, and I am not in flesh. I used to be a hard hitter, and my arms are very long for my height (5 feet 8/2 inches); at any rate exercise is good, and this, the severest of all; fencing and the broad-sword never fatigued me so much.118
Some years later, in a note to the Eleventh Canto of Don Juan, he paid tribute to 'My friend and corporeal pastor and master, John Jackson, Esquire, professor of pugilism, who I trust still retains the strength and symmetry of his model of a form, together with his good humour, and athletic as well as mental accomplish- ments.'119 Byron, whose Achilles tendons were so contracted he could only walk on the balls of his toes and who had been reviled as 'a lame brat' by his mother, remained, throughout his life, anxious about his own looks and an admirer of good looks in others.120 Although this is never mentioned in his writings, boxing and swimming surely appealed to Byron as sports in which the impact of his lame- ness was minimal.121
Jackson's portrait was hung among the family pictures at Newstead Abbey, Byron's family home, and included in a collage of boxers on his dressing screen. The four-panel, six-foot high screen features theatrical portraits on one side and, on the other, coloured prints of prize-fighters and fights; some reports from Boxiana are included and some accounts of fights are handwritten. Both sequences are arranged chronologically; the boxing sequence begins with Figg and Broughton and ends with Jackson (illus. 18/19). 122
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18
Byron's screen: four panels, c, 1811-14, popular prints collaged onto a wooden frame.
19
Detail of Byron's screen, featuring Tom Molineaux.
John Jackson, one of whose nicknames was 'Commander-in-Chief, may also have been the model for John Johnson, the 'British friend' with whom Don Juan fights the Turks in canto eight of Byron's satire.123 This is suggested by the description of their thrashing by 'Turkish batteries' as like a flail, / Or a good boxer' in stanza xliii, and the ambiguous phrasing in stanza xcvn, where 'Jack' could refer to the first or surname:
Up came John Johnson (I will not say Jack) For that were vulgar, cold, and commonplace, On great occasions such as an attack . . .
Johnson certainly inspires the sort of admiring devotion in Juan that Jackson did in Byron. While Juan is a 'mere novice' at war, Johnson is 'a noble fellow' who is frequently 'very busy without bustle'; in return, we are happy to learn, Johnson 'really loved him in his way'.124
Byron's interest in boxing did not stem wholly from its healthful benefits. The glamorous demi-monde of prize-fighting also appealed. An 1807 letter described London life as consisting of, among other diversions, 'routs, riots, balls and boxing matches', a lifestyle that would be duplicated by Don Juan, who passed his London afternoons 'in visits, luncheons, / Lounging and boxing'.125
At this time, the boxing world centred on a handful of London pubs in the back rooms of which boxers often trained, and where their managers might meet, and dine, with wealthy backers. On retiring, many boxers opened pubs attracting a sporting clientele with their trophies and their stories. Bob Gregson's Castle Tavern in High Holborn opened in 1810 and its snuggery soon became an inner sanctum for the Fancy. After Gregson was convicted for debt evasion, Tom Belcher took over, 'skimm[ing] the cream off the Fancy', as Egan put it, for another fourteen years.126 After Tom Spring defeated Bill Neate, Egan noted that 'Belcher's house, the Castle Tavern, was like a fair; Randall's was crowded to suffocation; Holt's hadn't room for a pin; Eales' was overstocked; and Tom Cribb's was crammed with visitors.'127 Byron was a regular customer at all these houses, especially Cribb's - 'Tom is an old friend of mine; I have seen some of his best battles in my nonage', Byron noted after an evening during which he 'drank more than I like'.128
Two of the most famous regulars at Jackson's Academy, Cribb's pub, and the London fights, were fictional - Corinthian Tom and his country cousin, Jerry Hawthorne, the rakish heroes of Pierce Egan's picaresque bestseller, Life in Lon- don (1821), a work lavishly illustrated by his friends, Robert and George Cruik- shank (George, 'not averse from using his fists in an up-and-down tussle', was sometimes compared to the fighter Tom Spring).129 The three men often worked together, and between them created a distinctive 'flash' style of commentary on Regency life (illus. 48). The next chapter will explore this style in some detail.
The appeal of Life in London lay largely in its promising to bring together high and low life. A trip to the Royal Academy, for example, is followed by,
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and juxtaposed with, one to the slums - cousin Jerry must enjoy the complete urban experience. When John Clare read Don Juan in 1824 he wrote in his journal that Byron's 'Hero seems a fit partner for [Egan's] Tom and Jerry'.130 Byron himself boasted of 'eternal parties', featuring 'Jockies, Gamblers, Boxers, Authors, parsons, andpoets ... a precious Mixture, but they go on well together.'131 Boxing culture throve on the promise of social promiscuity. The readers of Life in London were largely neither upper nor working class, but they could, with Egan's help, imagine themselves mingling with members of both. At the Castle Tavern, Egan wrote, 'You may be seated next to an m.p. without being aware of that honour; or you may likewise rub against some noble lord without com- mitting a breach of privilege. You may meet poets on the look-out for a hero, artists for subjects; and boxers for customers.'132 Readers, whether 'fire-side heroes' or 'sprightly maidens', could, he promised, '"see Life" without receiving a scratch.'133
Some found this picture of social promiscuity more frightening than ap- pealing. In Tales of a Traveller (1824), Washington Irving's Buckthorne described a boxing match as nothing more than 'an arena, where the noble and illustrious are jostled into familiarity with the infamous and the vulgar'. 'What, in fact, is The Fancy itself,' he continued, 'but a chain of easy communication, extending down form the peer to the pick-pocket, through the medium of which a man of rank may find he has shaken hands at three removes, with the murderer on the gibbet?'134
For Byron the effect of moving between high and low life had psychological as well as social consequences. In a journal entry for 23 November 1813, largely preoccupied with feeling 'wound up' after an unpleasant dream, he noted the therapeutic effects of such jaunts:
I must not dream again; - it spoils even reality. I will go out of doors and see what the fog will do for me. Jackson has been here: the boxing world much as usual; - but the club increases. I shall dine at Crib's tomorrow. I like energy - even animal energy - of all kinds; and I have need of both mental and corporeal. I have not dined out, nor indeed, at all, lately: have heard no music - have seen nobody. Now for a plunge - high life and low life. Amant alterna Camaana; [The Muses love alternat- ing verses.]135
An insistence on the value of alternating between the mental and corpo- real, or more, an insistence on the necessity of the physical for 'the ethereal', re- curs throughout his notebooks. On 19 April 1814, he recorded having spent four days lovesick and alone, except, it emerges, for daily visits from Jackson:
I have sparred for exercise (windows open) with Jackson an hour daily, to attenuate and keep up the ethereal part of me. The more violent the fatigue the better my spirits for the rest of the day . . . To-day I have
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boxed an hour - written an ode to Napoleon Buonaparte - copied it - eaten six biscuits -drunk four bottles of soda water -redde away the rest of my time - besides giving poor [Webster?] a world of advice on this mistress of his . . .136
The detailed nature of Byron's accounting - including the perennial dieter's awareness of the precise number of biscuits he has consumed - suggests that he did not leave the balance of high and low, physical and emotional, to chance. On the day of his mother's funeral in 1811, Byron called for his page to bring his box- ing gloves for his daily exercise rather than follow the coffin to the family vault. The sparring that day, the page recalled, was more violent than usual.137 After his beloved brother Tom died in 1818, a distraught John Keats was taken to a prize-fight at Crawley Downs by well-meaning friends. Pugilism, the 'Regency answer to grief, stoical and worldly', did not seem to work in his case.138
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Pugilism and Style
All the great poets should have been fighters. Take Keats and Shelley,
for an example. They were pretty good poets, but they died young.
You know why? Because they didn't train.
Cassius Clay, 19641
Byron consistently affected hauteur about those who took writing too seriously; a gesture characteristic of what Christopher Ricks terms his 'flippant lordli- ness'.2 In an 1821 journal entry, he noted that his mother, Madame de Stael and the Edinburgh Review had all, at various times, compared him to Rousseau. A page then follows in which he explains why he cannot see 'any point of resem- blance'. There are many points of contrast, and some interestingly odd conjunctions. The first comes in Byron's initial distinction - 'he wrote prose, I verse; he was of the people, I the Aristocracy'. Prose then is aligned with 'the people'; poetry with the Aristocracy. The revelation that 'he liked Botany, I like flowers, and herbs, and trees, but know nothing of their pedigrees' further damns prose for its utilitarianism. Rousseau is little more than an Enlighten- ment taxonomist. From then on, it is a short step (a mere colon) from 'He wrote with hesitation and care, I with rapidity and rarely with pains' to an account of what 'better' things an aristocrat might find to do:
He could never ride nor swim 'nor was cunning of the fence', I am an excellent swimmer, a decent though not at all dashing rider . . . sufficient offence . . . not a bad boxer when I could keep my temper, which was difficult, but which I strove to do ever since I knocked down Mr Purling and put his knee-pad out (with the gloves on) in Angelo's and Jackson's rooms in 1806 during the sparring . . .
In a journal entry of 1813, written before going to dinner at Tom Cribb's with Jackson, Byron complained that 'the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes' was a 'sign of effeminacy, degeneracy and weakness. Who would write, who had anything better to do?'3
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Byron's concern with class is evident in the scorn he expressed five years later for Leigh Hunt's reference to poetry as a 'profession': 'I thought that Poetry was an art, or an attribute, and not a profession.'4 There was one profession, however, which Byron admired unreservedly. Pugilism was an activity in which the bound- aries between professional and amateur were clear. Nonchalance was not there- fore required, and proper training was desirable. Byron could train as hard as he liked to box, without anyone suspecting that he was not a gentleman. And even he thought that there were literary activities which required a comparable pro- fessional attitude. In 'Hints from Horace' (1811), Byron lambasted the Edinburgh Review critic Francis Jeffrey as unqualified to discuss his poems, suggesting that no boxer would presume to enter the ring without proper training.5
In this chapter, I shall explore some of the ways in which, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, writers and artists found in pugilism not only a subject-matter, but the basis for a method.
LITERARY FLASH
Writing about pugilism reached its zenith in the 1820s, at a time when the sport itself had begun to wane. At the forefront of the fad was undoubtedly Pierce Egan's Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism. The first volume appeared in 1812, followed by a second in 1818, a third in 1821, and a new series in two volumes in 1828 and 1829. His round-by-round accounts of fights be- tween Mendoza and Humphries, or Cribb and Molineaux, are still the major sources quoted today. In 1824, he began editing a weekly paper, Pierce Egan's Life in London and Sporting Guide, which later developed into the famous sport- ing journal, Bell's Life in London. What distinguished Egan's work from other boxing histories of the period (such as William Oxberry's 1812 Pancratia) was its great verve and distinctive style. Dubbed 'the Great Lexicographer of the Fancy', Egan did not just reflect the language of the Fancy, he created it.6 His 1822 edi- tion of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue included many of his own coinings.
Egan's writing is characterized by a lively mixture of elaborate metaphors, dreadful puns and awful verse. In this passage from 'The Fancy on the Road to Moulsey Hurst', aided by a lavish supply of commas, italics and capitals, he describes a particular type of 'fancier':
His heart is up to his mouth every moment for fear he should befloored, he is anxious to look like a swell, if 'tis only for a day: he has therefore borrowed a prad to come it strong, without recollecting, that to be a top- ofthe-tree buck requires something more than the furnishing hand of a tailor, or the assistance of the groom. It should also be remembered, that although the Corinthian at times descend hastily down a few steps, to take a peep into the lower regions of society, to mark their habits and customs, yet many of them can as hastily regain their
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eminency, as the player throws off his dress, and appear in reality -
a GENTLEMAN.7
The horseman's flash style is an unsuccessful attempt at assuming a higher class position - his gig is 'hired, his horse ('prad') borrowed, and his clothes reflect the taste of his tailor. The enterprise is doomed, Egan suggests; it is obvious to any- one really flash, really knowing, that he is an impostor, an 'empty bounce'. The Corinthian 's 'mark[ing]' of 'the habits and customs' of a lower class is not, however, subject to the same disparagement. He does not cling to his disguise, but readily, 'hastily', throws it off to resume his status. Slumming is temporary and permissible while social climbing, which strives for permanent change, is not.
Class mobility was a key element in the spread of boxing and its idiom dur- ing this period. The early nineteenth century saw the establishment of numer- ous magazines, many of which catered for a growing 'army of bachelor clerks and lawyer's apprentices' whose aspiration to gentility often manifested itself as an interest in traditionally aristocratic pastimes.8 Flash slang involved the middle-class imitation of an upper-class imitation of lower-class idioms.9
The Tory Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was particularly keen on traditional squirish activities such as pugilism and published numerous reports, stories and articles on the sport. (In 1822 it declared itself 'a real Magazine of mirth, misanthropy, wit, wisdom, folly, fiction, fun, festivity, theology, bruising and thingumbob'.10) Most notable were the boxing writings of John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University, writing as Blackwood's fictional editor, 'Christopher North'. Wilson had boxed while a student at Oxford - his friend Thomas De Quincey recalled that 'not a man, who could either 'give' or 'take', but boasted to have punished, or to have been punished by, Wilson ofMallens [Magdalen]' - and often depicted himself in Blackwood's as a kind of critical pugilist.11 But while Hugh MacDiarmid later wrote scathingly of Wilson as 'the most extraordinary exponent' of the kind of 'verbiage' which is intended 'simply to batter the hearer into a pulpy state of vague acquiescence', others relished both the verbiage and the battering.12 'I cannot express . . . the heavenliness of associations connected with such articles as Professor Wilson's,' wrote Branwell Bronte in 1835, 'read and re-read while a little child, with all their poetry of language and divine flights into that visionary realm of imagination'.13
One of Wilson's finest flights of imagination can be found in the May 1820 issue of Blackwood's in the form of a '"Luctus" on the Death of Sir Daniel Don- nelly, Late Champion of Ireland.' The prize-fighter had died after a particularly heavy drinking session. Wilson included copiously footnoted tributes from imagined scholars in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, along with poems in the style of Byron and Wordsworth. While Byron is perhaps too obvious a target, and 'Child Daniel' not particularly funny, the 'extract from my great auto-biographical poem' contributed by W. W. is sharply attentive to both the Lake Poet's style and his distance from the world (and slang) of the Fancy:
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. . . Yea, even I, Albeit, who never 'ruffian'd' in the ring, Nor know of 'challenge', save the echoing hills; Nor 'fibbing', save that poesy doth feign, Nor heard his fame, but as the mutterings Of clouds contentious on Helvellyn's side, Distant, yet deep, aguise a strange regret, And mourn Donnelly - Honourable Sir Daniel: - 14
Wordsworth enjoyed a rare immunity to 'boximania'.15 By the 1820s, it had become almost unthinkable in certain circles not to understand boxing slang or the 'flash'. The oed cites the first instance of 'flash' being used to mean 'dashing, ostentatious, swaggering, "swell"' in 1785: the slightly later meaning of 'belong- ing to, connected with, or resembling, the class of sporting men, esp. the patrons of the ring' dates from 1808. But the two meanings seem related. 'A flash man upon the town' is surely swaggering and dandyish, as well as knowledge- able about prize-fighting. A third, related, meaning is 'knowing, wide-awake, "smart", "fly"'. Egan opens Boxiana with a footnote explaining the Fancy 'as many of our readers may not be flash to the above term'. But it seems likely, as Egan must surely have realized, that if a reader was flash to 'flash', he would be flash to 'the Fancy'.16
Keats's description of Byron's Don Juan as 'a flash poem' seems to draw on all these meanings; few poems are so knowing, swaggering, and connected to practitioners and patrons of the ring.17 Canto xi presents an encounter between Juan, newly arrived in London from Spain, and an assailant called Tom, 'full flash, all fancy', whom Juan shoots and kills. '0 Jack, I'm floor'd' are his final words. Byron then devotes a stanza to the memory of Tom, 'so prime, so swell, so nutty, and so knowing'. Tom would have understood such flash language, but Juan does not even understand standard English.18 A note is supplied, which refuses to explain anything because, Byron says, 'the advance of science and of language has rendered it unnecessary to translate the above good and true Eng- lish, spoken in its original purity by the select mobility and their patrons'. He directs any readers who 'require a traduction' to Gentleman Jackson.19 In 1808, John Cam Hobhouse commented that his friend had been 'deeply admitted into the penetralia Jacksoniana'; some years later, in his Life of Lord Byron, Thomas Moore recalled his amusement at observing 'how perfectly familiar with the annals of "The Ring", and with all the most recondite phraseology of "the Fancy", was the sublime poet of Childe Harold'.20 (Byron's attachment to boxing and its language was, Moore felt, one of his several 'boyish tastes'.)
Gary Dyer argues that Byron and his friends were attracted to the Fancy's dialect because it 'was fashioned to hide meanings from outsiders'.21 Indeed as Thomas Moore put it in the preface to his satirical poem 'Tom Crib's Memor- ial to Congress', flash 'was invented, and is still used, like the cipher of the diplo- matists, for purposes of secrecy'.22 What that secrecy meant to upper-class
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'fanciers' like Byron is a matter for speculation. Dyer reads Byron's secrets as always ultimately referring back to sodomy. Byron's biographer, Benita Eissler, maintains that Jackson and Angelo were 'rumoured' to be lovers as well as busi- ness partners, and that the Academy served as a cover for illicit meetings.23 While there is no direct evidence for this, it is certainly true that Byron's London circle was interested in sodomy as well as in boxing.
But a secret language surely holds other attractions. One is exclusivity, or, in the age of the beginnings of commercial journalism, the pretence of exclu- sivity. In the course of a general denunciation of the Fives Court as a 'college of scoundrelism' in 1824, Washington Irving's Buckthorne asks, 'what is the slang language of "The Fancy" but a jargon by which fools and knaves commune and understand each other, and enjoy a kind of superiority over the uninitiated?'24 Robert Southey's fictional Don Espriella, 'writing to the uninitiated' back in Spain in 1807, certainly takes great pleasure in explaining such terms as 'bot- tom', 'a pleasant fighter' and 'much punished'.25 In 1818, however, phrases such as these remain untranslated by Byron, although he tells us that only what he calls 'the select mobility and their patrons' will understand; only they speak 'good and true English'. Byron's play on 'select nobility' does more than suggest that boxers are like noblemen. His footnote also mocks the widespread ten- dency to explain flash language in footnotes. By freely coining his own new phrase, 'select mobility', Byron is attacking jargon's claim to provide unique access to knowledge.
Many other poets made comparable play with boxing language. The narra- tor of Henry Luttrell's Advice to Julia: A Letter in Rhyme (1820) stops a perfectly adequate description of a fight to apologise for his lack of pugilistic vocabulary:
But hold. - Such prowess to describe
Asks all the jargon of the tribe;
And though enough to serve my turn
From 'Boxiana' I might learn,
Or borrow from an ampler store
In the bright page of Thomas Moore . . .26
Thomas Moore is an interesting choice of source, for he much disliked boxing. Nevertheless, Moore too sought out the company of Jackson, and once attended a fight (which was 'altogether not so horrid as I expected') for the sake of his verse; in order 'to pick up as much of the fiashfrom authority, as possible'.27 Although he 'got very little out of Jackson', he went on to write two popular poems on pugilistic themes.
John Hamilton Reynolds, on the other hand, loved boxing (he was the box- ing correspondent, as well as theatre critic, for the London Magazine). As a young man he regularly attended fights and sparred, while writing poetry and work- ing as a clerk in an insurance office. The Fancy (1820) is semi-autobiography dis- guised as the fictional biography of Peter Corcoran, boxing groupie and 'Student
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of Law' (the name was borrowed from an eighteenth-century fighter and had the advantage of sharing an acronym with the Pugilistic Club). Corcoran is also a poet, and much of The Fancy consists of his poems: 'pugilism', the editor notes, 'engrossed nearly all his thoughts, and coloured all his writings'. The writing is full of cringe-worthy pugilistic puns. Consider, for example, one of the 'Stanzas to Kate, On Appearing Before Her After a Casual "Turn Up"':
You know I love sparring and poesy, Kate,
And scarcely care whether I'm hit at, or kiss'd; - You know that Spring equally makes me elate,
With the blow of a flower, and the blow of a fist.
'Spring' is asterisked, and the fictional editor writes, 'I am not sure whether Mr. Corcoran alluded here to the season, or the pugilist of this name.'28
Such pompous comments work to distance the reader from the editor as well as from Corcoran. In the preface, for example, he notes that 'this style of writing is not good - it is too broken, irresolute, and rugged; and it is too anx- ious in its search after smart expressions to be continuous or elevated in its sub- stance'.29 By the book's end, we become aware both of the compulsive appeal of such 'rugged' and punning language - particularly as a way of deflating the 'elevated' discourse of much poetry; again Wordsworth seems a target here - and of its repetitive limitations.
A wider look at the literature of the 1820s (in particular magazine litera- ture) shows just how pervasive an addiction to flash really was. Thomas De Quincey, for example, savoured its use in a variety of contexts, some of which were more apposite than others. Boxing slang works particularly well in a July 1828 attack on 'The Pretensions of Phrenology', because both boxing and phrenology are interested in the human skull. Medical and sporting jargon are set against each other in a description of the phrenologists who, 'after receiving a few hard thumps on ihefrontal sinus and the cerebellum, . . . were fain to have recourse to shifting and shuffling; bobbing aside their brain-boxes'. In the debate De Quincey champions the philosopher Sir William Hamilton, who we soon learn is no 'shy fighter', no 'flincher, a 'tolerably hard hitter and 'rather an ugly customer: 'the chanceried nobs of his two antagonists exhibit indisputable proofs of his pugilistic prowess, and of the punishment he is capable of administering'. And this is only the opening paragraph.30
Later that same month, De Quincey became a co-editor of the Edinburgh Evening Post, contributing the latest news from London and writing many short editorial notices. One addressed a dispute between two Edinburgh intellectuals on the teaching of Greek at Scottish universities with the promise of organizing 'a set-to ... in our Publishing Office, between three and four' on any day of their choosing.31 De Quincey and his co-editor, the Reverend Andrew Crichton, did not get on, and Crichton's own articles often contained digs at De Quincey 's 'addiction' to metaphors drawn from the 'vile' sport of boxing. The 'defence of
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. . . pugilism' is 'very shallow', and 'monstrously inconsistent with Christian principles', he wrote in a review of Blackwood's; an author who resorts to 'the slang of the fancy' has 'a rough lump of the brute in him, which ought to be cut out by the scalpel'.32 The surgical metaphor is itself an implicit rebuke to such authors.
HARD WORDS AND HARD BLOWS IN HAZLITT
In essays on topics ranging from parliamentary debate to sculpture to theatre to boxing, William Hazlitt talked about blows. The Reformation struck a 'death- blow' at 'scarlet vice and bloated hypocrisy'; William Godwin's Enquiry concern- ing Political Justice dealt a 'blow to the philosophical mind of the country'; Wordsworth's 'popular, inartificial style gets rid (at a blow) of . . . all the high places of poetry.'33 'On Shakespeare and Milton' (1818) reads like a comparison of the styles of two boxers rather than two writers. Shakespeare's blows are 'rapid and devious', 'the stroke like the lightning's, is sure as it is sudden'. Milton, on the other hand, 'always labours, and almost always succeeds'.34 'Milton has great gusto. He repeats his blow twice; grapples with and exhausts his subject.'35
And it is not only poems which deal blows. In an 1826 essay 'On the Prose- Style of Poets', Hazlitt asserts categorically that 'every word should be a blow: every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow'. 'Weight', 'precision' and 'contact' are needed to strike the best blow, and produce the best prose. Some writers display some of these virtues; few all. Byron's prose, for example, is 'heavy, laboured and coarse: he tries to knock some one down with the butt- end of every line'.3
Hazlitt foregrounds the relationship between fighting and writing styles in an 1821 essay on William Cobbett. The essay begins by comparing the radical politician to the boxer Tom Cribb. Initially the comparison seems to be based on the fact of Cobbett 's devotion to pugilism and his self-representation as, like Cribb, a living embodiment of John Bull.37 Hazlitt then moves on to mat- ters of style:
His blows are as hard, and he himself is impenetrable. One has no no- tion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he 'fillips the ear of the public with a three-man beetle'.38
The last phrase is a quotation from Henry iv part 2, and its inclusion, alongside sporting analogy, is a favourite technique of Hazlitt 's. In the pages that follow, the metaphor is developed more fully. Cobbett has a 'pugnacious disposition, that must have an antagonist power to contend with', but this is a 'bad propensity' since:
If his blows were straightforward and steadily directed to the same object, no unpopular Minister could live before him; instead of which
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he lays about right and left, impartially and remorselessly, makes a clear stage, has all the ring to himself, and then runs out of it when he should stand his ground.39
The essay concludes by shifting the comparison. Cobbett is now no longer Eng- land's hero, Tom Cribb, but 'Big Ben', Benjamin Brain, known to be 'bullying and cowardly'. Not so tall but very stocky, Brain had defeated the long-reigning champion Tom Johnson in 1791 in 'a most tremendous battle'.40 Johnson had been a favourite of the fashionable Fancy, and was even reputed to have worn pink laces in his boxing boots.41 Big Ben was less gentlemanly. He badly dam- aged Johnson's nose in the second round, and fought on regardless, even when, in his distress, Johnson soon after broke a finger on a ring post. For many com- mentators this victory marks the end of the first era of British boxing, when men stood toe-to-toe and punched away without much technique. For Hazlitt to compare Cobbett to Big Ben is to insult not just his bravery, but also his skill and intelligence. Cobbett, he concludes, is 'a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush them by his weight, but is not prepared for resistance, and is soon staggered by a few smart blows'.42
Hazlitt 's most sustained comparison of fighting and writing can be found in 'Jack Tars', an essay originally published in 1826 under the title 'English and Foreign Manners'. 'There are two things that an Englishman under- stands,' Hazlitt begins, 'hard words and hard blows,' and he goes on to define the English character in terms of a sort of aggressive empiricism. French audiences appreciate Racine and Moliere, whose 'dramatic dialogue is frothy verbiage'; English audiences prefer to watch boxing, where 'every Englishman feels his power to give and take blows increased by sympathy', or, what is put forward as its equivalent, English plays whose dialogue 'constantly clings to the concrete and has a purchase upon matter'. Englishmen, in short, perceive the world through violent opposition. This makes them feel 'alive' and also manly. 'The English are not a nation of women ... it cannot be denied they are a pugnacious set.'43
A complex alignment of qualities is being made. Some are familiar -pug- nacity, masculinity and Englishness; new to the mix is empiricism, defined as the pugnacious, masculine, English way of perceiving the world. The Eng- lish 'require the heavy, hard, and tangible only, something for them to grap- ple with and resist, to try their strength and their unimpressibility upon'.44 English empiricism is, in Hazlitt 's terms, less concerned with what John Locke called secondary qualities (colour, taste and smell are, Hazlitt main- tained, of more interest to the French), than 'the heavy, hard and tangible' primary qualities.45 The solid materialism of Englishness ('our lumpish clay') is a favourite theme of Hazlitt 's, especially in opposition to light French live- liness. English criticism of French culture is difficult, he argued, because 'the strength of the blow is always defeated by the very insignificance and want of resistance in the object'.46
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'The same images and trains of thought stick by me', Hazlitt wrote in his 'Farewell to Essay-Writing' (1828). 47 This is clearly true, but his use of boxing idiom and metaphor was not an unthinking tick. Indeed, it serves much more various and complex purposes in his work than it does in that of any other writer of the time. Contemporary discussions of Hazlitt's language, however, rarely went beyond politically motivated condemnation or praise. Blackwood's argued that prize-fighters were 'downright Tories' and therefore belonged in Black- wood's, but other journals were more interested in suggesting that neither Ha- zlitt or pugilists were suitable for their polite middle-class readers. The New Edinburgh Review was 'sorry to say' that some of Hazlitt's allusions were 'of the lowest and most shockingly indelicate description'. It joined the Quarterly Review in dismissing him as a 'Slang-Whanger':
We utterly loathe him where he seems most at home, namely, among pugilists, and wagerers, and professional tennis-players, passing cur- rent their vain glorious slang. We protest against allusions to the very existence of the Bens and Bills and Jacks and Jems and Joes of 'the ring', in any printed page above the destination of the ale-bench; but to have their nauseous vocabulary defiling the language of a printed book, reg- ularly entered at Stationers' Hall, and destined for the use of men and women of education, taste, and delicacy, is quite past endurance . . . we strenuously protest against this bang up style, this 'fancy diction', in a series of 'original essays'. Our conclusion, at least, is irresistible, - the author has not kept good company . . .48
The anti-Cockney snobbery of the Tory journals would not have surprised Ha- zlitt, nor would the qualified support of John Hamilton Reynolds, author of The Fancy, and boxing correspondent of the liberal London Magazine. Indeed Reynolds's only criticism of the second volume of Table Talk - that Hazlitt's points are put forward too directly- is itself made in 'fancy diction':
The style of this book is singularly nervous [i.e. sinewy, strong and vig- orous] and direct, and seems to aim at mastering its subject by dint of mere hard hitting. There is no such thing as manoeuvring for a blow. The language strikes out, and if the intention is not fulfilled, the blow is repeated until the subject falls.49
Fascinated by boxing's metaphorical possibilities, Hazlitt wrote only one essay on the thing itself, 'The Fight' (1822). One of the most influential and fre- quently anthologized pieces on boxing, the essay encompasses many of the themes already discussed - style, Englishness, masculinity, the material world - and presents them in a manner at once casual and densely considered.
Consider the epigraph, which rewrites Hamlet's musings on what he hopes to accomplish by putting on a play for Claudius's benefit (or punishment):
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— The fight, the fight's the thing,
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.50
Hazlitt's substitution of 'fight' for 'play' has two implications: first, that a fight is a play, a kind of performance; secondly, that this particular fight/play is a per- formance from which something is to be learnt. Hamlet's play will catch the king's conscience. What about the fight Hazlitt witnesses? The contest is first of all a contest of performed styles; styles that we have come to think of as French and English. The champion, Bill Hickman, the Gasman, is 'light, vigorous, elas- tic', his skin glistening in the sun like a panther's hide'; his unfavoured chal- lenger, Bill Neate, is 'great, heavy, clumsy', with long arms 'like two sledge-hammers'. At one point, 'Neate seemed like a lifeless lump of flesh and bone, round which the Gasman's blows played with the rapidity of electricity or lightning.' The two men also differ in personality. Hickman is a Homeric boaster, who arrives to fight 'like the cock-of-the-walk'. Hazlitt is more judg- mental than Homer, however, and complains that Hickman 'strutted about more than became a hero'. Neate is modest and celebrates his eventual victory 'without any appearance of arrogance'.
In general, though, both men wonderfully exemplify courage and en- durance. But of what kind? Classical comparison casts Neate as Ajax to Hick- man's Diomed, Hector to his Achilles. The fight itself amply confirms the 'high and heroic state of man'. It reminds Hazlitt of the 'dark encounter' between clouds over the Caspian, in Milton's Paradise Lost, as Satan faces Sin and Death at hell's gates.51 And yet the life actually lived during a fight is nasty, brutish, and (relatively) short. The fighter's triumph is not only transitory, but in essence banal ('The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed blood, the mouth gaped blood'), and invariably surreptitious (like a 1990s rave, the fight between Hickman and Neate took place, at the shortest possible notice, in a field near Newbury). Could it be that the literary form best suited to this brief battle was not epic poetry, but the essay?
Hazlitt's essay, like the preparations made for the fight by participants and spectators alike, is much ado, if not exactly about nothing, then about some- thing as fleeting as it is pungent. He finds it difficult enough to get himself out of London. Missing the mail coach prompts a self-reproach that seems excessive, 'I had missed it as I missed everything else, by my own absurdity.' Finally, how- ever, he is on his way, and as he puts on a great coat, his mood improves. Leav- ing London behind, he enters another world with its own distinctive rules and customs. Joe Toms walks up Chancery Lane 'with that quick jerk and impatient stride which distinguishes a lover of the fancy'; in the coach to the fight Ha- zlitt meets a man 'whose costume bespoke him one of the fancy'; on the way back he describes his friend, Pigott, as being 'dressed in character for the occa- sion, or like one of the fancy; that is, with a double portion of great coats, clogs, and overhauls'. It is only on the journey home that Hazlitt himself is properly 'dressed in character'; Pigott supplies him with a 'genteel drab great coat and
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green silk handkerchief (which I must say became me exceedingly).' The cos- tume gives him the confidence to deride a group of 'Goths and Vandals . . . not real flash-men, but interlopers, noisy pretenders, butchers from Tothillfields, brokers from Whitechapel' who brashly interrupt a discussion of the respec- tive merits of roasted fowl and mutton-chops. The essay ends with him reluc- tantly returning these clothes. So far, so Pierce Egan.
Like Egan, Hazlitt relished flash language. 'The Fight' is littered with italicized idioms: 'turn-up', 'swells', 'the scratch', 'pluck'. But the great literary virtue of an essay is that it does not have to stick to one kind of performance. Hazlitt rapidly expands his repertoire of allusion beyond Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. His allusions politicize pugilism. They enhance its democratic credentials. Riding in the coach with Toms, he recites, 'in an involuntary fit of enthusiasm', some lines of Spenser on delight and liberty; Toms promptly translates these 'into the vulgate' as meaning 'Going to see a fight'. The connection between boxing, sentiment and (political as well as psychological) liberty is reinforced on the return journey, when Pigott reads out passages from Rousseau's NewEloise. And if literature can enhance an appreciation of boxing, boxing also has literary potential. Hazlitt is enchanted by the conversation of a man he meets in the pub, and tells him that he talks as well as Cobbett writes. Perhaps in response to his critics, Hazlitt makes it clear that sporting interests are not the preserve of Tory squires; middle-class radicals can make them urban, modern and sophisticated.
Hazlitt 's pleasure in joining this convivial, masculine world is palpable. This had been his first fight, he announces at the beginning of the essay, 'yet it more than answered my expectations'. But what were those expectations? In 'On Going A Journey', published four months earlier, Hazlitt had written of the desire to 'forget the town and all that is in it'. In the town was his landlady's daughter, Sarah Walker, whose charms and unfaithfulness form the subject of an autobiographical meditation, Liber Amoris (1823). She is never mentioned here, but Hazlitt does occasionally (and rather cryptically) evoke his misery. The essay begins by dedicating what follows to 'Ladies'. He compliments 'the fairest of the fair' and the loveliest of the lovely' and entreats them to 'notice the exploits of the brave'. But a rather sour note emerges when he urges ladies to consider 'how many more ye kill with poison baits than ever fell in the ring'. These words gain a poignant resonance when we consider that an early draft of the essay contained a passage about his lovelorn wretchedness. David Bromwich argues that an awareness of this passage reveals 'the under-plot' of the essay and explains its 'impetuous pace' and 'arbitrary high spirits'.52
'The Fight' tells the story of a man who is almost successful at escaping him- self. If romance is a 'hysterica passio, the Fancy is 'the most practical of all things', and its emphasis on mundane facts - its thoroughly English empiricism - dis- tracts him most of the time.53 'The fancy are not men of imagination', he is pleased to note. Occasionally, though, he slips back into self-pity. After describ- ing the pleasures of the training regime, he cannot help adding:
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'Is this life not more sweet than mine?' I was going to say; but I will not libel any life by comparing it to mine, which is (at the date these pres- ents) bitter as coloquintida and the dregs of aconitum!
But such passages of lovesick rhetoric (passages common in Liber Amoris) are in- frequent. As long as he can talk of boxing and mutton-chops, love and London can be kept at bay:
A stranger takes his hue and character from the time and place. He is a part of the furniture and costume of an inn ... I associate nothing with my travelling companion but present objects and passing events. In his ignorance of me and my affairs, I in a manner forget myself.54
Hazlitt's language of the blow provided him with a means to compare poets and politicians to athletes and (democratically) to judge one against the other.55 The 'blows' of John Cavanagh, the fives-player, for example, were 'not undecided and ineffectual', unlike Coleridge's 'wavering' prose.56 Hazlitt also judged his own work by the standard of sport, and sometimes found it lacking. 'What is there that I can do as well as this?' he once asked on observing some Indian jugglers. 'Nothing', was his reply. 'I have always had this feeling of the inefficacy and slow progress of intellectual compared to mechanical excellence, and it has always made me somewhat dissatisfied.'57 'I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket- player, than the best prose-writer of the age.'58 But most of the time, Hazlitt did believe that prose could eventually achieve its own excellence, comparable (among other things) to relation between parts in the Elgin marbles; 'one part being given, another cannot be otherwise than it.'59 'The Fight' ends with a 'p.s.', in which Ha- zlitt agrees with his friend Toms's description of the fight as 'a complete thing'. The last sentence - 'I hope he will relish my account of it' - suggests that the essay is consciously striving to be something equally 'complete', something in which all the parts harmoniously create a whole (however ephemeral).
SCULPTING AND PAINTING THE BOXERS
In the same month that 'The Fight' appeared, Hazlitt published the first of three essays on the Elgin Marbles. His remarks there, and elsewhere, directly attack Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses (1769-1790), which argued that the beauty of a work of art was 'general and intellectual': 'the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist'.60 On this view, the artist is completely divorced from the craftsman who works with his eyes, hands and materials. Hazlitt, on the other hand, emphasized the ways in which art resembled craft and sport - and in all these spheres genius could emerge. One of the pleasures of painting, he maintained, was that, unlike writ- ing, it 'exercises the body' and requires 'a continued and steady exertion of muscular power'. The best paintings, and sculptures, were those in which the
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muscular power of both sitter and artist remain apparent. The Elgin Marbles 'do not seem to be the outer surface of a hard and immovable block of marble, but to be actuated by an internal machinery'; in Hogarth's pictures, 'every feature and muscle is put into full play.' Both are 'the reverse of still life'; both are com- parable to the 'harmonious, flowing, varied prose' of the essayist.61
Hazlitt frequently included Hogarth in his pantheon of English geniuses, all of whom rejected notions of the ideal in order to grapple with matter as it is and who defined beauty in democratic and empirical terms. 'The eye alone must determine us in our choice of what is most pleasing to itself,' Hogarth wrote in The Analysis of Beauty (1753), and in that choice, sports fans have at least as good an eye as sculptors or anatomists:
Almost everyone is farther advanced in the knowledge of this specula- tive part of proportion that he imagines; especially he hath been inter- ested in the success of them; and the better he is acquainted with the nature of the exercise itself, still the better the judge he becomes of the figure that is to perform it.
In terms that would be echoed in the twentieth century by Bertolt Brecht and Ezra Pound, Hogarth argued against aesthetic contemplation as a disinterested activity. The more interested the spectator is (by which he presumably means the more money he has wagered) the better his judgment is.
For this reason, no sooner are two boxers stript to fight, but even a butcher, thus skill'd, shews himself a considerable critic in proportion; and on this sort of judgment often gives, or takes the odds, at bare sight only of the combatants. I have heard a blacksmith harangue like an anatomist, or sculptor, on the beauty of a boxer's figure, tho' not per- haps in the same terms . . .
Too many contemporary artists, Hogarth maintained, learn about the human body by looking at sculpture (particularly classical sculpture) rather than by looking at people.
I firmly believe, that one of our common proficients in the athletic art, would be able to instruct and direct the best sculptor living, (who hath not seen, or is wholly ignorant of this exercise) in what would give the statue of an English-boxer, a much better proportion, as to character, than is to be seen, even in the famous group of antique boxers, (or as some call them, Roman wrestlers) so much admired to this day.62
Hogarth is referring to a sculpture, now knows as 'The Wrestlers', which was much praised and studied by the English Academicians, and formed the basis for an extensive discussion of muscles in both Joshua Reynolds's Tenth
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Discourse (1780) and John Flaxman's Lectures on Sculpture (1829).63 Small bronze copies were widely disseminated.64 In order to understand and thus represent human movement, Flaxman argued, the sculptor must understand anatomy, geometry and mechanics:
The forced action of the boxers renders the muscular configuration of their shoulders so different in appearance from moderate action and states of rest, that we derive a double advantage from the anatomical consideration of their forms: first, we shall learn the cause of each par- ticular form, and, secondly, we shall be convinced how rationally and justly the ancients copied nature.65
Hogarth, meanwhile, had looked to Figg, Broughton and George Taylor as his models. Two years before writing the Analysis, he had produced a series of drawings of the dying Taylor (supposedly intended for his tombstone), including Death giving George Taylor a Cross-Buttock and George Taylor Breaking the Ribs of Death (illus. 20). But it was Figg ('more of a slaughtererthan ... a neat, finished pugilist') who especially appealed to Hogarth, not only as an exemplar of English vigour and honesty, but also as a fellow modern urban professional.66 Figg appeared in several of Hogarth's satirical paintings and prints: in Southwark Fair (1732) he sits grimly upon a blind horse in the right-hand corner, in A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733) he is sprawled drunkenly in the foreground, and in plate two of The Rake's Progress (1735), 'Surrounded by Artists and Professors', he is pushed into the background by a dandyish French fencing master.67
William Hogarth, George Taylor's Epi- taph: George Taylor Breaking the Ribs of Death, pen and ink over pencil and chalk, c. 1750.
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Fifty years on, boxing was much more respectable than it had been in Hog- arth's day, and Hazlitt noted approvingly that the actor Edmund Kean was not ashamed to admit to 'borrow[ing] . . . from the last efforts of Painter in his fight with Oliver' in his portrayal of Richard ill's final moments.68 Next door to the Fives Court, retired prize-fighter Bill Richmond ran the Horse and Dolphin, a pub where he was said to have initiated the fashion of sparring bare-chested in order that spectators could admire the muscular development of the fighters. Various members of the nearby Royal Academy, including Benjamin Haydon and the President, Joseph Farington, frequented the Fives Court and Horse and Dolphin, but more often the boxers posed at the Academy's life classes.69 Far- ington's diary for 19 June 1808 records a visit to the home of his friend Dr Anthony Carlisle, soon to be elected Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy, where the company were presented with 'Gregson, the Pugilist, stripped naked to be exhibited to us on acct. of the fineness of His form '. Farington's approach is not that of Hogarth, or Hazlitt. The real is only interesting in its relation to the ideal. Gregson the pugilist quickly becomes Gregson the anatomical specimen, the classical approximation:
All admired the beauty of His proportions from the Knee or rather from the waist upwards, including His arms, & small head. The Bone of His leg West Sd [side] is too short & His toes are not long enough & there is something of heaviness abt the thighs - Knees & legs, - but on the whole He was allowed to be the finest figure the persons present had seen. He was placed in many attitudes.70
While Hogarth was always concerned about proportion in relation to function ('fitness') - what 'dimensions of muscle are proper (according to the principle of the steelyard) to move such or such a length of arm with this or that degree of swiftness of force' - the Academicians had very little interest in the use of the bones and muscles they were contemplating.71 Boxers were to be admired to the extent that their bodies approximated pre-determined ideals of beauty, not because they worked well. Ben Marshall's portrait of Jackson, copied as a mezzo- tint by Charles Turner in 1810, positions the clothed prize-fighter beside a clas- sical sculpture. We cannot help comparing their legs (illus. 21).
Ten days after Farington first saw Gregson, the party reassembled at Lord Elgin's house to see him 'naked among the Antique figures', the newly arrived fragments of the Panthenon frieze now known as the Elgin Marbles. As soon as the fighters arrived, one recalled, 'ancient art and the works of Phidias were for- gotten'.72 At the end of July, four of the leading fighters of the day -Jackson, Belcher, Gulley and Dutch Sam - were brought to Elgin's for a 'Pugilistick Exhibition'. Farington noted that the sculptor John Rossi particularly admired Dutch Sam's figure 'on account of the Symmetry & the parts being expressed', and Sam is thought to be the model for Rossi's 1828 sculpture, Athleta Britannicus (illus. 22). 73 An attempt at pure classicism, we have no idea when looking at the
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21
Charles Turner after Benjamin Marshall, Mr John Jackson, 1810.
sculpture that the model was a nineteenth-century Jew from the East End of London.74
The pugilist's identity is also not apparent in Sir Thomas Lawrence's por- traits of his childhood friend, John Jackson. The first, exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1797, featured him, twice-lifesize, as Satan Summoning His Legions, to illustrate Milton's line, 'Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.'75 As Peter Radford notes, the painting makes an 'obvious boxing pun about having been knocked down and having to get up', but this was for private consump- tion. While the body was Jackson's - Egan had described him as 'one of the best made men in the kingdom'; others praised his 'small' joints, 'knit in the man- ner which is copied so inimitably in many of the statues and paintings of Michelangelo' - the face was that of the actor, John Kemble.76 The same combina- tion featured in an 1800 painting of Rolla, from Sheridan's Pizarro.71 Jackson's
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22
Charles Rossi, Athleta Britannka, 1828.
23
Theodore Gericault, Les Boxeurs, 1818, lithograph.
muscular body was a useful starting point from which to paint grand subjects; his face, and profession, were not important.
Historical context returned, to be married with classical precedent, in the most widely known boxing image of the early nineteenth century, Theodore Geri- cault 's lithograph Les Boxeurs (illus. 23). On the one hand, it makes reference to contemporary events and setting. The boxers, dressed in modern clothes, are usually taken to be Cribb and Molineaux, and we can pick out a few men in suits and one in a prominent top hat in the crowd. Two beer tankards are prominently placed in the bottom right-hand corner. The anglophile Gericault had not attended either fight between the two men - he first visited England in 1820 - but he would have witnessed boxing matches in the Paris studio of painter Horace Vernet, a rendezvous for Restoration liberals, and perhaps, more importantly, he was familiar with English sporting engravings. His decision to depict the scene in a lithograph also signalled a commitment to the contemporary. Lithography was then a new technique and was associated mainly with political satire and other forms of ephemera.78
Gericault differs from Hogarth, however, in that he fuses references to the modern scene with allusions to classical and Renaissance art; he had recently returned to Paris after some years in Italy. Michelangelo's influence, in particu- lar, is apparent in the sharp contours, strained poses, bulging muscles and heroic stylization of the fighters.79 Several spectators are also portrayed naked to the waist. Most striking is one in the left foreground -perhaps having just
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24
Theodore Gericault, Two Boxers Facing Left, 1818.
been defeated himself? - who lies in a languid classical pose practically at the fighters' feet. The mixture of realist and classical conventions is disconcert- ing, but allows Gericault to present the fight as both sharply contemporary and grandly mythical.
Les Boxeurs positions its opponents very deliberately in the centre of the work, in identical monumental stances. They are static, unlike the fighters in Gericault 's more naturalistic pencil and pen studies of the same year (illus. 24). The black man wears white trousers; the white man's trousers have black stripes. Gericault is obviously interested in tonal contrast, an interest that would be revived in George Bellows 's depictions of interracial boxing a hundred years later. But Gericault 's time, and his politics, were different from Bellows 's. Black men also feature in Gericault 's great paintings of 1819, The African Slave and The Raft of the Medusa, works that are often discussed in the context of liberal campaigns against France's complicity in the slave trade, and Toussaint L'Ouverture's heroic rebellion in Haiti.80 In most images of the contest between Cribb and Molin- eaux, the American appeared as little more than a caricature, often barefooted, 'blackamoor' (illus. 47). In Gericault 's lithograph, he is not only complementary but absolutely equal to his opponent; here, it seems possible that he might win.
THE ERA OF BOXIMANIA
Works of the early twenties, such as Hazlitt's 'The Fight' (1822), Egan's Life in London (1821) and John Hamilton Reynolds's The Fancy (1820) celebrated a cultural moment that was coming to an end. An elegiac air infects their
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exuberance. In 1818, Reynolds abandoned poetry (and boxing) to become a lawyer, and in 1820, about to marry, and with his good friend, Keats, very ill, he wrote The Fancy as a 'final parting with his youth, his poetry, and the forbidden delights of youth'.81 But if Londoners were leaving the Fancy behind, out-of- towners were becoming increasingly interested. London's sporting pubs were fast becoming tourist attractions, and places like the Castle Tavern in Holborn assumed legendary status.
In Howarth in Yorkshire, the Bronte children were keen readers of Black- wood's Magazine, which was passed to them by a neighbour until 1831. One of their parodies, The Young Men's Magazine, included an 'Advertisement' by Charlotte and Branwell, issuing a challenge to 'a match at fisty-cuffs'.82 Their juvenilia is populated by young noblemen, always 'masters of the art', who set at each other 'in slashing style'.83 Charlotte eventually lost interest, but Branwell continued to read Blackwood's and Bell's Life. Numerous references to, and sketches of, his pugilistic heroes can also be found in his letters.84
Bronte could not decide whether he wanted to be a painter or a poet. The poems he submitted to Blackwood's were always rejected. In July 1835, he wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Art asking for an interview. His biographers have debated whether he actually sent this letter, and whether, as a result, he vis- ited London the following month. He claimed that he went. The uncertainty stems from the detailed account of London adventures he gave on his supposed return. Juliet Barker, who doubts the trip took place, maintains that Bronte's impressions of the Castle Tavern, and his account of conversations with its land- lord, Tom Spring, were lifted straight from the pages of Egan's Boxiana and Book of Sports (1832), which gives a particularly lively and detailed description of the tavern and its patrons.85
A country boy who really did visit the pilgrimage sights of the Fancy was the poet John Clare. On his third visit to London in 1824, Clare was taken by the painter Oliver Rippingille to the Castle Tavern, and to Jack Randall's Hole in the Wall in Chancery Lane - where Hazlitt's 'The Fight' begins - and to see some sparring at the Fives Court. Clare later recalled:
I caught the mania so much from Rip for such things that I soon became far more eager for the fancy than himself and I watch'd the appearance of every new Hero on the stage with as eager curosity [sic] to see what sort of fellow he was as I had before done the Poets - and I left the place with one wish strongly in uppermost and that was that I was but a Lord to patronize Jones the Sailor Boy who took my fancy as being the finest fellow in the Ring.86
Iain McCalman and Maureen Perkins speculate that Clare may also have attended one of the numerous theatrical adaptations of Egan's Life in London, and argue that 'there can be little doubt that he modelled his own metropolitan tourist programmes on the "sprees and larks" of Egan's fictional heroes'.87
74
In the Northampton asylum in which he spent the last years of his life, Clare adopted many pseudonyms and alter egos, including those of some of the prize- fighters he had watched on that trip to London. Inventing new names was of course a speciality of prize-fighters, but Jonathan Bate speculates that 'the per- sona of the pugilist became Clare's stance of defiance' in the violent atmosphere of the asylum.88 Clare was seen shadow-boxing in his cell, crying out 'I'm Jones the Sailor Boy', and 'I'm Tom Spring', or, as 'Jack Randall Champion of the Prize Ring', issuing a 'Challenge to All the World' for 'A Fair Stand Up Fight'.89 On one occasion Clare (soon to write his own 'Child Harold' and 'Don Juan a Poem') even referred to himself as 'Boxer Byron / made of Iron, alias / Box-iron / At Spring-field.'90 The personae of Box-iron and Boxer (Lord) Byron pull in differ- ent directions: Clare wanted to be both the self-made working-class prize-fighter and the kind of Lord who patronized such men. But his assumption of these roles brought no relief from his isolation and increasing alienation from both worlds. One letter (to an unidentified and possibly imaginary correspondent) laments that although 'It is well known that I am a prize-fighter by profession and a man that has never feared any body in my life either in the ring or out of it . . . there is none to accept my challenges which I have from time to time given to the public.'91
Two months before he died, an ailing Branwell Bronte wrote to Joseph Ley- land, signing off with the remark that he was 'nearly worn out'. The letter was accompanied by a sketch of a man lying in bed and a skeleton standing over him. The skeleton is saying that 'the half minute time's up, so come to the scratch; won't you?' The prostrate man replies, 'Blast your eyes, it's no use, for I cannot come', and above is written - 'Jack Shaw, the Guardsman, and Jack Painter of Norfolk'. Painter had been defeated by Shaw in 1815 (just weeks before Shaw died heroically at Waterloo). The fight was largely memorable for Painter's courageous resilience: he 'received ten knock-down blows in succes- sion; and, although requested to resign the battle, not the slightest chance appeared in his favour, he refused to quit the ring till nature was exhausted'.92
Branwell Bronte, a painter himself, died in 1848, and John Clare followed in 1864. Both men lasted longer than the Fives Court; built in 1802 at the start of pugilism's vogue, it was pulled down in 1826 as part of the development of Trafalgar Square (illus. 49). The golden age of boxing was over.
75
Fighting, Rightly Understood'
'Modern legislation is chiefly remarkable for its oppressive interference with the elegant amusements of the mob,' complained Punch, tongue largely in cheek, in 1841.
Bartholomew-fair is abolished; bull-baiting, cock-pits, and duck-hunts are put down by act of Parliament; prize-fighting, by the New Police . . . The 'masses' see no pleasure now.1
The establishment of Robert Peel's New Police in 1829 had gradually made it possible to enforce a series of legal judgments to outlaw the prize-ring. But these judgments did little more than confirm the shift in public attitudes to the sport. By the time of Victoria's accession in 1837, prize-fighting was firmly in decline. Pugilists had served as ushers at George iv's coronation in 1821, but the patron- age of Queen Victoria or the presence of her Prince Consort at ringside was unthinkable. Respectable middle-class society saw no place for an unruly sport favoured by an alliance of the working and upper classes (the 'bawling, hustling, and smashing' Populace and the 'great broad-shouldered' Barbarians, as Matthew Arnold put it), while evangelical Christianity stressed its brutish nature.2 Only 30 years earlier, newspapers had extolled the manly virtues of pugilism; now they stressed its physical and moral dangers. The New Sporting Magazine, founded by R. S. Surtees in 1834, announced in its prospectus that 'prize-fighting, Bull-baiting and Cock-fighting' were low and demoralizing pur- suits' and would be excluded from its pages.3 In their place Surtees substituted the 'jaunts and jollities' of riding and hunting.
A series of scandals ranging from thrown fights to murder was partly to blame. In 1824 fight-promoter John Thurtell was hanged for the murder of a gambling associate and the trial made sensational news; a few months later magistrates stopped a fight ('if it could be so termed', said Egan) at Moulsey Hurst and arrested both fighters.4 The following year even Hazlitt admitted that 'the Fancy have lately lost something of their gloss in public estimation; and, after the last fight, few would go far to see a Neate or a Spring set-to'.5 In the
76
years that followed the pugilists themselves tried to improve matters - Spring, for example, set up the Fair Play Club in 1828 - but without aristocratic backing and finance, the boxers lacked the necessary authority to regulate their sport. 'When honour and fame cease to influence the combatants,' lamented Vincent Dowling, editor of Bell's Life, 'a system of low gambling is substituted.'6
Many also considered large gatherings of unruly fight fans to be threaten- ing, as large-scale popular protest, from the Luddites to the Chartists, continued into the 1820s. William Cobbett had noted in 1805 that boxing matches do not merely 'give rise to assemblages of people; they tend to make the people bold'.7 But without an obvious foreign enemy, such boldness was no longer welcome. Increasingly, reforming magistrates clamped down on those involved in staging fights. They even began to appear in this capacity in novels. In Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), George Nupkins boasts of having 'rushed into a prize- ring . . . attended only by six special constables; and, at the hazard of falling a sacrifice to the angry passions of an infuriated multitude, prohibited a pugilis- tic contest between the Middlesex Dumpling, and the Suffolk Bantam'.8 The magistrate in George Borrow 's Lavengro (1851), meanwhile, confesses that although 'of course, I cannot patronize the thing very openly, yet I sometimes see a prize-fight'.9 In Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), set in the 1840s, the town's Roman Amphitheatre is described as a popular venue for 'pugilistic encounters' because it is 'secluded' and 'entirely invisible to the out- side world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure'.10
The era of the great boxers also seemed to be over. New champions such as Tom Spring continued to attract a following, but the tone of much journalism was resolutely elegiac. A newspaper account of Spring's defeat of the aging Tom Oliver on 20 February 1821 (a fight attended by the schoolboy William Glad- stone, bunking off from Eton), described the pair as 'first-raters of the present day' but greatly inferior to their predecessors.11 The great fighters, and com- mentators, of the Regency died soon afterwards: 'Gentleman John' Jackson in 1845; Tom Cribb in 1848; Pierce Egan in 1849; and Tom Spring in 1851, the year in which, in Lavengro, George Borrow lamented the passing of the great days of prize-fighting.
I have known the time when a pugilistic encounter between two noted champions was almost considered in the light of a national affair; when tens of thousands of individuals, high and low, meditated and brooded upon it, the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, until the great event was decided. But the time is passed, and people will say, thank God that it is; all I have to say is, that the French still live on the other side of the water, and are still casting their eyes hitherward - and that in the days of pugilism it was no vain boast to say, that one English- man was a match for two of t'other race; at present it would be a vain boast to say so, for these are not the days of pugilism.12
17
AMERICAN BEGINNINGS AND BRITAIN S GREAT PUGILISTIC REVIVAL'
Although the Molineaux-Cribb fights had generated much British excitement in 1810, for 'the first quarter of the nineteenth century most Americans were unaware that boxing matches even took place in their country'.13 In the decades that followed, however, ever-increasing numbers of immigrants began to estab- lish the sport. An Irishman vs. an Englishman was a reliable crowd-puller, but very few of the early immigrants made a living through prize-fighting.
During the 1830s, some British fighters, facing ever-more limited opportu- nities at home, decided to cross the Atlantic to capitalize on budding Ameri- can interest in bare-knuckle bouts. The first to make the journey was James ('Deaf') Burke, who had been unable to find an opponent since a 98-round bat- tle ended in his adversary's death. Burke arrived in New York in 1836, where he appeared on stage at Conklin's Hall 'as the Venetian statue' - poses included 'Hercules struggling with the Nemean lion, in five attitudes' and 'Samson slay- ing the Philistines with a jaw bone'.14 The following year he had two fights against Irishmen; one in New Orleans, which degenerated into chaos (Irish sup- porters attacked Burke, accusing him of unfair play), and the other on Hart's Island, New York, which he easily won. The New York Herald reported the sec- ond match with showy reluctance; although we 'regret and detest' the kind of exhibition the British are so fond of, the paper declared, 'our duty as chroni- clers compels us to make public what otherwise we should bury in oblivion'.15
While Burke had been in America, a quick-witted Nottingham fighter called William Thompson, or more usually Bendigo, had emerged as a real contender for the Championship. Burke fought Bendigo on his return to England in 1839, but was disqualified for head-butting; Bendigo lost the championship to Ben Caunt in 1842, and regained it from him in 1845 (both were bitterly contested fights). In 1850, he retired from the ring and, in a development considered to be a sign of the times, became a Methodist preacher.16
Burke and Bendigo are both mentioned in Herman Melville's 1851 novel, Moby-Dick. While there is no evidence that Melville attended any of their fights, these were widely reported in the American press. Certainly Melville felt that Bendigo was well enough known to refer to him in an 1847 letter to a sick cousin in Rio: 'come back to us again and send a challenge across the water to fight Bendigo for the Champion's Belt of all England'.17
Nationalist bravado also informs Chapter 37 of Moby-Dick, which ends with a famous passage in which Captain Ahab challenges the 'great gods' to 'swerve' him from his goal of taking revenge on the White Whale to whom he had lost a leg. In evoking his 'fixed purpose', Ahab compares himself to a train: 'Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way! ' Less often noted is Ahab's comparison of the unswerving nature of a train on its iron way to a boxer facing his opponent. Ahab begins his soliloquy by evoking his
78
own 'steel skull . . . the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!' He then addresses 'ye great gods' directly:
I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies, - Take some one of your one size: don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye there.18
Ahab's claim that the English bruiser gods will not be able to stop his advance on the whale is pure (and characteristic) bluster. Only a few years later, however, an American boxer, with a more credible claim to be unswervable, appeared on the scene. In 1858, the Irish-American fighter John C. Heenan sent a real 'challenge across the water', not to Bendigo but to the then 'Champion of England', Tom Sayers.
In January i860 Heenan set off for England carrying a considerable burden of expectation. He appealed to both ethnic and national loyalties - to Irish- Americans, he was fighting as 'a son of Erin', to American-born nativists (many of whom had supported his opponents at home), Heenan was now a represen- tative of 'Uncle Sammy', a defender of 'dear Columbia's pride'.19 (A similarly convenient move took place 100 years later when, by taking on the German Max Schmeling, Joe Louis became an American' as well as a 'Negro' fighter.)
In England, meanwhile, the Heenan-Sayers fight was greeted as the begin- ning of a 'Great Pugilistic Revival'; in truth, however, it represented old-style English pugilism's last stand.20 This round of Britain vs. the United States dif- fered in many ways from that which had taken place 50 years earlier. Steadily if slowly growing in the United States, prize-fighting had continued to decline in Britain, a shift in the balance of power reflected in the fact that it was now an English David (5ft 8in and 150 pounds) who was to face an American Goliath (4 inches taller and nearly 40 pounds heavier). Heenan, named for his home- town as the 'Benicia Boy', was also nine years younger than Sayers.21 While much of the American press looked forward to a test of national supremacy, the British press treated the event as a brutal anachronism and campaigned to stop it taking place. The Manchester Guardian, for example, argued against the association of healthy 'muscular art' with the 'unhealthy excitement' which sur- rounded prize-fighting:
The fighters . . . perform their part for money; not to develop their manly energies; nor do they assist in developing the physical powers of those around them. Instead of going to witness a prize-fight, let men don the gloves and learn and practice the art of fighting for themselves.22
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The rhetoric intensified, culminating in a parliamentary debate four days before the fight took place. One mp called for the Home Secretary and the Prime Min- ister to intervene and stop what was clearly a 'meditated breach of the peace'. Pursuing what he described as a 'moderate path', Palmerston argued that he could see no reason why a prize-fight should constitute a greater breach of the peace than a 'balloon ascent'.23
Heenan vs. Sayers went ahead on 17 April i860, in Farnborough, Hamp- shire, the town having been chosen partly because of its excellent rail links.24 Thousands of spectators attended. After 37 rounds, over two hours, and many injuries - Heenan was reduced to near-blindness in his right eye - the contest ended in chaos and a draw was declared.25 Although Bell's Life cheerfully debated who had come off worse, concluding that 'Heenan's mug was decidedly the most disfigured', the extreme violence of the fight shocked many.26 The New York Herald, meanwhile, complained that 'the Britons . . . stopped the fight in order to save their money':
Let Mr. Bull, who seems to be growing old and shaky about his pins, keep his five-pound notes - we are rich enough to do without them. We do not really want his money, but simply desired to let him know that we could whip him in a matter of muscle as well as in yachts, clip- per ships, steamboats, india-rubber shoes and other things, city rail- ways, sewing machines, the electric telegraph, reading machines, pretty women, and unpickable bank locks.27
The following month, in an essay on his walks into 'shy neighbourhoods', Charles Dickens, as 'the uncommercial traveller', noted 'the fancy of a humble artist' in small shop windows, 'as exemplified in two portraits representing Mr Thomas Sayers, of Great Britain, and Mr John Heenan, of the United States of America':
These illustrious men are highly coloured, in fighting trim and fighting attitude. To suggest the pastoral and meditative nature of their peaceful calling, Mr Heenan is represented by an emerald sward with primroses and other modest flowers springing up under the heels of his half-boots; while Mr Sayers is impelled to the administration of his favourite blow, the Auctioneer, by the silent eloquence of a village church. The humble homes of England, with their domestic virtues and honeysuckle porches, urge both heroes to go in and win; and the lark and other singing birds are observable in the upper air, ecstatically carolling their thanks to Heaven for a fight. On the whole, the associations entwined with the pugilistic art by this artist are much in the manner of Izaak Walton.28
Dickens's target is, as ever, hypocrisy and affectation: not boxing itself, but attempts to take the edge off a violent sport by wrapping it in a highly romanti- cized pastoralism.
80
ft &^te$& <tdte&V*&
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TXD 8JUDAT T"""1 <fSX TU T*MMTTy^T"M™**- ■UlrCtir JflHN fl HMBAK "MIC Itwtn »!»• iTg« J"fM t..«nri» Jir imumi1
25
Currier and Ives, 7fo Great Fight for the Championship: Between John C. Heenan 'TheBenicia Boy' and Tom Sayers 'Champion of England', i860, lithograph.
In the months that followed, portraits of the fighters and depictions of the fight itself gained wide circulation. The New York Illustrated News even sent over an engraver to pick up ringside drawings so that he could prepare the blocks on the trans-Atlantic voyage for immediate printing.29 Two of the most widely circulated prints were by J. B. Rowbotham and Currier and Ives; both are rather formal images of the boxers squaring off before the contest begins. Intended to commemorate an energetic and violent occasion, they are, ironically, static and peaceful (illus. 25). One of these prints catches the eye of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), which is set on 16 June 1904, the day the Times reported the sale of the Sayers-Heenan championship belt.30 Stephen is window- shopping when his eye is caught by 'a faded i860 print of Heenan boxing Sayers'.
Staring backers with square hats stood around the roped prizering. The heavyweights in light loincloths proposed gently each to the other his bulbous fists. And they are throbbing: heroes' hearts.31
The inappropriate gentleness of Victorian representations of boxing was something that Dickens, as we have seen, took comic advantage of. Disraeli, too, in his 1845 novel Sybil, brought pugilism and cosy domesticity together. After Sybil is arrested with her radical father at a Chartist gathering, a 'kind- hearted inspector' takes her home rather than leaving her to languish overnight in prison. There his wife puts her to bed in a comfortable room decorated with 'a piece of faded embroidery . . . and opposite it . . . portraits of [the pugilists] Dick Curtis and Dutch Sam, who had been the tutors of her husband, and now lived as heroes in his memory'. For them, there is no contradiction between the
81
male (pugilistic) and female (domestic) arts.32
But if the inhabitants of 'humble homes' were untroubled about the compatibility of an interest in boxing and a devotion to larks and honeysuckle porches, those of less humble dwellings were not so sure. In the weeks following the fight, Punch ran a series of cartoons in which 'extremely proper- looking personages' went to great lengths to disguise their interest in Sayers vs. Heenan (illus. 26). Certainly the days of un- abashed flash appreciation were long gone; Victorian gentlemen, like Disraeli's Egre- mont, generally had the 'good taste not to let [their] predilection for sports degener- ate into slang'.33 The predilection itself, however, did not die out.
One proper-looking personage who retained a lively interest in boxing was the publisher John Blackwood who, a week after the fight, wrote to George Lewes, then in Rome with George Eliot:
reTEllESTiaCi IKTELLiGEXCE,
KH.UX Hqt Ho nqmUUt unl umuntf |irvjic-kn'kiwr iwouiuftt '■ ffirt / n«. Gur^er; Sfitrfim' Ttttjntft «JK»»H/ 'at y* Hli tkthtfit 'IkUart'itml r|t Milt arm™ Tvb Sijcrj and lk< £n!cia Bo+tl*
I have not much news from London, the fight for the Championship monopolizing everyone's attention. It is quite comical and I cannot help feeling as keen as possible about gallant little Tom Sayers with his one arm maintaining such a fight. I am satisfied if he had not lost the use of his right arm he would have polished off the giant.
26
'Interesting
Intelligence',
Punch,
21 April i860.
Although he begins by talking of 'everyone' as if that does not include him- self, and describes the brouhaha as 'quite comical', Blackwood soon slips into a discussion of the details of the fight. His authoritative commentary is, however, quickly (dis)qualified by the un-Corinthian remark, 'I never saw a prize fight, and I daresay five minutes conversation with the worthy Tom would effectually cool my enthusiasm.'34 He had no intention of degenerat- ing into slang.
Three years later the poet William Allingham expressed a similarly tempered enthusiasm. His diary for 6 July 1863 excitedly records a glimpse of Sayers, 'a middle-sized but singularly well-knit figure of a man, strong, light, easy of movement, almost Greek in his poses but altogether natural and unconscious'. A few days later, having seen Sayers fight 'Young Brooks' in a Lymington cricket field, he expands on his reflections:
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The high-shouldered pugilist such as Leech draws is not the genuine article. Sayers has rather falling shoulders though wide and muscular, so has Heenan, and Tom King. Ease and freedom of movement charac- terizes them all, especially Sayers. They doubtless enjoy life in their way, so long as they keep within tolerable bounds, and the fighting itself is a great animal pleasure.35
Yet even while praising Sayers, both Blackwood and Allingham felt it necessary to distance themselves from the boxer; Blackwood by suggesting the limits of his conversation, Allingham by alluding to the pugilistic lifestyle and the necessity of keeping it 'within tolerable bounds'. William Thackeray mocked such equiv- ocation in his i860 'roundabout' essay on the Heenan-Sayers fight for the Corn- hill Magazine entitled 'On Some Late Great Victories'. 'Ought Mr. Sayers be honoured for being brave, or punished for being naughty?' What the Victorian public wanted, Thackeray complained, was to have it both ways: to say to 'naughty' Tom Sayers, 'we are moralists, and reprimand you; and you are hereby reprimanded accordingly', but, at the same time, to reserve the option of chang- ing their minds. 'I mean that fighting, of course, is wrong; but that there are occasions when, &c. . .'3<5
Changing attitudes to boxing typified the gap between the Regency world that Thackeray had grown up in and the Victorian world of his adulthood. As a schoolboy he had loved the 'extraordinary slang' of Pierce Egan's rakish tales, but as an adult he recalled Tom and Jerry as 'a little vulgar'; 'brilliant but some- what barbarous, it must be confessed'. 'There is enjoyment of life in these young bucks of 1823 which contrasts strangely with our feelings of i860.'37 Egan's tales of sporting gentlemen were now only to be found 'in the corner of some old country-house library' of a Corinthian 'grandpappa'.38
The vulgar energetic world of the Corinthians is immortalized in Vanity Fair (1845), set during the Napoleonic Wars. The novel contains many incidental ref- erences to the Fancy, most of which are associated with dissipated young men who hanker after the life of Tom and Jerry, but who don't, somehow, quite come up to scratch. After a drunken night at Vauxhall Gardens, for example, Jos Sedley tries to fight a hackney-coachman but instead is carried off to bed. The next day, his friends, knowing he can't remember a thing, tease Sedley that he 'hit him flat out, like Molyneux. The watchman says he never saw a fellow go down so straight.'39
The Crawley family is full of boxers. After being sent down from Cambridge, Rawdon Crawley becomes a 'celebrated "blood" or dandy about town': 'Boxing, rat-hunting, the fives-court, and four-in-hand driving were then the fashion of our British aristocracy; and he was adept in all these noble sciences.' When Becky Sharp (who will marry him) asks his sister whether he is clever, she is told that he has 'not an idea in the world beyond his horses, and his regiment, and his hunting, and his play'. Rawdon's uncle, the Reverend Bute Crawley, has sim- ilar tastes. While studying theology at Oxford, he 'had thrashed all the best bruisers of the "town"', and 'carried his taste for boxing and athletic exercises
83
into life; there was not a fight within twenty miles at which he was not present' (illus. 51).40
The most fully developed portrait of an Egan-like young Buck is the Rev- erend's son, James Crawley, a good-looking 'young Oxonian' who has 'acquired the inestimable polish of living in a fast set at a small college'. Excited by a coach journey with 'the Tutbury Pet' and a night at Tom Cribb's Arms, where he was 'enchanted by the Pet's conversation', he proceeds to his aunt's house to ingra- tiate himself into her will. There, however, he gets increasingly drunk on her good port, and after describing 'the different pugilistic qualities' of his favourite fighters, offers to take on his cousin 'with or without gloves'. This then leads to a disquisition on his favourite theme, 'old blood':
There's nothing like old blood; no, dammy, nothing like it. I'm none of your radicals. I know what it is to be a gentleman, dammy. . . look at the fellers in a fight; aye, look at a dawg killing rats, - which is it wins? the good blooded ones.
The more 'ruby fluid' James ingests, the stronger his devotion to good old blood becomes. The example of 'good blood' he provides, however, suggests that it is a fluid he himself lacks:
Why, only last term, just before I was rusticated, that is, I mean just before I had the measles, ha, ha, - there was me and Ringwood of Christchurch, Bob Ringwood, Lord Cinqbar's son, having our beer at the 'Bell' at Blenheim, when the Banbury bargeman offered to fight either of us for a bowl of punch. I couldn't. My arm was in a sling . . . Well, sir, I couldn't finish him, but Bob had his coat off at once - he stood up to the Banbury man for three minutes, and polished him off in four rounds, easy. Gad, how he did drop, sire, and what was it? Blood, sir, all blood.41
His aunt sends him away in disgust.
All this pugilistic ambition, and interest, is presented as not only rather ridiculous, but as out of touch with modern life. For Thackeray, pugilism epit- omizes the profligate world of the Regency, a world that appealed to villains but also to students and minor army officers who refuse to grow up.42 Captain Mc- Murdo is a 49-year-old 'Waterloo man' whose barracks room is 'hung around with boxing, sporting, and dancing pictures, presented to him by comrades as they retired from the regiment, and married and settled into a quiet life'. He is pictured sitting up in bed 'reading in Bell's Life an account of . . . [a] fight between the Tutbury Pet and the Barking Butcher'.43 In Robert Browning's 1858 poem 'A Likeness', prints of boxers are relegated to the 'spoils of youth' that adorn a bachelor's room, along with 'masks, gloves and foils' and 'the cast from a fist ("not, alas! Mine, / But my master's, the Tipton Slasher")'; in Thackeray's novel, such artifacts are the spoils of eternal bachelors.44
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The suggestion that an interest in boxing is rather adolescent (and hence mildly deplorable) is also made in George Eliot's Middlemarch, written slightly later (1871), and set slightly later, just before the Reform Bill of 1832, in a small Midlands community. Fred Vincy, 'a young gentleman without capital' and, despite a university education, 'generally unskilled', finds it particularly difficult to find a place for himself in the modern world. But Vincy is saved from a life of fecklessness by the love of his childhood sweetheart, Mary Garth, and eventual employment in estate management with her father, Caleb. A key moment in his transformation comes when he chances upon six farm labourers attacking the agents employed to build the new railway. Vincy tries to take control from the safety of his horse until one of the men shouts 'a defiance which he did not know to be Homeric': 'Yo git off your horse, young measter, and I'll have a round wi' ye, I wull. You daredn't come on w'out your hoss an' whip. I'll soon knock the breath out on ye, I would.' Vincy, who 'felt confidence in his power of boxing', tells them, 'I'll come back presently, and have a round with you all in turn, if you like.' Both Vincy and the farm labourers have grown up in a now outmoded feudal world and, uncertain how to act in the modern era that the railway rep- resents, they easily fall back on the old (pugilistic) methods of settling disputes. But when Caleb Garth hears of Vincy's pugnacious intentions - 'It would be a good lesson for him. I shall not be five minutes' - he quickly intervenes. Garth, 'a powerful man . . [who] knew little of any fear except the fear of hurting oth- ers and the fear of having to speechify', is a modern man and knows how to operate in the modern world. Instead of fighting and teaching 'lessons', he reasons with the farm workers and reassures them about the impact of the railway on their livelihood.45 On the following page, Fred Vincy falls off his horse into the mud - his real education is beginning.
The idealized Adam Bede, the eponymous hero of Eliot's second book, needs no such education. Published in 1859, but set during the Napoleonic wars, the novel contrasts its protagonist's fighting style with that of his rival in love, Arthur Donnithorne. From the opening pages of the novel, we are meant to admire Adam as a particularly British physical specimen:
a large-boned muscular man nearly six feet high, with a back so flat and a head so well poised that when he drew himself up to take a more distant survey of his work, he had the air of a soldier standing at ease.46
Adam Bede is 'a Saxon', but with 'a mixture of Celtic blood' - a complete Briton. 'We want such fellows as he to lick the French,' a bystander remarks. Young squire Arthur Donnithorne is, by contrast, 'well-washed, high-bred, white- handed, yet looking as if he could deliver well from the left shoulder, and floor his man'. A boxer at Oxford, Arthur nonetheless acknowledges that Adam would knock him 'into next week' if they were to 'have a battle'.47
As indeed happens, inevitably, when Arthur seduces Hetty Sorel, whom Adam loves, and then abandons her. 'If you get hold of a chap that's got no
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shame nor conscience to stop him,' Adam had once remarked, 'you must try what you can do by bunging his eyes up.'48 When Adam shows himself to be such a chap, he and Arthur do battle.
The delicate-handed gentleman was a match for the workman in every- thing but strength, and Arthur's skill in parrying enabled him to protract the struggle for some long moments. But between unarmed men, the battle is to the strong, where the strong is no blunderer, and Arthur must sink under a well-planted blow of Adam's, as a steel rod is broken by an iron bar. The blow soon came, and Arthur fell, his head lying concealed in a tuft of fern, so that Adam could only discern his darkly-clad body.49
Looked at from one perspective, this passage, published in the same year as The Origin of Species, presents a classic scene of what Darwin called 'the law of bat- tle' - instinct drives the two men to fight, 'with the instinctive fierceness of pan- thers', over a possible mate.50 The very blows are forces of nature, 'like lightning'. From another perspective (and I would suggest, more centrally) the scene encapsulates class struggle, labour (represented by the industrial image of the blacksmith's 'iron bar') defeating feudal aristocracy (a sword-like 'steel rod'). This kind of scene occurs many times in Victorian fiction, with interest- ing variations. Here, it is worth noting that, although Adam's deference, and Christian pity, have returned by the beginning of the following chapter, he refuses to shake hands with Arthur: 'I don't forget what's owing to you as a gentleman; but in this thing we're man and man.'51
A year later, in the month of the Heenan-Sayers fight - April i860 - George Eliot's third book, The Mill on the Floss, was published. While Eliot used 'mill' in her title to refer to a building on a river, the word also had another meaning in boxing slang - the fight was a 'mill'.52 These alternatives proved irresistible to Punch, a magazine which relished the most hackneyed of puns. The humour of the cartoon lies in the seemingly obvious incompatibility between the novels (and drawing rooms) of Victorian womanhood and the very thought of a prize- fight (illus. 27). 53 This was a sentiment which now was accepted even by read- ers of Blackwood's Magazine. 54In this context, it was of course great fun to make jokes about women reading fight-reports and even, occasionally, fighting them- selves. Thomas Ingoldby's 1840 poem 'The Ghost' describes a man who fears 'his spouse might knock his head off', for 'spite of all her piety, her arm / She'd sometimes exercise when in a passion'. The narrator concludes,
Within a well- roped ring, or on a stage,
Boxing may be a very pretty Fancy, When Messrs. Burke or Bendigo engage;
— 'Tis not so well in Susan, Jane, or Nancy: To get well mill 'd by any one's an evil,
But by a lady - 'tis the very Devil.55
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27
'Constance (literary) and Edith (literal)', Punch, 28 April i860.
£iffl*fan« IfHtnrii). " Hjivk vim pirjhOTinn Aii-imwW'Tlai !'[«■ era T11K FLOiH,' DSAitT" JfrtM ftorraf). "SV>, r*»*tt>, I ((.kfr. !«jt; and I tmm TIlAf TOti cm fisd iJrxmaa TO INTHltaT totf IK TOX LHJSMITWIf «P * DlitilWTIXU I'lmtf-lUHT ! "
In i860, the joke seemed never ending in Punch cartoons, which showed men 'initiating' women (readers of Belle's Life, sic), and mothers handing over their babies to a burly boxing tutor (illus. 28).
The association of The Mill on the Floss with 'milling' is actually not as absurd as Punch had implied. A novel of childhood and adolescence, it focuses on the relationship between a brother and sister, Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Tom Tulliver is consistently depicted as a lad of honour' and a keen fighter. He particularly likes to read, and relate, 'fighting stories', and so his fellow pupil, Philip Wakem, who is said to have been 'brought up like a girl' and whose deformity makes him 'unfit for active sports', tells him the story of Ulysses, 'a little fellow, but very wise and cunning', in his battle against the Cyclops, Polyphemus. '0 what fun!' says Tom, but his words have an ironic resonance later in the novel when, some years later, he accuses Philip Wakem of not 'acting the part of a man and a gentleman' with his sister, Maggie. Philip replies, 'It is manly of you to talk in this way to me. Giants have an immemorial right to stupidity and insolent abuse.' Wakem 's response recalls the Homer of their youth, and Tom is now cast as Cyclops. Tom's pugnacity exemplifies what Eliot terms 'masculine philosophy', yet it is a mas- culinity of a particularly limited (schoolboy) type, one whose morality is based on strength. However many Greek verbs he learns, Tom is unable to be anything other than 'an excellent bovine lad' who believes in the 'boys' justice' of the fist.56
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28
'Muscular Educa- tion - The Private Tutor', Punch, 26 May i860.
MUSCULAR (etlGATlOH-THe PRIVATE TUTffltt 1 Hii lit. Ux'ia ! "
The guilt-free pleasure of eighteenth-century fight scenes was no longer possible for Victorian writers or readers. Fighting could not be condoned, except, of course, in the service of a moral cause. Happily, moral causes were not hard to find; so much so that in 1901 George Bernard Shaw felt able to condemn what he described as the 'abominable vein of retaliatory violence all through the literature of the nineteenth century'.57
An exemplary case of morally justified retaliation occurs in Chapter Five of Vanity Fair. This is a very different occasion from the prize-fights mocked elsewhere in the novel. At 'Dr Swishtail's famous school', Dobbin, the son of a grocer, is consistently tormented by boys only slightly more secure in their status. Known to them by the name of 'Figs', he is neither a dandy nor a 'bruiser'. Although at his happiest when left alone to read the Arabian Nights while the rest of the school pursue sports, Dobbin cannot ignore the spectacle of 'the great chief and dandy' Cuff tormenting a smaller boy. The narrator speculates that Dobbin may be 'revolting' against the 'exercise of tyranny' or perhaps hankers after revenge. Whatever the reason, his coming forth is compared to that of 'little David' against 'brazen Goliath', and the North American colonies against George 111.58 The narrator, claiming that he has not 'the pen of a Napier or a Bell's Life', nonetheless describes the thirteenth, and final, round of the ensuing fight in the manner of that sporting journal:
It was the last charge of the Guard (that is, it would have been, only Waterloo had not yet taken place) - it was Ney's column breasting the hills of La Haye Sainte, bristling with ten thousand bayonets, and crowned with twenty eagles - it was the shouts of the beef-eating
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British, as leaping down the hill, they rushed to hug the enemy in the savage arms of battle -in other words, Cuff coming up full of pluck, but quite reeling and groggy, the Fig-merchant put in his left as usual on his adversary's nose, and sent him down for the last time.59
In this passage, which was to inspire similar parodies by James Joyce and Ralph Ellison in the twentieth century, Thackeray does more than simply show his familiarity both with the work of the military historian Sir William Napier and the popular magazine, Bell's Life in London. His target is the all too easy interchange between the discourses of prize-fighting and war (illus. 46). 6o
SCHOOLBOY BOXERS: 'THE NATURAL AND THE ENGLISH WAY'
The 1850s and '60s saw the creation of many new public schools, in which 'rep- resentatives of old families [mixed] with the sons of the new middle classes'. These schools, claims Asa Briggs, instigated 'a gradual fusion of classes', by 'drawing upon a common store of values'.61 Sport, placed at the heart of the cur- riculum, was one of the central ways in which those values were transmitted. Public school sporting stories became enormously popular, with Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) starting the trend and reinventing the schoolboy as a heroic character.62
Thomas Hughes's school was Rugby, whose headmaster, Thomas Arnold, epitomized the values of what became known as muscular Christianity.63 Good character depended on a healthy mind in a healthy body - mens sana in corpore sano.64 Although rugby and cricket are also considered, the delicate relation- ship between physical prowess and moral character finds its most vivid expres- sion in the novel's depiction of boxing. Hughes begins a chapter entitled 'The Fight' with a warning:
Let those young persons whose stomachs are not strong, or who think a good set-to with the weapons which God has given us all, an uncivi- lized, unchristian, or ungentlemanly affair, just skip this chapter at once, for it won't be to their taste.
The chapter chronicles Brown's initiation into muscular and manly Christian ways through a fight with, of course, a bigger boy. After the fight is over, Tom and 'the Slogger' shake hands 'with great satisfaction and mutual respect'. 'Fighting', Hughes concludes, 'is the natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels' (illus. 29). 65
Throughout the next hundred years, in the pages of magazines at least, English boys continued to find quarrels which needed settling. In 1866 Edwin Brett's Boys of England was founded as 'A Magazine of Sport, Travel, Fun and Adventure', but it was not until 1879 and the launch of The Boy's Own Paper that sport became a staple of schoolboy stories. In 1948 E. S. Turner joked that
29
Arthur Hughes, illustration for Tom Brown s Schooldays (1869 edition).
'any historian of the remote future relying exclusively on old volumes of boys' magazines for his knowledge of the British way of life in the early twentieth century . . . will record that the country was the battleground of an unending civil war between a small vigorous race known as Sportsmen and a large, slug- gish and corrupt race known as Slackers'.66 The battleground extended far beyond the school walls. After the First World War, Marvel ran a series of stories by Arthur S. Handy in which parsons, newspaper editors, farmers, dockers, millionaires, plumbers and taxi drivers all ended up as boxing heroes, while in the Champion, 'sport grew from a fetish to a frenzy' (illus. 57). 6?
In his advocacy of boxing, Thomas Hughes had higher ambitions than the mere settling of schoolboy quarrels and desires, or the exercising of 'the temper, and . . . the muscles of the back and legs'.
Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.68
On the one hand, fighting is 'natural', especially if you are English; on the other,
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'rightly understood', it must always have a 'chivalrous' and Christian purpose behind it.69 In Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Hughes distinguished the self- indulgent 'muscleman' from the 'muscular Christian' who, like St Paul, brings his body into 'subjection'.70
Hughes's determination to avoid celebrating the mere 'muscleman' meant that for all his descriptions of sports and fighting, his works give very little sense of the bodies involved in them. The male body is present less as something con- crete and material than as a sign of, or instrument for, chivalry. This was not the case in the work of Hughes's near contemporary, Walter Pater, whose essays, from 'Winckelmann' (1867) to 'The Age of Athletic Prizemen' (1894), marked yet another revival of interest in Greek sculpture and the 'Hellenic ideal' of the male body.71 Published just two years before the modern Olympics began, 'The Age of Athletic Prizemen' celebrates 'peaceful combat as a fine art': an art mani- fested in sculptures of athletes and their poetic equivalents, Pindar's poems, 'sung in language suggestive of a sort of metallic beauty'.72 For Pater the beauty of these works derived from their celebration of the fleeting moment: the ath- lete is poised 'just there for a moment, between the animal and spiritual worlds', between actions, and between youth and maturity. The emphasis on stillness ('repose' is Pater's word) suggests in turn what he calls 'sexless beauty': the white marble statues have been 'purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion'. The young athletes memorialized are curiously 'virginal yet virile'.73 They represent the unity of unstained mind and unstained body.
St Paul's emphasis on subjugation appealed to both Hellenists and Muscu- lar Christians. Pater stressed 'the religious significance of the Greek athletic service' and argued that 'the athletic life certainly breathes of abstinence, of rule, of the keeping un der of oneself \74 But while Hughes promoted the moral conse- quences of such subjugation, Pater's emphasis was aesthetic.75
QUEENSBERRY AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF THE AMATEUR IDEAL
In many different contexts in nineteenth-century Britain, Asa Briggs wrote, there was 'an interplay between what happened nationally and what happened in the schools'.76 Common to both was the codification of sports. The Football Association was founded in 1863, the cricketing yearbook Wisden was first pro- duced in 1864, the Rugby Union rules (based on the Rugby School rules) were formulated in 1871, and in 1866 the Pugilists' Benevolent Association adopted a series of rules partly devised by the lightweight champion boxer, Arthur Cham- bers, but famously published, the following year, under the name of their 24- year-old endorser, the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas.77 Boxing regulations had gradually become more rigorous during Victoria's reign: Broughton's 1743 rules were superseded in 1838 by the London Prize Rules (which were revised in 1853). These specified the size of a boxing ring, the use of turf, the role of seconds and umpires, and outlawed head-butting, kicking and
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biting. Most importantly, they also decreed that if the contest was undecided all bets were off.78 The Queensberry Rules (essentially a modified version of those which had governed sparring for many years) went much further towards bridg- ing the gap between the amateur and professional sport. All the grappling holds now associated with wrestling were disallowed, thus ensuring a more upright con- test; weight categories for boxers were to be strictly observed, and gloves, which had been used mainly in training, were now to be compulsory in fights. Under the London Prize Rules, fights were to the finish, although exhausted fighters or their seconds might agree to a draw (as happened after 37 rounds in the case of Heenan vs. Sayers). Under the Queensberry rules, there would be a set number of rounds (usually no more than twenty), limited to three minutes each, with one minute between rounds; a man who was knocked down was allowed ten seconds to get to his feet or lose the fight by a knockout).
After the 1860s old-style prize-fights continued clandestinely, but they were no longer the national events that Sayers vs. Heenan had been. Endorsed by organizations such as the Amateur Athletic Club, the Queensberry rules were increasingly chosen over the London Prize Rules. Bare-knuckle boxing was giving way to boxing in its modern form.
Shortly after the end of the Civil War, the Marquess of Queensberry, accompanied by Arthur Chambers, visited the United States for, as his grand- son notes, 'agreement with American supporters of the game was essential'.79 Queensberry 's rules came into effect slightly later in America than in Britain; John L. Sullivan's last contest under the London Prize Ring rules took place in 1889. In the United States, the dichotomy between attitudes towards profes- sional and amateur boxing was particularly pronounced, perhaps because pro- fessional prize-fighting was even more violent and disorderly there. From the late 1840s until the Civil War, tension between 'natives' and the growing num- bers of Irish immigrants found expression in a series of fiercely contested fights
30
Mathew Brady, two soldiers posed as boxers at a Federal camp at Petersburg, Virginia, April 1865.
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between various pairings of Tom Hyer, Yankee Sullivan, John Morrissey and John C. Heenan. The most colourful of these fighters was John Morrissey. Prize- fighting was only one element in what was effectively a wrong-side-of-the-tracks Benjamin Franklin career, ranging from street gangs to political 'shoulder-hit- ting' (persuading voters to make the 'right' choice) to the founding of the Saratoga race-track (with accompanying lucrative gambling opportunities) to serving two terms in Congress. Today, Morrissey is remembered for his involve- ment in the murder of William Poole - Bill the Butcher - the leader of a so- called Native American (anti-Irish) gang. Herbert Asbury told the story in The Gangs of New York (1927) and Martin Scorsese adapted it for the cinema in 2002. 8o
The passing of legislation to outlaw prize-fighting (in Massachusetts in 1849; in New York in 1859) coincided with a boom in sparring academies and cheap boxing manuals. Partly as a result of the Heenan-Sayers contest, boxing also became a popular form of camp recreation during the American Civil War; 'a poignant if fleeting alternative to the ghastliness of battle' (illus. 30). 8l From the antebellum period onwards, working-class prize-fighting was considered corrupt and deplorable, while genteel sparring was welcomed as a means of restoring 'vigour' (a popular word particularly by the end of the century) to middle-class men. Reformers such Thomas Wentworth Higginson argued that sports such as boxing counteracted what they saw as the inherently emasculat- ing effects of city life.82 'I am satisfied', announced Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the asthmatic Autocrat of the Breakfast Table', in 1858, 'that such a set of black- coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast of in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage.'83 One of the delights of 'a manly self-hood' that Walt Whitman celebrated in his i860 'Poem of Joys' was the 'joy of the strong-brawn'd fighter, towering in the arena, in perfect condition, conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent' (illus. 31).84
In the late 1870s and '80s, Henry James created American protagonists whose masculinity was directly shaped by the Civil War and its aftermath. Vet- erans of the war like Basil Ransom (in The Bostonians, 1886) and Christopher Newman (in The American, 1877) were 'national types' whose instinct for battle had been redirected into commercial and romantic ventures. To be 'a powerful specimen of an American', Newman must first of all be physically fit, strong and vigorous. A product of 'the elastic soil of the West', he was 'not a man to whom fatigue was familiar'; his rhetoric, too, involves delivering blows to his competitors and generally putting their noses 'out of joint'. It is not simply that Newman's 'physical capital' correlates with his financial and moral worth; rather, James suggests, it is his natural physical 'vigour' that allows his other accomplishments. 'What should I be afraid of?', he announces, 'I am too ridicu- lously tough'.85 But Basil Ransom worries that men like Newman are becoming rare. The 'masculine tone', he complains, is under threat.86 Perhaps America was growing 'old and soft'.87
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31
George A. Hayes, Bare Knuckles c. 1870-85.
32
George Bellows, Business-men's Class, ymca, lithograph, 1916.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote directly of the nationalistic (Anglo-Saxon American) imperative behind 'the strenuous life': 'There is no place in the world for nations who have become enervated by the soft and easy life, or who have lost their fibre of vigorous hardness and masculinity'.88 Roosevelt also believed that boxing was also an ideal sport for city dwellers. 'When obliged to live in cities,' he wrote in his 1913 autobiography, 'I for a long time found that boxing and wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and attractive form.' But it was not only the possibility of a vigorous workout in a limited space that appealed. 'Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal development', he maintained, 'must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent' (illus. 32). 89
'box, don't fight'
In Britain, finding vent for dangerous urban 'animal spirits' was one of the am- bitions of the Christian socialist movement, which Thomas Hughes founded with F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. One of their earliest initiatives was a night school and a series of Working Men's Associations. In 1854 the evening classes developed into the establishment of the Working Men's College. When Hughes proposed to teach boxing there, Maurice was alarmed, and indeed 'was afraid that the fighting in Tom Brown's Schooldays might be used to justify the brutalities of professional prize-fighting', in particular the notorious contest between Sayers and Heenan.90
Maurice need not have worried about associations of amateur sparring with the dying days of bare-knuckle prize-fighting for, even in the 1860s, and even in Britain, the two sports were coming to be seen as radically different.91 Hughes loathed prize-fighting, writing in an 1864 letter that 'fighting in cold blood for money is under any conditions as brutal and degrading a custom as any nation can tolerate'.92 But that was not to say that 'round shoulders, narrow chests, stiff limbs' were to be condoned; they were 'as bad as defective grammar and arithmetic'. Everybody at the college had to box with Hughes, and the sparring classes 'grew into informal social gatherings'.93
In 1880, the British Amateur Boxing Association was founded with the motto, 'Box, don't fight', and with this in mind, social and religious reformers encouraged the setting up of boxing clubs in working-class areas. The violence of the street, it was thought, could be redirected into the gym. In his 1899 study of East London, Walter Besant wrote of the importance of bringing the public school ideal into poor neighbourhoods:
They work off their restlessness and get rid of the devil in the gym- nasium with the boxing-gloves and with single stick; they contract habits of order and discipline; they become infected with some of the upper-class ideals, especially as regards honor and honesty, purity and temperance.
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The language Besant uses here is suffused with, and indeed confuses, religious and medical imagery. Boxing would not only enact a kind of exorcism ('fifteen minutes with a stout adversary knock the devil out of a lad - the devil of restlessness and pugnacity'), but also, he suggests, become a kind of beneficial contagion.94 This might also have other, more immediately practical, advantages. When, in Besant's novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), Angela Messenger worries about security in her Utopian Palace of Delight (a model for the real People's Palace) her friend, the aristocrat-in- disguise Harry Le Breton, suggests engaging 'a professor of the noble art of self-defence'.95
In East London, Besant recalled the success of a church boxing club in Shoreditch, and urged readers who 'think that this is not the ideal amusement for a clergyman' to think again (illus. 33). 96 In fact many churches and later synagogues ran gyms and supported fighters.97 The close involvement of organizations such as the Boy Scout Movement, the Jewish Lads' Brigade and Boys' Town in amateur boxing forms the basis of many fictional (as well as true) boxing stories well into the twentieth century.98 The 'boxer-and-the priest' movie did particularly well during the thirties.99
Needless to say, Hollywood notwithstanding, boxing did not always succeed in ridding the streets of the devil. In his book on the Kray twins, John Pearson describes