2

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 boxing’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 spontaneous and participatory forms of entertainment towards the more formally-organised 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, undoubtedly 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 tradesmen 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, ‘Amphitheatre’, and school near Adam and Eve Court off London’s Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), where he taught boxing along with quarterstaff, backsword and 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 gentlemen’ (illus. 9). Samuel Johnson’s uncle, Andrew, ran a similar booth at Smithfield meat market.⁷

8 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.

9 Anonymous printmaker, Figg’s Card, c. 1794.

Although boxing matches were frequently advertised as ‘trials of manhood’, women as well as men could often be found fighting at the booths and beargarden (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 Nogüe’s Voyages et Aventures (1728) reported matches between girls and women ‘stripped to the waist’; William Hickey, meanwhile, described coming upon two women boxing near Drury Lane in 1749, ‘their faces entirely covered 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 surprised 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 hopelessness, 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

10 Butler Clowes (after John Collett), The Female Bruisers, 1770, mezzotint.

Boxing began to flourish in the early eighteenth century, at the expense of other sports such as quarterstaff 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 Enlightenment project of systemization and law-making thus extended to pugilism, with the first written rules of prize-fighting published under Broughton’s name in 1743.¹⁶ 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 beginnings to one man than boxing owed to him’ (illus. 12).¹⁷

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 horse handicapping and began dividing boxers into light, middle, and heavyweight 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.

11 Sal Dab Giving Monsieur a Receipt in Full, 1766, mezzotint.

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 separated from the platform by a gap where the other spectators stood, their eyes level with the pugilists’ feet.

12 Broughton’s Rules, 16 August 1743.

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’:

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 glamour 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-Puritan 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 Drayton, produced the Annalia Dubrensia, a collection of poems celebrating the games as a revival of the ‘Golden Age’s Glories’, and defending their ‘harmlesse merriment’ from Puritan censure. John Stratford’s poem lists many classical 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.

A desire to evoke classical boxing led Figg, and Broughton after him, to describe 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 become 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 CLIO 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 ‘Alba’s 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 college, 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 boxer is initiated. ‘He learned to swear very prettily, lie with a good Grace, flatter and deceive, promise any thing, 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 ‘season[ing] his Discourses with Bribery, Corruption, and Hanover.’³⁰

‘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 classical origins.³¹ Broughton’s advertisement is even quoted in a footnote.³² Fielding’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 Homerican 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 advantage 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 forgot 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 language of classical poetry. In Joseph Andrews (1742), we are momentarily anxious for Parson Adams when his opponent concludes ‘(to use the Language of fighting) 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’.³⁶ 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-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 exquisite delight in seeing them, convey little pleasure in the feeling’.³⁹ One opponent 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 mutton 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, fighting 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 lodging. 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 revealed. 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 trouble. Adams, the first muscled if not muscular Christian, proceeds with ‘no weapons but what Nature had furnished him with’, and, it seems, some surreptitiously 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 for a good punch-up. Fighting (like sex) is ubiquitous in Fielding’s novels; something 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 Fielding 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 handshake with the balance of power unchanged), rather than tragic and radical (epitomized 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 decided 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 . . .⁵⁰

Some years later the prize-fighter Daniel Mendoza approvingly cited this passage, 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 Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, against the Hanoverian King George II (for whom both Tom Jones, and Broughton’s patron, the Duke of Cumberland, fought). Exactly contemporary with Tom Jones, William Hogarth’s The March to Finchley (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 translated into civil war’ or ‘the natural fighting spirit of the people, cheered on by an excited crowd’.52 To define Britishness, as Broughton did, in the pseudo-military vocabulary of ‘championism’ (a concoction of pugnacious Protestanism, egalitarianism, 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 delicious’ 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 having 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 concludes 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 boxing, 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. Contests continued to be staged, but gradually moved away from the metropolitan centres.⁵⁸ Ten years earlier, as Paul Whitehead had observed in ‘The Gymnasiad’, 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 disbanded 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 everyone was unhappy at the prospect of the boxing academies closing. An appreciation 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 Londoners. 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 describing 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 Animals’ 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 dissection 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, 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 circumstance 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 supplying 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 eighteenth-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 Mendoza lost the first fight and immediately wrote to a popular newspaper complaining 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 followed 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 championship (in dubious circumstances) to John Jackson.

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 lucrative, 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 ‘Fashionables’, 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) include 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 genteel 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).

13 School for Boxing, 1788.

14 Thomas Rowlandson, Six Stages of Marring a Face, May 1792, etching.

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 earliest 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 comicconservative 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 technique 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’.

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 unfortunate 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 Beatée must pay the Money about which they quarreled.’ Should his readers worry about the implications 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 allows ‘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 deliberately 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 protégé of Edmund Burke, was elected to Parliament in 1784 and by 1792 became one of the most ardent supporters 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. Windham 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 nickname) 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 condemned 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:

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 circumstances 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-fighting in turn had become a representation of war.

‘The cult of heroic endeavour and aggressive maleness that was so pronounced 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 certainly 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 convivial 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 particular, 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 matches were frequently organized to enact and illustrate anxieties about new immigrant populations (Jewish and Irish), no foreigner had challenged an English champion since 1733.87 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 slaveowners, 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 Northumberland, 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 protégé 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 challenging Cribb, by then champion of England (which at that time also meant champion 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 feverish atmosphere of the day:

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 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 illprepared Molineaux in what the Times described as a ‘most obstinate and sanguinary 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 jingoism 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 Go’.⁹⁸ Works such as ‘Defence of Boxing’ (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,’ 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 masculinity. In Boxiana, the Protestant Irish Pierce Egan sometimes claimed boxing 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 physically 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, gallantly 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 Englishman, 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 – I 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 yeoman, 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 ‘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).¹⁰⁵ Cobbett, however, did not refer to Belcher’s reputation 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 dancing 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 eighteenth-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 meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’¹⁰⁷ Three years later, in Auld Reikie, 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’:

17 Benjamin Marshall, James Belcher, Bare-Knuckle Champion of England, c. 1803, oil on canvas.

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, unfailing 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 consciousness 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 defeated 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 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 Cambridge in 1806, Byron took up boxing with great passion, initially as part of a rigorous regime of exercise and dieting; he quickly lost 3½ 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 acquaintance 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 8½inches); 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 accomplishments.’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 lameness 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

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 XCVII, 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 London (1821), a work lavishly illustrated by his friends, Robert and George Cruikshank (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, 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, and poets . . . 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 committing 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 appealing. 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 Camænæ [The Muses love alternating verses.]¹³⁵

An insistence on the value of alternating between the mental and corporeal, or more, an insistence on the necessity of the physical for ‘the ethereal’, recurs 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 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 boxing 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