1 Albert Camus, ‘The Minotaur, or The Stop in Oran’ (1954), in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York, 1970), p. 123.
2 Quoted in John Eligon, ‘Even in Defeat, Jones Remains Center of Attention’, New York Times, 3 October 2005, Section D, p. 5.
3 Plato, Protagoras, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie (Harmondsworth, 1956), p. 73. See also Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth, 1960), pp. 34–5; Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin, TX, 2004).
4 Gary Wills, ‘Muhammad Ali’ (1975), in I’m a Little Special: A Muhammad Ali Reader, ed. Gerald Early (London, 1999), p. 166.
5 When We Were Kings, dir. Taylor Hackford and Leon Gast (1997).
6 A. J. Liebling, The Sweet Science (1956) (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 5. On the endemic nostalgia of boxing commentators, see A. J. Liebling, ‘The University of Eight Avenue’, A Neutral Corner (New York, 1990), p. 31.
7 Philostratus, Gymnasticus, in Waldo E. Sweet, Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook with Translations (Oxford, 1987), p. 223.
1 Philostratus, Gymnasticus, in Stephen G. Miller, Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources (Berkeley, CA, 1991), p. 31. On Greek nostalgia in this period, see Michael Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (New Haven, ct, 1987), p. 4; Jason König, Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 7. On comparable late-Victorian nostalgia, see Donald G. Kyle, ‘E. Norman Gardiner and the Decline of Greek Sport’, in Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology, ed. Donald G. Kyle and Gary D. Stark (College Station, TX, 1990), pp. 7–44.
2 On the ritual significance of the Thera paintings, and in particular the boys’ shaved heads, see Ellen N. Davis, ‘Youth and Age in the Thera Frescoes’, American Journal of Archaeology, 90, no. 4 (October 1986), 399–406. See also Nanno Marinatos, Art and Religion in Thera: Reconstructing a Bronze Age (Athens, 1984). On the implications of the skeletal disorder of one of the figures, see Susan Ferrence and Gordon Bendersky, ‘Deformity in the “Boxing Boys”’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 48, no. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 105–23.
3 R. A. Hartley, History and Bibliography of Boxing Books (Alton, Hants, 1988), p. 6.
4 Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World, p. 153. On boxing in Samoan funeral games, see James Frazer, ‘The Killing of the Divine King’, in Aftermath: A Supplement to The Golden Bough (London, 1990), p. 314.
5 Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (London, 1993), pp. 412–53.
6 Réne Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977), p. 8.
7 Andrew Stewart, Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1997), p. 32; Virgil Nemoianu, ‘René Girard and the Dialectics of Imperfection’, in To Honor René Girard, ed. Alphonse Juilland (Saratoga, CA, 1986), p. 8. See also Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford, CA, 1987).
8 Michael Silk, Homer: The Iliad (Cambridge, 1987), p. 104.
9 James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Durham, NC, 1994), p. 210.
10 Jasper Grifffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980), p. 193.
11 Homer, Iliad, trans. Martin Hammond (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 382.
12 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York, 1991), pp. 124–6.
13 Homer, Odyssey, pp. 270–73.
14 On the suitors’ attitudes to games see Leslie Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Princeton, 1999), p. 255.
15 Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World, p. 70.
16 Tom Winnifrith, ‘Funeral Games in Homer and Virgil’, in Leisure in Art and Literature, ed. Tom Winnifrith and Cyril Barrett (London, 1992), p. 16.
17 Winnifrith, ‘Funeral Games in Homer and Virgil’, p. 24. Baron Pierre de Courbertin’s assertion that ‘the important thing . . . is not to win but to take part’ is not in the spirit of Greek competitiveness. See Waldo E. Sweet, Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1987), p. 118; Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World, p. 115. An Edwardian view of Greek ‘fair play’ can be found in K. T. Frost, ‘Greek Boxing’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 26 (1906), pp. 213–25.
18 See Thomas F. Scanlon, ‘Boxing Gloves and the Games of Gallienus’, The American Journal of Philology, 107, no. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 110–14.
19 ‘Virgil’s Æneis’, in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1958), vol. III, p. 1185.
20 Apollonius, Jason and the Golden Fleece (The Argonautica), trans. Richard Hunter (Oxford, 1993), p. 38; Virgil, The Georgics, trans. L. P. Wilkinson (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 107. See Richard Hunter, ‘Bulls and Boxers in Apollonius and Vergil’, The Classical Quarterly, new series, 39, no. 2 (1989), pp. 557–61. Mesopotamian cylinder seals often featured friezes of animal contests. In the Akkadian period, pairs of contesting figures sometimes included human-headed bulls or bull-men.
21 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (London, 1976), p. 116; Norman Mailer, The Fight (London, 1976), p. 156.
22 Richard Heinze, Virgil’s Epic Technique (1982), trans. Hazel and David Harvey and Fred Robertson (Bristol, 1993), pp. 121–41.
23 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. David West (Harmondsworth, 1990), pp. 115–19.
24 Achilles stops the wrestling match at the funeral games. Homer, Iliad, p. 383.
25 Joseph Farrell, Aeneid 5: Poetry and Parenthood’, in Reading Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. Christine Perkell (Norman, ok, 1999), p. 102; R.G.M. Nisbet, ‘Aeneas Imperator: Roman Generalship in an Epic Context’, in Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. S. J. Harrison (Oxford, 1990), p. 382. See also König, Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire, pp. 238–9.
26 Homer, Iliad, p. 382. See Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World, p. 113. Tacitus and Quintilian mention boxing in arguments about skill specialization. See H. A. Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome (London, 1972), p. 65.
27 Homer, Iliad, pp. 331, 334.
28 Michael C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid (Cambridge, MA, 1965), p. 215, fn. 22.
29 The Athenian develops the analogy fully. If they ran out of sparring partners, they would use dummies, and if they had none of those, they would ‘box against their own shadows – shadow-boxing with a vengeance!’ Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 323–4; The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 188.
30 Plutarch, Moralia, in Miller, Arete, p. 35; Marcus Auerelius, Meditations, trans. A.S.L. Farquharson (London, 1946), p. 38.
31 Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, revised. J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson (Oxford, 1980), pp. 70–71.
32 1 Corinthians, 9: 26–7.
33 Onomastos of Smyrna is credited (by Sextus Julius Africanus) with drawing up the basic rules, while Pythagoras of Samos is reputed to have introduced scientific boxing to the 48th Olympiad in 588 BC. See Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World, p. 80; Sweet, Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece, p. 71.
34 Pausanias, Guide to Greece, trans. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, 1971), vol. II, p. 259. See also König, Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire, ch. 4; Zahra Newby, Greek Athletics in the Roman World (Oxford, 2005), ch. 7.
35 Suetonius, ‘Augustus’, in The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (London, 1962), p. 63.
36 Tacitus also reports an anxiety that Greek practices such as boxing will distract young men from their duties as warriors. Annals (Harmondsworth, 1956), p. 323.
37 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, p. 63.
38 Cicero, Laws, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford, 1998), p. 137.
39 Horace, Epistles, in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London, 1929), pp. 412–13; Terence, Eunuch, in Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome, pp. 51–2.
40 St Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, 1961), pp. 121–2. For a very different view of spectatorship, see Philostratus’s account of an exceedingly violent wrestling match. Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London, 1960), p. 151.
41 This is Horace’s definition of the scope of lyric, as opposed to epic, poetry in The Art of Poetry, in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, pp. 456–7.
42 Bacchylides, Ode I, in Epinician Odes and Dithyrambs of Bacchylides, trans. David R. Slavitt (Philadelphia, 1998), p. 11.
43 Deborah Steiner, The Crown of Song: Metaphor in Pindar (London, 1986), p. 111.
44 Bacchylides, Ode III, Epinician Odes and Dithyrambs, p. 21.
45 Pindar, ‘Olympian X’, trans. C. M. Bowra, The Odes (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 106–7. Pausanias’s version of the founding of the Olympics has the games beginning in a heavenly contest between the gods. Guide to Greece, p. 216.
46 See, for example, Pindar, ‘Olympian X’, in Odes, p. 110; and, on athlete-heroes, Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World, pp. 128–9.
47 Richmond Lattimore, ‘A Note on Pindar and His Poetry’, The Odes of Pindar (Chicago, 1964), p. viii. Epinicians for events such as the chariot race (which the wealthy inevitably won) were more ‘sumptuous’ than those for events like running or boxing, which athletes won. Robert Fogles, Bacchylides: Complete Poems, trans. Fogles (New Haven, CT, 1961), p. xxii.
48 Pindar, ‘Olympian VII’, in Odes, pp. 164–9; and ‘Olympian V’, in Odes, pp. 94–5.
49 In The Art of Poetry, Horace declares that should he fail to maintain poetic forms such as the epinician, he would not deserve to be called a poet. Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, pp. 456–9. See, for example, Odes, Book 4, Ode 3 in The Complete Odes and Epodes, trans. David West (Oxford, 1997), pp. 115–16.
50 Dio Chrysostom, 28th Discourse, in Dio Chrysostom, trans. J. W. Cohoon (London, 1939), vol. 5, pp. 360–63. On gladiatorial exhibitions, see the 31st Discourse, p. 121, and Cohoon’s comments, p. 358.
51 See König, Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire, ch. 3.
52 Winckelmann, ‘On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks’ (1755), in Winckelmann: Writings on Art, ed. David Irwin (London, 1972), p. 64.
53 Winckelmann, ‘Imitation’, p. 62; James Davidson, ‘Tall and Tanned and Young and Lovely’, London Review of Books, 18 June 1998, p. 26.
54 The Greek physician, Galen, complained that training inflicted as many wounds as conflict. See Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World, p. 93.
55 Dio Chrysostom, 28th Discourse, p. 365.
56 Heinze, Virgil’s Epic Technique, p. 132.
57 Idyll 22, ‘The Dioscuri’, in Theocritus, Idylls, trans. Anthony Verity (Oxford, 2002), pp. 61–6.
58 In Apollonius’s version of this story (which most scholars argue preceded Theocritus), Amcyus is killed by Polydeuces.
59 In Vera Historia, Lucian too sets a modern athlete (Areios) against a Homeric hero (Epeios). See König, Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire, pp. 77, 237.
60 Mark Golden, Sport and Society in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1998), p. 59, fig. 3.
61 The sculpture is also known as the Terme Boxer. The Baths of Diocletian (Rome, 2002), pp. 103–5.
62 Thom Jones, ‘The Pugilist at Rest’, in The Pugilist at Rest (London, 1994), pp. 18–19. Jones’s narrator speculates that the statue depicts Theogenes.
63 Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome, p. 23. König notes that ‘mangled ears occur so frequently that they seem to have been taken as a standard means of identifying an athlete as a wrestler or boxer.’ Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire, p. 115.
64 Lucilius, in The Greek Anthology, trans. W. R. Paton (London, 1918), vol. V, p. 111.
65 Greek Anthology, vol. V, p. 111; see also vol. V, p. 109.
66 Ibid., p. 109.
67 Philostratus, Gymnasticus, in Miller, Arete, p. 18.
68 Greek Anthology, vol. IV, p. 343.
69 Plato, The Republic, p. 229.
70 Ovid, ‘Letter XVI: Paris to Helen’, in Heroides, trans. Harold Isbell (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 153.
71 Propertius, ‘The advantage of Spartan athletics’, in The Poems, trans. Guy Lee (Oxford, 1994), pp. 90–91. Propertius also frequently imagined sex as a kind of combat sport (‘let bruises show that I’ve been with my mistress’). See Golden, Sport and Society in Ancient Greece, pp. 128–9; Poliakoff, Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece; ch. 20.
72 Anacreon, fragment 369; Sophocles, Trachiniae, 441, in Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, p. 261. Eros is, however, more commonly imagined as a wrestler than as a boxer. For athletic Cupids, see Philostratus, Imagines, p. 25.
73 Lucilius, Greek Anthology, p. 111.
74 Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, p. 227.
1 John Marshall Carter, Medieval Games: Sports and Recreations in Feudal Society (Westport, CT, 1992), pp. 102, 140.
2 See Alison Sim, Pleasures and Pastimes in Tudor England (Stroud, 1999).
3 Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-knuckle Prizefighting in America (Ithaca, NY, 1986), pp. 23–4.
4 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), p. 249.
5 The Dairy of Samuel Pepys, ed. John Warrington (London, 1953), vol. II, p. 87.
6 This is the claim made by T. B. Shepherd, who includes the report in his anthology, The Noble Art (London, 1950), p. 88.
7 Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. during the last twenty years of his life, ed. S. C. Roberts (Cambridge, 1925), p. 7. Until recently Figg’s card was attributed to Hogarth; today it is thought to be a late-eighteenth-century forgery. Boxing booths continued to feature in British fairgrounds until the 1980s; one features prominently in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 film The Ring. See Vanessa Toulmin, A Fair Fight: An Illustrated Review of Boxing on British Fairgrounds (Oldham, 1999), and Tony Gee, Up to Scratch (Harpenden, 1998).
8 Pierce Egan, Boxiana, or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism: A Selection, ed. John Ford (London, 1976), pp. 21–2.
9 The London Journal, 31 August 1723, cited in Christopher Johnson, ‘“British Championism”: Early Pugilism and the Works of Fielding’, Review of English Studies, new series, 47 (August 1996), p. 343, n. 33.
10 Quoted in James Peller Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century (London, 1808), p. 334. On ‘mixed doubles’, see pp. 42–3, 339. See also Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 122–6.
11 Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, London in 1710, trans. W. H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare (London, 1934), pp. 90–91; Martin Nogüe, Voyages et Aventures (1728); William Hickey, Memoirs (1749–1809), ed. Alfred Spenser (London, 1913–15), vol. I, pp. 82–3.
12 Pierre Jean Grosley, A tour to London, or, New observations on England and its inhabitants, trans. Thomas Nugent. (Dublin, 1772), vol. I, p. 64.
13 For an account of the context in which this print was made, see Ben Rogers, Beef and Liberty (London, 2003), pp. 123–8.
14 The Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1754, quoted in Liza Picard, Dr Johnson’s London (London, 2000), p. 208. See also George Rudé, Hanoverian London (Trupp, 2003), pp. 74–5.
15 Dennis Brailsford, Bareknuckles: A Social History of Prizefighting (Cambridge, 1988), p. 28. Casanova reported coming upon a man dying ‘from a blow he had received in boxing’ in the streets of London. On inquiring about medical assistance, he was told that this was not possible since two men had bet 20 guineas on his death or recovery. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, Three Tours Through London in 1748, 1776, 1797 (New Haven, 1941), pp. 62–3.
16 H. D. Miles, Pugilistica: A history of British Boxing (Edinburgh, 1906), vol. I, pp. vii, 9, 10. Captain John Godfrey’s Treatise on the Useful Science of Defence, which includes a chapter on boxing, was published in 1747. Prior to this, fist fighting was only one of several forms of ‘Prizefighting’. Other forms involved cudgels, quarterstaffs and backswords.
17 Brailsford, Bareknuckles, p. 2. Norbert Elias argues that it was not until these rules were introduced that boxing ‘assumed the characteristics of a “sport”’. ‘The Genesis of Sport as a Sociological Problem’, in Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process, ed. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning (Oxford, 1986), p. 21.
18 The Daily Advertiser, February 1747, in Miles, Pugilistica, vol. I, p. 26.
19 Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, p. 54.
20 William Maginn, ‘An Idyl on the Battle’, in Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Skelton Mackenzie (New York, 1855–7), vol. I, p. 277. The battle in question is the 1823 fight between Bill Neate and Tom Spring.
21 James Faber’s portraits of Broughton and Figg are reproduced and discussed in Sarah Hyde, ‘The Noble Art: Boxing and Visual Culture in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture, ed. David Chandler, John Gill, Tania Guha and Gilane Tawadros (London, 1996), pp. 93–7.
22 The games stopped in 1643 as a result of the Civil War and were revived soon after the Restoration. They finally ended in 1853, after complaints of increasingly rowdy crowds.
23 Michael Drayton, ‘To My Noble Friend Mr. Robert Dover on his brave annual Assemblies upon Cotswold’, and John Stratford, ‘To my kind Cosen, and Noble Friend Mr Robert Dover, on his Sports Upon Cotswold’, in Robert Dover and the Cotswold Games: Annalia Dubrensia, ed. Christopher Whitfield (Evesham, 1962), pp. 102, 179–180.
24 John Suckling, ‘A Session of the Poets’, in Fragmenta Aurea (London, 1646), p. 7.
25 See Seymour Howard, ‘Some Eighteenth-Century “Restored” Boxers’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56 (1993), pp. 238–55.
26 Moses Browne, ‘A Survey of the Amphitheatre’, in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford, 1984), p. 292.
27 John Byrom, ‘Extempore Verses Upon a Trial of Skill Between the Two Great Masters of the Noble Science of Defence, Messrs. Figg and Sutton’, in Miscellaneous Poems (Manchester, 1773), vol. II, p. 47. Greek gore as well as grace characterizes Paul Whitehead’s ‘The Gymnasiad, or The Boxing–Match’ (1744), a mock-heroic account of Broughton’s victory over George Stephenson in three books. An extract from Book III is included in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, pp. 373–4. Jonathan Swift’s ‘The Battle of the Books’ (1704) satirized the ongoing debate between ‘Ancients’ and ‘Moderns’.
28 Christopher Anstey, The Patriot (Cambridge, 1767), pp. 5, 7, 19. See Martin S. Day, ‘Anstey and Anapestic Satire’, English Literary History, XV/2, p. 145.
29 Christopher Anstey, Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse, Wherein That Celebrated Hero is Carried Into High Life (London, 1756), vol. I, p. 4. Simon Dickie considers the Memoirs as an example of the ‘ramble’ novel in In the Mid-Eighteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Stanford, 2001 (http://novel.stanford.edu/archive2.htm).
30 Anstey, Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse, vol. II, p. 265.
31 Fielding learnt to box at Eton, which he attended from 1719 to 1724. In various essays and poems from the 1730s he mentions attending Figg’s amphitheatre. Martin C. Battestin, A Henry Fielding Companion (Westport, CT, 2000), pp. 63–4.
32 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (Oxford, 1996), p. 615.
33 Ibid., p. 181.
34 Henry Fielding, Shamela, in Joseph Andrews and Shamela (London, 1973), pp. 18–19. Fielding mentions two contemporary women fighters in a burlesque of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire: ‘Have you not heard of fighting Females / Whom you rather think to be Males? / Of Madam Sutton, Mrs. Stokes / Who give confounded Cuts and Strokes?’ Miscellanies, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Oxford, 1972), vol. I, p. 111.
35 Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 156.
36 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (New York, 1987), pp. 109–10.
37 Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 68.
38 Ibid., p. 447. In case the reader does not know the phrase Fielding explains it in a footnote, as he later does with ‘muffled’ (p. 615).
39 Broughton’s ‘most favourite blow was the projectile, and when directly planted in the pit of the stomach, generally proved decisive’. [William Oxberry], Pancratia, or a History of Pugilism (London, 1812), p. 44. The spot just above the liver became known as ‘Broughton’s Mark’. Bob Mee, Bare Fists: The History of Bare-Knuckle Prizefighting (Woodstock, NY, 2001), p. 14.
40 Fielding, Tom Jones, pp. 614–15.
41 Bonnell Thornton and George Colman (as ‘Mr Town’), The Connoisseur 22 August, 1754, reprinted in Boxing in Art and Literature, ed. William D. Cox (New York, 1935), p. 59.
42 Oxberry, Pancratia, p. 37.
43 Anstey, Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse, vol. I, p. 66.
44 Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 434.
45 Fielding, ‘An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men’ (1743), reprinted as an appendix to Joseph Andrews, p. 327.
46 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, p. 108.
47 See Johnson, ‘“British Championism”’, for an account of the full range of boxing references in Fielding.
48 John Richetti says this is the effect, and intent, of the novel’s many forms of repetition. The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (London, 1999), p. 124.
49 Samuel Richardson, as Johnson points out, ends Clarissa with a duel in which Morden kills Lovelace: ‘“British Championism”’, p. 348.
50 Tom Jones, pp. 230–31. See also p. 220. Anstey gently mocks this attitude in Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse. At one point his hero knocks out a dragoon, and after the fallen man has had a chance to set ‘his Hair and other matters to rights’, Buckhorse clasps and shakes his hand, saying, ‘I never love a Man till I have box’d him’ (p. 131).
51 Daniel Mendoza, The Memoirs of the Life of Daniel Mendoza, ed. Paul Magriel (London, 1951), p. x.
52 Jenny Uglow, Hogarth (London, 1997), p. 423.
53 Henri Misson, M. Misson’s memoirs and observations in his travels, trans. John Ozell (London, 1719), vol. I, p. 304.
54 Grosley credited boxing for the fact that London was the ‘only great City in Europe where neither murders nor assassinations happen’, and supported the conventional view of English magnanimity. He also noted the adoption of the sport in Brittany, whose inhabitants ‘still practise it with certain modifications’. The modified sport, which combined hand and foot fighting, became known as boxe-française. A tour to London, vol. I, pp. 62–3, 67, 94.
55 Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New Haven, 1950), p. 278.
56 Pierce Egan, Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism (London, 1818), vol. I, p. 19; Piozzi, Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, pp. 150, 7.
57 Christopher Johnson notes that while the words ‘box’ or ‘boxing’ do not appear in translations of the epics by Dryden (1697, 1700) or Pope (1715–20, 1725–6), Cowper’s 1791 version of the Iliad refers to ‘the boxer’s art’: ‘“British Championism”’, p. 332, n. 5.
58 Brailsford, Bareknuckles, ch. 2.
59 Whitehead, ‘The Gymnasiad’, l. 29. See, for example, the London Evening Post of 23 October 1764, quoted in Picard, Dr Johnson s London,p. 126.
60 Boxing in Art and Literature, ed. Cox, p. 57. See Lance Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture, 1749–1764 (Oxford, 1986), ch. 2.
61 Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 98, 188.
62 See Tony Gee, ‘From Stage-Fighting Fame to the Gallows at Tyburn: James Field – Pugilist and Criminal’, in The British Board of Boxing Control Boxing Yearbook 2006, ed. Barry J. Hugman (Harpenden, 2005), pp. 55–8.
63 Godfrey, Treatise upon the Useful Science, p. 56.
64 Nat Fleischer and Sam Andre, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London, 1959), p. 18.
65 The World, 10 January 1788, quoted in Ruti Ungar, ‘On Shylocks, Toms and Bucks: Images of Minority Boxers in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Britain’, in Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain, ed. Michael Berkowitz and Ruti Ungar (London, 2007), p. 25.
66 See Adam Chill, ‘The Performance and Marketing of Minority Identity in Late Georgian Boxing’, in Fighting Back?, pp. 33–49.
67 See Mendoza, Memoirs, ch. 3, ‘A Verbal Contest with Humphreys’. David Liss’s thriller, A Conspiracy of Paper (London, 2000) draws on the Memoirs for the life of pugilist Benjamin Weave, although the novel is set in 1719 and deals with the South Sea Bubble. Mendoza’s great-granddaughter was the mother of actor Peter Sellers.
68 On ‘earning a living from sport’ at this time, see Adrian Harvey, The Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture in Britain, 1793–1850 (London, 2004), pp. 198–202.
69 In 1834 Francis Place rather optimistically noted that Mendoza’s school had ‘put an end to the ill-usage of the Jews’: ‘the art of boxing as a science . . . soon spread among young Jews and they became generally expert at it.’ Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), p. 219. In 1787 the Times observed that the school was near the Bank of England and that this was consistent with Mendoza’s ‘character as a Jew’. Ungar, ‘On Shylocks’, p. 25.
70 G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1944) (London, 1973), p. 503. See John Ford, Prizefighting: The Age of Regency Boximania (Newton Abbot, 1971).
71 Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons (London, 1951), p. 451.
72 Joseph Moser, The Adventures of Timothy Twig, Esq. (London, 1794), vol. I, pp. 45, 47.
73 Mendoza, Preface to The Memoirs, p. xi. For examples of such attacks see Grosley, A Tour to London, vol. I, p. 96.
74 Richard Steele, The Tatler, 7 July 1709; in The Tatler, ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford, 1987), vol. I, pp. 271–2.
75 Mendoza, Preface to The Memoirs, p. xi.
76 On English fair play, see Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 148–57. For the importance of fair play to the seventeenth-century Venetian ritual pugni, see Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists (Oxford, 1994), p. 94.
77 M. Misson’s memoirs, vol. I, pp. 305–6
78 Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, pp. 44–5.
79 Ibid., p. 74.
80 Diary entry for 27 October 1792, quoted in Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, The Early Life and Diaries of William Windham (London, 1930), pp. 257–8.
81 Quoted in The Earl of Roseberry, ‘Introduction’, The Windham Papers (London, 1913), vol. I, pp. 6–7.
82 Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, 1998), p. 333. See also Harvey, The Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture, pp. 64–71.
83 The Windham Papers, vol. II, p. 351–2.
84 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 2003), p. 303.
85 Egan, Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, vol. I, pp. 481–2.
86 Colley, Britons, p. 303.
87 In 1733 a Venetian boxer Alberto di Carni fought Bob Whiteaker. A song celebrating di Carni’s defeat proclaimed, ‘Your foreigners may be allow’d to be bringers, / Of Eunachs and Fiddlers and Singers, / But must not pretend to Bring Boxers or Flingers’. Whiteacre’s Glory (Dublin, 1733). See also Godfrey, Treatise upon the Useful Science, pp. 58–60. Venetian boxing had a long history. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, groups of artisans regularly fought guerre dei pugni on the city’s bridges. See Davis, The War of the Fists.
88 Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, p. 110.
89 Black Ajax by George MacDonald Fraser (London, 1997) is a thoroughly researched fictional account of the fights, presented through the eyes of (and in the styles of) real and imaginary witnesses. See also Peter Radford, ‘Lifting the Spirits of the Nation: British Boxers and the Emergence of the National Sporting Hero at the Time of the Napoleonic Wars’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 12, no. 2 (April–June 2005), pp. 249–70.
90 Thomas Jefferson, letter to J. Bannister, 15 October 1785, in Living Ideas in America, ed. Henry Steele Commager (New York, 1951), p. 557.
91 D. K. Wiggins, ‘Good Times on the Old Plantation’, Journal of Sport History, 4, no. 3 (1977), pp. 260–84.
92 Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, p. 101.
93 Ibid., pp. 100–101. Egan probably wrote the letter.
94 Quoted in Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), p. 447. Appendix 1 consists of short biographies of boxers from 1791 to 1902. For a detailed account of Cribb’s training, see Peter Radford, The Celebrated Captain Barclay (London, 2001), pp. 167–74.
95 Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, Wellington: A Personal History (London, 1997), p. 184.
96 Thomas Moore, ‘Epistle from Tom Cribb to Big Ben concerning some Foul Play in a Late Transaction’ (1818), in Poetical Works (London, 1891), pp. 588–9.
97 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (London, 1987), p. 36.
98 Claims made for duelling in France were not dissimilar from those made for boxing in England: Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley, CA, 1998), p. 145. On the British tendency to associate France (and its culture) with effeminacy, see Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity (London, 1999).
99 William Cobbett, ‘In Defence of Boxing’, The Political Register (August 1805), in Cobbett’s England, ed. John Derry (London, 1968), pp. 172–80.
100 The eponymous narrator of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Rodney Stone (1896) justified prizefighting’s widespread public support in the 1800s in terms of the fact that there was no conscription into the British army and navy; the army and navy depended on ‘those who chose to fight because they had fighting blood in them’. Rodney Stone (London, 1912), p. 12.
101 Boxing infiltrated lowland Scots society and some academies were set up – notably under George Cooper. Scott’s familiarity with boxing culture emerges in surprising places. For example, an 1803 letter to George Ellis begins by announcing, ‘My conscience has been thumping me as hard as if it had studied under Mendoza.’ The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 1787–1807, ed. H.J.C. Grierson (London, 1932), vol. I, p. 196.
102 Walter Scott, ‘The Two Drovers’, in Two Stories (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 43, 51. See Christopher Johnson, ‘Anti-Pugilism: Violence and Justice in Scott’s “The Two Drovers”’, Scottish Literary Journal, 22, no. 1 (May 1995), pp. 46–60.
103 Scott, ‘The Two Drovers’, pp. 67–8.
104 Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, p. 58.
105 Richard Holmes, in Romantics and Revolutionaries, exh. cat., National Portait Gallery, London (London, 2002), pp. 128–9. In Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–8), such dandyism is mocked in the figure of the villain, Bill Sikes, who sports a ‘black velveteen coat’ and ‘a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck, with the long frayed ends of which, he smeared the foam from the beer as he spoke’; like Belcher, Sikes is famously accompanied by a bull-terrier. Oliver Twist (Harmondsworth, 2002), p. 98. In The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Dick Swiveller’s fantasy of life as a convict involves a leg iron ‘restrained from chafing . . . [his] ankle by a twisted belcher handkerchief.’ The Old Curiosity Shop (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 259. The eponymous hero of William Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon (1844) complains that he can no longer tell the difference between ‘my lord and his groom’ since ‘every man has the same coachman-like look in his belcher and caped coat.’ Barry Lyndon (Oxford, 1984), p. 248.
106 In ‘Advice to a Youth’, Cobbett argued that ‘natural beauty of person . . . always has, it always will and must have, some weight even with men, and great weight with women. But this does not want to be set off by expensive clothes.’ Cobbett’s England, p. 157. He might also be alluding to Belcher’s reputation as the ‘Napoleon of the Ring’, a name bestowed partly because he was ‘so successful in battle’ and partly because he was said to look like the Frenchman. Egan, Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, vol. I, p. 144. See also The Celebrated Captain Barclay, pp. 74–5.
107 Quoted in the oed.
108 Robert Fergusson, ‘Auld Reikie’, in The Poems of Robert Fergusson, ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid (Edinburgh, 1954–6), vol. II, p. 112. See Edwin Morgan, ‘A Scottish Trawl’, in Gendering the Nation, ed. Christopher Whyte (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 208–9.
109 Anstey, The Patriot, pp. 19–20.
110 See, for example, Colley, Britons, ch. 6, and A History of Private Life, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, MA, 1990). In 1804, Richard Bisset satirized Mary Wollstonecraft, author of The Rights of Women (1792), as longing for the day ‘when the sex would acquire high renown in boxing matches’. Modern Literature: A Novel (London, 1804), vol. III, p. 200; quoted in Dugaw, Warrior Women, p. 141.
111 [B. W. Proctor], ‘On Fighting’, Fraser’s Magazine, May 1820, p. 519. A friend of Keats, Proctor trained with Tom Cribb and published verse and biographies under the pseudonym Barry Cornwall.
112 Tom Moore’s Diary: A Selection, ed. J. B. Priestley (Cambridge, 1925), p. 18. Entry for 4 December 1818.
113 Miles, Pugilistica, vol. I, p. 97.
114 [Eaton Stannard Barrett], Six Weeks at Long’s (London, 1817), vol. III, pp. 200–201. John Jackson, under the pseudonym Milo Gymnast, plays an important role in the story.
115 William Cobbett, quoted in Steven Parissien, George IV: The Grand Entertainment (London, 2001), p. 309. See also Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity, ch. 5. The Prince separated from Caroline a year after their marriage in 1795. Although they lived apart and both had numerous indiscreet affairs, she felt entitled to take her place as his Queen in 1821.
116 Byron, ‘Hints from Horace’ (1811), in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford, 1970), p. 138.
117 Thomas Moore, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (London, 1875), pp. 116–17.
118 Byron, in Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Peter Gunn (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 142
119 Byron, Notes to Don Juan, in Complete Poetical Works, p. 918.
120 Moore, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, p. 24.
121 Thomas Moore noted that, after his death, Byron’s friends found it hard to recall which of his feet was lame (they settled on the right): ‘Mr Jackson, his preceptor in pugilism, was, in like manner, obliged to call to mind whether his noble pupil was a right or left hand hitter before he could arrive at the same decision.’ Life and Letters of Lord Byron, p. 1062.
122 See Bohun Lynch, ‘Lord Byron’s Fire-Screen’, The Field, December 1922, pp. 7–9; Aubrey Noakes, ‘70 Years of Prize Ring History’, Boxing News, 20 August 1947, pp. 8–9; Elizabeth Stewart-Smith, Byron’s Screen (Mansfield, 1995).
123 Cecil Y. Lang, ‘Narcissus Jilted: Byron, Don Juan and the Biographical Imperative’, in Historical and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome McGann (Madison, 1985), pp. 154–5.
124 Don Juan, Complete Works, pp. 758, 765.
125 Letter to Elizabeth Pigot, 13 July 1807, in Moore, The Life and Letters of Lord Byron, p. 90; Don Juan, in Complete Works, p. 796.
126 Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, p. 168. For a list of ‘sporting houses kept by pugilists’, see pp. 185–6.
127 Quoted in Jon Hurley, Tom Spring (Stroud, 2002), p. 104.
128 Byron, Selected Letters and Journals, p. 131.
129 Hurley, Tom Spring, p. 117. Life in London became a theatrical hit, adapted in various forms throughout Britain and the United States. Exhibition bouts were included as part of the evening’s entertainment.
130 Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London, 2003), p. 264.
131 Byron, Letters and Journals, vol. I, pp. 135–6. Letter to Elizabeth Pigot, 26 October 1807.
132 Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, pp. 168, 172.
133 Egan, Life in London. Or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, The Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (London, 1821), pp. 19–20.
134 Washington Irving, ‘Buckthorne, or the Young Man of Great Expectations’, in Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. Judith Giblin Haig (Boston, 1987), p. 121. The ‘murderer on the gibbett’ is probably John Thurtell, a boxing promoter who was executed for murder in January 1824. Pierce Egan’s Account of the Trial and his Recollections of John Thurtell were published later that year. Buckthorne is surely a play on the eighteenth-century prizefighter, Buckhorse.
135 Byron, Selected Letters and Journals, p. 128. He is quoting Virgil, Eclogues iii.59.
136 Ibid., p. 145. Entry for 10 April 1814.
137 Moore, Life and Letters of Lord Byron, p. 213.
138 Robert Gittings, John Keats (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 390. Jack Randall defeated Ned Turner after 34 rounds.
1 Cassius Clay, ‘Do You Have to Ask?, in I am the Greatest! (Rev-Ola, 1964).
2 Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford, 1974), p. 75.
3 Byron, Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Peter Gunn (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 332, 131. Entries for 15 October 1821 and 24 November 1813.
4 Byron, Selected Letters and Journals, p. 217. Letter to Thomas Moore, 1 June 1818.
5 ‘Hints from Horace’, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford, 1970), p. 138. Of Jeffrey’s attack on Hours of Idleness in 1807, he said, ‘it ‘knocked me down’, but ‘I got up again.’ Quoted in Elizabeth Longford, Byron (London, 1976), pp. 16–17.
6 [William Maginn], ‘A Letter to Pierce Egan, Esq. By Christopher North’, Blackwood’s Magazine (March 1821), pp. 672–3. For a full account of his career, see J. C. Reid, Bucks and Bruisers: Pierce Egan and Regency England (London, 1971).
7 Pierce Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, ed. John Ford (London, 1976), pp. 199–200.
8 Gregory Dart, ‘“Flash Style”: Pierce Egan and Literary London, 1820–28’, History Workshop Journal, 51 (2001), p. 198. Mark Parker argues that the magazine was ‘the preeminent literary form of the 1820s and 1830s in Britain’. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1.
9 This is not quite the same as saying it was a ‘classless language’: Dart, ‘“Flash Style”’, p. 191.
10 Blackwood’s Magazine, July 1822, pp. 105–6.
11 Thomas De Quincey, ‘Sketch of Professor Wilson [Part ii]’, Edinburgh Literary Gazette, 11 July 1829, in Works, ed. Robert Morrison (London, 2000), vol. VII, p. 16. See also Robert Morrison, ‘Blackwood’s Berserker: John Wilson and the Language of Extremity’, Romanticism on the Net, 20 (November 2000).
12 Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Eccentrics (London, 1936), pp. 99, 105.
13 Quoted in Christine Alexander, ‘Readers and Writers: Blackwood’s and the Brontës’, The Gaskell Society Journal, 8 (1994), p. 57.
14 Blackwood’s Magazine, May 1820, p. 187. In October 1820, Boxiana published a sonnet ‘On the Battle Between Mendoza and Tom Owen, at Banstead Downs’, also supposedly by W. W., with a lengthy note on the difference between the Fancy and fancy. For other examples of parodies using pugilism for bathetic effects, see Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 56.
15 The term was coined by Jon Bee in Fancyana (1824).
16 Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, p. 13.
17 Letters of John Keats: A Selection ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford, 1970), p. 311. Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 17–14 September 1819. Hazlitt noted the ‘oddity of the contrast’ between the serious and ‘flashy’ passages in Don Juan. ‘Lord Byron’, Lectures on the English Poets and The Spirit of the Age (London, 1910), p. 241.
18 Byron, Don Juan, in Complete Poetical Works, pp. 790–1. By Canto XV, stanza XI, the narrator tells us that ‘since in England’, his mind has ‘assumed a manlier vigour’ (p. 833).
19 Byron, Don Juan, in Complete Poetical Works, p. 918.
20 P. W. Graham, Lord Byron’s Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron (Columbus, oh, 1984), p. 32; Thomas Moore, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (London, 1875), p. 446.
21 Gary Dyer, ‘Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites: Being Flash to Byron’s Don Juan’, PMLA (2001), pp. 562–78 (p. 564).
22 Moore, Poetical Works (London, 1829), p. 159.
23 Benita Eissler, Byron (London, 1999), p. 103.
24 Washington Irving, ‘Buckthorne, or the Young Man of Great Expectations’, in Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1824), ed. Judith Giblin Haig (Boston, 1987), p. 121.
25 Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons (London, 1951), p. 451.
26 [Henry Luttrell], Advice to Julia: A letter in rhyme (London, 1820), p. 32.
27 Tom Moore’s Diary: A Selection, ed. J. B. Priestley (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 17–18. Entry for 29 November and 4 December 1818.
28 John Hamilton Reynolds, The Fancy: A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the Late Peter Corcoran, of Gray’s Inn, Student of Law, with a Brief Memoir of His Life (1820), reprinted with a prefatory memoir and notes by John Masefield and illustrations by Jack B. Yeats (London, 1905), pp. 64, 74.
29 Reynolds, The Fancy, p. xxi.
30 Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Pretensions of Phronology’, in Works, ed. David Groves (London, 2000), vol. V, p. 323.
31 Thomas De Quincey, ‘To a Reader; Invitation to a Set-To on Greek Literature’, in Works (London, 2000), vol. VI, p. 226.
32 Andrew Crichton, Edinburgh Evening Post, 28 June 1828, in De Quincey, Works, vol. VI, p. 194.
33 William Hazlitt, ‘Introduction to Elizabethan Literature’, in The Fight and Other Writings, ed. Tom Paulin and David Chandler (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 64; ‘William Godwin’, in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 280; ‘Mr. Wordsworth’, The Fight and Other Writings, p. 306.
34 Hazlitt, ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’ (1818), in The Fight and Other Writings, pp. 92, 97, 101. In a later essay, ‘Poetry’ (1829), he describes Perdita’s speech on flowers in The Winter’s Tale as ‘knock[ing] down’ English readers: The Fight and Other Writings, p. 208.
35 Hazlitt, ‘Gusto’ (1817), in The Fight and Other Writings, pp. 78, 80.
36 Hazlitt, ‘On the Prose-Style of Poets’ (1826), in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 406.
37 Linda Colley, ‘I am the Watchman’, London Review of Books, 20 November 2003, p. 16.
38 William Hazlitt, ‘Character of Cobbett’ (1821), in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 129.
39 Hazlitt, ‘Character of Cobbett’, p. 133. The allusion here is to Don Quixote. A more general essay, on ‘Parliamentary Eloquence’, repeats the claim that, a ‘repetition of blows . . . is of no use, unless they are struck in the same place’: The Fight and Other Writings, p. 323.
40 The phrase is used in a newspaper clipping describing the fight which is glued on to Byron’s screen.
41 Peter Radford, The Celebrated Captain Barclay: Sport, Money and Fame in Regency Britain (London, 2001), p. 23.
42 Hazlitt, ‘Character of Cobbett’, p. 138.
43 Hazlitt, ‘Jack Tars’, in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 157.
44 Hazlitt, ‘Jack Tars’, p. 158.
45 Much of Hazlitt’s language is Lockean: ‘The idea of solidity we receive by our touch; and it arises from the resistance which we find in body to the entrance of any other body into the place it possesses . . .’; ‘“hard” and “soft” are names that we give to things only in relation to the constitutions of our own bodies’. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. D. Woozley (Glasgow, 1984), pp. 103, 105. See also Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (London, 1998), p. 31.
46 Hazlitt, ‘Madame Pasta and Mademoiselle Mars’, in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 483, 485.
47 Hazlitt, ‘A Farewell to Essay-Writing’, in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 540.
48 ‘Letter to Pierce Egan, Esq.’, quoted by Duncan Wu in his ‘Introductory Note’ to Table Talk, ed. Wu (London, 1998), p. xii.
49 John Hamilton Reynolds, London Magazine, 7 (May 1823), quoted in Wu, ‘Introductory Note’, Table Talk, p. XV.
50 Hazlitt, ‘The Fight’, in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 140, quoting Hamlet, II. ii 600–1.
51 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, ll. 714–16.
52 David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New Haven, 1983), pp. 436–7, n. 10. The deleted passage, which Bromwich quotes, comes in the third paragraph, after ‘I passed Hyde Park Corner’, and before, ‘Suddenly I heard the clattering of the Brentford stage’. For a full discussion about the ways in which Hazlitt negotiates between sentiment and its ‘apparent opposite’, see David Higgins, ‘Englishness, Effeminacy, and the New Monthly Magazine: Hazlitt’s The Fight in Context’, Romanticism, 10 (2004), pp. 170–90. See also Gregory Dart, ‘Romantic Cockneyism: Hazlitt and the Periodical Press’, Romanticism, 6 (2000), pp. 143–62.
53 William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris (London, 1957), p. 89.
54 Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’, in Table Talk, p. 166.
55 Arguing against the introduction of class distinctions into literary criticism in an 1821 essay, Hazlitt quoted Jem Belcher’s response when asked how he felt when facing a larger opponent: ‘An’ please ye, sir, when I am stript to my shirt, I am afraid of no man.’ ‘Pope, Lord Byron, and Mr. Bowles’, London Magazine (June 1821), p. 594.
56 Hazlitt, ‘The Indian Jugglers’ (1821), in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 125. On the competing claims of androgynous and masculine prose for Coleridge, see Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity (London, 1999), ch. 4.
57 Hazlitt, ‘The Indian Jugglers’, pp. 115–16.
58 Hazlitt, ‘On the Qualifications Necessary to Success’, London Magazine 1 (June 1820), p. 653 fn.
59 Hazlitt, ‘Prose-Style and the Elgin Marbles’, in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 240.
60 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, CA, 1959), p. 171.
61 Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’, in The Fight and Other Writings, pp. 22–3; ‘On the Elgin Marbles’, Part II, in The Fight and Other Writings, pp. 225, 231; ‘On Hogarth’s Marriage-à-la-Mode’, Part II, in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 167; ‘Prose-Style and the Elgin Marbles’, in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 240.
62 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT, 1997), p. 67.
63 Reynolds complained that the Boxers ‘are engaged in the most animated action with the greatest serenity of countenance. This is not recommended for imitation’. Discourses on Art, p. 181.
64 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, 1981), p. 339.
65 John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (London, 1829), pp. 119–20.
66 Pierce Egan, Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism (London, 1818), vol. I, p. 20. See also Sarah Hyde, ‘The Noble Art: Boxing and Visual Culture in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture, ed. David Chandler, John Gill, Tania Guha and Gilane Tawadros (London, 1996), pp. 93–7, and Ronald Paulson, Hogarth (Cambridge, 1991), vol. I, pp. 23–4.
67 Jenny Uglow offers allegorical readings of Figg’s presence: in Southwark Fair, he ‘could suggest that old political prizefighters too should be wary of challengers’; in The Rake’s Progress, he represents ‘the old squirarchical pleasures’ that the Rake is rejecting. Hogarth, pp. 243, 248.
68 William Hazlitt, ‘On Genius and Common Sense’ (1821), in The Fight and Other Writings, p. 535. Tom Oliver defeated Ned Painter in May 1814. On Kean’s interest in the ‘aesthetic of boxing’, see Jeffrey Kahan, The Cult of Kean (London, 2006), pp. 13–19.
69 Haydon’s interest extended beyond the life class. His diary records trips to the Fives Court and the eager perusal of a fight report. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope (Cambridge, MA, 1960), vol. II, pp. 220, 452.
70 The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kathryn Cave (New Haven, 1982), vol. IX, pp. 3300-1.
71 Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, p. 68. Some years later Thomas Carlyle, arguing for the importance of the ‘Intuitive’ over the ‘Logical’, asked ‘does the boxer hit better for knowing that he has a flexor longus and a flexor brevis?’ ‘Characteristics’, Edinburgh Review, 59 (December 1831).
72 The Diary of Joseph Farington, vol. IX, p. 3306; Sir Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression with the Fine Arts (London, 1890), pp. 10–11.
73 The Diary of Joseph Farington, vol. IX, pp. 3320–21. In 1744 Jack Broughton modelled for the arms of Michael Rysbrack’s sculpture Hercules, housed in the Stourhead Pantheon. See Richard Warner, Excursion from Bath (London, 1801), p. 111; M. I. Webb, ‘Sculpture by Rysbrack at Stourhead’, The Burlington Magazine, 92 (November 1950), p. 311.
74 On representations of Dutch Sam, see Ruti Ungar, ‘On Shylocks, Toms and Bucks: Images of Minority Boxers in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Britain’, in Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain, ed. Michael Berkowitz and Ruti Ungar (London, 2007), pp. 19–31.
75 Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, l.330. According to Michael Levey, the painting was ‘generally accounted a failure’. Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1769–1830, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London (London, 1979), p. 34.
76 Boxiana: A Selection, p. 48.
77 For fuller accounts of these paintings, and Homer Reciting His Poems to the Greeks, in which Jackson appears in the foreground as the young victor in the foot race, see Douglas Goldring, Regency Portrait Painter: The Life of Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A. (London, 1951), pp. 74–5, 110–11, 196, and Radford, The Celebrated Captain Barclay, pp. 43–6, 64.
78 On the more general use of boxing prints for political and satirical purposes, see Seymour Howard, ‘Boxing Broadsides’, in Popular Art: Essays on Urban Imagery, ed. Elizabeth Adan (Berkeley, CA, 1992), pp. 18–19.
79 See Lorenz E. A. Eitner, Géricault: His Life and Work (London, 1983), p. 91.
80 See Maureen Ryan, ‘Liberal Ironies, Colonial Narratives and the Rhetoric of Art: Reconsidering Géricault’s Radeau de la Méduse and the Traite des Nègres’, in Théodore Géricault: The Alien Body / Tradition in Chaos, exh. cat., Morris and Helin Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, 1997), pp. 18–51.
81 John Masefield, ‘Introduction’, to Reynolds, The Fancy, p. 19.
82 Quoted in Carol Bock, ‘“Our Plays”: the Brontë juvenilia’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, ed. Heather Glen (Cambridge, 2002), p. 48. In Charlotte Brontë’s Corner Dishes (1834), the young Duke of Zamorna employs a pugilist as his private secretary and sparring companion. Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (Oxford, 2003), pp. 414–15.
83 Patrick Branwell Brontë, Works, ed. Victor Neufeldt (New York, 1997), vol. I, p. 177.
84 See Mary Butterfield, Brother in the Shadow: Stories and Sketches by Patrick Branwell Brontë (Bradford, 1988), pp. 121–5, and Christopher Heywood, ‘“Alas! Poor Caunt”: Branwell’s Emancipationist Cartoon’, Brontë Society Transactions, 21, no. 5 (1995), pp. 177–85.
85 Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London, 1999), p. 229.
86 John Clare, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford, 1983), p. 144.
87 Iain McCalman and Maureen Perkins, ‘Popular Culture’, in The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford, 1999), p. 220.
88 Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London, 2003), p. 438.
89 John Clare, Letters, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford, 1985), p. 648 n.
90 Northampton ms. Jotting, quoted in Clare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Mark Storey (London, 1973), p. 3. See also Edward Strickland, ‘Boxer Byron: A Clare Obsession’, The Byron Journal, 17 (1989), pp. 57–76.
91 Clare, Letters, p. 647.
92 H. D. Miles, Pugilistica (Edinburgh, 1906), vol. I, pp. 442–3. The fight took place on 18 April; the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June. The image is reproduced in Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontës (Cambridge, 1995), p. 95.
1 ‘Punch’s Theatre’, Punch, 25 September 1841, p. 131.
2 Matthew Arnold, ‘Culture and Anarchy’ and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 109, 114–15. Arnold takes his description of the Barbarians from Tennyson’s ‘The Princess’ (1847).
3 Quoted in Carol Lansbury, ‘Sporting Humor in Victorian Literature’, Mosaic, 9, 4 (Summer 1976), p. 70.
4 John Ford, Prizefighting (Newton Abbot, 1971), p. 188.
5 William Hazlitt, ‘Rev. Mr. Irving’ (1825), in Lectures on the English Poets and The Spirit of the Age (London, 1910), p. 205.
6 Vincent Dowling, Bell’s Life, 2 October 1825, in Ford, Prizefighting, pp. 189–90.
7 William Cobbett, ‘In Defense of Boxing’ (1805), in Cobbett’s England, ed. John Derry (London, 1968), p. 178.
8 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (Oxford, 1986), p. 295.
9 George Borrow, Lavengro (Oxford, 1982), pp. 157–9.
10 Thomas Hardy links modern prizefighting to the ghosts of ‘gladiatorial combat’, both of which prefigure the ‘mortal commercial combat’ in which Henchard and Farfrae are engaged. The Mayor of Casterbridge (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 141, 142, 186.
11 Jon Hurley, Tom Spring (Stroud, 2002), p. 75.
12 Borrow, Lavengro, p. 167. Lavengro and its sequel, The Romany Rye (1857), are full of fights and stories of old-school pugilists.
13 Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY, 1986), p. 40.
14 Viscount Knebworth, Boxing (London, 1931), pp. 36–7.
15 Quoted in Alan Lloyd, The Great Prize Fight (London, 1977), p. 9.
16 Ibid., pp. 13, 7. See also Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Bendy’s Sermon’, in Songs of the Road (1911).
17 Quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography (Baltimore, 1996), vol. I, pp. 501–2.
18 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (Harmondsworth 1972), p. 266.
19 Gorn, The Manly Art, pp. 148–9.
20 This claim was made in All the Year Round (19 May 1860). The author, John Hollingshead, felt it necessary to begin his piece by announcing that it was with the ‘encouragement’ of ‘my friend the Conductor of this Journal’ (that is, Dickens) that he both attended the fight and wrote about it. The essay begins, ‘There was a period, not more than some six months ago, when most of us thought we could never publicly state that we had seen a prize fight.’ H. D. Miles, Tom Sayers, Sometime Champion of England, His Life and Pugilistic Career (London, 1866), Appendix, pp. xx-xxxii.
21 Heenan had worked in the foundries of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in Benicia. Forty years later the teenage Jack London briefly worked, and drank, there. See John Barleycorn (1913), ch. 12. In England, the name provided opportunities for numerous jokes. Punch pretended it was a girl’s name; Surtees adopted it for the name of a wayward stag. ‘The Wrong Ring for Ladies’, Punch, 3 March 1860, p. 87; R. S. Surtees, Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds (London, 1865).
22 Lloyd, The Great Prize Fight, pp. 72–3.
23 Ibid., pp. 113–15.
24 Farnborough was easily served by both the South Eastern and South Western lines. Railways, and special excursion trains, made it possible for a much wider social spectrum, as well as greater numbers, of spectators to attend sporting events. James Walvin, Leisure and Society, 1830–1950 (London, 1978), pp. 24–7. For an account of the journey to Farnborough, see Miles, Tom Sayers, pp. 164–6.
25 See Hugh Walpole’s The Fortress (London, 1932), Part IV, for a fictional account of the fight.
26 Lloyd, The Great Prize Fight, p. 145.
27 Quoted in Punch, 26 May 1860, p. 210.
28 Charles Dickens, ‘The Uncommercial Traveller: Shy Neighbourhoods’, in The Uncommercial Traveller and other Papers, 1859–70, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (London, 2000), p. 119.
29 Lloyd, The Great Prize Fight, p. 133.
30 The Times, 16 June 1904, p. 9.
31 James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 311. See J. Lawrence Mitchell, ‘Joyce and Boxing’, James Joyce Quarterly, 31, 2 (1994), pp. 21–9.
32 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (Harmondsworth, 1980), pp. 395, 397.
33 Ibid., p. 58.
34 George Eliot, Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, 1954), vol. III, pp. 289–90. The following year Lewes’s son, Thornton, sent his father an excited letter telling him of his fight with a ‘Mr. R’. He concludes the letter, ‘That is all, as Sayers said to Heenan, when he split the latter’s eye open’. Eliot, Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, 1978), vol. VIII, pp. 294–5. Black eyes are also the mark of prizefighters in Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 382.
35 William Allingham, A Diary, 1824–1889 (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 85–6.
36 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘On Some Late Great Victories’, in Roundabout Papers, ed. John Edwin Wells (New York, 1925), pp. 41–7. Thackeray also published (anonymously) ‘The Fight of Sayerius and Heenanus: A Lay of Ancient London’, a parody of ‘Horatius’, one of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842). Punch (28 April 1860), p. 177.
37 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘De Juvente’, in Roundabout Essays, pp. 83–4.
38 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘John Leech’s Pictures of Life and Character’, Quarterly Review, 191 (December 1854).
39 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Oxford, 1983), p. 70.
40 Ibid., pp. 112, 128, 113. On more recent Oxford University boxing, see Blue Blood, dir. Stevan Riley (2006).
41 Ibid., pp. 424–5, 427–8, 430.
42 Vanity Fair’s villain, Lord Steyne is modelled on the Earl of Yarmouth, a patron of Gentleman John Jackson. Lord Yarmouth spoke on ‘the national unity of the pugilistic art’ at the inaugural dinner of the Pugilistic Club in 1814. Peter Radford, The Celebrated Captain Barclay (London, 2001), p. 222. Yarmouth is also the model for Lord Monmouth in Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844).
43 Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 685.
44 Robert Browning, ‘A Likeness’, in Robert Browning: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Adam Roberts (Oxford, 1997), pp. 341–2. The eponymous hero of Washington Irving’s ‘Buckthorne’ recalls his Oxford college room as ‘decorated with whips of all kinds, spurs, fowling pieces, fishing rods, foils and boxing gloves.’ Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. Judith Giblin Haig (Boston, 1987), pp. 95–127. Schoolboy studies were decorated in a similar style. See Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Oxford, 1999), p. 94.
45 George Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 557–8.
46 George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 8.
47 Ibid., p. 19. By the end of the novel, Eliot suggests that Adam’s moral sensibility has developed ‘like a muscle’ to match his physical prowess (p. 489). On Eliot’s debt to Thomas Hughes, see Maureen M. Martin, ‘“Boys who will be Men”: Desire in Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30, 2 (2002), pp. 483–502.
48 Eliot, Adam Bede, pp. 62–3, 163, 165.
49 Ibid., p. 302.
50 Darwin distinguishes Natural Selection, the ‘struggle for existence’, from Sexual Selection, the ‘struggle between the males for possession of the females’, in which ‘special weapons confined to the male sex’ ensure victory. The Origin Of Species (Oxford, 1996), p. 73. I am not claiming a direct influence. Adam Bede was published in February; Eliot read The Origin of Species shortly after it appeared in November.
51 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 310.
52 In R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1869), schoolboy John Ridd speculates on the roots of the expression: ‘whether that word hath origin in a Greek term meaning a conflict, as the best-read boys asserverated, or whether it is nothing more than a figure of similitude, from the beating arms of a mill . . . it is not for a man devoid of scholarship to determine’. Lorna Doone (London, 1967), pp. 28–9.
53 In ‘On Some Late Great Victories’, Thackeray personified Morality as a woman, only to interrupt her, ‘Have the great kindness to stand a LEETLE aside, and just let us see one or two more rounds between the men’ (p. 43).
54 See, for example, Samuel Warren, ‘The Thunder Struck and the Boxer’ (1832), in Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine, ed. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (Oxford, 1995), pp. 243–80.
55 Thomas Ingoldsby, ‘The Ghost’, in The Ingoldsby Legends, or Mirth and Marvels (London, 1840), pp. 96–7.
56 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 90, 107, 237, 258, 447–8, 506, 537.
57 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface’ to Cashel Byron’s Profession (London, 1925), p. xvii.
58 Thackeray, Vanity Fair, pp. 49, 50. This reworks a similar scene set in an 1843 short story, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Frank Berry’. See The Fitz-Boodle Papers and Men’s Wives (London, 1857), p. 59. The school is called ‘Slaughter House’; Thackeray attended Charterhouse, where he broke his nose in a fight.
59 Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 54. Although Dobbin is named for the fruit his father sells, Thackeray may also be alluding to the prizefighter James Figg.
60 An example of this interchange was Thomas Moore’s description of Waterloo as ‘that great day of milling, when blood lay in lakes, / When Kings held the bottle, and Europe the stakes.’ ‘Epistle from Tom Cribb to Big Ben’ (1818), in Poetical Works (London, 1891), pp. 588–9.
61 Asa Briggs, Victorian People (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 152.
62 So said Blackwood’s Magazine (February 1861), p. 131.
63 The phrase ‘muscular Christianity’ was first used in T. C. Sandars’s review of Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857). Donald E. Hall, ‘Introduction’, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge, 1994), ed. Hall, p. 7. See also J. A. Mangan, ‘Bullies, beatings, battles and bruises: “great days and jolly days” in one mid-Victorian public school’, in Disreputable Pleasures, ed. Mike Huggins and J. A. Mangan (Abingdon, 2004), pp. 23–5.
64 Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1978), p. 4.
65 Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, pp. 281–2.
66 E. S. Turner, Boys Will be Boys (London, 1948), pp. 247.
67 Ibid., p. 254.
68 Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, pp. 282, 301. On Hughes’s debt here to Thomas Carlyle, see David Rosen, ‘The volcano and the cathedral: muscular Christianity and the origins of primal manliness’, in Muscular Christianity, ed. Hall, p. 25.
69 On Hughes’s concern with the concept of England, see Dennis W. Allen, ‘Young England: muscular Christianity and the politics of the body in Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, in Muscular Christianity, ed. Hall, pp. 114–32.
70 1 Corinthians, 9: 26–7. Hughes makes this observation as Tom is about to have his first taste of a ‘town and gown row’. Tom Brown at Oxford (London, 1861), vol. I, pp. 198–200. Hughes attended Oriel College, which he described as ‘the accepted home of the noble science of self-defence’. Edward C. Mack and W.H.G. Armytage, Thomas Hughes (London, 1952), p. 28. At Cambridge, Thomas Welsh, better known as Massa Sutton, taught Charles Kingsley to box. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), p. 451.
71 See Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980), pp. 280–97, and Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal (New Haven, 1994), pp. 239–53.
72 Walter Pater, ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’, in Greek Studies (London, 1910), pp. 276, 279. Pater compares ancient athletes with modern cricketers.
73 Walter Pater, ‘Winckelmann’ (1867), in The Renaissance (Oxford, 1989), p. 137; ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’, in Greeks Studies, p. 280.
74 Pater, ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’, p. 295 (my emphasis).
75 Norman Vance finds a ‘possible meeting point’ between Muscular Christian ideals and Pater’s aestheticism in the ‘moralised Hellenism’ of the Revd. E. C. Lefroy. The Sinews of the Spirit (Cambridge, 1985), p. 185. James Eli Adams argues that Carlyle is their common root. ‘Pater’s muscular aestheticism’, in Muscular Christianity, ed. Hall, pp. 215–38.
76 Briggs, Victorian People, p. 160.
77 In his personal life, the Marquess was also pugnacious. Best known as the father of Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), and Wilde’s great antagonist, the police intervened to stop him fighting on the street with his son Percy. The Tenth Marquess of Queensberry, The Sporting Queensberrys (London, 1942), p. 141.
78 Donald Thomas, The Victorian Underworld (New York, 1998), p. 195.
79 Marquess of Queensberry, The Sporting Queensberrys, p. 116.
80 The Native Americans opposed the election of foreigners to office, and demanded the repeal of naturalization laws. See Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (London, 2002), ch. 5; Edward Van Every, Sins of New York as ‘exposed’ by the Police Gazette (New York, 1930); Gorn, The Manly Art, ch. 3. On the wider context, see Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY, 1990).
81 Gorn, The Manly Art, p. 164. The Rev. Gilbert Haven compared Ulysses S. Grant to Morrissey, describing him as ‘but a boxer on a bigger scale’, who ‘fights with others’ fists’. National Sermons (Boston, 1869), p. 617.
82 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ‘Saints and Their Bodies’, in Major Problems in American Sport History, ed. Steven A. Riess (Boston, 1997), pp. 83–85.
83 Oliver Wendall Holmes, ‘The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table’, Atlantic Monthly, 1 (May 1858), p. 881.
84 Walt Whitman, ‘A Song of Joys’, in Leaves of Grass (Oxford, 1990), p. 143. See also Whitman, ‘Pugilism and Pugilists’ (1858), in I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times, ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz (New York, 1932), pp. 105–6.
85 Henry James, The American (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 33–4, 52–3, 56. Eric Haralson connects Newman’s ‘corporeal and capitalist energies’. ‘Henry James’s The American: A (New)man is Being Beaten’, American Literature 64 (1992), p. 478. Jeffory A. Clymer links the novel to changes in late nineteenth-century boxing, most of which, however, occurred after the novel’s publication. ‘The Market in Male Bodies: Henry James’s The American and Late-Nineteenth-Century Boxing’, The Henry James Review, 25 (2004), pp. 127–45.
86 Henry James, The Bostonians (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 290.
87 Duffield Osborne, ‘A Defence of Pugilism’, North American Review, April 1888, pp. 434–5. Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893) is the classic expression of this anxiety.
88 Theodore Roosevelt, ‘The Strenuous Life’ (1900), in Works (New York, 1926), vol. XIII, p. 319. On Roosevelt as a Harvard student boxer, see Jacob A. Riis, Theodore Roosevelt, The Citizen (New York, 1903), pp. 29–31.
89 Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York, 1985), p. 42.
90 Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, p. 52.
91 The difference is made clear by Colin, the protagonist of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel, The Secret Garden. Happy to acquire muscles that ‘stand out like lumps’, Colin is appalled by the thought that he might resemble a prizefighter. The Secret Garden (Oxford, 2002), pp. 250, 270.
92 Mack and Armytage, Thomas Hughes, p. 98.
93 Ibid., pp. 79–80. See J. Llewelyn Davies, The Working Men’s College 1854–1904 (London, 1904).
94 Walter Besant, East London (London, 1901), p. 172.
95 Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (Oxford, 1997), p. 182. Harry’s father, it turns out, had in ‘his Corinthian days . . . often repaired to Seven Dials to see noble sportsmen chez Ben Caunt’. All Sorts and Conditions of Men, p. 225.
96 Besant, East London, pp. 329–31.
97 See J. S. Reed, ‘Ritualism Rampant in East London – Anglo-Catholicism and the Urban Poor’, Victorian Studies, 31, 3 (1988), pp. 375–403; John Springhall, ‘Building character in the British boy: the attempt to extend Christian manliness to working-class adolescents, 1880–1914’, in Manliness and Morality, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester, 1987), pp. 52–74; and on a similar phenomenon in 1930s Chicago, Gerard R. Gems, ‘Selling Sport and Religion in American Society: Bishop Sheil and the Catholic Youth Organization’, in The New American Sport History, ed. S. W. Pope (Urbana, IL, 1997), pp. 300–11.
98 Robert Baden-Powell suggested that boxing might help combat ‘the deterioration of our race’ noted after the Boer War. Scouting for Boys (Oxford, 2005), pp.184, 192. He recommends A. J. Newton’s 1904 manual, Boxing. A rabbi’s son learns to box at Manchester’s Jewish Lads’ Brigade in 1916 in Louis Golding, Magnolia Street (Nottingham, 2006), pp. 329–30.
99 Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 45.
100 John Pearson, The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins (London, 1984), pp. 41, 43. See also Michael Berkowitz, ‘Jewish Blood-Sport: Between Bad Behavior and Respectability’, in Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain, ed. Michael Berkowitz and Ruti Ungar (London, 2007), pp. 67–82.
101 William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890).
102 Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (London, 1996), p. 80.
103 Ibid., p. 173.
104 George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, 2003), p. 91.
105 John Carey, The Violent Effigy (London, 1973), p. 28.
106 Charles Dickens, Letters, vol. VI, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (Oxford, 1988), p. 777.
107 Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, p. 528. See also James E. Marlow, ‘Popular Culture, Pugilism and Pickwick’, Journal of Popular Culture, 15, no. 4 (1982), pp. 16–30.
108 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (Harmondsworth, 2000), pp. 111, 25, 106, 29.
109 Joseph Addison, The Spectator (London, 1907), vol. I, p. 123.
110 Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, p. 225. On Victorian pubs run by ex-boxers, see Walvin, Leisure and Society, pp. 35–6.
111 Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, p. 373.
112 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth, 2002), pp. 313, 577, 622, 442.
113 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Harmondsworth, 1996), p. 304.
114 An earlier example than those given in the oed can be found in Washington Irving’s ‘Buckthorne’ (1824). The narrator says, ‘I felt as if I could have fought even unto the death; and I was likely to do so; for he, was, according to the boxing phraze, “putting my head into Chancery” . . .’; Tales of a Traveller, p. 111.
115 ‘Legal Pugilism’, Punch, 7 August 1841, p. 41.
116 Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (London, 1996), p. 46.
117 Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, p. 1. See Lois E. Chaney, ‘The Fives’ Court’, Dickensian, 81 (1985), pp. 86–7.
118 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Harmondsworth, 1996), p. 298.
119 Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, p. 537.
120 After calling Mr Pickwick ‘a humbug’ in the book’s opening chapter, Mr Blotton says ‘he had used the word in its Pickwickian sense’. Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, p. 6.
121 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Harmondsworth, 1996), pp.170, 246, 650, 652. Mr Jarndyce, in Bleak House, is also occasionally ‘floored’: when Esther rejects his plum pudding in Chapter Three and when she describes Mrs Jelleby as ‘a little unmindful of her home’ in Chapter Six.
122 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 50.
123 Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, pp. 279–80. ‘Backing the little one’ is a principle of chivalry for Roboshobery Dove in Arthur Morrison’s Cunning Murrell (London, 1900), p. 206.
124 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Harmondsworth, 2002), pp. 47–8. Martin Chuzzlewit decides to go to America after attempting to strike Pecksniff. Martin Chuzzlewit (Oxford, 1982), pp. 182–3.
125 Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, p. 99. Nicholas also knocks down the comic tragedian Mr. Lenville in ch. 29 and the villainous Sir Mulberry Hawk in ch. 32.
126 Carey, The Violent Effigy, p. 29
127 Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 157.
128 Ibid., pp. 253–7. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon has tussles with local lads for similar reasons: Barry Lyndon (Oxford, 1984), pp. 17, 22.
129 Dickens, David Copperfield, pp. 261, 266, 282.
130 Ibid., pp. 356, 476, 530, 531, 354, 567, 571–2, 689, 697–8.
131 Ibid., pp. 395, 678, 735. See Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains (Oxford, 2001), pp. 175–82. Charlotte Brontë was equally severe on latter-day Byronism. Jane Eyre’s overbearing rival, Miss Ingram, disapproves of modern young men as ‘absorbed in care about their pretty faces and their white hands’. Jane Eyre (Toronto, 1999), pp. 257–8.
132 Dickens, Great Expectations, pp. 60, 62–3. See also Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London, 1981), p. 122.
133 Ibid., pp. 90–92. Mary Edminson dates the main action of the novel as roughly 1807 to 1823; that is the era of Regency boximania. ‘The date of the action of Great Expectations’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 13 (1958), p. 31.
134 Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 93.
135 Ibid., pp. 47, 140–42, 225.
136 Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 283.
137 Dickens, Great Expectations, pp. 181, 185.
138 Wilkie Collins’s muscular Christians are more sinister. Geoffrey Delamayn fights with ‘stuffed and padded gloves’ but they are only ‘apparently harmless weapons’. Man and Wife (Oxford, 1998), p. 174.
139 Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, pp. 45–6.
140 Charles Dickens, Speeches, ed. K. J. Fielding (London, 1988), p. 123.
141 Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, pp. 175–6.
142 Arthur Conan Doyle, Rodney Stone (London, 1912), p. 12.
143 Francis Galton, ‘On the Anthropometric Laboratory at the Late International Health Exhibition’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 14 (1884), p. 211.
144 Fitzsimmons is claimed by several nations. He was born in Cornwall in 1863, moved to New Zealand as a child, learned to box in Australia and was an American citizen when he won the heavyweight title.
145 Angus Wilson, The Naughty Nineties (London, 1976), pp. 6–7.
146 David Christie Murray, The Making of a Novelist (London, 1894), pp. 196–7, 198–99, 212.
147 The French Revolution and its aftermath was a popular subject for 1890s historical fiction. See Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter, Edwardian Fiction (Oxford, 1997), pp. 185–6. Rodney Stone had its origins in a play which Conan Doyle wrote as a vehicle for Sir Henry Irving in 1894. The House of Temperley: A Melodrama of the Ring ended with a lengthy boxing match. Although, or perhaps because, reviewers praised its ‘life-like’ quality, the play did not attract large audiences. Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales (New York, 1999), pp. 268–9. Other historical novels of this period featuring boxing include Arthur Morrison’s Cunning Murrell (1900) and, a favourite of the young Norman Mailer, Jeffrey Farnol’s The Amateur Gentleman (1913). Many of Georgette Heyer’s 1930s novels include Regency boxing.
148 Doyle, Rodney Stone, p. 251.
149 Stashower, Teller of Tales, p. 192.
150 Ibid., p. 35.
151 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1903); see, in particular, his encounter with the Bristol Bustler in ‘How the King Held the Brigadier’. See also Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lord of Falconbridge’, in which Tom Spring is tricked into fighting the Lord, ‘Jackson’s favourite pupil’. The Last Galley (1911).
152 A prizefighter also features as a bodyguard to a diamond magnate in ‘A Costume Piece’ by Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung. The presence of this ‘paid bully’ provides an added challenge to Hornung’s gentleman thief, Raffles. The Amateur Cracksman (Harmondsworth, 2003), pp. 23–38.
153 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 41.
154 Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, p. 355.
155 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth, 1950), p. 76.
1 Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His Times (London, 1988), p. 13.
2 Tom Wolfe, Foreword, The Police Gazette, ed. Gene Smith and Jayne Barry (New York, 1972), p. 10. See also Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, 1999), pp. 193–210.
3 Smith, ‘Introduction’, The Police Gazette, pp. 15–16.
4 See Frank Butler, A History of Boxing in Britain (London, 1972), ch. 5.
5 José Martí, ‘Letter from New York’, in José Martí: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (Harmondsworth, 2002), pp. 107–15.
6 Robert Frost, ‘New Hampshire’, in Complete Poems (London, 1951), pp. 193–4. The poem was published in 1925 during the heyday of William Jennings Bryan’s fundamentalist crusade against teaching the theory of evolution in public schools.
7 Theodore Dreiser, A Book about Myself (London, 1929), pp. 150–51.
8 In 1903, depressed by the reception of Sister Carrie, Dreiser went to a sanatorium run by William Muldoon, Sullivan’s trainer-manager, and later portrayed him in a 1919 story, ‘Muldoon, the Strong Man’. Fulfilment and Other Tales of Women and Men, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Santa Rosa, CA, 1992), pp. 341–84. See Kathy Frederickson, ‘Working Out to Work Through: Dreiser in Muldoon’s Body Shop of Shame’, in Theodore Dreiser and American Culture, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (Newark, NT, 2000), pp. 115–37.
9 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Harmondsworth, 1981), pp. 165, 43. In creating McTeague Frank Norris may also have thought of Sullivan. Norris drew on a newspaper report of a murder case, which said of the accused, Collins: ‘Fancy a first cousin of John L. Sullivan’s in Collins’ dress and situation and you have the man.’ San Francisco Examiner, 14 October 1893, in McTeague (New York, 1977), p. 260.
10 Vachel Lindsay, ‘John L. Sullivan, The Strong Boy of Boston’, in Collected Poems (New York, 1925), pp. 93–5. The poem is dedicated to Louis Untermeyer and Robert Frost. In 1921 Frost wrote to another poet, Sara Teasdale, proposing to include Lindsay’s poem in a collection of poetry about Sullivan. The collection never materialized. Philip Cronenwett, ‘Frost to Teasdale: A New Letter’, Friends of the Dartmouth Library Newsletter, no. 31 (July 2001), p. 3.
11 Edward Bellamy imagined that people of the future would associate Bostonians with pugilistic skills. Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (New York, 2000), p. 26.
12 Lindsay used the phrase ‘Higher Vaudeville imagination’ when introducing his poems in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse in 1913. The editor, Harriet Monroe, reprinted his comments in her introduction to his collection The Congo and Other Poems (New York, 1914).
13 Patrick Myler, Gentleman Jim Corbett (London, 1998), pp. xiv, 46.
14 Ibid., pp. 216–21. Alan Woods argues that the marketing of Corbett marks ‘a major step in the American commercialization of both sport and theatre.’ ‘James J. Corbett: Theatrical Star’, Journal of Sport History (Summer 1976), p. 175.
15 Mark Twain, Selected Letters, ed. Charles Neider (New York, 1982), p. 224. Corbett ends his autobiography with his version of this anecdote. He refers to Twain as ‘dear old Mark, another good friend of mine’. The Roar of the Crowd (New York, 1925), p. 328. Twain had described Sullivan as the kind of ‘man of prowess’ who would have done well in the Middle Ages. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in Historical Romances (New York, 1994), p. 304.
16 For a full account of the Texan fight promoter Dan Stuart’s attempts to stage the fight, see Leo N. Mitetich, Dan Stuart’s Fistic Carnival (College Station, TX, 1994).
17 Myler, Gentleman Jim Corbett, p. 141; Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography (New York, 1985), p. 43.
18 Quoted in Steven A. Riess, ‘In the Ring and Out: Professional Boxing in New York, 1896–1920’, in Sport in America: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Donald Spivey (Westport, CT, 1985), p. 97.
19 From 1911 to 1918, a state commission ran these clubs, bringing in around $49,000 in revenue a year. The 1920 Walker Bill was modelled on the examples of the British National Sports Club and Army, Navy and Civilian Board of Control. In a 1906 short story, ‘The Coming-out of Maggie’, O. Henry describes ‘the legal duress that constantly threatened’ the Give and Take Athletic Association of New York’s East Side. The Four Million (London, 1947), p. 53.
20 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York, 1960), pp. 96, 250. Sinclair may have drawn on Alexander R. Piper’s Report of an Investigation of the Discipline and Administration of the Police Department of the City of Chicago which described how Joseph Kipley, Police Superintendent during the late 1890s, supported an ultimately unsuccessful scheme to hold illegal prizefights to aid a ‘Police Relief Fund’. Piper, Report (Chicago, 1904), pp. 5–11. See Perry R. Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana, IL, 1983), p. 240.
21 Jack London, John Barleycorn (Oxford, 1989), p. 3. See also pp. 12, 27, 33.
22 G. Stanley Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York, 1923), pp. 578–9. Although Hall officially disapproved of prize-fights in his non-confessional writings, he vociferously championed the moral and physical benefits of amateur boxing. See Adolescence (New York, 1904), p. 218; Youth (New York, 1904), pp. 3, 78, 102–3.
23 Eakins’s interest in professional, rather than amateur, boxing only began in the late 1890s, but once introduced to the sport, Lloyd Goodrich notes, he attended the arena ‘several times a week . . . watching [the fights] with such intensity that he would go through all the motions’. At ‘polite parties he would draw friends aside to discuss the latest bouts’. Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (Cambridge, MA, 1982), vol. II, p. 144.
24 Salutat alludes to Hail Caesar! We Who Are About To Die Salute You (1859) by Eakins’s Paris teacher, Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1866 Eakins wrote from Paris to his father about the American reputation for boxing. Quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, vol. I, p. 21. Eakins described Gérôme’s painting as depicting ‘cold cruel barbarians’ who kill each other ‘for love of fighting’ while ‘the fat hideous Caesar’ is raised far above them in his elaborate throne. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, vol. I, pp. 45–6.
25 Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, vol. II, p. 277.
26 Quoted in Martin A. Berger, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (Berkeley, CA, 2000), p. 113.
27 Michael Hatt, ‘Muscles, morals, mind: the male body in Thomas Eakins’ Salutat’, in The Body Imaged, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (Cambridge, 1993), p. 68.
28 Bennard B. Perlman, Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight (New York, 1988), p. 56.
29 Quoted in Perlman, Painters of the Ashcan School, p. 89.
30 David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (Oxford, 1995), p. 258.
31 Edward Lucie-Smith, American Realism (New York, 1994), p. 69.
32 Bellows, quoted in Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven, 1992), p. 213, n. 58.
33 Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America, p. 100.
34 Charles Belmont Davis, ‘The Renaissance of Coney’, in Tales of Gaslight New York, ed. Frank Oppel (Edison, NJ, 1985), p. 29.
35 Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America, p. 100.
36 Quoted in Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America, p. 215, n. 84.
37 See, for example, Robert Haywood, ‘George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s: Boxing, Violence, and Male Identity’, Smithsonian Studies in American Art, 2 (Spring 1988), pp. 3–15.
38 James Huneker, ‘Seen in the World of Art’, New York Sun (5 March 1911). The ‘mere manliness of Mr. Bellows’s style is enough to distinguish him’ from the general ‘American school of painting’ in which ‘there is so much that is effeminate,’ wrote Henry McBride: New York Sun (20 November 1921). Bellows is ‘a real man, with “pep” enough for half a dozen’ declared the Boston Evening Transcript (13 January 1919). All are quoted in Shi, Facing Facts, p. 267.
39 George Santayana first used the phrase in his 1911 lecture ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’.
40 Frank Norris, ‘The True Reward of the Novelist’, in The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays (London, 1903), pp. 15–22.
41 Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (Harmondsworth, 1990), vol. I, p. 114. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Note on Modern Prizefighting’ (1901), appended to Cashel Byron’s Profession (London, 1925), p. 341.
42 A film of the novel, Román Boxera, was made in Czechoslovakia in 1921. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (Harmondsworth, 1993), vol. III, p. 374.
43 Shaw, ‘Preface’, Cashel Byron’s Profession, pp. xii–xiii.
44 P. G. Wodehouse, ‘The Pugilist in Fiction’, The Independent Shavian, 30, nos 1–2 (1992), pp. 2–14. A schoolboy boxer at Dulwich, Wodehouse often wrote about boxers. See, for example, ‘The Debut of Battling Billson’, in He Rather Enjoyed It (1924) and Bachelors Anonymous (1973).
45 Norman Clark, ‘“Come to Lunch!” – G. Bernard Shaw: Exclusive Interview’ in Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, ed. A. M. Gibbs (Iowa City, IA, 1990), pp. 94–5.
46 Clark, ‘“Come to Lunch!”’, p. 195.
47 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Joe Beckett v Georges Carpentier’, in Punches on the Page, ed. David Rayvern Allen (Edinburgh, 1998), pp. 41–7; Arnold Bennett, ‘The Prize Fight’, in Boxing in Art and Literature, ed. William D. Cox (New York, 1935), pp. 139–45.
48 Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. III, pp. 208–9. See also Jay Tunney, ‘The Playwright and the Prizefighter: Bernard Shaw and Gene Tunney’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 23 (2003), pp. 149–54; and ‘Cashel Byron’s Profession: A Catalyst to Friendship – Life Imitates Art’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 25 (2005), pp. 52–8.
49 Shaw, ‘Preface’ to Cashel Byron’s Profession, p. XV.
50 Shaw, Cashel Byron’s Profession, pp. 4, 7, 24, 141–2, 276.
51 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Croxley Master’, The Green Flag (London, 1905), pp. 104–70.
52 Shaw, Cashel Byron’s Profession, p. 167; Shaw, ‘Joe Beckett v Georges Carpentier’, p. 47.
53 Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. I, p. 114.
54 Shaw, ‘Modern Prizefighting’, pp. 345–6.
55 George Bernard Shaw, Preface, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (London, 1898), vol. I, pp. xxv–xxvi.
56 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1953), pp. 172, 178–9, 182.
57 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Veblen’s Attack on Culture’, Prisms (1967), trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, ma, 1981), p. 81. For an example of an extended development of this idea, see, Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport – A Prison of Measured Time, trans. Ian Fraser (London, 1978).
58 Horace Fletcher, The A.B.–z of Our Own Nutrition (1903). See Donald J. Mrozek, Sport and the American Mentality, 1880–1910 (Knoxville, TN, 1983), pp. 91–7, 196–9.
59 Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stories (Oxford, 1990), p. 22.
60 The raw is always preferable to the cooked. In Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs contrasts the fastidious Lord Greystoke who ‘sent back his chops to the club’s chef because they were underdone, and when he had finished his repast he dipped his finger-ends into a silver bowl of scented water and dried them upon a piece of snowy damask’ with his nephew Tarzan, who ‘gobbled down a great quantity of the raw flesh’ before wiping ‘his greasy fingers upon his naked thighs’. Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (London, 1917), p. 77.
61 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Harmondsworth, 2002), p. 53.
62 Jon Hurley, Tom Spring (Stroud, 2002), p. 18; Moses Browne, ‘A Survey of the Amphitheatre’, in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford, 1984), p. 292. See Ben Rogers, Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation (London, 2003).
63 Quoted in The Great Prize Fight (London, 1977), pp. 80–81.
64 Norman Mailer, The Fight (London, 1975), pp. 27–8.
65 Quoted in Tom Spring, p. 26. See also Peter Radford, The Celebrated Captain Barclay (London, 2001), pp. 169–70.
66 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 119.
67 Daniel Mendoza, ‘Observations on the Art of Pugilism’, Appendix to The Memoirs of the Life of Daniel Mendoza, ed. Peter Magriel (London, 1951), p. 113.
68 Arthur Morrison, ‘Three Rounds’, in Tales of Mean Streets (London, 1927), pp. 85–96. Stan Shipley has written on the difficulty of conceiving boxers as a labour force in this period. ‘Tom Causer of Bermondsey – A Boxer Hero of the 1890s’, History Workshop, 15 (1983), pp. 28–59.
69 In an early comic story, ‘Shorty Stack, Pugilist’ (1897), Frank Norris too depicts the effects of stodge (here, potato salad) on a boxer’s stomach. The Apprenticeship Writings, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr and Douglas K. Burgess (Philadelphia, 1996), vol. I, pp. 187–95.
70 Jack London, ‘A Piece of Steak’, in The Portable Jack London, ed. Earle Labor (Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 232–48.
71 See, for example, his remarks on the 1905 ‘Britt-Nelson Fight’ in Jack London Reports, ed. King Hendricks and Irving Shepard (New York, 1971), p. 258.
72 Jack London, ‘The Somnambulists’, in Revolution and Other Essays (London, 1910), pp. 46–7, 50. The Federal Meat-Inspection Act, designed to prevent adulterated livestock from being sold as food, and to ensure that meat was slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions, was passed in 1906. For London, Darwin’s ideas could be pretty much be reduced to ‘the law of meat’, the title of Chapter Five of White Fang (1906). See also Jack London, Smoke Bellew (1911), chs. 1 and 2.
73 London wrote an almost identical sentence in John Barleycorn, only substituting drinking for boxing (p. 66). ‘Certainly Prizefighting is not half as brutalizing or demoralizing as many forms of big business,’ concurred Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, p. 43.
74 George Orwell, ‘Introduction to Love of Life and Other Stories by Jack London’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth, 1970), vol. IV, p. 45.
75 Orwell, ‘Introduction to Love of Life’, p. 47. Orwell concludes that ‘if [London] had been a politically reliable person he would probably have left behind nothing of interest’ (p. 48).
76 London described Battling Nelson as both ‘the abysmal brute’ and ‘the lean and hungry proletarian’ in his report of the 1905 Nelson–Britt prize-fight: Jack London Reports, pp. 254–5. Nelson became known by the first rather than the second title, and dedicated his 1909 autobiography to London, thanking him for ‘paying me the biggest compliment ever accorded me by any writer.’ David Mike Hamilton, ‘The Tools of My Trade’: The Annotated Books in Jack London’s Library (Seattle, 1986), pp. 212–13. London revived the phrase as the title for a 1911 novella, in which Pat Glendon, a bear-eating, Browning-reading ‘creature of the wild’ retires when the corrupt nature of capitalist boxing becomes clear to him.
77 Champion (1949) starred Kirk Douglas as Midge. The film was based on Ring Lardner’s 1915 short story of the same title.
78 Non-capitalist fights can occur in nature. See Buck vs. Spitz in The Call of the Wild (1903), ch. 3. Mark Seltzer describes the protagonists of London’s animal stories as ‘men in furs’: Bodies and Machines (New York, 1992), p. 166.
79 Jack London, ‘The Mexican’, in The Portable Jack London, pp. 291–313.
80 Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (Oxford, 1986), pp. 171–2.
81 Dreiser, Sister Carrie, p. 338.
82 Pierce Egan, Boxiana: A Selection, ed. John Ford (London, 1976), p. 15.
83 Roland Barthes, ‘The World of Wrestling’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 2000), pp. 15–25.
84 Jack London, A Daughter of the Snows (London, 1964), p. 46. London’s formulation is close to that of one his favourite writers, Herbert Spencer, who maintained that ‘the amount of vital energy which the body at any moment possesses is limited; and that being limited, it is impossible to get from it more than a fixed quantity of results.’ Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical (London, 1861), p. 268. Although stories such as ‘A Piece of Steak’ or ‘Three Rounds’ suggest that decline in muscle stock was an individual phenomenon, reversible with the ingestion of a good meal, many argued that it affected whole populations. See H. Llewellyn Smith, ‘Influx of Population (East London)’, in Charles Booth et al., Life and Labour of the People in London, 1st series (London, 1902), vol. III, p. 110. For a full account of various applications of thermodynamic language in this period, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 1990).
85 Jack London, ‘Jeffries Never Wasted Energy’, in Jack London Reports, pp. 287–90.
86 Jack London, ‘What Life Means to Me’, in No Mentor but Myself, ed. Dale L. Walker and Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 90–91. Compare George Orwell’s remark that ‘a novelist does not, any more than a boxer or a ballet dancer, last for ever. He has an initial impulse which is good for three or four books, perhaps even for a dozen, but which must exhaust itself sooner or later.’ ‘As I Please’, in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. IV, p. 293.
87 See Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens, GA, 1985), pp. 92–112.
88 London, John Barleycorn, pp. 134–5; Jack London, Martin Eden (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 104–5.
89 Shaw, ‘Modern Prizefighting’, p. 335.
90 Ibid., p. 336.
91 Myler, Gentleman Jim Corbett, p. 129.
92 Gorn, The Manly Art, p. 205.
93 Ibid., p. 205.
94 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (London, 1975), vol. VI, p. 127. See also E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), pp. 56–97.
95 Gorn, The Manly Art, p. 205.
96 The first automatic timing device was used in California for the 1891 Corbett vs. Jackson fight. It was not adopted in New York until 1925 when the new Madison Square Gardens opened. Myler, Gentleman Jim Corbett, p. 42.
97 Arthur Morrison, Cunning Murrell (London, 1900), pp. 210–12. The chapter is entitled ‘The Call of Time’.
98 John Masefield, ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ (1911), in Poems (London, 1946), pp. 37–79. The pub call of time – ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’ – was to play a significant part in ‘A Game of Chess’, Section ii of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).
99 ‘Between Rounds’ is also the title of an O. Henry story in which the ongoing fight between a husband and wife is briefly interrupted by the news of a missing child. The Four Million (1906).
100 Carl Smith contrasts the ‘peaceful’ nature of these paintings with George Bellows’s lithographs, Between Rounds (1916), where ‘the two exhausted fighters slump on their stools and over the ropes as they gasp for life’, and A Knockout (1921), where ‘the upright fighter does not stand back . . . but, tasting blood, bulls his way past the referee to finish the slaughter’. ‘The Boxing Paintings of Thomas Eakins’, Prospects, 4 (1979), p. 408. See Emma S. Bellows, George Bellows: His Lithographs (New York, 1927).
101 Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration (Chicago, 1989), p. 71. Eakins here depicts his friend, sportswriter Clarence Cranmer (the man raising his hat in Salutat) as the timekeeper.
102 Martin A. Berger describes Salutat is ‘an apparent reworking’ of Eakins’s 1875 Gross Clinic, another setting in which professional activity becomes a spectacle. Berger, Man Made, p. 112.
103 See Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph (Philadelphia, 1994).
104 Eakins studied in Paris from 1866 to 1869. In 1867, Courbet and Manet were rejected from the Exposition Universale and famously showed their work in a building outside. Eakins wrote home about the Exposition, but did not mention Manet. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, vol. I, p. 30.
105 Emile Zola, ‘The Experimental Novel’, in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. and trans. George J. Becker (Princeton, 1963), p. 171.
106 Frank Norris, ‘Zola as a Romantic Writer’, in Literary Criticism, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin, TX, 1964), p. 72.
107 London, Martin Eden, p. 118. The mechanical model of the body had changed considerably in 75 years. In 1818 Pierce Egan had compared the boxer’s muscles to ‘springs and levers, which execute the different motions of the body’. Boxiana (London, 1818), vol. I, pp. 37–8.
108 Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: History of the Motion Picture Through 1925 (New York, 1986), p. 88. Laurent Mannoni notes that ‘from 14 April 1894 to 1 April 1895 the takings of the New York Kinetoscope Parlor were $16,171.56.’ Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow (1995), trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter, 2000), p. 400.
109 In an earlier novel, London described a sense of being both actor and spectator as being characteristic of dreams. Jack London, Before Adam (London, 1929), p. 109. See David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford, 2007), p. 19.
110 Films of animal fights were also popular and presumably to London’s taste. The first boxing kangaroo was exhibited by Professor Landermann at the London Aquarium in 1892. Paul Gallico’s Matilda (1970; filmed in 1978) is the story of a kangaroo which knocks out the middleweight champion.
111 Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, p. 427. See also Luke McKernan, ‘Sport and the First Films’, in Cinema: the Beginnings and the Future, ed. Christopher Williams (London, 1996), p. 109; Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York, 1990), pp. 82–3.
112 Myler, Gentleman Jim Corbett, p. 96.
113 McKernan, ‘Sport and the First Films’, p. 110. The Lumières had projected film before this, but not commercially. The New York World advertised the event: ‘You’ll sit comfortably and see fighters hammering each other, circuses, suicides, hangings, electrocutions, shipwrecks, scenes on the exchanges, street scenes, horse-races, football games, almost anything, in fact, in which there is action, just as if you were on the spot during the actual events. And you won’t see marionettes. You’ll see people and things as they are.’ Quoted in Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, p. 96.
114 Although celebrated as new, this was the same punch as Jack Broughton’s ‘projectile’, discussed by Fielding’s Tom Jones.
115 Quoted in Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, pp. 196–7.
116 Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, p. 288. Staged re-enactments, based on newspaper reports, were also popular. See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, pp. 196, 201; Dan Streible, ‘Fake Fight Films’, in Le cinéma au tourant du siècle, ed. Claire Dupré La Tour, André Gaudreault, and Roberta Pearson (Québec, 1999), pp. 63–79.
117 Quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901 (Philadelphia, 1969), p. 175.
118 James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 323.
119 Miletich, Dan Stuart’s Fistic Carnival, pp. 95, 229–30; William A. Brady, The Fighting Man (Indianapolis, 1916), pp. 148–50. Corbett had earned $5,000 for his first film, the six-round staged contest against Courtney in 1894, but also received royalties of $150 per week (later reduced to $50) for each set of films on exhibition in the kinetoscopes. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, p. 84.
120 Shaw, ‘Modern Prizefighting’, p. 340. Jack London’s ‘abysmal brute’ earns ‘from twenty to thirty thousand dollars a fight, as well as equally large sums from the moving picture men’. Jack London, The Abysmal Brute (Lincoln, NE, 2000), pp. 62–3.
121 Dan Streible, ‘A History of the Boxing Film’, Film History, 3 (1989), pp. 235–47; McKernan, ‘Sport and the First Films’, p. 107. Equally bold are the claims made by Noel Burch, Life to those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1990), p. 143.
122 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (Berkeley, CA, 1968), p. 2.
123 Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, p. 116.
124 I am quoting from a poster advertising a 20 June 1898 showing of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons film at the Argyle Theatre of Varieties, Birkenhead, which is on display at the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, University of Exeter.
125 Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York, 2000), pp. 136–7.
126 Quoted in Streible, ‘A History of the Boxing Film’, p. 238.
127 Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked (London, 1912), p. 122.
128 On 29 January 1912, for example, the Argyle Theatre of Varieties, Birkenhead, advertised Phil Rees’s Stable Lads in their Novel Racing Act, ‘Not a Crook’, introducing New Songs, Dances, and Comic Boxing. The Bill Douglas Collection, University of Exeter. After 1900, boxing films in America were largely shown at burlesque houses. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making American Cinema, 1900–1910 (Berkeley, CA, 1999), pp. 3–12.
129 Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, p. 116
130 Dennis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue (London, 2000), vol. I, p. 13; John Barnes, The Beginnings of Cinema in England, 1894–1901 (London, 1992), vol. IV, p. 239.
131 The Knockout was completed on 29 May and released on 11 June 1914; Mabel’s Married Life (dir. Chaplin and Mabel Normand) was released on 20 June.
132 Bioscope (3 June 1915) described Chaplin as fighting ‘with the agility of a boxing kangaroo and with almost as much disregard for the rules of warfare’. Glen Mitchell, The Chaplin Encyclopedia (London, 1997), p. 97.
133 Chaplin may have picked up this gag from The Knockout where Fatty Arbuckle instructs the camera to move away while he is changing. See also William Paul, ‘Charles Chaplin and the Annals of Anality’, in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley, CA, 1991), pp. 109-30.
134 Mark Winokur, American Laughter:Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy (London, 1996), p. 104.
135 Chaplin attended fights in Hollywood and, with Fatty Arbuckle, acted as a second at the LA Athletic Club. He was often photographed with boxers. Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (Harmondsworth, 1996), pp. 185–8, 273; David A. Yallop, The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle (London, 1976), p. 79.
136 Thomas Burke, ‘The Chink and the Child’, Limehouse Nights (London, 1916).
137 The Abysmal Brute was the title of a 1911 Jack London novella; it was filmed in 1923. See also Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (London, 1973), p. 241.
138 Dudley Andrew, ‘Broken Blossoms: The Vulnerable Text and the Marketing of Masochism’, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton, 1984), p. 21.
139 Brigitte Peucker, Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton, 1995), p. 61.
140 Estimates varied; one source suggested that in Chicago 60 per cent of spectators were women. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, p. 200.
141 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA, 1991), p. 1.
142 Dan Streible, ‘Female Spectators and the Corbett–Fitz-simmons Fight Film’, in Out of Bounds: Sports, Media and the Politics of Identity, ed. Aaron Baker and Todd Boyd (Bloomington, IA, 1997), pp. 34–5, 41. Women also attended his stage performances. William Brady, Showman (New York, 1937), p. 107. Sherwood Anderson recalled shadow-boxing in front of a girl he was trying to impress in hope that ‘she will take me for . . . a young Corbett’. A Story Teller’s Story (New York, 1924), p. 202.
143 Nellie Bly, ‘A Visit with John L. Sullivan’, in Punches on the Page, ed. Allen, pp. 11–16. London includes a lengthy scene in which a woman journalist interviews a prizefighter in The Abysmal Brute, p. 79.
144 Streible, ‘Female Spectators and the Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight Film’, p. 31. On Annie Laurie, see Barbara Belford, Brilliant Byline: A Biographical Anthology of Notable Newspaper Women in America (New York, 1986), p. 140.
145 Quoted in Miletich, Dan Stuart’s Fistic Carnival, p. 196.
146 Corbett, The Roar of the Crowd, p. 264.
147 Ashton Stevens, ‘Tragedy is Mirrored in the Face of Britt’s Father’, San Francisco Examiner, 10 September 1905, quoted in Michael Oriard, ‘Introduction’ to Jack London, The Game (Lincoln, NE, 2001), p. xv.
148 Streible, ‘A History of the Boxing Film’, p. 241.
149 Quoted in Riess, ‘In the Ring and Out’, p. 113. See also Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana, IL, 1990), pp. 53–9.
150 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Oxford, 1996), p. 73.
151 Shaw, Cashel Byron’s Profession, pp. 28, 41–2. For a comparison with a similar scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, see Elsie B. Adams, ‘A “Lawrentian” Novel by Bernard Shaw’, The D. H. Lawrence Review, 2 (1969), pp. 245–53.
152 Shaw, Preface to Cashel Byron’s Profession, p. xi. Corbett first played the role in 1901; he also appeared in a Broadway production in 1906. See Benny Green, Shaw’s Champions (London, 1978), ch. 3.
153 Shaw, Cashel Byron’s Profession, pp. 49, 266, 277.
154 London, Martin Eden, p. 303. See also London, A Daughter of the Snows, p. 10.
155 The best account of the novella is Michael Oriard’s introduction to the 2001 edition, pp. vii–xviii; see also Christian Messenger, ‘Jack London and Boxing in The Game’, Jack London Newsletter, 9 (1976), pp. 67–72.
156 London, The Game, pp. 9, 13.
157 Ibid., p. 41.
158 In 1883, actress Ann Livingston reportedly ‘dressed as a boy’ to attend a fight between her boyfriend, John L. Sullivan, and Charlie Mitchell. Nat Fleischer and Sam Andre, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London, 1959), p. 61. In 1909, London’s wife, Charmian, attracted controversy when, undisguised, she accompanied him to the Johnson–Burns contest in Sydney. Clarice Stasz, American Dreamers: Charmain and Jack London (New York, 1988), p. 192. See also ‘The Birth Mark: A Sketch written for Robert and Julia Fitzsimmons’, in which a girl dresses up in a man’s tuxedo and sneaks into the West Bay Athletic Club for a bet. There she meets Fitzsimmons who, although he knows she’s a girl, strings her along for a while. Jack London, The Human Drift (New York, 1917).
159 London, The Game, p. 53.
160 Ibid., pp. 61–5. Michael Hatt compares London’s description of Joe with Thomas Eakins’s depiction of boxer Billy Smith in Salutat, which he claims ‘requires an imaginary female viewer’. ‘Muscles, morals, mind: the male body in Thomas Eakins’ Salutat’, p. 68.
161 London, The Game, pp. 80, 84, 98–9.
162 A similar moment of incomprehension can be found in The Sea-Wolf when Maud Brewster tries to intervene in some dangerous ‘man-play’. Jack London, Novels and Stories (New York, 1982), p. 641.
163 See Jean Pfaeflzer, The Utopian Novel in America, 1886–1896: The Politics of Form (Pittsburgh, 1984), p. 145–6.
164 William H. Bishop, The Garden of Eden, USA: A Very Possible Story (Chicago, 1895), pp. 148, 198.
165 The Police Gazette, ed. Smith, p. 120.
166 Quoted in Vanessa Toulmin, A Fair Fight (Oldham, 1999), p. 33. Belle Gordon regularly used a punch bag as part of her vaudeville act, and is named as the author of Physical Culture for Women (New York, 1913). Other women’s boxing movies include Gordon Sisters Boxing (Edison, 1901), based on Bessie and Minnie Gordon’s stage act; The Physical Culture Girl (Edison, 1903), in which a young woman wakes up, stretches, and hits a punch bag; and Boxing Ladies (Mitchell and Kenyon, early 1900s) in which two women fairground boxers rescue a man from a gang of thieves. See also Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998), p. 33.
167 J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, 1959), p. 110; George Gissing, The Odd Women (London, 1980), p. 102. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 71.
168 Frank Norris, ‘A Girl of Twenty Who has the Frame of a Sandow’, in The Apprenticeship Writings, pp. 238–40. Many of Norris’s heroines recall Capitaine. For example, Moran, the daughter of a Norwegian sea captain, is ‘massive’: ‘even beneath the coarse sleeve of her oilskin coat one could infer that the biceps and deltoids were large and powerful’. Norris describes her as more powerful than the hero, Ross Wilbur, but when they fight, he wins. Moran of the Lady Letty (New York, 1898), pp. 70–72.
169 London, A Daughter of the Snows, p. 17. As the novel goes on, Frona becomes less interested in physical activity and comes to represent an alternative moral position. Compare the unnamed heroine of ‘Amateur Night’, whose ‘vigorous daintiness . . . gave an impression of virility with none of the womanly left out.’ Jack London, Moon-Face and Other Stories (New York, 1906), p. 60. See Clarice Stasz, ‘Androgyny in the Novels of Jack London’, in Jack London: Essays in Criticism, ed. Ray Wilson Ownbey (Santa Barbara, CA, 1978), pp. 54–65.
170 London, A Daughter of the Snows, pp. 52, 53, 55.
1 Frank Norris, ‘The True Reward of the Novelist’, in The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays (London, 1903), p. 19.
2 On the role of sport in the development of a national ethos in this period, see S. W. Pope, Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876–1926 (Oxford, 1997).
3 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York, 1976), p. 128.
4 Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, in The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories (New York, 1996), p. 168.
5 Sabine Haenni, ‘Visual and Theatrical Culture, Tenement Fiction, and the Immigrant Subject in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl’, American Literature, 71, 3 (1999), p. 513.
6 Cahan, Yekl, p. 185.
7 Ibid., p. 173.
8 Jules Chametzky, From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan (Amherst, MA, 1977), p. 53.
9 Initially rejected by magazines such as Harper’s as being of no interest to ‘the American reader’, Yekl was eventually published in 1896. A translation also appeared in a Yiddish magazine. Saul Scott, Homing Pidgins: Immigrant Tongues, Immanent Bodies in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (Stanford, CA, 1995), p. 17. On Yekl’s reception, see Jules Chametzsky, Our Decentralized Literature (Amherst, MA, 1986), pp. 61–2.
10 Chametzky, From the Ghetto, p. 55. Werner Sollors also finds that Jake’s ‘bastardized language’ is rendered ‘quite derogatorily’. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford, 1986), p. 164. For a more subtle reading, see Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley, CA, 1999), ch. 5.
11 Cahan, Yekl, p. 194.
12 Howe, World of Our Fathers, p. 473.
13 Cahan, Yekl, pp. 170–71.
14 See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York, 1991), pp. 53–4. On the revival of interest in Mendoza at this time, see Michael Berkowitz, The Jewish Self-Image: American and British Perspectives, 1881–1930 (London, 2000), p. 75. Muscular Judaism was promoted by the Maccabi movement. By 1914, there was over 100 Maccabi clubs in Europe. For an example from Weimar Germany, see Hermann von Wedderkop, ‘Jüdischer Box-Klub Machabi’, Querschnitt, 6 (1926), p. 887.
15 Israel Zangwill, The Children of the Ghetto (London, 1998), pp. 8–9.
16 Paul Breines, Tough Jews (New York, 1990), pp. 19–49.
17 Quoted in Howe, World of Our Fathers, p. 128.
18 Patrick Myler, The Fighting Irish (Dingle, 1987), p. 49.
19 In this period, a ‘move from racial to cultural identity appears to replace essentialist criteria of identity (who we are) with performative criteria (what we do).’ Walter Benn Michaels, Our America (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 14–15.
20 O. Henry, ‘The Coming-out of Maggie’, The Four Million (London, 1947), pp. 51–8. In 1905 the National Police Gazette noted that although ‘Celtic names’ still dominated boxing, many of them belonged to Italians (‘the stiletto of one generation being succeeded by the hard knuckles of the next’). Major Problems in American Sport History, ed. Steven A. Riess (Boston, 1997), pp. 280–81.
21 Steven A. Riess, Sport in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Wheeling, IL, 1995), p. 104.
22 James. T. Farrell, Young Lonigan, in Studs Lonigan (New York, 1977), pp. 82, 143. On the experience of Jewish immigrants in Irish Harlem at this time, see Henry Roth, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (London 1995), p. 30. The 1927 film, East Side, West Side is the story of an Irish-American boxer made-good (played by George O’Brien) and his Jewish girlfriend. See Frederick V. Romano, The Boxing Filmography: American Features, 1920–2003 (Jefferson, nc, 2004), pp. 53–4.
23 Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York, 1983), p. 13. See also Patrick Myler, Gentleman Jim Corbett (London, 1998), ch. 5, and David Berzmozgis, ‘Choynski’, Natasha and Other Stories (London, 2004), pp. 113–26.
24 James Corbett, The Roar of the Crowd (New York, 1925), p. 65.
25 ‘The National Police Gazette Supports the Rise of Italian Boxing, 1905’, Problems in Sport History, ed. Riess, p. 281.
26 See John Harding with Jack Berg, The Whitechapel Windmill (London, 1987). An opera based on the book, written by Berg’s cousin Howard Frederics and Jacob Sager Weinstein, was performed in London in 2005.
27 Quoted in Allen Bodner, When Boxing was a Jewish Sport (Westport, CT, 1997), p. 19. In Joseph Roth’s 1929 story ‘Strawberries’, eight brothers disperse from their Eastern European birthplace; ‘one became a boxer in America’. Joseph Roth, The Collected Stories, trans. Michael Hoffmann (New York, 2002), p. 143. The wicked son in the parable of the four sons in the Haggadah was sometimes presented as a boxer. Douglas Century, Barney Ross (New York, 2006), p. 27.
28 John Dos Passos, Nineteen Nineteen, in USA (London, 1950), pp. 667–8.
29 Philip Roth, Patrimony (London, 1999), p. 203. The book he gave his father was Ken Blady, The Jewish Boxers’ Hall of Fame (New York, 1988).
30 Philip Roth, The Facts (New York, 1997), p. 28.
31 Farrell, Young Lonigan, 145.
32 Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (Oxford, 1992), p. 152.
33 Nat Fleischer, Leonard the Magnificent (Norwalk, CT, 1947), p. 87.
34 Simon Lovish, Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers (London, 1999), pp. 121, 301.
35 Groucho Marx and Richard J. Anobile, The Marx Bros. Scrapbook (New York, 1974), p. 40; Lovish, Monkey Business, p. 134.
36 Budd Schulberg, ‘The Great Benny Leonard’, Ring Magazine (May 1980), pp. 32–7.
37 Levine, From Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, pp. 145–6.
38 Charles E. Van Loan, ‘No Business’, in Taking the Count: Prize Ring Stories (New York, 1915), pp. 147–73. Hemingway was a fan of Van Loan’s fight stories. In 1924, while working on In Our Time, he gave a copy to a friend, and in 1925 he sent his bullfight story, ‘The Undefeated’ to George Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post, with a letter explaining that he was trying ‘to show it the way it actually is, as Charles E. Van Loan used to write fight stories’. Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (London, 1985), p. 148; Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (New York, 1989), p. 249.
39 Cohn was based on Harold Loeb, whose mother was related to the Guggenheims. Loeb and Hemingway had a famous, drunken almost-fight in Pamplona in 1925. Harold Loeb, The Way It Was (New York, 1959), pp. 294–7; Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, pp. 304–5. Hemingway’s satire may also have been directed at Princeton-educated Scott Fitzgerald. See James Plath, ‘The Sun Also Rises as ‘A Greater Gatsby”, in French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jackson R. Bryer (London, 1999), pp. 257–75; Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (London, 1969), p. 107.
40 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (London, 1976), pp. 7–8. Compare with Loeb, The Way It Was, p. 218.
41 On Santayana and the Ivy League ‘spirit’, see Ronald Berman, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2001), ch. 6.
42 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, pp. 11, 39, 40, 135, 148, 158–61, 167–9, 172.
43 Michaels, Our America, p. 27.
44 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, pp. 8, 32.
45 Herman Melville, Typee (London, 1993), p. 234. This view was widely assumed, despite contrary evidence from works such as Captain Cook’s accounts of his voyages to the South Sea. See John Hoberman, Darwin’s Athletes (Boston, 1997), p. 105.
46 James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1991), pp. 59–60.
47 James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Penguin, 1990), pp. 76–8. See also, Johnson, Black Manhattan, pp. 74–8.
48 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Oxford, 1999), pp. 70, 74. See also Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1849), in Puttin’ on Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York, 1969), p. 68; and the Rev. W. P. Jacobs, quoted in Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves, ed. Charles L. Perdue, Jr, Thomas E. Barden and Robert K. Phillips (Charlottesville, VA, 1976), p. 155.
49 Douglass, Narrative, pp. 68, 57. On the book’s debt to the American jeremiad, see David Blight, Introduction, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1993), p. 8. See also Robert O’Meally, ‘Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative: The Text Was Meant to be Preached’, in Afro-American Literature, ed. Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto (New York, 1979).
50 David L. Dudley, My Father’s Shadow (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 27–8.
51 Jenny Franchot, ‘The Punishment of Esther: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of the Feminine’, in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge, 1990), p. 141.
52 Richard Yarborough, ‘Race, Violence and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave”’, in Frederick Douglass, ed. Sundquist, p. 174. See also Donald B. Gibson, ‘Reconciling Public and Private in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative’, American Literature, 57 (Dec 1985), p. 563.
53 Douglass, Narrative, p. 67. ‘He has borne himself with gentleness and meekness, yet with true manliness of character,’ concluded William Lloyd Garrison: Preface to Douglass, Narrative, p. 5.
54 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1969), pp. 242–6.
55 David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1989), p. 112.
56 See Bernard R. Boxill, ‘The Fight with Covey’, in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, ed. Lewis R. Gordon (New York, 1997), pp. 273–90.
57 Legree delegates Tom’s whipping to ‘two gigantic negroes’. He wants to make Tom an overseer for which he believes ‘hardness’ is the prerequisite. In refusing to beat others, Tom remains physically soft but morally firm. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in Three Novels (New York, 1982), p. 415. In My Bondage, Douglass wrote, ‘while slaves prefer their lives, with flogging, to instant death, they will always find christians enough, like unto Covey, to accommodate that preference.’ In taking on Covey, Douglass ‘had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die’ (p. 247). On ‘Douglass’s preference for death’, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London, 1993), pp. 61–4.
58 See Susan F. Clark, ‘Up Against the Ropes: Peter Jackson as “Uncle Tom” in America’, The Drama Review, 44, no. 1 (2000), pp. 157–82; Linda Williams, ‘Versions of Uncle Tom: Race and Gender in American Melodrama’, in New Scholarship from BFI Research, ed. Colin McCabe and Duncan Petrie (London, 1996).
59 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, pp. 246–7.
60 Frederick Douglass, ‘Fighting the Rebels with One Hand’, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassinghame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, 1991), Series 1, vol. III, pp. 473–88.
61 Frederick Douglass, ‘Men of Color, To Arms’, in Life and Times (Cleveland, OH, 2005), pp. 397–8. Douglass is alluding to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: ‘Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?’. He also attached this stanza to the end of his accounts of the Covey fight in My Bondage and Life and Times.
62 Frederick Douglass, ‘What the Black Man Wants’, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 1, vol. IV, p. 69.
63 The fight is ‘the primal scene in male African American autobiography’. Dudley, My Father’s Shadow, pp. 26–7
64 Kelly Miller, ‘Frederick Douglass’, Voice of the Negro, 1 (1904), pp. 463–4; John Henry Adams, ‘Rough Sketches: The New Negro Man’, Voice of the Negro, 1 (1904), p. 450.
65 Paul Lawrence Dunbar, ‘Frederick Douglass’, in Helen Pitts Douglass, In Memoriam Frederick Douglass (Freeport, NY, 1971), p. 168.
66 Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1969) pp. 40–41.
67 James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (New York, 1935), p. 208. In an 1892 interview with R. Thomas Fortune, Douglass described Jackson as ‘one of our best missionaries abroad. ‘ Quoted in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 1, vol. V, pp. 500–501.
68 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1995), p. 54. See D. K. Wiggens, ‘From Plantation to Playing Field’, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 57, no. 2 (1986), pp. 101–16.
69 Dale A. Somers, The Rise of Sports in New Orleans, 1850–1900 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1972), pp. 181–3.
70 David K. Wiggens, ‘Peter Jackson and the Elusive Heavyweight Championship: A Black Athlete’s Struggle Against the Late Nineteenth Century Color-Line’, in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in US Black Men’s History and Masculinity, ed. Ernestine Jenkins and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, IA, 2001), vol. II, p. 293.
71 Corbett, The Roar of the Crowd, p. 118. See also Leo N. Miletich, Dan Stuart’s Fistic Carnival (College Station, TX, 1994), p. 214.
72 Patrick Myler, Gentleman Jim Corbett (London, 1998), pp. 37–45.
73 Clark, ‘Up Against the Ropes’, p. 173. Sullivan also appeared in a production of the play, as Simon Legree. Nat Fleischer, John L. Sullivan (London, 1952), p. 165.
74 Winston Churchill’s drawing of the fight is reproduced in The Fireside Book of Boxing, ed. W. C. Heinz (New York, 1961) p. 205.
75 Guy Deghy, Noble and Manly: The History of the National Sporting Club (London, 1956), pp. 104–5. The story of the Jackson-Slavin fight is recounted by an English bartender in the opening chapter of Budd Schulberg’s novel, The Harder They Fall (1947).
76 On Jackson’s gentlemanliness, see Kasia Boddy, ‘Peter Jackson and Jack Johnson Visit Britain’, in Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain, ed. Michael Berkowitz and Ruti Ungar (London, 2007), pp. 51–66.
77 Johnson, Black Manhattan, p. 73. See, for example, Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (New York, 1991), p. 650.
78 Richard Wright, ‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’, Uncle Tom’s Children (New York, 1993), p. 14. Wright included this passage in his 1945 memoir Black Boy (London, 1970), p. 202. The only change is the addition of the Fifteenth Amendment.
79 Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson (Washington, NY, 1975), pp. 27–8.
80 Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out (New York, 1977), p. 48. Out of print for many years, Johnson’s autobiography was reissued at the height of Black Power under the title, Jack Johnson is a Dandy (1969).
81 Jack London, ‘Burns-Johnson’, in Jack London Reports, ed. King Hendricks and Irving Shepard (New York, 1970), pp. 258–9, 260, 261, 263. In his autobiography, Johnson felt obliged to note that ‘to me it was not a racial triumph.’ Johnson, In the Ring and Out, p. 53.
82 Roberts, Papa Jack, p. 53. On ‘the black American as a living comic supplement,’ see Jessie Fauset, ‘The Gift of Laughter’ in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (New York, 1997), pp. 161–7.
83 See William H. Wiggens, Jr. ‘Boxing’s Sambo Twins: Racial Stereotypes in Jack Johnson and Joe Louis Newspaper Cartoons, 1908–1938’, Journal of Sport History, 15, no. 3 (Winter 1988), pp. 242–54.
84 Roberts, Papa Jack, pp. 24–6.
85 In 1901, Jim Jeffries had seen Johnson defeat his brother in five easy rounds. Roberts, Papa Jack, p. 21.
86 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, McClure’s Magazine, 12 (February 1899).
87 Quoted in Johnson, Black Manhattan, p. 66.
88 Lovish, Monkey Business, pp. 70–71.
89 Quoted in Finis Farr, Black Champion: The Life and Times of Jack Johnson (New York, 1965), p. 105.
90 Arthur Conan Doyle, Rodney Stone (London, 1912), p. 164; ‘Both in Fine Condition’, New York Times, 3 July 1910, p. 2; Jack London, Jack London Reports, pp. 266, 273. See John Hoberman, Darwin’s Athletes, pp. 11–12
91 ‘Johnson’s Mother Happy’, New York Times, 5 July 1910, p. 3.
92 Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: A Life in New Orleans (New York, 1986), p. 31; Henry Crowder, ‘Hitting Back’, in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York, 2002), p. 119.
93 Allen Guttmann, Sports Spectators (New York, 1986), p. 119.
94 Quoted in Lerone Bennett, Jr, ‘Jack Johnson and the Great White Hope’, Ebony (October 1976), p. 80. The Johnson years coincided with the founding of the NAACP (1909), the National Urban League (1911) and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1918).
95 Tad, ‘Keeping Pace with Jack Johnson’, Preface to Johnson, In the Ring and Out, p. 19.
96 John Lardner, ‘That Was Pugilism: The White Hopes – I’, The New Yorker, 25 June 1949, p. 59. See also Graeme Kent, The Great White Hopes: The Quest to Defeat Jack Johnson (Sutton, 2005).
97 William A. Phelon, ‘Fitzsimmons and the White Hopes’, Baseball Magazine, 4 (February 1914), p. 51.
98 Georges Carpentier, Carpentier by Himself, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1958), p. 89.
99 Jack London, The Abysmal Brute (Lincoln, NE, 2000), pp. 5, 16.
100 Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Mucker (New York, 1974), pp. 183–4.
101 W.R.H. Trowbridge, The White Hope (London, 1913), pp. 61, 293, 303.
102 Gilmore, Bad Nigger!, pp. 75–90.
103 James Weldon Johnson, ‘The Passing of Jack Johnson’, in The Selected Writings, ed. Sandra Kathryn Wilson (Oxford, 1995), vol. I, p. 126. See W. Stephen Bush, ‘Arguments of Fight Films’, The Moving Picture World, 15 May 1915, pp. 1049–50; Edward de Grazia and Roger K. Newman, Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment (New York, 1982), pp. 185–6; Dan Streible, ‘Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films’, in The Birth of Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996), pp. 170–200; Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley, CA, 2004), ch. 4; Richard Maltby, ‘The Social Evil, The Moral Order and the Melodramatic Imagination, 1890–1915’, in Melodrama, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cooke and Christine Gledhill (London, 1996), p. 226.
104 Theodore Roosevelt, ‘Recent Prize-Fight’, Outlook, 16 July 1910, p. 551.
105 W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Prize Fighter’, in Writings (New York, 1986), p. 1162.
106 W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Problem of Amusement’, in W.E.B Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, ed. Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver (Chicago, 1978), pp. 226–37.
107 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, April 1926, p. 270; ‘As to Pugilism’, Pittsburgh Courier, 7 April 1923, p. 6.
108 Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice (Chicago, 1970), p. 359. Johnson later ran the Harlem Club de Luxe, which became the Cotton Club. See Johnson, In the Ring and Out, pp. 58–60; Ted Vincent, Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age (London, 1995), p. 70; Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 1997), pp. 3–18.
109 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York, 1996), p. 57. On black dandies, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford, 1993), pp. 133–4.
110 The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana, IL, 1981), vol. X, pp. 75–6.
111 Nick Carraway laughs at the sight of ‘a limousine, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes’. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 75.
112 Johnson married Etta Duryea in late 1910 or early 1911. She committed suicide in September 1911, and in 1912 he married Lucille Cameron. They divorced in 1924 and the following year he married Irene Pineau. On interracial marriage in this period, see W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Intermarriage’, Crisis, 5 (February 1913), pp. 180–81; Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (Oxford, 1982), pp. 130–41.
113 Roberts, Papa Jack, p. 145; Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgiveable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York, 2004), ch. 10. On white slavery in the movies, see Grieveson, Policing Cinema, ch. 5.
114 Booker T. Washington, ‘A Statement on Jack Johnson for the United Press Association’, 23 October 1912, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. XII, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana, IL, 1982), pp. 43–4. For Johnson’s response, see Gilmore, Bad Nigger, p. 102.
115 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, p. 70.
116 ‘Actions Against Jack Johnson: Assault on a Music-Hall Artist’, The Times, 2 March 1916, p. 4. See also Boddy, ‘Peter Jackson and Jack Johnson Visit Britain’.
117 Immediately after the fight Johnson said nothing, but within a year, he sold his ‘confessions’ to Nat Fleischer, editor of The Ring, for $250. Footage of the fight, recovered by Jim Jacobs and included in his film Jack Johnson (1970), suggests that Johnson really was knocked out.
118 Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Boston, 1987), pp. 66–7, 71–2, 273. He later recalled being told that he ‘did not look like the boxer-type [portraits] . . . that were reproduced with the reviews of Home to Harlem .’ Claude McKay, from A Long Way Home, in The Portable Harlem Renaissance, ed. David Levering Lewis (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 165.
119 George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 364. For the full story, see Jon-Christian Suggs, ‘“Blackjack”: Walter White and modernism in an unknown boxing novel’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 38, no. 4 (Fall 1999), pp. 514–40.
120 Jim Tully had been a professional featherweight boxer (1907–1915) and in 1937 published a prize-fight novel, The Bruiser. He is best known, however, as author of Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography (1924), which was filmed in 1928.
121 Quoted in Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York, 1988), pp. 103–4. Langston Hughes attended one of the 37 performances. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York, 1993), p. 251. See Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914–1930 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 297–8; and Theophilus Lewis’s review, in The Messenger Reader, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York, 2000), p. 247.
122 See Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana, IL, 2003).
123 Henry Louis Gates, ‘Canon-Formation, Literary History and the Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to the Told’, in Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Houston A. Baker and Patricia Redmond (Chicago, 1989), p. 33.
124 James Weldon Johnson, ‘Inside Measurement’, in The Selected Writings, ed. Wilson, vol. I, pp. 260–61.
125 James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York, 1931), p. 9.
126 W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Talented Tenth’, in The Negro Problem (New York, 1903), pp. 33–75.
127 Johnson, ‘The Passing of Jack Johnson’, p. 125.
128 Johnson, Along This Way, p. 208.
129 James Weldon Johnson, ‘The Negro in American Art’, in Selected Writings, vol. I., p. 262. Robert Coady was the editor of The Soil (1916–17) which argued that America’s distinctive culture was found outside its museums. He interspersed photographs of figures such as Johnson and the comedian Bert Williams among reproductions of primitive and European art. See Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley, CA, 1999), pp. 81–89.
130 In a 1924 article in the Messenger, A. Philip Randolph imagined Du Bois and Marcus Garvey as boxers and gave a round by round account of their contest. A. Philip Randolph, ‘Heavyweight Championship Bout for Afro-American-West-Indian Belt, Between Battling Du Bois and Kid Garvey . . . Referee – Everybody and Nobody’, in Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Theodore G. Vincent (San Francisco, 1973), p. 122.
131 George S. Schuyler, ‘The Negro-Art Hokum’, in The Portable Harlem Renaissance, ed. Lewis, p. 97.
132 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York, 1937), p. 61.
133 Denzil Batchelor, Jack Johnson and His Times (London, 1956), p. 178.
134 The song was recorded and reproduced by folklorist J. Mason Brewer in Worser Days and Better Times: The Folklore of the North Carolina Negro (Chicago, 1965), p. 178.
135 J. ‘Berni’ Barborn, ‘The Black Gladiator’, quoted in Streible, ‘Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films’, p. 195 n. 17.
136 Roberts, Papa Jack, p. 134. The song adapts an urban toast featuring a character called Shine. See Larry Neal. ‘And Shine Swam On’, in Black Fire, ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York, 1968), p. 638. For two versions, see The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York, 1997), pp. 51–2. Legend had it that Johnson was refused a ticket for the Titanic, but in April 1912 he was in Chicago arranging a fight with Jim Flynn. After Johnson defeated Flynn, the Chicago Defender described him as ‘the pugilistic Titanic of the Caucasian race’. Roberts, Papa Jack,p. 134.
137 William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York, 1999), p. 64. McKay later dismissed what he called ‘the highly propagandized Negro renaissance period’. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 154.
138 Claude McKay, ‘If We Must Die’, in Harlem Shadows: The Poems (New York, 1922), p. 53.
139 See Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ‘The Trope of the New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black’, in The New American Studies, ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley, CA, 1991), p. 325.
140 Rollin Lynde Hartt, ‘The New Negro. When He’s Hit, He Hits Back’, Independent, 15 January 1921, pp. 59–60, 76. The term ‘New Negro’ had been in circulation since the 1890s but was used increasingly in the period following the postwar race riots. See Foley, Spectres of 1919.
141 W. A. Domingo, Editorial, The Messenger, September 1919, and J. A. Rogers, ‘Who Is the New Negro, And Why?’, March 1927, reprinted in The Messenger Reader, ed. Wilson, pp. 308–12, 335–7.
142 Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935), in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (New York, 1979), p. 83; Hurston, ‘High John de Conquer’ (1943), in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of African-American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Jackson, MI, 1981), pp. 541–8. See also Harry Ostler, ‘Negro Humor: John and Old Master’, in Mother Wit, ed. Dundes, pp. 549–60.
143 See H. C. Brearley, ‘Ba-ad Nigger’, in Mother Wit, ed. Dundes, pp. 578–85; John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia, 1989), ch. 5; William H. Wiggens, ‘Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger: The Folklore of His Life’, Black Scholar (January 1971), pp. 4–19.
144 Crowder, ‘Hitting Back’, pp. 117–19.
145 Alain Locke, ‘Sterling Brown: The New Negro Folk-Poet’, in Negro, ed. Cunard, pp. 88–92.
146 Sterling Brown, ‘Strange Legacies’, in The Collected Poems, ed. Michael S. Harper (New York, 1980), pp. 86–7. Johnson meanwhile compared himself to Job. Johnson, In and Out the Ring, p. 167.
147 Johnson, In and Out of the Ring, pp. 168–9.
148 Roberts, Papa Jack, p. 212.
149 Claude McKay, The Negroes in America, trans. Robert J. Winter, ed. Alan L. McLeod (Port Washington, NY, 1979), p. 3. The original text was lost; this version was translated from Russian back into English.
150 For a reading of McKay as ‘a precursor – and Marxian pre-critic – of black cultural studies’, see Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, pp. 86–87.
151 McKay, The Negroes in America, pp. 53–5. See also Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay (Baton Rouge, LA, 1996), pp. 185–9.
152 Langston Hughes, ‘Prize Fighter’, Fine Clothes to the Jew (New York, 1927), p. 33.
153 Jean Toomer, ‘Box Seat’, in Cane (New York, 1988), p. 67.
154 See Darwin T. Turner, ‘Contrasts and Limitations in Cane’, reprinted in Toomer, Cane, p. 210; and Thomas Fahy, ‘Exotic Fantasies, Shameful Realities: Race in the Modern American Freak Show’, in A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States, ed. Townsend Ludington (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), pp. 75–82.
155 On the popularity of the ‘fistic quarrel’ in minstrel shows, see Lott, Love and Theft, pp. 126–8.
156 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’, in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth, 1981), pp. 1023–4. See also ‘Nig’ Coston, a Tyson-like biter, in P. G. Wodehouse, Psmith Journalist (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 105.
157 William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography (New York, 1967), p. 141.
158 Joyce Carol Oates, ‘George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings’, in (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (New York, 1988), p. 295. See also Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven, 1992), p. 101.
159 McKay, Home to Harlem p. 106. Whites who attended ‘nigger clubs’ justified their visits as nostalgia for a childhood spent among ‘little darkies’. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (New York, 1981), p. 103.
160 See Emma S. Bellows, George Bellows: His Lithographs (New York, 1927). Compare The White Hope with The Saviour of his Race, an etching which Bellows published in Masses the month after Willard beat Johnson. The white fighter is depicted with arms outstretched against the corner post in an obvious crucifixion allusion. Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America, p. 218.
161 Ernest Hemingway, ‘“A Matter of Colour’, in Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916–1917, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Washington, DC, 1971), pp. 98–100. See also David Marut, ‘Out of the Wastebasket: Hemingway’s High School Stories’, in Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy, ed. James Nagel (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1996), pp. 81–95; Gregory Green, “A Matter of Color”: Hemingway’s Criticism of Race Prejudice’, Hemingway Review, 1 (Fall 1981), pp. 27–32. Hemingway began boxing lessons in 1916. See Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (London, 1969), pp. 43–4; Peter Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (Oxford, 1985), pp. 23–4.
162 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, p. 60. His model seems likely to have been the 1922 Siki-Carpentier fight. James L. Martine, ‘Hemingway’s “Fifty Grand”: The Other Fight(s)’, in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, NC, 1975), p. 200; Peter Benson, Battling Siki (Fayetteville, AR, 2006), pp. 251–2.
163 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, p. 14.
164 Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, p. 297. The fight took place on 9 June; Hemingway changed it to 20 June.
165 Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Light of the World’, in Winner Take Nothing (London, 1977), pp. 67–73.
166 Ketchel’s real name was Stanislaus Kiecal.
167 Ketchel’s knockdown of Johnson was widely believed, even at the time, to have been staged for the film cameras. The painter John Sloan wrote appreciatively in his diary of seeing ‘the cinematograph pictures of the recent fight between Ketchel and the negro Jack Johnson. The big black spider gobbled up the small white fly – aggressive fly – wonderful to have this event repeated.’ Quoted in John Sloan’s New York Scene, ed. Bruce St John (New York, 1965).
168 Walter Benn Michaels, ‘The Souls of White Folk’, in Literature and the Body, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, 1988), p. 193.
169 Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway (Philadelphia, 1966), p. 50. On the story’s relationship to Holman Hunt’s painting of Jesus with a lantern, see Michael Reynolds, ‘Holman Hunt and “The Light of the World”’, Studies in Short Fiction, 20 (Winter 1983), pp. 317–19.
170 Roberts, Papa Jack, pp. 81–4. In a 1922 letter, Hemingway described Ketchel as ‘too small for that damned smoke’. Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (London, 1985), p. 64. See also William J. Collins, ‘Taking on the Champion: Alice as Liar in “The Light of the World”’, Studies in American Fiction, 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1986), pp. 225–32; James J. Martine, ‘A Little Light on Hemingway’s “The Light of the World!”’, in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Jackson, pp. 196–8.
171 See Howard L. Hannum, ‘Nick Adams and the Search for Light’, in New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Jackson L. Benson (Durham, NC, 1990), pp. 321–30.
172 Hemingway described the story as being about a ‘busted down pug and a coon’. Selected Letters, ed. Baker, p. 157. Baker argues that Ad was an amalgam of Ad Wolgast and Bat Nelson, and that Bugs was based on the trainer who had looked after Wolgast, a one-time opponent of Steve Ketchel. The story was originally called ‘A Great Little Fighting Machine’. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, pp. 178–9.
173 The opening story of In Our Time, ‘Indian Camp’, introduces the recurrent motif of a safe-seeming camp which turns out to be a violent and dangerous place.
174 Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Battler’, in In Our Time (New York, 1986), pp. 53–62. He sent the manuscript to his publisher with a letter claiming it had ‘a good 3/1 chance’ at success. ‘And I never bet on Jeffries at Reno nor Carpentier not other sentimental causes.’ Hemingway was only 11 in 1910, but he did bet, and lose, on Carpentier in 1921. Selected Letters, pp. 155, 52.
175 Thomas Strychacz, ‘Dramatizations of Manhood in Hemingway’s In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises’, American Literature, 61, no. 2 (May 1989), p. 252.
176 See, for example, George Monteiro, ‘“This is My Pal Bugs”: Ernest Hemingway’s “The Battler”’, in New Critical Approaches, ed. Jackson, pp. 224–8. Consider also Hemingway’s reported comments to Gertrude Stein: ‘when you were a boy and moved in the company of men, you had to be prepared to kill a man, know how to do it and really know that you would do it in order not to be interfered with.’ A Moveable Feast (London, 1982), pp. 21–2.
177 The novel makes much of the ‘mingled virtues’ of Johnny’s mixed blood, or ‘sanguinary cocktail’. Alin Laubreaux, Mulatto Johnny, trans. Coley Taylor (London, 1931), p. 204. See also John Frederick Matheus, ‘Some Aspects of the Negro interpreted in Contemporary American and European Literature’, in Negro, ed. Cunard, pp. 86–7.
178 Joseph Moncure March, The Set-Up (Garden City, NJ, 1931), pp. 123, 200.
179 Mae West, The Constant Sinner (London, 1995), p. 6. The original American edition had the title Babe Gordon; the working title was Black and White. Marybeth Hamilton, The Queen of Camp: Mae West, sex and popular culture (London, 1996), p. 138.
180 Bearcat McMahon was a White Hope of the teens. Stories about the feats of Mae’s father, ‘Battling Jack West, Champion of Brooklyn New York’, and various boyfriends, can be found in West’s autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It (London, 1996) pp. 2–3, 17, 23–5, 136. Boxers reputed to have had affairs with West include Jim Corbett, Johnny Indrisano, William ‘Gorilla’ Jones, Kid Berg and Joe Louis. See Maurice Leonard, Mae West:Empress of Sex (New York, 1991), pp. 292–4 and passim.
181 The Constant Sinner, pp. 47, 17, 90, 103, 109–10, 212. When the novel was adapted for Broadway in 1931, Money Johnson was played by a white actor in blackface. Hamilton, The Queen of Camp, p. 148. See also West, Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It, p. 148.
182 Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York, 1999), pp. 22, 40, 43, 74. On the fashion among white women to have black lovers and ‘Negro’ annoyance at Jack Johnson’s white wives, see Heba Jannath, ‘America’s Changing Color Line’, in Negro, ed. Cunard, pp. 64–5. Although the OED dates the use of ‘johnson’ as a slang equivalent of ‘penis’ to 1863, Clarence Major argues that its use in African-American slang ‘probably stems from the image of Jack Johnson pounding his opponent’. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 261.
183 Thurman, Infants of the Spring, pp. 79, 87, 156, 169.
184 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 13, 19–25, 36, 38, 115.
185 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London, 1958), p. 62.
186 The advertisement ran in The Freeman’s Journal on 19 and 28 April 1904 (p. 4 each day) and described an upcoming ‘civil and military’ boxing tournament to be held at Earlsfort Terrace Rink, including a ten-round fight between M. L. Keogh of Dublin and Garry of the Sixth Dragoons. On the 30th, we learn that Keogh has won. Joyce changed the names slightly to avenge himself on Percy Bennett, the consul-general in Zurich whom he sued in 1918. Bennett had supported Henry Carr, another member of the consulate, in a row concerning Joyce’s theatre company, the English Players. Carr is avenged in ‘Circe’. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford, 1982), pp. 436–42, 472. See also Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of Ulysses (New York, 1967), p. 70.
187 See Tracy Mishkin, The Harlem and Irish Renaissances: Language, Identity and Representation (Gainsville, FL, 1998).
188 James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth, 1992), pp. 219–20. Ted Keogh, who managed a prizefighter, may have been a model for Blazes Boylan. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 389.
189 Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 412–4.
190 Ibid., p. 432. Valente argues that Bloom here is merely providing ‘a colonial impersonation of manhood’. Joseph Valente, ‘“Neither fish not flesh”; or how “Cyclops” stages the double-bind of Irish manhood’, in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge, 2000), p. 120. See also Richard Brown, ‘Cyclopean Anglophobia and Transnational Community: Re-Reading the Boxing Matches in Joyce’s Ulysses’, in Twenty-First Joyce, ed. Ellen Carol Jones and Morris Beja (Gainsville, FL, 2004), pp. 82–96; Tracey Teets Schwarze, ‘“Do You Call That a Man?”: The Culture of Anxious Masculinity in Joyce’s Ulysses’, in Masculinities in Joyce, ed. Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf and Colleen Lamos (Amsterdam, 2001), pp. 113–35.
191 See Valente, ‘“Neither fish not flesh”’; Vincent Cheng, ‘Catching the Conscience of a Race’, in Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 15–56.
192 Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 496, 745–6, 764.
193 Stuart Gilbert argues that this chapter, ‘Eumaeus’, was meant to represent both physical and linguistic exhaustion, and that Bloom was perhaps deliberately trying to send Stephen to sleep. Quoted in Ellman, James Joyce, p. 372, n.
194 Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 444–5, 805. Later still, Bloom rejects ‘retribution’ against his wife’s lover, Blazes Boylan – ‘Duel by combat? No’, pp. 863, 866. On Mendoza’s 1791 visit to Ireland, see Myler, The Fighting Irish, pp. 19–22.
195 While Bloom is walking home, Molly lies in bed reminiscing about the attentions paid to her by various men. She remembers a fish supper that a King’s Counsel gave her ‘on account of winning over the boxing match’. His silk hat recalls those worn by the spectators in the nineteenth-century print seen by Stephen. Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 925–6.
196 Joyce misquotes the title (deliberately?) as Physical Strength and How to Obtain It. See Hugh Kenner, ‘Bloom’s Chest’, James Joyce Quarterly, 16.4 (1979), pp. 505–8; Cheryl Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Urbana, IL, 1986), pp. 193–5; Brandon Kershner, ‘The World’s Strongest Man: Joyce or Sandow’, James Joyce Quarterly, 30.4/31.1 (1993–94), pp. 667–96.
197 Bloom first thinks of Sandow on his way back from buying his breakfast kidney, when, after reading a Zionist pamphlet, he becomes depressed at the thought of the ‘dead sea in a dead land’ and his own ageing body. ‘Must begin again those Sandow exercises. On the hands down.’ (Sandow wrote of the benefits of his system for ‘the inner organs’ as well as visible muscles.) He remembers them again in ‘Calypso’ and in ‘Circe’ when he develops a stitch. In ‘Ithaca’, the narrator notes that the exercises would also have given him ‘a most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility.’ Bloom is 11st 4lb and wears a size 17 collar. His ‘before and after’ measurements are also given. Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 73, 567, 797, 779, 835, 850. Chapter Seven of Strength and How to Obtain It is entitled ‘Physical Culture for the Middle-Aged’.
198 Eugen Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It (London, 1900), pp. 89–95; Eugen Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training: A Study in the Perfect Type of the Human Form (London, 1894), pp. 19, 113.
199 Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 564, 572, 578.
200 Shortly after Ulysses was published, Joyce told Arthur Power that, ‘in realism you are down to the facts on which the world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp.’ Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (New York, 1974), p. 98.
201 Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 62.
202 Joyce, Stephen Hero, pp. 34, 82.
203 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface’ (1901) to Cashel Byron’s Profession (London, 1925), p. xiv. Boxing could easily have been included in the litany of ‘British Beatitudes’: ‘beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops’. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 556.
204 The Keogh-Bennett fight, and Joyce’s battle with the Zurich consulate is again evoked as Carr drunkenly announces that Bennett’s his ‘pal’ – ‘I love old Bennett’. Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 579, 686, 687, 69. See Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 442.
205 Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 689, 696, 697. The scene also reworks one in Stephen Hero in which a drunken ‘bandy-legged little’ clerk argues with a medical student about ‘the art of self-defence’. There is again great relish in the quoted lingo of ‘props’, ‘mits’ and ‘smashing’. Joyce, Stephen Hero, pp. 211–12. That scene may in turn rework an incident from Joyce’s early life. See Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 156.
206 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 18.
207 If the Irish were often described as blacks, then perhaps occasionally blacks were Irish. See Noel Ingatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995).
208 Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 62; Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 371.
209 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 16–18, 338–55, 609–10.
210 Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York, 1924), p. 216; Bud Fisher, A. Mutt, 1907–1908 (Westport, ct, 1977), p. 51. The pair did not make it into the English or Irish press until 1918 when they appeared as soldiers – Mutt as an American, Jeff as British. Joyce may also have encountered Mutt and Jeff in one of over 500 animated silent cartoons produced between 1917 and 1928. See Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1908–1928 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), pp. 196–200.
211 Dan Schiff, ‘Joyce and Cartoons’, in Joyce in Context, ed. Vincent J. Cheng and Timothy Martin (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 210, 212. See also Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 61.
212 William York Tindall compares the knockout to Private Carr’s biffing of Stephen in ‘Circe’. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake (New York, 1969), p. 181. See also Schiff, ‘Joyce and Cartoons’, p. 209.
213 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 301, 302, 304.
214 Joyce described this part of the book as ‘the most difficult of all’: ‘the technique here is a reproduction of a schoolboy’s (and schoolgirl’s) old classbook complete with marginalia by the twins, who change sides at half time, footnotes by the girl (who doesn’t), a Euclid diagram, funny drawings etc.’ James Joyce, Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert (London, 1957), p. 406.
215 Jimmy Wilde, known as the Mighty Atom, held British, European and World flyweight titles between 1916 and 1923. Heavyweight Jack Sharkey (born Joseph Chusauskas of Lithuanian parents) adopted the Irish name of his hero Tom Sharkey, and fought against Dempsey, Schmeling and Louis in the 1930s. He was briefly champion in 1932. In 1918, Katherine Mansfield told Middleton Murry that, despite her new iron supplements, ‘Jimmy Wilde is more my size than Jack Johnson.’ The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. V. O. Sullivan and M. Scott (Oxford, 1987), vol. II, p. 222.
216 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 269.
1 In Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler ( John Cusack) memorably declares kickboxing the ‘sport of the future’.
2 Bruce J. Evensen, ‘Jazz Age Journalism’s Battle Over Professionalism, Circulation, and the Sports Page’, Journal of Sports History, 20, no. 3 (Winter 1993), p. 231; Paul Gallico, A Farewell to Sport (1937) (London, 1988), p. 15.
3 ‘Jack Dempsey, New Heavyweight Champion, Announces He Will Draw the Color Line’, New York Times, 6 July 1919, p. 20. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that ‘Dempsey develops a weak heart because of Texas Rickard’s strenuous efforts to protect him from the Willis wallop’. The Crisis, April 1926, p. 270.
4 Thomas Healey, A Hurting Business (London, 1996), p. 17.
5 Quoted in Tom Clark, The World of Damon Runyon (New York, 1978), p. 123.
6 Peter Heller, In This Corner! (London, 1973), p. 55; Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (London, 1988), p. 88.
7 Gallico, Farewell to Sport, p. 16.
8 A species of cichlid, Cichlasoma biocellatum, was nicknamed ‘Jack Dempsey’ and ‘renowned for the fairness of his fighting’. This was not, however, the boxer’s reputation. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Latzke (London, 1967), p. 94.
9 Damon Runyon, New York American, 5 July 1919, p. 1.
10 Jack Dempsey, with Jack Cuddy, Championship Fighting (London, 1950), pp. 8–9. Dempsey and Willard were reunited in the 1933 film, The Prizefighter and the Lady. Dempsey says, ‘A little bit of a problem we had in Toledo that day’ and Willard replies, ‘I don’t remember much about that day, Jack’.
11 Melvin B. Tolson, ‘Omega’, Harlem Gallery, Book 1: The Curator (New York, 1969), p. 149.
12 Damon Runyon, New York American, 5 July 1919, p. 1.
13 Clark, The World of Damon Runyon, pp. 11–14, 124.
14 ‘The Psychology of Boxing’ is the subject of a chapter in Georges Carpentier, My Methods, or Boxing as a Fine Art, trans. F. Hurdman-Lucus (London, n.d.).
15 Gallico, Farewell to Sport, p. 17. During the Second World War, Dempsey wrote a book about ‘down and dirty’ techniques. One illustration caption reads ‘“Remember . . . he’s the enemy. Break off his arm and hit him over the head with it.”’ Jack Dempsey, How to Fight Tough (Boulder, CO, 2002), p. 125.
16 Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago, 1970), p. 127.
17 The original Madison Square Garden, a converted railroad station, opened at Madison Square in 1874; in 1891, a new sports arena dedicated chiefly to boxing, opened on the site. In 1968 the Garden moved to its current location on top of Penn Station at 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue.
18 Max Schmeling, An Autobiography, trans. George B. von der Lippe (Chicago, 1998), p. 53.
19 Ernest Hemingway, ‘Fifty Grand’, Men Without Women (New York, 1986), p. 86.
20 See Elliott J. Gorn, George Plimpton and Marianne Doezema’s short essays on the painting in Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900–1950, ed. Beth Venn and Adam D. Weinberg (New York, 1999), pp. 146–57.
21 The Lynds, Middletown (New York, 1929), p. 226. See Jesse Frederick Steiner, ‘Spectatorism versus Participation’, in Americans at Play: Recent Trends in Recreation and Leisure Time Activities (New York, 1933), pp. 100–102.
22 Stuart Chase, Men and Machines (London, 1929), pp. 259–60.
23 Peter Standish, Understanding Julio Cortázar (Columbia, sc, 2001), pp. 47–8; Julio Cortázar, ‘Circe’, Breve Antologia de Cuentos (Buenos Aires, 1991), p. 12; Garrison quoted in Ray Barfield, Listening to Radio, 1920–1950 (Westport, CT, 1996), p. 80. Firpo’s story forms the basis for Julio Cortázar, ‘Torito’, Final del juego (1956). See also Cortázar, ‘The Noble Art’, in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (New York, 1986).
24 Richard Bak, Joe Louis: The Great Black Hope (New York, 1998), p. 25.
25 Stanley Woodward, Sports Page (New York, 1949), p. 38. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, there had been a 50 per cent rise in sports coverage in 63 of America’s largest papers. Between 1920 and 1925, newspaper circulation increased by 5 million. Evensen, ‘Jazz Age’s Journalism’, pp. 234, 236.
26 Gallico, Farewell to Sport, pp. 103–5. Within months of buying the New York Journal in 1895, William Randolph Hearst quadrupled its sports coverage and introduced the first dedicated sports section. His circulation wars with Joseph Pulitzer were partly fought over their respective coverage of Corbett’s title defence against Charlie Mitchell, the fight that Abraham Cahan’s Yekl reads about. Evensen, ‘Jazz Age Journalism’, p. 238. The New York Daily News, Hearst’s ‘first conspicuously successful tabloid’, was launched in 1919. Frederick Allen Lewis, Only Yesterday (New York, 1964), p. 3. ‘A journal for the home’ called Cosy Moments is transformed into ‘red-hot stuff’ by the introduction of crime and boxing in P. G. Wodehouse’s 1915 novel, Psmith Journalist (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 9, 32.
27 See Leo Lowenthal, ‘The Triumph of Mass Idols’, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Palo Alto, CA, 1968), pp. 109–41.
28 Heywood Broun, ‘Sport for Art’s Sake’, in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, ed. David Halberstam (Boston, 1999), p. 133.
29 Lowenthal, ‘The Triumph of Mass Idols’, p. 133.
30 Ibid., pp. 131–4.
31 Damon Runyon, ‘The Big Umbrella’, in On Broadway (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 441.
32 William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York, 1998), p. 269.
33 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (Berkeley, CA, 1968), pp. 448–56.
34 Paul Gallico, The Golden People (New York, 1965), pp. 13–28.
35 Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis, 1955), p. 241.
36 F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’, in The Crack-Up (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 10; Lewis, Only Yesterday, p. 155.
37 John Dos Passos, ‘Newsreel XL’, Nineteen Nineteen (1932), in USA (London, 1950), pp. 665–6.
38 Carpentier’s Hollywood films include The Wonder Man (1920), A Gypsy Cavalier (1922) and The Show of Shows (1929).
39 Quoted in Claude Meunier, Ring Noir (Paris, 1992), pp. 74–5. A full translation appears in Carpentier’s autobiography, Carpentier by Himself, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1958), pp. 135–8.
40 Broun, ‘Sport for Art’s Sake’, pp. 131, 134. Eugene O’Neill supposedly once told Harry Kemp, a Byronic Provincetown poet who often talked about boxers, that he would have ‘liked to have been a prizefighter, too – but I got a blow once that loosened all my teeth.’ Edmund Wilson, The Twenties (New York, 1976), p. 338.
41 Ring Lardner, ‘The Battle of the Century’, in Some Champions, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman (New York, 1992), pp. 134–49. When Lardner died in 1933, Scott Fitzgerland described him as a ‘disillusioned idealist’: ‘It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Ring’, in The Crack-Up, pp. 37–8.
42 Gene Tunney, ‘My Fights with Jack Dempsey’, in The Aspirin Age, 1919–1941, ed. Isabel Leighton (London, 1950), p. 159.
43 Tunney studied Dempsey’s fights in detail. ‘My Fights with Jack Dempsey’, pp. 155–7.
44 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 125. See Elliot J. Gorn, ‘The Manassa Mauler and the Fighting Marine: An Interpretation of the Dempsey–Tunney Fights’, Journal of American Studies, 19, no. 1 (1985), pp. 27–45.
45 Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring (Urbana, IL, 1990), p. 72.
46 Quoted in Sammons, Beyond the Ring, p. 71; ‘The Manassa Mauler and the Fighting Marine’, p. 29.
47 In ‘The Bear’ (1942), William Faulkner described the never-ending conversation about the fight between the bear, Old Ben, and the dog, Lion, as anticipating the way ‘people later would talk about Sullivan and Kilrain and, later still, about Dempsey and Tunney.’ Faulkner’s story is set in the early 1880s. If the Kilrain-Sullivan fight of 1889 signalled the beginning of the development of modern commercial boxing, the Tunney-Dempsey contests of 1926 and 1927 represented its apotheosis. This is just one manifestation in the story of capitalism’s encroachment on the ‘doomed wilderness’. Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (Harmondsworth, 1960), pp. 175, 147.
48 See Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey, The Manassa Mauler (Baton Rouge, LA, 1979), pp. 258–63.
49 Sherwood Anderson, ‘Prize Fighters and Authors’, in No Swank (Philadelphia, 1934), p. 20.
50 Lewis, Only Yesterday, p. 174; Clark, The World of Damon Runyon, p. 189. ‘G. B. Shaw’s Letters to Gene Tunney’, are in Collier’s Magazine, 23 June 1951. See also Jay Tunney, ‘The Playwright and the Prizefighter: Bernard Shaw and Gene Tunney’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 23 (2003), pp. 149–54; Benny Green, Shaw’s Champions (London, 1978).
51 Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (Harmondsworth, 1993), vol. III, p. 208. See Gene Tunney, ‘What People Want To Know About Me’, The American Legion Monthly Magazine, March 1927, and ‘The Ring and the Book: A Champion Surveys the Literary Champions who have written of the Glories of the Fight’, The Golden Book Magazine, April 1934. See also David Margolick, ‘The Reader in the Ring’, New York Review of Books, 31 May 2007, pp. 46–8.
52 Harrison S. Martland, ‘Punch Drunk’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 91, 13 October 1928, pp. 1103–7. The OED cites the first use of ‘punch drunk’ in 1918.
53 Anderson, ‘Prize Fighters and Authors’, pp. 17–20.
54 James T. Farrell, ‘A Remembrance of Ernest Hemingway’, in Literary Essays, 1954–1974, ed. Jack Alan Robbins (Port Washington, NY, 1976), pp. 88–9. Robert Frost asked Tunney how Hemingway bloodied his nose. Nelson Algren, Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way (New York, 1966), p. 128.
55 Ernest Hemingway, ‘Banal Story’ Men without Women, pp. 126–8. Hemingway is referring to Laird S. Goldsborough, ‘Big Men – Or Cultured’, Forum, 73 (February 1925), 209–14. The story was first written for the Little Review’s ‘Banal Issue’. Hemingway wrote to the editor Jane Heap, ‘Now don’t go and switch numbers on me and put it in A Great White Hopes number.’ Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, pp. 265–6. See also Wayne Kvam, ‘Hemingway’s “Banal Story”’, in New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, NC, 1990), pp. 215–23.
56 Mina Loy, ‘Perlun’, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Manchester, 1997), pp. 75, 96; Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring ’20s (New York, 1999), p. 249.
57 Gösta Adrian-Nilsson’s 1926 collage Bloody Boxing Debut (1926), figure 7.18, in Christopher Wilk, ‘The Healthy Body Culture’, in Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939, ed. Wilk, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, London (London, 2006), pp. 263, 285n.
58 Djuna Barnes, ‘My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight’ (1914), in New York, ed. Alyce Barry (Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 168-73.
59 Djuna Barnes, ‘Jess Willard Says Girls Will Be Boxing for a Living Soon’, in I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband (London, 1987), p. 137.
60 Djuna Barnes, ‘Dempsey Welcomes Female Fans’, in I Could Never Be Lonely, p. 285.
61 Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Ringside Seats (New York, 1937), pp. 208–26.
62 Quoted in Brian Gallagher, Anything Goes (New York, 1987), p. 98.
63 Mae West, The Constant Sinner (London, 1995), p. 59.
64 Colette, Chéri, trans. Roger Senhouse (London, 2001), p. 14, 18.
65 Ibid., p. 25. When Léa meets Chéri again after the war, he appears ‘scraggy’ to her; no longer like a pugilist, but ‘like a fighting cock’. Colette, The Last of Chéri (1926), trans. Roger Senhouse (London, 2001), pp. 51–2.
66 Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 219.
67 Rosamund Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets (London, 1981), pp. 146–7. In the second volume of Ford Madox Ford’s war tetralogy, Parade’s End (1924–28), Captain Christopher Tietjens refuses a soldier home-leave on the grounds that he will be killed by his wife’s lover, a prizefighter. Ironically, a bomb gets him instead. Parade’s End (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 309–10.
68 Jane Bowles, ‘Going to Massachusetts’, in My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works (New York, 1978), p. 460.
69 Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, in The Collected Writings, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (London, 1993), pp. 98, 100. A lack of ability to fight is linked to lack of virility elsewhere in the novel. See also Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Columbia, SC, 1981), p. 199.
70 William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography (New York, 1967), pp. 224, 226.
71 Schmeling, An Autobiography, pp. 49–50; Erik Jensen, ‘Crowd Control: Boxing Spectatorship and Social Order in Weimar Germany’, in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford, 2002), pp. 93–4.
72 See Frederick V. Romano, The Boxing Filmography, 1920–2003 (Jefferson, NC., 2004), pp. 152–4; Frank Ardolino, ‘Shadow Boxing: Max Baer on Canvas and On Screen’, Aethlon, 9, no. 1 (Fall 1991), pp. 67–71. The film was banned in Germany because ‘the relationship of the Jewish man – who . . . is a quite Negroid type . . . – with the non-Jewish women in the film is . . . a violation of the National Socialist sentiment as interpreted by the new film law of February 16’. David Hull, Film in the Third Reich (Berkeley, CA, 1969), p. 47.
73 Jensen, ‘Crowd Control’, p. 93.
74 Tom Dardis, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down (New York, 1979), pp. 133, 190.
75 Quoted in Marion Meade, Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase (New York, 1995), p. 160.
76 Dardis, Keaton, p. 133.
77 Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (New York, 1980), p. 243.
78 H. L. Mencken, ‘Appendix to Moronia, part 3: Valentino’, in Prejudices: Sixth Series (London, 1927), p. 311.
79 Quoted in Gaylen Studlar, This Mad Masquerade. Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York, 1996), p. 185. If Valentino was not sufficiently a boxer, Garbo was too much of one. Kenneth Tynan complained that she walked ‘like a middleweight boxer approaching an opponent’. ‘Garbo’, Sight and Sound, 23, no. 4 (April–June 1954), p. 189. See also Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA, 1991).
80 Emily W. Leider, Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino (London, 2003), p. 374.
81 John Dos Passos, ‘Adagio Dancer’, The Big Money, in USA, pp. 861, 863–4.
82 Dorothy Parker, ‘The Sheik’ (1922), in The Uncollected Dorothy Parker, ed. Stuart Y. Silverstein (London, 2001), p. 115.
83 Quoted in Chase, Men and Machines, p. 258.
84 Quoted in Envisioning America: Prints, Drawings and Photographs by George Grosz and his Contemporaries, 1915–1933, exh. cat., Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 10.
85 George Grosz, An Autobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley, CA, 1997), p. 228.
86 Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley, CA, 1999), p. 57.
87 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Montparnasse’, Le Guetteur mélancolique suivi de Poèmes Retrouvés (Paris, 1970), pp. 180–81.
88 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, in Imaginations (New York, 1970), pp. 97, 103.
89 See Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford, 1994).
90 Although by the 1920s, boxing was thought of as an American sport, it was initially popularized by young Germans who had learned to box in British prisoner-of-war camps during the war. Jensen, ‘Crowd Control’, p. 81.
91 Hannes Meyer, ‘Die Neue Welt’ (1926), in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley, CA, 1994), p. 447. See also ‘The Healthy Body Culture’, pp. 249–96.
92 Herbert Jhering, ‘Boxing’, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 686.
93 John M. Hoberman, Sport and Political Ideology (London, 1984), p. 19.
94 Quoted in David Bathrick, ‘Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture’, New German Critique, 51 (Autumn 1990), p. 119. See Der Querschnitt: Facsimile Querschnitt durch den Querschnitt 1921–1936, ed. Wilmont Haacke (Frankfurt, 1977), p. 146.
95 Quoted in Jensen, ‘Crowd Control’, pp. 89–90.
96 Willi Wolfradt’s discussion of impersonality in Baumeister’s 1929 series, Sport und Maschine, is quoted in John Willett, The New Sobriety, 1917–1933: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (London, 1978), pp. 105–6.
97 Belling’s sculpture is reproduced in Bärbel Schrader and Jürgen Schebera, The ‘Golden’ Twenties: Art and Literature in the Weimar Republic (New Haven, CT, 1980), pp. 144, 174.
98 Schmeling, An Autobiography, pp. 28–30; Grosz, An Autobiography, p. 195. The painting is reproduced in Willett, The New Sobriety, p. 103.
99 Schmeling won the title because Sharkey was disqualified. The following year he defended it against Stribling, and in 1932 lost, by a dubious decision, to Sharkey. ‘We wuz robbed,’ Joe Jacobs famously yelled. An Autobiography, pp. 4, 65–6, 75–6, 81–3, 91, 102–5.
100 Schmeling, An Autobiography, pp. 32–3; Peter Kühnst, Sport: A Cultural History in the Mirror of Art, trans. Allen Guttmann (Dresden, 1996), p. 331. Hemingway later said of Dietrich, ‘The Kraut’s the best that ever came into the ring’. Lillian Ross, Reporting (London, 1966), p. 204.
101 Bertolt Brecht, Diaries 1920–1922, trans. and ed. John Willett (London, 1979), p. 74; Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–1956, ed. John Willettt and Ralph Manheim (New York, 1987), pp. 57–8.
102 Grosz, An Autobiography, p. 188.
103 Bertolt Brecht, 1954 note on In the Jungle of Cities, trans. Gerhard Nellhaus, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London, 1970), pp. 71–2.
104 Quoted in Battrick, ‘Max Schmeling on the Canvas’, p. 122. Brecht wanted to write a novel or play about Dempsey vs. Carpentier. Das Renomee: Ein Boxerroman, Werke (Frankfurt/Main, 1989), vol. XVII, pp. 421–39.
105 Brecht, Poems 1913 to 1956, ed. Willett and Manheim, pp. 1534.
106 Bertolt Brecht, Man Equals Man in Collected Plays: Two, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London, 1994), pp. 75, 90; Franco Ruffini, ‘A Little More Healthy Sport! Bertolt Brecht and Objective Boxing’, Mime Journal (1996), p. 5.
107 Brecht, Note on In the Jungle of Cities, p. 65. See also p. 53.
108 Bertolt Brecht, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1927), trans. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, in Collected Plays: Two, p. 211.
109 The protagonist of ‘Hook to the Chin’ is roughly based on Samson-Körner. Bertolt Brecht, Collected Short Stories, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London, 1992), pp. 68–71. For an unfinished fragment of ‘Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Körner’, see Brecht, Collected Stories, pp. 207–24.
110 Schmeling, An Autobiography, pp. 19, 22.
111 Quoted in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (London, 1974), p. 551. Samson-Körner’s 1925 essay ‘Jugend und Sport’ is discussed in Theodore F. Rippey, ‘Athletics, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Weimar Press’, German Studies Review, 28, no. 1 (2005), pp. 91–2.
112 Maximillian Sladek, ‘Our Show’ (1924), in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 556. See also Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 165–75.
113 Quoted in Envisioning America, p. 14.
114 ‘Girls’ Prizefights Entertain Dempsey’, New York Times, 2 May 1922, p. 27.
115 Quoted in Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire, p. 295. In 1924, a quintet of ‘athletic fräuleins from the land of the pretzel and schnapps’ embarked on a tour of American vaudeville houses. The Boxing Blade (12 April 1924). In England, there was outrage when a boxer called Annie Newton challenged Dempsey. The niece of A. J. Newton, author of a 1904 boxing manual, Annie later featured in a documentary on Women London Boxers (Gaumont, 1931).
116 ‘Berlin Wickedness Shocks Dempsey’, New York Times, 4 May 1922, p. 27.
117 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Americanism and Fordism’, in Selections from the Prison Diaries, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London, 1971), p. 318.
118 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 85.
119 George Du Maurier, Trilby (Oxford, 1995), pp. 3–4, 89, 91–2, 144, 229–30. Although set in the 1850s, the novel includes much 1890s detail.
120 Claude Meunier, Ring Noir (Paris, 1992), pp. 111–13. See also Daniel Karlin, Proust’s English (Oxford, 2005), p. 14.
121 Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in A la recherche du temps perdu, Pléiade edition (Paris, 1987), vol. IL, p. 200, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London, 2002), vol. IL, p. 490; Sodome et Gomorrhe, Pléiade, vol. III, p. 23, English translation, vol. IV, p. 25; La Prisonnière, Pléiade, vol. III, p. 710, English translation, vol. V, p. 229. In Le Temps retrouvé, the Baron imagines the war as a gigantic boxing match: Pléiade, vol. IV, p. 373, English translation, vol. VI, p. 129. I am grateful to Danny Karlin for drawing my attention to these passages.
122 Arthur Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be . . . American’, in Oeuvres, ed. Jean-Pierre Begot (Paris, 1992), pp. 121–4. Terry Hale’s translation is in Four Dada Suicides, ed. Roger Conover, Terry Hale and Paul Lenti (London, 1995), p. 34. See also André Dunoyer de Segonzac on the arrival of American boxing, in Meunier, Ring Noir, pp. 35–6. Dunoyer de Segonzac later illustrated Tristan Bernard’s Tableau de la boxe (1922) and Jean Giraudoux’s Le Sport (1924).
123 Carpentier, My Methods, or Boxing as a Fine Art, p. 22; Carpentier by Himself, p. 60.
124 Carpentier, My Methods, p. 23.
125 Orio Vergani, Poor Nigger, trans. W. W. Hobson (London, 1930), p. 193.
126 Colette, Contes des Mille et Un Matins (Paris, 1970), some are quoted in Meunier, Ring Noir, pp. 46–49. Cocteau, quoted in Alexis Philonenko, Histoires de la Boxe (Paris, 1991), p. 400 (my translation). On Hemingway’s coaching of Masson and Miró, see Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson (New York, 1976), p. 86. Man Ray attended a 1929 fight with Hemingway; his photographs are reproduced in Jean-Michel Bouhours, ‘Les Mystères du Château du dé’, in Man Ray: directeur du mauvais movies, ed. Jean-Michel Bouhours and Patrick de Haas (Paris, 1997), p. 97. On Hemingway’s encounter with Jean Prévost, see Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 189–90. On Bonnard’s 1931 self-portrait The Boxer, see Graham Nickerson, in Pierre Bonnard, Stealing the Image: Works on Paper, exh. cat., New York Studio (New York, 1997). See also Yvette Sánchez, ‘Un round de littérature française et la boxe’, Versant, 40 (2001), pp. 159–7l.
127 Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita (Harmondsworth, 1995), p. 26.
128 Quoted in Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston, 1996), p. 68. See also Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia (London, 2000).
129 Ivan Coll, ‘The Negroes are Conquering Europe’, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 559; Paul Colin, quoted in Karen C. C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes’, Critical Inquiry, 24 (Summer 1998), p. 921; ‘Ring du Coliseum’ is included in Josephine Baker, footage from the Cinématheque de la Danse archives (Paris, 1998); many thanks to Sarah Wood for showing me this.
130 Quoted in Katia Samaltanos, Apollinaire: Catalyst for Primitivism, Picabia and Duchamp (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984), p. 53.
131 Stovall, Paris Noir, pp. 67–8. See Michel Fabre, ‘The Ring and the Stage: African Americans in Parisian Public and Imaginary Space before World War 1’, in Space in America: Theory History Culture, ed. Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt (Amsterdam, 2005), pp. 521–8. For a fictional life of Sam McVea, see Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Distiques pour plaire à Dupuy’, in Poésies libres (Paris, 1978), p. 51.
132 Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana, IL, l998), p. 11.
133 Quoted in Jules-Rosette, Black Paris, p. 29. See also Eduardo Arroyo, Panama Al Brown (Paris, 1998), pp. 106–8.
134 Stovall, Paris Noir, pp. 3–4, 75. See also Craig Lloyd, Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (Athens, GA, 2000).
135 Gwendolyn Bennett, ‘Wedding Day’, in The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women, ed. Marcy Knopf (New Brunswick, NJ, 1993), p. 54. See also Alice Morning’s ‘Something Alive in Paris’, The New Age (11 March 1920), pp. 302–3. Morning describes ‘modern life’ at the ‘Nothing-Happens Bar’. The cast of characters includes ‘a negro boxer’, ‘a short woman, sports variety’ and ‘an American sausage-king’, and the story, a scene in which ‘the negro boxer mistakes his place in the sun and pays court to the sportswomen, for which Uncle Sam taps him on the head from behind and knocks him out.’ Morning describes this as a ‘scene of gilded savagery’.
136 Claude McKay, The Negroes in America (Port Washington, NY, 1979), p. 50. Individuals too did not always fare so well. In 1913, Jack Johnson was refused rooms at the city’s best hotels. Roberts, Papa Jack, p. 186.
137 John Lardner, White Hopes and other Tigers (New York, 1951), pp. 118–36.
138 The first African–American to contest a title after Johnson was Tiger Flowers who won the world middleweight title in 1926. See Andrew M. Kaye, The Pussycat of Prizefighting: Tiger Flowers and The Politics of Black Celebrity (Athens, GA, 2004).
139 Hemingway wired this description of Siki to the Toronto Star two days before the fight. Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (New York, 1989), p. 73.
140 Lincoln Steffens, ‘The Carpentier-Siki Fight’, in The World of Lincoln Steffens, ed. Ella Winter and Herbert Shapiro (New York, 1962), p. 249.
141 Bob Scanlon, ‘The Record of a Negro Boxer’, in Negro, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York, 2002), p. 210.
142 Orio Vergani’s Siki-like hero, George Boykin, fights a French opponent and finds ‘the primeval savagery of his race’ has been ‘unloosed’. Vergani, Poor Nigger, p. 160. Despite this language, the novel portrays Boykin as a victim of prejudice. In 2004, it was adapted by Extramondo-Theatri 90 for the Milan stage as Knock Out (dir. Michela Blasi). P. C. Wren, author of Beau Geste, also wrote a novel about Siki, Soldiers of Misfortune. M’Bongu is ‘so much lower in the scale of creation’ than his white opponent that he is impossible to beat. (New York, 1929), p. 20.
143 ‘Battling Siki as a Dark Cloud on the Horizon’, Literary Digest, October 1922, pp. 62–5; ‘Battling Siki Shot Dead in the Street’, New York Times, 16 December 1925, p. 3; Gerald Early, ‘Battling Siki’, The Culture of Bruising (Hopewell, NJ, 1994), p. 68. See also Gerald Early, ‘Three Notes Toward a Cultural Definition of The Harlem Renaissance’, Callaloo, 14, no. 1 (1991), p. 142.
144 Steffens, ‘The Carpentier-Siki Fight’, p. 250.
145 Blaise Diagne, Le Populaire, 1 December 1922. A slightly different translation is quoted in Benson, Battling Siki, p. 258. When Diagne became Under Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1931, an American magazine reminded its readers that he was the deputy who had risen ‘magnificently in the Chamber in 1922 in defense of his compatriot Battling Siki, kinky-haired light heavyweight’. ‘Butcher’s Son’s Cabinet’, Time, 9 February 1931.
146 David Trotter, The Making of the Reader (London, 1984), p. 73.
147 Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (London, 1969), pp. 132, 162. See also Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (London, 1985), p. 139. When Hemingway wrote his memoir of that period, A Moveable Feast, in the late 1950s, his reputation as a boxer-writer was firmly established. It therefore seems deliberately provocative to preface the book with the announcement that it will contain ‘no mention of the Stade Anastasie where the boxers served as waiters at the tables set out under the trees and the ring was in the garden. Nor of training with Larry Gains, nor the great twenty-round fights at the Cirque d’Hiver.’ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (London, 1984).
148 Morley Callahan, That Summer in Paris (New York, 1963), p. 122. See David L. Inglis, ‘Morley Callaghan and the Hemingway Boxing Legend’, Notes on Contemporary Literature, 4, no. 4 (1974), pp. 4–7; Scott Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald (London, 1999), pp. 138–44.
149 Hemingway, Selected Letter’s, p. 673.
150 On Hemingway’s encounter with Wallace Stevens, see Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway (London, 1987), p. 437. Hemingway’s contest with William Carlos Williams took place on the tennis court. Williams, The Autobiography (New York, 1967), p. 218.
151 Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 116.
152 Ibid., pp. 205, 210.
153 Sherwood Anderson, Selected Letters, ed. Charles Modlin (Knoxville, TN, 1984), p. 80.
154 Judy Jo Small and Michael Reynolds, ‘Hemingway v. Anderson: The Final Rounds’, The Hemingway Review, 14, no. 2 (Spring 1995), p. 4. In an earlier draft the fighter had been called Nerone; Hemingway changed the name to Anderson and then, finally, to Andreson. Anderson responded with a story about two ‘substantial-looking’ men whose fight settles nothing. Sherwood Anderson, ‘The Fight’, in Death in the Woods and Other Stories (New York, 1961), pp. 95–108.
155 Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 649.
156 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London, 1967), p. 277. On teaching Pound to box, see Hemingway, Selected Letters, pp. 62, 65. See also Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 123.
157 Wyndham Lewis, ‘The “Dumb Ox” in Love and War’, in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘A Farewell to Arms’, ed. Jay Gellens (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970), pp. 72–90.
158 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, pp. 75–6.
159 On this passage, see David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism (Oxford, 2001), p. 287.
160 Ezra Pound, ‘Patria Mia’, in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York, 1973), pp. 109–10. A few pages earlier Pound relates a story about ‘Bill Donohue, a pugilist’ who is forced to lift pianos to amuse the ‘civilised peoples of the world’ (p. 105). Again American virility has been made to perform with the tools of effete European culture, to little appreciation.
161 Wyndham Lewis, ‘A Soldier of Humour’, in The Wild Body (London, 1927), pp. 27–8. See Trotter, The Making of the Reader, pp. 76–7.
162 See Trotter, Paranoid Modernism, pp. 305–11.
163 For an argument that being an American is a profession in itself, see Cravan, Oeuvres, pp. 121–4.
164 Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London, 1954), p. 10.
165 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London, 1950), p. 13.
166 Ezra Pound, ‘On Technique’, in Selected Prose, pp. 32–3.
167 Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York, 2003), p. 47. Siki is mentioned in Canto 74 (l.704) in the context of a passage about undergraduates and the First World War. The students with their bayonets are ‘inferior gorillas’; Siki, it seems, is the real thing. The Pisan Cantos, p. 23. On Dempsey and Tunney, see Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London, 1951), pp. 86–7.
168 Pound, Selected Letters, p. 348.
169 Conrad Aiken, ‘King Bolo and Others’, in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, ed. M. J. T. Tambimuttu and Richard March (London, 1948), pp. 20–23. See also Conrad Aiken, Ushant (London, 1963), pp. 133–7. Attending Harvard in 1910, Quentin Compson is ‘boxed . . . all over the place’ by a fellow student who has learnt to fight by ‘going to Mike’s every day, over in town’. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 149–50.
170 O’Donnell advertised in the MIT newspaper The Tech: ‘Boxing and Physical Culture taught by STEVE O’DONNELL Boxing Instructor at Harvard University First class gymnasium all the latest Spaulding machines, hot and cold shower baths. Guaranteed no black eyes or marks. 8 E. Concord St., cor Wash.’ Available at http://www-tech.mit.edu/ archives/VOL_026/TECH_V026_S0129_P004.pdf.
171 T. S. Eliot, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, in The Complete Poems and Plays (London, 1969), p. 20.
172 The facsimile of The Waste Land includes a satirical reference to Fresca as ‘Minerva in a crowd of boxing peers’. Valerie Eliot glosses this by naming the peers as the 8th Marquis of Queensberry and the 5th Earl of Lonsdale. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original, ed. Valerie Eliot (London, 1971), pp. 29, 127. Eliot retained an interest in boxing throughout his life. In 1963, he attacked television, but admitted that he nevertheless liked to watch boxing. David E. Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago, 2003), p. 228. In 1963 Groucho Marx began a correspondence with Eliot and joked that he shared a first name with Tom Gibbons, ‘a prizefighter who once lived in St. Paul’. The Groucho Letters (London, 1969), pp. 127–9.
173 Nevill Coghill, ‘Sweeney Agonistes (An anecdote or two)’, in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, p. 86.
174 Dos Passos, USA, pp. 402, 404.