STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE 25.3

April 2003 | 25.3

Scott J. Juengel

Reflecting on the elusiveness of boxing as an object of critical scrutiny, Norman Mailer once remarked that “to try to learn from boxers [is] a quintessentially comic quest. Boxers are liars. . . . Once you knew what they thought, you could hit them. So their personalities become masterpieces of concealment” (43). Despite this belated caution, the drama inside the ring has long exhibited an almost allegorical power for men and women of letters eager to find cultural meaning in such a concentrated trial of the will. For instance, in William Cobbett’s 1805 essay, “In Defense of Boxing,” published in the weekly Political Register on the occasion of a Coroner’s decision “wherein death was the consequence of a boxing-match,” the persistent cries to “eradicate the practice of boxing” compel Cobbett to summon what he saw as a more debilitating cultural spectre: England’s steady fall into effeminacy (172). He begins by valorizing the pugilistic arts as a civil means of settling quarrels in a frequently uncivil society, particularly in contradistinction to the decidedly craven sword-play of the French and Italians. For Cobbett, the issue at stake appears patently simple: “[W]e must either have cuttings and stabbings, or boxing”; however, as he continues, it becomes clear that the ramifications of this choice are farther reaching: “[F]or, much as I abhor cuttings and stabbings, I have as I hope most others of my countrymen have, a still greater abhorrence of submission to a foreign yoke. Commerce, Opulence, Luxury, Effeminacy, Cowardice, Slavery: these are the stages of national degradation. We are in the fourth; and I beg the reader to consider, to look into history, to trace the states in their fall, and then say how rapid is the latter part of the progress! Of the symptoms of effeminacy none is so certain as a change from athletic and hardy sports or exercises to those requiring less bodily strength and exposing the persons engaged in them to less bodily suffering” (175). Here Cobbett’s defense of boxing for its own sake (as humane, spirited, manly) gives way to a figuration of the sport as a metonymic device for “deeds of bravery of a higher order,” including the military safeguarding of national borders and the instantiation of hegemonic cultural values. While the sport’s origins lie in “that generous mode of terminating quarrels between the common people, a mode by which the people of England have, for ages, been distinguished from those of all other countries” (172), Cobbett reimagines prize-fighting as a form of radical pedagogy that teaches class identification through public spectacle: “But boxing matches give rise to assemblages of the people; they tend to make the people bold: they produce a communication of notions of hardihood; they serve to remind men of the importance of bodily strength; they, each in its sphere, occasion a transient relaxation from labour; they tend, in short, to keep alive, even amongst the lowest of the people, some idea of independence; whereas amongst cutters and stabbers and poisoners there is necessarily a rivalship for quietness and secrecy . . . seeing that their mode of seeking satisfaction is with the greatest chance of success pursued in the dark” (178-79).

Cobbett’s apologia for the sport is instructive, in part because the author’s working-class sympathies and republican ardor situate boxing as a powerful agent in the induction of the lower classes into political life, but also because Cobbett returns insistently to the “public-ness” of the ring. Unlike the “quietness and secrecy” of other, more perilous forms of mediation, boxing functions as a constitutive part of the nineteenth-century public sphere, a space where cultural prerogatives and the wages of political participation are articulated by and communicated throughout the masses. What makes this particularly ironic is the fact that boxing had been illegal in Britain since 1750, which suggests that the culture of the ring (known at the time as “the fancy”) exposes the tension between state mandate and the efficacy of potential counterpublics, discursive arenas where heterogeneous groups can band and form alternative and even illicit social strategies and practices. As boxing historian Elliott Gorn asserts, the fancy represents a “hybrid culture” (29), a mobile public sphere that bracketed difference in the service of common interests, an incongruous feature of a sport grounded in combat. In order to suggest ways in which the culture of the ring is complicit with the mechanisms of national identity formation and the “recuperation” of masculinist ideals, I want to first map out the discursive politics of the fancy, and then interrogate the representation of a single bare-knuckle bout, the fight between Thomas Hickman (alias “The Gaslight Man”) and Bill Neate at Hungerford-at-Berkshire on December 11, 1821.

The Hickman-Neate contest is certainly not the most culturally significant fight of the bare-knuckle heyday in England, nor is it notable as a demonstration of pugilistic excellence (Neate stopped Hickman after eighteen bloody rounds), but it is an event that captivated the popular imagination, with over 25,000 spectators in attendance, and yielded surprising literary capital, most strikingly in William Hazlitt’s 1822 essay “The Fight.” More importantly however, the Hickman-Neate bout, understood through the competing “styles” of masculine performance assumed by the two pugilists, allows us to consider how the brutality of early boxing symbolically stages the concomitant violence intrinsic to both nation and gender formation. Both are products of the exigencies of disavowal and repudiation, and the logic of nineteenth-century sport similarly hinges on the promise that “the better man wins,” so much so that at times the outcome of a match is presumed to underwrite certain racial and cultural stereotypes. Intriguingly, the authenticity (and thus the narrativization) of the Hickman-Neate bout is threatened by suspicions of a “cross,” or fixed outcome, suggesting that the contest between the crude, outlandish Hickman and the gentlemanly Neate potentially unfolds like a melodrama of masculine decorum. This double inscription—on one hand, boxing as a meaning-laden cultural practice, and on the other, its possible (pre)scriptedness or imposture—is the focus of what follows.

The culture of sports as we know it today—organized, codified, commercialized, and global—is clearly the “invention” of the Victorian and Edwardian age, shaped simultaneously by new cults of health and hygiene, shifting conceptions of recreational time and disposable income created by mass industrialization, modernized methods of transportation, and the rise of a public school athletic ethos. In the first half of the nineteenth century pugilism occupies an uncertain position in this consolidation of sporting culture: illegal yet rarely prosecuted (and even tacitly protected), decried by Evangelical and Methodist clergy yet patronized by the landed gentry, bare-knuckle boxing performs a spectacular masculine ideal that honors rule-bound violence and promotes an aesthetic of bloodletting. It is perhaps useful to imagine the boxing ring as a site of liminal politics within the period, for in Hazlitt’s time the ring was literally an area hastily constructed on the borders of permissible society, physically delineated by the teeming spectators who made the event public, and reserved for recomposing the representational strategies of class and gender identification. That the height of bare-knuckle boxing coincides with a period of warfare and rearguard paranoia in England (including the Napoleonic wars, the Peterloo Massacre, George III’s madness, etc.), as well as the beginning of what Benedict Anderson calls “the age of nationalism in Europe,” suggests how the images and accounts of the athletic male body potentially counterweigh the historical trauma resulting from political discord. As I explore in the discussion of the Hickman-Neate bout below, the exemplary masculine subject that emerges here—one that must somehow square the competing drives of raw physicality and gentlemanly etiquette—represents a compensatory discourse of male rehabilitation upon which the nineteenth-century fantasy of English national identity is constructed.

George Mosse’s pioneering work Nationalism and Sexuality first explored the dual histories of national and sexual identity, positing that the formation of nationalism in modern Europe is complicit with the idealization of middle-class masculinity maintained by a newly codified bourgeois “respectability.” Citing the coterminous emergence of nationalistic ideology, new cultural regimes of sexual conduct, and the revalorization of male beauty born of the eighteenth-century Greek revival, Mosse charts the way in which these discourses not only came to mutually reinforce each other, but also how, given that nationality and gender are relational terms having meaning only within a differential system of signification, they together demarcate the figurative boundaries of the patriotic body by stigmatizing the masturbator, homosexual, immigrant, and Jew (among others) as examples of a weak and undisciplined masculinity. Mosse’s work is useful in that it brings into relief the gendered implications implicit in Benedict Anderson’s understanding of nation as “a deep, horizontal comradeship,” an imagined “fraternity” organized and policed by what Mosse calls “respectability” (qtd. in Anderson 7). Sublimating libidinal energy into the “higher purpose” of nationalism and “projecting a stereotype of human beauty which supposedly transcend[s] sensuousness,” according to Mosse (11), male propriety simultaneously deepens the identification with the state while “exorcising a homoeroticism” that might otherwise jeopardize “the history of [male] friendship” (16). As the example from Cobbett intimates, bare-knuckle boxing is imagined as an antidote to creeping cultural effeminacy by offering a space where masculine competency can be (over)determined, and thus, having co-opted nationalistic strategies of self-representation, the ring and its patrons function as a microcosm of the national “fraternity.”

Therefore, the boxing ring in the early nineteenth century can be viewed as a critical site for staging the destruction, reorganization, and recuperability of the masculine body. Unlike contemporary prize-fighting, bare-knuckle bouts determine the limits of raw physical being: stripped to the waist in the open air and fighting without the protection of gloves, mouthpiece or referee, the early modern pugilist fought rounds measured not by tidy three-minute increments but rather by knockdowns, by the very ability to remain upright and conscious. A fight is deemed over only when a contestant cannot return standing to the “scratch” (a mark in the center of the ring) within the allotted thirty seconds between rounds. Yet despite the impetuosity and savagery of these bouts, each contest is intricately structured, its gestures coded: from the customary pre-fight formalities like throwing one’s hat in the ring and tying one’s “colors” to the ring-stakes, to the stylized postures assumed by each fighter standing at the scratch and the recalibration of the betting odds after each round, boxing unfolds like a self-conscious cultural practice, rewarding violence while it registers acquiescence to rule. To borrow Joyce Carol Oates’s phrasing, between the conventions of the ring and the capriciousness of its violence, “all is style,” for boxing is “ideally, superior to all accident. It contains nothing that is not fully willed” (9, 12). As becomes clear below, these styles of masculine will, enacted as they are in primitive spectacle, furnish a roughly-hewn alternative to the top down hegemony of state-inspired nationalism.

Much of what we know about the discursive productions of the ring in the early nineteenth century we owe to a single, often eccentric, but encyclopedic work, Pierce Egan’s Boxiana; or, Sketches of Antient and Modern Pugilism, the first volume of which was published anonymously in 1812, the fifth and final volume in 1828. At over two thousand pages, Boxiana aspires to be “as complete a book of reference as possible” (1: 43), and in so doing serves as a compendium of boxing ephemera, reproducing handbills, popular songs and chants, contemporary newspaper reports, boxer’s obituaries, as well as blow-by-blow accounts of nearly every significant fight over a fifty-year period. Egan studies the culture of boxing with the rigor, if not the objectivity, of a social scientist, constructing the fancy as a complex community with its own rules, rituals, boundaries, and modes of signification. Like Cobbett, Egan sees the ring as a forum for a kind of political education: for instance, in one telling passage Egan compares the study of “learned and dead languages” to witnessing “the manly and national practice of Boxing,” a comparison that leads Egan to posit a rough-and-tumble pedagogy of experience, warning that “books alone will not inform us of the true state of things, without an intercourse with that book of books, REAL LIFE. . . . It becomes, then, our duty to observe well the passing scene” (1: 301-02). By proposing that the fancy constitutes a vital supplement to “the classical acquirements” of the learned, Egan’s analogy works to valorize boxing as a form of cultural capital and authenticate the street patter of the fan as a legitimate and cohesive discourse in its own right (not insignificantly, Egan was also a lexicographer, and the editor of a noted dictionary of urban slang).

I accentuate Egan’s relationship to language and sociability because it is evident from the opening pages of Boxiana that his passion for the sport often serves as a vehicle for aggressively articulating his crudely pro-English prejudices. According to Egan, the manly art of pugilism should be viewed as a “national propensity . . . in perfect unison with the feelings of Englishmen,” a propensity which apparently erases the exigencies of station, or as Egan relates: “Distinction of rank is of little importance when an offense has been given, and in the impulse of the moment, a PRINCE has forgot his royalty, by turning out to box . . . and a BISHOP, the sanctity of his cloth, displaying those strong and national traits so congenial to the soil of liberty” (1: 3). That the imperative to box outstrips the demands of one’s civic function suggests that these staged physical encounters restage a kind of political primal scene, offering the spectator a glimpse into what Egan calls the “great obscurity” of the distant past where “wounded feelings brought manly resentment to its aid” (1: 2-3). Not surprisingly, Egan goes to great lengths to anchor the sport firmly in proto-English history: “It has been attempted by some writers to prove that BOXING did not originate in Great Britain; but in recurring to the times of the immortal Alfred, according to ancient authorities, we shall find, that wrestling and boxing formed a part of the manual exercise of the soldiers at that distant period. The ancient Britons have always been characterized as a manly, strong, and robust race of people, inured to hardship and fatigue, and, by the exercise of those manly sports, acquired that peculiar strength of arm which rendered them so decisive in warlike combats. . . . [Therefore], in speaking generally, as a national trait, we feel no hesitation in declaring, that it is wholly—BRITISH” (1: 14). Moreover, the lineage of boxing in England “might be traced through the succeeding reigns, with every degree of certainty, except in some few instances, where the conquerors introduced effeminate refinements . . . as tending towards creating a degeneracy of spirit among the natives of this island” (1: 15). It is widely held, as Anderson suggests, that the idea of “nation” coalesces as a “cultural artifact of a particular kind” toward the end of the eighteenth century, although “the nation states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future” (4, 11-12). Thus, when Egan chronicles the history of boxing as a “national trait” consolidated in and through the history of conquest, he suggests the interpenetration of national space and the contours of the masculine body: English military prowess is contingent upon the ancient cultural preoccupation with pugilism, which in turn safeguards against the effeminized threat of foreign invasion that would jeopardize the pugilist’s—and the Englishman’s—body.

The “cultural production” of boxing as a “national propensity” is therefore not only underscored by historical prerogatives grounded in a murky Anglo-Saxon past, but is bounded by acts of disavowal, exclusion, and cultural disputation that mark the ring as a metonym for the broader political imaginary. As foreign invasion brought the threat of degeneracy, so did foreign-born boxers occasion nationalistic retrenchment. Early in volume one, Egan chronicles “the insolent threat of the English laurels being torn from their native soil, and transplanted to a foreign land” by a Venetian gondolier who “threw down the glove, boasting, at the same time, that he would break the jaw-bone of any opponent who might have the temerity to fight him” (1: 22). In response, the English boxing ranks (where “John Bull was not thus to be bounced out of his pluck or his money”) rally around a fighter named Bob Whitaker, selected to contest the Italian’s claims; after a raw and undisciplined battle, Whitaker finally stops the gondolier “with one ‘English peg’ in the stomach (quite a new thing to foreigners),” a blow that is afterwards celebrated as “too much of the English rudeness for [the Venetian] to bear” (25). Here boxing intimates a multi-layered narrative of engagement wherein even the punches themselves embody particular national values. Similarly, when the British champion Tom Cribb first defeated the American Tom Molineaux—an ex-slave described as “a perfect stranger, a rude, unsophisticated being [who] was too ambitious, by threatening to wrest the laurels from the English brow, and planting them upon the head of a foreigner” (1: 361)—Egan writes that Cribb succeeded in “chastis[ing] the bold intruder, in protecting the national practice and honour of the country, his own character from contempt and disgrace, and the whole race of English pugilists from ridicule and derision” (387). This baldly chauvinistic rhetoric gains a measure of sanction from sporting associations like the Pugilistic Society, specifically founded in 1814 to “keep alive the principles of courage and hardihood which have distinguished the British character, and to check the progress of that effeminacy which wealth is too apt to produce.” Egan, not surprisingly, offers a ringing endorsement for the civic necessity of such clubs, comparing their cultural function to the Royal Society, Antiquarian Society, and the Society of Arts.

For Egan then, boxing represents both a microcosm of and an intervention into national life, stimulating a “love of country” while reinforcing a phallic masculinity presumed to be imperiled. That boxing is perceived to have wide-ranging political significance becomes clear in an appendix to the fourth volume of Boxiana in which Egan reproduces an 1820 exchange before Jeremy Bentham’s “Society for Mutual Improvement,” debating whether “the Magistracy of England” deserves censure or approbation for failing to enforce the ban on boxing and “winking at what affords much amusement and keeps up the spirit and courage of the country?” (4: 577). The discussion that follows returns insistently to the largely working-class demographics of the fan base, and the contention by the sport’s opponents that “prize fights were not only the means of collecting numerous blackguards together, but they tend more to encourage a spirit of gambling, and ferocity of disposition” (4: 586). The sport is subsequently defended by a “Mr. M.” who, in espousing “the liberty of the lower orders to enjoy their own recreations unmolested” (4: 578), intimates the ominous class anxieties fostered by industrialization:

In the steam-engine, we must have a safety valve, to let off the excess of steam, or it will

Here the boxing ring seemingly mitigates the prospect of popular unrest as the mechanistic metaphor veers between the maintenance of class equilibrium, the psychological effects of subjugation, and the pragmatics of social justice. The analogy reminds us of the way in which boxing, and nineteenth-century sports in general, are part of the “humble modalities [and] minor procedures” of Michel Foucault’s concept of discipline: “The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely” (170, 137-8). Because boxing incorporates within its operations the tension between licit and illicit—conflating as it does the “crime” and its “punishment”—Mr. M. envisions a cultural practice that polices itself, functioning as a closed political system wherein the very question that occasions the debate hasn’t a stake. Ironically, the seeming aggressivity of boxer’s near naked body in the ring is here reconfigured as the “docile body” of penal reform, as various disciplinary mechanisms cultivate what Foucault calls a body’s “aptitude,” its utility within and acquiescence to a broader “political anatomy.”

Foucault and contemporary theorists of masculinity make clear that this “political anatomy” of discipline produces a form of gender competency that both enables and circumscribes the masculine subject: to master the skills of a sport like boxing—and thereby provide “amusement” for the assembled public—is also to participate in delimiting and reifying a stereotypical gender position that makes the subject available to what Foucault calls “a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it” (138). As a site of embattled manhood, the ring presents a stark distillation of disciplinary logic: unmanly or effeminate behavior is confirmed and spectacularly punished in an event that is measured by the ability of one man to maintain consciousness over and beyond another. That there emerges a rigorous decorum of the body in Foucault’s model suggests a theoretical complement to Mosse’s focus on the powerful sexual etiquette emergent in the period and the ideology underwritten by nineteenth-century biology’s marriage of muscle and will. Indeed, what the fancy rallies to witness is a crude politics of character, wherein the atavistic physical identities of the ring’s participants are shaped and acculturated by the sport itself, offering “ample recompense for the interruption of harmony by their disputes.”

I invoke this complex of prevailing forces—disciplinary, biopolitical, sexual—that accrue around the pugilistic body in order to suggest how the realization of national identity is a discrete affair of muscle and matter, a raw pantomime that enacts and seemingly grounds one’s Englishness in the material world. I want to argue that the body of the pugilist becomes for Cobbett, Egan, Hazlitt, and other Regency sportsmen a form of consolidating and sublimating the tacit violence of national identification and a synecdoche for the discursive theatrics of gender and nation formation. With this in mind, I want to turn now to Hazlitt’s recounting of the Hickman-Neate fight, long treated as little more than a familiar essay on a notoriously “blackguard subject,” in order to measure how Hazlitt constructs a physical public sphere for the articulation of this contested masculinity.

If Egan’s Boxiana is the repository of the sport’s tangled prehistory, then Hazlitt’s 1822 essay “The Fight” is its most elegant tableau, an account of the author’s initial foray into the robust life of the fancy. Both authors provide detailed accounts of the Hickman-Neate bout, although for each of them the bloody contest itself is subordinate to the larger enterprise of communicating the wages of masculine prerogative both inside and outside the ring. Neither Hickman nor Neate possess the charisma of a Cribb or Jem Belcher, nor does the bout offer the ethnic intrigue of the great Cribb-Molineaux or Dan Donnelly-Tom Oliver fights (the latter a famous 1819 contest between the Irish and English champions); nonetheless, Hazlitt’s friend P.G. Patmore enticed the essayist into the sixty-mile trek to Hungerford, Berkshire by insisting that “if ever he meant to see one, now was his time; for that there had never been such a one before, and never would be such another” (qtd. in Wilcox 2). What brings them to this picturesque hill outside Hungerford is a striking contrast in masculine styles. Another in a long line of champions from Bristol, Bill Neate is by Egan’s account a “good man,” “extremely prepossessing” in his disposition outside of the ring and a model of gentlemanly comportment and fairness inside it (3: 272). Hazlitt likewise remarks Neate’s “modest cheerful air,” and calls him “a modern Ajax . . . with Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear the pugilistic reputation of all Bristol” (17: 81). However according to Egan where Neate’s boxing style “exhibits the perfection of this noble science—it is the cautious, the skillful, the sublime,” his opponent evinces “the shifting, the showy, and the flowery style of boxing” (4: 58), preferring “the ponderous charge, in order to confound, route, and dismay the feelings of his opponent. His attack is truly terrific. His head and body seem as if secured by a coat of mail, insensible to any punishment” (3: 287). As will become evident, Tom Hickman’s arrogant boasts, rugged tactics, and displays of bravura threaten to unsettle the ideological work of the ring, positing an audacious and excessive masculinity in the place of the docile body of cultural subjection.

But the physical encounter inside the ropes is only part of the story, for Hazlitt’s narrative is perhaps foremost a meditation on male bonding in the conversible world. As Hazlitt and others of the period describe it, the fancy is a communal body that fashions itself out of anecdote, measures itself in boasting, and maintains itself through conviviality, even as it bears witness to a popular entertainment so fundamentally brutal. As any reader of “The Fight” can attest, Hazlitt’s essay is as much about the rigors of conversation as it is about a prize fight, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the story of “two men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies” (17: 82) is rivaled only by an intense need to discuss and analyze every nuance of the fight, from the odds in advance to the likelihood of a “cross” afterwards. Hazlitt records not only the difficulties inherent in traveling to a bout taking place in a clandestine location, but more dramatically the restlessness that the fight generates in the coffee houses, inns, and taverns in the days leading up to the opening exchange of blows. Much of the first half of the essay is devoted to roaming from public house to public house, “talking of what was to happen or of what did happen, with a noble subject always at hand, and liberty to digress to others whenever they offered” (17: 73).

This image of boxing culture as a heterogeneous site of sociability bound by a common compulsion works in large part because the often gruff Hazlitt not only sees the ring as a public sphere delimited by those whose discourse animates it, but because he inverts the terms as well, representing spirited conversation as pugilistic. For instance, Hazlitt’s narrative begins with the author and his male cohorts staying up all night in a boisterous inn (their conversations alternating between “politics and the fight”), and focuses principally on the conversational antics of a “tall English yeoman,” “a fine fellow, with sense, wit, and spirit, a hearty body and a joyous mind, free-spoken, frank, convivial—one of that true English breed that went with Harry the Fifth to the siege of Harfleur” (17: 77). The swain, whom Hazlitt explicitly compares to the renowned champion Jem Belcher, represents Hazlitt’s rugged ideal in a masculine world, in part because he wields words like a cudgel: “It did one’s heart good to see him brandish his oaken towel and to hear him talk. He made mince-meat of a drunken, stupid, red-faced, quarrelsome frowzy farmer,” who “made many attempts to provoke his humorous antagonist to single combat, which the other turned off with great adroitness” (17: 77-8). Hazlitt’s conspicuous pleasure in the verbal thrashing that the yeoman administers to the inebriated farmer suggests how the author understands social intercourse as a network of bruising relations delimited through conversational sparring; in other words, the boxing match itself only replicates in spectacular form the counterpunching of animated conversation that precedes it in Hazlitt’s narrative.

Significantly, what differentiates rousing discourse in a pub from the physical trials inside the ring is a sense of decorum. Hazlitt’s description of Hickman’s brazenness makes explicit the connection between these two arenas: “[T]his spirited and formidable young fellow seems to have taken for his motto the old maxim that ‘there are three things necessary to success in life—Impudence! Impudence! Impudence! It is so in matters of opinion, but not in the FANCY, which is the most practical of all things” (17: 79). Hazlitt’s strictures concerning the spectacle of masculine prowess are severely tested once the fight begins, in part because “the Gas-Man” is a figure of unseemly bravado: It was not manly, ‘twas not fighter-like. If he was sure of the victory (as he was not), the less said about it the better. Modesty should accompany the FANCY as its shadow. The best men were always the best behaved. Jem Belcher, the Game Chicken (before whom the Gas-Man could not have lived) were civil, silent men. So is Cribb, so is Tom Belcher, the most elegant of sparrers….[I]mpertinence was a part of no profession. A boxer was bound to beat his man, but not to thrust his fist, either actually or by implication, in every one’s face. Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman” (17: 79-80). This strange juxtaposition of decorum and violence, modesty and lurid drama, maps out the parameters and paradoxes of nineteenth-century masculinity: the peculiar form of English obstinacy and severity that Hazlitt extols might be sanctioned “in matters of opinion,” but within the “practical” dynamics of the fancy it is denounced as “not manly . . . not fighter-like.” The ring’s “practicality” is then figured as its pedagogical efficacy, for in the world of the ring, a man must conduct himself with scrupulous propriety, or end the match bloodied and bruised, as the indecorous Gas-man discovers: “All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death’s head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like on of the figures in Dante’s Inferno” (17: 83). Hazlitt understands Hickman’s defeat as “as fine a piece of poetical justice as I had ever witnessed” (17: 80), in large part because it corresponds to what Roland Barthes, in his now familiar meditation on wrestling, calls “the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.” As boxing promises Hazlitt, so wrestling promises Barthes “an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction” (25). Just as verbal decorum becomes a compensatory gesture countering the physical brutality of bare-knuckle boxing, so does the viciousness of the ring answer the indecency of the braggart. Where Barthes’ representation of wrestling rests upon the sport’s stylized but fraudulent theater of intelligibility, Hazlitt’s “fight” blurs the line between spectacle and sport.

Thus, on the one hand, boxing becomes a mannered bit of theater, its outcome potently scripted in the melodramatic dumbshow of the participants’ bodies in the ring: “[The Gas-Man] strutted about more than a hero, sucked oranges with a supercilious air, and threw away the skin with a toss of his head, and went up and looked at Neate, which was an act of supererogation. The only sensible thing he did was, as he strode away from the modern Ajax, to fling out his arms, as if he wanted to try whether they would do their work that day. By this time they had stripped and presented a strong contrast in appearance. If Neate was like Ajax, “with Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear” the pugilistic reputation of all Bristol, Hickman might be compared to Diomed, light, vigorous, elastic, and his back glistened in the sun, as he moved about, like a panther’s hide” (17: 81). Yet on the other hand, despite the staginess of his description and the trumpeting of “poetical justice,” Hazlitt is quick to defend the fight against allegations of a fix, and thus any form of scriptedness. After the bout the author describes a confrontation at an inn in Wolhampton with a group of young upstarts—“Goths and Vandals,” Hazlitt snorts—who insist that Neate’s victory was a “cross.” As his friend Patmore (renamed Pigott in the essay) “withdrew from the smoke and noise into another room,” Hazlitt stays on to “dispute the point with them for a couple of hours sans intermission by the dial” (17: 84).

Significantly, Egan’s rendering of the fight and its aftermath corroborates the insinuation of scandal and, not surprisingly, traces it back to Hickman’s ignominious character. Having provided a blow-by-blow description of Neate’s triumph in the ring, Egan chronicles the pathetic and premature death of Hickman in a carriage accident almost a year to the day after the fight, only to end his narrative by conceding that there is more to the Gas-Man’s story, something which had “produce[d] great symptoms of uneasiness in the minds of several of Hickman’s backers” (4:75). The author of Boxiana relates how on 21 June 1822 a drunken and belligerent Hickman, responding to a rebuke from a prominent denizen of the fancy, claimed that he could beat Neate “whenever [he] liked,” and that he only lost because he had received eighteen hundred guineas to throw the fight, even going so far as to name the three men who plotted the scheme and fronted the money. “This event did not long remain a secret in the sporting circles,” Egan writes, “in fact, it was buzzed all over the town” (4: 78). After sticking to his story for a couple of days, Hickman recapitulated, but only once one of the designated conspirators (Mr. Gulley) confronted him. Egan stages the encounter between the two would-be conspirators as if it were a scene in a melodrama: the once swaggering boxer now awkward and fidgety before a man of real social power, explaining how drink and ego got the better of his tongue, and pledging “to go before a magistrate to swear that the reports you have heard are an entire falsehood. I never did receive any money from you, or any other person, to lose the battle: and I now publicly declare I was beaten by Neat against my will” (4: 79). Despite the display of contrition, Egan immediately supplies anecdotal evidence that suggests Hickman was seen cashing a £1000 Exchequer-bill at the Bank of England shortly after the bout; however, rather than pass judgment on his subject, Egan only “pledge[s] . . . for the plain unvarnished statement which appears in the succeeding pages, leaving the reader to make his own comments” (4: 75). The cross that haunts the bout’s outcome also bedevils any telling of the fight: for instance, that Hickman ends his concession to Gulley by “now publicly declar[ing]” that he lost the fight “against his will” seemingly calls the former “public-ness” of the bout into question, and with it any subsequent representation of the boxer’s will.

I raise the problem of the fix because it serves as a scandalous reminder of the kind of potent ideological narratives that plague the ring and the performances that define it. Where Egan seemingly turns even Hickman’s repentance into a counterfeit by juxtaposing the vignette of his mortification with additional suspicions of shadowy “unpleasantness,” Hazlitt insists on a just outcome even as he tropes the entire spectacle as theater, its artfulness marked immediately and ironically by his epigraph, a misquotation of Hamlet’s famous resolve, “—The fight, the fight’s the thing, / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (17: 72). Similarly, Hazlitt’s defense of the fight’s integrity returns at essay’s end in the form of a curious postscript: “P.S. Toms called upon me the next day, to ask me if I did not think the fight was a complete thing? I said I thought it was. I hope he will relish my account of it” (17: 86). Hazlitt’s equivocal closure—the fight’s “completeness” is ultimately avowed only beyond the boundaries of the narrative itself, thereby allowing always for supplementary revisions—points to the way in which bare-knuckle boxing in Regency England is complicit in a greater narrative project of imagining and reconstituting national manhood. I interrogate the manner in which Hazlitt’s text figures the fight as both a self-consciously constructed artifact and a brutal event unfolding in real time because I want to end by showing how Hazlitt’s conflicted representation of boxing participates in what might be called sentimental history, a mapping of the popular past through the fluid affective life of the present.

Hazlitt ends “The Fight” in a coach listening to an “old gentleman” from Bath nostalgically rhapsodizing over bouts he witnessed in his youth. In particular, the elder fan tells the sentimental tale of “a fight between the famous Broughton and George Stevenson…in the year 1770,” a match that ended controversially. Hazlitt’s rendering of the scene is complicated:

Notably, the scene is a tangle of embedded voices—Hazlitt’s, the elder gentleman’s, Stevenson’s, Cuthbert’s death-bed confession, and even Broughton’s exhausted surrender are enclosed in the passage—a structural reminder of how the telling of history is a dialogic project. That the “truth” of the 1770 bout lies in something unheard, or rather in a sentence that waits fifty years to find articulation, suggests that Hazlitt’s essay becomes an intervention into the reveries of popular nostalgia, a means of giving voice to what “the world did not allow.” Hazlitt’s chance meeting with the older fan has its antecedent in the same fan’s youthful conversation with the aging Stevenson, and coming as it does immediately after the Neate-Hickman bout, the tableau in the coach serves to situate the 1821 fight within the history of a discursive community, and more importantly, within a history of prize-fighting that is perpetually under revision. While the actual struggles in the ring metonymically condense (and figuratively, if tenuously, answer) cultural anxieties over national identification and masculine decline, it is the subsequent need to re-present these encounters anecdotally that at once underwrites the sport and reaffirms the structure of male bonds in the period. Each outlaw match, unspeakable within the official discourse of the state, becomes a part of a vernacular history of modern English masculinity, told and retold in the makeshift fraternities that emerge when men seek out a common idiom. Hazlitt’s melding of conversation and boxing reflects the interconnections between strategies of discourse that foster consensus and a sport that unfolds like a system of signs. The event that possesses such a lurid fascination for the men who crowd the ring also provides a model of etiquette for the raucous business of the emergent “public sphere.” Ironically, it is as if Hazlitt sees in the bloody physical match of men an originary moment for the proper construction of civil society, an origin that, as he reminds us, reverberates through the best conversation: “[W]e talked of this and that with amicable difference, roving and sipping of many subjects, but still invariably we returned to the fight” (17: 78).

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