Whether the death of bare-knuckle fighting is to be mourned is not a question to be dealt with in the first chapter. As George Borrow observed very many years ago, “These are not the days of pugilism,” and without attempting any discussion of the rights and wrongs of the general problem, we may yet read the annals of the Ring and draw our own conclusions from particular instances. The “days of pugilism” are unlikely to return.
It is not, indeed, until we come to George Borrow that we find the praises of boxing sung as a sport, as an outlet for energy, as pure good fun. It is true that, being Borrow, he tells us in Romany Rye of a character who regarded it “as a great defence against Popery.” But Borrow, when he left Popery alone, had a splendid, “Elizabethan” and full-blooded view of life, whether he was concerned with the pleasures of milling or the “genial and gladdening power of good ale, the true and proper drink of Englishmen.”
“Can you box?” asks the old magistrate in Lavengro. “I tell you what, my boy: I honour you.... Boxing is, as you say, a noble art—a truly English art; may I never see the day when Englishmen shall feel ashamed of it, or blacklegs and blackguards bring it into disgrace! I am a magistrate, and, of course, cannot patronise the thing very openly, yet I sometimes see a prize-fight.”
“All I have to say,” Borrow continues later on in Lavengro, “is, that the French still live on the other side of the water, and are still casting their eyes hitherward—and that in the days of pugilism it was no vain boast to say, that one Englishman was a match for two of t’other race.”
What would he have said had he lived to see a French champion? The two words, “boxing” and “Frenchman,” within half a mile of each other, so to put it, made a stock joke in those days and for long after, even to within recent memory.
Borrow had the true boxer’s joy in a fight for its own sake, the violent exercise, the sense of personal contest which is more manifest in fisticuffs than in any other sport.
“Dosta,” says Jasper Petulengro, “we’ll now go to the tents and put on the gloves; and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!”
The following is his account of the crowd at a prize-fight, the encounter itself being dismissed in a few lines:—
“I think I now see them upon the bowling-green, the men of renown, amidst hundreds of people with no renown at all, who gaze upon them with timid wonder. Fame, after all, is a glorious thing, though it last only for a day. There’s Cribb, the Champion of England, and perhaps the best man in England: there he is with his huge, massive figure, and a face wonderfully like that of a lion. There is Belcher, the younger ... the most scientific pugilist who ever entered a ring.... Crosses him, what a contrast! Grim, savage Skelton, who has a civil word for nobody and a hard blow for anybody—hard! one blow, given with the proper play of his athletic arm, will unsense a giant. Yonder individual, who strolls about with his hands behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets, undersized, and also looks anything but what he is, is the King of the Lightweights, so-called—Randall! the terrible Randall, who has Irish blood in his veins: not the better for that, nor the worse; not far from him is his last antagonist, Ned Turner, who, though beaten by him, still thinks himself as good a man, in which he is, perhaps, right, for it was a near thing; and a better ‘shentleman,’ in which he is quite right, for he is a Welshman.... There was—what! shall I name the last? Ay, why not? I believe that thou art the last of all that strong family still above the sod, where may’st thou long continue—true species of English stuff, Tom of Bedford—sharp as Winter, kind as Spring.
“Hail to thee, Tom of Bedford.... Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman of the brown eye, worthy to have carried a six-foot bow at Flodden, where England’s yeomen triumphed over Scotland’s king, his clans and chivalry. Hail to thee, last of England’s bruisers, after all the many victories which thou hast achieved—true English victories, unbought by yellow gold....”
Borrow wrote of the Prize-Ring in its decline and of its best days from a greater distance than did Egan, and his perspective is therefore truer. Still we do learn a great deal from Boxiana of the old giants; whilst contemporary engravings, some of which will be found here, give us, more or less faithfully, the attitudes of the fighters. Whether the artists observed the same fidelity in regard to the muscular development of the principals we must decide from our own experience. It is often said that if men were to train themselves to this herculean scale they would be so muscle-bound as to be almost immobile.
At the beginning of Volume III. of Boxiana, Egan tells us of the extraordinary physique of the fighter.