The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [7]
Egan brought out his first bound volume, comprising sixteen numbers, in 1813, although the title page reads 1812. (It had gone to the subscribers with the first installment.) He did not put out another bound volume until 1818. There was a third in 1821, a fourth in 1824, and a fifth in 1828. By that time the Sweet Science was entering one of its periodic declines. Too many X (Egan’s way of writing crooked) fights had disgusted backers and bettors, and there was a lack of exciting new talent. The Science was not to reach another peak until the rise of Tom Sayers, in the late 1850s, which would culminate in Tom’s great fight with the American, John C. Heenan, in 1860. Egan abandoned Boxiana after the 1828 volume.
A great charm of Boxiana is that it is no mere compilation of synopses of fights. Egan’s round-by-round stories, with ringside sidelights and betting fluctuations, are masterpieces of technical reportage, but he also saw the ring as a juicy chunk of English life, in no way separable from the rest. His accounts of the extra-annular lives of the Heroes, coal-heavers, watermen, and butchers’ boys, are a panorama of low, dirty, happy, brutal, sentimental Regency England that you’ll never get from Jane Austen. The fighter’s relations with their patrons, the Swells, present that curious pattern of good fellowship and snobbery, not mutually exclusive, that has always existed between Gentleman and Player in England, and that Australians, Americans, and Frenchmen equally find hard to credit. Egan is full of anecdotes like the one about the Swell and his pet Hero, who were walking arm-in-arm in Covent Garden late one night, when they saw six Dandies insulting a woman. Dandies were neither Gentleman nor Players, and Egan had no use for them. The Swell remonstrated with the Dandies and one of them hit him. The Swell then cried, “Jack Martin, give it them,” and the Hero, who was what we today would call a light-heavyweight, knocked down the six Dandies. From Egan’s narrative it is impossible to tell which performance he considered more dashing, the Swell’s or the Hero’s.
That particular Hero, by the way, was known as the Master of the Rolls, because he was by trade a baker. “Martin is very respectably connected,” Egan wrote, “and, when he first commenced prize pugilist, he had an excellent business as a baker; but which concern he ultimately disposed (or got rid) of, in order, it seems, to give a greater scope to his inclinations.” Egan’s cockney characters, and his direct quotes of how they talked, were a gift to Dickens, who, like every boy in England, read the author of Boxiana. In the New York Public Library catalogue there is listed a German monograph, circa 1900, on Egan’s influence on Dickens, but I know of no similar attempt at justice in the English language.
Egan’s pageant scenes of trulls and lushes, toffs and toddlers, all setting off for some great public, illegal prize-fight, are written Rowlandson, just as Rowlandson’s print of the great second fight between Cribb and Molineaux is graphic Egan. In the foreground of the picture there is a whore sitting on her gentleman’s shoulders the better to see the fight, while a pickpocket lifts the gentleman’s reader (watch). Cribb has just hit Molineaux the floorer, and Molineaux is falling, as he has continued to do for a hundred and forty-five years since. He hasn’t hit the floor yet, but every time I look at the picture I expect to see him land. On the horizon are the delicate green hills and the pale blue English sky, hand-tinted by old drunks recruited in kip-shops (flophouses). The prints cost a shilling colored. When I look at my copy I can smell the crowd and the wildflowers.
Egan could be stately when he wanted, as you can see from the following sample taken from the dedication of the first volume of Boxiana:
To those, Sir, who prefer effeminacy to hardihood—assumed refinement to rough Nature—and whom a shower of rain can terrify, under the alarm