Writing the Prizefight: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World by Jack Snowdan (review)

[Erratum]

Pierce Egan, was, in every sense of the phrase, one of a kind. Born in London and buried in Highgate Cemetery, North London, the capital city afforded this one-time compositor an athletic landscape that allowed him to become a celebrity figure and a journalist of note. In 1821 Egan launched a journal called Life in London, which he dedicated to George IV. At the height of his fame and fortune, the King received Egan at the Royal Court.

Egan’s ability to spin out a narrative and his wizard-like flair of conjuring up phrases and words specifically designed to showcase sporting events—mostly horse racing and prize fighting—established his reputation as England’s premier observer/recorder of sporting events.

The author of Writing the Prizefight, David Snowdon, earned his Ph.D. at Newcastle University in 2008. The book examines the literary contributions made by the boxing reporting of Pierce Egan (1772-1849). In particular the focus is on the Boxiana, or, Sketches of Modern Pugilism, four volumes of which appeared between 1818 and 1824. As Snowdon points out, Egan was not a solitary voice commenting on pugilism. Sport reporting was a highly competitive arena, and Egan’s success arose because he was daringly imaginative and saw opportunities to be exuberant and extravagant with his linguistic forays. He gave his larger than life pugilistic characters a jargon, and a swagger, that saw him describing a prize fight as if it was a staged performance, with all manner of theatrical and dramatic overtones. Snowdon adroitly makes the case that Egan’s essays reinforced the stereotype of the fight game being a public platform to reveal national values on morality, military readiness, and British identity.

Writing the Prizefight is a scholarly tome, and Snowdon is to be congratulated not just on his scrutiny of Egan but the manner in which he sees Egan as a founding father of a type and form of creative writing. Snowdon’s chapter fragment, “Traces in Selected Nineteenth Century Literature,” could very easily be revisited to become a treatise in its own right. He sees Egan’s influence impacting such writers as George Bernard Shaw, John Henry Newbolt, William Hazlitt, George Orwell, A.J. Liebling, and Norman Mailer. Charles Dickens is held up as a prime example of the working writer, with deadlines to meet, who was influenced by Egan’s pugilistic phrasing. Snowdon quotes a sentence from The Pickwick Papers: “… and without further invitation he gave the Reverend Mr. Stiggins a preliminary tap on the head, and began dancing round him in a buoyant and cork-like manner” (p. 196).

The appendix to Writing the Prizefight is a glossary that just has to be a lexiconographers dream. A legion of words and phrases that, by themselves, nicely testify to prize fighting being much more than “the sweet science” (Egan coined the phrase). This reviewers favorite five terms are, “bellows to mend” (short of breath), “flash of lightning” (glass of gin), “muffles” (boxing gloves), “pepper” (inflict severe punishment), and “podger” (a stiff blow).

Snowdon’s Writing the Prizefight is sports history of a high order. It should be read as a complementary volume to Dennis Brailsford’s Bareknuckles: A Social History of Prize-Fighting (1988). Also highly recommended is Brailsford’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Pierce Egan.