‘Bottom’

Abstract

Chapter 3 explores the violent world of prize-fighting in London and New York. It starts with a fight in a field in Hampshire in 1860. A lot of people have come down on the train from London to see a young Irish American hard man called John Heenan take on the considerably older, and smaller, English champion Tom Sayers. The fight is serious, not fraudulent, but ends in farce, paving the way for a sport already in decline to be over and done with by the end of the century. The chapter spreads out from Sayers Heenan to take on the part prize-fighters played in a plebeian way of seeing the English in their history. The ‘Fancy’, so-called, saw themselves as keepers of the boxing constitution. The ‘Bloods’, so called, saw themselves as defenders of the country’s honour. No sport aroused as much popular excitement. Boxing was a literary subject too. It developed a way of speaking all of its own and, in essay and metaphor, fighters’ unique ability to fight fair (no knives) under rules while giving and taking no quarter (‘Bottom’) either in battle or the ring, were highly prized expressions of liberty. The chapter ends with the Queensberry Rules and the birth of modern boxing as a mainly Anglo-American affair, now performed in theatres not fields.