The Best Developed Man in Great Britain and Ireland? Eugen Sandow and the Commercialization of Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

In 1901 Eugen Sandow, a strong man performer turned health authority, hosted a competition in the Royal Albert Hall to determine the ‘best developed man in Great Britain and Ireland’. At the contest, members of the public, the military, and the scientific community watched as Sandow and his judges compared men’s physiques. Typically depicted by historians as a pivotal step in the development of bodybuilding as a sport, this article repositions Sandow’s contest as a public manifestation of British eugenics and concerns about physical deterioration. Welcoming a thousand competitors in its qualifying rounds, Sandow’s contest was advertised with reference to perfecting the British male body and stemming the tide of British degeneration. When the outbreak of the Second South African War in 1899 delayed the contest’s finale, Sandow’s marketers redoubled efforts to depict the contest as an antidote to the physical deterioration of British troops said to have become evident in the conflict. Here it is argued that Sandow simultaneously magnified, and profited, from a broader British eugenic concern about the male body. His competition served as a strong reminder for how widespread such concerns were in late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain and, more importantly, how they could be commercialized.