Modern Manners: Regency Boxing and Romantic Sociability

Abstract

Despite sharing roots in the traditions of non-conformity and radicalism, William Hazlitt, essayist and polemicist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist philosopher and novelist, are not generally grouped together by Romantic scholars. Still less often are the two authors (Hazlitt the boxing enthusiast and Wollstonecraft, resolutely anti-boxing) discussed in the context of popular Regency sports, such as prize-fighting, on which subject it is rightly assumed that Wollstonecraft had little sympathy or interest. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, I want to argue here that Hazlitt’s contribution to sporting literature, specifically that of the hyper-masculine and physically brutal world of boxing, in his great essay ‘The Fight’, published in the New Monthly Magazine in February 1822, links him to Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment feminist interest in reforming social manners and morals. The essayist’s eyewitness account of going to his first boxing match, between Bill Neate and Tom Hickman on Hungerford Downs in December 1821, describes the manners and attitudes of lower-class boxers, but it judges them, I contend, against a set of manners, such as modesty, respectability and sociability, chiefly associated with, and valued by, the middle classes. While it might easily be assumed that Hazlitt’s attendance at the Hungerford fight is an example of his well-known penchant for the more dubious side of popular London life (with boxing routs ranking alongside visits to prostitutes, play houses and the ‘wickedness round about Covent Garden’ in attraction), I propose that the ‘Cockney School’ essayist elevates boxing from its low surroundings by recasting it as a socially acceptable experience for the middle classes in terms that emphasise what Jeffrey N. Cox has called the Cockney School’s ‘Huntian programme of cheerfulness and sociality’. Contrary to the expectations set up in its combative title, I argue that the subject of ‘The Fight’ is convivial middle-class masculine sociality; this is an essay that demands to be read as a discussion of modern