Professional Sport and Shaw's Cashel Byron

Abstract

George Bernard Shaw's early romantic novel about a prizefighter, Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) is possibly the first literary treatment of the risks, compulsions and social hypocrisies surrounding professional sport. It offers a critique of class, work and leisure, of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, of violence as a spectacle and of the distinction between professional and amateur. In the ‘Preface’ and ‘Note on Modern Prizefighting’, added to the 1901 edition, Shaw provided both a history of prizefighting and a trenchant critique of the public taste for violence which, as he saw it, encouraged the emergence of professional boxing with gloves, under the Queensberry rules, as an even more brutal and dangerous spectacle. Shaw's intimate knowledge of the world of prizefighting, in decline in the 1880s, and his examination of the life of an athlete in a dangerous ‘profession’, open up a critical juncture in the history of modern sport.