Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850 1487500327, 9781487500320

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SPORTING CULTURES, 1650–1850

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EDITED BY DANIEL O’QUINN AND ALEXIS TADIÉ

Sporting Cultures, 1650–1850

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London www.utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0032-0 (cloth) Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sporting cultures, 1650–1850 / edited by Daniel O’Quinn and Alexis Tadié. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0032-0 (cloth) 1. Sports – Social aspects – History – 18th century. I. O’Quinn, Daniel, 1962–, editor II. Tadié, Alexis, 1963–, editor GV706.5.S72 2017

306.4’8309033

C2017-903690-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments Introduction

xi 3

da n i e l o ’ qu in n a nd a l e x is ta d ié

Part One: Classical Lineages 1 What Is Sport? Arts of Rural Sport and the Art of Poetry, 1650–1800 21 f ra n s d e b ru y n

2 Funeral Games: Ludic Events, Imperial Violence, Authorial Encounters 49 da n i e l o ’ qu in n

3 Fencing and the Market in Aristocratic Masculinity

66

ashley l. cohen

Part Two: Sporting Animals and Their Uses 4 Turf Wars: Violence, Politics, and the Newmarket Riot of 1751 ri ch a rd nash

5 Animals as Heroes of the Hunt sa ra h r. co he n

114

93

vi

Contents

6 Horse Racing in Early Colonial Algeria: From Anglophilia to Arabomania 136 philip dine

Part Three: The Mediation of Sports 7 Sport and the Body Politic: Athletic Competitions in Rousseau’s Republican Theory 163 o u ri da m o st e fa i

8 Writing Fighting/Fighting Writing: Jon Badcock and the Conflicted Nature of Sports Journalism in the Regency 179 j o h n w h a le

9 At Play in the Mountains: The Development of British Mountaineering in the Romantic Period 196 s i m o n b a i n b r id g e

Part Four: The Sporting Body 10 Sports, Recreation, and Medicine in Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Italy and France 219 l au re n t t urc o t

11 Healing Hysteric Bodies: Women and Physical Exercise in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 236 s y lvi e kl e ima n -l a f o n

12 “The Physical Powers of Man”: The Emergence of Physical Training in the Eighteenth Century 250 a l e x i s ta d ié

13 What Is Training?

272

a l e x a n d e r r e g ie r

Coda – Pilgrim, Pundit, Photographer, Spy: The Ambiguous Origins of Himalayan Mountaineering 297 s u p ri ya chau d h u r i

Bibliography

315

Contributors

347

Index

353

Illustrations

Plates (found following page 116) 1 2

3

4

5

6

7 8

Franz Josef Winter (copy after), Maria Amalia of Austria, Bayer. Staatsgemäldesammlungen © ARTOTHEK. “Position pour la garde en tierce et le coup de tierce. Plate 5.” from L’Ecole des Armes by Domenico Angelo (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1763), engraving by Charles Hall after James Gwin, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. “The D_ of [blank] playing at foils with her favourite Lap Dog Mungo after Expending near 10,000 to make him a – ” (London 1773), engraving by William Austin. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Wolf Hunt, 1734, oil on canvas; Schwerin, Staatliches Museum. Photo: bpk, Berlin/Staatliches Museum, Schwerin/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY. Alexandre-François Desportes, Hound Stalking a Pheasant, between 1702 and 1742, oil on paper; Lille, Palais des Beaux-arts, dépôt de la Manufacture nationale de Sèvres. Photo: author. Oudry, Spaniel Seizing a Bittern, 1726, oil on canvas; Schwerin, Staatliches Museum. Photo: bpk, Berlin/Staatliches Museum, Schwerin/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY. Desportes, Self-Portrait as Hunter, 1699, oil on canvas; Paris, musée du Louvre. Photo: ©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Desportes, Boar Attacked by Eight Dogs, 1702, oil on canvas; Fontainebleau, musée national du château. Photo: ©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource.

viii Illustrations

9a

9b 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

Claude III Audran and Desportes (attrib.), Designs for a Ceiling, c. 1698–99, gouache on gold ground; Paris, Musée des arts décoratifs. Photo: Les Arts décoratifs, Paris/Jean Tholance. Tous droits réservés. Detail of Plate 9a. Oudry (attrib.), Fragment of decorative painting, c. 1725, oil and gold leaf on panel; Paris, Musée des arts décoratifs. Photo: Les Arts décoratifs, Paris/Jean Tholance. Tous droits réservés. Oudry, Bitch Nursing her Young, 1752, oil on canvas; Paris, Musée de la chasse et de la nature. Photo: Nicolas Mathéus. Théodore Géricault, Course de chevaux libres à Rome (1817). Géricault, Cheval arabe gris blanc (before 1824) [Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen]. Augustin Régis, La reddition d’Abd el-Kader, le 23 décembre 1847. [Musée Condé, Chantilly]. Hocine Ziani, Bataille de Kheng en-Natah (1984). [Musée central de l’Armée, Alger]. Francis Hayman, See-Saw (1742). Tate Gallery. http://www.tate .org.uk/art/artworks/hayman-see-saw-t00524.

Figures 3.1 “Seconde position du Salut. Plate 11.” from L’Ecole des Armes by Domenico Angelo (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1763), engraving by Charles Hall after James Gwin, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 70 3.2 “Signore Vestris Senr. in the character of the Prince in the grand pantomime [sic] ballet (call’d) Ninnette à la Cour,” published for Bell’s British Theatre (London, 1781), engraving by J. Thornthwaite from drawing by James Roberts. From The New York Public Library. 71 4.1 “A Print of the Chaise Match Run on New-market Heath.” Engraving, 1750. 110 5.1 Jean Chabry after Oudry, Hyena Fighting a Dog, 1749–50, softpaste porcelain; Detroit Institute of Arts. Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts, USA20449; Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund; gifts from W. Hawkins Ferry, Henry Ford II, Mr …/Bridgeman Images. 116

Illustrations ix

5.2 Desportes, Ponne, Bonne, and Nonne, 1702, oil on canvas; Paris, musée de la chasse et de la nature, dépôt du Louvre. Photo: Nicolas Mathéus. 119 5.3 Oudry, The English Fox, 1733; pen and point of brush and black ink, grey wash, heightened with white tempera on blue paper; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library. 126 5.4 Oudry, Head of a Setter, c. 1740, black and white chalk on blue paper; Schwerin, Staatliches Museum. Photo: bpk, Berlin/ Staatliches Museum, Schwerin/Gabriele Bröcker/Art Resource, NY. 128 12.1 “Indian Club Exercises,” Donald Walker, Walker's Manly exercises (London: n.p., 1855), plate IV, page 22. 258 12.2 “Swimming-Action of the Feet,” Donald Walker, Walker's Manly exercises (London: n.p., 1855), plate XXII, page 85. 260 13.1 “Single figure striking strait forward, before a looking glass,” Art of Manual Defence, London: for G. Kearsley, 1799. 289

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Acknowledgments

The present collection is the result of collaborative research carried out over two continents and generously supported by the France Canada Research Fund/Fonds France Canada pour la Recherche. The editors would like to thank the Fund for enabling them to organize a symposium in Paris as well as workshops in Montreal and Los Angeles, where some of the papers were originally presented. In the course of preparing this volume we have benefited from the help and support of our institutions, the University of Guelph, Ontario, and the University of Paris-Sorbonne. We would like to thank in particular, in the Sorbonne, the VALE research centre and the Conseil Académique. The Institut Universitaire de France also provided financial support for the organisation of conferences and for the publication of this volume. At the University of Guelph, we would like to acknowledge Lori Irvine for her assistance with financial matters throughout the project. At the University of Toronto Press Richard Ratzlaff welcomed our project with great enthusiasm and helped us bring it to light. The readers for the Press offered helpful criticism and encouraging commentary. At the French Embassy in Canada Armelle Chataigner-Guidez was our attentive interlocutor. Leslie Allin’s help was invaluable for preparing the final manuscript. Amélie Tard looked after the logistics of the symposium in the Sorbonne. We would like to thank them for helping us turn our original idea into this volume.

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SPORTING CULTURES, 1650–1850

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Introduction daniel o’quinn and alexis tadié

The eighteenth century witnessed an efflorescence of cultural material associated with sports. While in previous centuries sports were the object of disquisitions, celebrations, and representations, mechanical reproduction amplified the circulation of texts, images, and cultural artefacts. The hunt and other country sports became the locus of significant innovations in visual arts. Racing and boxing generated important subcultures that very quickly became the focus of brash new forms of prose writing in a wide variety of media and of a significant number of prints and engravings. Cricket generated its own body of visual and textual representations while real tennis courts were gradually turned into theatres, both in Paris and in London. In less sensational fashion, sport’s relation to the propagation of health and the regulation of the physical body increasingly permeated medical, historical, and philosophical writings. And yet the cultures of sport constitute one of the most underexplored domains in eighteenth-century studies.1 While sport is central to eighteenth-century culture, the sporting experience is also embedded in the mediascape of London or Paris, the provinces, and the colonies. Sporting figures were attracting more attention than ever before as a culture of celebrity was emerging in all areas of the arts. Sports are thus crucial for considering a wide array of underanalysed cultural and social phenomena. But what are sports? A number of studies start with a functionalist definition based on an a priori idea of what counts as sport. For instance, in his seminal study of sports, Allen Guttman offered strict criteria for differentiating between play, games, and sports – play corresponding to a non-utilitarian physical or intellectual activity pursued for its own sake, games to organized play, and sports to playful physical contests.2

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These definitions are in turn dependent on a dichotomy between modern sports and those of previous times, induced in particular by quantification and the quest for records. For Guttman, the popularization of mathematical discoveries led in the eighteenth century to the modern obsession with the quantification of sport, and therefore to the birth of modern sports: “the emergence of modern sports represents … the slow development of an empirical, experimental, mathematical Weltanschauung.”3 Critics of this conception have emphasized that it does not recognize the continuities between physical activities of the early modern period and contemporary pursuits. It tries rigidly to separate different practices when we would like to see continuities in time and activity – part of the pleasure experienced by schoolboys who play football in the courtyard is that they are indulging in the same physical endeavour as the world stars whose names are printed on their shirts. More generally, as argued for instance by John McClelland, sports are both agonistic and ritualistic; they require their own reserved spaces and are temporally autonomous; like play sports are pleasurable but unlike play they are competitive.4 The very many criteria that we can invoke to define sports and to differentiate them from games and play preclude rigid definitions and separations, although we might well say that we recognize certain endeavours as sports, that others are games, while certain activities (say, chess, which is a contest, is regulated by a World Federation, but does not involve physical exertion) are very much on the borderline. In the early modern period, sporting practices were perhaps more fluid than in our contemporary era. While the word “sport” predominantly applied to hunting, shooting, or fishing – activities which are studied in this volume – the word could be used to refer to a pastime, to village games, as well as to physical exertions defined by rules and sanctioned by a prize. Certain sports such as pugilism found great echo in the eighteenth century, horse racing flourished, while jeu de paume was on the wane. Changes in the nature of these activities were taking place in the eighteenth century, such as mountaineering, which gradually became more – and less – than a scientific endeavour aimed at enriching natural history. But since the vast majority of sports involve some form of physical exertion, the nature of physical activity, in all its physical, medical, and playful dimensions, is central to an understanding of what we mean by “sports” – the reflection on such issues started in the early modern period in Italy, France, and England, before feeding into related and relatively new questions of training.

Introduction 5

In the present collection, rather than trying to offer a strict definition of “sport,” we have preferred to study the diversity of issues connected to sports, then and now. We have focused on activities which contemporaries would have recognized as “sports,” as well as on modes of physical exertion which were slowly being defined as such. We have analysed their educational, political, or medical dimensions, with a view to understanding their place in the cultures of the time. Above all, we have considered, as did John McClelland and Brian Merrilees, that a great number of physical activities of past centuries could be considered as sports, no less than contemporary pursuits: “the athletic activities that were amply practiced from at least the twelfth century were not the formless, unproblematic, ritual-dominated, violent folk or noble games that most sports historiography describes. They displayed organization, purposeful motivation, structure, rules, professionalism, i.e., many of the characteristics of sport today. They just did so in a way that now seems unfamiliar.”5 This is also the reason why this collection does not attempt to offer a history of sports in the long eighteenth century. A number of sports, in particular emerging team sports such as cricket, do not feature in this volume, but rather than offer a comprehensive description of the variety of physical activities in the period, we have chosen to focus on a number of practices which enabled us to investigate the cultures of sport. One of the implicit assumptions of this collection of essays is indeed that something important happens to both the representation and the practice of sport in the eighteenth century, which in many ways defines our understanding of this complex social phenomenon today. The eighteenth century saw a simultaneous explosion in sporting art and in the coverage of sport in the press. At one level this explosion is part and parcel of the vast expansion of media – both visual and print – in the period; but at another level, it fundamentally altered the place of sport in the social and economic world. Perhaps the most important change was not in the activities themselves – people have always been at play – but in their mediation. As reports of matches and competitions and pictures of famous horses, players, and events began to circulate more widely – i.e., beyond the field of aristocratic patronage – the phenomenon of fandom and the economic saturation that we now associate with sports began to emerge as significant social forces. Although the celebrity of sportspersons is not a new phenomenon in the twenty-first century, it now reverberates in previously unknown ways through television or new (social) media, such as Twitter. For

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instance, the 2014 World Cup final generated 35 million tweets and at the end 618,725 tweets per minute discussed the match. This unending stream of discourse signals very little else than the excitement of viewers during the match. Understanding the cultural importance of sports events requires the complex blend of historicization, theorization, and close reading that we associate with cultural analysis in its most rigorous manifestations. More reflective modes of interaction with sports capture the deeper significance of such events and introduce a critical distance from the enthusiasm they generate. Two examples come to mind in this respect, two (un)controversial planetary stars who arguably contributed as much to their sports as the great historical figures. Tennis has recently been dominated by the (in many ways antithetical) figures of Serena Williams and Roger Federer. These sportspersons have attracted passion, adulation, and sometimes controversy, and generated more copy, often electronic, than their contemporaries. While the world of mass media has tried to analyse, or perhaps absorb, these characters, they have remained at a distance from these investigations. As a consequence, the chic and slick image of Federer, fostered by a taste for old-fashioned apparel and endorsement of high-end Swiss watches, has sometimes attracted more attention than the complex nature of his game. The angry and seductive figure of Serena Williams, likewise, has been the subject of as many commentaries as her actual success on court. The lack of engagement with the personality and nature of the achievements of Serena Williams was the subject of a recent essay by Claudia Rankine,6 while David Foster Wallace brought to his analysis of Federer’s game his fine understanding of the complexities of tennis.7 For Rankine, the achievements of Serena Williams are not appreciated as they should be, in spite of her breaking a number of records throughout her career. This is due not only to her personality, but to issues connected with race. She finds in Williams traces of the necessity to overachieve when you are black (“black excellence”) as well as a resistance to discourses of racism: “For black people, there is an unspoken script that demands the humble absorption of racist assaults, no matter the scale, because whites need to believe that it’s no big deal. But Serena refuses to keep to that script.” She emphasizes her humanity in victory as in anger, as well as her consciousness of belonging to a history of fighting against racism, of having “come out of a long line of African-Americans who battled for the right to be excellent in such a space that attached its value to its whiteness and worked overtime to keep it segregated.”8 While Serena in conversation with Rankine

Introduction 7

mentions previous important black players, such as Althea Gibson,9 Arthur Ashe,10 or Zina Garrison, whose actions were not limited to the tennis court,11 Rankine focuses her argument on Serena’s wider historical importance as well as on her individual excellence. This essay resonates as the subscript to her Citizens: An American Lyric. In this book of poetry, Rankine meditates on the nature and the dynamics of race, finding in Serena, among others, the embodiment of a Black person in a white world, displacing the iconic value of Serena to a historical and poetic plane unknown to most journalists. She weaves together tennis and poetry, Serena opening up ways of writing about race. When Serena Williams was recently named Sportsperson of the Year for 2015, the immediate reaction in many quarters was “Why didn’t the horse get the prize? American Pharoah was the first triple-crown winner in 37 years!” For some, the disturbing comparison of human and animal was immediately legible in the repertoire of American race relations; it is also legible in the long history of the porous boundary between human and animal in the history of sport. As we will see, horses and humans are very much on the horizon of analysis in this collection: the way we think about them – as Swift so forcefully understood – has always been a matter of deep disturbance. Wallace’s essay on Federer contrasts with Rankine’s in that he is only concerned with the nature of Federer’s game, with the mysterious workings of his stroke-playing understood as art. Turning his back on the journalism that offers well-rehearsed facts about Federer’s achievements and records (“it’s all just a Google search away”), the author of Infinite Jest, a novel partially set in the world of a tennis academy, reflects on moments of epiphany, which he calls “Federer moments.” He finds in Federer’s game an expression of corporeal and kinetic beauty, which in turn, proves a challenge to the writer: “A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice – the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height.”12 For Wallace, Federer’s game is both the victory of beauty over power and aggression, and an occasion when the writer must rise, while perhaps ultimately be defeated, to both the analytical and the aesthetic challenges posed by tennis in general, by Federer in particular. The syntactical tour-de-force of a description of a rally between Agassi and Federer,13 the obsessive insistence on details surrounding the Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer, the philosophical understanding

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of the difficulty of dealing with his subject (“You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or – as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject – to try to define it in terms of what it is not”)14 or again the connections with other sportspersons who defied gravity, such as Ali, Jordan, or Gretzky, are examples of the ways in which sports can transform writing at the same time as writing can expand our understanding of sports. Rankine and Wallace, in different and contrasting literary forms, suggest ways in which writing about sports not only leads to an exploration of the nature of sports, but also generates imaginative disquisitions that can in turn be shared by the readers. Reflections on particular matches, on the significance of the sportsperson’s art, on their connections with historical and social dynamics beyond the sporting world are articulated to a deeper understanding of the literary act. Rankine and Wallace published incidental pieces on sport but also found in sport ways to reflect on, and construct, narratives. While Rankine devotes a section of Citizen to Serena, tennis is the matrix of Infinite Jest. Rankine’s “American lyric” shifts into passionate prose to consider Serena Williams’s political significance and in the process opens up lyric to new aesthetic registers. The viral image of a bystander calmly reading Rankine’s book at a Donald Trump rally testifies to the irrepressible potential of both lyric utterance and political action. In turn, the tennis academy of Infinite Jest is for Wallace the occasion to portray a closed universe which connects with the larger world of American contemporary society – the depiction of the worlds of sport can interrogate a modern society riven through by issues of competition, success, drugs, anxiety, discipline, and rebellion. Such connections between sport and writing belong to a longer than usually acknowledged aesthetic tradition. This is apparent in the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of new genres of painting, of new forms of writing about sports, and new hybrid modes of mediation suitable to sports’ increasingly mass appeal. Although it perhaps resonates less directly with our contemporary experience of sport, the artistic output associated with the hunt and other equestrian matters in the early modern period dwarfs almost all other subject matters. The Andrew Mellon Collection of British Art has a subcollection and an entirely separate museum for sporting art. A similar situation holds in France.15 Indeed it may be difficult to fully comprehend the economy of painting in the period without thinking through this huge body of work. Similar if smaller collections of writing and visual material associated with shooting, archery, tennis, or mountaineering are no less fascinating.

Introduction 9

However, perhaps the most revealing, because so fully elaborated, archive of sporting materials in the period pertains to boxing. Hazlitt’s “The Fight” famously explores the parallels between the art of pugilism and the art of writing. Hazlitt’s relation to prize-fighting foreshadows in some ways Wallace’s relation to tennis. Both authors were practitioners of the sport; both authors found in the sport a figure for style, for aesthetic risk, and ultimately for authorship. Hazlitt’s interest in the subculture of pugilism is infectious, and reflects a widespread fascination with the sport. Yet despite its canonical status Hazlitt’s essay has received relatively little critical attention. Tom Paulin is no doubt correct in seeing Hazlitt’s representation of the 1822 bout between Bill Neat and Tom “Gas-Man” Hickman as an allegory for the kind of prose style Hazlitt was endeavouring to create, but it is important to recognize, as some recent critics have done, that the essay absorbs a pre-existing set of discourses and social dispositions into itself.16 Prize-fighting was an illegal practice in the early nineteenth century, yet its performance was anything but clandestine. Because of the huge monetary stakes involved, fights invariably made their way into the papers, not in the form of advertisements, but as part of the society news. The most striking aspect of these events is the efflorescence across a wide range of media of “the Fancy,” a term which encompassed all those who had an interest in boxing, boxers, and public alike. The Fancy was a blanket term used to characterize the subculture which both surrounded and activated the prize-fighting world. A heterogeneous social entity, the Fancy included some of the most elite men in the kingdom, but one of its defining qualities was a self-imposed antinomianism which allowed men, and some women, of all ranks to socialize if not on the same footing then at least in the same spaces. The Fancy developed its own highly complex argot and a series of rituals aimed at regulating the complex betting procedures that underwrote its activities. This idiom became so arcane, and yet so crucial, that a number of dictionaries were published to keep everyone on the same page. The fights themselves, including the events leading up to and following the events, were represented first in the daily newspapers, in drinking songs, and broadside poetry, and then in the highly stylized works of writers such as Pierce Egan and John Badcock, whose Boxiana series both repeated and modified earlier print materials into an extended narrative of boxing’s history in England. As one might imagine, that narrative is devoted to sorting out how masculinity and national character come together in both the body of the fighter, and

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in the sociability of the fans. Important fights were also the subject of widely circulated prints, and particularly famous ones, such as the epochal bout between the Englishman Cribb and the African-American fighter Tom Molineaux; they even inspired a run of Staffordshire pottery figurines.17 In short, the Fancy, and all its complex significations, permeated the social and cultural field. With the exception of a subgenre of classicizing portraits of fighters either in fighting stance or in fine clothes, virtually every representation of these fights, in any media, always included both the fighters and the Fancy. This relationship between audience and fighters warrants particular attention not only for understanding the culture of sport in the eighteenth century, but also for understanding Hazlitt’s essay in particular. Hazlitt’s narration of the Neat-Hickman fight is difficult to forget, especially passages such as the following: I never saw any thing more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death’s head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante’s Inferno.18

But the carefully crafted repetitions and the implicit homage to Pierce Egan’s rhetorical strategies are embedded in a remarkable piece of journey writing whose primary emphasis is on the sociability of the Fancy. It is in his interchanges with his companions on the Bath mail coach that Hazlitt draws the extensive literature on training into his discursive purview. And it is in the conversations at the inn on the eve of the fight that Hazlitt engages with the blending of ranks symbolically enabled by the subculture and literally enacted by the world of gambling. His disquisition on the honour of prize-fighters and proper conduct in the ring allows him to cede the moral high ground to an African-American voice, thus enacting a radical critique of both his social world and his own privilege. And it is on the return to London that the speaker brushes with Windham and sees Piggott reading La Nouvelle Heloise and suddenly opines that sentimental masculinity and an enthusiasm for violence are not mutually exclusive (has there ever been a more succinct critical reflection on Rousseau’s novel?). These seemingly incidental observations are Hazlitt’s primary concern because they capture a society in precarious flux. This volatility is part and parcel of Hazlitt’s

Introduction 11

style prior to and immediately after the actual set-to. One of the great joys of Hazlitt’s essay is the way that it forces readers to circulate among its sentences, often recursively, to gain some purchase on what is happening in the social scene he is representing. From Egan and Badcock Hazlitt learned how the desire to know more can be activated by simply invoking highly specialized knowledge: names like “Richmond” that are known to some and not by all. This has the effect of placing the reader in a complex struggle to comprehend the fighting world from both the inside and the outside. One could venture that the pleasurable unease instantiated by reading “The Fight” mimetically renders the affective insecurity of going down to Hungerford Common with perhaps too much riding on the outcome, and with perhaps an unclear sense of one’s acceptance in such a violently changing world. Struggling with Hazlitt’s essay is both an aesthetic challenge – reading “The Fight” requires careful attention to Hazlitt’s shifts in tone, his allusions, and his remarkable elisions – and an epistemological puzzle – understanding what “The Fight” is about requires deep acts of historicization and a thorough theorization of social relations. Because both the bodies of the athletes and the sociability of the fans are always at stake, sports writing, one could venture, for all its apparent triviality is inherently political. A quick list of Hazlitt’s “incidental” concerns in “The Fight” includes the training of the body, the meaning and function of racial prejudice, the complexity of gender performance both between men and in mixed company, the relationship between the “real” economy and the shadow economy of gambling, the vexed question of sociability between ranks of people at this historical moment, the distinction between the country and the city, and the very significance of mediated information in a burgeoning world of print. This catalogue is in many ways a summary of the concerns of this collection more generally. Hazlitt’s essay both addresses these issues in passing and enacts them in ways that often catch one off guard. When one reads “The Fight” for the first time one is somewhat like Hickman at the end of the first round, overconfident in one’s ability as an interpreter; by the end, the essay, by hanging back like Neat, has given the reader a hermeneutic drubbing. Perhaps the closest cognates to Hazlitt’s essay in our contemporary moment are the remarkable attempts aesthetically to capture the significance of Zinedine Zidane. Already revered among the football world for his club career, Zidane acquired iconic status in the aftermath of the 1998 World Cup (a 143m2 portrait of the hero of the World Cup

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could be seen for years along the corniche in Marseilles, placed there by a famous sports brand). But the collection of trophies won by Zidane in France, Italy, and Spain was partly overshadowed by the manner of his exit from professional football, at the 2006 final of the World Cup. Zidane’s art was celebrated by two video artists in their “21st Century Portrait”19 of the footballer. With seventeen cameras trained on the great midfielder, tracking his every movement for an entire match, the video is at one level a celebration of grace, movement, and of Zidane’s particular brand of intense concentration. But it is the soundtrack for this singular fixation that is so haunting. Selective editing of the sound focuses on the crowd so that one comes to feel as though one is Zidane, isolated in this vast sea of expectation and scrutiny. In this regard the video, like Hazlitt’s essay, sneaks up on the viewer. What seems at first to be a documentation of physical prowess turns out to be a devastating enactment of Zidane’s affective predicament. And that predicament, like that explored by Hazlitt, is inherently bound up with the politics of nation, empire, ethnicity, class, race, and gender. Buried in the noise of the video is the complex history of Algeria and France, the contemporary history of immigration and identity, of masculinity, race, and the pursuit of excellence that is as moving as it is intractable. In many ways, Zidane, as Rankine implicitly recognizes, poses many of the same questions as Serena. Zidane’s famous head-butt on the Italian defender Materazzi has been the occasion of a number of critical explorations, and of interpretations of this gesture which snatched defeat from the teeth of victory.20 Visitors to Qatar could remember the event through a sculpture by the French-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed, originally exhibited outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris. An outcry against idolatry led Qatar to remove the statue; it was later bought by the French art collector François Pinault (provoking further outcry when he wanted to display it on the edge of the garden of his villa in Dinard, Brittany). Jean-Philippe Toussaint published in 2006 his La Mélancolie de Zidane.21 His essay is a meditation on this moment that no one ever saw live (perhaps not even the officials), in which he finds complexity and cause for romantic imaginings; it is a literary answer to Zidane’s unattainable moment. Toussaint reflects on the ambiguity of this gesture, on the ways in which it opens up interpretation: “It has always been impossible for him to bring his career to a close, even, least of all, beautifully, for to end beautifully is nonetheless to end, to seal the legend.”22 Toussaint finds in Zidane a figure of identification, a pretext for writing, and above all

Introduction 13

an experiment in form with this short text delicately poised between analysis and fiction, between sport and literature. It connects with the more recent Football23 which recounts experiences of watching football, without ever describing the games. Toussaint analyses the openness of football in its connections with Time, which leads to a wider reflection on the literary act and ends where La Mélancolie de Zidane had started, on a contemplation of the sky. The sporting spectacle is always about more than competition: it reveals the desires, the blind spots, and the very ideological underpinnings of both the participants and the spectating culture. The essays in this collection differ significantly from recent sports studies. Practised mainly by scholars based in history and sociology departments, much of the extant research on sport is highly empirical and tilted towards the twentieth century. The contributors to this volume are largely writing from literature and art history backgrounds and this is felt principally in their attention to representation. Every essay in this book also closely integrates historical enquiry with the careful assessment of how embodied practices are rendered for consumption in the cultural marketplace. In this regard the collection has true interdisciplinary aims in that it challenges many of the disciplinary frameworks with which it is identified, particularly relating to periodization, the boundaries of eighteenth-century studies, and Romanticism, and in general the distinction between cultural studies and history proper, reflected in institutional structures and academic publishing. The place of sports and physical exercise in human cultures is given different emphasis at different periods of time, through varied processes of mediation. Competitions, the praise of heroes in poetry, visual representations all contributed to the centrality of physical activity in ancient Greece. In the Renaissance, humanists integrated physical activities in their definitions of the general education of a gentleman, and listed ball games, fencing, or jousting as suitable enterprises. While a growing number of manuals instructed would-be practitioners on how to hit a ball or ride a horse, a body of texts reflected on the nature, the uses, and the beauties of physical activities. The jeu de paume offered, for instance, frequent occasions to reflect on the progress of the game as well as to depict amorous exchanges, so that sport could be seen both as an end in itself and as a fruitful mode of literary investigation. Of course, as we demonstrate during the course of this book, the uses of the word “sport” evolved during the early modern period, moving gradually away from the aristocratic pursuits of the Renaissance, coming

14

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first to encompass rural sports such as angling and hunting, and later on in the eighteenth century opening to sports like horse racing or boxing, while the “old” games (jeu de paume for instance) were dying out. New literary genres emerged in the process, such as the poetry of rural sport, the corpus of writing that flourished in the early modern period which is the object of Frans de Bruyn’s opening chapter. De Bruyn shows the intricate links between sports and writing, a dominant theme of this collection. The same gentlemen who enjoyed field sports would indulge in poetry, while their education in ancient Greek and Roman authors would have introduced them to the genres of the pastoral and the georgic. Hence, the sporting activity that is the subject of a given poem also leads to a critical reflection on the art of writing. The importance of ancient literature to mediate sport in the Renaissance and later appears as well in Daniel O’Quinn’s analysis of a rarely discussed episode in Lady Montagu’s journey to the Ottoman Empire. O’Quinn stresses the importance of Montagu’s engagement with both the Aeneid and the Iliad in her letters, and shows how this event and its epic background enable the author not only to play with these references but also to intertwine reflections on the fate of empires. The final essay in this first section pursues issues of distinction and class. Ashley Cohen examines the case of Julius Soubise, whose mother was probably enslaved and his father a white planter. But he was given a genteel education that included characteristically aristocratic pursuits like fencing and riding, so that Cohen demonstrates how his career articulates race and rank, empire and distinction, and provides a window into larger questions of sociability itself. Animals were, of course, central to early modern sports and we focus in the second section on activities which give them pride of place, thus bringing to light the complex aesthetic, social, and political meanings with which they could be endowed. Horses figure prominently in an activity common to the eighteenth century: horse racing. In a piece of detective work, Richard Nash shows how much race meets could be central to the social negotiations of early modern culture, characterized by a constant struggle between the preservation of privilege and the promise of class mobility. The transformations of sports in the period appear as well in the ways in which hunting, an important activity for rural poetry, served different ends in eighteenth-century French painting. As Sarah Cohen shows in her examination of animal painting in France, the focus on hounds rather than on the more general depiction of the hunt, could signal a desire to elevate animal painting within the hierarchy of genres; above all, these animals could be seen as noble and free beings

Introduction 15

who were, in Cohen’s words “the unrivalled heroes of the hunt.” Horses were also important in the colonial world, both for the English and for the French. In an essay which stretches beyond the early modern period, but which is crucial to our argument about the importance of sports to engage critically with the enactment of power, Philip Dine investigates the political resonances of equestrian culture in colonial Algeria, revealing intriguing shifts in the conceptions of colonial rule. While the politics of sporting spectacles was being played out on various fields, at home and abroad, an argument was developing that would make of sports a crucial element in the education of citizens. Rousseau, as demonstrated by Ourida Mostefai, stressed the public importance of games. The notion of play, and beyond of physical education, was therefore central to education and allowed citizens to exercise their political freedom. Mostefai brings out the often-overlooked centrality of sports in Rousseau’s political thought, and suggests that the French Revolutionaries emphasized the importance of games and sports in direct reference to Rousseau’s principles. Writing further contributed to the mediation of sports and to reflections on their meanings. Thus John Whale analyses the emergence of writing about sports in his consideration of John Badcock, who wrote against the foremost sports writer of the age, Pierce Egan. While Egan was a mediator for a somewhat refined readership, Whale argues that Badcock defined himself as a more aggressive writer, ultimately exposing the contradictions inherent in the new modes of sports writing and the difficult mediations of a subculture. Similarly, the emergence of mountain-travel writing at the turn of the century sheds light on new modes of understanding physical activities. Since the pioneering work of Huizinga and later Caillois, the idea of play has been central to analyses of sports. We argue that this was central to the ways in which the early modern period came to define sports. In his consideration of the emergence of mountaineering in the early modern period, Simon Bainbridge shows, for instance, how it became a form of play, moving away from initial forms that emphasized the collection of natural history or with a specific goal in mind. Physical activities did not only connect with games and play, but also suggested a relationship to the body that could also be the object of medical inquiries. This is the subject of the last section of this book, devoted to the effects of physical activities on the body. If we want to understand the relationship between sports and medicine, we should consider, as does Laurent Turcot, the history and importance of medical treatises, in France in particular as well as earlier in Italy. Turcot

16  Daniel O’Quinn and Alexis Tadié

shows that early modern medicine provided an active principle for the theory and practice of physical training. Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon shows further that physical exercise was seen as a possible cure for women affected with hysteria. But she underlines the fact that this perspective actually perpetuated the specificity of hysteria as a typically female affection. Focusing on Great Britain, Alexis Tadié pursues Turcot’s and Kleiman-Lafon’s arguments about the intricate relations between medical knowledge and physical training. He analyses discourses of physical training in order to show the birth of “scientific” training at the end of the eighteenth century, in ways that are not too dissimilar from our current practice. Such discourses developed considerably in the early part of the nineteenth century, and Alexander Regier demonstrates that they came to define the very notion of training. In particular, training became the means of the self-discipline of the body and hence, echoing differently Rousseau’s concerns, of the self-policing of the citizen. The coda by Supriya Chaudhuri examines the birth of mountaineering in India and its links to local concerns such as pilgrimage. This essay is less of a conclusion to the overall volume than an example of how the concerns of the previous chapters provide the backdrop for future work beyond 1850 and beyond the boundaries of Europe. In doing so this final essay opens the field both temporally and spatially to address questions of coloniality and power nascent in the collection as a whole. It suggests that issues of borders between sports and work, between sport and nonsport, between sport and power lie at the heart of our understanding of the nature of sports, in the eighteenth century and beyond. NOTES 1 Recent exceptions include Harrow, British Sporting Literature and Culture, and von Mallinckrodt and Schattner, Sports and Physical Exercise. 2 Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 3–7. 3 Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 85. 4 McClelland, Body and Mind. See chapter 1 in particular. 5 McClelland, introduction to Sport and Culture, ed. McClelland and Merrilees, 36. 6 Rankine, “The Meaning of Serena Williams.” https://www.nytimes. com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-meaning-of-serena-williams.html. Rankine’s writings on Serena Williams tend to omit, in intriguing ways, Williams’s sister Venus.

Introduction 17 7 Wallace, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” 8 Rankine, “The Meaning of Serena Williams.” 9 Althea Gibson was the first African-American player to win a Grand Slam title, in Paris in 1956, and perhaps even more significantly, she won the US Open at Forest Hills in 1957 and 1958, in the context of the civil rights movement. 10 Arthur Ashe was the first male African-American player to win a Grand Slam title, winning the US Open in 1968 and famously Wimbledon in 1975. 11 Arthur Ashe set up a foundation for AIDS patients and fought for the end of apartheid in South Africa, while Zina Garrison set up the Zina Garrison Academy to provide educational support for children in the Houston, TX, area (http://zinagarrison.org/). 12 Wallace, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” 13 Fittingly, one sentence describes the whole rally: “There’s a mediumlong exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner ... until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does – Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side ... and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner – Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), ‘How do you hit a winner from that position?’” Wallace, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” 14 Wallace, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.”

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15 The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris retraces the history of man’s engagement with animals through the ages. 16 See Paulin, The Day Star of Liberty. Aside from a series of recent articles on pugilism, a group of scholars have brought further context to Paulin’s argument: see McCutcheon, “On ‘vulgar exhibition’; Hazlitt, “‘The Fight,’ and the Pornography of Popularity”; Juengel, “Bare-Knuckle Boxing and the Pedagogy of National Manhood”; Higgins, “Englishness, Effeminacy”; Snowdon, “Hazlitt’s Prizefight Revisited”; and Moore, “Modern Manners.” 17 See O’Quinn, “In the Face of Difference.” 18 Hazlitt, “The Fight,” 83. 19 Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, DVD. 20 There is even a Wikipedia page devoted to the incident. See “Coup de tête de Zidane,” Wikipedia, last modified 4 July 2016, accessed 5 July 2016, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/coup_de_tête_de_Zidane. 21 Toussaint, La Mélancolie de Zidane. See also Delbée, La 107e minute. 22 Toussaint, “Zidane’s Melancholy,” 12; “Il y a toujours eu chez lui l’impossibilité de mettre un terme à sa carrière, et même, et surtout, en beauté, car finir en beauté c’est néanmoins finir, c’est clore la légende” (Toussaint, Mélancolie, 10). 23 Toussaint, Football; Toussaint, Football, trans. Shaun Whiteside.

PART ONE Classical Lineages

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Chapter One

What Is Sport? Arts of Rural Sport and the Art of Poetry, 1650–1800 frans de bruyn

Sport’s indisputable cultural, economic, political, and social importance in the twenty-first century, as a global phenomenon that touches the lives of many millions, has made it a subject of extensive study in the academy. Not surprisingly, a major theoretical concern for students of the subject, chiefly sociologists and historians, has been to define the distinctive character of sporting activity. What is sport? How has it been conceived historically, how has it evolved over time, and how is it understood today as a social and cultural praxis? As the work of researchers and theorists of sport testifies, defining what sport is has proved a tricky business. Questions crowd in. How does sport differ from other physical activities, such as exercise or manual labour? What is it that distinguishes sport from other diversions: play, games, or athletics? What happens to sport when it is codified, professionalized, and commercialized? During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period in which the social practices we today recognize as sport emerged, such questions as these about the nature of sport, its purposes and uses, began to surface in texts on the subject and prompted critical reflection in some unlikely places. One of these is the poetry of rural sport, a lively corpus of writing that flourished from the Renaissance to the early 1800s. This poetry circulated at a time when the term “sport,” which meant diversion or amusement in its earliest usage, was being extended to refer specifically to the field sports of angling, hunting, and shooting.1 That these activities should become a subject for the poetic muse is not surprising when one considers that rural sports were regarded as the privilege of the gentry, who owned the land on which such sports were pursued and who met the property qualifications that granted them

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the right to hunt game.2 The same gentlemen who enjoyed field sports might also acceptably divert themselves with poetry, and their education in ancient Greek and Roman authors would have introduced them to the genres of pastoral and georgic, the two primary classical models for the poetic treatment of their rural avocation. In this essay, I focus in particular on what the georgic tradition offered the poets of rural sport. The avowed purpose of georgic poetry is didactic: it aims to describe the principles and practices of a branch of knowledge or a practical art. As such, it proved highly adaptable to the poetic exploration of field sports: their customs, usages, skills, and rules. The locus classicus of georgic writing – indeed, the poem that gave this genre its name – is the Georgics of the Roman poet Virgil. Virgil’s ostensible subject is advice to the reader on farming, but as with all georgic poems, the subject matter furnishes a pretext for the consideration of a range of significant social, literary, philosophical, and political issues. A key example of this recurring dynamic in the georgic is the poet’s characteristic turn to authorial self-reflexivity: the poet comes to consider the task of writing in the very process of performing it. This meta-critical reflection on the part of the georgic writer is metaphorically framed by analogy with the rules and processes of the art under discussion in the text. In the case of the Georgics, Virgil compares his labours as a poet with those of the farmer. In a pun on the Latin word versus, which designates both turning a “furrow” and turning a “line of verse,” he compares his poetic task of composition with the farmer’s labour in ploughing his land. Poetry of rural sport in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries manifests the same reflexiveness. The sporting activity that is the subject of this poetry also furnishes an occasion for critical reflection on the art of writing, though the different nature of the activity under consideration complicates the georgically inspired analogy. Insofar as angling, hunting, and shooting are arts that require practice and skill, they can be treated “georgically,” with a poetic review of the processes and rules of the art. Insofar as they are conceived of as sports, with prominent elements of pleasure and artifice, the analogy between the art of the poet and that of the sportsman points to a different conception of authorship and authorial exertion from the process-oriented model implicit in making or crafting a text. To conceive of writing as the Virgilian georgic does, in terms of agricultural work, of tilling and cultivating the land, is to focus on the laboriousness of writing and to highlight revision as a means of achieving

What Is Sport?

23

stylistic correctness. The central authorial preoccupation of eighteenthcentury Virgilian georgic writers is with critical questions of propriety and decorum, with finding appropriate linguistic and rhetorical means to render poetic such subjects as husbandry that are otherwise seen as unliterary or mundane. If, as Virgil emphasizes in the first book of the Georgics, it is the ploughman’s concern to strive until his tools shine, what then is the parallel care of the poet? If the farmer’s production of the furrow or versus burnishes his plough, the poet must accordingly see to his verses – his figurative furrows – and burnish the language with which he makes them until his precepts gleam in their expression.3 This, according to Joseph Addison, is Virgil’s lasting achievement in the Georgics, which avoids any “Phrase or Saying in common talk” and abounds instead “with Metaphors, Grecisms, and Circumlocutions, to give his Verse the greater Pomp, and preserve it from sinking into a Plebeian Stile.” As Addison famously notes, Virgil “tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness.”4 In the case of those georgic poems whose subject is rural sport, the effort of composition becomes associated with organized, structured play and competition, with activities that are chosen and not imposed by external circumstance or compulsion. Like the subsistence arts of agriculture, the arts of rural sport require application, discipline, and focus, but they are not remunerative or prompted by necessity. To conceive of writing as a form of angling, for instance, is to provoke reflections on literary pleasure, on art as artifice (or deception), on poetry and sport as rule-based arts, and on the problematic, sometimes unreliable, nature of representation. In hunting texts, by contrast, accounts of the chase after the prey – a standard episode or set piece in these poems – offer the writer an occasion to reflect on the nature of artistic inspiration. Here, the artist’s pursuit of the poetic muse or, put more mundanely, the author’s search for a subject becomes a central theme of meta-critical exploration. More broadly, authorial self-reflection in the poetry of rural sports leads to a consideration of the nature of sport itself as an activity – its self-imposed, artificial difficulty and the peculiar sense of purpose that animates it. The writers in this tradition become, in effect, early theorists not only of what defines sport, but also of what constitutes play or a game, and how these pursuits differ from work. Though field sports differ in important respects from other forms of sporting activity, such as athletics, boxing, wrestling, or team sports, they all share a number of underlying fundamentals that find articulation in the poetry of rural

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sport. In the pages that follow, I consider angling poetry first, followed by poems about hunting and shooting, to argue that these texts supplement or adapt the Horatian dictum, Ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry), oft cited in eighteenth-century literary criticism, to propose an alternative analogy of the arts, Ut ludus poesis (as is sport, so is poetry). In tracing this analogy, we gain insight not only into critical and aesthetic assumptions central to eighteenth-century poetry, but also into the period’s conception of sport and its cultural significance. The analogy between the arts treated in the georgic and the art of writing is a culturally durable one. The direction of the mind in reasoning or thinking analogically is inevitably influenced by the analogies it employs. In an article reporting on a study of 2,000 published interviews with professional writers, Barbara Tomlinson identifies four persistent “metaphorical stories” these writers have relied on to communicate their experience of writing, of which three – gardening, hunting, and fishing – are central to the georgically inflected body of poetry under discussion here. Tomlinson notes how each of the “stories” or analogies tends to give “different answers to questions we might ask about composing.” Though her study is concerned primarily with the phenomenological experience of writing (which finds a parallel above all in the poetry of hunting, with its focus on the author’s search for inspiration), her findings also have a broad applicability to our understanding of the georgic as a genre, including the poetry of sport.5 Rural Sports, Subsistence Arts, Poaching: Virgilian and Renaissance Precedents Poets who wrote on field sports in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were conscious of the classical warrant in Virgil for a georgic treatment of their subject. In the first book of the Georgics, Virgil introduces, in a well-known (and thematically key) passage, a myth of origin that describes Jove’s imposition of labour on mankind, so that “practice, by taking thought, might little by little hammer out divers arts.” Among these arts, which include agriculture and navigation, Virgil numbers hunting and fishing: “Then men found how to snare game in toils, to cheat with bird-lime, and to circle great glades with hounds. And now one lashes a broad stream with casting-nets, seeking the depths, and another through the sea trails his dripping drag-net.”6 Virgil mentions hunting again in a ten-line passage in book 3, which describes the care

What Is Sport?

25

of hunting dogs and makes reference to the coursing of hares and wild asses and the hunting of boar and deer.7 In an age deferential to classical literary precedent, Virgil’s example, along with the models bequeathed by ancient authors of cynegetic and halieutic verse (Oppian, Grattius, and Nemesianus), was a welcome touchstone.8 It did not go unremarked, however, that Virgil speaks of hunting and fishing in the Georgics as subsistence arts, as modes, like husbandry, of laboriously making a living or meeting basic human needs. We must look to Renaissance texts, such as the Book of St. Albans (1486, 1496) and the advice manuals of Gervase Markham, to find early treatments of angling, fowling, and hunting as pursuits undertaken for pleasure.9 The reader for whom Thomas Barker designed his Art of Angling (1653), for instance, is the “man that goeth to the River for his pleasure.”10 From the first, angling was associated in these texts with authorship and scholarly application. In his enumeration of the “inward qualities” of the angler, Markham notes that, the first, and most especiall ... is, that a skillfull Angler ought to be a generall Scholler, and seene in all the liberall Sciences, as a Gramarian, to know how eyther to Write or discourse of his Art in true termes, eyther without affectation or rudenesse. He should haue sweetnesse of speech, to perswade and intice other to delight in an exercise so much laudable.11

Markham’s text, as he acknowledged in a 1631 reprint, is a prose paraphrase, with additions, of John Dennys’s, The Secrets of Angling (1613), which announces its Virgilian literary affiliations from its opening line, “Of Angling, and the Art thereof I sing.”12 Further echoes of Virgil are scattered through the poem, and a brief dedicatory Epistle invokes the georgic tradition explicitly with the assertion that angling is “euery way as fit a subject for Poetry as Husbandry.”13 A commendatory sonnet prefaced to The Secrets of Angling calls attention to the analogy between angling and authorship in a conceit that plays elaborately on the word “line.” Just as the angler derives both profit and pleasure (“gaine and game”) from his “Hooke and Line,” so too the poet captures, “With many a Line, well made, both Eares and Harts, / And, by this Skill, the skille-lesse skill-full makes.”14 As will appear, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653, 1676) took its inspiration from these precedents, a circumstance Walton acknowledges with an extensive and appreciative quotation from The Secrets of Angling at

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the conclusion of his introductory chapter. The analogy between the line of the poet and that of the fisher resonated with seventeenthcentury poets. Steven Zwicker observes, for example, that an angler, “a reflexive, self-conscious, and extravagant version of Walton’s Piscator,” haunts the conclusion of Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House (written by 1651).15 Resting in an osier’s “Branches tough ... / While at my Lines the Fishes twang,” the speaker at length turns away from the river and his fishing tackle, which represents figuratively his writing instruments: “But now away my Hooks, my Quills, / And Angles, idle Utensils.”16 In bringing together angling and authorship, two pursuits that require leisure as well as material means, these Renaissance writers implicitly recognize a distinction fundamental to the developing conception of sport, between an activity undertaken as a livelihood (fishing) or as a recreation (angling). By the eighteenth century, this distinction became more unequivocal, and in the process it hardened into a disparaging dismissal of subsistence modes of fishing as little more than poaching. In The Genteel Recreation (1700), for instance, John Whitney laments that the River Medway at Tunbridge is “stor’d with Poachers plenty,” whose “Large Nets the game do so destroy, / That with an Angle few we can decoy.”17 Thomas Scott, in The Anglers (1758), distinguishes his genteel arts of fishing from the “sordid toils” of those who fish to live, whom he describes, following Virgil, as using the tools of casting-nets and drag-nets: But mine is not the glory to unfurl The net’s umbrello, with Herculean whirl; Nor wading to the neck, in mud obscene, Tug the cork-buoyant mesh, whole streams to clean. The decent Angle’s mine.18

The apparent conflation here of subsistence with poaching seems at first view rather unaccountable, but it is less so when one considers, as P.B. Munsche argues, that the word “poacher” in the eighteenth century “was not a legal term at all. Rather, it was an epithet applied to those who violated certain established conventions of sporting ... To most country gentlemen, the primary characteristic of a poacher was simply that he was not a sportsman.”19 From the outset, then, the definition of “sport” was entangled in political considerations of social hierarchy. A similar distinction governed agricultural pursuits in the period:

What Is Sport?

27

gentleman farmers engaged actively in the agricultural improvement of their land without ever undertaking any actual manual labour. The author of The Innocent Epicure (1697, 1713) likewise distinguishes his engagement in angling from that of the “needy lad” who fishes off London Bridge using a line with multiple hooks or the “poor country Hind” who launches a coracle on the River Dee in order to ease the “Curse of Want.” Necessity may justify their crude fishing methods, and they may indeed derive pleasure from their fishing, but theirs is not a sporting pleasure to be celebrated in poetry: Pleasure like this may suit their rustick Souls; But neither suits the Poet’s Verse or Rules. Somewhat uncommon heightens his Desire, Which those that love not, may with Force admire, Thus I to chrystal Brooks resort, and chuse Arms all genteel and neat, and fit for Use.20

The difference between the subsistence fisher and the angler, argues the poet, is that the angler, like the poet, artificially constrains his activity (because he can afford to) by rules that heighten both the challenge it poses and the aesthetic value and pleasure that ensue: Thus, he that justly plays the Angler’s Part, In my Opinion, still should thrive by Art. And trust his Skill, tho’ oft he be deceiv’d; The Conquest will at last be well atchiev’d.21

Artificial constraint is a characteristic fundamental to both poetry and sport. We admire, as Voltaire aptly puts it in voicing his approval of a georgic poem by Pierre-Fuleran Rosset, “Le mérite de la difficulté surmontée” (the merit of difficulty overcome).22 The phrase “difficulté surmontée” appears frequently in Voltaire’s writing; it encapsulates the aesthetic value he ascribes to the mastery of formal constraints in writing, such as the use of rhyme in poetry and drama, or the creation of a dramatically effective play despite the structural restrictions imposed by the dramatic unities. In the Virgilian agricultural georgic and its direct English descendants, the difficulty to be surmounted is the challenge of treating seemingly unpoetic subject matter poetically (precisely what Voltaire praises in Rosset). In the case of technical prose works, the challenge lies in justifying the development of innovative rhetorical

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and formal strategies that were perceived to violate prevailing literary norms. The aim, in short, is to write about dung and yet avoid naming it. Writing and Angling: The Challenge and Deception of Representation The conceptualization of writing as angling is most authoritatively articulated in Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653, 1676). In a memorable and evocative phrase, Walton describes his book as “a recreation of a recreation.”23 This phrase declares that both writing and angling are pleasurable pastimes, but it can also be read (with an adjustment in the pronunciation) as “re-creation of a recreation,” meaning an act of creating anew or replicating. This reading throws attention on the question of what authors do when they write and how they do it. In the first chapter of Walton’s dialogue, as the characters Piscator, Venator, and Auceps speak in commendation of their favoured recreations – angling, hunting, and falconry – Piscator emphasizes, when his turn comes to speak, that his sport is not unlike the art of poetry: O Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an Art; is it not an Art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Flie? a Trout! that is more sharp sighted than any Hawk you have nam’d ... the Question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it? for Angling is somewhat like Poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightned by discourse and practice, but he that hopes to be a good Angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit; but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the Art it self.24

This passage highlights several points of comparison that repeatedly come to the fore when the art of writing is considered from the perspective of angling. Because poetry and angling are rule-based arts, they can be studied and reduced to method, thus enabling them to be taught and learned; proficiency in both can be improved by practice, though a certain pre-existing aptitude (mental or physical dexterity) marks the best practitioners; both are meant to be pleasurable; and both employ forms of representation that are in varying ways problematic. In each of these topics, something salient to our understanding of both arts is foregrounded. The final point – that angling is a form of representation – might seem counter-intuitive at first, but to consider representation from this perspective is to get at a fundamental, perhaps

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defining, feature of both angling and poetry. The first sentence of the passage just cited provides a clue: “doubt not but that Angling is an Art; is it not an Art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Flie?” To employ an artificial fly as a lure in fishing not only imposes a formal constraint on the activity, thereby making it sporting and demanding practised skill (in the making and the use), but also adds elements of seduction, entrapment, and deception to the sport – elements grounded, ultimately, in a sophisticated form of (mis)representation. As Simon Ford insists in his neo-Latin poem Piscatio (1692, 1733), “’Tis not enough to catch the shining Prey, / But to deceive the Wantons as they stray.”25 The capture of the prey is secondary, in the end, to the cunning employed to do so. Applied to writing, this analogy constructs the relationship between writer and reader as one of hunter and hunted. If the poet is conceived of as an angler, the reader may be thought to stand in for the trout. Angling for readers involves dangling before them a sophisticated simulacrum of experience (the lure of representation), and doing so is an act that is both erotic and duplicitous. Thus, in the opening line of Piscatio, Ford calls angling an “insidious” and an “alluring” art. It is worth recalling here that the suspicion of artistic representation as something fundamentally duplicitous runs deep in Western thought. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates makes the point with an example that would resonate with any angler: “the same things appear bent and straight to those who view them in water and out, or concave and convex, owing to similar errors of vision about colours ... And so scene-painting in its exploitation of this weakness of our nature falls nothing short of witchcraft.”26 In his third poetic dialogue, “Angling for Trout,” Scott describes the dry fly in a way that emphasizes its status as a vivid, active visual representation. Musaeus complains that the fish are not rising to his lure: What ails this mimic Fly? it springs no game, Like yours its colours, and in form the same. O! as fam’d Walton, could I wheel the Line, Or glory, Cotton, in a hand like thine, And lightly on the dimpling Eddy fling The hypocritic Fly’s unruffled wing, Enamell’d spoil shou’d then my conquests grace.27

In appearance, the “mimic” and “hypocritic” fly is convincing enough, but the angler must also simulate convincingly the movement of the

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impersonated insect on the water’s surface: the representation must be animated and brought to life. On the poet’s part, wheeling an effective line of verse requires analogous skill in animating his or her subject. It should be noted, in passing, that Scott here invokes Walton (with a renewal of the play on the meaning of “line”) as the auctor, the founder or chief exemplar, of a literature of angling, much as John Denham was revered in the eighteenth century as the auctor of hunting poetry in Coopers Hill (1642).28 Indeed, Scott’s invocation of Walton – “O! as fam’d Walton, could I wheel the Line” – echoes Denham’s celebrated apostrophe in Coopers Hill to the River Thames, which was repeatedly cited in the eighteenth century as the beau-ideal of poetic art: “O could I flow like thee, and make thy streame / My great example, as it is my theme!” As the speaker in The Innocent Epicure emphasizes, the decorum of genteel angling poetry and its smooth diction is mirrored in the “chrystal Brooks” to which the poetic angler resorts, unlike the “impetuous Flood” with which the subsistence fisher is forced to struggle – the violence of the water matching the crudeness and indecorum of his fishing arts.29 To return to the subject of representation and its unreliability, Scott’s description of the deception performed by the art of the angler follows immediately upon a remark about the chilly spring weather, in which the misrepresentations of poets are censured: The seasons, surely, in these northern climes, Laugh at their image drawn by modern Rhimes. ... E’en now the Hawthorn, on the birth of May, Witholds her blossom, nor believes the day.30

Simplicius’s response to this remark by Musaeus about poetic deception is to dismiss rhymes and conventional fictions altogether: “I heed not songsters, and I hate all lies, / Plain words may profit, and plain sense is wise.”31 Yet Simplicius betrays no ironic awareness of the parallel between the poet’s play with words and conventions, and his own mastery of deception as an angler: “There’s magic in your wand [fishing rod],” exclaims Musaeus of his companion’s abilities, “your fly’s a spell, / Old Merlin form’d and bless’d them in his cell.”32 A more sophisticated and knowing juxtaposition of the same kind appears in James Thomson’s description of trout fishing in the 1744 edition of The Seasons.33 In Spring, the poetic speaker advises that angling for trout is best undertaken, “While yet the dark-brown water aids the

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Guile” of the angler. Armed with “well-dissembled Fly,” the angler is directed by the speaker to find the “dubious Point” of the stream (a pool or a rocky stretch) and “There throw, nice-judging, the delusive Fly; / And, as you lead it round in artful Curve, / With Eye attentive mark the springing Game.” By contrast, when the sun is high in the sky, and the bright light thwarts the fisher’s guileful art, he is advised to lie down on the bank or under a tree and capture the surrounding scene: There let the Classic Page thy Fancy lead Thro’ rural Scenes; such as the Mantuan Swain Paints in the matchless Harmony of Song. Or catch thyself the Landskip, gliding swift Athwart Imagination’s vivid Eye.34

The speaker proposes to the reclining sportsman two ways of capturing his surroundings, both of them problematic. One is to view the landscape in a conventionalized way, through the eyes of a poet (Virgil) who wrote about a rural scene distant in both time and place from that surrounding the viewer and therefore alien to the viewer’s experience. The other is to “catch” the landscape in its movement, which is metaphorically described in angling terms as “gliding swift / Athwart Imagination’s vivid Eye.” Here the fishing analogy becomes explicit, and in the verse paragraph that immediately follows, Thomson reflects on the poetic equivalent of the challenge inherent in tying flies sufficiently convincing to draw in the prey: But who can paint Like Nature? Can Imagination boast, Amid its gay Creation, Hues like hers? Or can it mix them with that matchless Skill, And lose them in each other, as appears In every Bud that blows? If Fancy then Unequal fails beneath the pleasing Task; Ah what shall Language do? Ah where find Words Ting’d with so many Colours; and whose Power, To Life approaching, may perfume my Lays.35

Thomson invokes in this passage the critical dictum that poetry is like painting, but his insertion of the fishing episode into the poem immediately

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before these lines signals an underlying connection between poetic and piscatorial representation, for tying artificial flies is also very much like painting. (Perhaps the poet who comes closest to answering Thomson’s question, “Ah where find Words / Ting’d with so many colours,” is Alexander Pope, who is at his painterly best in Windsor-Forest when he describes vividly the “various race” that populates England’s streams: “The brightey’d Perch with Fins of Tyrian Dye, / The silver Eel, in shining Volumes roll’d, / The yellow Carp, in Scales bedrop’d with Gold.”)36 The instructions of John Gay in Rural Sports (1713, 1720) and William Stevenson in his poem of the same name (1759, 1765) both emphasize the painterly representational skill required to make an effective lure. Stevenson advises the angler to cull feathers of every tint and hue from nature’s most variegated birds, and then with “the finest plumage each displays, / ... decorate in it your mimic fly”: With just proportion shape each splendid wing, To spread and flutter on the dimpling pool; Still near to life your imitation bring, Its faultless and invariable rule.37

Stevenson’s instructions conclude with advice on how to conceal the fishhook, using “Down, cotton, velvet, feathers, tissues, furs,” which in turn prompts reflections tinged with a note of misogyny on the elaborate dissimulations of female dress. Stevenson must have borrowed this last conceit from Gay, whose Rural Sports, published a half century earlier, describes the art of fly tying in language that calls to mind Alexander Pope’s account of Belinda’s toilette in Canto 1 of The Rape of the Lock: To frame the little Animal, provide All the gay Hues that wait on Female Pride, Let Nature guide thee; sometimes Golden Wire The glitt’ring Bellies of the Fly require; The Peacock’s Plumes thy Tackle must not fail, Nor the dear Purchase of the Sable’s Tail. Each gaudy Bird some slender tribute brings, And lends the growing Insect proper Wings, Silks of all Colours must their Aid impart, And ev’ry Fur promote the Fisher’s Art. So the gay Lady, with expensive Care, Borrows the Pride of Land, of Sea, and Air;

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Furs, Pearls, and Plumes, the painted Thing displays, Dazles our Eyes, and easie Hearts betrays.38

Like young Belinda adorning herself (an adornment that blurs the line between enhancement and dissimulation), the angler exploits every commodity that land, sea, and air can provide to fabricate his simulacrum.39 Gay’s wordplay, in a manner characteristic of the Scriblerian satirists, transforms “toil,” the work of the poet (or angler), into “Toils,” meaning “nets” (OED): snares employed alike by fisher, satirist, and would-be seductress. The irony of Gay’s poem turns on the fact that the rural sports he describes as an escape from the ruthless competitiveness of city and court employ analogous arts of deceit and betrayal: The Fisherman does now his Toils prepare, And arms himself with ev’ry watry Snare, He meditates new Methods to betray, Threat’ning Destruction to the finny Prey.40

Two issues are at play in these passages. Thomson’s emphasis is on the failure of his medium, and indeed of the artistic imagination, to encompass the exhaustless, kinetic variety of nature, whereas Gay, Scott, Stevenson, and other angling poets reflect on the point where imitation and dissimulation meet. All these poets recur to a theme that is central to Virgil’s conception of his Georgics, for, as Kevis Goodman points out in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, as much as Virgil courts referentiality in his poem, he equally dances away from it. In his essay on Virgil, Addison portrays a poet who privileges words and literary allusiveness over things to such an extent that what one would expect to find at the heart of a didactic text, referentiality, recedes from view and in its place is substituted, in Goodman’s phrase, “a splendid virtual reality.”41 According to Addison, “we receive more strong and lively Ideas of things from [Virgil’s] words, than we cou’d have done from the Objects themselves; and find our Imaginations more affected by his Descriptions, than they wou’d have been by the very sight of what he describes.” 42 Hunting and Shooting as Metaphors of Inspiration Poetry of hunting in the eighteenth century focuses repeatedly, though not exclusively, on the chase: the pursuit of wild animals using tracking dogs, commonly called hounds. Coursing was the chase of hares or other game with greyhounds, by sight; but by the eighteenth century, hunting

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down quarry (such as foxes) by scent had gained wide favour. William Somervile, author of The Chase, claimed that the latter was an important modern improvement over the ancients, who had no “Notion of pursuing Wild Beasts by the Scent only, with a regular and well-disciplin’d Pack of Hounds.” Ancient hunters, he argues, “must have pass’d for Poachers amongst our modern Sportsmen,” a statement that imputes superior sportsmanship to the modern practice, owing seemingly to a self-imposed challenge that demands greater skill of both hunter and hound.43 As Somervile’s observation implies, forms of hunting with hounds have a long history, with a corresponding literary tradition that dates back to classical times. By contrast, the poetry of shooting in the period was relatively new, given that the modern invention of the gun, so fundamental to the modern sport of shooting (as opposed to hawking, netting, or setting), had so recently revolutionized the sport. Though Virgil, as previously noted, mentions forms of hunting as georgic arts, eighteenth-century poets of hunting looked also for precedents to several other poets of imperial Rome, whose more extensive treatments of hunting provided a classical warrant for treating the chase as a metaphor for the writer’s search for a subject. The Roman poet Nemesianus, for example, who wrote Cynegetica or The Chase in the late third century, equates the chase after game with the frenzy of poetic inspiration: “The thousand phases of the chase I sing; its merry tasks do we reveal, its quick dashes to and fro – the battles of the quiet country-side. Already my heart is tide-swept by the frenzy the Muses send.” He follows this announcement of his subject with a trope of originality previously used by Virgil in the Georgics: the poet will guide his poetic chariot “o’er wilds remote, where never wheel marked ground,” printing “our steps on virgin moss.”44 Then, after a passage in which Nemesianus reviews and rejects numerous heroic and mythological subjects previously treated by poets, he again asserts the originality of his subject, this time making explicit the analogy with the hunt and the chase: “We search the glades, the green tracts, the open plains, swiftly coursing here and there o’er all the fields, eager to catch varied quarries with docile hounds.”45 How to capture these sporting energies in words is the equivalent poetic quarry Nemesianus seeks. The Cynegetica of Oppian, a second-century Greco-Roman poet, follows the same formula; he cites the command of the goddess Diana, “Prepare, a yet-unbeaten Track to take, / Which never Poet yet has trod in Verse.”46 John Mawer, the eighteenth-century translator of these lines, underscores the importance of the poet’s meta-critical theme by

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including on the title-page of his translation an epigraph from Nemesianus that also addresses the goddess with a prayer for inspiration: “Goddess, arise, lead thy poet through the untrodden boscage: thee we follow; do thou disclose the wild beasts’ homes and lairs.”47 In an essay appended to his translation, Mawer proposes a more scientific justification for the analogy between hunting and poetic inspiration, giving a naturalized account of the familiar classical trope: “I scarce so much as ever walk, or ride into the Fields, but I am particularly disposed for Meditation, and have often turned a Day of Pleasure, this Way, into more Benefit towards any Sort of Composures, than if I had sat it out in my Study ... The Mind draws in new Ideas, at the same Time that we draw fresh Air.” He recommends such exercise equally to the reflective statesman and the poet: “a Statesman, in ranging the Fields, has the same Advantages of laying Schemes of Government, and varying his Politicks to this or that View, as the Man of Letters has in forming new Images, and marshalling his Ideas for a Discourse, or a Poem.”48 Mawer’s statement calls to mind the opening lines of Pope’s An Essay on Man, in which the poet addresses his friend, the statesman Lord Bolingbroke, and invites him to join the poet in an intellectual quest that he figures as a shooting party: Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise.49

Pope’s lines figure the task of intellectual inquiry as an exploration, a search for game, but his emphasis falls more on the social dimension of his enterprise, which is to be pursued as a dialogue among gentlemen (for he assumes shooting and intellectual reflection to be sports for the leisured classes). Shooting, here as elsewhere in Pope’s poetry, is also a metaphor for the inspiration of the satirist, who beats the field to flush out folly and shoot it as it flies.50 His lines recall John Dryden’s characterization of the authorial imagination in search of its subject as a spaniel scenting out birds and putting them up: “wit in the poet ... is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble Spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of Memory, till it springs the Quarry it hunted after; or, without metaphor, which

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searches over all the memory for the species or Idea’s of those things which it designs to represent.”51 Several decades before Pope, John Locke had made use of the hunting analogy to describe his philosophical project of exploring the human mind. He signals thereby the introspective, self-reflexive character of his investigation and conveys a sense of the psychological experience of intellectual inquiry, which turns out to be not unlike the pleasure aroused by the pursuit of game. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) opens with an “Epistle to the Reader” that introduces philosophical inquiry as a form of hunting and hawking: He that hawks at Larks and Sparrows, has no less Sport, though a much less considerable Quarry, than he that flies at nobler Game: and he is little acquainted with the Subject of this Treatise, the UNDERSTANDING, who does not know that, as it is the most elevated Faculty of the Soul, so it is employed with a greater and more constant Delight than any of the other. Its searches after Truth, are a sort of Hawking and Hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the Pleasure. Every step the mind takes in its Progress towards Knowledge, makes some Discovery, which is not only new, but the best too, for the time at least.52

Locke’s quarry – the subject of his book – is the processes of sense perception and mental reflection by which the mind acquires knowledge of the world around it and an understanding of itself, but he uses the analogy of hunting to signal his awareness that the object of his inquiry is also the means he must use to search out and capture that object. The “internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves,” as Locke puts it at the beginning of Book 2, are both the source of all our knowledge and the indispensable means we must use to gain knowledge about how we acquire knowledge.53 Originality, inspiration, the mind’s meditation on its own operations – these authorial and philosophical preoccupations find their correlative in the rhythms of the chase. Somervile’s The Chace, the most successful and popular hunting poem of the eighteenth century, features a series of thrilling set pieces that describe the pursuit of the hare, fox, and stag – episodes which Donna Landry rightly recognizes as the heart of the poem.54 The chase passages fuse the poet’s critical self-awareness so seamlessly with his experience of his sport that we are no longer conscious of the metaphor’s tenor and vehicle: seeking inspiration is the chase, and the chase is the inspiration:

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Now, my brave Youths, Now give a Loose to the clean gen’rous Steed; Flourish the Whip, nor spare the galling Spur; But in the Madness of Delight, forget Your Fears. Far o’er the rocky Hills we range, And dangerous our Course; but in the Brave True Courage never fails. In vain the Stream In foaming Eddies whirls; in vain the Ditch Wide-gaping threatens Death. The craggy Steep Where the poor dizzy Shepherd crawls with Care, And clings to ev’ry Twig, gives us no Pain; But down we sweep, as swoops the Falcon bold To pounce his Prey. Then up th’ opponent Hill, By the swift Motion slung, we mount aloft.55

The riders surmount with ease craggy steeps that the shepherd (of melodious pastoral poetry), paralysed with terror, fears to tread. Somervile’s description recalls vividly the classical trope of the poet who, in Virgil’s phrase, roams joyously “the lonely steeps of Parnassus ... o’er heights, where no forerunner’s track turns.”56 The trope is naturalized in Somervile’s heroic presentation of his mounted sportsmen in hot pursuit, a heroism that matches the scale of Virgil’s self-presentation. A more recent precedent of which Somervile would doubtless have been aware is Pope’s account of a chase in Windsor-Forest: Th’impatient Courser pants in ev’ry Vein, And pawing, seems to beat the distant Plain; Hills, Vales, and Floods appear already crost, And ere he starts, a thousand Steps are lost. See! the bold Youth strain up the threatning Steep, Rush thro’ the Thickets, down the Vallies sweep, Hang o’er their Coursers Heads with eager Speed, And Earth rolls back beneath the flying Steed.57

The Re-creation of a Recreation: Sport, Poetry, and Pleasure Somervile and Locke are both keenly alive to the sheer pleasure of the chase, whether intellectual, as with Locke, or physical, as in the hunt. In describing his philosophical hunt, Locke observes, “the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure,” and he recognizes the mind’s delight

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in discovering something new to itself – the surprise and fulfilment of the “eureka” or “aha” moment. Locke’s observation points forward to one of the key insights of the eighteenth-century poets of hunting, which touches on what we would now call the psychology of sport. In the foxhunting passage cited above, Somervile conveys the addictive thrill of the chase, the adrenalin or endorphin rush (as we would say) that it excites, as he urges the youthful follower of hounds, “in the madness of delight [to] forget / Your fears.” The experience of hunting eclipses any practical purpose it may have, as John Aikin shrewdly notes in an observation that captures exactly the distinction between sporting and subsistence arts. The keen sportsman “receives delight from the Chace itself, independently of the acquisition; for it is found, that no degree of plenty obtained by the labours of others ... has been able to subdue that ardour by which many are impelled to incur hardships ... in pursuit of an object, which would be extremely trivial, were it not for the gratification experienced in the very pursuit.”58 In a later passage, reflecting on his memory of a stag hunt (Somervile, we recall, wrote The Chace as an elderly man, and the poem is infused with the poignant double perspective of an older man remembering the reckless energy and intensity of his youth), he describes further the peculiar way in which physical sport takes us out of ourselves: How happy art thou, Man, when thou’rt no more Thy self! When all the Pangs that grind thy Soul, In Rapture and in sweet Oblivion lost, Yield a short Interval, and Ease from Pain!59

This sense of being taken out of ourselves (the “rapture” of the chase) calls to mind Plato’s description of the poet in his dialogue, Ion: “For a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.”60 The pleasure of the rider to hounds, as Somervile states a few lines earlier, is a “wild transport ... luxuriant joy, / and pleasure in excess” – an almost Blakean affirmation uncharacteristic of the poetry of the 1730s.61 The eighteenth century was fond of drawing analogies among the sister arts, and though the favoured analogy for poetry (as in the angling verse examined above) was that it is like painting, the sister art repeatedly invoked in hunting poetry is music. In Rural Sports, William Stevenson in fact dismisses the visual arts as unequal to capturing the

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kinetic energy of the hunt. In a play of words on the term “still life,” he contrasts the animation of the hunt with the static quality of painting and sculpture: Swift, and transported, o’er the level lawn. With loosen’d rein, the rapid courser flies; Ne’er yet by puny art or sculpture drawn, Art somewhat still remote from life implies.62

Music, which unfolds through time, is more suited to convey both the emotional transport and the rapid movement of the chase. Music was, of course, from ancient times associated with poetry and with the experience of inspiration, most prominently, perhaps, in the story of Orpheus, who is sometimes linked with Dionysus, the god of wine, and who died violently at the hands of the frenzied Maenads, Dionysus’s female followers. Here the analogy of the arts, the Dionysian music of the chase, points to an undercurrent of excess that, as will appear, progressively undermines the eighteenth-century generic conception of sporting poetry. For Somervile, the baying of the hounds and the winding of the horn are sweeter sounds than the songs of birds or the majesty of the organ. The chase itself is set to music: Heavens! what melodious Strains! how beat our Hearts Big with tumultuous Joy! the loaded Gales Breathe Harmony ... The Chorus swells; less various, and less sweet The thrilling notes, when, in those very Groves, The feather’d Choristers salute the Spring, And ev’ry Bush in Consort joins; or when The Master’s Hand, in modulated Air, Bids the loud Organ breathe, and all the Pow’rs Of Musick in one Instrument combine, An universal Minstrelsy.63

The invocation of music as the aesthetic counterpart that best approximates the experience of the hunt foregrounds the embodied pleasure of sport and its fusion of physical and emotional sensation. But this sporting pleasure has its dark side, as these poets recognize. Danger and violence are never far below the surface. In Stevenson’s poem, the

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screams of the hare as she is hunted down mix with the music of the coursers: “With her loud screams their triumphs cadence keep.”64 Violence and thrilling sensation – these are key elements of our psychological experience of sport, as the poets of rural sport understood well. Even angling poetry, which represents its sport in a predominantly pastoral mode, portraying it as contemplative rather than martial in character, acknowledges from time to time the pain inflicted by the angler on the fish and on the live bait used to catch it. Thomson implores the fisher to eschew live bait – “let not on thy Hook the tortur’d Worm, / Convulsive, twist in agonizing Folds” – and Gay remarks on the “gasping pains / And trickling blood” that mark the death throes of the captured fish.65 This prompts a question that became increasingly urgent as the century wore on. How could violent pain inflicted on a sentient being impart pleasure or be considered sporting?66 One of the most trenchant formulations of this question in the period appears in an unlikely quarter, Samuel Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns’s A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), a book in which Jenyns attempts to explain the existence of evil in a world deemed to be governed by an omnipotent and benevolent God. Jenyns’s argument, that a hierarchy of being inevitably requires the existence of human suffering for the greater good of a system we do not fully understand, is demolished by recourse to a sporting analogy. His speculation “that as we have not only animals for food, but choose some for our diversion, the same privilege may be allowed to some beings above us” is subjected by Johnson to a withering thought experiment: I cannot resist the temptation of contemplating this analogy ... He might have shown that these hunters, whose game is man have many sports analogous to our own. As we drown whelps and kittens, they amuse themselves now and then with sinking a ship, and stand round the fields of Blenheim, or the walls of Prague, as we encircle a cockpit. As we shoot a bird flying, they take a man in the midst of his business or pleasure, and knock him down with an apoplexy.67

Johnson here reduces the term “sport” to its original signification, dismissing it as mere diversion – and a sadistic diversion at that. Johnson’s review of Jenyns, which dismantles the ancient conception of the Great Chain of Being and, by implication, the sense of

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exceptionalism it promotes (of humanity’s hierarchical privilege over other animals in the scheme of creation), addresses squarely the problematic character of what Tobias Menely, borrowing from James Thomson, calls “‘tyrant custom’: the inhuman cultural practices that stage human exceptionality, the brutality that sustains human identity.” Menely argues persuasively that “the distinction between animal and human, between those who speak and those who do not, those who may be sacrificed or eaten without committing a murder and those whose lives are protected by the law,” a categorical opposition that “stabilizes the symbolic order,” comes into question in the eighteenth century, and he maintains that this questioning has implications for the field sports as well.68 A variety of reasons have been suggested for changing cultural attitudes, including urbanization and a growing middle-class gentility, but Menely suggests that insofar as the hunt is a preserve of privilege for nobility and gentry, the growing critique of cruelty towards animals “occurred within a larger reformation of sovereign legitimacy.”69 By the late eighteenth century, poets were increasingly problematizing the sporting pleasures of the field. Stevenson implores his reader to turn away from the scene he describes: “Turn, turn aside, nor see the victim die! / Ah! From her plaints avert the anguish’ ear!” The subject of the hunt has become unfit for poetry; it is a theme the poet now counsels his readers to shun. At the conclusion of Stevenson’s poem, accordingly, his depiction of the violence of hare hunting ends paradoxically in silence: But let the numbers farther cease to flow, Haply, to sport enthusiastic swains, Blended too much with elegiac wo, The Muse when she should triumph, but complains.70

The problem for the poet is one of genre too. The matter-of-fact, instructional approach of the georgic gives way in these later poems increasingly to elegy and satire, a shift signalled in Stevenson’s title, Rural Sports, Descriptive and Elegaic. Pastoral and georgic, the traditional genres of the countryside, no longer appear adequate to capture increasingly complex and ambivalent attitudes. Sylvan strains will no longer do: O could the Muse here end her sylvan strain, Nor wake to harsher notes the conscious reed!

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Frans De Bruyn Must pleasure ever be allied to pain, As shadows from their substances ne’er freed!71

Animal cruelty was not the only concern that contributed to a growing questioning of the legitimacy of the pleasure to be derived from field sports. The very conception of sportsmanship itself came under critical scrutiny. In September. A Rural Poem (1780), Richard Gardiner interrogates satirically the meaning of sportsmanship and the conception of masculinity that underlies it. He deplores the “Unmanly shot” that kills fowl flying upward to distract the shooter from their nests and their young. “Is this a triumph?” he asks, “This that manly pride, / Which boasts so much of reason for its guide? / To view unmov’d the mangled covies die.”72 He regards sardonically the eighteenth-century figure of the sporting “jock”: “Loose from his school, too dull for classic ground, / The man-child claims his hunter and his hound.”73 Like Somervile, Gardiner writes from the perspective of an older man reviewing the pleasures of youth, but his frowning assessment of youthful excess contrasts sharply with Somervile’s nostalgia. The pleasure Somervile so evidently feels at the memory of his youthful obsession with the chase can no longer be unself-consciously enjoyed. Gardiner turns instead to satire as the poetic mode best fitted to address cultural practices that, owing to ongoing tensions about the game laws, poaching, and changing land use, have become grounds of contestation.74 He writes in an opening note, “as the game is a subject of serious controversy in most places, this passion is deservedly ridicule’d (with some degree of pleasantry) in the following little poem.”75 In consequence, the nature of sportsmanship itself is redefined, and the poet retreats to his closet and to poetic composition as a sport superior to the pleasures of forest and field: “True sporting is true honour,” Gardiner concludes, Not him, whose vacant mind for ever loves To haunt the fields, the meadows, and the groves; … No! he sports best, and with the most applause, Who hunts for wisdom, and consults her laws; Beats classic ground, where sportive muses twine Their laureate wreaths for brows, soft Gray, like thine; Where bards seraphic tun’d their lyres to please,

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Where Milton soar’d and Horace walk’d with ease: Above the sportsman’s rant, the loud regale, The song, the bumper, and the thread-bare tale.76

The outward turn of the georgic poets to a world of practices and things is reversed, and the poet of sport abandons in the process the genre of georgic for other forms. The disappearance of georgic as a formal poetic genre at the end of the eighteenth century has been much discussed by literary historians: here we witness an example of that disappearance, spurred by the ambivalence poets had come to feel about the pleasures of sport and the questionability of treating those pleasures with unironic georgic perspicuity.77 Donna Landry points to Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) as the most eloquent poetic articulation of this change: “No longer was it possible, [Goldsmith’s] narrator argues, for a poet to write a triumphant georgic poem celebrating England’s greatness through her agriculture and the recreational amenities of her countryside.” The georgic of sport has fallen victim to ever advancing engrossment of land by wealthy landowners and erosion of common rights, with the consequence that field sports, especially the chase, have grown ever more exclusive, no longer offering a plausible locus of harmony or concord to represent the nation to itself.78 Coda: Georgic Labour and the Aesthetics of Sport A concluding perspective on sporting pleasure can be gained by a consideration of its relationship to work. Walton, in characterizing his angling book as “a recreation of a recreation,” encapsulates unforgettably the pleasure he takes in his sport and in his writing. This perspective contrasts with that of the agricultural georgic, in which writing is characterized as laborious. Virgil writes, it is true, of the exhilarating challenge his chosen subject poses, but his prevailing emphasis is on the difficulty and arduousness of his task. In The Anglers, Scott invokes this Virgilian conception of poetry in his opening lines, where he consciously positions his own sporting activities athwart the labours of husbandry and authorship: But books or bus’ness, with unpausing care, What force of body or of mind can bear? The steed, unharness’d from the plow awhile, Returns with spirit to his rural toil,

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Frans De Bruyn Sports (like parentheses) may part the Line Of labour, without breaking the design. But as, in verse, parentheses (if long And crowded) mar the beauty of the song; So pastimes which ingross too large a space Disturb life’s system, and its work deface.79

Here sport is deliberately set within the archetypal georgic scene of agricultural labour: the two exist for Scott in a kind of symbiosis. The workhorse, after a period of rest, “Returns with spirit to his rural toil”; and so it is likewise with sport. Too much play, Scott maintains, disturbs the rhythm of life’s system, a point he stages in a poetic couplet in which an enjambment created by a parenthesis – “(if long / And crowded)” – technically violates the integrity of the line and upsets the poetry of balance. Sport cannot properly be enjoyed without its opposite, work. In a conscious echo of the Virgilian analogy between the georgic poet’s verses and the farmer’s furrows, Scott affirms that sports, in their proper sphere can “part the line / Of labour” without interfering with the purposeful task of tilling the fields. This is as true of the poet as of the farmer: the reinvigorating slumber that the exercise of sport affords rekindles the poetic impulse, as “Fancy, flowing with recruited vein, / Pours out her pleasures in this Rhiming strain.”80 There are generic implications here for the poetry of sport, though Scott does not pursue them in this passage. The peculiar nature of sport is that it is bound by rules, and requires strenuous application and practice in order to be mastered, yet all this highly focused effort does not have a conventionally georgic economic goal or outcome. There is an element of purposefulness without purpose that distinguishes sport from other georgic subjects – though didactically minded eighteenthcentury poets did not, indeed could not, write entirely disinterestedly of rural sports. Generically speaking, for these poets, the georgic and yet not-quite-georgic nature of rural sport as an art is reflected in the kind of verse they write on the subject, which displays strong marks of the georgic tradition but intermixes with this elements of other forms, notably pastoral, descriptive poetry, topographical poetry, and lyric. Yet, if they leaven their poetry with a portion of the otium – ease and leisure – authorized by the classical pastoral, the generic mixtures they experiment with are designed to capture the paradox at the heart of sport: that it is a species of leisure which takes nonetheless an active, goal-directed, and often aggressive and competitive form.

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NOTES Note: My interest in the poetry of rural sport originates with one of my former doctoral students, Phil McKnight, who devoted his doctoral thesis project to the subject. The poetic archive enumerated in the bibliography that follows was initially compiled by Dr McKnight. I wish also to thank Donna Landry for reading a draft of this essay and offering some incisive advice. 1 A note in the OED charts this evolution in meaning: “In early use the sense of ‘sport’ as a diversion or amusement is paramount; by the 18th and 19th centuries the term was often used with reference to hunting, shooting, and fishing ... The consolidation of organized sport (particularly football, rugby, cricket, and athletics) in the 19th cent. reinforced the notion of sport as physical competition.” 2 The property qualifications in force during the eighteenth century were defined in the Game Act of 1671, and they remained basically unchanged until the Game Reform Act of 1831. With a few exceptions, only persons who owned land freehold worth £100 annually in income or who had leases ninety-nine years or longer on land worth £150 annually qualified under the Act. There were other, pre-existing privileges; as Sir William Blackstone points out in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4:175, “The statutes for preserving the game are many and various, and not a little obscure and intricate.” See Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers, 8–14; and Landry, The Invention of the Countryside, 73–6. Blackstone was scathing about the criminalization of killing game, as defined under the Act: though this “crime,” he writes, is of a highly “questionable ... nature ... yet it is an offence which the sportsmen of England seem to think of the highest importance” (Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4:174). 3 See Virgil, Georgics, 84–5. The modern commentator Roger A.B. Mynors, following Servius, glosses this passage with a citation from Cato’s advice to his son: “You can still tell a good farmer by the shine on his tools.” Mynors, “Commentary,” 11. 4 Addison, “An Essay on the Georgics,” 151. 5 Tomlinson, “Cooking, Mining, Gardening, Hunting,” 74. 6 Virgil, Georgics, 91, book 1, lines 133–42. 7 Virgil, Georgics, 182–3, book 3, lines 404–13. 8 Cynegetics denotes hunting (with dogs) and the chase; halieutics is the art or practice of fishing. 9 See Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature , 153. 10 Thomas Barker, Barker’s Delight, 1.

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11 Markham, The Pleasures of Princes, 15. 12 Dennys, The Secrets of Angling, sig. B1r, line 1. Dennys echoes the opening words of the Aeneid: “Arms and the man I sing.” 13 Dennys, The Secrets of Angling, sig. A3v. 14 Dennys, The Secrets of Angling, sig. B1r. 15 Zwicker, Line of Authority, 61–2. 16 Marvell, Upon Appleton House, 99, stanzas lxxxi–lxxxii. 17 Whitney, The Genteel Recreation, 11. 18 Thomas Scott, The Anglers, 3, dialogue 1, lines 47–51. 19 Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers, 52–3. 20 [J.S.], Innocent Epicure, 22–3. 21 [J.S.], Innocent Epicure, 24–5. 22 In a letter to Rosset, Voltaire writes, “J’ai lu avec beaucoup d’attention votre poëme sur l’agriculture. J’y ai trouvé l’utile et l’agréable, la variété nécessaire, et la difficulté presque toujours heureusement surmontée” (I have read your poem on agriculture attentively, and I find it both useful and pleasurable, with a necessary variety and with difficulties [formal challenges] almost always happily surmounted). Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Letter to Rosset, 22 April 1774, 12x: xxx. 23 Walton, Compleat Angler, 169. I cite here the 1676 edition. See also Semenza’s remarks on this passage in Sport, Politics, and Literature, 147. 24 Walton, Compleat Angler, 190. 25 Simon Ford, Piscatio, 4. 26 Plato, The Republic, 2:449 (10: 602c–d). 27 Thomas Scott, The Anglers, 12, 3.15–21. 28 The identification of an auctor was, as S.J. Harrison notes, part of the ancient definition of a genre, which “sought to attach ancient and authoritative names to literary forms.” See Generic Enrichment, 6. On Coopers Hill as the originating intertext not only of eighteenth-century hunting poetry, but also of topographical poetry (from which walking poetry developed), see Landry, Invention, 104–6, 128–30. 29 Denham, Coopers Hill, 10; [J.S.] Innocent Epicure, 23. 30 Scott, The Anglers, 11, dialogue 3, lines1–2, 5–6. 31 Ibid., 12, dialogue , lines 11–12. 32 Ibid., 15, dialogue 3, lines 77–8. 33 The poem grew and underwent numerous revisions, from the initial publication of “Winter” in 1726 until the final version appeared in 1746. 34 Thomson, The Seasons, 24, lines 455–9. Spring was first published in 1727, but the fishing passage was added in 1744. 35 Thomson, Seasons, 24–5, lines 468–77.

What Is Sport? 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

61 62 63

Pope, Windsor-Forest, 200, lines 142–4. Stevenson, Rural Sports, 1:191. Gay, Rural Sports, 6. Critics have remarked on how Pope’s description of Belinda’s dressing table reflects the commerce of commodities and consumption in eighteenth-century Britain. The same holds true here for Gay. See Landa, “Pope’s Belinda,” and Brown, Ends of Empire, 103–34. Gay, Rural Sports, 3. Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, 28. Addison, “Essay,” 149. Somervile, Preface to The Chace, sig. A4. Here is another instance where poaching is understood as unsportsmanlike conduct. Nemesianus, Cynegetica, 485–7. Nemesianus, Cynegetica, 491. Oppian, Oppian’s Cynegeticks, 3. Nemesianus, Cynegetica, 495. Mawer, Dedication to Sir Robert Walpole, 10 (new pagination). Pope, “An Essay on Man,” 504, book 1, lines 9–14. Compare, for example, Pope’s use of the shooting metaphor in An Epistle to Cobham, 154–6, “Know, God and Nature only are the same: / In Man, the judgment shoots at flying game; / A bird of passage! gone as soon as found” (Poems, 555). Dryden, “An Account of the Ensuing Poem,” 53. Locke, “Epistle to the Reader,” An Essay, 6. Locke, Essay, 104. Landry, Invention, 179–94. Somervile, The Chace, 65, book 3, lines 83–96. Virgil, Georgics, 175, book 3, lines 291–3. Pope, Windsor-Forest, 200, lines 151–8. Though field sports form a prominent portion of Windsor-Forest, Pope, unlike other poets of sport, does not to any real extent exploit possible parallels between the field sports he describes and the arts of the poet. John Aikin, “A Critical Essay,” 3. Somervile, The Chace, 85, book 3, lines 422–5. Plato, Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 220 (534b). Somervile, The Chace, 85, book 3, lines 419–20. Stevenson, Rural Sports, “Part 3, Hare-Hunting,” 213. Somervile, The Chace, 64, book 3, lines 64–76.

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64 Stevenson, Rural Sports, “Part 3, Hare-Hunting,” 217. 65 Thomson, Seasons, 22, lines 388–9); Gay, Rural Sports (1713), 6, lines 156–7. 66 As Eric Rothstein notes, this ambivalence about hunting predates the eighteenth century. See “Discordia Non Concors.” 67 Johnson, Review, 535. 68 Menely, The Animal Claim, 85, 87. 69 Menely, The Animal Claim, 92–3. 70 Stevenson, Rural Sports, “Part 3, Hare-Hunting,” 219. 71 Stevenson, Rural Sports, “Part 1, Angling,” 196. 72 Gardiner, September, 8–9. 73 Gardiner, September, 4. 74 See Donna Landry’s examination of the origins of anti-hunting sentiment and its impact on poetry of rural sport in Invention of the Countryside, 113–25. 75 Gardiner, September, 1 n†. 76 Gardiner, September, 31–2. 77 See, for example, Kurt Heinzelman, “Roman Georgic in the Georgian Age: A Theory of Romantic Genre,” Texas Studies of Literature and Language 32 (1991): 182–214. 78 Landry, Invention of the Countryside, 119–20. 79 Scott, The Anglers, 1–2, dialogue 1, lines 9–18. 80 Scott, The Anglers, 4, dialogue 1, lines 79–80.

Chapter Two

Funeral Games: Ludic Events, Imperial Violence, Authorial Encounters daniel o’quinn

Despite being strongly discouraged by her friends and relatives who feared for her safety, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu set out from London with her husband in August 1716 on a diplomatic mission that took them through Europe to Constantinople. Hoping to stay for a minimum of five years, Lady Mary was the first English woman to write about her travels in Ottoman lands and her observations serve as one of the most important records of intercultural exchange between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Edward Wortley Montagu was charged with the daunting task of negotiating an end to the Austro-Turkish war that had broken out in 1716. Because so much of the scholarship on Montagu has focused on Lady Mary’s representation of Ottoman culture very little has been said either about her stay in Austria – in spite of the fact that the “European” portion of the Letter-book takes up half of the text – or about the way that geopolitical conflict permeates the letters. This essay attempts to correct these critical lapses by attending to Lady Mary’s representation of a women’s shooting match in Vienna. It is one of the earliest accounts of a sporting event written by a woman and I believe it reveals a great deal not only about Montagu’s rhetorical strategies in the letters, but also about the complex ways in which bodily acts are mediated in her text. The relative lack of commentary on the Viennese letters is due to inattention to the formal design of the two-volume Letter-book. Most editions of the text follow Halsband’s Complete Letters and break the order of the Letter-book by integrating pieces of actual correspondence.1 If one attends solely to the fair-copy Letter-book that was circulated among her coterie and from which the first 1763 edition was pirated, one discovers not only that the text has a carefully constructed internal

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structure, but also that many of its formal gestures are explicitly and implicitly in dialogue with important textual precursors. There is an obvious engagement with travel writing, but there is a less frequently discussed negotiation with the Aeneid and the Iliad. Lady Mary’s interest in these texts is hardly surprising: Pope’s translation of Homer was in her luggage and she was travelling through the very spaces represented in these epic texts. But more important, Virgil and Homer provide important models for thinking about and writing about war. The actions of these gun-wielding women are afforded far more cultural significance than they would seem to warrant and they point to very subtle historical arguments about war and empire. These historical arguments rely on a retroactive allusion to one of the most famous representations of sport in all of literature – the archery contest held in honour of Anchises in Book V of the Aeneid. Both Virgil’s archery contest and Montagu’s allusion to it are temporally complex because they impinge on the present action of the narrative and yet refer to events well in the future. My intention is to demonstrate how these temporal folds allow Montagu to engage critically with the very imperial conflict that was the focus of her husband’s failed mediation. Fear and Loathing outside Belgrade The first thirty years of the eighteenth century was a period of constantly changing borders, of conquests and reconquests, and of shifting allegiances on the frontiers separating Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman and Habsburg Empires had been at war all through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As recently as 1683 the Ottomans had been on the verge of conquering Vienna itself. Conflict between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans had been a fact of life for almost 200 years – the first Ottoman siege of Vienna took place in 1529 – but 1683 was a particularly perilous moment for the Habsburgs. Vienna was seriously weakened by the plague and the Austrians were besieged by a large force of Ottoman janissaries, spahis and infantry. Strategic errors by the Ottoman commander, the Grand Vizier Kara Mustapha Pasha, allowed the Habsburg capital to be relieved by the Polish forces of Jan Sobieski. The alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and the Poles marked a turning point in the history of conflict between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. War continued for sixteen years after the Battle of Vienna and would flare up again in the second decade of the eighteenth century, but never again would Ottoman military forces progress this far westward. The Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) and the Treaty of Passarowitz

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(1718) are crucial events for understanding the limitations on the westward expansion of the Ottoman Empire. These two moments of peace, arising from significant losses in the field, saw the Ottomans losing key territories and strategic positions in Eastern Europe, while temporarily strengthening their grip on the Peloponnesian peninsula. In retrospect we can view the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz as a decisive step in the contraction of the Ottoman Empire, but the period immediately preceding Edward Wortley Montagu’s term as ambassador was one of Ottoman resurgence. Having successfully defeated the Russians at Pruth River in the Russo-Turkish War (1710–11), and having reconquered the Morea from the Venetians in 1715, the Ottomans, spurred on by pro-war factions, set out to regain Hungary. Leaving some troops at home to guard against a possible attack by the Russians and sending others to Albania to guard Corfu, the Grand Vizier and Sultan’s son-in-law, Damat Ali Pasha, was perhaps overly confident as he marched north. Eugene of Savoy, the talented Austrian Habsburg military leader, who had fought at the Battle of Vienna and had defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Zenta in 1697, was once again victorious at Petrovaradin on 5 August 1716 and the Grand Vizier died from his battle wounds. Within a year and a half, the Austrians would take Belgrade and force the Ottomans to submit to the Treaty of Passarowitz. The fall of Belgrade is the subject of one of Edward Wortley Montagu’s most significant diplomatic dispatches. Writing to Secretary of State Joseph Addison on 2 August 1717, the inexperienced British Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte attests to the difficulty of gathering definitive information in wartime: When I writ my letter of the 18 of the last month neither the French Ambassador nor the Dutch nor my self had any certain advice of what passed at the Camp, or Belgrade. All letters between the Court and this place were stop’d for a time, and it has been for some days believed by almost every body even the Officers of the Camacham that Belgrade was taken after a siege of a month. The people were extremely uneasy. But within two or three days many have been put in prison for having spread that news which ’tis now said is false and that Belgrade has only been blocked up.2

Because he is at a distance from the action Wortley’s letter is mired in uncertainty, but there is something peculiar about the way that the letter enacts a similar disclosure and suppression of information as it describes. Even after it is confirmed that Prince Eugene of Savoy has razed the city to the ground and that over 20,000 Ottoman troops have been killed, Wortley is reticent: he simply states that “the Turks were intirely routed.”3

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Wortley’s remarks are terse, but they are considerably more loquacious than those of his more famous wife. The regular pattern of correspondence in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letter-book is disrupted for precisely the period when the siege and fall of Belgrade took place. The six-month gap between Letter 38 and Letter 39 consigns the destruction of Belgrade to textual oblivion.4 This, in spite of the fact that Prince Eugene’s victory spelled the end of her husband’s diplomatic attempts to resolve the conflict and likely marked the violent end of one of her most valued friendships. Nor is there any mention of the fact that Lady Mary and her husband were only recently residents of Belgrade. There is only silence. Wortley’s reticence and Lady Mary’s silence stand in marked contrast to their dispatches from Belgrade only six months earlier. In March and early April, both were witness to the tangible effects of warfare not only on the flesh, but also on what we would conventionally call sovereignty. In a letter addressed to Alexander Pope from Belgrade, Lady Mary reports: we pass’d over the fields of Carlowitz, where the last great victory was obtained by Prince Eugene over the Turks. The marks of that Glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being strew’d with the Skulls and Carcasses of unbury’d Men, Horses and Camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled humane bodies, and refflect on the Injustice of War, that makes murther not only necessary but meritorious.5

The Austrians had defeated the Ottomans at Peterwardien on 5 August 1716, so it is important to remember that during this phase of her journey Lady Mary is effectively passing through what was six months earlier a war zone. But by referring to the fields of Carlowitz, Montagu’s observations become curiously doubled. The name of Carlowitz carries with it ties to the notorious Battle of Zenta (1697) where Prince Eugene of Saxony defeated the Grand Vizier, killed over 30,000 Turkish troops, and secured the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699. The action at Peterwardien in 1716 was not a massacre, and so in the phrase “that Glorious bloody day” Montagu conflates the two events in a manner that gives the impression that the physical bodies of the dead from the epochal earlier battle are still present as a sign of history. The flesh of the unburied men elicits both horror and an ethical argument. War here commits violence against the idea of justice itself. This recognition opens onto an explicitly theoretical consideration that disconnects human nature from rationality: Nothing seems to me plainer proofe of the irrationality of Mankind (whatever fine claims we pretend to Reason) than the rage with which they

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contest for a small spot of Ground, when such vast parts of fruitful Earth lie quite uninhabited. ’Tis true, Custom has now made it unavoidable, but can there be a greater demonstration of want of reason than a Custom being firmly establish’d so plainly contrary to the Interest of Man in General? I am a good deal inclined to believe Mr. Hobbs, that the State of Nature is a State of War, but thence I conclude Humane Nature not rational, if the word reason means common sense, as I suppose it does. (25.95; H 1.305)

Significantly, Montagu does not go on, as Hobbes does, to suggest that in the face of such irrationality it is necessary to seek protection under a sovereign power. Instead, she gives a detailed account of the political situation in Belgrade where she and her husband were detained before entering the Ottoman Empire. Her account of the situation in Belgrade is harrowing, and I believe instructive, because it demonstrates how little control the sovereign has over the military. While in Peterwardien she and her husband were informed that the people of Belgrade were weary of the war and had killed their Bassa, or Pasha, in a mutiny because he had taken bribes to allow the Tartars to ravage the German Frontiers. As she states, “We were very well pleas’d to hear of such favourable dispositions in the people,” but when they arrived in the garrison they found an altogether different situation: The late Bassa fell under the displeasure of his soldiers, for no other reason, but restraining their Incursions on the Germans. They took it into their heads from that mildnesse, he was of intelligence with the Enemy, and sent such information to the Grand Signor at Adrianople. But redress not coming quick enough from thence, they assembled themselves in a tumultuous manner, and by force dragg’d their Bassa before the Cadi and Mufti, and there demanded justice in a mutinous way; one crying out, why he protected the infidels? Another, why he squeezed them of their Money? that easily guessing their purpose, he calmly reply’d to them that they ask’d him too many questions, he had but one Life, which must answer for all. They immediately fell upon him with their Scimitars (without waiting the sentence of their Heads of the Law) and in a few moments cut him in pieces. The present Bassa has not dar’d to punish the murder … You may imagine, I cannot be very easy in a Town which is really under the Government of an insolent Soldiery. (25.96–7; H 1.306–7)

Montagu’s narrative resonates with much of the Tory writing in England against the notion of a standing army, but the story is important because it so carefully represents the frontier as a zone of violence, corruption,

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and fear.6 The janissaries, in side-stepping the Cadi, who administers both Islamic and Ottoman law, are explicitly operating against the very state-form that they ostensibly serve. Montagu is bluntly showing us something about Hobbes’s protection racket that goes unsaid when she first invokes the notion of war as the state of nature: namely, that the state’s monopoly on violence – even in a state taken to be the very essence of absolutism – far from protecting the people, actually perpetuates a cascade of violence precisely because the military acts according to its insatiable desires. And the violence flows in all directions thus instituting a condition of “uneasiness” to borrow a euphemism employed by both Lady Mary and her husband.7 If we understand Montagu’s representation of the dead at Peterwardien and of the crisis in Belgrade as a critique of Hobbes’s argument for sovereign power, then the rest of her letter from Belgrade offers an important counterexample. Trapped in Belgrade under the military rule of the corrupt Bassa for roughly a month, Montagu suddenly recounts a remarkable scene of hospitality: In the mean time we are lodg’d in one of the best Houses, belonging to a very considerable man amongst ’em, and have a whole Chamber of Janizarys to guard us. My only diversion is the Conversation of our Host, Achmet-Beg, a title something like that of Count in Germany. His father was a great Bassa and he has been educated in the most polite Eastern Learning, being perfectly skill’d in the Arabic and Persian Languages, and is an extraordinary Scribe, which they call Effendi. This accomplishment makes way to the greatest preferments, but he has had the good sense to prefer an easy, quiet, secure life, to all the dangerous Honnours of the Port. He sups with us every night, and drinks wine very freely. You cannot imagine how much he is delighted with the Liberty of conversing with me. He has explain’d to me many pieces of Arabian Poetry, which, I observ’d are in numbers not unlike ours, gennerally alternate verse, and of a very musical sound. Their expressions of Love are very passionate and lively. I am so much pleas’d with them, I really believe I should learn to read Arabic if I was to stay here a few months. He has a very good Library of their Books of all kinds and, as he tells me, spends the greatest part of his Life there. I pass for a great Scholar with him by relateing to him some of the Persian Tales, which I find are Genuine. At first he believ’d I understood Persian. I have frequent disputes with him concerning the difference of our Customs, particularly the confinements of Women. He assures me there is nothing at all in it, only says he, we have the advantage that when our wives cheat

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us, no body knows it. He has wit and is more polite than many Christian men of Quality. I am very much entertained with him. (25.97–8; H 1.307–8)

United by their rank and education, Lady Mary and Achmet-Beg pass their time in conversation and conviviality. But everything about this scene of cosmopolitan hospitality is shadowed by violence and ethnic partition. Because the scene of hospitality itself is surrounded by the janissaries, they are part and parcel of its constitution. Achmet-Beg’s house acts as a kind of sanctuary from this historical zone of violence, irrationality, and death, but we also need to recognize that Achmet-Beg is himself in a form of internal exile: he has avoided the preferments of the Porte because such an accession to a position of power is inherently dangerous in a volatile state. In short, non-participation in the political world of the Porte is a precondition of the ideal converse presented here. Perhaps this is why no mention is made of Wortley in this passage. Because he is a minion of the state, he quite literally cannot come into the same discursive space as Lady Mary and Achmet-Beg, in spite of the fact that he clearly shared the same house. In this context, the sanctuary afforded in Achmet-Beg’s house and his library is both extrapolitical and gendered. The discursive exclusion of Lady Mary’s husband is not incidental. It is part of a larger pattern of reserving domestic sites of intercultural exchange for women that is most famously registered in Letter 26, the famous representation of the hammam, and in the account of the Kahya’s harem in Letter 34. Viennese Prophesies Lady Mary’s acute sensitivity to the fact of war in the region is registered both locally in highly allusive scenes of conflict, and more generally at the level of textual structure. The complex task of interpreting Letter 25’s account of Petrovaradin and Belgrade requires that we attend to a seemingly trivial, almost whimsical event from earlier in the text whose representation shows how war permeates Viennese culture and society. Roughly one month after Prince Eugene’s victory at Petrovaradin and only a couple of months prior to her perilous encounter in Belgrade, Lady Mary sends the following account of a “diversion” in the court at Vienna to her sister Lady Mar: The next day I was to wait on the Empress Amalia, who is now at her palace of retirement half a mile from the town. I had there the pleasure of seeing a diversion wholly new to me, but which is the common amusement

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Daniel O’Quinn of this court. The Empress herself was seated on a little throne at the end of the fine alley in the garden, and on each side of her ranged two parties of her ladies of honour with other young ladies of quality, headed by the two young arch-duchesses, all dressed in their hair, full of jewels, with fine light guns in their hands, and at proper distances were placed three oval pictures, which were the marks to be shot at. (9.63; H 1.268)

This account, like so many representations of elite leisure, operates on a number of levels. Because it is marked as a “common amusement of this court” it becomes emblematic of Austrian character. We are treated to the spectacle of aristocratic women exhibiting their marksmanship. Representations of courtly women in hunting dress or holding rifles were not uncommon. In fact, one of the most famous portraits of the Arch Duchess Maria Amalia of Austria – a participant in the event Montagu is describing – from roughly this time shows her embracing an elaborately decorated rifle (see plate 1). Montagu emphasizes later that watching women handle guns is the “favourite pleasure of the emperor, and there is rarely a week without some feast of this kind, which makes the young ladies skillful enough to defend a fort” (9.63; H 1.268–9). So we are placed somewhere just adjacent to the male viewers of this scene. This is a subtle move on Montagu’s part, quite typical of the Letter-book as a whole, in that she separates her femininity from that of the women she is observing and also implies that the male courtiers are positioned much like her. As we will see, this ascription of femininity is crucial to Montagu’s designs. At one level Montagu is suggesting that such an amusement is entirely fitting for such a heavily militarized society. And yet the gender inversion turns the entire scene into an emblem of the perversion of social relations and thus a sign of social corruption that attends continual war. Montagu also points to a certain level of gender insubordination when she encounters Prince Eugene of Savoy. While on leave from the theatre of war Eugene is explicitly feminized in the text; and here women are masculinized in telling ways. Montagu is intrigued by their erotic agency: in this scene they are quite literally valued by the observing men for their martial qualities.8 Drawing out Montagu’s ascription of non-normativity to the scene tallies well with the subversive components of the game itself. If we look closely at the targets, we find that all of them portray the usurpation of phallic agency: The first was that of a Cupid, filling a bumper of Burgundy, and the motto, ’Tis easy to be valiant here. The second a Fortune holding a garland in her hand, the motto, For her whom Fortune favours. The third was a Sword with

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a laurel wreath on the point, the motto, Here is no shame to the vanquished. (9.63; H 1.268)

In the first instance, the shooter shoots the shooter to preserve her erotic autonomy. In the second case, the shooter quite literally pierces the “lucky lady” of Fortune. In the final target, the bullet destroys the sword with the laurel wrapped around its tip. All of the mottos are playful and draw attention to the allegorical potential of female marksmanship. But what is so interesting is the way that these allegories get layered. At the lowest level of signification, the bravery that comes with drinking, the favouritism that comes with luck, and the lack of shame that comes with vanquishing phallicism all allegorize female erotic agency and autonomy. But erotic allegory takes on a more political overtone when the empress allocates the prizes: Near the Empress was a gilded trophy wreathed with flowers, and made of little crooks, on which were hung rich Turkish handkerchiefs, tippets, ribands, laces, etc. for the small prizes. The Empress gave the first with her own hand, which was a fine ruby ring set round with diamonds in a gold snuff-box. There was for the second a little cupid set with brilliants, and besides these a set of fine china for a tea table, enchased in gold, Japan trunks, fans, and many gallantries of the same nature. All the men of quality at Vienna were spectators, but only the ladies had permission to shoot, and the Arch-Duchess Amalia carried off the first prize. (9.63; H 1.268)

Montagu’s specificity here is significant. All of the prizes have distinctly Eastern connotations and the text moves from explicit reference to Turkish goods to other commodities that would have come by way of Ottoman lands. The specific prizes would seem to signify little more than luxury except that this scene of mock-battle is embedded in an actual theatre of war between Austria and the Ottoman Empire. What is confusing is that the political allegory is disconnected from enemy combatants – the scene seems far more concerned with lines of amity than with lines of enmity. But in a gesture typical for the Letter-book, Montagu provides the allegorical key in a seemingly off-hand remark whose retroactive application allows us to comprehend the rhetorical function and historical import of this diversion: I was very well pleased with having seen this entertainment, and I do not know but it might make as good a figure as the prize shooting in the Aeneid, if I could write as well as Virgil. (9.63; H 1.268)

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By invoking Virgil at this point, Montagu would seem to be treading close to the domain of mock epic. As with the card game in The Rape of the Lock attention to detail unlocks another level of meaning. The funeral games held in honour of Anchises in Book V of the Aeneid is one of the strangest parts of the poem;9 that Montagu is reading the shooting match through this lens is indicative of her neoclassical pretensions, but it is also a sign of her sly politicization of seemingly trivial encounters. For Aeneas and his soldiers, the funeral games are a respite from the violence of the Trojan War and a diversion from the deeply unsettling encounter with Dido. They are also a transitional point in the text. Prior to the hiatus of the games, Aeneas and his followers are essentially refugees beholden to the hospitality first of Dido and second of Acestes. After the games and the burning of Aeneas’s ships, those who follow Aeneas are firmly embarked on the conquest of Latium and the prosecution of war foretold by Anchises’s prophecy. Because Acestes is strongly associated with Troy in the poem, Book V marks the end of the retroactive view of the Trojan War and anticipates the series of narrative events that culminate in the formation of the Roman Empire. But what are we to make of Montagu’s comparison between the shooting match in the Viennese court and the archery match from the funeral games for Anchises? She doesn’t explicitly play out the terms of the comparison, but rather marks the potential nascent in an act of writing that could unfold if she had epic pretensions. It is a lacuna that calls on the reader to finish her thought. If we back out from the scene, at least one of the implications is clear: this is a transitional moment in the text. At this point, Montagu, like the Austrians, is approaching the frontier on the eve of Prince Eugene’s assault on Petrovaradin. After they cross the frontier, she and her husband are in Constantinople when the Austrian forces raze Belgrade to the ground and thus force the Ottomans into accepting the Peace of Passarowitz in 1718. This action effectively ended Edward Wortly Montagu’s diplomatic mission and forced an early return to England. Since the Letter-book is composed after the establishment of this chronology of Austrian ascendancy, the shooting match bears more than fleeting comparison to the archery match in Book V of the Aeneid, for it too has a complex relation to prophecy and narrative composition. Virgil’s archery contest is a very strange event. Aeneas orders a dove to be tied to the mast of a ship and four archers take part. The first arrow, from Hippocoon, strikes the mast. The second, fired by Mnesthes, cuts the cord that fixes the dove. As the dove flies away, the third archer,

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Eurytion, aims and kills the bird as it tries to escape. The fourth archer, Aeneas’s host Acestes, will not be outdone: Acestes, grudging at his lot, remains, Without a prize to gratify his pains. Yet, shooting upward, sends his shaft, to show An archer’s art, and boast his twanging bow. The feather’d arrow gave a dire portent, And latter augurs judge from this event. Chaf’d by the speed, it fir’d; and, as it flew, A trail of following flames ascending drew: Kindling they mount, and mark the shiny way; Across the skies as falling meteors play, And vanish into wind, or in a blaze decay.10

In the Latin text, the flaming arrow is compared to a shooting star, and here in Dryden’s translation the reader is presented with a flaming meteor. Dryden’s translation skews the meaning by figuring this as “a dire portent.” The negative connotation is not present in the Latin because it resonates with another shooting star in Book II that portends the future glory of Julius Caesar. As numerous commentators have argued, these shooting stars have conventionally been read as precursors or “allusions to the famous comet of 44 BC that was considered a sign of the apotheosis of Julius Caesar.”11 “The comet appeared at a time of incredible tension between Marc Antony and Octavian, just after Caesar’s assassination, when it was very unclear whether or not civil war would erupt at once between the two rivals.”12 This comet coincided with another celebratory sporting event. Caesar had established games in honour of his divine progenitor Venus, and they were eventually moved to July, his own birth month, by Octavian in 44 BC, the first summer after Caesar’s death. The comet was read not only as Caesar’s apotheosis, but also as a sign of the piety of Ceasar’s adopted son Octavian. In other words, the comet prefigures Octavian’s rise to power. When we remember that Octavian and Antony would eventually split the empire into East and West, and that Octavian ultimately would send his general Agrippa to vanquish the Easternized Antony, whose claim to true “Roman-ness” was undermined by his relation to Cleopatra, then the significance of the omen both in Virgil and Lady Mary becomes clearer. In Virgil, Acestes’s arrow foreshadows the ascendance of Virgil’s patron Octavian and the reunification of the Roman Empire into a vast

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amalgam of Europe and Asia. Of course the link between comet and burning arrow, between the present world of the Aeneid’s composition and this narrative moment in Book V, relies on the retroactive anticipation that characterizes Anchises’s prophecy and the poem itself. As David Ross states, “The Trojan past, having reached a finality through the unreality of Virgilian inversion, has suddenly, with this dread omen, become the Roman future.”13 Lady Mary’s gesture here is more playful, but no less complex. Composing the Letter-book after the Treaty of Passarowitz, Montagu can jokingly suggest that the shooting match has certain prophetic qualities: the Austrians will vanquish the Ottomans in the future. The grave Charles VI of Austria finds himself aligned with the pious Octavian; Eugene of Savoy gets to be the Agrippa in this story, and this diversion portends the eventual expansion of Austrian imperial control eastwards. This helps to explain why Montagu keeps both herself and these historical figures at an observational remove from the contest: like Octavian, the emperor “reads” the scene played out before him from a distance and thus it is Empress Amalia, like Aeneas, that convenes the games and distributes the prizes. And Montagu, like Virgil, takes on the task of prophetic representation. Montagu does not play out the allegory in detail, not least of all because there is no astronomical event, no exhibition of filial piety, and the conflict is less of a civil war than a clash of empires, but also because she has other objectives. Most notably she recognizes that the shooting match, like the games sponsored by Octavian, honour Caesar’s progenitor Venus. As John T. Ramsey argues, the games combined ludi Veneris Genetricis and ludi funebres in a fashion that laid the foundation for the imperial ludi Victoriae Caesaris that were such a prominent feature of Octavian’s rule after he took the name Augustus.14 In the Viennese contest, the language of love and the language of empire are thoroughly entwined; thus the event rehearses the Roman games alluded to by Virgil. Lady Mary’s attention to the games as erotic spectacle not only reinforces the allegorical connection to Caesar’s funeral games, even when the comet fails to appear, but also suggests that the interpenetration of love and war exhibited in the shooting match is itself a symptom of corruption comparable to the excesses of later Roman ludi. But Lady Mary’s most interesting rhetorical move has to do with fear. In the Aeneid, the burning arrow is immediately understood as an omen. Because its significance can be perceived only by the reader, the immediate witnesses to this supernatural event are bewildered. But their wonder quickly gives way to terror when the women in Aeneas’s party, under the

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influence of Iris, set fire to the Trojan ships. Sent by Juno to foil Aeneas’s destiny, Iris persuades the Trojan women to fire the ships by instigating gossip about endless war and maternal sacrifice. In other words, Iris plays on the women’s desire for security, an implicit recognition of “their fear of a continuing, omen fraught voyage.”15 Virgil is remarkably restrained in his representation of the Trojan women. The blame for the destruction of Aeneas’s fleet is placed squarely at Juno’s feet in part because the Trojans who choose to stay in Sicily with Acestes go on to found the city of Segesta, a key Roman ally in the First Punic War. There is no explicit omen in Lady Mary’s rendering of the shooting match, but as soon as she invokes Virgil there is an explicit articulation of fear: “This is a favourite pleasure of the Emperor, and there is rarely a week without some feast of this kind, which makes the young ladies skillful enough to defend a fort, and they laughed very much to see me afraid to handle a gun” (9.63; H 268–9). Lady Mary emphasizes her own fear and the fear of those who do not handle weapons. The significance of this move becomes apparent when we compare Lady Mary’s gesture to the most famous English translation of the Aeneid. Dryden referred to his act of translation as “Bringing Virgil over into Britain,” and he consistently makes the thematics of exile, revolution, invasion, and usurpation consonant with recent British political life. As Richard Morton argues, Dryden’s translation of the archery contest highlights the fear of the Trojans upon witnessing the flaming arrow: The Trojans and Sicilians wildly stare, And, trembling, turn their wonder into pray’r. The Dardan prince put on a smiling face, And strain’d Acestes with a close embrace; Then, hon’ring him with gifts above the rest, Turn’d the bad omen, nor his fears confess’d. “The gods,” said he, “this miracle have wrought, And order’d you the prize without the lot. Accept this goblet, rough with figur’d gold, Which Thracian Cisseus gave my sire of old: This pledge of ancient amity receive, Which to my second sire I justly give.”16

This image of the trembling Trojans and of Aeneas putting on a brave face is largely Dryden’s construction: he manipulates most of the adjectives to emphasize the timidity of the Trojans who choose to stay in

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Sicily and he has the spirit of Anchises add this advice to the original: “The Wholsom Counsel of your Friend receive;/And here, the Coward Train, and Women leave.” (3:1196).17 In Dryden, the heroism of Aeneas and those who choose to go to war relies on the shaming of women and effeminate men – i.e., on a consolidation of masculinity. Recent readings of Dryden’s Aeneid have emphasized the links between Aeneas and William III, and I do not think it is difficult to see how Dryden’s attempts to find favour with the new regime are served by these highly gendered interpolations.18 But Dryden’s alterations of Virgil help us to see what Lady Mary is not doing. By owning her fear, Lady Mary is firmly aligning herself with the Trojan women who value security over wars of conquest. As the Letter-book unfolds it becomes clear that she not only abhors war itself, but also comes to favour the Ottoman side of the conflict. She states this explicitly in Letter 25 and Letter 33 (where she refers to the fall of Belgrade as a “loss”),19 but it is perhaps most profoundly articulated in the way that she deploys sexuality. As we have seen, the Viennese women’s facility with guns is a figure for their sexual agency – they are the dominant figures in heterosexual relations. The letter immediately following the description of the shooting contest is about the Viennese women’s practice of publicly maintaining lovers with the assistance of their husbands. But for all her amusement, Lady Mary resists these kinds of practices: she will not take a Viennese lover, even when one is offered, and she will not pick up a gun, even if only for sport. When she crosses the dangerous frontier into Ottoman territory, she puts fear behind her while at the same time emphasizing her gender normativity. In a sense, she posits a different kind of femininity than that deployed by Dryden. This feminine figure is not a scapegoat or a rhetorical trope, but rather is a narrator, or to put it more forcefully, an author “Bringing Virgil with her into the Ottoman world.” Her subtle play – and I think that is the best way to describe her practice here – with the funeral games of both Anchises and Caesar is only the first of numerous textual interactions with the Aeneid. And I would argue that it is the maintenance of her gender and class normativity that leads Lady Mary to represent the Ottoman women she encounters as more appropriately “European” than the women she meets in Austria. Unlike even Empress Amalia, whom she admires, she recognizes and celebrates the freedom and the agency of the Turkish women at the same time that she physically separates them from the culture of war. Indeed once the text fully enters Ottoman space, the events of the Austro-Turkish War are

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not remarked upon, but the presence of war is felt in frequent allusions to the anguish of the Trojan women. Thus the shooting contest allows Montagu to do two things simultaneously. By deploying the funeral games themselves in a way almost as mysterious as the ominous flaming arrow, she plays out the historical ascendance of the Habsburg Empire by invoking and reenacting Virgil’s allegorical celebration of Octavian and Julius Caesar. It is a subtle way of testifying to the slaughter that would ensue. Her reticence here is itself a compelling rehearsal of Virgil’s own open-ended figure. But this is a reenactment with a difference because it foretells Habsburg victory without celebrating Austria.20 Unlike Virgil, whose treatment of Aeneas’s conquest of Latium is thoroughly, and at times tortuously, intertwined with Roman self-validation and hence the celebration of empire, Lady Mary is in a position adjacent to these historical narratives and thus can take up a position of critique. It is for this reason that the most famous letters celebrate hospitality not war: the sanctuary afforded by Achmet Beg in war-torn Belgrade, her stopover in the hammam at Sophia, and her visits to the harem of the Khaya’s lady. After her withering remarks on Austrian sociability, these are all posited as constitutive spaces of a different kind of empire, one based on peaceful cosmopolitan intercultural exchange, not territorial acquisition and the enforcement of conformity to the norms of the conqueror. With the invocation of exchange here, I think we can elucidate one last element of Lady Mary’s account of the shooting match. As noted above, Aeneas quells the anxiety activated by the flaming arrow by giving Acestes a conspicuously Trojan gift – a Thracian cup owned by Anchises. The reward is an affirmation of identity and cultural continuity. But in the Austrian shooting match, Empress Amalia’s prizes are all conspicuous commodities from the Levant trade – they are valuable for their exotic luxury. Thus the reward here is an appropriation of difference that ultimately emphasizes the hollowness of Habsburg imperial designs. These games do not commemorate the glory of one’s forebears, but rather indulge in acquisition pure and simple. Montagu’s subtle gesture towards mock epic is critical not only of Virgil’s epic validation of the self-same (especially as it appears in Dryden’s translation), but also of Austria’s bellicose pretensions to “vanquish” alterity (whether that is understood in geopolitical or gendered terms). What emerges from Montagu’s allusion to the funeral games is a political, social, and authorial position distinct from these two violent fantasies of empire in which Montagu becomes other than herself.

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NOTES 1 For the publication history of various editions, see Montagu, The Complete Letters, 1:xvii–xx. 2 Edward Wortley to Joseph Addison, Pera 2 August 1717, State Papers, 97/59. 3 Edward Wortley to Joseph Addison, Pera 22 August 1717, State Papers, 97/59. 4 While I will be referring to Robert Halsband’s edition of The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, vol. 1, I have used as my primary source the faircopy Letter-book at Sandon Hall. Halsband’s edition intercuts the materials from the Letter-book with other correspondence and eliminates the numbers that Montagu placed at the head of each letter. This gives the impression that the letters are actual correspondence and downplays the degree to which the Letter-book, which Montagu shared with friends and which was eventually printed (with each letter numbered), was shaped and edited after her return from Constantinople. In short, the Letter-book constitutes a formal whole and this has important implications for how we read the text. The Letter-book has been published under a variety of titles, I will refer to it as the Embassy Letters so as not to downplay the sections of the text that do not pertain immediately to her experiences in the Ottoman Empire. 5 In all cases, I will be referring to letters as they are numbered in the Letterbook and presented in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters (Broadview). When citing from the letters I will present the letter number followed by the Broadview page numbers and then Halsband’s page numbers in brackets in the body of the text: (25.95; H 1.305). 6 While anti-standing army positions were also mobilized by some Whigs, the account of military corruption is not at all distant from classic Tory positions taken by Harley and Bolingbroke. Note how Lady Mary underlines that the failure of the sultan to regulate the law is due to distance. And how the sultan here, as the apogee of sovereign power, becomes in his very extremity the test case for sovereignty in Hobbes. Aaron Hill, in A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, had already described the Ottoman empire as Leviathan: when a Man who seriously reflects on what he sees, becomes a Witness of the numberless Attendants, Trains, and Carriages of the Turkish Armies, he cannot but with Wonder bless that God, who curbs in Mercy the Ambitious Arms of this prodigious Government, and has kindly plac’d a powerful Hook in the presumptuous Nostrils of their Great Leviathan. (28–9)

7 Here is Wortley’s account of the situation: This Pasha’s predecessor was stabb’d and cut into small Pieces by the Janissaries in the Market Place. Their chief reason was his not having agreed to their desire

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of plundering the German Country from whence at that time, and when I went by, they bought the greatest part of their Provisions. From his not complying with them, they argued that he was not enough enclined to carry on the War. They stab’d a Citizen in the streets while I was there for no reason but his being a Christian. Not one man was asked any question about either of these Facts, and the Pasha used no other method to hinder these disorders which differed little from a mutiny but giving them money in great quantity. (Edward Wortley to Joseph Addison, 10 April 1717, State Papers, 97/59.) It should be noted that where Lady Mary diverges from her husband is in her account of the symbolic violence done to the Cadi and by extension to the state. As a representative of the state, Wortley remains silent on the precariousness of the law and chooses instead to focus attention on violence directed at what he perceives to be ethnic alterity. Lady Mary is far more interested in how the janissaries’ violence undermines the state’s claims to stability and order.

8 But that value is mediated through Empress Amalia – i.e., the women perform for her not for Emperor Charles VI and she is in control of the prizes. In other words, the emperor is only ever in a voyeuristic relation to the games. 9 Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, V, 485–544. 10 Dryden, Virgil’s Aeneis, V. 267–568, lines 685–95. 11 Frantantuaono, Madness Unchained, 145. 12 Frantantuaono, Madness Unchained, 146. For the most detailed account of the comet see Ramsey and Licht, The Comet of 44 B.C., 61ff. 13 Ross, Virgil’s Aeneid, 101. “This ‘Julian star’ (sidus Iulium) soon became a fixture on coins and seals. It was placed by Octavian over the statue of Caesar in the Forum and was represented on the pediment of the planned temple of the new god (not completed until 29 BC), which itself, with its altar in front, marked the spot where his body had been cremated. The comet became iconographically as important as the representation of pietas to be seen in Aeneas’ flight from Troy” (101). Lady Mary emphasizes her expertise in Roman coins in numerous letters. 14 Ramsey and Licht, The Comet of 44 B.C., 52. 15 Morton, “Bringing Virgil,” 158. 16 Dryden, Virgil’s Aeneis, V. 696–707. 17 See Morton, “Bringing Virgil,” 158–60. 18 See Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception, and Morton, John Dryden’s Æneas. 19 Montagu, Letter 33.127; H 340. 20 Charles VI is no Octavian.

Chapter Three

Fencing and the Market in Aristocratic Masculinity ashley l. cohen

During the last four decades of the eighteenth century, fencing ceased to be synonymous with duelling and came into its own as a sport in Britain. Once a symbol of “aristocratic vice,” fencing was reborn as an elite leisure activity that exemplified and actively fostered the ideals associated with the era’s new brand of aristocratic martial masculinity. Nobody played a more important role in fencing’s rehabilitation than Domenico Angiolo Malevolti Tremamondo, or, as he was known in England, Domenico Angelo. The son of a prominent merchant from Leghorn, Italy, Angelo studied the courtly arts of fencing, riding, and ballet in Paris with Europe’s leading masters before settling in London in the mid-1750s.1 There he opened an Academy in Soho Square that put fencing squarely on the map of the fashionable world. Yet Angelo was not without his critics. The same decades that witnessed fencing’s reinvention as an elite sport also witnessed the rapid expansion of the peerage through the creation of new titles and the resuscitation of extinct ones, a development that triggered anxieties about the fungibility of Britain’s nobility. These anxieties were alternately soothed and exacerbated by Angelo’s – and fencing’s – growing public prominence. In his capacity as fencing master to the royal princes, Angelo functioned as a custodian of the ancient courtly arts, a guardian of chivalric tradition entrusted with the sacred task of ensuring its uninterrupted transmission to the next generation of English royalty. But as an entrepreneur who managed a successful business in the form of his Academy, Angelo upended tradition as much as he upheld it. By commodifying the courtly art of fencing and selling it on the marketplace as a skill that could be learned for a fee, Angelo helped to blur the increasingly tenuous line between noble birth and noble breeding. One

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of Angelo’s fencing pupils – the Afro-British celebrity Julius Soubise – became a focal point for this disquietude about the evaporation of the aristocracy’s ancient “aura.”2 Nonetheless, by the close of the eighteenth century, fencing was firmly ensconced in the landscape of commercialized entertainments enjoyed by London’s fashionable elite. Fencing: From Self-Defence to Sport Fencing’s transformation from a form of combat (duelling) to a nonlethal leisure activity is visible in the evolution of fencing manuals. Approximately a dozen fencing manuals written in – or translated into – English were published in England, Ireland, and Scotland over the course of the eighteenth century. The earliest of these were all written by fencing masters who prepared students for serious combat, not for friendly competition.3 Thus, these documents approach fencing as a means of self-defence. For example, The English Fencing Master (1702) views duels as inevitable and thus advises all gentlemen to learn to fence “that they may be able to defend themselves when they are forced to draw.”4 Similarly, Hope’s New Method of Fencing (1714) emphasizes the life-and-death stakes of mastering fencing on its title page, where it enumerates the occasions in the life of a gentleman when a knowledge of fencing becomes a necessity: “for the Defence of his Life upon a just Occasion, or Preservation of his Reputation and Honour, in any Accidental Scuffle, or Trifling Quarrel.”5 Despite the legal condemnation of – and official royal opposition to – duelling, on the one hand, and the predominance of pistols over swords in English duels, on the other, fencing manuals continued to promote the art first and foremost as a means of self-defence.6 For example, in the introduction to his English translation of Monsieur L’Abbat’s The Art of Fencing (1735), Andrew Mahon acknowledges that “the KING has forbid Duels,” but then proceeds to argue for the continued relevance of fencing nonetheless, reasoning that “it must at last be agreed to, that a Man who wears a Sword without knowing how to use it, runs as great a Hazard, and is full as ridiculous, as a Man who carries Books about him without knowing how to read.”7 Even as fencing continued to be associated predominantly with the “aristocratic vice” of duelling, an emergent discourse promoted fencing as a form of exercise and recreation particularly suited to young gentlemen. Although sporting plays no explicit role in the justificatory apparatus of The Art of Fencing, the emergence of fencing as a

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competitive leisure activity can be glimpsed in the book’s final chapter, “Thrusts of Emulation for Prizes, Wagers, &c.,” which lists eight rules for judging and competing in fencing matches, and whose illustrations feature practice foils rather than deadly weapons.8 A decade later a new edition of Hope’s New, Short, and Easy Method of Fencing (1744) similarly invokes duelling and focuses on self-defence – describing the “chief Design” of the book as “the Safety and Preservation of Mens [sic] Honour and Lives” – but at the same time registers the burgeoning popularity of fencing as a leisure activity by including “A Scheme of LAWS (according to the Author’s own Sentiment) to be observed in all Fencing-Schools.”9 Even as the purview of fencing expanded beyond the duel, however, its aristocratic connotations remained intact. Hope’s “LAWS,” for example, include guidelines for decorum: given that “a Fencing-School” is “a place to which Persons of the best Quality do frequently resort,” it is advised that “Cursing and Swearing, and obscene Language” be prohibited, “and that Decorum and Civility [be] observed and paid by the Scholars to one another, as it becomes Gentlemen.”10 Moreover, to the extent that Hope promoted fencing as a sport, he did so exclusively for a gentlemanly audience, characterizing fencing as a “DIVERTING and USEFUL” form of “Moderate Exercise” for “Young Gentlemen” at school.11 In this way, fencing’s elite connotations were preserved during its passage from an art of self defence to a form of recreation. As all this attests, fencing’s reputation was already undergoing a quiet rehabilitation when Domenico Angelo arrived in London sometime around 1755. At first Angelo was known only as a master equestrian. It was in this capacity that he was brought to the attention of George II in 1758 by his first patron, Henry Herbert, the tenth earl of Pembroke.12 A few years later Angelo’s friend, the theatre manager Thomas Sheridan, choreographed his debut as a fencing master in the form of a wellattended match with an Irish challenger held at the Thatched House Tavern in St James’s Street. News of the “ease and grace” with which Angelo defeated his opponent caught the attention of the Princess of Wales, who became his patron and appointed him riding and fencing master to the royal princes.13 Soon he had acquired a devoted following among the English aristocracy, who flocked to his first studio on Leicester Square and later his Academy in Soho Square. Over the next half century Angelo – and later his son, Henry Angelo – built on the momentum generated in the preceding decades to achieve nothing short of a transformation of fencing’s public image.

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Much of Angelo’s success can be attributed to his unique approach to fencing, which is captured in his fencing manual, L’Ecole des Armes (later published in English as The School of Fencing). The first edition of L’Ecole des Armes was funded by a private subscription raised by 236 of Angelo’s present and former pupils, many of them noblemen.14 Almost instantly, the book supplanted all those that had come before it in England.15 It was so successful that a second edition was published in 1765 with parallel English and French texts. “[B]eautifully printed on fine royal paper, with 47 elegant copper-plates,” this edition’s oblong folio size would have made it a literally massive addition to a family library – not to mention an expensive one.16 A subscription cost “only one guinea,” and the book was sold subsequently for no less than 27 shillings.17 The dimensions, price, and language of L’Ecole des Armes make it easy to surmise the demographics of Angelo’s target audience: royal and aristocratic. The book’s dedication to Angelo’s pupils “their Royal Highnesses, the Duke of Gloucester and Prince HenryFrederic” – which essentially functions as an advertisement of his royal patronage – reinforces this impression.18 It is important to understand Angelo’s audience because it deeply informs his approach to fencing, which he promoted as a specifically aristocratic pursuit. In the opening pages of his book Angelo makes a persuasive case for why, in the wake of duelling, fencing still “justly forms part of the education of persons of rank.”19 Instead of emphasizing self-defence, he enumerates a very different set of advantages that follow from the study of fencing: “additional strength of body, proper confidence, grace, activity, and address.”20 In other words, Angelo promoted fencing as a pedagogical vehicle for the embodied (and gendered) performance of rank. Fencing was a means to an end: it was a healthful and entertaining way for the sons of peers to acquire that perfect balance of confidence, grace, and strength that characterized the era’s ideal of martial – but still genteel – masculinity.21 Nowhere is this approach more evident than in Angelo’s astonishingly detailed instructions for “the salute,” which unfold over five pages of text and five accompanying illustrated plates.22 The amount of attention Angelo lavishes on the salute is indicative of his approach to fencing as a noble art. Since the salute is essentially a “civility,” it represents a moment where the art of fencing veers especially close to its roots in the art of courtly etiquette. The five plates illustrating the salute vividly capture the “genteel deportment” and “graceful air,” which, according to Angelo, “are absolutely necessary” for the execution of

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Figure 3.1 “Seconde position du Salut. Plate 11.” from L’Ecole des Armes by Domenico Angelo (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1763), engraving by Charles Hall after James Gwin, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

this manoeuvre (Figure 3.1).23 In fact, the poise and stance of the master fencer in these images are so graceful that they recall the corporeal language of ballet, reminding us that the two courtly arts shared a fundamental movement vocabulary – and, indeed, that Angelo studied and taught them both (Figure 3.2).24 Angelo’s instructions are revealing in another way. Since the salute is a ceremonial gesture offered to the audience and one’s opponent at the commencement of a fencing bout or match, Angelo’s unprecedentedly detailed instructions can be taken as a measure of the rise of fencing as a competitive spectator sport in London, a development I discuss in more detail below. The forty-seven

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Figure 3.2 “Signore Vestris Senr. in the character of the Prince in the grand pantomime [sic] ballet (call’d) Ninnette à la Cour,” published for Bell’s British Theatre (London, 1781), engraving by J. Thornthwaite from drawing by James Roberts. From The New York Public Library.

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copper plate illustrations made for L’Ecole des Armes similarly signal the book’s approach to fencing as a sport, rather than a life-saving skill. Whereas the illustrations in manuals like The English Fencing Master and The Gentleman’s Tutor for the Small-Sword (1730) use a punctured body and gushing blood to figure the successful execution of a manoeuvre, the copper plates in L’Ecole des Armes feature practice foils. The capped points of the weapons are patent indications that these foils are of the harmless variety used in competition and recreational play. Carlisle House: Fencing and the Fashionable World All of the elements of Angelo’s unique approach to fencing outlined in L’Ecole des Armes were put into practice at his Academy at Carlisle House in Soho Square. The Academy opened its doors in 1763, the same year as the publication of L’Ecole des Armes. Funds raised by subscription allowed Angelo to build a Riding House and stabling behind the house. Equestrian lessons, stabling, and even discreet horse dealing represented an important – perhaps even a primary – revenue stream for Carlisle House for the next two decades.25 But Carlisle House was much more than just a fencing and riding academy, and therein lay the secret of Angelo’s success. In keeping with the philosophy of fencing outlined in L’Ecole des Armes, Carlisle House provided students with an arena of manly, elite sociability where they could translate their abstract lessons in gentlemanly deportment into concrete practice.26 Henry Angelo expounds upon this aspect of his father’s establishment in his memoirs: Garrick, the elder Colman, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many illustrious foreigners also, were constant visitors at the house; hence the pupils had the advantage of conversing in many living languages, and acquiring that general knowledge of society, which no other house perhaps could afford. Indeed it was considered a school of politeness, and the best to rub off that shyness of habit, so common to youth from sixteen to eighteen, on quitting their studies, either in a public or private school, and an useful and agreeable probation, previously to entering either of the universities, or commencing their travels.27

By Henry Angelo’s description, Carlisle House was a veritable finishing school for the sons of peers. This is no doubt why Domenico Angelo’s fencing lessons were so effective in teaching “proper confidence” and “address”: Carlisle House provided a supplementary classroom for

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these lessons. The house served as a sort of safe space in which young men of rank could rehearse and perfect various practices of aristocratic sociability prior to their more public debuts at university or on the grand tour. The experience for those students who boarded at Carlisle House must have been especially immersive. “Such Gentlemen as shall chuse to board and lodge” were welcome at Carlisle House beginning in November 1764.28 The considerable fees for this option (“100 Guineas per Annum”) included lessons in fencing and riding; and Angelo also retained a French tutor to facilitate his lodgers’ ongoing studies in “living languages.”29 The lively atmosphere that must have prevailed at Carlisle House is captured in Henry Angelo’s description of the celebrities who formed its “constant visitors.” One can imagine that Garrick, Colman, and Reynolds provided lodgers with abundant opportunities to practise the art of witty conversation, and master the feigned spontaneity of bon mots. Indeed, a rather ominous stipulation added to Angelo’s standard advertisement in 1775 may be taken as a measure of the spirit of conviviality that prevailed at Carlisle House: “Gentlemen to find their own wine.”30 Although Angelo dealt in ancient, pre-capitalist courtly arts, his business was thoroughly commercialized – not to mention profitable. Fees for fencing were two guineas “Entrance” and “two Guineas per Month, for 12 Lessons.”31 Fees for riding were three Guineas “Entrance” and “three Guineas per Month, for 16 Lessons.”32 When liquid cash was needed, discounted subscriptions were sometimes offered. For example, in 1779 a subscription costing 15 guineas entitled subscribers to “a year’s instruction in the exercise of horsemanship” (with lessons given three times weekly) and the added “advantage” of having “one horse broken for a lady, or the road.”33 Even at this relatively discounted rate, fees were still steep at Carlisle House. Yet such expensive rates catered perfectly to Angelo’s aristocratic clientele, since they guaranteed his establishment’s exclusivity.34 All this made for a very profitable business. At its height, Carlisle House purportedly earned Angelo an income of £4,000 per annum.35 From 1767 to 1779, dancing lessons were also included in the cost of boarding at Carlisle House.36 Dancing may seem like an odd addition but it was, in fact, in perfect harmony with the aristocratic tenor of Angelo’s Academy, since it completed the traditional triad of the courtly arts.37 Angelo himself was trained in this triad in Europe, where, in addition to studying fencing and equestrian arts with the Continent’s finest masters (Teillagory and Monsieur de la Guerinière, respectively),

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he also studied dancing with the Paris Opéra’s ballet master, Gaetan Balthasar Vestris (pictured in Figure 3.2).38 However, dancing suffered a hard fate at Carlisle House when the tenor of elite masculinity turned towards a more martial ideal during the 1770s in response to the fiasco of the American War – and the crisis in aristocratic leadership it generated – and Angelo’s offerings shifted accordingly.39 In 1779 dancing was dropped from the list of lessons offered to boarders in Angelo’s advertisements, and replaced with a more martial offering: “military exercise.”40 Nonetheless, even as fashions changed, the fundamental pedagogical mission of Angelo’s Academy remained the same. Carlisle House was always, first and foremost, “a school of politeness.” The condition of possibility for the fulfilment of this pedagogical mission was Angelo’s own position in the fashionable world. Royal and aristocratic patronage opened the doors of the beau monde to Angelo, and he both announced and consolidated his arrival there by choosing to base his operations at Carlisle House in Soho Square. Such a fashionable address must have cost a small fortune to lease. But the investment was no doubt worthwhile since it placed Angelo at the centre of “the Town,” and thereby allowed him to live in close proximity to his pupils, not to mention in a commercialized simulacrum of their lifestyles.41 The precise niche that Angelo filled in the ecosystem of the beau monde requires systematic discussion. Angelo was a leading member of what I will call “the sociable service elite.” These were the professional men and women of bourgeois (and sometimes lower) origins who socialized with the aristocracy not as equals in rank or fortune, but rather because they rendered peers and their families some service. Painters and musicians offered concrete billable services like portraits and concerts. Angelo, who was not himself of noble birth, taught those who were how to acquire the “body techniques” associated with their inherited rank.42 Other members of the sociable service elite dealt in less tangible services. Actors, playwrights, intellectuals, and celebrities offered nothing more or less than the pleasure and prestige of witty and consummately cultured company. They traded, in other words, in sociability. As Henry Angelo’s above-quoted description indicates, Carlisle House became a gathering place for members of what I am calling the sociable service elite. At Carlisle House the artists and intellectuals of the sociable service elite came together to enjoy each other’s company, sometimes in the presence of aristocratic patrons, at other times not. The Carlisle House clique contained a veritable roster of cultural icons. Regular

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visitors included actors, dancers, playwrights, musicians, composers, painters, politicians, and celebrities, including – to name just a few – David Garrick and his wife Eva Marie Veigel, Thomas Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his wife the soprano Elizabeth Ann Linley, Samuel Foote, George Colman the Elder, John Bannister, Johann Christian Bach, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Benjamin West, George Stubbs, David Morier, Richard Brompton, Frederick Prince of Wales, John Wilkes, John Horne Tooke, and the Chevalier d’Eon.43 In this context we can begin to appreciate the atmosphere in which Angelo’s young pupils honed their manners and social prowess. All of these cultural luminaries were de facto instructors in Angelo’s “school of politeness.” While Carlisle House represents an extraordinary late-Georgian social institution – and one that certainly deserves more scholarly attention – it would be a mistake to consider it wholly unique. In fact, Angelo borrowed many pages from the playbook of one of his neighbours in Soho Square – who was, perhaps not coincidentally, also an Italian transplant – the famous Teresa Cornelys, whose own Carlisle House sat opposite Angelo’s. As Gillian Russell argues in her groundbreaking Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, Cornelys was a visionary entrepreneur who transformed the social life of London’s elites by commercializing long-established forms of “domiciliary sociability” like visiting, card playing, and “private” assemblies.44 Prior to 1760 these activities were already staples in the social routines of aristocratic and upper-class women; but Cornelys broke new ground by monetizing them at her simulacrum “House” on Soho Square. Within just a few years of its opening (in November 1760) Carlisle House became synonymous with a revolution in fashionable sociability. The vanguard of this revolution were the aristocratic women whom Cornelys empowered to sell tickets to her events, a distribution system that ensured the exclusivity of her gatherings and made Carlisle House a distinctly “feminine cultural space.”45 Without making the comparison too strict, we might see Angelo’s Carlisle House as a masculine counterpart to Cornelys’s establishment across the square. This was no coincidence: it seems likely that Angelo took inspiration from Cornelys in designing his own enterprise. Cornelys’s celebrity must have been one of the factors that drew Angelo to Soho Square, since his neighbour had already firmly established the location’s prominence on the map of the fashionable world. In other ways, too, Angelo seems to have tried to ride on the coattails of

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Cornelys’s success. More often than not his Academy’s weekly newspaper advertisement was printed in close proximity on the page to Cornelys’s announcements. Such positioning visually announced the propinquity – in place and spirit – of Angelo and Cornelys’s operations. In place of the female-led, late-night entertainments that Cornelys hosted at her Carlisle House, Angelo offered a slate of gentlemanly daytime recreational activities. Angelo also resembled – and once again very likely imitated – Cornelys in the way in which he positioned himself vis-à-vis the fashionable world’s other prominent venues of entertainment and sociability. For example, he played Cornelys’s customary part – that of the fashionable host(ess) – when he occasionally served as the master of ceremonies at her competitor, the Pantheon. And, like Cornelys, Angelo was also drawn to another shining hub of the fashionable world, the Opera. In 1781, a decade after Cornelys tried and failed (with disastrous consequences) to stage an opera at Carlisle House, Angelo closed his Riding Academy “to assist in the conduct and management of the Opera-House.”46 Given that his duties at the Opera House seemed to have little to do with the action onstage – and instead consisted principally in managing the King’s Theatre’s “New Assembly Room,” and the post-opera entertainments and subscription balls held therein – Angelo’s new career brought him closer to the territory of Teresa Cornelys than ever before.47 In some respects, this career trajectory was influenced by Angelo’s past. Angelo’s time studying ballet at the Paris Opéra meant that he was familiar with the opera world; and one of his close friends in London was the Opera House’s maître de ballet, Monsieur Petro.48 But Angelo’s involvement with opera in London also testifies to the nexus between domiciliary sociability, fashion, and theatre identified by Russell. This becomes even clearer when we consider that Angelo also maintained strong ties with London’s theatrical community. He was, in fact, originally brought to the city by the actress Peg Woffington (a former lover of David Garrick), with whom he had kindled a romance in Paris; and he maintained many friends at Drury Lane and Covent Garden after their breakup, as Henry Angelo’s list of Carlisle House regulars indicates.49 Such is the story of Domenico Angelo’s arrival and ascendance in the fashionable world. His success can only be explained in the context of broader developments in London’s social landscape, developments from which he benefited and to which he contributed in turn. Angelo arrived in London at a time of tremendous cultural upheaval and change. It is no coincidence that he opened his Academy in 1763,

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the year that the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the Seven Years’ War. In the wake of the war, London’s social landscape was radically transformed by the forces of capitalism and commercialization.50 In part because of Angelo’s influence, and in part because of his timing, fencing’s rebirth as a sport took place within the context of this brave new world of commercialized sociability and recreation. This context was largely responsible for Angelo’s unprecedented and unparalleled success as a fencing impresario. However, it also gave rise to some serious misgivings about Angelo’s Academy, and fencing’s newfound popularity. After all, by marketing the courtly arts on a pay-per-fee basis, Angelo made them available to a non-aristocratic clientele. At a time of unprecedented social mobility, when the nation’s traditional socioeconomic hierarchy seemed to be crumbling under the weight of new money accumulated in the colonies and through wartime profiteering, Angelo’s business model gave rise to serious misgivings. These misgivings are the subject of the next section. Julius Soubise and the Performance of Aristocratic Masculinity Julius Soubise was born in Saint Kitts to a white planter father and a mother of African descent whose identities both remain unknown. In 1764, at the age of about ten, he was sent to England under the ownership or guardianship of a Royal Navy captain.51 When his precocity and intelligence charmed Catherine (Hyde) Douglas, Duchess of Queensberry, Soubise was given over to her care. It is unclear whether Soubise entered the duchess’s household as a servant, an ornamental “pet slave,” or as an orphaned ward, but it is certain that by 1767 he was enjoying a genteel education that included the courtly arts of fencing, ballet, and riding, which he seems to have studied under Domenico Angelo’s instruction. Sometime in the late 1760s or early 1770s, Soubise was sent to live at Carlisle House in the capacity of Angelo’s assistant. During this time he began to teach pupils fencing and riding at Eton and other public schools. At first, Soubise maintained a relatively low profile. But sometime between 1771 and 1772 this suddenly changed, and Soubise began to make his mark on the ton.52 Now he attended the Opera and patent theatres, frequented masquerades at Vauxhall and the Pantheon, joined many fashionable clubs, paraded through Hyde Park and Windsor in a liveried carriage reportedly given to him by the duchess for his use, and even kept an apartment where he entertained female guests. Suddenly, Soubise was to be found everywhere about the town, and

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everywhere he went his foppish macaroni dress, flamboyant manners, and extravagant spending habits conspired with his colour to make him a veritable sensation. In the understated words of Henry Angelo, he “made a figure.”53 As a man of no birth and African slave origins who had achieved a flawless noble mien and taught the courtly arts of fencing and riding, Julius Soubise proved a potent focal point for growing disquietude about the seeming evaporation of class distinctions in an era that witnessed unprecedented levels of social mobility as well as the rapid expansion of the peerage.54 It would be difficult to overemphasize the misgivings of Britain’s upper classes on this point. As Russell has observed, during the 1770s “miscegenation of rank” was “a prospect as appalling as racial miscegenation” to British elites.55 In this context, Soubise is an illuminating figure, even though his life story was, of course, something of an anomaly. The anxieties that crystallized around Soubise’s race were also, in part, a response to the seeming fungibility of Britain’s upper classes in the decade following the Seven Years’ War. If a black man could master the kind of aristocratic mien suited to the rakish son of a duchess, how could the greater aristocracy possibly retain its mystique of exclusivity? Responses to Soubise’s race cannot – and should not – be reduced to a matter of class, but they are nonetheless symptomatic of anxieties about class that permeated metropolitan life and discourse during this period. Since the little scholarship that has been written about Soubise focuses largely on his relationship with the Duchess of Queensbury, Domenico Angelo’s role in his life has been overlooked.56 As a result, the importance of fencing to Soubise’s self-presentation and his public image has yet to be appreciated. In fact, the courtly arts of fencing, riding, and ballet were all crucial to Soubise’s self-stylization as a “Black Prince.”57 For example, in a particularly illuminating excerpt from his memoirs, Henry Angelo recalls seeing Soubise integrate a series of ballet steps into the routine polite gesture of “presenting a chair to a lady”: “I remember seeing him, when presenting a chair to a lady, if from some distance, make three pauses, pushing it along some feet each time, skipping with an entre-chat en avant, then a pirouette when placed.”58 In this remarkable passage, we can see that a hyper-stylized performance of courtly, aristocratic masculinity was central to Soubise’s self-presentation. When we recall that fencing and ballet shared the same fundamental movement vocabulary – whose origins lay in an aestheticization of the etiquette observed in Louis XIV’s court – we

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can begin to appreciate how important Soubise’s fencing training must have been to his embodied public persona.59 No doubt for this very reason, fencing was also central to the public criticism directed against Soubise, and against the duchess for providing him with what his critics saw as an inappropriate education. For example, in an oft-quoted diary entry, Lady Mary Coke concedes that “her Grace judged right” in teaching Soubise “everything he had a mind to learn,” except in the case of the courtly arts: “but when She told me he learnt to ride & fence, I cou’d not help thinking those exercises too much above his condition to be useful, & wou’d only serve to give him expectations that cou’d not be answer’d.”60 Lady Mary Coke’s objections here have as much to do with Soubise’s “condition” – that is his station, or class – as they do with his race. In this sense, her disapprobation might extend well beyond Soubise. After all, Soubise was hardly the only non-aristocratic pupil enrolled at Domenico Angelo’s Academy. Angelo’s business model was to impart a gentlemanly education to whomever could afford to pay for one; and in this sense his Academy represented a mechanism of upward mobility. It is true that Angelo taught ten Hanoverian princes how to fence and ride like royalty, but it is no less true that he taught Julius Soubise how to do so as well. Angelo is thus implicated in what is perhaps the most well-known public attack on Soubise: a satirical cartoon published in 1773 that pictures him fencing with the Duchess of Queensbury (Plate 3). Much has been written about this cartoon in recent years, and various layers of its satire have been excavated, most having to do with Soubise’s race and its implied polluting effect on the duchess (via the fencing mask that darkens her face).61 However, the significance of the central activity of the cartoon – fencing – has not been fully appreciated. Fencing is certainly the vehicle for the cartoon’s barely concealed sexual innuendo, and thus its attack on the duchess’s reputation, as scholars have noted. But it would be a mistake to read the cartoon’s use of fencing as merely allegorical, or to assume that the duchess is the cartoon’s only target. In fact, the cartoon also implicates Domenico Angelo. Only a passing glance is needed to see that the cartoon is a spoof of one of the illustrations from L’Ecole des Armes. A closer look shows that the cartoon nearly exactly reproduces (except, of course, for the dress and countenances of the fencers) Plate 5, “Position pour la garde en tierce et le coup de tierce” (Plate 2). Since Angelo served as a model for all of his book’s illustrations, he too is present, and implicated, in the cartoon’s

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satire. The cartoon’s motto lambasting the duchess for “Expending near 10000 to make him [Soubise] a – ” implicates Angelo as well. The duchess may have spent a small fortune trying to make “Her favorite Lap Dog” Soubise “answer” – both her call and her purposes – by making him a gentleman, but Angelo is equally guilty for having earned a small fortune in this pursuit. In other words, part of what is under attack in this cartoon is the whole economy of class aspiration; and this critique extends well beyond the cartoon’s crude personal references to Soubise and the duchess. In spoofing Angelo’s fencing manual by replacing the handsome models of his illustrations with a racial caricature and a woman, the cartoon takes aim at the heart of Angelo’s philosophy and business model: the idea that fencing lessons have the power to transform his pupils – whoever they might be – into gentlemen. In some sense, then, the ultimate target of the cartoon is neither Soubise nor the Duchess of Queensbury, nor even Angelo, but the market economy in which the trappings of rank could be indiscriminately bought and sold.62 Like Lady Mary Coke’s journal entry, the satirical cartoon flags the danger of instructing Soubise in fencing at the same time that it rejects the possibility that any such training could ever make Soubise a gentleman. The cartoon’s grotesque rendering of Soubise’s physiognomy implies that his race is immutable, and immutably opposed to the noble mien he cultivated so assiduously. Yet however much the cartoon works to soothe the anxieties it raises, its preoccupations are nonetheless symptomatic. The real danger of Soubise’s elected pursuits far exceed the relatively trivial question of whether he, personally, would or would not maintain his foothold among the fashionable elite. Soubise’s fencing career provoked so much anxiety because his mastery of this consummately aristocratic art unmasked the performative nature of aristocratic martial masculinity. The very ease and seamlessness with which Soubise – a man of no birth and black skin – inhabited the corporeal habitus of rank revealed rank to be a learned performance. This was the real threat that Soubise, and to some extent Angelo’s Academy, posed to the late Georgian social order. Carlisle House long outlasted the momentary furor raised by the celebrity of Angelo’s “black assistant” Soubise.63 Soubise’s career in London, on the other hand, was not so long-lived. In July 1777, when Soubise was only twenty-three years old, the duchess’s death robbed him of a protector just when he needed one most. Facing an impending avalanche of debts and a rape allegation, Soubise boarded the Bessborough East Indiaman, bound for Madras. For the next two decades, until

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his death in 1798, he lived in India, for the most part in Calcutta. Eking out a living outside of the beau monde proved difficult for Soubise. But to the extent that he did meet with professional success it was owing to Angelo. For Soubise essentially reproduced Angelo’s business model in Calcutta, where he taught fencing lessons and operated a manège that traded in gentility as much as it did in horses. In Calcutta Soubise made a career out of his aristocratic education by teaching the city’s middling – but class-aspirational – whites how to act like gentlemen. This business model could hardly be advertised in clearer terms than in a newspaper puff that was printed in the Calcutta Chronicle in 1788. Since the piece was in all likelihood printed at Soubise’s expense, it is fair to read it as an act of self-fashioning: Yesterday morning, early, the manly exercise of horse-manship was practiced at the Menage, by the scholars of Mr. Soubise, before a very numerous assembly. After the practice was over, near two hundred of the principal people of the settlement sat down to an elegant breakfast provided on the occasion. Breakfast being over, a ball was given, and the ladies and gentlemen were so highly delighted, that it was not without evident signs of regret, they relinquished such a pleasing and health-giving source of amusement …64

Riding, and particularly hunting, were popular pursuits among Calcutta’s upwardly mobile but decidedly middling European population, in part because these pastimes represented a grade of polite leisure culture that would have been foreclosed to them in Britain. In this context we can begin to see that Soubise’s business was essentially to trade, in equal parts, in class training and class fantasy. In this respect, his manège taught much more than just horsemanship: it offered an education in – as well as the opportunity to take part in a simulative performance of – English gentility.65 This is especially evident in the description of the entertainment that followed the scholars’ display of their equestrian learning, which recalls the salon-like atmosphere of Carlisle House. Like his mentor, Angelo, Soubise combined instruction in gentlemanly arts with the opportunity to practise genteel sociability: in this case, in the form of “an elegant breakfast” and “a ball.” Finally, the gendered dimensions of this class training hardly need explication. The “ladies” present provide an audience for this performance of elite masculinity, and turn the whole affair into an exercise in the kind of heterosexual sociability practised at polite gatherings like assemblies.

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Meanwhile, riding is a “manly exercise” that, like fencing, epitomizes aristocratic masculinity – or, in this case, the somewhat less elite ideal of the country squire. Fencing as a Fashionable Spectator Sport In the 1780s and 1790s the rising popularity of amateur and competitive fencing matches cemented the sport’s position in the leisure economy of the fashionable world. Fencing’s rise as a fashionable spectator sport was presided over largely by Henry Angelo, who succeeded to his father’s position as London’s premiere fencing master when the latter eased into retirement. This period may be termed the “second wave” of fencing’s popularity. Its distinct features vis-à-vis the first wave of fencing in England can be measured in the differences between the business models of father and son. Whereas Domenico Angelo focused most of his business on instruction, Henry Angelo expanded his operation to include recreational matches between amateur fencers, as well as ticketed competitions featuring continental masters. Moreover, while Domenico Angelo sought a second revenue stream in equestrian lessons and stabling, his son focused all of his energies on fencing. Finally, Henry Angelo catered to a more diverse – that is, a less exclusively aristocratic – clientele. Despite these differences, one crucial thing remained the same: Henry Angelo fostered the “club”-like atmosphere pioneered by his father, making his establishment a site of sociability as well as recreation.66 The growing popularity of fencing as an amateur recreational sport is visible in the advertisements that announced the opening of Henry Angelo’s “Fencing Academy” in 1784. The Academy’s location in the “Great Room over the entrance of the Opera-house, Hay-market” no doubt reflected his father’s involvement with the King’s Theatre, as well as his own desire to base his enterprise in a location already established on the map of the fashionable world.67 In a detailed advertisement published in various London papers, Angelo outlined an operation that departed from Carlisle House in significant ways. In addition to offering instruction in fencing, the Academy also functioned in the manner of a modernday fencing club. On “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from twelve to three,” gentlemen are invited to attend the Academy “either as Fencers or Spectators, particularly on the Wednesdays, which day he means principally to appropriate to assaults,” or bouts.68 This plan is revealing, in that it implies a critical mass of amateur fencers eager to participate

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in recreational play. This impression is further strengthened by Angelo’s allusion to “a Plan at his Academy” specifically designed for “Amateurs of Fencing, who would not chuse to be considered as Scholars, but are desirous of an opportunity to practice only.” This plan was apparently popular enough that Angelo expanded it when he opened a new Fencing room in Bolton Street, Piccadilly, after the Opera house was destroyed in a fire in 1789. In 1791 Angelo advertised terms for “the Amateurs who have acquired some knowledge in the Art, and are desirous of practicing only.”69 By “subscribing for the Season,” such “Gentlemen” would be “entitled to the use of the Academy on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from Twelve till Three o’Clock, where they will have an opportunity of improving themselves by ASSAULTS with different Fencers.” The existence of a community of amateur fencers eager to fence bouts on a weekly basis may be taken as a testament of Domenico Angelo’s success in popularizing the sport. He had trained a generation of young men in the art of fencing and it was up to his son to provide these men with a venue where they could enjoy practising this pastime as adults. The first major milestone in fencing’s evolution as a spectator sport in London was a “Trial of skill” held at Carlisle House in 1770 between the London fencing master Monsieur Rheda and “Mr. Doyer, an Irish gentleman, who came from Dublin on purpose to decide this feat of arms.”70 According to newspaper accounts, “Wagers to the amount of 3000l.” were bet on the match. However, such events did not become a regular part of London’s entertainment landscape until the end of the decade. Indeed, it is instructive that the match between Rheda and Doyer is described as a “Trial of skill” instead of an “assault,” the terminology that would later become standard for describing friendly sporting bouts (as opposed to duels). A watershed moment in the popularity – and public print-culture prominence – of competitive fencing occurred in 1778, when a series of “public assaults” took place at the above-mentioned “Mr. Rheda’s Academy” between Monsieur L’Abadie and Monsieur Le Piere, who were described in the press as “two foreign professors” of the art. Although Domenico Angelo did not organize these matches, he was twice called upon by “the desire of the whole assembly” to play the part of referee and “determine any thrusts that might be disputed between the judges,” a request that testifies to his reputation as an unrivalled authority and the public face of fencing in London.71 The popularity of the first of these matches prompted Mr Rheda to limit “the number of tickets” to the second match, held two weeks later, “to avoid confusion.”72 Priced at a guinea apiece, it is significant that enough tickets were sold to make

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this step necessary. Rheda justified steep ticket prices in his advertisements for the second assault by describing the improvements he was making in anticipation of it: “galleries constructed around the room, that every spectator may be agreeably seated and have a perfect view of the combat.”73 Of course, a high entrance fee also guaranteed the exclusivity favoured by the nobility and gentry who constituted fencing’s primary practitioners and fans. The extensive coverage of these matches in the press represents the first time that fencing was reported on as a modern competitive sport in England. This reportage was published under the heading “FENCING INTELLIGENCE,” a rubric that reflects Domenico Angelo’s legacy, and the kinship he helped establish between fencing and other fashionable entertainments, such as the theatre, masquerade, and opera, all of which commanded their own “INTELLIGENCE” columns.74 Much like Henry Angelo’s subscription plan for amateur fencers, the press coverage of these matches testifies to the existence of a significant community of fencing aficionados who could appreciate detailed and technical descriptions of fencing matches. One column even listed point scores for touches in the format of other modern scored sporting events.75 After the groundbreaking matches between L’Abadie and Le Piere, fencing matches became a regular – albeit a relatively infrequent – form of fashionable entertainment in London. As was true of fencing scholars, fencing audiences also tended to be elite, and fencing matches were exclusive accordingly. Following the trend for “private” assemblies that took hold among aristocratic circles around the turn of the century, fencing began to be featured at private, domiciliary entertainments.76 For example, in 1787 the Prince of Wales, who was a long-term friend of Henry Angelo, held a series of “private Assault[s]” at his London residence, Carlton House. The featured opponents at these events were Monsieur Fabian, described in the press as “a celebrated Professor of the Fencing Science,” and the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, an Afro-French composer who was regarded by his contemporaries as the undisputed best fencer in Europe.77 After this main event, on both occasions, Henry Angelo then fenced a Monsieur Mogé, and the former was judged to “hold the second place to St. George” in terms of skill. At the second match, the Chevalier d’Éon, who was biologically male at birth but who was then living as the “Mademoiselle D’Eon” spontaneously challenged St George to a match, but even though she “play’d loose,” perhaps in a comic fashion, St George’s “skill was still uppermost.”78 In keeping with the reportage of fashionable “private” entertainments – such as

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the Richmond House private theatricals, which are advertised directly above the description of the first Carlton House match in the St. James’s Chronicle – the names of illustrious guests are recorded. On this occasion, the event seems to have been geared towards fencing enthusiasts, since the only guests mentioned besides the competitors are “the elder Angelo,” “the Duke de Lausun,” “and a few Amateurs.”79 Like the L’Abadie and Le Piere matches, the Carlton House matches represent a milestone in the history of fencing as a sport, since they seem to be the first time that fencing masks were worn during competition.80 The matches also testify to how completely fencing’s reputation was transformed over the course of the century. The Morning Herald’s reporting on the Carlton House match was placed in the same vertical column as a paragraph praising the Prince of Wales for his abstention from the Newmarket races, “a proof of forbearance unexampled in the history of Princes,” and one sure to increase the “national affection” for him.81 Once a symbol of aristocratic vice, fencing was now held up as a (rare) sign of the prince’s virtue. Less expensive, more health-giving, and far more virtuous than gambling, fencing epitomized the renovated reputation that would carry the aristocracy as a ruling class through the next century. This seems to have been true of other elite sports as well, perhaps reflecting a larger shift in the place of sports in British society and culture. Likewise, if fencing once represented uncharted territory for commercialized entertainment, it was now an accepted, and even lauded, addition to London’s slate of seasonal amusements. Domenico Angelo may have begun his career riding the coattails of Teresa Cornelys, but she ended hers by borrowing a page from his playbook when she tried to capitalize on the vogue for elite sports by laying out grounds “in a very superior stile as a female archery.”82 Archery may have proved an insufficient vehicle for the rehabilitation of Cornelys’s finances and reputation, but fencing kept the Angelo dynasty afloat for generations to come. Conclusion Despite the abundance of scholarly literature on duelling, virtually no scholarship exists on the history of fencing as a sport in eighteenthcentury Britain. As I have tried to show, this lacuna deserves to be filled. The history of recreational and competitive fencing has much to tell us about the histories of masculinity, sociability, manners, and sports. While I have tried to touch upon some of the main points, much work remains to be done.

86 Ashley L. Cohen NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25

Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 192. Benjamin, The Work of Art. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 187. Blackwell, The English Fencing-Master, 49. Hope, Hope’s New Method, ii. Andrew, “The Code of Honour and Its Critics”; Andrew, Aristocratic Vice; and Banks, “Killing with Courtesy.” Labat, The Art of Fencing, 129–30. Labat, The Art of Fencing, 134. Hope, New, Short, and Easy Method, vi, 233. The rules for foil competition appeared in print for the first time in any language in Hope’s 1692 Fencing Master’s Advice to his Scholar. See Fare, “Hope, Sir William, first baronet (1664–1729).” Hope, New, Short, and Easy Method, 233. Italics in original. Hope, New, Short, and Easy Method, 265. Italics in original. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 193. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 193. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 194. Although its authority on the Continent was more contested, it was still excerpted in Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Ibid. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London, England), Thursday, 9 May 1765. Public Advertiser (London, England), Monday, 23 April 1764; issue 9198. All quotes are from the English edition. Angelo, The School of Fencing, iii. Angelo, The School of Fencing, v. Angelo, The School of Fencing, v. For the rise of martial masculinity, see O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis, esp. 243–301; and Russell, The Theatres of War. For more general overviews of masculinity in this period, see Michèle Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man”; Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society; and Robert W. Jones, Literature, Gender and Politics. Angelo, The School of Fencing, 17–21. Angelo, The School of Fencing, 17. Early French ballet manuals also include instructions on etiquette, for example how to remove one’s hat. See Homans, Apollo’s Angels, 20–1, 25–6. Public Advertiser (London, England), Friday, 18 February 1763; issue 8829; Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 198.

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26 For “sociability” as a keyword for eighteenth-century studies, see Russell, Women, Sociability and Theater; and Russell and Tuite, Romantic Sociability. See also Clark, British Clubs and Societies; and Paul Langford, “Manners and the Eighteenth-Century State.” 27 Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, 1:104. 28 Lloyd’s Evening Post (London, England), 21 November 1764–23 November 1764; issue 1150. 29 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London, England), Saturday, 20 June 1767; issue 11 948. 30 London Evening Post. 11 February 1775. 31 Lloyd’s Evening Post (London, England), 21 November 1764–23 November 1764; issue 1150. 32 Lloyd’s Evening Post (London, England), 21 November 1764–23 November 1764; issue 1150. 33 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Friday, 24 September 1779; issue 2167. 34 The same was true for the archery clubs that sprung up in England during the late Georgian and Regency periods. See Troost, “Archery in the Long Eighteenth Century,” 108. 35 Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 198. 36 Lloyd’s Evening Post (London, England), 21 November 1764–23 November 1764; issue 1150. 37 Homans, Apollo’s Angels, 16. 38 Malcolm Fare, “Angelo, Domenico (1717–1802),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition, 2004). 39 On martial masculinity, see note 21. For the crisis in aristocratic leadership, see Andrew, Aristocratic Vice; Bayly, Imperial Meridian; Cannon, Aristocratic Century; Ashley L. Cohen, “The Aristocratic Imperialists”; Linda Colley, Britons; Linda Colley, “The Apotheosis of George III”; Harling, The Waning of “Old Corruption”; O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis; Wilson, The Sense of the People, 178–95. It is worth noting that the century’s progression towards a more martial masculine ideal is visible in the trajectory of Henry Angelo’s career. In a departure from his father’s business model, he wrote his own fencing manual for a military audience, and advertised his Academy specifically for military men. He was also fencing master to the Light Horse Volunteers of London. The only fencing books published in eighteenth-century Britain after The School of Fencing were both written for military audiences: Henry Angelo, Hungarian & Highland Broad Swords; Lonnergan, The Fencer’s Guide; McArthur, The army and navy gentleman’s companion, or a new and complete treatise on the theory and practice of fencing.

88 Ashley L. Cohen 40 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Friday, 24 September 1779; issue 2167. 41 Greig, The Beau Monde, 8–11. 42 The concept of “habitus” is also useful here. Mauss, “Techniques of the Body”; Elias, The History of Manners; Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. 43 Henry Angelo, Angelo’s Pic Nic; Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo; Kelly, Mr. Foote’s Other Leg, 93, 171, 219, 250. 44 My account of Cornelys draws heavily from Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgia London, 17–21. See also Summers, Empress of Pleasure. 45 Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgia London, 21. 46 Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgia London, 54–7; Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Monday, 15 April 1782; issue 455. Angelo continued to teach fencing lessons at his house, as well as at Eton and Harrow schools, for years to come. He took on Prince William as a pupil in 1789. 47 Public Advertiser (London, England), Saturday, 8 February 1783; issue 15194; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (London, England), Friday, 14 February 1783; issue 4289; Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Thursday, 30 January 1783; issue 704. 48 Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, 1:134. 49 Fare, “Angelo, Domenico (1717–1802),” ODNB. 50 See Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War; and Koehn, The Power of Commerce. 51 The following details of Soubise’s life have been pieced together from Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo; Angelo, Angelo’s Pic Nic; Vincent Carretta, “Soubise, Julius (c.1754–1798)”; Coke, The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, 1:194–5; Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 27–70. 52 This date is approximated from Nocturnal Revels, 1:210. 53 Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, 1:215. 54 George III greatly enlarged the peerage through the creation of new titles and the resurrection of extinct ones. This expansion was in part a political exigency tied to imperial expansion: the king needed new peers in order to consolidate his influence over ministers and tighten the Crown’s hold on colonial governance, which was severely shaken by the consecutive debacles of the American War and Fox’s India Bill. Expanding the peerage was also a way to absorb the newly rich into the nation’s established socio-political order, and thus to prevent them from posing a threat to it. By 1800, only 6 per cent of peerages were older than 200 years. Whereas the number of peers rose by thirty from 1710 to 1770, and fell by eight

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57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

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from 1770 to 1780, it rose by seventy-eight between 1780 and 1800. See Cannon, Aristocratic Century, 15–17; Lowe, “George III, Peerage Creations and Politics.” Russell, “An ‘entertainment of oddities’: Fashionable Sociability and the Pacific in the 1770s,” 67. Soubise may have been associated more with Angelo than with the duchess in the minds of some of his contemporaries. A 1789 news item identifies him as “the black assistant, some years since, at Mr. Angelo’s Academy,” and makes no mention of the duchess. Argus (London, England), Tuesday, 29 December 1789; issue 244. Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, 1:452 Angelo, Angelo’s Pic Nic, 61. Homans, Apollo’s Angels, 16–26. Coke, The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, 1:194–5. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human, 8. Another satire of this market economy can be found in Samuel Foote’s 1765 play The Commissary, in which a newly enriched wartime profiteer tries to acquire the polish of a gentleman by taking lessons in elocution, dancing, music, and fencing. Argus (London, England), Tuesday, 29 December 1789; issue 244. Calcutta Chronicle, 11 December 1788. Horsemanship was as powerful a signifier of elite masculinity as fencing. See Landry, Noble Brutes, 3, 16, 35, 48–9; Edwards, Enekel, and Graham, The Horse as Cultural Icon, 5–11; Allen, Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, 189–94. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 209. Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Tuesday, 9 March 1784; issue 1050. Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Tuesday, 9 March 1784; issue 1050. Morning Chronicle (London, England), Wednesday, 26 January 1791; issue 6751. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London, England), Tuesday, 20 March 1770; issue 12 808. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Thursday, 5 March 1778; issue 1676. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Monday, 16 March 1778; issue 1685. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Monday, 16 March 1778; issue 1685.

90 Ashley L. Cohen 74 O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis, 13; Russel, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, 37, 44–51. It is worth noting that many of Henry Angelo’s fencing pupils were actors, who integrated their skills in their performances on stage. A knowledge of fencing seems to have become a prerequisite for portraying Hamlet, for example. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 212. 75 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Thursday, 5 March 1778; issue 1676. 76 Greig, The Beau Monde, 201. 77 St. James’s Chronicle (London, England), Thursday 12 April 1787; issue 4074. 78 World and Fashionable Advertiser (London, England), Thursday, 12 April 1787; issue 88. 79 St. James’s Chronicle (London, England), Thursday 12 April 1787; issue 4074. 80 World and Fashionable Advertiser (London, England), Thursday, 12 April 1787; issue 88. 81 Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Thursday, 12 April 1787; issue 2017. 82 Troost, “Archery in the Long Eighteenth Century,” 113. Interestingly, Henry Angelo took on several female pupils, all of them actresses. One pupil, “Mrs. Glover,” even displayed her skills onstage at the Haymarket, to great applause. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 212–13.

PART TWO Sporting Animals and Their Uses

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Chapter Four

Turf Wars: Violence, Politics, and the Newmarket Riot of 1751 richard nash

In the spring of 1751, the beautiful and notorious bigamist Elizabeth Chudleigh was between husbands, though perhaps not in the most luridly literal sense of that happy phrase.1 She had, seven years earlier, secretly married Augustus Hervey, shortly after meeting him at the races at Winchester. She was beautiful, he was handsome; what could go wrong? Hervey was the second son of the Earl of Bristol, and about to launch his naval career; Chudleigh was a colonel’s daughter whose beauty had recently brought her to court as maid of honour to the princess. In other words, these were two young people without means, dancing on the periphery of pleasure and power. Marriage was doubtless not the only natural act that suggested itself. By keeping the marriage secret, Chudleigh was able to keep her position at court, and Hervey launched on a naval career more noted for its amatory than its military engagements – when his private journal was finally published in the twentieth century it bore the subtitle, “The Adventures Afloat and Ashore of a Naval Casanova.” In 1749, Hervey was at sea; Chudleigh, at court, was fending off the matrimonial designs (though not the attentions) of the Duke of Hamilton and the recently widowed Duke of Ancaster. That spring brought about England’s first ever “Royal Jubilee,” a splendid celebration at Ranelagh Gardens that extended over several days and was intended to be highlighted by the daytime masquerade at Ranelagh on Monday, 1 May, and the musical piece composed by Handel to accompany the royal fireworks the previous Thursday, inaugurating the festivities. In fact, both events were upstaged several evenings later by the fireworks performed by Chudleigh when she appeared at a private masquerade for the entertainment of the king, dressed (albeit only marginally) as Iphigenia, prepared for

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sacrifice. Even for the scandalous court, this public nudity threatened to push beyond acceptable limits, and she was shunned by other maids of honour. Not, however, by her besotted monarch. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, the poor king stood before her naked majesty “stupidly good,” and asked, rather wistfully, if he might touch her breast. With an intoxicating blend of sweet assurance, Chudleigh promised her king that if he would give her his hand, she would place it “on a softer spot.” The king dutifully extended his hand, and Chudleigh gently turned it palm up, then bent it at the elbow to touch the royal forehead. Even the king had to smile. It was (yet another) era of royal fireworks, scandalous aristocrats, and audacious displays; a time of impudence and impertinence. In November 1750, Chudleigh’s one-time suitor, the Duke of Ancaster (age thirty-six) surprised society by marrying privately the beautiful Mary Panton, half his age. Horace Walpole, with his usual mixture of venom and accuracy, described her as the “natural daughter of a disreputable horse jockey.” That she was illegitimate seems accurate, and Panton was undeniably a horse jockey; he had succeeded Tregonwell Frampton more than two decades earlier as the Master of the King’s Running Horses at Newmarket, with a better reputation in Ancaster’s circles than in Walpole’s. The following month saw the arrival at court of the “fabulous Gunning sisters,” who quickly drew the attention of the daily press and of wealthy aristocrats. In a time before paparazzi photojournalism, advertisements for their portraits in mezzotint engravings frequently appeared alongside stories of their movement through court functions. Early in 1752, the Duke of Hamilton, the other duke previously pursuing Chudleigh, refocused his sights (through a haze of alcohol) on the younger Gunning, Elizabeth. Unable to restrain his ardour at a ball on 14 February, he pressed her to marry him without delay; so impetuous was his desire that he is said to have enacted his proposal by offering that most romantic of love-tokens, a ring pulled from a convenient bed curtain: how could a girl refuse? Nor was love balked by the clergyman who refused to perform the ceremony without a licence; the couple commissioned a carriage to take them to Keith’s notorious Mayfair chapel to solemnize the occasion. The less-impetuous sister, Maria, held out for another year before giving her hand to the Earl of Coventry. The middle of the eighteenth century, as the previous paragraphs suggest, echoes both flamboyantly and faintly the libertine excesses of the early court of Charles II. But these performances are of a different kind, just as the players themselves are of a different type. Matthew

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Kinservik has noted in Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late EighteenthCentury England that “The reign of George II was regarded by many people at the time as being more outrageous for its immorality than the fabled Restoration court of Charles II nearly a hundred years earlier. In fact, the mid-eighteenth century was a time of strong contrasts between vice and virtue, delicacy and grossness, prudery and obscenity” (69). With the exception of George II, himself, who, when Chudleigh was presented to him, was already sixty-six, most of the names recited in these opening paragraphs are of a common generation, one that might be thought of as the first Hanoverian generation. The ladies, it is true, are somewhat younger than the gentlemen, and Mary Panton and the Gunning sisters were born in the early thirties, during the reign of George II. At the other extreme, however, only the Duke of Kingston had been born under Stuart rule (1711). The Duke of Ancaster was born in the year of the Hanoverian succession, 1714. The remainder of these figures (and many more alluded to in what follows) were born in the early 1720s, and came of age in the 1740s and 1750s. While there may be some resemblance to the excesses of libertinism that accompanied the restoration of monarchy in the years following 1660, these excesses are perhaps more decadent than libertine: they are less a re-assertion of a lost privilege restored that Restoration libertines claimed, and more the flagrant enacting of an inherited privilege, freely indulged in. While the libertine ethos of the Restoration encouraged ever more brazen displays of the flaunting of privilege, the mid-eighteenth century, decadent revival had something more like the ambivalent rhythm of scandal and concealment that seem somewhat more like our own time. In this essay I want to suggest that these ambivalent rhythms of the transgressive behaviour at the carnivalesque site of sport in the Georgian era can be seen as ushering in a fraught, anxious, modern democratic state, descended from, but no longer anchored by, the court privilege of Charles’s restored monarchy. Bakhtin theorized the space of carnival as a space of transgressive potential: “it replaced all forms of rank and hierarchy with a boundless utopian freedom.”2 Yet so often in modern culture, as in the events described below, that transgressive potential often vacillates between poles of public and private, profligate excess and violent reprisal and recontainment. One form may be the private indulgence of excess concealed behind the mask of respectability and propriety, but another form may be the very public display of what appears to be levelling of class barriers, only to privately re-assert those barriers in sometimes violent reprisal. If the Jockey Club originated

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(informally, at first, and then with more conscious organization) sometime after the end of the reign of the “Merry Monarch,” whose pursuit of pleasure seemed to suspend rules of social order, it did so primarily as a social club of likeminded “noblemen and gentlemen.” But as those recreational interests sanctioned socially transgressive behaviour, the next generation of the club found itself reimagining its purpose in ways that simultaneously created a space for exercising privilege and also policed entry into that space. In place of what had once been the order of the court, to be suspended (or not) at the will of the monarch, a new order of the club was called into being. In the pages that follow, I want to offer new insight into that re-ordering of the Jockey Club, paying particular attention to the ways in which the events surrounding the Newmarket spring meeting in 1751 signal a nexus of politics, class identity, violence, and sport in a way that may be thought of as distinctly modern. While conducting research in London into the events described in the following essay, I took the opportunity one evening to attend a play. By good fortune more than by careful planning, the play I took in turned out to be Laura Wade’s Posh at the Duke of York’s Theatre. Wade’s highly topical references to the practice of rich and privileged males indulging in wanton destruction in order to wallow in their own narcissism certainly registered with my fellow playgoers as an indictment of Boris Johnson, mayor of London, and Prime Minister David Cameron, both of whom had been identified as members of the Bullingdon Club when at Oxford. Established in the late eighteenth century, the Bullingdon Club has a long history of boorish excess, sanctioned under a system of elite privilege turning a blind eye to “boys being boys.” Wade’s play, subsequently translated into film as The Riot Club, only gained additional topical relevance with the revelations of Cameron’s activities with the Piers Gaveston Society while at Oxford. While I had a general sense of the play’s allusions to contemporary English politics, my own attention was drawn to the set design. The play’s frame tale – in which a politically well-connected alumnus of the Riot Club meets disappointedly with his own nephew at the play’s beginning and more supportively at the play’s end with the most destructive member of the current club, thereby suggesting the continuing support of the worst consequences of privileged excess – is set in a private study or library, where Scotch is consumed properly and the walls are lined with eighteenth-century racing portraits. The Bullingdon Club, of course, was originally created in the late eighteenth century, ostensibly as a cricket

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and horse racing club. Given the research I had been engaged in, however, my own response was to think of events a generation earlier, in 1751, that led to what has long been thought to be the origin of the Jockey Club. Perhaps less important today, but central to both Restoration and eighteenth-century eras of aristocratic excess is the carnivalesque sporting ground of the race meet, that space of royal pleasure identified so strongly with Charles and the Restoration. Horse racing is, and was from the outset, about the horse and human-equine athletic competition, but it has also always been about the human social interactions surrounding that competition. Horse racing was a sport with strong Stuart associations, and only the faintest of Hanoverian ties, but it had its well-connected Whig champions, as well as Tory supporters. Above all else, horse racing was a scene of recreation, risk, gambling, and the temporary suspension of general rules of order and decorum – it was the natural place for Hervey and Chudleigh to have kindled their secret, ill-advised, ill-fated marriage, and a natural place for the Duke of Ancaster to turn away from Chudleigh to wed the beautiful young “natural” daughter of a “disreputable jockey.” Race meets were sites of indulgence, risk, and opportunity, and by the middle of the eighteenth century no race meet was more central to the aristocratic social calendar than Newmarket. And that, of course, was an invitation to trouble. When Robert Black set out to write the history of the Jockey Club at the end of the nineteenth century, he cited an advertisement from the fall of 1751 as the first public record of the Jockey Club: This is to acquaint the Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Society call’d the Jockey Club that the first Weekly Meeting will be held on Thursday, as usual, at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall.3

For over a century historians accepted Black’s interpretation that the club had been formed shortly before this advertisement, primarily as a gentlemen’s social club. Recent discoveries, however, have demonstrated that the club was in existence for decades prior to 1751, and may be traced back in one form or another to the time of the Hanoverian succession and perhaps originated in some form as early as the last years of the reign of Charles II.4 Throughout the twentieth century, racing historians accepted without serious question two inferences Black had drawn from this advertisement: 1) that the Club had been formed at some point prior to that fall, but presumably not long before; and 2) that

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the Club in this earliest form was primarily a social club of noblemen and gentlemen drawn together by sporting interest, and only became a regulatory body a generation later. As prominently as the dukes and lords mentioned above figured in the social life of the waning days of the reign of George II, few figures from that era left less of an imprint on the pages of history than “George Prentice, Esq,” yet he is central to this narrative. The earliest notice I have been able to uncover that may refer to him is an account in the records of the Old Bailey of the arrest of “George Prentice, alias Johnson,” for horse theft in 1726. Hardly an auspicious debut, though it must be noted that he was acquitted of the charge. The charges allege that on at least two occasions, Prentice negotiated over the purchase of a horse, agreed upon a price, subject to trial of the horse, left one shilling “earnest money” on deposit, and then rode away: The Prisoner in his Defence said, that he bought the Horses, and intended to pay for them, but being short of Money, he was obliged to keep out of the way. He call’d several to his Reputation, who gave him a good Character, and added that about 3 Years ago, his Father left him 600 l. and a Brew-house, which he Sold, not being capable to manage it himself, and that he has since dealt in Tobacco, and Brandy. – The Jury Acquitted him.5

Whether or not the George Prentice whose close brush with horse theft is described above is our “George Prentice, esq,” our character appears in recognizable form ten years later, when a “Great Match” is advertised on Merrow Downs at Guildford between two galloways (small horses) owned by Thomas Ridge, esq. and George Prentice, esq., both of Hampshire. One place where “George Prentice, Esq.” appears with some regularity (sometimes as “George Prentis, Esq”) is in John Cheny’s Historical List of Horse-Matches Run, published annually from 1727 onward. Prentice first appears in this work in the year 1744, racing without success in smaller meets, and he does not yet appear in the subscriber’s list. Soon, however, “George Prentice, Esq” is appearing in those lists as “from Hertfordshire”; while it takes a while, by the end of the 1740s, he is beginning to enjoy significant racing success. The upward turn in Prentice’s fortunes, whether they began with Galloway racing at Merrow Downs or with dodgy horse-dealing a decade earlier, is equally remarkable considering that by the end of the 1740s, the relatively few mentions one can find of “George Prentice, Esq.” place him quite prominently in the world of court society. George II’s

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younger son, William, Duke of Cumberland, the hero (or “Butcher”) of Culloden after defeating the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, rented Prentice’s house in Surrey as a royal hunting lodge for the 1750 hunt season. A year earlier, Prentice purchased a 4-year-old colt named Blacklegs, who had been racing successfully in the north, bringing him to Newmarket in October, where, as a mild longshot, he won under jockey William Moody, the 50-guinea plate restricted to 4 year olds (most racing at the time was for horses five years old and older). At the time, Newmarket races effectively served as bookends to the racing season, so this 4-year-old race not only marked the end of the 1749 season, but provided the most relevant form reference when the 1750 racing season opened at Newmarket in April. Horses at this time took their age from May Day (that has now been changed to 1 Jan.), so the 50-guinea plate for four year olds on 17 April repeated the same conditions as the October race, only this time Blacklegs, now ridden by John Gillum, was a strong favourite. There is very little record of Gillum as a rider, and what little there is indicates that he rode mostly for Prentice. Blacklegs was defeated, however, by Mr Martindale’s Snip, “so that the very knowing ones were as much mistaken as the day before” (Old England, Saturday, 21 April 1750). Such defeat of expectations is what racing is made of, and there is no clear signal that anyone took anything amiss in this defeat of “the very knowing ones.” Prentice, himself, had good reason to celebrate the meeting, for only four days later, a gelding he had recently purchased named Trimmer, half-brother to Shakespear, whom Blacklegs had defeated the year before, won the 135-guinea purse for 5 year olds, ridden by John Gillum. While this race was for 5 year olds, it was also the last important race for that age group before May Day, when they would turn six, and become eligible for the King’s Plate races that were the most lucrative events contested at race tracks outside Newmarket. The King’s Plates had been established in the seventeenth century to encourage the breeding of better horses, and they took the form of fourmile heats, with a half an hour between heats. One had to finish within 240 yards (“a distance”) of the winner to continue, and the first horse to win two heats won the plate. If the first three heats produced three distinct winners, those three contested a fourth and final heat. While the first Royal Plate had been established at Newmarket, a series of similar plates were soon added at race courses around the country, providing an economic incentive for horse racing and breeding. After the Hanoverian succession, the early Jockey Club introduced a new style

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of stakes racing in single heats that flourished briefly in the 1720s and 1730s before the gambling act of 1739 sent racing into decline. Through the 1740s, purse money declined and fewer and fewer horses competed. The royal plates remained, and once again became the only significant prize money on offer. During the 1750 season, the various royal plates were won by Trimmer, Looby, Crab, and Stump, seldom running against one another. In October, these four met for the final King’s Plate at Newmarket, where Trimmer, ridden by John Gillum, won with ease, confirming the form he had demonstrated in the spring, and marking him as the best plate horse of the year. This set the stage for the following April when, as their last start as six year olds, the same horses assembled for the first King’s Plate of 1751, when “the very knowing ones were as much mistaken” as they had ever been, but this time the consequence of that mistake proved radically different. The very first result to appear in a London paper erroneously named the favourite Trimmer as the winner of the first heat, before subsequent accounts quickly corrected the erroneous report. After correctly noting that Stump won the first heat, Crab the second, and Looby the third and fourth, thereby winning the plate, this account continues: “and Mr. Prentice’s Chesnut Gelding Trimmer, got by Hobgoblin, who won the King’s Plate with great Ease in October last, against the very same Horses he now started with, was distanced in the first Heat; which caused great Surprize and Speculation, as vast Sums were depending upon him against the Field.”6 Among those who were numbered the greatest losers were the Marquis of Granby, notorious for losing as much as 10,000 pounds in an evening, and according to various accounts that tend to corroborate one another deeply distressed by gambling losses at this meet. News accounts immediately prior to the meet have him travelling to Newmarket in company with the Dukes of Kingston and Ancaster, as well as the Earl of Portmore and “diverse other persons of distinction.”7 If reversals of form had happened before, as they continued to happen afterwards, this particular form reversal set a new standard for brazen duplicity. The year before, Blacklegs had been beaten, but he had finished second. In 1751, Gillum simply pulled up Trimmer early in the running of the first heat. This was neither the first, nor the last, time that a race favourite has been pulled up early in the running of a race – horses do, after all, go lame. But the rules of heat racing mean that a horse who is distanced is eliminated, so whether the horse was sound or not, those who had wagered on “Trimmer against the field” for the plate were immediate losers. Prentice did nothing to diminish

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the “surprise” of those who had backed his horse, making it clear that he had by wagering through other parties been taking the field against his own horse. Within a week after the spring meeting, the first advertisement for the races at Rugby in June appeared with a sentence explicitly excluding any horse that was now or had been the property of George Prentice at the time of the spring Newmarket meeting. In the months that followed, virtually every race meet in the country added such language to their advertisements. Prentice sold Trimmer and his other horses, who were taken to Ireland, as the only place where they could continue to race. Even then, however, the defence against Prentice remained vigilant, and several notices appeared during the summer when it was alleged that either Prentice or Gillum had attempted to purchase another horse for racing. This concerted action – undertaken before the advertisement that has long been read as signalling the formation of the Jockey Club – is a de facto “ruling off” of an undesirable, even though the technical authority for such action would not become possible until the Jockey Club acquired the land on which the Newmarket courses sit, rendering it private property subject to such actions.8 That only became a legally defensible action in the 1760s. Among the nobility and gentry present at this spring Newmarket meeting was the aforementioned Augustus Hervey, the first husband of Elizabeth Chudleigh and the second son of the Earl of Bristol. Shortly after his secret marriage to Chudleigh, he had gone to sea, but by 1751 he was back. And he kept a journal, which, when published two hundred years later, included this summary of his participation: I was persuaded to go to Newmarket this meeting by Townshend and Norris, which I did, tho I did not care for any one diversion at it. I stayed most of the week there, and hunted very often, but what was worse, I lost my money, for there was no resource here – one must play or drink, and I chose the first rather than the last. I lost a good deal on a horse called Trimmer, of Mr. Prentice’s, who had 2 to 1 in his favour at starting, but by a supposed trick was distanced and led in. Mr. Prentice was suspected in this and was excluded from? Newmarket on this account [I went to Wrattin[g] the 14th when the week was over, & dined there, & the next day went to see Ld. Montfort at Horse-heath, where we dined & I returned to Town on the 16th].

Hervey’s journal, published for the first time in the 1950s, is not the actual journal he kept, but a memoir he compiled from that journal in

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the 1760s, drawing extracts from his original.9 That document, though apparently intended at one time for publication, remained in manuscript until its publication was authorized in the 1950s. By that time, some intervening party had excised some passages, by literally cutting them from the manuscript. The sentence in brackets in the above quotation was omitted from the published version of the memoir, but can still be found in the surviving manuscript in the Suffolk County Record Office (941/50/3). Editing his journal into memoir form later in life, Hervey clearly did not think it necessary (or convenient) to record his participation in the riot that took place before he left Newmarket. As spectacular as Prentice’s actions were in fixing the 1751 King’s Plate and scoring an enormous betting coup, that action was overshadowed by the aftermath that ensued, once the victims of his ruse sought consolation. The King’s Plate was run on Thursday, 11 April; the following night, with tempers perhaps frayed, an incident broke out in the hazard room that rapidly escalated in violence, spilling out of the Coffee House that served as the home of the Jockey Club, into the streets, where the riotous crowd swelled to over a hundred, with the object of their fury, one James Fletcher of Lancashire, subjected to a severe beating, horsewhipping, and “the discipline of the horsepond,” ducking him repeatedly before leaving him near death.10 He did not recover consciousness for six days. Ducking, the “discipline of the horse pond,” was a not uncommon form of vigilante “rough justice” in the period for sharpers and cheats caught by a mob. This particular incident, however, with its scale of violence resembles more than a little a nearly exact contemporary event: the last witch-killing in England. In that incident, on 18 April 1751, exactly one week after Prentice’s coup, an elderly couple in Tring, Hertfordshire, John and Ruth Osborne, were tied together and ducked repeatedly in the horse pond. When they were eventually pulled out, Ruth was already dead, and John expired shortly thereafter. The ringleader of the mob, Thomas Colley, a chimney sweep, was prosecuted over the summer, found guilty, and hung. The contrasted judicial responses to these parallel instances of vigilante rioting could not be more pronounced. The riotous aristocrats of the mid-eighteenth century understood as well as any publicist-advised politician of today the importance of “getting out in front of the story” when it comes to managing public opinion when scandal looms. Then, as now, the wise course was to try and enlist the daily press in support of one’s position. By the time Fletcher was

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regaining consciousness in Newmarket, a version of events that appears to have been written by or on behalf of one of the participants appears in print. Notably, the following account was inserted into the London Evening Post on 17 April, the day before Colley led his mob against the unfortunate Osbornes in a copycat form of mob justice: The circumstances of a late incident at Newmarket having been variously represented, it may be agreeable to the public to be informed of them as they really happened. A person, not upon the level with the Gentlemen of the meeting, had mixed himself among them one evening at play; he was suspected to be a common sharper by some of the gentlemen, and, probably to clear himself of that suspicion, affected to nod and wink at a person of fashion, who was of the Company. This was resented, and some ill words that succeeded produced blows. The suspected person got out of the room and soon returned with a Parcel of People like himself, and with them attempted to disturb and abuse the company. A scuffle ensued, and in consequence of the victory, which declared itself on the gentlemen’s side, the General of the adverse party was taken prisoner, and did penance for some minutes in a Horse Pond. After this, and peaceably receiving some discipline with the whips of the Company, and finally, begging pardon on his knees, he was dismissed.11

I suspect that this account may have been initiated by, and perhaps composed by, John St Leger, who seems to have been if not the Newmarket ringleader, at least a prime mover in their actions, and (based on information in the indictment) the individual who compelled Fletcher to get down on his knees and beg pardon. Whether the account was written by St Leger or someone else, the point of view seems to be that of a witness, but the tone seems to smack of one who was at least familiar with Tom Jones. That observation is not entirely idle, for Fielding was serving as a magistrate at the time, and would have been a likely figure for those involved to consult. Moreover, he was at this time working on his treatise, An Enquiry into the Late Increase in Robberies, which would appear later in the year. That work, when published, not only links robbery and other criminal activity to an increase in gaming, but does so in precisely the classed terms set forth here: gambling may be a vice for everyone, but it is only dangerous when indulged in by the “commonality,” as it is a vice that the nobility and gentry can afford. St Leger, at the time, had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday the day

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before Prentice’s coup; and Horace Walpole describes him at the head of the young set at White’s during this summer of 1751: The two Miss Gunnings, and a late extravagant dinner at White’s, are twenty times more the subject of conversation than the two brothers [Newcastle and Pelham] and Lord Granville. These are two Irish girls, of no fortune, who are declared the handsomest women alive. I think their being two so handsome and both such perfect figures is their chief excellence, for singly I have seen much handsomer women than either; however, they can’t walk in the park or go to Vauxhall, but such mobs follow them that they are generally driven away. The dinner was a folly of seven young men, who bespoke it to the utmost extent of expense: one article was a tart made of duke cherries from a hot-house; and another, that they tasted but one glass out of each bottle of champagne. The bill of fare is got into print, and with good people has produced the apprehension of another earthquake. Your friend St. Leger was at the head of these luxurious heroes – he is the hero of all fashion. I never saw more dashing vivacity and absurdity, with some flashes of parts. He had a cause the other day for ducking a sharper, and was going to swear: the judge said to him, “I see, Sir, you are very ready to take an oath.” “Yes, my lord,” replied St. Leger, “my father was a judge.”12

It may pay to observe the timing of these events for several reasons. The dinner described as “a folly of seven young men” appears to be the very first – and certainly the most ostentatious – of the “turtle feasts” or “turtle frolics” that became synonymous with extravagant consumption in the mid-eighteenth century. This particular dinner was so over the top that the bill of fare (seven pages long) made it into print, and was widely talked about and written up in the daily press. In its extravagance and ostentatious display of wanton indulgence, this meal sets the standard that the Bullingdon Club will begin emulating a generation later, and that Wade will criticize in our own time. It may be particularly worth noting that the dinner of “seven young men” at White’s, presided over by St Leger, takes place at the end of May, while St Leger et al. were awaiting their trial, for Fletcher had decided to prosecute in the Court of King’s Bench: “On Thursday [9 May] at the court of Kings Bench eight persons of distinction were moved against in behalf of Mr. Fletcher, for an assault committed on him last Newmarket races; and we hear there will be upwards of twenty more.”13 As we know that St Leger was one of those indicted, it may well be that the “seven young

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men” consisted largely of his codefendants. The case was heard late in June, and the judge found probable cause to proceed to the assizes: “On Tuesday the Court of King’s Bench granted an information against a noble Duke and four other persons of distinction for ducking and male treating Mr. Fletcher last Newmarket meeting; and it is expected the affair will be brought on before the Lord Chief Justice Willes at the ensuing assizes at Bury.”14 In the event, however, the affair was not brought on, and there is no record of it in the records of the Bury assizes. In that era, while a prosecution such as this one would be brought in the king’s name by the coroner (in this case, ironically enough, James Burrows, who four years later would begin the practice of systematically recording cases heard in the Court of King’s Bench), the actual prosecutor was the victim himself. In all likelihood, the simplest explanation of why the case went no further is that the wealthy defendants simply bought off Fletcher, much in the manner in which the boys in the Bullingdon Club would subsequently throw their money at those whose establishments they vandalized to evade charges. Perhaps, in some small way, the success of the defendants in buying off and covering up the prosecution contributed to Burrows’s decision to begin recording cases tried in the King’s Bench. But in any case, the matter was never heard again after being bound over to the assizes, nor were any of the other names that had been hinted at made public. The entire matter was buried in obscurity with only one official document remaining to mildew quietly and unobtrusively in the National Archives at Kew. This item (KB11/40/1) is the indictment filed by Burrows that gives us our best information as to the events of the Newmarket riot. This document goes well beyond the partial account published in the Evening Post, corroborating that account on some points, giving much more detail on many others, and clearly adopting a less generous view of the brutality engaged in by the “Gentlemen of the Meeting.” The narrative of events, as unfolded in the indictment, identifies four individuals by name, at the head of a group “to the number of thirty persons and upwards, whose names are as yet unknown to the Coroner.” Those four are John St Leger, late of the Parish of All Saints in Newmarkett in the County of Cambridge, esq.; Augustus Hervey, late of the Parish and county aforesaid, esq.; John Healy, late of the parish aforesaid in the county aforesaid, merchant; and Edward Bigland, ditto, wine merchant. As narrated in the indictment, the initial fracas began in the hazard room in the Coffee House that seems to have served at this time as

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the informal headquarters of, and meeting place for, the Jockey Club, where John Deards kept a subscription book of those attending the Newmarket meeting. The named individuals and those many others whose names are unknown set upon Fletcher violently, and “cruelly beat, wound[ed] and treated so ill that his life was greatly despaired of.” Bigland is singled out for “uttering and saying these words (that is) ‘Damn him It is Fletcher the pick pocket. He gave a bet against me in the Cock pitt. It does not signify what you do to him.'” Further on, Bigland again appears to be specifically referenced as agitating the growing mob: “saying and often repeating these words: ‘Kill him. Kill him. Kill him. [mildew ...] … [gam]bler, thief and a pickpocket.’” Fletcher is then, much wounded, driven out into the streets where the riot continues. Now new names are added to those previously identified, even as we repeat the same formula about those “whose names are as yet unknown.” These new names are the most noble Peregrine Bertie, Duke of Ancaster, etc., and the Rt. Hon. Alexander Montgomery, Earl of Eglintoune, “together with divers other malefactors and disturbers of the peace.” This group, including those “whose names are as yet unknown” continue the same treatment as specified in the indictment above, and more: “and treat so ill that his life was greatly despaired of and ... they the said John St. Leger, Augustus Hervey, John Healy, Edward Bigland, the Most Noble Peregrine Bertie, Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven, the Rt. Hon. Alexander Mongtomery, Earl of Eglington, and the said divers other malefactors and disturbers of the peace” dragged him through the horse pond, beating him and kicking him while on dry land, then crying out “duck him, duck him, it is Fletcher the Pick Pocket!” continued to drag him through the horse pond “for a space of half an hour.” The details of the indictment specify that “they put a rope about him [Fletcher]” and did “violently, forcibly and cruelly dragg, duck, beat bruise and kick” him. Fletcher was apparently finally pulled from the pond almost completely senseless, and then dragged to a nearby coffee house (presumably the one where events began), covered with cuts and bruises, and generally insensible; he did not fully recover his senses for six days. In its final articulation of the full abuse of Fletcher, the indictment indicates that the mob grew by stages, and eventually goes beyond those named to implicate a much larger, riotous multitude, “to the number of One Hundred Persons and upwards, whose Names are as Yet unknown to the said Coroner and Attorney of our said present sovereign.”

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For all that, when the prosecution halted somewhere between the hearing in the Court of King’s Bench in late June and the assizes later that summer, the entire event seemed to go away without so much as a whisper; Laura Wade’s script was largely anticipated by historical events 250 years earlier. When the Jockey Club met, “as usual” over that winter in London, it was not (as Black and other historians have long inferred) as a group of clubbable gentlemen sharing a common sporting interest so much as it was a new, aggressive, younger generation ready and willing to take matters into their own hands as needed, to police their sporting interest and protect (as magistrate Fielding encouraged) gentlemanly vice from inroads being made by “common sharpers.”15 But that line, of course, is more brightly lit as a class barrier than as a moral barrier. And, even in this version of the story, some questions still remain: were there consequences, perhaps even important ones, precipitated by the event, but kept as quietly concealed as the event itself? And to which side (if we can even discern two sides) should our moral sympathies incline: do we cheer for or against the upstart rakes, con-men, and sharpers who put one over on the wealthy elites? Do we cheer for or against moral reform when it punishes criminal action with violence, even when that reform may be generated more by protection of class interest than by honour and morality, and even when there is a greater interest in exemplary punishment than in a deliberate consideration of guilt and innocence? Do we step back from the whole sordid scene with a pious curse of “a pox on both their houses?” Or do we find ourselves oscillating between opposing positions, cheering sometimes for trickster figures to emerge victorious, sometimes for wrongdoing to be punished swiftly and severely; sometimes applauding the suspension of a system of justice that seems inadequate, sometimes appalled by what that system will wink at and allow? Horse racing has a long history, and in every era of that history from the beginning to the present day, those questions have always divided its followers, and helped to shape the carnivalesque appeal of the sport. But these are also questions woven deeply into the fabric of modern society; and each of those questions above can be posed in 2017 about some vibrant form of mass culture or about our daily newscasts. By way of coda, however inadequately and incompletely, I want to gesture towards some answers to those questions in so far as they apply to the specific instance of the Newmarket riot of 1751. Of necessity, these answers will be both sketchy and (in some cases) speculative, but they might at least offer a useful starting point for further investigation.

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Beyond the six men named in the indictment – the Duke of Ancaster, Lord Eglintoun, John St Leger, Augustus Hervey, John Healy, and Edward Bigland – who else may have been implicated in the events of that evening? The most intriguing possibility is perhaps the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, and close companion of his patron the Duke of Bedford, Secretary of State for the Southern Department. For some time, there had been political rivalry between Sandwich and Bedford on one side of the ministry and Henry Pelham and his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, on the other. In what has generally been viewed as adroit manoeuvring by the latter pair, Lord Sandwich was ousted from his position in June 1751, and Bedford resigned the following day in protest. Of these four men, only Lord Sandwich was in Newmarket in April. But it may be more than mere coincidence that the first notice of a pending dismissal appears in the newspapers the very same day as the first accounts of the “late disturbance at Newmarket,” when it is reported that the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Sandwich have either been asked to resign or soon will be so asked. In some accounts, it was given out that Lord Gower would soon be asked to resign the Privy Seal. After this initial leak, there is no further word for another six weeks until a little more than a week before Fletcher’s case is heard in Westminster. It is not the fifty-seven-year-old Lord Gower who is also asked to resign, but his thirty-year-old son, Viscount Trentham, who served with Lord Sandwich at the Admiralty and was also present at Newmarket. In the intervening month of May, Lord Sandwich was mostly out of the public eye, taking up a sort of refuge at Windsor Lodge with the Duke of Cumberland. He did, however, from that location finalize arrangements for one of the first major cricket matches to be held at Newmarket at the end of June between a team organized by himself (and including the Duke of Bedford), representing Eton College Alumni, and a team organized by Lord March, representing All England. This Sandwich-Bedford sporting-political partnership has long been noted as central to the Pelham-Newcastle faction’s complaint that Bedford’s faction neglected business for pleasure. Certainly, there was significant ground for complaint. Bedford’s passion for cricket, in particular, was intense. Even more relevant to the events at Newmarket, the correspondence of the Duke of Newcastle includes a report from 1750 that Bedford and Sandwich have spent the summer “in riot and gaming,” in the company of Theobald Taaffe. Taaffe, though a member of parliament, was notorious mostly as an Irish adventurer and

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gamester, and frequently identified as a sharper. He was also a principal (on the losing side) in one of the most famous wagers in Newmarket’s history, during that summer of 1750. Taaffe wagered that one could not find four horses to pull a carriage nineteen miles in one hour. His opponents carried the day, however, by having a special lightweight carriage built, on which was seated a small boy, the entire rig then drawn by four racehorses, each ridden by a jockey, with a fifth horse providing a pace. The print recording this match rapidly became one of the most popular of sporting prints, and the event announced the auspicious debut of one of the most colourful of gambling characters, Lord March, later Duke of Queensbury (Figure 4.1). Lord March’s partner in this wager was Lord Eglintoun, named in the indictment of the 1751 riot; and in conjunction with the evidence of the cricket match of 1751, and the testimony of the Dupplin letter to Newcastle about Sandwich and Bedford spending the summer in riot and gaming in company with Taaffe, it becomes all the more plausible to see this set, including Lords Sandwich and Trentham, involved in the spring riot. If so, the potential scandal may have played more than a minor role in the change of ministry that summer. That possibility only grows stronger when Theobald Taaffe and Edward Wortley Montagu are imprisoned in Paris that fall, charged with having cheated at dice, and then with violence forced payment from one Abraham Paiba. This fall scandal supplanted the story of the spring riot that never developed, as it proceeded through numerous legal twists and turns, but for our purposes a few points are worth noticing. Edward Wortley Montagu, scapegrace son of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was a member of parliament like Taaffe, and (probably also like Taaffe) he held his seat only to be protected from creditors, never making a speech and rarely attending. He was also a kinsman of, and had been serving as secretary to, Lord Sandwich. In preparation for his autumn sojourn in France, he had married (bigamously, at Mayfair) Elizabeth Ashe, the diminutive courtesan, reputed to be the illegitimate daughter of Princess Amelia. Paiba, for his part, was a diamond-broker and money-lender, like his father, who had just turned twenty-one, and immediately gone bankrupt in the spring of 1751. He then appears at the hazard table at the Newmarket meeting, under the name “James Roberts,” where he borrows three hundred pounds from Taaffe, before disappearing (presumably during the riot). Yet when Montagu and Taaffe encounter him in Paris, living as Roberts with a woman masquerading as his wife, he is living well and is well-funded, until Taaffe

Figure 4.1 “A Print of the Chaise Match Run on New-market Heath.” Engraving, 1750.

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and Montagu relieve him of most of his money – according to Paiba/ Roberts, by getting him drunk and cheating at dice. How should we read this turn in the narrative? Were Taaffe and Montagu dispatched to recover, by any means necessary, the money lost to Paiba/Roberts, in the vein of “it takes a thief to catch a thief?” And if so, by whom? The version of events told by Taaffe and Montagu is that they encountered Paiba by chance; Paiba claims by design, but offers no reason for the design. Could Paiba have been working in tandem with Taaffe at the Newmarket meeting, only to find the riot provided him an opportunity to scoop and run? He could hardly say so, though he does level the charge of cheating him at dice. However one sorts out the various possibilities (and much space I believe is available for competing possibilities), this aftertale would seem fairly thoroughly to discredit Magistrate Fielding’s idea that a class barrier preventing the common sort from imitating the vices of their betters can ever prove successful. Yet that is precisely the use to which the story was put, when the conversation came up in London: “The Speaker was railing at gaming and White’s apropos of these two prisoners. Lord Coke, to whom the conversation was addressed, replied, ‘Sir, all I can say is, that they are both members of the House of Commons, and neither of them of White’s.’”16 That works, of course, only so long as one separates Montagu and Taaffe from Sandwich and Bedford and March and Eglintoun and Ancaster. And no one makes such separation more difficult than trickster figures like George Prentice. Whether or not he began as a would-be horse thief, by 1740 he had opened an account with the prestigious private banking firm of Hoare’s, and by 1749 he was racing at Newmarket and renting a hunting lodge to the Duke of Cumberland. But after the riot of 1751, he was persona non grata, not just in racing circles, but throughout polite society. With all the resilience of impudence, however, Prentice adapts to his new terrain. By the end of the year, he has relocated to Surrey, near Godstone, where he goes into business with the keeper of the Iron Pear Tree Inn. This inn took its name from the hard-water spring behind it that made the fruit trees bear fruit almost impossible to eat. To a man like Prentice, this was a fresh opportunity, and he set up on Parliament Street in Westminster, as the first person to sell bottled water to Londoners. Advertisements extolling the curative properties of the “one and only” Iron Pear Tree Water begin appearing late in 1751, and continued for several years, always by an author denominated only as “the proprieter.” Soon a rival appears on the scene, trying to sell

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from a nearby spring, but Prentice vigorously (and apparently effectively) defends his claims to uniqueness. Whether the rival succeeded in guessing Prentice’s identity, or only inferred that such determined refusal to provide a name indicated something to hide, the conflicting ads begin to focus on the question of the identity of “the proprietor.” Then silence until late in 1759, when this notice appears in the London papers: If George Prentis, now or late of Parliament Street, Westminster, Esquire, will apply, either by himself or friend, to the printer of the Salisbury Journal, he will be directed to persons that will be of infinite service to him, and be a means of extricating out of many difficulties he now labours under. If he comes himself, he need not fear of a protection; if any person is sent by him as his friend, it will be expected that an Affidavit be made of it, before he be treated withal.17

Whatever became of that announcement we do not know, but a legal notice in 1775 records that Prentice went on shortly to serve an important legal precedent: in 1763, he was successfully prosecuted in Dunkirk, where he had fled from his English creditors, and his arrest, prosecution, and confinement in Dunkirk’s debtor’s prison serves as precedent that that city would no longer serve as a sanctuary for bankrupts. His will, proved in 1765, was drawn up in 1758, a year before the advertisement offering to help him extricate himself from his many difficulties. Modern culture is, to a very great extent, defined by a constant struggle between the preservation of privilege and the promise of class mobility. Nowhere is the tension, drama, and excitement of that struggle more manifest than in the carnivalesque space of the race meet.

NOTES 1 By April 1751, authorities seem to agree that the secret marriage between Hervey and Chudleigh was thoroughly over; there is less agreement as to when the Duke of Kingston succeeded in her affections, though Kinservik reports that rumours were circulating by 1752. The second marriage was not celebrated until 1769. Where Chudleigh was in April 1751 is unclear to me, but as events will show, both Hervey and Kingston were at Newmarket. 2 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, 15–16.

Turf Wars  113 3 General Advertiser (London, England), 19 November 1751. 4 Oldrey, Cox, and Nash, The Heath and the Horse, 272–88; Huggins, “University Professor,” 12; Nash, “Sporting with Kings,” 21; and Nichol, “Jockeying for Position.” Nichol’s discussion of political satire keyed to horse racing between 1768 and 1773 complements some of the discussion below. I will register one tangential caution, however, about his discussion of an engraving satirizing the Jockey Club in a Ned Ward pamphlet of 1709. For a variety of reasons, I now think that this pamphlet is a pirated edition of a section in Ward’s History of the London Clubs that does date from 1709, but that the engraving may have been from a later date and was bound in separately. 5 “Trial of George Prentice, alias Johnson.” https://www.oldbaileyonline. org/browse.jsp?div=t17260831-7. 6 General Evening Post (London, England) 13–16 April 1751. 7 Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 4–6 April 1751. 8 “We hear that a certain Person in the Sporting Way, has been excluded from being concerned in Subscribing to Plates at Newmarket on any future Occasion; and that the Noblemen of the last Meeting there (where his flagrant and notorious behaviour was exceedingly conspicuous) have all agreed to prevent his wicked Designs at every Horse Race &c where they have Influence” (General Advertiser [London, England], Tuesday, 16 April 1751). 9 See Hervey, Augustus Hervey’s Journal. 10 “We hear that the resentment of the Nobility and Gentlemen at the last meeting at Newmarket was so great against some gamblers there, for their rascally behavior, that several of them were severely beat, duck’d and horsewhipped, so as to narrowly escape with their lives” (General Advertiser, [London, England] Wednesday, 17 April 1751). 11 London Evening Post, 16–18 April 1751. 12 Walpole, Letter to Horace Mann, 18 June 1751 (OS). http://images.library. yale.edudefault.asp?e=2. 13 London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette, Monday, 13 May 1751. 14 London Morning Penny Post, 26–8 June 1751. 15 The behaviour of “these fellows ... should ... admonish all Gentlemen and Ladies to be cautious with whom they mix in public places, and to avoid the sharper as they would a pest” (Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, &c., 37). 16 Walpole, Letter to Horace Mann, 22 November 1751 (OS). http://images. library.yale.edudefault.asp?e=2. 17 London Chronicle, 29 December 1759.

Chapter Five

Animals as Heroes of the Hunt sarah r. cohen

Artistic representations of the hunt in eighteenth-century France sideline or even banish the human in favour of animal protagonists. By contrast the sport itself, especially the aristocratic parforce hunt which was enacted with horses and dogs, was a valued social institution, with elaborate rituals and a hierarchical distribution of honours and tasks among the many personages involved.1 Eighteenth-century artists did create portraits of human hunters with their game, as well as genre scenes such as the “hunt breakfast” that loosely addressed the role of the hunt as an emblem of societal status. But pictorial and sculptural depictions of the hunt’s actual chases and battles emphasize the ferocity, dexterity, and singleness of purpose on the part of the dogs and their prey. Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s series of cartoons for tapestries, Royal Hunts of Louis XV (Fontainebleau, musée du château, and Paris, Louvre), is exceptional in this regard; although crucial in establishing Oudry’s own reputation as an artist of the hunt,2 it is highly unusual in featuring all players of the parforce hunt. Even in these works, however, the nobility on horseback appear as upright, detached observers of the multitudinous, rushing dogs and the fleeing prey.3 More typical of Oudry’s production, both within and outside of the court, is his Wolf Hunt of 1734: in the clearing of a wooded environment, a pack of hounds encircles a lone, snarling wolf; the violence of the scene is enacted in canine fashion through tooth, claw, and what we imagine to be fierce barking on the part of the two central characters (Plate 4). Although we know from treatises that white dogs were the most favoured for the parforce hunt,4 there are no human handlers, let alone noblemen on horseback, to interrupt the animal action. The dogs do not even wear collars, as if Oudry wanted to demonstrate their wild

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kinship to the wolf, who in turn roars back at them, matching tooth with tooth.5 Even more commonly found in eighteenth-century art are more intimate confrontations between a single hunting dog and a bird of prey. In these works, too, there is no sign of human presence and the interest of the painting lies in the dynamics of surprise and defence enacted by the protagonists. Oudry’s older contemporary Alexander-François Desportes painted innumerable versions of a hunting hound surprising or stalking unwary prey (Plate 5). Alert, focused, and tense with contained desire to spring upon the pheasant, Desportes’s hound glistens with life and agency. In Oudry’s Spaniel Seizing a Bittern the small, feisty canine brings down the large bird with a firm grip on its leg, while the bittern thrashes back with magnificent, outspread wings (Plate 6). By placing the foes in shallow space close to the picture plane, Oudry encourages a viewer to read their physical expressions and to enter emotionally into the drama. These types of paintings would have been affordable only for the elite, some of whom would have been hunters themselves with their own packs of dogs, itself an expensive undertaking.6 But intimate confrontations of animal hunters with their prey also emerged in more widely produced, accessible media, such as porcelains and terracotta sculptures. Jean Chabry’s soft-paste porcelain of a hyena struggling with a hound, modelled after a painting by Oudry, is one such example (Figure 5.1).7 Intended as an ornamental piece for a table or cabinet, these porcelains, like the paintings of Oudry and Desportes, eliminate any sign of human involvement, so that the fiercely battling mammals appear as the sole actors.8 What might have been the reasons for this focus upon animals, rather than humans, as hunters and battlers of fierce or running prey? We know from published responses to Oudry’s hunt paintings displayed in the Salon exhibitions in Paris that the critics, and presumably their audience as well, considered his animal combats to be as compelling as history paintings, with their own, expressive characterizations.9 But the types of dogs depicted in these scenes, their unity as a pack, as well as the specific types of prey they pursue, were all central to the aristocratic institution of the hunt; why are the animals left completely on their own, sometimes without so much as a collar to remind us of their human owners and handlers? Among a number of lines of inquiry one might pursue in addressing this question, I shall explore three interrelated trends that sought to

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Figure 5.1 Jean Chabry after Oudry, Hyena Fighting a Dog, 1749–50, soft-paste porcelain; Detroit Institute of Arts. Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts, USA20449; Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund; gifts from W. Hawkins Ferry, Henry Ford II, Mr…/Bridgeman Images.

invert or challenge the “scale of nature” that placed the human above other animals: first, the efforts on the part of Desportes, Oudry, and other specialists to elevate animal painting within the hierarchy of genres in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture; second, the French aristocracy’s own ambivalence about its social status in the wake of Louis XIV’s centralization of power, which may have led them to embrace the animal warrior as a kind of alternative identity. Sceptical thinking developed since Michel de Montaigne had questioned the human being’s assumption that his own rationality trumped the sensory life of the non-human animal,10 and around the turn of the eighteenth century elite culture in France adopted such scepticism into their own practice by embracing the fable, the fairy tale, and the masquerade,

Plates

Plate 1 Franz Josef Winter (copy after), Maria Amalia of Austria, Bayer. Staatsgemäldesammlungen © ARTOTHEK.

Plate 2 “Position pour la garde en tierce et le coup de tierce. Plate 5.” from L’Ecole des Armes by Domenico Angelo (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1763), engraving by Charles Hall after James Gwin, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Plate 3 “The D_ of [blank] playing at foils with her favourite Lap Dog Mungo after Expending near 10,000 to make him a – ” (London 1773), engraving by William Austin. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Plate 4 Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Wolf Hunt, 1734, oil on canvas; Schwerin, Staatliches Museum. Photo: bpk, Berlin/Staatliches Museum, Schwerin/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 5 Alexandre-François Desportes, Hound Stalking a Pheasant, between 1702 and 1742, oil on paper; Lille, Palais des Beaux-arts, dépôt de la Manufacture nationale de Sèvres. Photo: author.

Plate 6 Oudry, Spaniel Seizing a Bittern, 1726, oil on canvas; Schwerin, Staatliches Museum. Photo: bpk, Berlin/Staatliches Museum, Schwerin/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 7 Desportes, Self-Portrait as Hunter, 1699, oil on canvas; Paris, musée du Louvre. Photo: ©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 8 Desportes, Boar Attacked by Eight Dogs, 1702, oil on canvas; Fontainebleau, musée national du château. Photo: ©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource.

Plate 9a Claude III Audran and Desportes (attrib.), Designs for a Ceiling, c. 1698–99, gouache on gold ground; Paris, Musée des arts décoratifs. Photo: Les Arts décoratifs, Paris/Jean Tholance. Tous droits réservés.

Plate 9b Detail of Plate 9a.

Plate 10 Oudry (attrib.), Fragment of decorative painting, c. 1725, oil and gold leaf on panel; Paris, Musée des arts décoratifs. Photo: Les Arts décoratifs, Paris/Jean Tholance. Tous droits réservés.

Plate 11 Oudry, Bitch Nursing her Young, 1752, oil on canvas; Paris, Musée de la chasse et de la nature. Photo: Nicolas Mathéus.

Plate 12 Théodore Géricault, Course de chevaux libres à Rome (1817).

Plate 13 Géricault, Cheval arabe gris blanc (before 1824) [Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen].

Plate 14 Augustin Régis, La reddition d’Abd el-Kader, le 23 décembre 1847. [Musée Condé, Chantilly.]

Plate 15 Hocine Ziani, Bataille de Kheng en-Natah (1984). [Musée central de l’Armée, Alger.]

Plate 16 Francis Hayman, See-Saw (1742). Tate Gallery. http://www.tate.org .uk/art/artworks/hayman-see-saw-t00524.

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all of which unfixed a person’s identity, including that of one’s species. Finally, as eighteenth-century French natural philosophy embraced sensation as a primary source of knowledge, the sensitive animal accordingly gained ontological stature. I will argue that the valiant animals that populate French depictions of the hunt carried with them an aura of nobility free from an authoritative chain of command, while also overturning the strictures of hierarchy that privileged human over animal experience, both within and outside the Academy. The Animal as Subject As early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries scenes of hunting in frescoes, tapestries, portable arts, and easel painting featured animals prominently, not only in figures of dogs and prey but also in birds and small creatures that can be found flitting and scampering in the wooded environment. Sometimes adhering to the generalized forms of medieval bestiaries and other times moving towards a more empirically based naturalism, the animal subjects of late medieval and Renaissance hunt scenes would become major, full-bodied players in the series of tapestries known today as the Hunts of Maximilian, first woven in Brussels, probably after designs by Bernard van Orley, in 1528–33.11 Frans Snyders, a specialist in animal painting who worked in Flanders in the first half of the seventeenth century, initiated the large hunt scenes that would become known in France as the animalier, in which animals are the sole actors.12 Snyders and his many pupils and followers constructed woodland hunts whose baroque energy galvanizes the actions of animals both European and exotic. These paintings sold at high prices all over Europe, and are often interpreted as status symbols, especially on the part of wealthy non-nobles who did not themselves have the privilege to hunt.13 In France, where Snyders’s works were appreciated by collectors as well as artists, his one-time apprentice Nicasius Bernaerts found a market of his own that culminated in extensive service to Louis XIV at Versailles in the 1660s.14 The king, himself an avid hunter, was developing a collection of art depicting the hunt, including a complete set of The Hunts of Maximilian, acquired in 1665 and elaborately displayed at Versailles.15 When Desportes, who had trained with Nicasius in the 1670s, returned to France from Poland in the later 1690s, he worked in several areas at once, both within and around the French court, to advance the theme of the hunt, and especially its animal actors.

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Desportes’s Self-Portrait as a Hunter, which he submitted as his morçeau de réception to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1699, was unprecedented in its subject as well as in its crafty promotion of the animal specialist as a worthy Academician (Plate 7). Candidates for admission into the Academy often submitted portraits of other artists holding the products or tools of their profession,16 such as Gabriel Revel’s portrait of the sculptor François Girardon cradling in his hands a marble bust with his carving tools lying nearby (Versailles, musée national du Château). Desportes upended this trend not only by depicting himself instead of another, older artist, but also by substituting a hunter’s rifle for a paintbrush and, for an artistic product, the “real” substance of animal bodies. His caress to the neck of the adoring spaniel that gazes up at him recalls the way in which artists had fondled figural sculptures in previous morceaux de réception, such as Revel’s portrait of Girardon. Startlingly lacking the powdered wig he would ordinarily have worn in public and in portraiture,17 Desportes connects his naturally textured hair to the fur and feathers of the dogs and game, as if implying familial similarity. While he enfolds the spaniel into his body, the alert male greyhound on the left completes the visual flow of his posture, as if poised to act as his master’s surrogate. In the hierarchy of genres implicitly maintained within the Academy, portraiture ranked above paintings of animals, and depictions of live animals ranked above the dead.18 Desportes’s reception piece boldly and imaginatively combined all three – man, living dogs, and dead game – as if in defiance of any separation among them. His painting was, nevertheless, considered as a still life rather than a portrait by the Academicians.19 Three years later Desportes would again confound Academic hierarchy by painting literal portraits of Louis XIV’s favourite dogs, this time at the king’s own behest.20 Commissioned for the antechamber of Louis XIV’s apartment at the pleasure palace of Marly, the large portraits featured specific dogs from the royal hunting pack in almost life-size proportions, both individually and in small groups, each posed alertly before winged game in extensive landscape settings. Desportes painted their names in capitals directly into the portraits and highlighted the letters in gold, a technique that recalls earlier court portraiture.21 In Desportes’s triple portrait Ponne, Bonne, and Nonne (Figure 5.2) the artist varied the attitudes of the dogs to suggest their different responses to the partridges they are about to surprise from behind a vegetative screen. Each carefully distinguished as to markings and fur texture, the spaniels emerge as three separate canine personalities. In 1714 Louis XIV commissioned

Figure 5.2 Desportes, Ponne, Bonne, and Nonne, 1702, oil on canvas; Paris, musée de la chasse et de la nature, dépôt du Louvre. Photo: Nicolas Mathéus.

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four additional portraits from Desportes to serve as overdoors at Marly; for these the artist painted individual dogs, each confronting a bird of prey within a complementary landscape. Louis XV would follow in the path of his great-grandfather the following decade, commissioning Oudry to paint portraits of his own favourite dogs for his country château at Compiègne, also with names emblazoned directly into the paintings.22 Although apparent portraits of dogs, especially those of the nobility, had appeared sporadically in European art beginning in the midsixteenth century,23 none before had been identified by name within the painting itself, nor identified so closely with a specific royal household. Both Louis XIV and Louis XV treated their favoured hunting dogs much as a canine retinue, a distinction that would be physically complemented by the portraits themselves. At Marly, the first set of dog portraits was hung above two sleeping niches, elegantly veneered in walnut with ebony fillets and flowers ornamenting their entrances.24 Similarly elaborate sleeping niches were outfitted at Versailles in the “Room of the king’s dogs,” a practice which Louis XV continued in the sleeping boxes and benches he had installed for his own favourite dogs in the “antichambre des chiens,” a reception room whose decorative frieze featured scenes of the hunt.25 Numerous anecdotes attest to the personal favour the kings showed towards their dogs, confirming the oft-repeated assertions in the hunting literature that the dogs – especially the white hounds whose portraits stand out in both series – served their masters as loyal and worthy “soldiers.”26 The image of the “noble” canine hunter would spread far beyond the court through numerous subsequent portrayals on the part of Desportes and Oudry. The hound startling the pheasant in the painting illustrated in Plate 5 is a variation, in reverse, of the portrait Desportes made of Louis XIV’s favourite hound Mite for Marly in 1714 (Paris, Musée de la chasse et de la nature).27 Beginning with hunt scenes he painted on commission for the royal Ménagerie after it was renovated for the duchesse de Bourgogne in the later 1690s, Desportes came to specialize in close-up views of canine packs chasing the most “noble” game, such as deer, boar, foxes, and wolves, as well as the occasional bear and hare.28 In these works we find not only courageous dogs but also their opponents dramatically fleeing or fighting back with all their might. Desportes produced such hunt scenes throughout his career both for his royal patron and private clientele, and like Snyders and his followers, he usually isolated the

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animals in a world unto themselves. Even those rare works that feature human hunters29 generally show the men somewhat apart from the battle; as in the actual practice of the parforce hunt, it was the dogs that did the primary tracking, running, and initial attacking – quite literally like soldiers on the front lines of battle.30 In a hunt scene by Desportes representing a group of hounds attacking a boar, the canines surround the angry animal, barking, biting, and flailing in a star-shaped burst of energy (Plate 8). The boar expresses his fury and attempts to ward off his attackers by roaring and wielding his primary weapon – the tusked maw, from which several dogs already suffer – head turned and red eyes flashing. An established tradition in the hunting literature encouraged human identification not only with the soldierly dogs but also with their valiant prey. Jacques de Fouilloux, whose treatise La Vénerie was the most widely circulated and influential early modern treatise on the hunt, composed blasons in the form of first-person poems for both the deer and the hare, which served as animal counterparts to his Blason du veneur that appeared earlier in the book.31 Guillaume Bouchet’s much longer and more emotive Complainte du Cerf was added in the second edition, and was in turn imitated by Georges de Tubervile in his English translation, which included The Fox to the Huntsman and The Otter’s Oration.32 Desportes’s animal hunt scenes, such as the attack on the boar (Plate 8) and his numerous depictions of dogs bringing down bucks and hotly pursuing wolves, foxes, and hares, similarly invite subjective identification with the non-human prey. Indeed, the success of these paintings was likely tied to his audience’s deep familiarity with the habits of prey animals, gleaned from detailed descriptions in the hunting literature. Indeed, one did not need to be a hunter oneself to value these depictions of animal warriors. Unlike the actual practice of hunting, which was restricted to aristocratic landowners, Desportes’s paintings were purchased not only by the old nobility but also by wealthy urban financiers and robe nobles such as the Pâris brothers and presidents of parliaments33 – just as the hunting treatises, packed with information on the animals involved, could be purchased by those who were not themselves able to participate. Although a gap occurred in the re-issuing of Fouilloux’s popular treatise between 1650 and 1754, numerous other writers produced their own versions in the earlier eighteenth century, among them the chevalier de Mailly, whose Éloge de la chasse of 1723 contained entertaining anecdotes about the extraordinary ruses devised by prey to elude the dogs.34 Desportes himself, we recall, had appeared

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in his morçeau de réception as if he, himself, were a noble hunter, but when he accompanied the king on his hunts, his role was to draw rather than to shoot. The hunt was both Desportes’s subject and his very artistic practice: the greater the role gained by the animals themselves, the greater the stature of the artist dedicated to their depiction. Species Inversions Both Desportes and Oudry also used animals as decorative agents through their early service to the innovative designer Claude III Audran, as well as in their own, subsequent involvement with tapestry design. This work may have stimulated their efforts to make animals the protagonists of their hunt scenes, for Audran, like his fellow court designer Jean I Bérain, dissolved the monumental history scenes and robust decorative structures that had dominated ceiling painting earlier in the reign of Louis XIV into an undifferentiated play of human, animal, and ornament. Audran’s delicate, filigree patterns, which the French called arabesques or grotesques, recall Renaissance grottesche, which were themselves fashioned after ancient Roman prototypes, and featured animals sporting with, or even transforming into human figures. Audran brought to this model a new emphasis upon the figures themselves as full-bodied, miniature performers interacting in fragmented scenarios. In their wit and defiance of ontological protocol Audran’s figural grotesques were akin to the impromptu performances enacted outside of traditional hierarchy in the context of court masquerade balls.35 It was to paint these figures into his designs that Audran employed Desportes, Oudry, and other artists around the turn of the eighteenth century. Given the association of the grotesque with the French aristocracy – especially, at first, with the circle surrounding the dauphin36 – hunting emerges as a prominent theme.37 In a decorative fragment thought to be a study either for a ceiling at the dauphin’s château of Meudon or for the redesign of the Versailles Ménagerie, Audran probably painted the ornament while Desportes painted the huntresses, dogs, and wounded deer (Plate 9a).38 In a particularly inventive corner, a group of hounds leaps towards the curée held aloft by a nymph, their bodies forming decorative arcs that perfectly carry the ornamental flow (Plate 9b). In the first half of the eighteenth century singeries became fashionable, and monkeys correspondingly took over the role of human hunters – thus allowing a viewer to quite literally see himself as an animal. A decorative fragment attributed to Oudry exhibits the wit of such depictions:

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while the hound and prey form graceful arcs and diagonals, the simian hunter balances on slivers of pure ornament (Plate 10). In the 1730s Christophe Huet would paint an entire hunting grotesque on the ceiling of the Grande Singerie at the château of Chantilly, featuring hunter monkeys in the livery colours worn by the princes of Condé and their guests when they hunted in the forest there.39 Tiny prey – boar, hare, deer – cower, hide, or run to safety on gilded ornament, while the dogs, as in Oudry’s work, contribute actively to the decorative invention. These lively, liminal figures may have been inspired by the fairy tales of Mme d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, and others that were becoming popular among the elite around the turn of the eighteenth century. While Perrault drew upon the “personalities” of familiar animals to create such memorable protagonists as Puss in Boots and Red Riding Hood’s wolf, Madame d’Aulnoy often made her characters change shape, passing from human to animal and back.40 As in the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, which also gained instant popularity when they were published in the last third of the seventeenth century,41 readers were encouraged to identify with animal characters, who speak and act anthropomorphically, but also retain some of their native animal traits. For example, in d’Aulnoy’s La Biche au bois, published in 1698, a princess is destined to live her days in the form of a deer. Doelike, she tries to hide deep in the woods and desperately flees an avid hunter who, it turns out, had previously fallen in love with her human self – a mix-up revealed only after the hunter-lover has wounded the princess-deer.42 Although Desportes’s little deer hunt in the upper left corner of the decorative design he made with Audran (Plate 9a) does not illustrate this or any other fairy tale per se, it recalls the play between human and animal – and utter lack of traditional hunting protocol – that the fairy tale embodies. Even the winged sprite blowing the hunting horn, her lower body transforming into an ornamental curve, recalls the fairies that populate d’Aulnoy’s tales. The art of telling fables and fairy tales had been cultivated in the elite salon culture of the seventeenth century,43 and even at Versailles an entire garden grove – the Labyrinth – was dedicated to the animal fables of Aesop, enacted by animal sculptures spewing “words” in the form of fountains.44 Cross-species play also found its way into courtly masquerade balls, such as the “sérail du Grand Seigneur” which took place at Marly in 1700, in which courtiers and professional performers paraded as animals.45 Many historians have discussed the breakdown of court protocol achieved by the masquerades, as well as the

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rise of aristocratic circles in Paris that minimized distinctions of rank in favour of social interaction.46 Both the grotesque and the fairy tale complemented such changes within elite culture, to a considerable extent through the medium of interspecies play. Desportes’s efforts to raise the profile of animal painting within the Academy likewise counteracted the traditional hierarchy of genres that placed the human subject above the animal, and the success with which he found patrons for his animal-centred paintings testifies to the willingness on the part of the cultured elite to embrace this inversion of categories. The lively coloration and flowing compositions of Desportes’s hunt scenes may have reminded his customers of the new taste in decorative design, while their distance from parforce conventions and retreat into the natural world of animals may have seemed equally liberating to aristocratic eyes. If fables, fairy tales, and grotesquerie prepared cultured viewers to envision humans transformed into animals, Desportes’s hunts offered a more realistic illusion of animals as protagonists of the “noblest” sport. Animal Intelligence Jean-Baptiste Oudry, who became an Academician about twenty years after Desportes, capitalized upon the growing eighteenth-century market for non-human animal hunts, and also pushed further the role of the animal in Academic pictorial practice. While Desportes had worked in a realistic manner derived from his Flemish training, Oudry created a more pronounced expressiveness in his depictions of animals, especially in his treatment of heads. Oudry had, in fact, been received into the Academy as a history painter, on the basis of a morçeau de reception depicting Abundance and Her Attributes, which featured the personification surrounded by a bountiful still life as well as a lively group of cattle, sheep, and goats (Versailles, musée national du Château).47 Although his allegorical theme earned the artist the title of history painter, he would subsequently concentrate his narrative and emotive powers upon non-human animal subjects. In developing what might be called “animal psychology” the younger artist was tapping into eighteenthcentury understandings of animal soul, based largely upon theories of sensory intelligence that applied to all animals, human and non-human alike. The hierarchy of the Academy in the seventeenth century had been closely tied to the Cartesian notion of the human as the sole possessor of rationality, while by contrast the eighteenth-century Academy,

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with its acceptance of animal subjects – as well as landscape and still life – was more oriented towards the sensationalism of John Locke and his Enlightenment followers such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. Oudry’s incisive characterizations of animals, as well as their close, foregrounded interactions, communicate through a language of feeling that viewers appreciated as naturally true as well as aesthetically satisfying. Oudry’s early project of illustrating the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine must have had a profound effect on his treatment of the animal as a conscious, highly sentient agent of action in his pictorial dramas.48 First published sequentially in 1668, 1678, and 1694 and several times thereafter, La Fontaine’s Fables themselves provided readers with a strong anti-Cartesian image of the animal, which may have contributed to the continued popularity of this literary work throughout the eighteenth century.49 Hunting makes periodic appearances in the Fables, and when it does the reader is often placed in the position of the prey, whether the predator be human, animal, or both. In one hunting fable La Fontaine demonstrated that animals possessed intelligence and agency, in direct refutation of Descartes’s theory of the mindless animal-machine. The long-standing debate over whether animals had souls, carried out both in philosophical writing and in the salons which La Fontaine frequented, encouraged audiences to look more closely at animals and their behaviour,50 and the hunt offered a good opportunity to prove that animals can learn, remember, and strategize.51 In his long, multifable Discourse to Madame de La Sablière, La Fontaine tells of the mother partridge who feigns a broken wing when she sees a hunter approaching with his hound: “She lures them onward, drawing them step by step away / From her dear brood, until at last the hunter cries, / ‘Quick! Grab her, dog!’ But, as it leaps for her, she flies! / Leaving the man to follow, vainly, with his eyes / As she soars off in sweet elation.”52 In his critically acclaimed illustrations, which were published as fullpage engravings in a luxury edition of the Fables just after his death in 1755,53 Oudry promoted the anti-Cartesian message of the Fables while also adding his own inventive touches and implementing his experience with depicting animal hunts. A good example is found in a drawing representing the witty and incisive fable, The English Fox (Figure 5.3). La Fontaine, who had dedicated the poem to an English noblewoman, claimed that both English foxes and English hounds were even more intelligent than those in France – but, like humans, he implies – only to a point. Chased nearly to exhaustion by the hounds, the fox creates the

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Figure 5.3 Oudry, The English Fox, 1733; pen and point of brush and black ink, grey wash, heightened with white tempera on blue paper; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library.

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brilliant ruse of pretending to be dead game hanging with other lifeless bodies on a gibbet; although the dogs are not fooled, the human hunter is, until the fox tries to enact the same stratagem again, and fails.54 Oudry’s drawing typically focuses attention upon the barking hounds, each in a distinct attitude demonstrating excitement and frustration. The fox, for his part, convincingly enacts the role of suspended corpse. An owl hangs beside the fox; although La Fontaine’s poem states that the dead “outlaws” the fox joins on the gibbet included badgers and other foxes as well as owls, it is possible that Oudry depicted a lone owl in order to call attention to the intelligence of the fox. In other Fables the poet emphasized the intelligence of owls: of the tawny owl that kept a pack of mice fattened and ready to eat by pecking off their legs, La Fontaine dared anyone to claim that such a strategy could come from a mere machine, declaring, “If this is not reasoning, I don’t know what reason is.”55 The owl in Oudry’s illustration The English Fox, its round eyes open and its wings outspread, appears to communicate to the viewer the wisdom of the mind that actually governs the fox’s seemingly inanimate body. Following upon his La Fontaine illustrations, Oudry developed a visual language of animal expression to convey the communication skills that Cartesian philosophy claimed animals lacked.56 In numerous detailed head studies of hunting dogs and prey, such as his chalk drawing Head of a Setter (Figure 5.4) the artist reworked the Academic tête d’expression into non-human animal performance. Ever since Charles Le Brun had proposed a codified system for representing the “passions of the soul” through configurations of the human face, the “expressive head” had been a staple of Academic visual discourse.57 By emphasizing the heads of his animal characters Oudry implied that these creatures, too, possessed soulful emotions which could be communicated both by the creatures themselves and by the attentive artist. The huge, saucer-like eyes of his setter are a typical strategy Oudry employed to effect such communication graphically. Around the middle of the eighteenth century natural philosophers such as Condillac and Charles Bonnet were likewise proposing for animals a form of understanding founded upon what they perceived and processed through their senses. Condillac, who posited sensation as the “first thoughts” that humans employed and the foundation of all reasoning, argued that when non-human animals see and distinguish objects one from another, they form “ideas” which, when linked in an internal network, form “the system of their knowledge.”58 Bonnet went

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Figure 5.4 Oudry, Head of a Setter, c. 1740, black and white chalk on blue paper; Schwerin, Staatliches Museum. Photo: bpk, Berlin/Staatliches Museum, Schwerin/ Gabriele Bröcker/Art Resource, NY.

even further in his contention that the soul of all animals is primarily sensorial, restating Descartes’s famous dictum: “a sentient being exists only insofar as it feels.”59 It is understandable that an artist, whose own medium was visually based, would choose to rely above all upon the eyes of his animals to convey their sensory intelligence. In his depictions of animal confrontations in the context of the hunt Oudry also emphasized expressive features of the heads, while drawing upon his skills as a decorative designer to infuse the agitated bodies of his creatures with Rococo flair.60 Such is the case with the bittern in Plate 6, whose outspread wings signal the great bird’s struggle and attempt to intimidate its attacker; at the same time the two create a continuously moving play of lines reminiscent of Oudry’s decorative designs, as in some kind of marshy dance (cf. Plate 10). The hyena fighting off a

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hound in Chabry’s porcelain sculpture after Oudry displays one of the most impassioned “faces” in his entire oeuvre, forever preserved in the glossy, sparkling surface of the white ceramic (Figure 5.1). Eighteenth-century viewers of these works would have recognized the way their elegant, decorative style and medium enhanced the “noble” aura of their hunting themes. At the same time they valued the expressive “truth” of Oudry’s animal characterizations, evidently believing, as did the philosophers, that animals possessed their own kind of sensory-based personalities, or “souls.” Praising Oudry’s work exhibited in the Salon of 1748, Baillet de Saint-Julien declared, “everything that he imitates is true; he gives to his subjects soul and body.”61 Another visitor, marvelling at the expression conveyed by Oudry’s painting of dogs attacking a wild sow and her young, confirmed, “Oudry seems to portray the character of the animals by the appropriate movement that he knows how to give to each species.”62 Sensationalist philosophy’s popular corollary was sentimentalism, a movement that overspread French culture during the second half of the eighteenth century and likely encouraged the interest Oudry and his audience took in the physically based expressivity of his animals.63 Indeed, one can see echoes of the large eyes of Oudry’s creatures in the faces of children and animals as depicted by sentimentalist genre painters such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze and portraitists such as François-Hubert Drouais.64 The most celebrated of Oudry’s sentimental paintings of animals, beginning when it was first exhibited in the Salon of 1753, is also among his most heroic depictions of a canine warrior of the hunt, the Bitch Nursing Her Young (Plate 11). Both the bitch and her newborn pups are of the “noblest,” white stock of hound, so we suspect that this attentive “mother” (as one critic referred to her when reviewing the Salon exhibition)65 will be responsible for adding significantly to the future population of great hunting dogs. In his treatise Fouilloux had stressed the importance of allowing young pups to nurse from their mother, believing that the bitch passed on through her milk the best of her hunter qualities.66 Oudry has presented the dogs’ environment much as Fouilloux recommended: a cool shed safely distanced from the other dogs, with a fresh bed of straw to protect them from cold and humidity.67 But while Fouilloux kept his focus upon the practical details of raising dogs for training in the hunt, Oudry constructs a canine narrative vignette, accentuated by the Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro and the oval format of the scene.68 Contemporary critics praised the painting as an expressive masterpiece: they noted the deliberate gestures of the mother dog, lifting her forepaw

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to protect the pup on the left and gazing watchfully towards something she has sensed off the right edge of the painting.69 The dog’s huge eyes and glistening nose, accentuated by the beam of sunlight, exhibit her full sensory awareness; perhaps it was this work, among others, that prompted Baillet de Saint-Julien to assert, in paying homage to Oudry in his review of the exhibition, “Descartes would have renounced his system in seeing your paintings: Bougeant would have written less frivolously his Language of Brutes.”70 In the Bitch Nursing Her Young, indeed, there is a specificity and complexity of communication not seen before in Oudry’s work: the animal shows, through head and body, at once “maternal” tenderness (a term used by more than one contemporary critic)71 and the ever-present preparedness for battle one would expect of a white hound. Conclusion The Bitch Nursing Her Young was exhibited with twenty-seven other works by Oudry in the Salon of 1753, many of them depicting animal hunts both large and small. Critics observed how much space of the exhibition was devoted to Oudry’s animal scenes.72 When Desportes submitted his morçeau de réception in 1699 (Plate 7), only one other animal specialist, his teacher Bernaerts, had been admitted into the Academy before him. But as Oudry, Jean-Siméon Chardin, the Huet family, and other specialists began to develop and exhibit their own work depicting animals during the first half of the eighteenth century the genre gained increasing value within the Academy, and both Oudry and Chardin occupied important positions of authority within its ranks.73 While the traditional Academic hierarchy that privileged human over animal became increasingly outmoded by contemporary tastes, in painting the noble institution of the hunt was virtually overtaken by charismatic dogs and their prey. Having surrendered, at the outset of the century, to the witty ontological inversions of decorative design, with its recollections of the fable and the fairy tale, viewers invested in the privileges of the hunt – and others who simply valued its cultural capital – accepted, and even welcomed, animal actors as its principal players. By the time Condillac and Bonnet were formulating their theories of sentient knowledge in the middle of the century, French audiences were moreover embracing the culture of feeling that opened the way for all beings, human and non-human alike, to be considered as vital characters. Indeed, the Bitch Nursing Her Young was purchased directly from the Salon exhibition by the materialist philosopher and salonier the baron d’Holbach, whose

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Système de la nature of 1770 would assert that all creatures acting with purpose possessed sentient intelligence.74 Animals had become, by the mid-eighteenth century, viable protagonists on par with the human – and the unrivalled heroes of the hunt.

NOTES 1 See Fouilloux, La Vénerie. Fouilloux’s treatise often was republished during the seventeenth century, and again in 1754. See also Gaffet, Nouveau traité . On the parforce hunt, see Pietsch, Porzellan Parforce. 2 Opperman, J.-B. Oudry, 54. 3 Cf. Freund, “Good Dog !” 68. Throughout her article Freund observes, as I do here, the independence of the animal protagonists in Oudry’s paintings of the hunt, although the conclusions she draws are somewhat different from my own. 4 Salnove, La Vénerie royale, 29; Gaffet, Nouveau traité, 149–50. 5 Wolves were less often targeted in the parforce hunt than were the more “noble” animals such as the deer; Fouilloux, for example, devotes twentyone pages of La Vénerie to the wolf, as opposed to eighty-one for the hunting of the deer. In his many representations of wolves Oudry tended to emphasize their physical and expressive similarities with dogs; see Cohen, “Animal Performance.” 6 Corval, Histoire de la chasse, 75. 7 The original painting by Oudry from which Chabry excerpted his battling pair is the Hyena Attacked by Two Dogs (Schwerin, Staatliches Museum, 1739). A terracotta version of the ceramic sculpture was also made for the Manufactory of Sèvres. 8 Human hunters do appear in certain large collections of table ornaments depicting the parfarce hunt, especially those produced in Strasbourg in the mid-eighteenth century, which resemble German models; see Pietsch, Porzellan Parforce. 9 See, e.g., La Font de Saint-Yenne, Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’état présent de la Peinture en France, 68, 8; cf. Opperman, J.-B. Oudry, 70–2. 10 Montaigne, Apologie de Raymond Sebond, Les Essais, II, 12, 436–604. See also, for example, Charron, Of Wisdom; Bougeant, Amusement philosophique; La Mettrie, Machine Man, 3–39. 11 See, Delmarcel, “The Killing of the Wild Boar,” 329–37; Balis, Jonge, Delmarcel, and Lefébure, Les Chasses de Maximilien; Schneebalg-Perelman, Les Chasses de Maximilien.

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12 On Snyders, see Koslow, Frans Snyders, chapter 6. On the animalier, see Iriye, “Le Vau’s Menagerie,” chapter 5. 13 Koslow, Frans Snyders, 28. Cf. arguments made by Scott A. Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece, chapter 4. 14 On the French market for works by Snyders, see Schnapper, Curieux du Grand Siècle, 89. On Bernaerts, see Meyer, Les Peintres du roi, 88. 15 Delmarcel, “The Killing of the Wild Boar,” 329; Guiffrey, Inventaire général du mobilier de la couronne 2:300, no. 714. 16 Williams, Académie Royale, 17–75. 17 In a drawing (Paris, Louvre) and a painting (private collection) Desportes made in preparation for the final work, he represented himself in a powdered wig, set in a landscape that compromises somewhat his close relationship to dogs and prey. See Lastic and Jacky, Desportes, 66–7; see also Jacky, “L’Autoportrait en chasseur.” 18 André Félibien, Conférences de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture Pendant l’année 1667, quoted in translation by Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting, 9. 19 Williams, Académie Royale, 131. 20 On this and subsequent commissions, see Lastic and Jacky, Desportes, 88–98; Salmon, “Cave Canem”; and Milovanovic, La Princesse Palatine, 49–53. 21 See, for example, chalk portraits made by the seventeenth-century French artist Daniel Dumonstier, such as that of the duchesse de Longeville (Paris, Musée du Louvre). 22 Opperman, J.-B. Oudry, 124–8; 23 See Lastic and Jacky, Desportes, 98. To the paintings by Jacopo Bassano and Larent de La Hyre mentioned by these authors, one could add Anthonis Mor’s portrait of the Bishop of Granvelle’s dwarf and mastiff (Paris, Louvre); Guercino’s painting of a mastiff (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum), and Jan Fyt’s Dog, Dwarf, and Boy (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie). 24 Milovanovic, La Princesse Palatine, 52. 25 Milovanovic, La Princesse Palatine, 49; Nolhac, Le Château de Versailles, 46–7; 50, n. 7; 54. 26 Mailly, Éloge de la chasse, 5: “Les chiens qu’on ramene de la chasse sont regardez comme de braves soldats.” 27 The king’s particular affection for Mite is suggested by the fact that in 1714, when Desportes executed his second portrait of her, she had already died; cf. Lastic and Jacky, Desportes, 95–8. The work illustrated in Plate 5 as well as a nearly identical oil on canvas formed part of the large collection

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32 33 34

35 36 37

38 39 40

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of Desportes’s works sold by his nephew, Nicolas Desportes, to the porcelain manufactory of Sèvres; see L’Atelier de Desportes, 31, no. 12. On game reserved for landed nobility, see Fromageau, “Droit de chasse et édits royaux” in De Chasse et d’Épée, 104–8; cf. Du Fouilloux, La Vénerie. Cf. Jacky, Desportes, 22. See Fouilloux, La Vénerie, whose detailed accounts of the conduct of the hunt feature dogs as primary protagonists. Fouilloux, La Vénerie, 36; 129; 52–3. Fouilloux’s blasons were probably inspired, in part, by certain late medieval bestiaries in which animals made their own statements in quatrains; see, Tilander, “La plus ancienne edition.” Gascoigne, The noble art of venerie or hunting, 197–203. Jacky, Desportes, 22. Mailly, Éloge de la chasse; see, for example, his accounts of the “charmed” hares that performed baffling feats of elusion and escape, pp. 10–20. According to Gaffet (Nouveau traité, 5), Mailly’s tall tale about the hare was drawn from an earlier source. See Cohen, Art, Dance and Society, 110–24. Scott, The Rococo Interior, 137–40. In addition to preparing the hunting grotesque discussed below, Audran may also have been responsible for the the duc de Vendôme’s Grand Cabinet at Anet, whose grotesques featured “quatre petites chasses”; Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo, 106, quoting Dezallier d’Argenville, Voyage pittoresque des encirons de Paris, 1755. Lastic and Jacky, Desportes, 50; see also 286, n. 44. Cf. Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo, 107. Garnier-Pelle, “Singeries and Exoticism,” 44. See Madame d[’Aulnoy]…, Les Contes de fées and Contes nouveaux ou les fées à la mode; Perrault, Histoires. See also Storer, La Mode des contes de fées; Defrance, Les Contes de fees, esp. 115–54. La Fontaine, Fables choisies; further editions were published in 1678 and in 1694. Numerous other editions of the Fables were published around the turn of the eighteenth century. Madame d[’Aulnoy], Contes nouveaux ou Les fées à la mode, 228–343; cf. Defrance, Les contes de fées, 138–9. Storer, La Mode des contes de fées, 9–24 ; Defrance, Les contes de fées, 12–13. “Les Animaux … sont si bien désignez … que l’eau qu’ils jettent, imite en quelque sorte la parole que la Fable leur a donnée”; Perrault [attrib.], “Description du Labyrinthe de Versailles,” 4. On the Versailles Labyrinth, see Maisonnier and Maral, Le Labyrinthe de Versailles.

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45 Bouchet, Mémoires du marquis de Sourches, 231–2 ; cf. London, “Aping the Aristocracy,” 12–13; 57–8. 46 See Scott, The Rococo Interior; Cohen, Art, Dance and the Body. 47 Xavier Salmon, Catalogue Entry no. 27, in Le Lazour and Daguerre de Hureaux, Les Peintres du roi, 142–4. 48 See Cohen, “Animal Performance”; Liebman, “Motion and Emotion.” 49 La Fontaine, Fables choisies. 50 See Cohen, “Chardin’s Fur,” and “Animal Performance”; Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine; Busson, “Introduction historique.” 51 See for example, Chambre, Traité de la connaissance des animaux, 342; 348; 349–50; Boullier, Essai philosophique, 271–2. 52 La Fontaine, Fables choisies [1668], IX, 20; translation taken from Hill, The Complete Fables of La Fontaine, 247. 53 La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers. 54 La Fontaine, “The English Fox,” Fables choisies [1694], XII, 23, trans. Hill, Complete Fables, 330–2. 55 “Si ce n’est pas là raisonner, / La raison m’est chose inconnue”; Fables choisis [1678], Book XI, Fable 9, “Les Souris et le Chat-Huant.” 56 Descartes had contended, in the Discours sur la méthode of 1637, that a fundamental indication of animals’ lack of reasoning was their inability to use language. This would become a central point of contention in the subsequent debate over animal soul. See De Fontenay, Le Silence des bêtes. 57 Charles Le Brun had established the “expressive head” as a staple Academic exercise in his own series of drawings depicting the “expressions of the passions,” many of which were subsequently published as engravings illustrating his 1668 lecture on the subject at the Academy. See Montagu, The Expression of the Passions. 58 Condillac, Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge, 11 and Traité des sensations [1754], in Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, 1:323 and passim; “... le systême des connoissances dans les animaux”: idem, Traité des animaux [1755], in, Œuvres philosophiques de Condillac, 1:357–8 (quotation from 358). 59 “Par rapport à lui-même, un Etre sentant n’existe, qu’autant qu’il sent ”; Bonnet, Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme, 453–4. 60 See Opperman, J-B Oudry, 1:53–4. 61 “Tout ce qu’il imite est vray; il donne à ses sujets l’ame et le corps”; Baillet de Saint-Jullien, Reflexions sur quelque circonstances presentes, Contenant Deux Lettres sur l’Exposition des Tableaux au Louvre cette année 1748. (n.d.); quoted in Opperman, J- Oudry, 1:198.

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62 “M. Oudry semble rendre le caractere des Animaux par le mouvement propre qu’il sçait donner à chaque espéce”; Lettre sur la peinture, sculpture et architecture, à M.xxx (1748); quoted in Opperman, J-BOudry, 1:196. 63 See Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment; Chua, “Dead Birds”; and Sheriff, Moved by Love. 64 Compare Greuze’s Wool Winder (c. 1759), which also features a wide-eyed kitten; and Drouais’s The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards (1758), whose child sitters are complemented by their gentle setter (both paintings New York, The Frick Collection). 65 Abbé Garrigues de Froment, in his Sentimens d’un amateur sur l’exposition des tableaux du Louvre… (1753), referred to the bitch as “cette mère”; Opperman, J-BOudry, 1:211. 66 Fouilloux, La Vénerie, 23. 67 Fouilloux, La Vénerie, 23. 68 The painting appears to be based upon Rembrandt’s Holy Family (Paris, Louvre), known at the time as the Ménage du menuisier (Opperman, J.-B. Oudry, 185). 69 See the reviews of Oudry’s works exhibited in the Salon of 1753 by a Monsieur Estève and (probably) by Friedrich Melchior Grimm; quoted in Opperman, J-B Oudry, 1:208, 206. 70 “Descartes eut renoncé à son systême en voyant tes tableau: Bougeant eut écrit moins frivolement son Langage des Bêtes”; Baillet de Saint-Julien, La Peinture: Ode de Milord Tellian… (1753); quoted in Opperman, J-B Oudry, 1:210. Cf. n. 10 above. 71 See Monsieur Estève, Lettre à un ami ; and Abbé Garrigues de Froment, Sentimens d’un amateur sur l’exposition des tableaux du Louvre in Opperman, J-BOudry, 1:208, 211. 72 See critics quoted and cited by Opperman, J-B Oudry, 1:206–7, 209, 211–13. 73 Chardin held the position of treasurer of the Academy from 1755 to 1774, and beginning in 1755 he also served as tapissier, in charge of hanging the works in the Salon exhibitions. Oudry became a professor in the Academy in 1743. 74 Opperman, J-B. Oudry, 183; Holbach, Système de la nature, 1:79.

Chapter Six

Horse Racing in Early Colonial Algeria: From Anglophilia to Arabomania philip dine

The emergence of horse racing as France’s first mass sporting spectacle coincided with two epoch-making events: the establishment of the modern state’s most important colony, and the accession of the Orleans branch of the Bourbon monarchy. The military success of the Algiers Expedition of June 1830 did not prevent the following month’s July Revolution, which brought to ascendancy a group remarkably committed to equestrian sport, both at home and in the newly acquired North African territory. The roots of this royal enthusiasm lay across the English Channel, as reflected in the Orleanists’ explicitly Anglophile patronage of French racing from its beginnings in the 1760s. The confidence of the new ruling house in an aristocratic equestrian culture shared across political boundaries was to have an intriguing parallel in early colonial Algeria. On the one hand, visiting artists found Romantic inspiration in the apparently timeless virtues of the Barb horse and the Arab horseman; on the other hand, cavalry officers both looked to North African bloodstock as a way of improving their own mounts and sought to turn racing into a means of exerting indirect rule over the territory. We may trace this narrative of imperial ambition, sporting diffusion, and cultural cross-fertilization by focusing on equestrian practices and their supporting discourses, as communicated by a variety of contemporary textual and pictorial representations. Such depictions reveal a sports-inflected reflection on and even, briefly, an attempted renegotiation of prevailing power relations, which may legitimately be regarded as a precursor to Emperor Napoléon III’s policy shift in the early 1860s in favour of establishing a royaume arabe or “Arab kingdom” in Algeria.

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Overlapping Equestrian Influences: England and the East Before examining the appeal of English equestrian models for the French nobility, it is necessary to consider what Donna Landry has persuasively characterized as the transformation of English culture by Eastern horses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 While it is impossible to do justice here to the range and subtlety of her analysis, we may note that her account broadly supports the long-held conviction within English racing as regards the abiding genetic influence of a relatively small number of Eastern antecedents, epitomized by three celebrated stallions imported from the Middle East and North Africa between 1689 and 1724: the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian, and the Godolphin Barb (or Arabian).2 The alternative nomenclature used to refer to this last-named animal underlines the frequent uncertainty as to the identity (in terms of breed), as well as the precise origins, of these and other historic progenitors.3 Landry notes that the tendency to label imported Eastern horses indiscriminately as “Arabian” resulted in an undervaluing of Ottoman bloodlines, including both those originating in the empire’s Turkish heartland and those to be found on its Western frontier: Yet calling so much of the imported foundation stock “Arabian” was probably misleading. The influence of North African Barbs and, especially, so-called Turks, should not be underestimated … We are left with the conclusion, therefore, that in a number of cases his lordship’s Arabian might very well have been his lordship’s Turk … His lordship’s Barb was also genetically crucial, as evidenced by Tregonwell’s Natural Barb mare and other Barb mares whose mtDNA [Mitochondrial DNA] is still present in their female descendants.4

All three of the genetic components highlighted by Landry (Arabian, Barb, and Turk) were accordingly drawn upon during the extended process of selective breeding that ultimately produced a qualitatively new type of animal: the “English Thoroughbred.” In spite of its name, this very special breed was thus an Anglo-Oriental amalgam, which combined speed, strength, and endurance, not to mention unquestionable grace, in an unprecedented fusion uniquely adapted to the demands of the race course. Landry stresses that the arrival of Eastern horses on the emergent English sporting scene not only had a profound impact on the genetic

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constitution of bloodstock as a result of this controlled hybridization, but also a direct influence on the country’s riding styles, including notably those of huntsmen and cavalry officers, as well as on the broader practices of equine husbandry. These changes in turn encouraged a thoroughgoing reassessment of equine-human interactions, which would lead to a new ethics of horsemanship and a new aesthetics of animal representation, reflected in such diversely innovative art as the equine portraiture of George Stubbs and the satirical fiction of Jonathan Swift. However, a pivotal aspect of this cultural transformation was conveniently forgotten, namely its unacknowledged debt to the East, where “there existed from the eighth century onward in the Islamic world an elaborate discourse of horsemanship or furusiyya – the theory and practice of hippology, veterinary care, farriery, and equitation.”5 Landry explains this omission in terms of the Orientalism first characterized by Edward Said, revealing that “this rich and varied legacy of Eastern influence on British horsemanship” was “seized upon and more or less consciously absorbed into European culture.”6 This appropriation included both the concept of the “purebred” horse and the administrative practices required for the development of the English Thoroughbred: Ironically, those keen genealogists, English horse breeders, first learned about equine pedigree keeping in the East. They imported the idea of a purified lineage and of written documentation to support it along with the horses themselves … The very word thoroughbred or through-bred for a pedigreed horse is a translation of the Arabic word kuhaylan, meaning “purebred all through.”7

It was thus the “profoundly hybrid” equestrian culture of the British Isles, in which the influence of Ottoman and Arab-Islamic horsemanship remained foundational but unrecognized,8 which would now be offered for imitation to the aristocratic elites of an ever more enthusiastically sporting Europe. French racing may be said to have come of age in 1865 with the triumph of Gladiateur in the “Triple Crown” of English Classic races: the 2,000 Guineas, the Derby, and the St Leger. Hailed by the French press as the “Avenger of Waterloo,” fifty years on from that national catastrophe, the colt was owned by the intensely patriotic Count Frédéric de Lagrange, who, remarkably, was born on the very day of Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat.9 Paradoxically, given Lagrange’s evident determination to achieve

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symbolic compensation for France in the equestrian sphere, Gladiateur was trained at Newmarket by Tom Jennings and ridden by the English champion jockey Harry Grimshaw. The colt was also painted by several leading producers of sporting prints for the British market, such as Henry Thomas Alken, Harry Hall, and John Miller. In fact, this dual affiliation reflected a century-long process of imitation that had begun under the Ancien Régime, when influential aristocrats had sought to develop the practice of racing on the English model.10 As Robert Tombs explains, this appropriation was as much competitive as it was imitative: “Anglomania” was both emulation of and rivalry with the English. The archanglomaniac was the Duc de Chartres, heir to the duchy of Orléans … In the 1770s Chartres … set up a horse racing and gambling coterie, with imported mounts and jockeys. They hoped to create a “French Newmarket” at Sablons, just west of Paris, where the first French horse races had taken place in 1766 … They ran highly publicized races in the presence of Marie-Antoinette.11

The involvement in racing of the monarchy’s most vilified representative underlines the fact that the country’s earliest sporting enthusiasm occurred against the backdrop of profound social and political transformation. In 1763 the Treaty of Paris had brought to an end the Seven Years’ War, with the loss of France’s North American territories to Great Britain, its foremost imperial rival. A generation later, the 1789 Revolution permanently altered the nation’s sense of itself and its place in the world, also setting the scene for the European crisis associated with the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. This process of upheaval would continue with the Bourbon Restoration (1814) and France’s catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (1815); the Legitimist branch of the monarchy would itself be ousted by the July Revolution of 1830. Of particular importance from our perspective, this tumultuous period also witnessed Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798–1801 and the Algiers expedition of 1830. Marking a major shift in French territorial ambitions, the Expédition d’Egypte was also, in the words of Edward Said, “in many ways the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another, apparently stronger one. For with Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt processes were set in motion between East and West that still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives.”12 Three decades later, the Expédition d’Alger was the beginning of a century and a quarter of French engagement in North Africa

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which would only end with Algerian independence in 1962. Remarkably, each of these incursions also served to give a new importance to equestrianism, both in its military and its sporting incarnations, with the two categories significantly overlapping in the army’s championing of horse racing in early colonial Algeria. Under royal patronage, the frequency of race meetings at Les Sablons had increased from just two a year in 1777 to over twenty by 1830.13 In addition to fashionable Anglophilia, aristocratic enthusiasm for the sport revealed a nostalgic concern for the preservation of class distinctions rooted in the fetishization of genealogy, or what Georges Vigarello terms “investment in breeding, a tenacious attachment to distinction and imagined perfection through bloodlines.”14 Taken together, these three concepts – la race, la différence, le sang – which we might render in English as “breed, distinction, blood” or “race, otherness, kinship” – offered a conservative alternative to the Republican motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. This ideological triptych could be applied, mutatis mutandis, as effectively to empire-building as to horse-breeding; these aristocratic preoccupations would be enshrined as guiding principles by French racing’s governing body, the avowedly utilitarian Société d’encouragement pour l’amélioration des races de chevaux en France, which was established in 1833. At the highest level, the country’s direction was now to be decided, “perhaps for the only time in its history, by a party of political anglophiles,” whose collective commitment to racing had long been one of its characterizing features.15 Thus, in Nicole de Blomac’s view, “The dawn of Louis-Philippe’s reign was placed under the sign of the galloping and jumping horse.”16 Just fifteen years earlier, Napoléon Bonaparte’s ambitions in the Middle East had helped lead France to the catastrophe of Waterloo. In contrast, Orleanist expansionism in Algeria would now be tolerated by the country’s imperial competitors, led by Great Britain, with “the king’s dashing sons [playing] prominent roles.”17 Horses and Horsemen in Pre-Colonial Algeria As we have seen, the Barb (or Barbary or Berber) horse was a vital component in the making of the English Thoroughbred. While the exact origins of this North African breed remain open to conjecture, they are undoubtedly characterized by hybridity, and thus marked by the phenomenon that geneticists recognize as heterosis or “hybrid vigour.” In this connection, Deb Bennett has highlighted the genetic legacy

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of the Afro-Turkic subspecies Equus caballus pumpelli, which lived in the southern and eastern coastal regions of the Mediterranean (an area which corresponds closely to the territory of the future Ottoman Empire) during the last Ice Age, and thus just prior to the domestication of the horse. This primary ancestor was, in Bennett’s view, crossed and recrossed with the Iberian subspecies Equus caballus caballus, first by Roman horsemen and then, in the wake of the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century CE, by the Visigoths, who likewise made the short sea crossing to North Africa, taking their horses with them.18 By the same token, horse races are probably as old as man’s domestication of the species, and thus considerably predate recorded history, in North Africa as elsewhere.19 Indeed, following their accession to independence, formerly French-controlled nations in the region have sought specifically to assert racing’s pre-colonial – and even anticolonial – credentials.20 There is certainly strong evidence of an ancient and thriving equestrian culture in the Maghreb, best exemplified by the classical renown of the Numidian cavalry, who would durably impress the invading Romans, first as their adversaries and then as their co-opted comrades-in-arms.21 As far as racing is concerned, the Roman Empire brought both amphitheatres for gladiatorial combat and circuses for chariot racing.22 In fact, modern archaeological research has demonstrated the popularity of chariot racing throughout the imperial province of Numidia.23 The remains of several major circuses may still be seen in Algeria, including at Cherchell (Roman Caesarea), Sétif (Sitifis), and Aumale (Auzia, modern Sour El Ghoziane).24 Such investigations reveal that large numbers of North African horses were also regularly raced at the Circus Maximus in Rome, as well as in the other western imperial provinces, suggesting the existence of a network of specialized stud-farms across the Maghreb. Particular evidence is available of one such centre at Tagaste (now known as Souk Ahras), the birthplace of Saint Augustine, near the modern Algerian border with Tunisia. Moreover, while chariot racing may have been a Roman innovation, the archaeological trace indicates that the sport’s rapid expansion in the region both drew upon and reinforced pre-imperial traditions of horse rearing and racing.25 This Maghrebian connection would appear to have been maintained, or perhaps reinvented, by Rome’s medieval carnival, in the form of the annual spectacle of the running of riderless horses along the Via del Corso (hence the street’s name), as recorded from the mid-fifteenth to the late nineteenth century. Known as the corsa dei barberi, a name which

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suggests the North African origin of its early equine participants, the event was memorably captured by Théodore Géricault in his series of studies entitled Course de chevaux libres à Rome (1817), in which he depicted the “race” both as a contemporary scene and a classical tableau (Plate 12). The catalogue information provided by the Louvre on its example of the latter representation interestingly notes the artist’s depiction of “A dozen stallions of Arabian blood.”26 As both a keen horseman and an artistic innovator, deeply familiar with the conventions of classicism and the tradition of the British sporting print, Géricault was particularly well placed to contribute to shaping the Romantic depiction of the horse, not only in such conventional fields as warfare, but also as an object of sensitive study in its own right. His role in the popularization both of racing and of the Arabian horse is exemplified respectively by his painting of Le Derby d’Epsom (1821) and his Cheval arabe gris blanc (date uncertain, but necessarily before 1824, the year in which the artist died, aged just 32) (Plate 13). Although Géricault’s interest in these themes clearly predates the French arrival in Algeria, it does underline the emerging engagement of the nation’s artists with equine subjects and equestrian activities. It is additionally striking that the theme of the corsa dei barberi should have been returned to some forty years later by Edgar Degas, the most celebrated of French racing artists, whose own representations of the event were directly influenced by the work of Géricault.27 As for the pre-colonial Maghreb, it would appear that an indigenous equestrian culture was subject to accretions by a series of invaders, as Roman rule was replaced in turn by that of the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Arabs, and the Ottoman Turks. All of these civilizations depended in their various ways upon the horse, as, indeed, did the invading French army after 1830. Moreover, the Napoleonic Expédition d’Égypte had demonstrated forcefully that a distinctive feature of French colonial control in the Arab-Islamic world was to be its commitment to the Orientalist project of establishing scholarly authority over the relevant territory, including not only its human populations, but also its equine inhabitants. Accordingly, in his monumental Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord (published between 1913 and 1929), Stéphane Gsell, the foremost authority on “Latin Africa,” notes the continued existence of two distinct breeds of horse in the region: the local Barb (or Berber) and the Arab, introduced by the Muslim holy warriors that it first carried from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century. A leading figure in French imperial historiography, and its associated myth-making,

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Gsell is predictably keen to underline the decisive contribution made by these two breeds in the creation of the English Thoroughbred.28 As the arch-Latinist suggests, and as the work of Donna Landry confirms, such celebrated precursors as the Godolphin Barb would seem to have been only the best-known examples of a long-established North African export trade in bloodstock. This view is borne out by the comments of an English traveller to the region a century before the French put an end to Ottoman rule. In his Travels, or, observations relating to several parts of Barbary and the Levant (1738), Thomas Shaw, a cleric and an Oxford academic, observed that: “The horse, formerly the glory and distinguishing badge of Numidia, has of late years very much degenerated; or rather, the Arabs have been discouraged from keeping up a fine breed, which the Turkish officers were sure at one time or another to be the masters of.”29 Landry’s analysis would, no doubt, encourage a somewhat more nuanced reading of the impact of the Ottoman presence on the horse culture of North Africa. However, what is not disputed by this critical visitor is that the local Arabs remain excellent horsemen, underlining the importance of equestrianism in the daily life of the indigenous male of a suitably leisured class. In Shaw’s terms: “What he values above all is his horse, wherein he places his highest satisfaction; being seldom well pleased or in good humour but when he is far from home, riding at full speed or hunting.”30 In fact, Shaw’s account combines stereotypical criticism of the Arabs’ perceived indolence with an informed appreciation of their hunting-honed equestrian skills, the latter couched in terms that appear to suggest their Roman origins: “Few there are who cannot quickly hunt down a wild boar; the representation of which sport, as it is performed to this day, is beautifully designed upon one of the medallions in Constantine’s arch.”31 Later generations of European travellers would follow Thomas Shaw in drawing attention to equestrianism as the key to understanding Algeria’s indigenous elite. As we shall see, such an image of traditional sporting passion would become deeply ingrained within the French colonial imagination. Hunting, Writing, Painting: French Depictions of Indigenous Equestrianism Both influential military commentators and leading artistic interpreters stressed the importance of the horse, and especially of hunting on horseback, to indigenous lifestyles and mentalities. Studies of the

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region by the pioneering Arabist and military strategist General Eugène Daumas provided detailed accounts of such traditional hunting methods. These included highly technical descriptions of the hunting of ostrich and gazelle on horseback, as well as the use of falcons and greyhounds.32 Daumas particularly highlighted the affection of the Saharan Arab elite for their specialized hunting dogs, referred to as sloughi [salukis], as a proof of their innate aristocracy.33 As Michèle Salinas has observed, hunting was central to the emergence of what she terms the myth of the desert Arab as a grand seigneur. She links this figure to the nostalgia for pre-industrial nobility that characterized certain sections of the European intellectual elite in the nineteenth century.34 Romanticism would be to the fore in this artistic reaction against the rise of technologically mediated and commercially motivated modernity. For the intelligentsia, as for many more humble migrants, the colonies offered an escape from the constraints – economic, political, and moral – of “metropolitan” France. In the figure of the noble desert Arab, artistic travellers found an inherently sporting incarnation of abiding chivalry rooted in feudalism. Traditional equestrian pursuits, including both hunting on horseback and the military spectacle of the fantasia, would particularly appeal to such visitors, headed by Eugène Delacroix, who visited Morocco extensively in 1832, also including in his itinerary shorter stays in Oran and Algiers. In his celebrated critique of Orientalism (1978), Edward Said highlights this artist’s leading role in the aesthetic construction of the colonized Maghreb and the wider Arab-Islamic world: “in the works of Delacroix and literally dozens of other French and British painters, the Oriental genre tableau carried representation into visual expression and a life of its own.”35 During his visit, Delacroix was impressed by the displays of equestrian skill that often greeted the arrival of his party, including especially the formal display of military horsemanship known as the fantasia, which his works would help to popularize. The painter’s experience of this traditional “game of gunpowder” was quickly reflected in the paintings that he devoted to the theme, including Fantasia ou Jeu de la poudre, devant la porte d’entrée de la ville de Méquinez [Meknes] and Exercices militaires des Marocains ou Fantasia marocaine (both 1832), as well as his Fantasia arabe (1833). This fascination would be shared by many later visitors and may be regarded as doubly ironic. To begin with, it was precisely the equestrian mobility of the emerging Algerian resistance movement that enabled it to mount a sustained challenge to French control of the territory, thereby seriously restricting

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opportunities for European tourists for over a decade. Later, when the military threat posed by indigenous equestrianism had been diffused, the historicity of mounted warfare would be replaced by the altogether more reassuring spectacle of the fantasia, together with a profusion of equally de-historicized representations of traditional hunting. As a simulacrum of Arab military force, the fantasia would become an almost compulsory theme for visiting French artists.36 Among the most notable of these later travellers was Eugène Fromentin, who consciously followed the lead of Delacroix in his published accounts of his travels, notably Une année dans le Sahel (1858), which concludes with an especially dramatic account of the fantasia, and then in his painting Une fantasia: Algérie (1869). Fromentin’s work would itself prove to be highly influential in the Orientalist representation of the Maghreb and its inhabitants, both human and equine. Central to the artist’s critical acclaim and public appeal were his panoramic, and deeply atmospheric, compositions of traditional hunting scenes, such as Chasse à la gazelle dans le Hodna (1856) and Arabes chassant au faucon (Sahara) (1865). Barbara Wright observes that the influential writer and art critic Théophile Gautier viewed these representations “as evocative of feudal times in Europe. In this, he was anticipating Baudelaire’s emphasis on Fromentin’s portrayal of the Arab horseman as a patrician dandy, a medieval seigneur.”37 Traditional hunting was similarly foregrounded in the work of such talented contemporaries as Horace Vernet and JeanLéon Gérôme, who joined Fromentin in producing a series of haunting images of Arab huntsmen, accompanied by their horses, hawks, and hounds. Wright relates how, in the course of the second of three trips to Algeria undertaken in the period 1846–52, Fromentin became involved with the intriguing figure of Oscar MacCarthy, the son of an Irish officer in the Napoleonic army. A respected commentator on the territory and its populations, MacCarthy organized a hunting expedition for the artist to Lake Haloula in the Mitidja region, just south of Algiers. Wright comments that Fromentin’s depiction of traditional hunting would draw on Shaw’s 1738 travel writings, as well as on stock European representations of the chase, which he productively combined with personal observations on the ground.38 His painting La Chasse au sanglier (1854), depicting the titular wild boar hunt, “was the first important example of a subject later to become a Fromentin staple.”39 Reflecting on his Algerian hunting experiences in his later writings, the artist would contrast the subtlety of indigenous approaches to the pursuit of game

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with the more forceful methods used by French cavalry officers, emphasizing the role of hunting on the military model as an extension of the colonial project.40 Wright notes that “the conventions of the hunt were freer than those in France, almost a simulacrum of the conquest,” or as Fromentin’s local guide puts it: “Everyone is free to charge at full speed, like in enemy country; the goal is to kill a lot. It is an exercise learned in waging war.”41 With overtones of the mounted chasse à courre traditionally enjoyed by the French nobility, hunting on the military model is consequently a joy, quite simply, because “nothing out there needs to be taken care of, not the land, which belongs to no one, nor the game, which is very abundant.”42 Thus, while a variety of generically depicted “Arabs” may have populated the apparently timeless landscapes of Fromentin’s traditional hunting scenes, the bled [countryside] through which the artist actually travelled was imaginatively, if not yet practically, emptied of its non-European inhabitants and former masters, becoming an equestrian playground for the colonizer, both in his military and artistic incarnations.43 In contrast to this discourse of sporting exclusion, the testimony of a senior officer from the Bureaux Arabes, based in the Algerian interior between 1844 and 1869, paints a picture of shared elite appreciation of the pleasures of horses and hunting. In his Chasses de l’Algérie et Notes sur les Arabes du Sud (1866),44 General Auguste Margueritte describes the unusually amicable relations with traditional huntsmen that allowed him to discover the joys of ostrich-hunting on horseback in the Sahara, which he suggests was a rare privilege for Europeans. His extended account presents the pastoral existence of Algeria’s tribes as idyllic in its seemingly biblical simplicity, although his detailed ethnographic notes do suggest a sensitivity to the organization of traditional communities that goes somewhat beyond such Orientalist stereotypes.45 For instance, we learn that the local tribes are extremely well adapted to the life of the desert and its deprivations, and actually hunt on the hottest days of the year, turning them to advantage against their quarry. Accordingly, from the 25th of June to the 15th of August, the ostrich-hunting season sees them exploit the intense heat as well as the speed of their specially bred and trained horses to run down the enormous birds. Such skills, we learn, are directly related to the custom of brigandage in the region, and are, in fact, restricted to those tribes who traditionally made a living from raiding caravans. The particular tribe that introduced Margueritte to the hunt, the Mekhalifs-el-Djereub, were thus previously the most notorious bandits in the Sahara, and the terror of European travellers in the region.46

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Such was the intense pleasure experienced by Margueritte in the course of these ostrich-hunts that he states: “I was in a state of rapture unlike any other.”47 Three factors combine to explain this delight: the richness of Algeria as an equestrian hunting-ground; the unparalleled freedom experienced by the European huntsman; and the transcendental solitude of the desert.48 This profoundly romantic – and, indeed, properly Romantic – depiction of hunting in the Sahara reinforces the conventional representation of the Arab as a noble savage at least partially resistant to the rationalizing, homogenizing, and, ultimately stultifying forces of modern Europe. The sporting liberation from social constraints celebrated by Margueritte – as in his accounts of the camaraderie of exotically evoked nights of barbarous feasting on ostrichflesh and even ostrich-brains, and of traditional story-telling around the camp-fire and under the desert stars – depends ultimately upon a deeply conservative, and essentially pre-industrial, construction of sporting masculinity. The equestrian interest of such accounts resides in their emphasis on the centrality of swift horses in the pre-colonial culture of the Maghreb. The remarkable story of Abd el-Kader’s anticolonial resistance significantly reinforces this impression. The Emir Abd el-Kader: From Anticolonial Resistance to Equestrian Dialogue The French invasion of Algeria in 1830 may be regarded as a continuation of unfinished business from Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition of 1798–1801. Primarily understandable in terms of Franco-British imperial rivalries, the earlier incursion had proved to be “a historic turningpoint in the relationship between the Muslim world and the West.”49 As one of its incidental outcomes, the campaign had resulted in the rediscovery of the virtues of the Arab horse in both military and sporting circles in France.50 Moreover, bloodstock sent back from Egypt now provided a practical alternative to prohibited English imports, thus encouraging what Blomac terms a more general mood of “ambient anglophobia and arabomania.”51 In 1806 Napoleon’s reinstatement of the regionally organized network of national stud farms, which had been closed during the Revolution, reflected his conviction of the public utility of the selective breeding of horses. The emperor also made it plain that he saw the Arabian breed as the key to the improvement of French bloodstock, specifically in the face of English rivalry.52 This revitalization became the primary objective of those responsible for

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French racing, which was itself re-established by the imperial decree of 31 August 1805, and which would now provide the sporting context for the emergence of a Franco-Oriental rival to the English Thoroughbred, in the form of the equally misleadingly named pur sang français.53 Horse races had actually taken place in Egypt in 1799 as part of the Fêtes de la République held to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the French Revolution.54 In addition, several horses acquired and even ridden by Napoleon himself while on campaign were passed on to the national stud, including a stallion named Ali. In spite of his advancing years, this animal was painted by the young Horace Vernet in 1812, subsequently serving as the inspiration for the emperor’s idealized Arabian mount in the mature artist’s tableau of La Bataille de Wagram (1836).55 Blomac says of such representations that “With very few exceptions, all [French] artists sublimated Eastern horses, helping to further the idea that they were necessarily handsome and that they all possessed the timeless brilliance of perfect beings adorned with the beauty of their origins … and reassuring the public of the existence of a mythical Arabian, Turkish or Persian horse.”56 This artistic myth-making was compounded by the failure of stud managers in the Napoleonic period to keep a reliable trace of the origins of their Eastern acquisitions, describing all such horses as Arabian, irrespective of their specific breed, thereby conflating the products of Egypt, Syria, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Barbary States.57 However, there could be no doubting either the continued fascination of the East for France’s horsemen, or the undiminished desire of successive political regimes to establish French hegemony in the Arab-Islamic world.58 These territorial ambitions would be put into practice once again with the Algiers Expedition of 1830. The leadership of the indigenous resistance to the French invasion passed in 1832 to the young Emir Abd el-Kader,59 when, at his father’s suggestion, he was asked by the Qadiri tribes to lead them in the defence of their homeland, and with it their religion. As Amira K. Bennison explains: “He called an assembly of tribal and religious notables to secure communal approval and then issued the following announcement in the markets: ‘… Anyone who wishes to serve under the Muhammadan banner … should hurry to the capital of the emirate, Mascara, so that his name may be inscribed in the emir’s rolls.’”60 Many of those who responded would be horsemen. As the traditional form of warfare of the Maghreb’s nomadic tribes, fighting on horseback would be central to both the practice and the representation of Abd el-Kader’s campaign. Colonel Scott, a British officer who joined the emir’s entourage in 1841,

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provided an estimate of the size of his forces following France’s signature of the Treaty of Tafna in 1837, a diplomatic coup for the Algerian side that would, however, only mark a temporary pause in the conflict: “He gave the total size of the army as 12,000–13,000 infantry and 4,000– 5,000 cavalry, an estimate reduced to 9,000 infantry and 2,400 cavalry by French military intelligence three years later.”61 Although the true figure is liable to have fluctuated as the emir’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, the total number of horsemen likely to have been committed to the anticolonial struggle between 1832 and 1847 remains impressive, particularly when it is remembered that each rider would typically require several mounts in the course of the campaign. Indeed, this equine attrition was regarded as a badge of honour, as Abd el-Kader himself recounted to Colonel Charles-Henry Churchill, a British diplomat who became close to the emir during his period of post-war exile: It was well I looked to the future; for the number of horses I had to replace in my regular cavalry was immense. There is not a man amongst these troops who had not had seven or eight horses killed under him, or rendered unserviceable. Indeed, it was not uncommon to find men who had lost from twelve to sixteen. Ibn Tahia … had had eighteen horses killed under him. The emulation in this point was such that any horseman who passed a year without being wounded or having a horse killed under him was looked on with contempt.62

Even allowing for poetic licence in the emir’s stirring account, such losses hint at the inevitable outcome of his traditionalist resistance to the superior manpower and firepower, if not necessarily horsepower, of the French army. Nevertheless, drawing upon his own exceptional skills as a horseman, Abd el-Kader would lead the indigenous elite for fifteen years against the invaders, mobilizing a local equestrian culture based on speed and freedom of movement. Using hit-and-run tactics to harry a better-armed but less mobile opponent, the emir’s combined military skill and political shrewdness enabled him to continue the struggle until his honourable surrender in 1847. This formal admission of defeat was marked in suitably equestrian fashion, when the Algerian leader presented his own jet-black steed to the Duc d’Aumale, as captured by Augustin Régis in his painting La reddition d’Abd el-Kader, le 23 décembre 1847 (Plate 14).63 In spite of previous assurances to the contrary, Abd el-Kader was then interned for four years in France, where he continued to press

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the case for Algerian independence. Less predictably, he was also persuaded at this time to contribute his thoughts on racing to the volume on Saharan horses published by Eugène Daumas in 1851. The general had established unusually close relations with the emir as the French consul to his embryonic Algerian state in the period of armed peace that followed the Treaty of Tafna. He now used his influence to ensure that Abd el-Kader was detained in appropriately dignified surroundings in exile. As the emir was moved from the prison at the French naval base of Toulon, via the southwestern city of Pau, to the former royal chateau of Amboise on the Loire, he and Daumas had ample opportunities to discuss their shared passion for horses.64 Back in Algeria, the emir’s exile removed the last major obstacle to French colonization. However, in spite of his defeat, Abd el-Kader had made an abiding impression on local military observers, none more so than General La Moricière, the cavalry officer most directly responsible for overcoming his challenge to France. As Nicole de Blomac puts it: “it was in the course of the pursuit of this refined and cultivated warrior chief that La Moricière and with him a generation of military men learned to judge the value of the enemy cavalry and to appreciate their horses’ Eastern blood.”65 Cavalry officers belonged to an inherently conservative elite, which shared a sense of both aristocratic and sporting kinship with Abd elKader, whose outstanding equestrian skills were such that, in the words of General Daumas, the emir was “generally held to be the finest horseman in Barbary.”66 Moreover, this horsemanship was rooted not so much in the tribal institution of the razzia, the lightning raid targeting plunder, but rather in hunting, an honourable recreation which sympathetic French sportsmen both recognized and respected. As a member of the douad warrior nobility, the emir had spent a lifetime in the saddle, and, as his opponents had been able to observe at length, he had “learned the arts of war from the universal sport of the aristocracy – the chase.”67 Once open hostilities between France and Algeria had come to an end, and without ever renouncing his commitment to his nation’s independence, Abd el-Kader was able to engage in conversation with selected interlocutors, such as Daumas, to whose extensive writings on North Africa’s horses and horsemen he would make a significant contribution. This dialogue not only confirms the emir’s intimate knowledge of hunting, but also reveals his informed appreciation of the complexities of horse racing. His comments in Daumas’s study of Les Chevaux du Sahara et les moeurs du désert (1851) are of particular significance in this

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regard, providing a fascinating insight into the history and traditional organization of indigenous racing.68 Horse Racing in Algeria: From Traditional Diversion to Colonial Association According to Abd el-Kader, racing predated the coming of Islam, but then had its cultural legitimacy immeasurably reinforced by receiving the religion’s seal of approval.69 Indeed, such was the appeal of this indigenous sport, the emir suggests, that huge crowds regularly attended traditional race meetings, on a scale unmatched outside the hajj, the annual gathering of pilgrims to travel to Mecca, with all members of the local nobility guaranteed to be in attendance.70 We learn that the races themselves were typically run over distances between three and seven kilometres on a course known as a djalba, with equitable starts achieved by means of a rope held taut between two men, in a manner that prefigures the modern use of starting tapes. Detailed rules for the conduct of races were also outlined by Abd el-Kader to Daumas, including a precisely codified system of offering and attributing prizes, and a strict religious ban on betting.71 “The roots” of this indigenous sport in the practical utility of the horse in the vast landscapes of North Africa help to explain the emphasis which traditional racing placed on covering long distances over testing ground. An insight into the methods used to prepare competitors for such events is offered by Lieutenant Adolph Vilhelm Dinesen, a Danish volunteer in the French colonial army. A friend of Hans Christian Andersen and the grandfather of Karen Blixen (author of the celebrated Kenyan memoir Out of Africa, 1937), Dinesen witnessed Abd el-Kader’s historic meeting with General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, the senior French officer in Algeria, at the signing of the Tafna peace treaty in 1837. Among its many remarkable qualities, his incisive study of Franco-Algerian relations at this time includes a detailed analysis of the merits of local horses and horsemen, in which Dinesen emphasizes their speed, manoeuvrability, resilience, and perfect adaptation to the local terrain, qualities which made the combination into such redoubtable adversaries.72 Of particular interest here are the Danish officer’s comments on indigenous methods of training, which work with the animal and the land to produce the perfect light cavalry mount: The qualities with which nature has endowed the horse are further developed and perfected by its training, which the Arab understands and masters

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to perfection. It is not trained, as in a stud, according to precise rules. Its riding school is the open plain and its rider is the warrior in action … Its strength is measured by races and its stamina is further increased by means of long and exhausting treks.73

This then was the backdrop to the arrival of modern horse racing in Algeria. As a result of Abd el-Kader’s extended campaign against the French, the Barb horse and the Arab rider had been durably established as a potent symbol of anticolonial resistance. Nevertheless, influential cavalry officers would seek to turn a shared, and specifically aristocratic, appreciation of the horse – and particularly horse racing – into a tool of colonial policy. In the words of Abd el-Kader’s privileged interlocutor General Daumas: “In the land of equestrianism par excellence, the horse must become our instrument, passing from the service of the Arabs to the service of the French, in order that not only our colony, but also our homeland itself, should profit from this precious conquest.”74 Modern racing came to Algeria at a time when the futures of France and the colony alike were in the balance. If the end of sustained opposition to the French presence was marked by Abd el-Kader’s surrender at the end of 1847, the European “Year of Revolutions” that followed was to sweep away the July Monarchy, initially replacing it with the shortlived Second Republic, and then, following a bloodless coup d’état in 1851, giving way to the Second Empire. These dramatic events had two major impacts on Algeria. First, the administrative incorporation of the vast territory into the body of the “one and indivisible” Republic in 1848, through its legal redefinition as three départements [counties], at a stroke transformed the colony into an integral part of the nationstate. This momentous event was the basis both of the ideological myth and the political reality of “French Algeria,” neither of which would be surrendered without the eight-year war of decolonization that was to occur a century later. Second, the seizure of power by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the former emperor’s nephew, now ruling as Napoléon III, was to result in a significant shift in France’s policy in North Africa. This so-called politique des grands chefs [policy of the leading tribal chiefs] would encourage a new awareness of and an openness to the indigenous population of Algeria, which would in turn inspire a remarkable sporting experiment on the part of senior French cavalry officers. France’s ultimately successful campaign of repression in Algeria had been led by horsemen like the Duc d’Aumale, General La Moricière, and, most relentlessly, General (and as of 1843, Marshal) Bugeaud. An

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equestrian by profession and persuasion, Bugeaud was personally responsible for importing to France a number of stallions from Tunisia and Syria.75 Although he was the most implacable opponent of the indigenous resistance to French rule, the general became convinced of what he termed, as early as 1842, “the necessity of governing Arabs by Arabs.”76 Influenced, paradoxically, by the administrative methods of Abd el-Kader, Bugeaud’s policy of reconciling the warrior nobility to French rule was as much a product of military pragmatism as of his visceral antipathy for democracy, whether in Algeria or France.77 Such thinking at the top of the colonial administration would appear to have encouraged other senior officers in their attempts to use racing to establish friendly relations with local Arab elites. The formation of the Société d’Encouragement in 1833, just three years after the invasion, also favoured the simultaneous expansion of the emerging sport and the new colony. Racing enthusiasts in Algeria could now draw upon developing metropolitan expertise, as when representatives of the French Jockey Club were invited to Algiers to attend the September 1851 race meeting.78 However, the earliest races organized by the French were not in the colony’s capital, but rather at Mostaganem, in the western département of Oran, with the area’s indigenous population being actively encouraged to participate both as participants and spectators.79 As the headquarters for the breeding and training of the army’s horses, Mostaganem was the natural starting-point for Algerian racing.80 A leading role in the organization of race meetings was played by the commander of the local military division, General Aimable Pélissier, who would go on become Governor-General of Algeria, and whose involvement ensured the significant capital investment and logistical support required to stage the events.81 The value of race meetings as a stimulus to economic activity was also readily appreciated by the local authorities. Such were “the great advantages derived by the town of Mostaganem from its horse races,” as the Prefect of Algiers observed in April 1850, that the other main colonial centres were quick to follow its lead.82 I have written elsewhere of the practical application of this policy of sporting association over the period 1847–52.83 For the purposes of the present discussion, a number of conclusions arrived at in that earlier analysis may usefully be reiterated in summary form. These include the following observations: the army’s success in making the Mostaganem races appealing to an indigenous audience, which increased from an already impressive 2000 spectators in 1847 to over 6000 in 1849; the

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colonial administrators’ appreciation of the specificity of indigenous horses and horsemanship, as reflected in the inclusion on race cards of events reserved for Barb horses and Arab riders, as well as Europeanonly and mixed events; and the application of differential regulations as regards clothing and weights, with European riders only being obliged to wear the standard jockey’s outfit and to be weighed for handicapping purposes. In addition, attention was drawn in that same discussion to the colonial administration’s provision of medical care and financial compensation to an indigenous rider injured at the Oran races of September 1852; and similarly to the inclusion on the card of the Algiers meeting, held that same month, of a 17-kilometre cross-country endurance race specifically designed to suit indigenous horses and their riders, in contrast to the shorter events typical of the European racetrack, and which was duly won by one Bel-Kassem-ben-Yahia, mounted on his own horse. Such evidence indicated that the military authorities were determined to control this sporting innovation, and particularly to regulate the roles assigned to indigenous participants and spectators. Nevertheless, the archival trace also suggests that a spirit of relative sporting openness informed these first competitive encounters between the colonizer and the colonized, at a moment which, in retrospect, stood on the cusp of military administration and large-scale civilian settlement. Horse racing under military control thus stands revealed as a first, though short-lived, experiment in sports-based inter-ethnic association. Its real, if always carefully selective, inclusiveness was in marked contrast to the characterizing exclusivity of the colonial sports that would typically follow it in Algeria. This impression is reinforced by looking a little more deeply at the efforts made by race organizers to encourage indigenous attendance at race meetings. So, to consider a very downto-earth example, it is hard to deny the evident good will of the Algiers racing commission which, in 1852, took the decision to reserve for Arab race-goers a section of the city’s Mustapha racecourse – “the bottom section of the military exercise ground that is bordered by the Hussein Dey road on the right and by the Hamma road on the left” – to reflect both their ever larger numbers and their status as nothing less than “the principal actors” in the events unfolding on the course.84 This administrative preoccupation with crowds, both Arab and European, was part of a broader attempt to improve Algeria’s racing infrastructure, which in turn suggests growing social recognition of the new sport. So, for instance, the Algiers racing authorities oversaw the construction of no less than three grandstands at the Mustapha course in 1851–2, one funded by the colonial

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administration, and two more, one on each side of this official stand, by local representatives of private industry. The contracts for building work specified that a minimum of 3000 places should be provided by the two stands open to the public.85 Such investment was part of a process of spatial division on the basis of social distinction that had already become familiar at racetracks in both England and France. In the longer term, ethnicity was destined to join class as a primary determinant of on-course segregation in Algeria, just as it already had at British colonial courses from the Curragh of Kildare to Calcutta.86 Yet, in the early days of Algerian racing, real efforts were undoubtedly made to include indigenous competitors and spectators alike in the new sociability of the racetrack. Conclusion: Arabomania from the Stud-Farm to the “Arab Kingdom” In the 1860s, the colonial politique des grands chefs would pave the way for the Second Empire’s ambitious project to institute a more enlightened variety of rule in Algeria, replacing the goal of “assimilation” with that of “association.”87 As Phillip C. Naylor explains, “Napoleon III’s directives, known as the Senatus-Consultes of 1863 and 1865, sought to alleviate the severity of colonialism. The emperor’s sympathy toward the Muslims – he referred to Algeria as an ‘Arab kingdom’ – alarmed the settlers.”88 In contrast, the army in Algeria would prove supportive of such thinking, sharing not only its aristocratic conception, but also its ground-breaking, even if always paternalistic, concern for the welfare of Algeria’s three million indigenous inhabitants, rather than merely for its 100,000 colonists.89 The resulting clash between soldiers and settlers ultimately resulted in the victory of the latter, while the Second Empire itself was to collapse in the wake of the country’s defeat in the FrancoPrussian war of 1870. It would thus fall to the civilian administrations of the Third Republic to manage the large-scale colonization of Algeria, a transfer of population that was itself directly encouraged by this latest military catastrophe, and particularly the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Although Louis-Napoleon’s vision of an Arab kingdom in Algeria would in the end prove fruitless, the project’s emphasis on the specificity of traditional social organization and the centrality of aristocratic tribal leadership did mark a significant, although temporary, change in French attitudes to the territory’s indigenous population. This policy shift also undoubtedly reflected an abiding French fascination with the “Arabian” horse and the “Arab” horseman, as variously imagined by Napoleon

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Bonaparte’s soldiers and scholars, Romantic painters, and sports-minded cavalry officers. Military circumstances and representational conventions together decreed that the monuments erected to celebrate the French ascendancy in Algeria should typically be equestrian statues, epitomized by that of the heir to the throne, the Duc d’Orléans, who had played an active part in the military campaign, and which was unveiled in 1845, directly in front of the historic Djemaa-el-Djedid mosque.90 In common with many other such monuments, this symbol of Algérie française was “repatriated” shortly after Algeria gained its independence, and now stands in Neuilly-sur-Seine, not far from French racing’s Anglophile origins on the Plaine des Sablons. For its part, the new state quickly erected its own memorial to Algeria’s first national hero, located in what had previously been the Place Bugeaud. The marshal’s own hated image had stood triumphantly on the site (and on his own two feet) since 1852, in the process becoming what Fromentin had identified as nothing less than “a definitive emblem of victory and possession.”91 Although the relevant square in central Algiers had also been renamed the Place Emir Abd elKader, the statue of the great warrior-saint was judged by many to be insufficiently imposing. It was consequently replaced in the 1980s with a more commanding monument, depicting the emir with scimitar aloft, and borne by a magnificent steed.92 Apart from its mimetic triumphalism, what was most striking about this representation of ostensibly restored Algerian nationhood was the mutual reverence for the horse that it assumed and unconsciously communicated. An uncannily similar image of the man and his mount was foregrounded in Hocine Ziani’s monumental Bataille de Kheng en-Natah (1984), a painting clearly conceived as a nationalist riposte to Horace Vernet’s celebrated Capture de la Smala d’Abdelkader, 16 mai 1843, but actually paying tribute to that work’s aesthetic of military horsemanship93 (Plate 15). A shared equestrian tradition had been forcefully revealed to French cavalry officers by the emir’s campaign of resistance from 1830 to 1847, and it was subsequently appealed to by those same sports-minded military men once the extended “pacification” of Algeria had – ostensibly, at least – been completed.

NOTES 1 Landry, Noble Brutes. 2 Landry, Noble Brutes, 2. Landry estimates that some 200 Eastern horses were imported between 1650 and 1750.

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3 On the origins of the Godolphin Barb, see Landry, Noble Brutes, 96, including the reference to the horse’s “mythic apotheosis in Eugène Sue’s romance of 1838,” Histoire de Arabian Godolphin (Paris: La Presse, 1838). 4 Landry, Noble Brutes, 172–4. 5 Landry, Noble Brutes, 23. 6 Landry, Noble Brutes, 25–6. 7 Landry, Noble Brutes, 76–7. The term “thoroughbred” may also be rendered by the Arabic word “asil” (‫)أﺻﯿﻞ‬, which is commonly used to refer to both horses and people with noble pedigrees. 8 Landry, Noble Brutes, 26. 9 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 271–2. See also Poyer, “Les Premiers Sportsmen.” 10 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 67. 11 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 93. 12 Said, Orientalism, 42. 13 Vigarello, “Le temps du sport.” 14 Vigarello, “Le temps du sport,” 194. 15 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 332; Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 38–9. 16 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 185. Unless otherwise stated all translations from French are my own. 17 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 335. 18 Bennett, “The Origins and Relationships of the Mustang, Barb, and Arabian Horse.” See also Grutz, “The Barb.” 19 This is generally held to have been achieved by no later than the second millennium BCE, and perhaps even as early as the fourth millennium BCE. 20 Allen Guttmann, following Michael Hirth, notes that “the [post-colonial] Islamic Republic of Mauritania decreed in 1980 that it was ‘indispensable ... to rehabilitate and develop traditional sportive activities: foot races, horse races, camel races, target archery, and wrestling.’” Guttmann, Games and Empires, 165–6. 21 See Sidnell, Warhorse, 186. See also Giovanni Battista Tomassini, “Bitless Equitation in Ancient Times,” The Works of Chivalry: History, Culture and Traditions of Classical Horsemanship, accessed 14 July 2016. http:// worksofchivalry.com/bitless-equitation-in-ancient-times-2/. 22 Hutchinson, Empire Games, 23. See also Julien, Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord, 198–200. 23 Humphrey, Roman Circuses, 295. 24 Humphrey, Roman Circuses, 331. 25 Thuillier, Le Sport dans la Rome antique, 134; Humphrey, Roman Circuses, 332; Fentress, “The Economy of an Inland City: Sétif,” especially 122 and 127. 26 Laborie, “Course de chevaux libres: La Mossa.”

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27 Boggs, Degas at the Races, 19–20. 28 Gsell, Histoire Ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord, 1: 229–30. See also Gsell, L’Algérie dans l’Antiquité, a new edition of a pamphlet intended for popular consumption and published in 1900 as one of a series by the Algerian Government-General for that year’s Exposition universelle), 84–5, on amphitheatres and gladiatorial games in Algeria. 29 Shaw, Travels, 303. 30 Shaw, Travels, 421–2. 31 Shaw, Travels, 421–2. 32 Daumas, Les Chevaux, 353–418. 33 Daumas, Les Chevaux, 377. 34 Salinas, Voyages et voyageurs en Algérie, 361–2. 35 Said, Orientalism, 118. 36 The editors of Delacroix’s journals would note with regard to the artist’s first experience of the spectacle on 6 March 1832: “Il s’agit ici de ces fantasias qui ont tenté le pinceau de tous les peintres qui visitèrent l’Orient.” Flat and Piot, Journal de Eugène Delacroix, 159, n. 1. 37 Wright, Fromentin, 297. 38 Wright, Fromentin, 190–1. See also 272–3, where Wright notes that, when writing Un Été dans le Sahara (1857), it was from Daumas that Fromentin derived his own pages on ostrich-hunting. 39 Wright, Fromentin, 289. 40 Fromentin, Une Année, 191–2. 41 Wright, Fromentin, 190–1 (Barbara Wright’s translation). 42 Fromentin, Une Année, 192. 43 On the linkage between hunting and colonialism in the British imperial context, see Mangan and McKenzie, “Blooding” the Martial Male, 1062. For a discussion of similar processes in the French empire, see Dine, “Big-Game Hunting.” 44 Margueritte, Chasses de l’Algérie; references are to the 1884 edition. 45 Margueritte, Chasses de l’Algérie, 51–106. 46 Margueritte, Chasses de l’Algérie, 55. 47 Margueritte, Chasses de l’Algérie, 83. 48 Margueritte, Chasses de l’Algérie, 72. 49 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 229. 50 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 123–9. 51 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 144–9. 52 Cited by Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 128–9. 53 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 133. 54 See the frontispiece engraving in Vinkeles and Vrijdag, Tafereelen van de Staatsomwenteling.

Horse Racing in Early Colonial Algeria  159 55 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 146–7. 56 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 147. 57 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 148. 58 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 148. 59 Amir ’Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhyi al-Din, also known as al-Jazairi, and referred to here by the standard French version of his name. 60 Bennison, “The ‘New Order,’” 595. 61 Bennison, “The ‘New Order,’” 596. 62 Charles Henry Churchill, The Life of Abdel Kader, 74. 63 Etienne and Pouillon, Abd el-Kader, 53. 64 Etienne and Pouillon, Abd el-Kader, 58. 65 Blomac, La Gloire et le jeu, 240. 66 Daumas, Les Chevaux, 29. 67 Kiser, Commander of the Faithful, 16. 68 “Observations de l’Emir Abd-el-Kader,” in Daumas, Les Chevaux, 215–21. 69 “Observations,” 215. 70 “Observations,” 216. 71 “Observations,” 220–1. 72 Dinesen, Abd el-Kader, especially 33–7, “Le guerrier arabe.” 73 Dinesen, Abd el-Kader, 34. 74 Daumas, Les Chevaux, 253. 75 Bois, Bugeaud, 477. 76 Sullivan, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, 102. 77 Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie , 224–7. 78 Akhbar: Journal de l’Algérie, 5 October 1852, p. 1, in Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM), Fonds ministériels, F/80/744: “Courses de chevaux, 1850–1853.” The French Jockey Club was formed in Paris in 1834 as the even more elitist social circle [cercle] of the Société d’Encouragement. 79 Hick, L’Empire du sport, 51. The relevant archives themselves – principally CAOM, Fonds ministériels, F/80/744, “Courses de chevaux, 1850–1853” – include a particularly informative letter on the origins and development of the Mostaganem races from General Pélissier to Governor-General, dated Oran, 16 February 1850. The website for the Association des Anciens de Mostaganem dates the construction of the town’s Khalifa racecourse to 1842 (“Chronologie des Evenements,” Association des Anciens de Mostaganem, accessed 27 July 2015, http://www.association-mostaganem. com/VilleChronologie.html). 80 Daumas, Les Chevaux, 271. The files of the Algerian Government-General also record stud-farms in existence in Blida and Coléa from at least 1844: CAOM, GGA/113/2N77, “Haras.”

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81 Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie, 356. 82 Letter, Prefect of Algiers to Governor-General, Algiers, 10 April 1850, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM), F/80/744. 83 Dine, “Nation et narration.” 84 Courses de Chevaux d’Alger – Commission, minutes of meeting held on 27 September 1852, under the heading “Poste des indigènes,” in Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM), F/80/744. Hussein Dey would itself become an important centre of Algerian racing in later years. 85 Contracts for building work, 1852, in Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM), F/80/744. 86 Hutchinson, Empire Games, 68–74. 87 On this important distinction, see Betts, Assimilation and Association. 88 Naylor, Historical Dictionary of Algeria, 13. 89 Ageron, L’Algérie algérienne, 27. 90 Dupuy, “Esquisse d’une histoire des statues.” 91 Cited in Wright, Fromentin, 198 [Wright’s translation]. 92 Etienne and Pouillon, Abd el-Kader, 91. See also Pouillon, “Images d’Abd el-Kader.” 93 Etienne and Pouillon, Abd el-Kader, 91–4.

PART THREE The Mediation of Sports

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Chapter Seven

Sport and the Body Politic: Athletic Competitions in Rousseau’s Republican Theory ourida mostefai

Jean-Jacques Rousseau began his career with an eloquent denunciation of the deleterious effects of progress on modernity. His Discourse on Sciences and Arts, the work that unleashed an enormous controversy and made him famous throughout Europe, argued that the much-celebrated spread of knowledge in Europe had, in fact, resulted in a process of moral, political, and cultural decay. Responding to the question proposed by the Dijon Academy – “Whether the restoration of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals”1 – Rousseau delivered a sharp rebuttal in the form of an indictment, advancing that “our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced towards perfection.”2 According to Rousseau’s provocative thesis, civilized man has “the appearance of all the virtues without having a single one.”3 The sophisticated urbanity of modern-day Europe is not the sign of the virtue that it purports to be but instead it is the very evidence of its corrupted morals. A widening gap now exists between appearances and reality such that we are being deceived by the semblance of right – Decipimur specie recti4 – while the ugly realities of modern civilization remain concealed behind the veil of urbanity and politeness. The opacity of a contrived language has made genuine communication impossible and the external sphere is no longer a true reflection of our inner disposition. But the Discourse on Sciences and Arts is not merely lamenting the loss of virtue and transparency; it also aims to deliver a political indictment. Indeed, Rousseau claims that by developing the culture of arts and sciences men have unwittingly surrendered their freedom and put themselves in chains while remaining blind to their condition: “While the Government and the Laws see to the safety and the well-being of

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men assembled, the Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden, throttle in them the sentiment of that original freedom for which they seemed born, make them love their slavery, and fashion them into what is called civilized people.”5 Thus the consequence of progress has been the establishment of a new type of enslavement – one that is all the more insidious and dangerous as it is artfully concealed. For Rousseau, “the mind has its needs, as has the body. The latter make up the foundations of society, the former make for its being agreeable.”6 However, by granting primacy to the needs of the mind over those of the body civilized societies have reversed the natural order and abandoned real virtues for a simulacrum. Thus while arts and sciences establish their despotism by spreading “garlands of flowers over the iron chains,” elegance and luxury barely conceal a diseased and decaying body: “Rich apparel may herald a man of great wealth, and its elegance a man of taste; the healthy and robust man is recognized by other signs: strength and vigour of body will be found under the rustic habit of a Husbandman, and not under the gilding of a Courtier.”7 Reprising – from Plato and the Stoics – the idea of the health of the body as the univocal sign of the well-being of the soul, Rousseau claims that the healthy and robust body is no longer to be found except among the uncivilized – labourers, farmers, and primitive peoples. And it is in this context and in order to highlight the scandal of this corruption that Rousseau’s First Discourse introduces a key metaphor: “The good man is an Athlete who delights in fighting naked: He despises all those vile ornaments which would hinder his use of his strength, and most of which were invented only to conceal some deformity.”8 In this image bodily strength and moral purity go hand in hand. The naked body of the athlete stands as the symbol of transparency, exemplifying the perfect correlation between being and appearance. With a body that needs no concealment, the athlete does not fear being seen in public: his willingness to fight in the nude and his contempt for concealment are the signs of his virtue. Furthermore, the athlete requires no instrument other than his body, and this self-sufficiency is the guarantor of his freedom. Strong and truthful the athlete stands as the embodiment of republican virtue and goodness. This notion of a strong and healthy body is crucial to Rousseau’s works: it is a key figure that is developed throughout his works and which forms the basis for his conception of nature and of politics. For

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the future author of Julie, Emile, and the Social Contract the strength and vigour of the body are the necessary conditions for natural freedom and political liberty: they are the distinguishing factors between virtuous and corrupt societies – the health of the body being the unequivocal sign of the health of the soul. Rousseau’s anthropology and politics rest on the axiom that only a robust physical constitution can allow man to be self-sufficient and maintain his independence and autonomy. Conversely, restraints placed on the free movement of bodies inevitably lead to despotism and tyranny. Such are the foundations on which the principles of Rousseau’s aesthetic, pedagogical, and political theories lie. Strength and Vigour in Rousseau’s Anthropology The strength and the health of the body are both the sign and the guarantee of the health of the social body. From the very start, Rousseau grants the body a fundamental valence on which he founds his anthropology. Thus the robust health of natural man is central to the concept of nature as it is articulated in the Second Discourse (Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men). An excellent anatomical and physical constitution characterizes natural man in Rousseau: “Accustomed from childhood to the inclemencies of the weather, and the rigor of the seasons, hardened to fatigue, and forced to defend naked and unarmed their life and their Prey against the ferocious Beasts or to escape them by running, Men develop a robust and almost unalterable temperament; the Children, since they come into the world with their Fathers’ excellent constitution and strengthen it by the same activities that produced it, thus acquire all the vigour of which the human species is capable.”9 Rousseau’s emphasis on the body as the foundation of liberty contrasts with the dominant approach of the Enlightenment, most notably with Thomas Hobbes.10 Whereas for Hobbes the state of nature reveals the feebleness of man’s condition and “how brittle the frame of our human body is”11 Rousseau sees man’s physical condition as fundamentally robust. Offering a further rebuttal to Hobbes’s theory Rousseau envisions no contradiction between the adult and child, the latter benefiting from the same strength and vigour. Furthermore, the solitary life of natural man, focused as it is on his self-preservation, does not lead to a state of mutual fear as it does for Hobbes. On the contrary, rather than being fearful, natural man grows confident in his ability

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to surpass other animals: “feeling that he surpasses them in skill more than they do him in strength, [he] learns to fear them no more.”12 Furthermore, natural man makes his body into a universal and selfsufficient instrument, thus realizing in nature the Greek ideal of autarkeia: Since his body is the only tool savage man knows, he puts it to various uses of which our bodies are incapable for want of practice, and it is our industry that deprives us of the strength and the agility which necessity obliges him to acquire. If he had had an ax, could his wrist have cracked such solid branches? If he had had a sling, could he have thrown a stone as hard by hand? If he had had a ladder, could he have climbed a tree as nimbly? If he had had a Horse, could he have run as fast?13

The Second Discourse thus expands on the metaphor of the athlete’s body introduced in the First Discourse: naked and unarmed, natural man reveals the illusory superiority of civilized man: Give civilized man the time to gather all his machines around him, [and] there can be no doubt that he will easily overcome savage man; but if you want to see an even more unequal contest, have them confront each other naked and unarmed, and you will soon recognize the advantage of constantly having all one’s strength at one’s disposal, of being ever ready for any eventuality and of, so to speak, always carrying of oneself along with one.14

Rousseau’s vision of a primitive health owes much to the Greeks and the Romans.15 But if Rousseau borrows this notion from the ancients, he re-actualizes it within the modern context of a Europe that is being confronted with the discovery of new peoples. Thus his critique of medicine is not simply a reprisal of the traditional moralist critique, inherited from the ancients: “When one considers the good constitution of Savages, at least of those we have not ruined with our strong liquors, when one realizes that they know almost no other illnesses than wounds and old age, one is strongly inclined to believe that the history of human diseases could easily be written by following that of civil Societies.”16 Rousseau’s argument is both more ambitious – for it is used to ground a new anthropology – and more complex as the notion of decadence is applied to both ancients and moderns. In describing the robust constitution of a man living in harmony with nature, Rousseau posits it as a guarantor of political liberty: there is no

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need for natural man to form social bonds at the expense of his freedom. His autonomy allows him to preserve his liberty and his physical strength gives him the means to protect his own life. Thus the political problem for Rousseau will be not so much the means by which to enter into a contract but rather the ways to preserve the fundamental natural freedom: moving away from the social contract tradition, Rousseau instead emphasizes the principles that ground man’s freedom, i.e., the strength and vigour of the body. Educating the Mind by Exercising the Body This principle presented in the First Discourse and expanded upon in the second one is reprised in Emile where it becomes a way to ground a critique of modern education and offer a new pedagogy. As the First Discourse had already made clear, free exercise of the body is a necessary condition for political freedom: “The ancient Republics of Greece, with the wisdom that was so conspicuous in most of their institutions, had forbidden their Citizens the exercise of all those quiet and sedentary occupations which, by allowing the body to grow slack and corrupted, soon enervate the vigour of the soul.”17 There can be no virtue without strength: the moderns, however, have forgotten this lesson, and thus enabled the decadence of morals: While the cultivation of the sciences is harmful to the martial qualities, it is even more so to the moral qualities. From our very first years a senseless education adorns our mind and corrupts our judgment. Everywhere I see huge establishments, in which young people are brought up at great expense to learn everything except their duties … I would as soon, said a Wise man, that my pupil had spent his time on the Tennis Court, at least his body would have been the more fit for it.18

Like his predecessors – most notably Rabelais, Montaigne, as well as his contemporaries the philosophes19 – Rousseau indicts a method of teaching the young that is not only useless but actually harmful, and a school system that is woefully inadequate. For Rousseau modern education is dangerous on two accounts for it restrains the freedom of the mind just as well as that of the body. It is harmful because it encourages the development of prejudice in the child’s mind and sickens the body by restricting its movements. Therefore, the first objective of a true education must be to prevent this harm: “May I venture at this point the

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greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of education? It is: Do not save time, but lose it.”20 Such is the purpose of the so-called negative education conceived by Rousseau: Therefore the education of the earlier years should be merely negative. It consists, not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and from the spirit of error. If only you could let well alone, and get others to follow your example; if you could bring your scholar to the age of twelve strong and healthy, but unable to tell his right hand from his left, the eyes of his understanding would be open to reason as soon as you began to teach him … by doing nothing to begin with, you would end with a prodigy of education.21

Thus, from birth to the age of twelve “the most dangerous period of human life,”22 education must strive to lose time, and allow the child to reach the age of reason with a healthy and robust body, the precondition for a healthy and robust mind. The goal of this “inactive method” is to cultivate freedom by maintaining the child in a state of independence. Negative education is designed to prepare the mind to receive the lessons of reason, and that is done through constant exercise: Would you cultivate your pupil’s intelligence, cultivate the strength it is meant to control. Give his body constant exercise, make it strong and healthy, in order to make him good and wise; let him work, let him do things, let him run and shout, let him be always on the go; make a man of him in strength, and he will soon be a man in reason.23

It is because the mind is dependent on the body that the latter must be the sole object of a child’s early education. Forced into constant exercise and movement, the child will receive his education thanks to this direct contact with the world around him and through simple observation. Negative education in Emile is conceived as a way to reconcile mind and body: So mind and body work together. He [the pupil] is always carrying out his own ideas, not those of other people, and thus he unites thought and action; as he grows in health and strength he grows in wisdom and discernment. This is the way to attain later on what is generally considered incompatible, though most great men have achieved it, strength of body and strength of mind, the reason of the philosopher and the vigour of the athlete.24

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The objective of this education is to counter the situation described in the First Discourse: the scandal of the discrepancy between the naked athlete and the decrepit social man: To learn to think we must therefore exercise our limbs, our senses, and our bodily organs, which are the tools of the intellect; and to get the best use out of these tools, the body which supplies us with them must be strong and healthy. Not only is it quite a mistake that true reason is developed apart from the body, but it is a good bodily constitution which makes the workings of the mind easy and correct.”25

Only free physical exercise will allow for the harmonious development of the intellect and the body while ensuring the self-sufficiency that results from independence from others and from their opinions. Thus Rousseau’s pedagogical method emphasizes the free movement of the child’s body. Quoting Montaigne and citing Locke among others, Rousseau insists on the need for appropriate clothing for physical exercise and on this basis expands his critique of the swaddling of infants: “The limbs of a growing child should be free to move easily in his clothing; nothing should cramp their growth or movement; there should be nothing tight, nothing fitting closely to the body, no belt of any kind. The French style of dress, uncomfortable and unhealthy for a man, is especially bad for children.”26 This emphasis on the freedom of the body is meant to counter the prevailing and mistaken notion of the fragility of the child. This assumed feebleness is for Rousseau illusory: “the supposed incapacity of children for our games is imaginary”27 and children should be allowed to practise and exercise their strength. Physical games and exercises of all kinds are to be encouraged, especially swimming, an essential skill – “in the water if you cannot swim you will drown, and we cannot swim unless we are taught”28 – that is nevertheless neglected because unlike horseback riding it holds no social prestige: “People are afraid lest the child should be drowned while he is learning to swim; if he dies while he is learning, or if he dies because he has not learnt, it will be your own fault.”29 In Rousseau’s pedagogical system, the child is allowed to develop freely through movement and exercise while his intellectual training is withheld until he is ready for it. Focusing on the education of a healthy and robust body allows for a true education of the mind while also guarantying freedom from political oppression. Negative education works

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to nurture childhood by enabling it to preserve its fundamental freedom. The culture of the body offers Rousseau the solution to the political problem of servitude, and pedagogy becomes a method for freedom. The Politics of Sports In Rousseau’s politics, then, bodily strength and exercise are a necessary condition for the preservation of political freedom. This accounts for the place of exercise and sports in Rousseau’s political works. The Letter to d’Alembert, the Considerations on the Government of Poland, as well as the Project for a Constitution for Corsica all provide illustrations of the principle that freedom of the body guarantees political liberty. These texts all offer practical considerations on the ways to create and maintain democratic institutions and practices. In the Letter to d’Alembert Rousseau’s rejection of the encyclopedist’s proposal to introduce French-style theatre into Geneva rests on the idea that theatre works as a despotic force on the minds and bodies of spectators. Far from being a means of spreading enlightenment and knowledge, French theatre is, according to Rousseau, a true instrument of political servitude: plays are “exclusive entertainments which close up a small number of people in melancholy fashion in a gloomy cavern, which keep them fearful and immobile in silence and inaction, which give only prisons, lances, soldiers, and afflicting images of servitude and inequality to see.”30 Refuting d’Alembert’s claims Rousseau rejects theatre as a model for the Protestant city state because of its fundamental incompatibility with the exercise of liberty. According to Rousseau’s analysis, dramatic spectacles produce a double alienation: on the one hand they imprison the spectators’ bodies and maintain them in “inaction,” while on the other hand they prevent their minds from thinking for themselves, forcing spectators and authors alike to submit instead to the rule of public opinion, to “the general taste.”31 Spectators are thus twice enslaved: physically and intellectually. According to Rousseau, traditional playhouses are well suited to monarchies for they reproduce its social inequalities within the physical space of the theatre. They are, therefore, incompatible with republicanism, which requires freedom among citizens. Rousseau’s argument rests on the opposition between two systems of governments – monarchical and republican – and on the need to preserve political freedoms in the Protestant city state. If the Letter to d’Alembert offers a rejection of traditional theatres, it also presents proposals for new positive forms of spectacles that can be

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compatible with the republican spirit. Having responded to D’Alembert, Rousseau moves to propose modern games for the republic: open-air festivals and athletic competitions that will allow citizens to exercise their political freedom. He urges Geneva to expand existing athletic competitions to encompass all “the various bodily exercises”: “Why should we not do to make ourselves active and robust what we do to become skilled in the use of arms? Has the republic less need of workers than of soldiers? Why should we not found, on the model of the military prizes, other prizes for gymnastics, wrestling, running, discus, and the various bodily exercises?”32 Addressing the magistrates, Rousseau proposes new ways of encouraging emulation among citizens, claiming that only through the practise of athletics will the republic be able to guarantee its security and its longevity. The proposals advanced in the Letter to d’Alembert are further developed in the even more explicitly political context of the Considerations on the Government of Poland (Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne). In response to Count Wielhorski, the exiled Pole soliciting his advice on the future of his country, the author of the Social Contract and now former citizen of Geneva33 offers his reflections on the ways and means of keeping patriotism alive in the absence of a homeland. In light of the all but inevitable annexation by Russia Poles must find a way to keep the love and memory of the fatherland alive in the hearts and minds of every citizen. In order to do so, according to Rousseau, Poles should revive the spirit of the institutions of antiquity and emulate the model of ancient athletic games. Bonds between citizens can be revived “in games that kept citizens frequently gathered together; in exercises that along with their vigour and strength used to increase their pride and self-esteem; in spectacles which, reminding them of the history of their ancestors – their misfortunes, their virtues and their victories – would engage their hearts, inflame them with lively emulation, and attach them strongly to the fatherland that was constantly kept present to them.”34 In order to instil love of the fatherland and develop patriotic virtues, Rousseau urges the institution of distinctive customs, including games: “A great many public games, at which the good mother country may delight to see her children at play.”35 Arguing that education is “the important point”36 he recommends national education for free men and the establishment of public spaces devoted to the practise of sport: In all Schools a gymnasium or place for bodily exercises must be established for the children. This badly neglected point is in my view the most

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important part of education, not just in order to form robust, healthy temperaments, but still more for its moral purpose, which is either neglected or fulfilled only by a mass of futile, pedantic precepts that are so many wasted words. I shall never repeat enough that good education must be negative.37

The Considerations on the Government of Poland propose the application of Rousseau’s pedagogical method in Emile. The goal is to extend the principles of “negative” education to public instruction: Their instruction can be domestic and individual, but their games must always be public and common to all. For it is a matter here not simply of keeping them busy, giving them a robust constitution, or making them agile and sturdy, but of accustoming them early on to rules, equality, fraternity and competitions; to live beneath the gaze of their fellow citizens and desire public approbation.”38

In advocating for the establishment of public spaces where sports can be practised in the open, the Considerations on the Government of Poland – as well as the Project of a Constitution for Corsica – expand on this fundamental principle of Rousseau’s political theory: the body as the solution to the problem of political liberty. Gymnastics for a Free People Rousseau’s programs for athletic competitions and public festivals were to inspire French revolutionaries who saw in them a means of regenerating the nation. In their calls for a renewal of education revolutionaries were inspired by Rousseau’s critique and by his proposals. Indeed, in proposing a new educational system for the new France they sought to implement both Rousseau’s negative and positive educations. In their quest to regenerate the nation they were aware of the need to both instruct and educate the new citizenry: to create a system of public instruction devoted to the betterment of the minds as well as a national education to develop the hearts of all citizens. In their calls for physical and moral regeneration, in their emphasis on games and gymnastics, and their insistence that a large place be given to physical exercise, they were applying Rousseau’s method. Thus Marie-Joseph Chénier, in his “Discourse on Education” delivered at the Convention in November 1793, proposed making sport the model

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of emulation for the new republic, allowing for the fusion of nation and education: The one among the philosophers who best knew the true theory of education, and still the one that has best developed the elements of human societies and the principles of freedom, the eloquent, the profound, the sensitive author of Emile, mainly concerned himself with gymnastics. In the first books of his immortal work, following the system of Plato, or rather the instinct of nature, it is in games and bodily exercises that the education of his pupil consists in until the age twelve. You can realize in part the plans of the great man; you can apply to public education and to the whole nation the method followed by Jean-Jacques for Emile.39

As a homage to Rousseau the newly founded republic was proposing a “gymnastics for a free people”40 so as to engender a “robust republican race.”41

NOTES 1 Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, or First Discourse, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 3; “Si le rétablissement des arts et des sciences a contribué à épurer les mœurs” (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, ou Premier Discours, Œuvres complètes [hereafter OC], OC 3:1). All subsequent presentations of Rousseau’s French texts are from Œuvres complètes and are referred to by volume and page number. 2 Rousseau, First Discourse, 9; “nos ames se sont corrompuës a mesure que nos Sciences et nos Arts se sont avancés à la perfection” (Premier Discours, OC 3:9). 3 Rousseau, First Discourse, 7; “les apparences de toutes les vertus sans en avoir aucune” (Premier Discours, OC 3:7). 4 Horace, Ars poetica, 25, quoted in First Discourse, 5; Premier Discours, 5. This was the epigraph selected by Rousseau to identify his discourse since submissions to the Academy were to be made anonymously. 5 Rousseau, First Discourse, 6; “Tandis que le Gouvernement et les Loix pourvoient à la sûreté et au bien-être des hommes assembles, les sciences, les lettres et les arts, moins despotiques et plus puissans peut-être, étendent des guirlandes de fleurs sur les chaînes de fer dont ils sont chargés, étouffent en eux le sentiment de cette liberté originelle pour laquelle ils sembloient être nés, leur font aimer leur esclavage et en forment ce qu’on appelle des peuples policés” (Premier Discours, OC 3:7).

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6 Rousseau, First Discourse, 6. “L’esprit a ses besoins, ainsi que le corps. Ceux-ci font les fondemens de la société, les autres en font l’agrément” (Premier Discours, OC 3:7). 7 Rousseau, First Discourse, 7. “La richesse de la parure peut annoncer un homme opulent, et son élegance un homme de goût; l’homme sain et robuste se reconnoit à d’autres marques: c’est sous l’habit rustique d’un laboureur, et non sous la dorure d’un courtisan, qu’on trouvera la force et la vigueur du corps” (Premier Discours, OC 3:8). 8 Rousseau, First Discourse, 7. “L’homme de bien est un athlète qui se plaît à combattre nud: il méprise tous ces vils ornemens qui gêneroient l’usage de ses forces, et dont la plus part n’ont été inventés que pour cacher quelque difformité” (Premier Discours, OC 3:8). 9 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality, or Second Discourse, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 135. “Accoutumés des l’enfance aux intempéries de l’air, et à la rigueur des saisons, exercés à la fatigue, et forcés de défendre nuds et sans armes leur vie et leur proye contre les autres bêtes féroces, ou de leur échapper à la course, les hommes se forment un temperament robuste et presque inaltérable; les enfans, apportant au monde l’excellente constitution de leurs peres, et la fortifiant par les mêmes exercices qui l’ont produite, acquiérent ainsi toute la vigueur dont l’espèce humaine est capable” (Second Discours, OC 3:135). 10 Rousseau is engaging in dialogue with all the major thinkers of the Enlightenment, including John Locke. For a discussion of the emergence in the period of a new discourse on the body at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and science, see Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, and Cussac, Deneys-Tunney, and Seth, Les Discours du corps au XVIIIe Siècle. 11 Hobbes, De Cive, 25. 12 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 136; “sentant qu’il les surpasse plus en adresse qu’ils le surpassent en force, il apprend à ne plus les craindre” (Second Discours, OC 3:136). 13 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 135. “Le corps de l’homme sauvage étant le seul instrument qu’il connoisse, il l’employe à divers usages, dont, par le défaut d’exercice, les notres sont incapables, et c’est notre industrie qui nous ôte la force et l’agilité que la nécessité l’oblige d’acquerir. S’il avoit eu une hache, son poignet romproit-il de si fortes branches? S’il avoit eu une fronde, lanceroit-il de la main une pierre avec tant de roideur? S’il avoit eu une échelle, grimperoit-il si légérement sur un arbre? S’il avoit eu un cheval, seroit-il si vîte à la course?” (Second Discours, OC 3:135–6).

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14 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 135. “Laissez à l’homme civilize [136] le tems de rassembler toutes ces machines autour de lui, on ne peut douter qu’il ne surmonte facilement l’homme sauvage; mais si vous voulés voir un combat plus inegal encore, mettez-les nuds et desarmés vis-à-vis l’un de l’autre, et vous reconnoîtrés bientôt quel est l’avantage d’avoir sans cesse toutes ses forces à sa disposition, d’être toujours prêt à tout evenement, et de se porter, pour ainsi dire, toujours tout entier avec soi” (Second Discours, OC 3:135–6). 15 See Plato, Gorgias, and Cicero, Tusculan Disputations. Seneca evokes the times when “Men’s bodies were still sound and strong”: “Medicine once consisted of the knowledge of a few simples, to stop the flow of blood, or to heal wounds; then by degrees it reached its present stage of complicated variety. No wonder that in early days medicine had less to do! Men’s bodies were still sound and strong; their food was light and not spoiled by art and luxury” (Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, 95.15, 67). 16 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 138. “Quand on songe à la bonne constitution des Sauvages, au moins de ceux que nous n’avons pas perdu avec nos liqueurs fortes, quand on sait qu’ils ne connaissent presque d’autres maladies que les blessures et la vieillesse, on est très porté à croire qu’on ferait aisément l’histoire des maladies humaines en suivant celles des sociétés civiles” (Second Discours, OC 3:138). 17 Rousseau, First Discourse, 21. “Les anciennes Républiques de la Grèce avec cette sagesse qui brilloit dans la plûpart de leurs institutions avoient interdit à leurs Citoyens tous ces métiers tranquilles et sédentaires qui en affaiblissant et corrompant le corps, énervent si-tôt la vigueur de l’âme” (Premier Discours, OC 3:23). 18 Rousseau, First Discourse, 22. “Si la culture des sciences est nuisible aux qualités guerriéres, elle l’est encore plus aux qualités morales. C’est dès nos premieres années qu’une éducation insensée orne notre esprit et corrompt notre jugement. Je vois de toutes parts des établissemens immenses, où l’on éleve à grands frais la jeunesse pour lui apprendre toutes choses, excepté ses devoirs … J’aimerois autant, disoit un sage, que mon écolier eût passé le tems dans un jeu de paume, au moins le corps en seroit plus dispos” (Premier Discours, OC 3: 24). This refers to Montaigne’s comment: “j’aymeroy aussi cher que mon escolier eut passé le temps à joüer à la paume; au moins le corps en seroit plus allegre.” (Montaigne, “Du pédantisme,” Les Essais, 1, 25, 138) or “I would just as soon that our pupil should spend his time playing tennis: at least his body would become more agile” (Essays, 156).

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19 For an example of the critique of French education by the philosophes, see d’Alembert’s scathing indictment in his article “College,” 3:634–7. 20 Rousseau, Emile, 67; “Oserai-je exposer ici la plus grande, la plus importante, la plus utile régle de toute l’éducation? Ce n’est pas de gagner du tems, c’est d’en perdre” (Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC 4:323). 21 Rousseau, Emile, 68; “La prémiére éducation doit donc être purement négative. Elle consiste, non point à enseigner la vertu ni la vérité, mais à garantir le coeur du vice et l’esprit de l’erreur. Si vous pouviez ne rien faire et ne rien laisser faire; si vous pouviez amener vôtre éléve sain et robuste à l’age de douze ans sans qu’il sut distinguer sa main droite de sa main gauche, dès vos prémiéres leçons les yeux de son entendement s’ouvriroient à la raison; sans préjugé, sans habitude il n’auroit rien en lui qui put contrarier l’effet de vos soins … en commençant par ne rien faire, vous auriez fait un prodige d’éducation” (Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC 4:323–4). 22 Rousseau, Emile, 67; “Le plus dangereux intervalle de la vie humaine” (Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC 4:323). 23 Rousseau, Emile, 97; “Voulez-vous donc cultiver l’intelligence de vôtre élêve, cultivez les forces qu’elle doit gouverner. Exercez continuellement son corps, rendez-le robuste et sain pour le rendre sage et raisonable; qu’il travaille, qu’il agisse, qu’il coure, qu’il crie, qu’il soit toujours en mouvement; qu’il soit homme par la vigueur et bientôt il le sera par la raison” (Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC 4:359). 24 Rousseau, Emile, 99; “Ainsi son corps et son esprit s’éxercent à la fois. Agissant toujours d’après sa pensée et non d’après celle d’un autre il unit continuellement deux opérations; plus il se rend fort et robuste, plus il devient sensé et judicieux. C’est le moyen d’avoir un jour ce qu’on croit incompatible et ce que presque tous les grands hommes ont réuni: la force du corps et celle de l’ame; la raison d’un sage et la vigueur d’un athlète” (Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC IV, 361–2). 25 Rousseau, Emile, 107; “Pour apprendre à penser il faut donc exercer nos membres, nos sens, nos organes, qui sont les instrumens de nôtre intelligence, et pour tirer tout le parti possible de ces instrumens, il faut que le corps qui les fournit soit robuste et sain. Ainsi loin que la véritable raison de l’homme se forme independamment du corps, c’est la bonne constitution du corps qui rend les opérations de l’esprit faciles et sures” (Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC 4:370). 26 Rousseau, Emile, 108; “Les membres d’un corps qui croît doivent être tous au large dans leur vêtement ; rien ne doit gêner leur mouvement ni leur accroissement ; rien de trop juste, rien qui colle au corps, point de ligature.

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L’habillement françois gênant et mal sain pour les hommes est pernicieux surtout aux enfants” (Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC 4:371). Rousseau, Emile, 133; “l’inaptitude qu’on suppose aux enfants pour nos exercives est imaginaire” (Emile, OC 4:403). Rousseau, Emile, 114; “dans l’eau si l’on ne nage on se noye, et l’on ne nage point sans l’avoir appris” (Emile, OC 4:379). Rousseau, Emile, 115; “On craint qu’un enfant ne se noye en apprenant à nager; qu’il se noye en apprenant ou pour n’avoir pas appris, ce sera toujours votre faute” (Emile, OC 4:379). Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to d’Alembert, 125; “ces Spectacles exclusifs qui renferment tristement un petit nombre de gens dans un antre obscure; qui les tiennent craintifs et immobiles dans le silence et l’inaction; qui n’offrent aux yeux que cloisons, que pointes de fer, que soldats, qu’affligeantes images de la servitude et de l’inégalité” (Lettre à d’Alembert, OC 5:114). Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, 19, “Le goût général” (Lettre à d’Alembert, OC V, 18). Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, 126–7; “Pourquoi ne ferions-nous pas, pour nous rendre dispos et robustes, ce que nous faisons pour nous éxercer aux armes? La République a-t-elle moins besoin d’ouvriers que de soldats? Pourquoi, sur le modéle des [116] prix militaires, ne fonderions-nous pas d’autres prix de Gymnastique, pour la lutte, pour la course, pour le disque, pour divers exercices du corps?” (Lettre à d’Alembert, OC 5:115–16). Following the condemnation of Emile and the Social Contract by the Genevan authorities, Rousseau publicly renounced his citizenship on 12 May 1763. Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, 250; “des jeux qui tenoient beaucoup les citoyens rassemblés, dans des exercices qui augmentoient avec leur vigueur et leurs forces leur fierté et l’estime d’eux-mêmes, dans des spectacles qui, leur rappellant l’histoire de leurs ancêtres, leurs malheurs, leurs vertus, leurs victoires, interessoient leurs coeurs, les enflamoient d’une vive émulation, et les attachoient fortement à cette patrie dont on ne cessoit de les occupier” (Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, 3:958). Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, 254. Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, 258. Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, 260; “Dans tous les Colléges il faut établir un gymnase ou lieu d’exercices corporels, pour les enfants. Cet article si négligé est selon moi la partie la plus importante de l’éducation, non seulement pour former des temperamens robustes

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et sains, mais encor plus pour l’objet moral, qu’on néglige ou qu’on ne remplit que par un tas de preceptes pedantesques et vains qui sont autant de paroles perdues. Je ne redirai jamais assés que la bonne éducation doit être negative” (Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, OC 3:967–8). Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, 260; “Leur instruction peut être domestique et particulière, mais leurs jeux doivent toujours être publics et communs à tous; car il ne s’agit pas seulement ici de les occuper, de leur former une constitution robuste, de les rendre agiles et découplés; mais de les accoutumer de bonne heure à la régle, à l’égalité, à la fraternité, aux concurrences, à vivre sous les yeux de leurs concitoyens et à desirer l’approbation publique” (Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, OC 3:968). “Celui des philosophes qui a le mieux connu la véritable théorie de l’éducation, comme il est encore celui qui a le mieux développé les éléments des sociétés humaines et les principes de la liberté, l’éloquent, le profond, le sensible auteur d’Emile, s’est surtout occupé de la gymnastique. Dans les premiers livres de son immortel ouvrage, et suivant en cela le système de Platon, ou plutôt l’instinct de la nature, c’est dans les jeux et dans les exercices du corps qu’il fait consister, jusqu’à l’âge de douze ans, toute l’éducation de son élève. Vous pourez réaliser en partie les plans du grand homme; vous pouvez appliquer à l’instruction publique et à la nation entière la marche que Jean-Jacques a suivie pour Emile” (Chénier, Discours sur l’instruction publique, 134). “La gymnastique d’un peuple libre” (Chénier, Discours sur l’instruction publique, 134). “une race de républicains doit être robuste” (Chénier, Discours sur l’instruction publique, 135).

Chapter Eight

Writing Fighting/Fighting Writing: Jon Badcock and the Conflicted Nature of Sports Journalism in the Regency john whale

I Appearing under the pseudonyms Jon Bee, John Bee, Bio-Dev, and John Hinds, as well as his own name, John Badcock made a substantial contribution to the popular literature of sport – and boxing in particular – from 1810 to 1830. Little is known of the details of his life, but from his contribution to a miscellaneous set of publications there emerges in his prose an energetic, agitated, abrasive, and oddly humorous persona who provides a stark contrast to Pierce Egan, his more celebrated contemporary and rival.1 As we shall see, Badcock sets himself up in aggressive opposition to Egan and relentlessly challenges the latter’s pre-eminent position as the leading “historian” of the Fancy – the term given to the boxing fraternity during this period. Indeed, it could be argued that Badcock defines himself in his battle with Egan; this conflict provides the clearest insight into his methods as a writer and a rationale for understanding this in many ways puzzling and contradictory figure who was an energetic and irascible presence in late Georgian sports writing. In his unstinting attempts to undermine his rival’s reputation, Badcock promotes a radically different identity for the role of editor and anthologizer in the field of sporting literature and its closely associated areas of slang dictionaries and insider guides to the metropolis. In comparison, Egan might be said to adopt a gentlemanly, objective, and often more polite literary persona which pushes his texts towards romance, offering what might be seen as euphemistic accounts of the sport’s violence. In this respect, Egan could be seen to mediate the aggression of a bloody sport in order for it to be more readily consumed by a wider, more refined audience. Though he can be bullish in his vindication of

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sporting values, for the most part Egan eschews the vulgarity of personal involvement and expressions of careerist ego. Badcock has no such reluctance towards self-promotion and coming forward – or “coming out” as he puts it – and parading himself combatively before the public with a series of verbal assaults upon his competitors and a string of personal vindications. He even dares to expose the corruption and chicanery of the popular sports he writes about, including the danger to the future of boxing posed by the fixing of matches. Throughout Badcock’s work there is a sustained – if often hectic and uncontrolled – assault upon established authority. As a result of his combative mode, part of Badcock’s significance, then, in this literature of popular amusements, is to articulate and self-consciously draw attention to the considerable labours involved in the production of its sporting and scientific miscellanies, its lexicographical enterprises, and its numerous dictionaries of slang. At the same time as he assiduously debunks Egan’s standing as the “historian” of the sport, he adopts the more workmanlike sobriquet of “scribe,” “quill man,” and “an Operator” as his preferred terms for defining the demanding role of author in this competitive form of popular chronicling. Even if this frequently takes the form of an impolite and mischievous self-pleading, it has the effect of producing a rich self-consciousness about the practices and, in particular, the conflicts attendant upon this kind of popular sports journalism. In so doing, Badcock provides us not only with his expression of the individualistic and aggressive tendency within sports writing in the Regency, but also its mode of production, including the labours and the vulnerability of its authors. Badcock’s case provides us with an invaluable opportunity to explore many of the key fault-lines and instabilities of this form of journalism.2 His creative antagonism to the field in which he works serves to expose its otherwise silent workings to critical scrutiny. His embattled position as a “scribe” provides us with an extended account of its conflicted position within popular culture as it constantly seeks to mediate between popularity and authority. In its hectic reaching after insider knowledge – its inhabitation of the “flash” subculture – sports writing manifests some of the more general features of boxing in this period as subcultural forms erupt into a more widespread popularity. Badcock’s example clearly exposes the contradictions as well as the creativity that result from this process. At the same time as being one of its severest critics, he is also a champion of the history of the sport. Making print capital out of mediating the subcultural is often an uncomfortable and paradoxical

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process. His work also brings into sharp relief one of the long-standing problems besetting pugilism and many other forms of popular sport: corruption deriving from gambling. In this respect, Badcock captures the precariousness not only of the sport, but of his own livelihood as a sports-writer.3 II Though often bolstered by a display of classical knowledge, Badcock’s texts are characterized by an aggressive anti-literary, particularly antifictional, stance. Like many other sporting publications of this period (and many since) they assert superiority over their rivals by a claim to greater accuracy and comprehensiveness, but they also share in a more general popular realism which places practical truth and a commitment to the social realities of commercial social life above the aesthetics of literary high culture. They espouse a popular rationalism based on utility underscored by a clear-cut morality. Many of them are compendia: dictionaries of slang; collections of household knowledge; histories of sport; practical guides to the metropolis. Clearly tapping into a newly developed market niche designed for a new and expanding lower middle class reading public, they might also be seen as contributing to a popular form of early nineteenth-century enlightenment. They are profoundly aware of their status as popular texts and they know they must mix knowledge and entertainment in order to sell. As well as satisfying a need for novelty and a requirement that they be useful, they must also respond to the current demands of the market. Despite their unabashed commercialism, however, Badcock’s publications are often in an embattled relationship with fashion. Their acute awareness of current consumer taste is matched by their antipathy to anything merely fashionable.4 An advertisement for Sportsman’s Slang describes it being written in “the Macaronic Style,” a reference not to its foppish modishness, but to its linguistic medley of styles or kinds of language, most particularly its mixture of jargon.5 Similarly, his dictionaries contain entries on dandyism which display a detailed knowledge of the subject, but a knowledge befitting the well-informed outsider rather than, as in his sporting entries, that of the devotee. As much as they answer a demand for a new genre of practical pocket-guides for an expanding lower middle-class reading public, Badcock’s texts also display a highly self-conscious awareness of their contribution to book history.

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This strongly developed historical sense is an abiding feature of Badcock’s work, though it is often accompanied by a surprising level of irreverence, sometimes directed at the very authority to which it is referring and at times deferring. In his activity as a lexicographer, for example, he clearly builds on the foundational work undertaken by Francis Grose whose Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) provided the basis for many of the subsequent cant and slang dictionaries of the early nineteenth century.6 But he is equally aware of Samuel Johnson as his most learned and celebrated predecessor in the more general field of lexicography.7 In typical fashion, however, Badcock peppers his texts with passing, often digressive, references to Johnson and these hover uneasily between reverence and mockery. In Bee’s Sportsman’s Slang, for example, he aggressively announces that it contains words not to be found in Johnson’s Dictionary. “‘WORDS NOT IN JOHNSON’ – no fudge,” an advertisement for the volume reads; and the book also contains entries which make fun of the learned doctor. Badcock’s gloss on the word “sparr” in the same volume contains a comic digression which suggests an interestingly ambivalent response to the illustrious lexicographer: SPARR (to) – fighting demonstrated: lessons in the art. Game chickens are said to sparr, when they fight for the mastery, which it is desirable one or the other should obtain soon to prevent everlasting rows in the walk. Pugilists learn the art of personal defence, with gloves on, that are stuffed upon the knuckles; this is sparring; if they would learn the mode of attack, let them begin early the actual set-to. Dr Johnson spelt the word with one (r) only; but saving his prescience, he knew nothing at all about sparring, he being but a single-fight man, having once floored, Tom Osborn, the bibliopolian. His “spar” is a long fir pole, used on board ships; and a fine piece of fun it would have been to see the old gent riding like a great bear astride one of these up Streatham hill where was his den. He gives no etymology, but simply says, “Spar v.n. to fight with preclusive strokes.” Whereas, every cocker and pugilist knows right well, that ’tis any thing but fighting: it comes from the word to spare, which in the gerund takes an additional [r], and keeps it when we return to the infinitive again.8

Badcock simultaneously parades and debunks his own bookish tendencies. There is a strong sense here of him attempting the fine balancing act of disseminating knowledge to a more general audience. The broad humour of his visual image of Johnson “the old gent” riding a fir pole to

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his den in Streatham is immediately followed by the more formal entry in Johnson’s own dictionary and a scholarly reminder of the grammatical forms of the verb in question, something with which other compilers, including Pierce Egan, did not trouble themselves.9 In such typical style, Badcock’s texts are combative, irreverent, and potentially comic in the way they treat historical authorities, but they also represent a concerted attempt to improve the general store of knowledge by building on and critiquing the previous literature of the sport. For all his faults – and they are many – Badcock possesses an impressive level of historical self-consciousness as a lexicographer and collector of slang terms. The opening “observations” prefaced to his Fancy-ana provide a good, representative indication both of his methods as a writer and of his embattled persona. Simultaneously functioning as advertisement and self-promotion, his supposedly neutral “observations” move very quickly from the criterion of truth based upon the best methods of research into a semi-comic personal history of the labours of authorship: A Publication which contains nearly 900 separate transactions, each of which has interested the FANCY, more or less, for a century past and by which vast sums changed hands every time, cannot fail to prove acceptable to all genuine Britons, as well as to those for whose use it is more particularly designed. But, it is not in quality alone that this little manual rests its claim to regard, though that be nearly double the number of events contained in the most massy work of its kind extant, and seven times as mush as a similar LIST, published a few years since. It is upon its accuracy as to dates, its faithfulness of exposition, its unequalled research, and concentration of fistic intelligence, [sparsus coegi]: that the present LIST looks for the confidence and patronage of the amateur. To attain this eminence, ten years, (agreeably to the Horation maxim) have passed silently on, while this sheet was accumulating its contents, and exacting much pains, care, and assiduity, in the process; though long, long ‘ere then materials had been already collected by the patient Editor:* every verbal information, within reach of the most laboured inquiry, was resorted to (regardless of experience); and 24,000 newspapers (by estimate) besides books, have been ransacked, compared together and the statements balanced in the scales of truth, ‘ere the conclusion judged most proper in each case, was decided upon. For about thirty years past the Editor hath relied mainly on his own view of events. Yet do several transactions (of a secondary nature, ’tis true) still stand open, as to date – that great essential of CHRONOLOGY,

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(which has been called, most aptly, “one of the eyes of history”… This species of information is solicited with earnestness; and whoever first finds six errors in these pages, shall nibble a quid for his own elie. J.B. *So long ago as July 12, 1821, the present materials, in fair form, on their way to the Printing Office, when their Author got disrobed of these papers, and he had to commence his labours anew! – “Think of that” (Reader) while you smoke tobacco! and weep, if you can cease grinning.10

In this passage, Badcock appeals to a mixed set of values and identities. As well as purporting to offer the most accurate and voluminous account of his chosen sport, he invokes financial curiosity as part of his hard-headed commercial realism and imagines his subject as a form of national history, a component part of British identity. On a more linguistic level, his immediate translation of the slang phrase “fistic intelligence” into the Latin sparsus coegi captures in contracted form the verbal axes of his authority: he possesses first-hand insider’s knowledge of the sport and he has the formal, classical learning which can see the knowledge he is purveying from the outside as a mode of history. For the reader, this presents a text which is always highly self-conscious and playful, but also one which is potentially disruptive, comic, and challenging. This assertive and abrupt linguistic mode which draws attention to the widely divergent make-up and the range of its linguistic registers is in marked contrast to that of Egan in which there is often a smooth assumption of the linguistic differences and a dominant use of standard English in conjunction with a mildly romanticizing, aestheticizing literary sensibility which has the effect of bringing a blackguard sport into the domain of polite culture. Egan, it might be said, mediates the sport and its potentially alienating ergot for the more literary reader whereas Badcock draws his reader’s attention to both the arduous process through which the text has been produced as well as highlighting the radical shifts between the kinds of language and knowledge which have been deployed.11 Badcock’s preface to Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, The Ring, The Chase, The Pit, of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life (1823) is also indicative of this complex historical self-consciousness, but his lexicographical enterprise here pushes him a step closer to the archaeological and archival. He clearly views his subject as arcane. As well as requiring the right kind of informants to gather its materials, his work is conceived of as a form of research in which the cultural object needs not just mediation

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or explanation, but recovery. Alongside this sense of a living archive, Badcock also claims that his lexicographical enterprise is an act of “improvement.” His presentation of a collection of arcane material for popular consumption is unashamedly accompanied by an aggressively moral agenda, part of which at least is focused on his zealous sense of the utility of disseminating practical forms of knowledge. Badcock’s enthusiastic self-championing of his own corrective intelligence extends beyond the sporting arena. In the preface to his Domestic Amusements (1823) he presents himself as an inveterate modernizer on a mission to eradicate “false notions” of “supernatural agency” and “witchcraft” which, he claims, still have a significant hold on the minds of many in the lower ranks of the general population. His purpose is to expunge “all wonder-raising epithets” from the language of popular science. He clearly sees this as part of the more general movement of historical progress in which popular enlightenment will play an important role in replacing superstition with “rationality.” In advancing this improvement, Badcock also subscribes to a notion of “refinement.” A refinement in the language of popular science, he argues, not only makes for greater intelligibility and lucidity in the mode of explanation, it also “avoids … vulgarisms.” Despite this promotion of linguistic improvement in a class-bound language of culture, Badcock falls short of adopting “elegance” as one of his watch-words: iii) The former volume of PHILOSOPHICAL RECREATIONS had for its basis the experiments, the amusements, the tricks, many of which have been, for the best part of a century, before the Public, in various large works, or copied, incorrectly enough, into small Collections, similar to that volume; Hooper Salmon, Boyle, Lupton, Smith, and Imison furnished their contents with the most valuable part of their contents. But fruitless is the inquiry, whether it arose from the fashion, from a perverse adherence to old modes of explanation, in those who undertook to hand down their ancient authors to us, or that these times have refined upon written language as well as upon manners – they were frequently found unintelligible, always insipid, and sometimes trifling: “Provide a” – “You take a” – “take your – in your hand” formed the boundaries of their refinement and choice of words; and if, in avoiding such vulgarisms, we may thereby have added nothing to elegance of teaching, it is not to be denied much was done towards clothing old ideas in a newer and cleverer style. All wonder-raising epithets were in like manner struck out, and a rationality sought in the exposure of false notions respecting supernatural agency

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and witchcraft, that are too prevalent among young folks and last in some to old age.12

Given this unstable mixture of realism and linguistic playfulness – which can include irreverent satire – it is perhaps not surprising that, on occasion, Badcock should express doubts as to whether he has gone too far in his robust attacks upon opponents, but even when he does so his manner is still combative and his worries about deploying an aggressive style soon turn into explanations and extended vindications rather than heart-felt apologies: No fiction of the brain, no imaginary character, makes any part of these pages, though I may not always hit the exact orthography of proper names; whereby offensive underlings of grovelling disposition, may find holes to creep, as they are wont, from the censure of their own controlled circles; and although I may have adopted a popular cognomen instead of a christian name, or legal denomination, yet to protest against, as I utterly eschew, all attempts at teaching this most perilous of all worldly knowledge, by the machinery of “pretty novel” or “amusing narrative”; to which some excellent cerebral writers of the present day seem fondly addicted; those modern Bunyans, who couch whatever they write “under the similitude of a dream.” Here and there, I find I have carried this plain-spoken, unvarnished openness of mine to the extremity, in the severe rebuke of some full-grown fool, or arrant actual knave, who stands at the head and foremost of his class. But I have no apology to make, to them, at any rate. In some few cases I am not sure that I did not intend to give pain; but then, this disposition has been amiably restricted to fitting objects: the censure of scoundrels, the exposition of villainies, cannot be supposed capable of being conciliated by the filthy pretensions of him who dares to expect complacencies that belong only to the virtuous: he even fancies too much when he hopes to escape with negative from the pen that is confessedly castigatory.13

III The typically robust foreword to The Fancy; or True Sportsman’s Guide (1826) by “An Operator,” a fortnightly journal to which Badcock was a major contributor, offers an insight into the way in which his brand of popular journalism begins to open up the very cultural domain upon which it depends for its existence. Here his mixture of high and low, his

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uneasy combination of learned and popular forms of knowledge, and his movement between different linguistic registers, fragments rather than consolidates his affiliation to his chosen sport. The foreword’s typically aggressive mode of self-justification operates on a number of levels. It begins with the more noble professed aims of offering a truthful and unbiased account of its subject and then personalizes these in the figure of its editor who is described as entering into the decline of his life and is therefore “wanting to leave behind him, as an example to the rising generation,” this account of sporting history as an important national inheritance. His work, we are told, contains “a faithful account of the Actions, Courage, and Prowess, of those Brave Men who have been an honour to their country, and … support[s] the system of old English Boxing in preference to the hired Assassin, the Dagger, the Pistol, and the Poisonous Draught.” Having in this way identified the editor with these larger historical and nationalistic principles the foreword moves on to a more specific definition of its self-professed independence and, in particular, its freedom from bias. It does this by differentiating itself from other competing writers and their publications; and in typical fashion it uses humour and classical learning to do so. Its professed independence is defined not only in relation to the obvious forms of patronage in the social and political hierarchy, but also to the fashions and whims of popular taste: Foreword [The Editor’s] determination to guide his pen with truth, and to steer free from bias in his capacity as a Biographer. He again pledges himself, that what he writes shall be impartial, and having retired from the Ring for nearly ten years, he can have no reason to calumniate: being now in the decline of life, our writers on Pugilism … they know not, poor scribes, how much influence their every silence has on the minds of men whose understandings lie in their heels, whose greatest wit is to be found at their knuckle-ends. The Publisher would not have offered the present publication to the notice of THE RING and its admirers, nor attempted to draw upon them, fortnightly, for the price of a heavy wet, to keep the game alive, if he could have persuaded himself that their attention was already adequately occupied by the present miserably defective slummery mode of bringing these matters upon the carpet. A mode whereby froth is served up for substance, epithet stands in the stead of sense, and a constantly feverish state of risible ridiculousness is foisted off for understanding. Besides these just objections to the manner in which this species of subjects has been hitherto

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mismanaged, we complain that an inflated pomposity has been imposed upon us for sublimity, tameness for accuracy, flippancy for liveliness and turgidity for precision – a state of things this which not always last; and if we do no other good, “Twill put them ’pon their mettle” But we look a little higher than this comes to: although we know full well that few among “the men” are grammarians – all round the ring you shall find critics; that some one has and there does not choose to read at all, whilst a good number seldom spell right, in a book or out of it, nor does either the one or the other “signify a bench of cat’s meat,” but it does signify a good deal (and here is the sore) that Mr – – no – should be longer permitted to go about teaching those things wrongfully, without being told of it tidily, as we do now. A vast difference between people falling into errors of this nature, and being dragged, or led into them, by flowery paths and devious ways; for, be it remembered, that “men are led by the nose more than by the understanding” in matters of mind connected with FANCY SPORTS particularly. For our parts we would, at any time, rather instruct the mind and amend the heart of any man than meddle with his konk. Moreover, let us say, we hope we never shall act “like that Pharisee,” nor “scribble like that scribe” [Juvenal.] On the contrary, we propose to keep ourselves entirely free from prejudice, from party-attachments, and from sycophancy of very kind; from fawning over a conqueror, or becoming lick spittle to a lord, whether that be a peer-lord, or a landlord: from lauding a man for his infamies, because he happens to up, or treading on another because he is down in the world … many a good man who has gone up, up, up in the estimation, is now down, down, down in the ring, as well as out of it.14

In keeping itself consistent with this claim of being “entirely free from prejudice” Badcock’s mode of journalism clearly runs a risk, not least by exposing the degree to which the whole culture of the Fancy is riddled with corruption, prejudice, and financial dependency. But it also runs an equally dangerous risk of alienating itself from its own cultural community by aggressively defining itself against extant accounts of the sport – not simply on the grounds of truthfulness, bias, or independence, but by reason of its linguistic proficiency and its cultural superiority. This is a particularly fraught territory for such a popular cultural production. The editor of The Fancy, like Badcock’s work more generally, simultaneously claims insider and outsider status for its texts. The

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Fancy; Or True Sportsman’s Guide is described as being written by “An Operator” now retired from the ring, but in its aggressive self-justification it reaches beyond the usual remit of its own cultural provenance. In this way, there’s a peculiarly conflicted aspect to Badcock’s career as a writer and publisher. His aggressive self-justifications open up the spectre of corruption at the heart of the sport he inhabits and celebrates, while his espousal of a new style also entails a thorough-going attack on his fellow writers. His almost obsessive degree of self-vindication and his drive towards individuation might fulfil a commercial imperative to sell copy, but it also makes him look like a dangerously self-destructive eccentric. In a series of “Miscellaneous” articles in the early issues of the fortnightly journal The Fancy Badcock mounts a concerted attack on Pierce Egan in which he runs the risk not only of creating enemies within his own profession and within his readership, but also of subscribing to a set of values which attack the very heart of sporting journalism in the period. His prime target is Pierce Egan’s hugely popular text, Life in London, which had run to numerous editions in the early 1820s.15 The terms of Badcock’s attack are typical of his more general unrelenting personal assault on the integrity and reliability of Egan’s sporting journalism. But they also take the form of a fierce critique of the quasi-fictional nature of this most popular text. In at once debunking Egan’s tendency towards literary romance and taking on a subscription to an extreme literalism, these articles reveal the nature and the limits of Badcock’s own contribution to literature in this field. His attack on romance in the writing of the Fancy puts him at odds with that literature’s precarious existence in the hinterland of fact and fiction, expertise and popularization. Badcock’s attack on the literariness of the Fancy goes straight to the heart of its subscription to sentiment and is therefore in serious danger of draining it of its life-blood. There is also an attendant risk, of course, of alienating his readers. Badcock sets about the fictional status of Egan’s text with a typically zealous literal-mindedness. He is intent on attacking the fictional aspect of Egan’s text, its literary idealization, and its excess. He belittles its subscription to a notion of the heroic and finds no point in its incorporation of quotations from Shakespeare. The oddity of Badcock’s own text lies in its seeming blindness to the burlesque and satirical comedy of his adversary. He adopts an almost messianic literalism as a means of trumping the archness of his competitor. Although it begins relatively politely by admitting that Life in London’s authors might have a different purpose

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and one at odds with his own mode of critique, Badcock ends his second sentence with the demotic posed against the French: “beau ideal” is mockingly pitched against “sconces.” He is particularly attentive to its linguistic register, but instead of welcoming linguistic variety as one might expect in view of his own work as a lexicographer, he turns on it as his prime target. His barbed footnote claiming that the authors of such a text in the United States would be referred to there as “Jargonic writers” exposes an interesting irony about Badcock’s self-contradictory interests in language. In this context and purely for strategic reasons, he seems to be particularly scornful and dismissive of linguistic variety: “LIFE IN LONDON,” What is it? – We are led to this inquiry, in consequence of some attempts lately made at depicting “Life in London” which do not square with our notion of what the thing ought to be. But, probably, we do mistake those gentlemen egregiously; they do not mean to depict (to paint) actual life, but merely to set forth a pretty print, “a study” of the brain, and to give the gaping world a new species of the beau ideal, that exists no where but in their own sconces. We are borne out in this conclusion (somewhat) by the very names they give to their fictitious heroes, in which they furnish us with a foretaste of the charicature [sic] situations and unheard-of scenes, in which they subsequently throw their said HEROES. “Heroes?” Yes; for every thing they take in hand becomes heroic, or monstrous fine, tremendously inconceivable,* or excessively superb. *In America such authors receive the name of “Jargonic Writers.” Is it to describe Life in London, as it actually is, to write a fiction full of bombastical absurdities; Is it set forth such as it ought to be, when flights of poetry, fifty years old, are dragged in neck-and-heels from the shelves, to narrate facts and occurrences? Which facts, by the way, never happened, but are lies, lies, lies, from beginning to end, or “False as Hell,” and ugly as Hecate, to boot. Is it not any thing but “Life” that when a bit of truth chanceth to slip in, it is then hung up in the clouds of rhetoric – or compelled to float in the hazy atmosphere of the writer’s caprice, or upheld by tortuous ponderosity in the sun’s eye, evidently for the purpose of scorching the reader’s senses with its beams. As an example of the latter – would any one of common sense, any one of the ten thousand readers of our FANCY, imagine, that such one as we and they are (for example), or any of our arts, would be appropriately introduced to public notice by such blazy lines as these – “O for a Muse of fire … matchless heroes” &c

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And who, what “matchless hero” does the reader imagine, causes this effulgency? Why, not other than George Harmer! Honest George.16

A number of paradoxes and contradictions are evident in this attack. The very terms in which Badcock ridicules the linguistic excess of Life in London expose his own weakness. His description of Egan’s work as “tortuous ponderosity” itself reads like a rather awkward verbosity rather than pert witty parody. As the critique progresses in two subsequent articles, Badcock presents himself almost as a selfless moral reformer and improver, purifying language and cutting back the excess of a disorderly realm of letters. In keeping with the practical imagination he displays in Domestic Amusements, the abiding metaphors here are also those of a sub-enlightenment in which common sense is supported by metaphors of light and clarity posed against the cloudy, frothy, obscurity he sees as constituting Egan’s literary excess. In his final instalment too Badcock leads himself into even greater self-contradiction. Here he challenges the accuracy of Egan’s text and claims superiority for his own project of The Fancy on the basis that it is a communal activity dependent on a number of well informed “operators” for its knowledge of the metropolis: After this description of what Life in London is not, let us see what it actually is: it is to depicture ACTUAL LIFE IN LONDON, aright when the reader is led to an intimate acquaintance with the FANCY SPORTS of the metropolis, their corollaries and minor incidents. It is actual Life in London, as it passes, that is depicted in the numbers of THE FANCY; which contain the occurante laborem, the practical experiences of our actual lives, devoted to the Task, and revelling in a fearless search after Truth. Aided by a galaxy of talent adapted to every one of its purposes, Life in London is actually seen by us and our very respectable colleagues (see pages 67, 98 &c) daily and nightly, hourly and extensively, and it is constantly developed in this our publication. Not recoiling under a cloak of fictitious characters, not conveyed in vague and smoky phraseology neither doubtful occurrences, or incidents in nubibus, disgrace our pages; but straight forward run-and-read lingo, aimed at the mark; real, actual bona fide acts, names, transactions; conveying instruction, and importing precautions and advice, as well as combining information and utility to every fancy reader. From this labour, whenever we retire – for retire we must and shall, sooner or later, no doubt exists that we shall not only leave the ring in a better moral state, and more tolerable, than when we came to it, but that

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the public and the magistrates, and the governors of the land, well understand the better the object, aims, and acts of the admirers of fancy Sports as pursued in this capital of the Empire. N.B. More proof hereof in a future Number. (100–1)

There is something strangely self-conscious in this farewell to sports writing. It reads not just as a description of Badcock’s own retirement, but as a more wide-ranging elegy on the genre as a whole. As well as mounting an all-out assault upon the fictionality of his rivals, his account wages war on some of the key components of the subculture of “Fancy Sports,” many of which depend for their existence on the specialist or even occult nature of their proceedings. One of the challenges and opportunities in the production of slang dictionaries related to such activities is their recording of a cant which by definition is privy to initiates and is constantly changing, thus guaranteeing a constant process of updating. Lexicography in this context simultaneously exhibits a sentimental chronicling of the activity and offends against the self-enclosed nature of the group. Here, Badcock pushes the literature of fancy sports into an even starker realm of exposure in his zealous reaching after facts. His literalism challenges the very basis of the Fancy by emptying his subject not only of its pleasingly occult or secret nature, but by subjecting it to an aggressive rationality. The extremity of his enterprise consists in replacing the sentimental attachment of a sympathetic individual dealing in “smokey phraseology” with an ever-vigilant network of operators dedicated to the production of unambiguous facts in a “run-and-read lingo.” In this way, Badcock might be said to risk evacuating sporting literature of its basis in a notion of the fancy. His moral crusade for the straightforward truth in sporting journalism might be described as an attack on sentiment per se. As Jeffrey C. Robinson has pointed out, “the society of the Fancy, even though it feature[d] dramas of winning and losing, encourage[d] a spirit of friendship, of generosity.”17 While exhibiting many of the creative characteristics of this society and while – as we have seen – cherishing many of its rituals as well as its language, Jon Badcock’s writings strike at the sentimental heart of the subculture he inhabits. If, as Richard Cronin has argued, the “cult of the prize fight” was “the most visible symptom of the new masculinism” in the years after the Battle of Waterloo,18 Badcock’s journalism draws attention to the instabilities within the literary endeavours which fed on pugilism’s new-found popularity. One of those instabilities concerns a revision of

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sentiment in the face of the new masculinism. Badcock’s savage attack on Pierce Egan’s literary sentimentalism in the field of sports journalism might be said to form part of that readjustment. Badcock’s case reveals the precariousness of the culture of the Fancy which attends sports in late Georgian England. His aggressive self-justifications provide an insight into an embattled subculture made more vulnerable in a period when the popularity of pugilism had exposed it as an illegal practice and opened up its attendant blackguard subculture to more general popular scrutiny. This could generate a very profitable secondary literature, but it could also threaten the very existence of the original activity. Many writers in the period indulge in a reverent, even mournful, chronicling of their beloved sports as they see them disappearing under a new wave of moral puritanism and a gradual process of codification. But for Badcock, the emphasis is on producing a history of the Fancy seemingly cleared of sentiment. Given that boxing in this period – for all its temporary popularity – was a profoundly embattled subculture threatened by legislation and a clear change in social mores which were moving away from the challenge of “manly sports,” Badcock’s texts provide a valuable insight into the extent to which the sport’s own internal culture was precariously predicated on contradictions and conflicts.

NOTES 1 Jon Badcock has a relatively short entry in the Dictionary of National Biography by W.P. Courtney, rev. Dennis Brailsford. For brief accounts of his work see Ford, Prizefighting, 183–6; Plimpton, foreword to Selections from The Fancy, vii–xv; Coleman, A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries, 178–92. Ford offers a cursory view of Badcock as an unreliable, inaccurate, and mentally deranged hack. Plimpton is more generous, but in his very brief comparison with Egan claims that the latter’s style contains more wit. Coleman’s account of his lexicographical publications is altogether more judicious and favourable. She recognizes his awareness of pronunciation, his critical handling of sources, and his first-hand knowledge of usage and, while aware of his tendency to be “opinionated and rambling,” compares his achievement in this field favourably to Pierce Egan’s. Badcock’s works contain frequent reference to his own contributions to Boxiana, The Fancy, The Fancy Gazette, Pancratia, Fancy-ana, Hints, Domestic Amusements, and A Living Picture of London. See the bibliography for his known publications.

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For a brief account of Badcock’s interaction with Pierce Egan in relation to Hazlitt’s essay, “The Fight,” and the surrounding culture of boxing, see Snowdon, “Hazlitt’s Prizefight Revisited,” accessed 30 December 2015, http://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/rt20_n02/. Snowdon offers the following description of the relationship between the two authors : A very public disagreement with his publishers (Sherwood, Jones, and Co.) presented Egan’s great rival, Jon Bee (fl. 1810–30), with the unexpected opportunity to supplant him as author of Boxiana, IV in 1824. At the court proceedings of 24 July 1823, the judge awarded Egan the right to continue his Boxiana writing on condition that any such text’s title was prefixed with “New Series.” “Jon Bee” was the pseudonym of John Badcock, and the similarity of his writing style allowed an almost seamless transition from Egan’s Boxiana volumes. Bee is an integral part of any study of pugilistic writing, which is further augmented by his editorship of The Annals of Sporting and Fancy Gazette (a total of thirteen volumes published biannually between 1822 and 1828). His lexical publication, Bee’s Sportsman’s Slang (1825), is also an informative source of information on the specialist jargon of the ring and flash language of the Fancy. Unfortunately, some of Bee’s energy was negatively channelled into sniping at Egan, and he became so piqued by what he perceived as Egan’s efforts to either anticipate or eclipse his publications that he permitted resentment to creep in and impinge upon certain reports and lexicographical definitions, claiming in Bee’s Sportsman’s Slang that Egan was “wholly incapable of undertaking a work requiring grammatical accuracy.”

2 3

4

5

By contrast, my account in this essay sees Badcock’s attack on Egan as importantly symptomatic not only of his own writing, but of one of the key fault-lines within late Georgian sporting journalism. For other accounts of sporting journalism in the period, see Strachan, “Fighting Sports”; and Whale, “Real Life.” For accounts of pugilism and its associated “manly sports” in the late Georgian period, see Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, 42–3, 145–6; Brailsford, Bareknuckles; Ford, Prizefighting; Strachan, Romanticism and Sport; Boddy, Boxing, 26–74; Higgins, “Englishness”; Whale, “‘Imperfect Sympathies.’” In this respect, Badcock evidences what Jeffrey C. Robinson in his study of the poetics of the Fancy has characterized as a “society not simply of appearances but one that calls attention to life-as-fashion, one that plays with the markers of fashions, finds vitality in the ephemeral itself” (Unfettering Poetry, 200). Badcock’s adoption of the term seems to travel across meanings 1 and 2 of “macaronic” as defined in the OED which include a “burlesque mingling”

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of styles, but would presumably exclude sense 3 which makes specific reference to the Macarones and their “foppish conceit.” Badcock’s own contribution to printed evidence of linguistic variety is also apparent from a search of the OED which reveals 318 citations from his works, the vast majority from his Domestic Amusements. See Coleman, A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries, 2:14–105. Even in his Fancy-ana; or, a History of Pugilism Badcock uses the chronology to record Johnson’s birth, describing him rather ambivalently as “lexiphanes.” Badcock, Bee’s Sportsman’s Slang, 163. See Coleman, A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries, 2:191–2. Badcock, Fancy-ana, i. See Whale, “Real Life,” 385–9. In the same issue of London Magazine I discuss Egan’s style in relation to the sentimentalizing aspect of the Fancy through the review of his Sporting Anecdotes by John Hamilton Reynolds. In the London Magazine, Reynolds describes the “beautiful indistinctness” of Egan’s language which “softens all objects to the same endurable appearance” and he admires “the ability with which the brutalities and severities of boxing are softened to the taste and timidity of a young gentleman in stays, or a lady at her breakfast table!” (386–7). Badcock, Preface to Domestic Amusements, vi–vii. Badcock, A Living Picture of London for 1828, vi. Badcock, The Fancy; or True Sportman’s Guide, i–iv. See Dart, “Flash Style.” Badcock, The Fancy, vol. 1, no. IV(1821), 100. Robinson, Unfettering Poetry, 197. Cronin, Paper Pellets, 221.

Chapter Nine

At Play in the Mountains: The Development of British Mountaineering in the Romantic Period simon bainbridge

Summing up the formal characteristics of play, we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious,” but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens1

“Wot a broghtin yoa here?”: The Question of Climbing In November 1797, the former soldier Joseph Budworth, who wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine under the pseudonym of Rambler, set out with his guide Paul Postlethwaite, the son of a local farmer, to climb “to the summit of Langdale Pike” (now known as Pike o’ Stickle).2 This adventure was part of a return visit to the English Lake District for Budworth, who had described his previous walking tour of the area in his travel book A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes in Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland of 1792. This earlier trip had itself included some notable climbing feats alongside the more standard ascents of Skiddaw and the Old Man of Coniston, including what Budworth himself claimed as the first ascent by a “stranger” of Helm Crag in Grasmere, of which he commented: “Although we ascended many hills higher than Helm Crag, as it has never been visited by strangers, and the ascent is so very difficult, I think it deserves being mentioned in speaking of mountains”

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(264). Langdale Pike was an even more ambitious target and Budworth describes how he and Postlethwaite both equipped themselves with “a long pole with a pike to it” and “started like hardy mountaineers” (266). In describing himself as a “mountaineer,” Budworth offers an early example of someone from outside a mountainous region claiming for himself the identity of one native to such a region.3 Like Helm Crag, Pike o’Stickle was a peak that forced Budworth to “scramble,” a term he uses that remains in current usage for mountain ascents that require the use of hands. The gnarly peak provided “many rough rocks to scramble up” and required Budworth and his guide “to haul ourselves by rocks to bring us to the crown of Langdale Pike, which is about twenty yards in circumference” (266–7). It was while seated on the summit of Pike o’Stickle that Budworth started to consider his motivation for the hazardous climb, an issue raised by his guide, as Budworth describes: Paul Postlethwaite sat down by me, and, after answering my questions, thought he had a natural right to make his own: p.p. : Ith’ neome oh fackins, wot a broghtin yoa here? ramb[ler].: Curiosity, Paul. p.p.: I think yoa mun be kurious enuff; I neor cum here bu after runaway sheop, an I’me then so vext at um, I cud throa um deawn th’Poike. (269)

Postlethwaite’s puzzlement at Budworth’s climbing ambitions emphasizes the combination of peril and play in the nascent sport of mountaineering. For the native inhabitant, the treacherous crags of Langdale should only be climbed for a specific purpose, the rescuing of errant sheep, and even then the inherent danger of the enterprise calls its value into question. To undertake such a risky pursuit with only the vaguely defined motivation of curiosity is beyond Posthlethwaite’s comprehension; the climber himself becomes “kurious enuff” in his failure to conform to familiar and understandable patterns of behaviour. Budworth’s account exemplifies the development of British mountaineering in the Romantic period as a form of “play,” as defined by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in his seminal work Homo Ludens of 1938.4 While the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened “mountaineering” in 18025 emerged out of a range of practices, and remained entangled with them, it was during the Romantic period that the climbing of peaks “interpolate[d] itself as a temporary activity

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satisfying in itself and ending there” (27), to quote Huizinga. Budworth’s ascents of Helm Crag and Langdale Pike illustrate how mountaineering started to be undertaken in the period as an end in itself, performed for its own pleasures, challenges, and gratifications rather than according to the strictures of the scientific, antiquarian, or picturesque expeditions out of which it evolved. It is this sense of climbing as play that troubles Postlethwaite about the Langdale Pike scramble. For the farmer’s son as shepherd or guide, the climb of the Pike is a dangerous economic necessity; as he informs his client “I bin heor oth’Poike oftnor an he loikd” (270). For Postlethwaite, Budworth’s climb exemplifies what Huizinga identifies as one of the major characteristics of play; it is “superfluous,” “a function which he could equally well leave alone” (26). Huizinga’s account of the first three major characteristics of play helps grasp the contrasting meanings of climbing Langdale Pike for the “Rambler” and his guide, meanings which are obviously informed by economic and class status. For Huizinga, the first main characteristic of play is “that it is free, is in fact freedom” (26). He writes: The need for [play] is only urgent to the extent that the enjoyment of it makes it a need. Play can be deferred or suspended at any time. It is never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. It is never a task. It is done at leisure, during “free time.” (26)

Clearly, in these terms, while climbing Langdale Pike is an act of “freedom” for Budworth, undertaken at leisure during the free time of a walking tour, for Postlethwaite it is a “task.” To this characteristic of freedom, Huizinga adds a second, “that play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own” (26). For Budworth, his adventure in the mountains enables him as “Rambler” to step out of his own life. Temporarily, the “stranger” assumes the same identity as Postlethwaite, the “mountaineer.” Postlethwaite himself, however, remains within the realities of his own life, identity, and native region. This sense of the different meanings of the mountain region and the time spent in it for the “stranger” and the local guide brings us to the third of Huizinga’s characteristics of play, what he terms “its secludedness, its limitedness”: “Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life as to both locality and duration … It is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own course and meaning” (28). For Budworth, the mountainous region of the Lake District performs in exemplary fashion the function of what

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Huizinga calls the “play-ground,” a term which itself echoes the title of one of the classics of mountaineering literature, Leslie Stephen’s The Playground of Europe, 1871.6 At the end of his time in the Lakes, Budworth will leave the “secluded” and “limited” play arena and return to his “ordinary” world. For Postlethwaite, this area is all that he knows. He informs Budworth that “I bin at Hawkshead, at a feor – an I bin at Ambleside, an he ah bib at Grassmere” (269–70), all villages within a few miles of his family farm at Langdale. For Postlethwaite the possibilities of play would require him to step beyond his own locality, as he did when visiting the Hawkshead fair, though the farmer’s son does also have greater ambitions, telling his employer that “I sud loike to goa as far ev’ry way (getting up and turning round) as I see neaw, or mure. I sud loike t’ see Lunnun on St. Paul’s” (270). In this essay, I want to develop this argument for the emergence of mountaineering as a form of play in the Romantic period. In doing so, I will provide a new way of understanding the development of this remarkable activity, engaging with but offering a different emphasis to the majority of work in the growing field of mountaineering studies, which tends to approach the subject through the politics of class, gender, identity, region, and nation, as in Peter J. Hansen’s recent major study The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment. My approach also differs from most of the work in the field by shifting the focus away from the much-studied histories of major mountains; Hansen’s book, for example, is primarily concerned with Mont Blanc with additional sections on Mont Ventoux, the Matterhorn, and Mount Everest. My own focus is the development of play in British mountains, which I will explore through analysis of a wide range of rarely studied texts of mountain travel, read within the framework of Huizinga’s theory. I will show how ascending mountains was initially undertaken for specific purposes, such as the collection of scientific data and specimens, and with a particular reward in mind, such as that provided by a summit view. I will then examine how people discovered in mountaineering an activity that became an end in itself. By way of introduction, I want to use this opening section to give an idea of the growth of mountaineering in Britain as a recreational activity and to show how when practised as play, rather than as a pursuit with an end in mind, it frequently provoked versions of Postlethwaite’s question, “Ith’ neome oh fackins, wot a broghtin yoa here?” Budworth was an adventurous and pioneering climber who undertook most of his ascents by himself or in the company of a guide. During

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the period 1770–1837, however, the ascent of mountains was becoming an increasingly popular leisure pursuit in Britain, particularly in the areas visited as part of the domestic tour: the Lake District, North Wales, and the Highlands of Scotland. For example, in 1792, the same year that Budworth was making his “first ascent by a stranger” of Helm Crag, Charles Ross reported: “In the months of July, August and September, the summit of Ben Lomond is frequently visited by strangers from every quarter of the island, as well as by foreigners.”7 Ben Lomond is the most southerly of the Scottish peaks over 3,000 feet and for many tourists its ascent became an obligatory rather than an optional part of their tour. James Denholm commented in 1804: “The greatest part of travellers who visit Loch Lomond upon a pleasure excursion, in general take advantage of the ferry at Inveruglas, and cross the lake to ascend Ben Lomond.”8 As Denholm’s account illustrates, during this period there was a developing infrastructure that provided support for those who wished to climb mountains. For Ben Lomond, this infrastructure included the ferry across the Loch and an inn, where a short stay was usually made “before attempting the swelling mountain, and where a guide is at hand to conduct you, by the best and readiest track, to the summit.”9 It is, of course, impossible to provide precise numbers of those who ascended Ben Lomond or the other popular peaks, such as Skiddaw and Snowdon, during the period. However, contemporary reports would suggest that in fine weather in the summer season these three summits were busy places. When Thomas Wilkinson climbed Ben Lomond in 1787, he was joined by a party that he described as “a genteel company, consisting of twelve persons, (six of either sex,) two guides, a black servant, and a pony with provisions.”10 This is a remarkable summit scene, interesting not only as an illustration of the climb’s popularity, but also because of the gender and race of the climbers. Mountaineering as play is open to women as well as men, but for non-whites or the lower classes, climbing is an economic labour or necessity, as we have already seen in the case of Paul Postlethwaite. Two decades after Wilkinson’s ascent, in 1805, George Smith reported that “many persons undergo the fatigue of climbing up to the top of [Ben Lomond’s] highest point.”11 This frustratingly vague term “many” is quite frequently used to suggest the high numbers of those participating in the culture of ascent, or some element of it, as when Robert Hasell Newell commented in 1821 that “Many go up [Snowdon] to see the sun-rise.”12 By the 1830s the number of people on the summits of the most popular mountains

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could disconcert those looking for a more solitary, spiritual experience. In 1837, for example, the Scottish naturalist and ornithologist William MacGillivray denounced the large numbers of urban pleasure-seekers he encountered on the most popular summits, writing: I cannot but look upon it as a gross profanation to enact in the midst of the sublimities of creation a convivial scene, such as is usually got up by parties from our large towns, who seem to have no higher aim in climbing to the top of Benlomond or Benledi than to feast there upon cold chicken and “mountain dew,” and toss as many stones as they can find over the precipices.13

MacGillivray’s account of the number of people on the tops of Ben Lomond and Ben Ledi illustrates that by the close of the Romantic period mountain ascent was well established as a leisure pastime for an increasingly large section of society. Like Budworth’s exchange with Postlethwaite, MacGillivray’s irritated words also reveal a clash of mountaineering cultures occurring on the very summit of the mountain. His use of the words “profanation” and “sublimities” indicate the sacred and aesthetic values with which he invested peaks. What he objects to is the use of mountains as a place of recreation for an urban population whose ascents constitute a form of fashionable consumption, equivalent to the feasting upon cold chicken and drinking of “mountain dew” indulged in by those who participate in such ascents.14 With its sense of conviviality, finding fun in rolling stones off the sides of the peak (an activity known as “trundling” that was also enjoyed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), MacGillivray’s summit scene again enacts the emergence of mountain climbing as play. It also provides an alternative image of mountaineering in the period to that at the centre of Hansen’s study, “in which modern man stands alone on the summit, autonomous from other men.”15 The development of mountain climbing in the Romantic period as a form of play is also illustrated by the changing accounts of motivation for ascents given by those who undertook them. In the next section, “Climbing with a Purpose,” I will look in greater detail at the different cultures out of which climbing emerged, but by way of introducing the shift in motivation it is worth quoting one example that reveals the desire to reach a summit as an end in itself. In 1828, M.R. of Liverpool wrote a narrative, “Four Days’ Ramble in the Neighbourhood of Bangor, North Wales,” for The Kaleidoscope, commenting: “From the time I

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landed in North Wales I had looked upon the ascent of Snowdon as a kind of achievement I should like to perform. It would be, I thought, a feat without which all my other excursions would be incomplete.”16 Here, the ascent to the summit is undertaken not for any scientific or aesthetic motivation but for its own sake. As a potential “achievement” and a “feat” in its own right, M.R.’s ambition to climb Snowdon can also be read in terms of Huizinga’s account of play. The Dutch historian writes: The element of tension … [in play] plays a particularly important part. Tension means uncertainty, chanciness; a striving to decide the issue and so end it. The player wants something to “go,” to “come off”; he wants to “succeed” by his own exertions. (29)

For M.R., the desire to succeed in his uncertain venture of climbing Snowdon aligns with Huizinga’s account of play. A successful ascent by his own exertions will decide the issue and bring his trip to a fitting end, but failure will produce a sense of non-completion. The playfulness of mountaineering as it developed in the Romantic period was highlighted by its potential dangers; the risks associated with climbing emphasized the seeming lack of justification for the pursuit. These dangers were most apparent in the Alps, the arena that a later generation of climbers would come to know as “the playground of Europe.” In 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s accession that we might think of as marking the end of the Romantic period, the Saturday Magazine published a lengthy three-part essay entitled “Some Account of the Valley of Chamouni, and the Ascent of Mont Blanc.” Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe, had first been climbed in 1786 and had become a focus for the most ambitious mountaineering expeditions of the age. The Saturday Magazine printed a list of what by 1837 had been the seventeen successful ascents of the mountain and commented: It may be amusing to observe the comparatively large number of our countrymen who figure in this list; out of the seventeen successful expeditions they are the heroes of no less than ten. It is easy to assign them the merit of courage and fortitude, – common qualities enough, – it is more difficult to discover any good resulting to mankind from their efforts. The only name in the list which, in the latter point of view, deserves to be, or will be remembered, is that of the Swiss naturalist, De Saussure, always excepting, of course, the names of Paccard and Balmat, who led the way to the summit.17

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As in Paul Postlethwaite’s response to Budworth’s climb of Langdale Pike and MacGillivray’s criticism of the convivial parties on Ben Lomond and Ben Ledi, it is the lack of any utilitarian or higher purpose in many of the Mont Blanc ascents that troubles the writer. While those who have climbed the mountain have shown courage and fortitude, the issue of “any good resulting to mankind” from their expeditions remains in question. For this writer, mountaineering is only justified and worth remembering when it serves such a purpose, as he comments: “It is, undoubtedly, true that the ascent of this mountain, when first undertaken for scientific purposes, was an object eminently praiseworthy.”18 In the next section of this essay, I want to examine the kind of mountaineering expeditions that were undertaken for praiseworthy purposes and that were used as comparison for the developing culture of climbing as play. Climbing with a Purpose: Scientific and Picturesque Mountaineering The playful culture of British mountaineering that developed in the Romantic period emerged out of climbing cultures that had some specific objective or purpose as the intended aim of their ascents, be these the collection of scientific data or the gaining of an elevated summit prospect. During the eighteenth century, the ascent of peaks was practically and symbolically linked to the ambitions of natural philosophy or science. Many of the first recorded climbs of Britain’s highest peaks were undertaken for specific scientific purposes, such as the search for rare botanical specimens that led to the first known ascent of Ben Nevis in 1771.19 Similarly several climbs of the Scottish mountain Schiehallion were undertaken in 1774 to measure its height in a project led by the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne to ascertain the mass of the earth.20 Elsewhere in Scotland, scientific and cartographic ambitions prompted the earliest known ascents of many peaks and stimulated the emergence of some of the age’s most prodigious mountaineers, as described by Ian Mitchell in his excellent Scotland’s Mountains before the Mountaineers. Two of the most significant climbers of the first part of the nineteenth century developed their roles as mountaineers within these cartographic and scientific contexts. John MacCulloch, whom Mitchell has described as probably deserving “the title of Scotland’s first peak bagger” and who was “out to climb as many hills as possible,”21 worked for the Ordnance Survey in Scotland and became the Trigonometrical

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Survey’s geologist, making yearly trips to Scotland from 1811 until 1821, and describing his exploits in his four volume Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland. William MacGillivray, the naturalist and author with John James Audubon of the History of British Birds from which I have already quoted, climbed extensively in the Cairngorms and elsewhere in his search for flora and fauna.22 As we have seen, the Saturday Magazine regarded the climbing of Mont Blanc as only praiseworthy when it was “first undertaken for scientific purposes,” and this link between mountaineering and the natural sciences was strengthened by the mutually reinforcing symbolism of discovery and achievement. For scientifically motivated climbers, the summit was a place of experimentation and revelation where elevation unveiled new knowledge. By gathering their data through arduous and sometimes dangerous ascents, natural scientists were able to instil a heroic and daring air into their own exploits. An important and inspirational figure here was the Genevan scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, author of Voyages dans les Alpes, who as we have seen was invoked by the Saturday Magazine’s writer. De Saussure was closely linked with the early attempts to climb Mont Blanc, having offered a prize to whoever first reached the summit, and had himself made the third climb of the highest peak in Western Europe in 1787, when he spent several hours conducting experiments on the mountain top. De Saussure was frequently invoked by British scientist mountaineers and cited as justification for their own researches on British mountains. De Saussure became the inspiration and the model for many mountaingoing scientists, such as the mineralogist Arthur Aikin, who lectured in chemistry at Guy’s Hospital, edited the Annual Review from 1803 to 1808, and helped found the Geological and Chemical Societies of London in 1807 and 1841 respectively. In the preface to his Journal of a Tour Through North Wales (1797), Aikin gives a self-effacing account of the importance of de Saussure for his own scientific project: I shall be unfortunate, if, in mentioning the great name of Saussure, I suggest any comparison in the mind of the reader, between the elaborate performances of that eminent mineralogist and the present humble publication; yet I think it right to observe, that the perusal of the Voyages dans les Alpes, suggested to me the idea of a tour into Wales upon something of a similar plan, and I have been not a little pleased in verifying among the Welsh hills some of the general observations laid down by Saussure as the result of his arduous journies among the snows of the Alps.23

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As the pre-eminent scientific mountaineer of the eighteenth century, who proved such an important stimulus and model for others, de Saussure remained a model for climbers throughout the period.24 While scientific motivations inspired many pioneering and exploratory mountain ascents, in Britain it was the picturesque tour that stimulated the development of mountain climbing as a popular leisure pursuit on a larger scale. Though picturesque travel is often associated with low-level views,25 the summit or elevated prospect became increasingly sought-after as viewing stations. Thomas West emphasized the advantages of the Lake District over the Alps in his Guide to the Lakes of 1778, writing that the Lake District mountains “are all accessible to the summit” and they “furnish prospects no less surprising [and] with more variety than the Alps themselves.”26 In this picturesque culture of mountain climbing, ascent was justified in terms of the view or prospect that the climber would gain. For example, after describing the “laborious ascent” required to reach the top of Skiddaw in 1773, William Hutchinson remarked that “the prospect which we gained from this eminence very well rewarded our fatigue,”27 while Jonathan Otley commented in 1825 that “an extensive prospect [is] the principal motive for ascending a mountain.”28 Throughout the period, there developed an increasingly sophisticated aesthetics of elevated viewing which came to appreciate the spectacle of changing meteorological conditions experienced on a mountain top almost as much as the unbounded prospect seen on a clear day.29 The “Curious” Practice of Mountaineering The scientific and picturesque cultures of Romantic-period mountaineering generally saw the physical act of climbing as a form of labour worth undertaking for a specific reward, be it scientific data or an elevated view. Increasingly, however, this economic understanding of ascent that separated the effort required for climbing from the gratification produced by elevation was superseded by an engagement in mountaineering as an end in itself, as a form of play as described by Huizinga: “[Play] is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it” (32). The concept of curiosity, invoked by Joseph Budworth as his motivation for climbing Langdale Pike, provided an intermediate position in this shift from a utilitarian or functional culture of climbing to a more playful engagement in mountaineering. As Nigel Leask has shown in

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his Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840, curiosity was a key if ambivalent term in the period’s travel writing, referring to an inclination towards knowledge but linked to ideas of novelty, singularity, and powerful first impressions.30 In the mountain writing of the period, curiosity retained this ambiguity. It was frequently invoked as the motivation that took individuals off the beaten track to new (and often perilous) situations and led to a sense of discovery. However, curiosity was also seen to lack the disciplinary rules of science or aesthetics and was defined by its failure to cohere to proper categories. Curiosity was linked to the encounter with danger in many of the period’s ascent narrative. In his Tour Of Wales, Thomas Pennant describes how, on Snowdon’s summit, “One of the company had the curiosity to descend a very bad way to a jutting rock, that impended over the monstrous precipice; and he seemed like Mercury ready to take his flight from the summit of Atlas.”31 Here “curiosity” would seem to imply a general sense of exploration and daring for the sake of a new sensation but with no specific object in mind. Similarly, the encounter with danger was central to Budworth’s conception of himself as a curious walker. “Curiosity,” which he describes as “that spur to idle minds” (97), was the stated motivation for his mountaineering adventures. In Rambles he terms his pioneering ascents “curiosity walks” and presents himself as well known in the area for undertaking them; while seeking his guide to ascend Langdale Pike, he describes how the Postlethwaite family “had often heard of my ‘curiosity walks,’ [and] they thought I might do it [make the ascent]” (266). In other words, it is Budworth’s record as a curious walker that provides his credentials for the dangerous climb of Langdale Pike. At the end of the period, the word was still being used to provide a justification for a perilous undertaking. Edward Baines defended his decision to climb Helvellyn by the ridge Striding Edge, despite being advised against it, as follows: “in spite of the warnings of our boatman, we chose it, being incited by curiosity.”32 Baines’s statement of motivation echoes those made by climbers embarking on grander scale projects, but doing so without specific scientific motivation. For example, in 1818, the Polish traveller Count Matzewski described the reasons for his ascent of Mont Blanc as “Curiosity, and the pleasure of doing what is not done every day,”33 while the following year the American William Howard rather apologetically cited his “clambering disposition” and “curiosity” as the only reasons for own ascent.34 “Curiosity,” then, frequently served as a way of attempting to justify a potentially risky expedition but its very lack of specificity led to

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the kind of criticism we have already seen articulated by Postlethwaite in his description of Budworth as “kurious enuff.” In another example, the Alpine historian and travel writer William Coxe gives a detailed account of a dramatic and technically advanced ascent of Mount Titlis, but regrets that the expedition “was only a mere object of curiosity” rather than undertaken for proper scientific reasons.35 The justification of “curiosity” used by all these climbers borders on an understanding of mountaineering as play, though remains just short of it, perhaps as a result of the need to find some sort of justification for a life-threatening activity. “Curiosity” implies that there remains the possibility of discovery in the activity, even if it is unclear what that discovery may be. In play, however, gratification comes through the activity itself. In the last section of this essay, I want to argue that though it is never articulated as such, mountaineering was a form of play for many of those who practised it in the Romantic period. Pride and Pleasure: Mountaineering as Play The best known cultural versions of the Romantic-period mountaineer, such as Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog of 1818 or Lord Byron’s account in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage of “He who ascends to mountain-tops,”36 present climbing as a solitary, serious pursuit in which the climber lifts himself above both the earth and the rest of society. However, the vast majority of British mountain ascents in the period were social events, undertaken by “strangers” to a region as part of their tour, and normally led by a local guide. Inns increasingly acted as the organization hub for these climbs, recommending and supplying guides, provisions, and sometimes horses or mules for the ascent, as well as accommodation and food before and after. These guided, inn-based summit excursions often involved the formation of larger groups out of the different parties or individuals who wished to make an ascent. John Keats, for example, went up Skiddaw, “with two others, very good sort of fellows,”37 while Paul Hawkins Fisher describes how having made arrangements with a guide to ascend Snowdon the previous night, “Two gentleman joined our party,” the group assembling “at the door of the inn about 8 o’clock in the morning.”38 While we have seen that some climbers, such as MacGillivray, were scornful of the “convivial” parties they encountered on mountain summits, for many the social element inherent within these guided group experiences contributed to the enjoyment of them. Fisher’s party failed to obtain the

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view from the summit of Snowdon that they had been hoping for, but this was more than compensated for by the conviviality of the climb: We found the two gentlemen who accompanied us so amusing clever and facetious, that we were hardly (at least not in any painful degree) sensible of the disappointment we had experienced in the object of our expedition; and not withstanding the personal labour it had occasioned, we returned to the inn in safety and good spirits at four o’clock.39

While the ostensible object of the expedition has not been achieved, and Fisher continues to see the climb itself as “labour,” the “good spirits” of Fisher’s party suggest it has been an enjoyable group experience and one which conforms to the characteristics of Huizinga’s ideas of play discussed above. Fisher’s account is particularly interesting because of his recognition of the increasing professionalization of the guides and his suspicion that the inn-based summit ascent has already become a commodity, a package with its own set of rituals designed to create a particular kind of mountain experience for the tourist. He writes: I confess that the preparations made and the divisions of the business on this occasion, seemed to me to resemble something intended for effect; and for investing the ascent of Snowdon with the air of an expedition, and the guide with a kind of professional importance: and yet it is neither safe for strangers to encounter the ascent without a guide, nor quite convenient without provisions.40

Joseph Hucks, similarly, describes how after his own climbing party had “procured a guide to conduct us to the top of Cader Idris” they “armed him with stores, and warlike preparations of all kinds (to wit): ham, fowl, bread, and cheese, and brandy.”41 Fisher’s and Hucks’s comments both reveal how the preparatory rituals for a mountain ascent could be used to construct a climb as play, as a “stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” Both writers are also aware of what Huizinga describes as the “only pretend” or “only for fun” element of their expeditions. Huizinga writes: This “only pretending” quality of play betrays a consciousness of the inferiority of play compared with “seriousness,” a feeling that seems to be something as primary as play itself. Nevertheless … the consciousness of

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play being “only a pretend” does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes that troublesome “only” feeling … The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. (27)

Fisher’s acknowledgment that the preparations for his group’s Snowdon climb “seemed to me to resemble something intended for effect” and Hucks’s mock-heroic register for describing his own party’s “warlike preparations” and “arm[ing]” show that they were both aware of the “only pretending” quality of “play” in their respective expeditions. However, Fisher’s account also reveals the fluidity Huizinga identifies between play and seriousness, as he asserts that “it is neither safe for strangers to encounter the ascent without a guide, nor quite convenient without provisions.” Hucks’s and Fisher’s comments also indicate that while much mountaineering was “only pretending,” it was pretending to be a particular type of activity. Hucks’s comically presents his party’s activities as martial, involving “warlike preparations” and the “arming” of the guide as if readying him for an epic battle. For Fisher, while the guide and provisions were necessary parts of the tour, the morning’s preparations also sought to transform the ascent of Snowdon into something grander than it was, into an “expedition,” a term which suggests the heroic contexts of a martial or exploratory undertaking with all its contingent dangers. Here we can see an important development in the history of mountain climbing as the ascent to a summit becomes a commercialized form of recreation through which the participants and consumers can experience excitements and risks that replicate those of the “heroic” pursuits of war and exploration. Through engagement in these mockexpeditions, the participants are also able to play a particular role or perform a particular identity, that of the soldier or the explorer. Mountaineering as a means of playing a heroic masculine role, akin to the soldier or explorer, is illustrated by the figure of Joseph Dornford, whom we might see as an embodiment of the playful mountaineer.42 In 1820, Dornford had just finished an MA at Oriel College, Oxford, and was “devoting a part of the long vacation to a Continental tour”43 when he attached himself to a party led by the Russian scientist Dr Hamel that aimed to climb Mont Blanc. This attempted ascent gained particular

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notoriety as a result of the death of three guides as the party neared the summit in what can be considered the first major mountaineering disaster. Dornford wrote an account to explain and justify his role in the tragic events, providing an insight into his own motivations. For Dornford, mountaineering enabled participation in a physical activity and the performance and testing of a particular identity, that of a “heroic” masculinity. He shows nothing of the interest in mountain landscapes so central to much of the travel writing of the period and, though he had joined up with Dr Hamel, he did not share the physiologist’s scientific interests, writing of his own narrative that “the scientific reader ... will probably rise disappointed from the perusal of this account” and referring such a reader to Hamel’s own pamphlet and to de Saussure’s description of his 1787 ascent (517). In Dornford’s narrative of the climb we can identify a very early articulation of the idea of mountaineering as a challenge or a test, an idea that would become a key trope in writing about the activity but which is normally seen as emerging in the Victorian period.44 Dornford particularly conceived the challenge of mountaineering in military terms. As an undergraduate, he had left Trinity College, Cambridge, to serve as a volunteer in the Peninsular War and he repeatedly represents the Mont Blanc expedition through military terms and figures. This sense of mountaineering as a continuation of, parallel to, and a substitute for, martial service is seen most clearly when Dornford describes the climbing party setting out: Our caravan now assumed a most romantic appearance; the costume of the guides, each with a French knapsack, and one or two with pelisses, being decidedly military. It reminded me strongly of a party of Guerillas in the Pyrenees, where uniformity in dress or appointment was considered as an unnecessary refinement. We had each a large straw hat tied under the chin, and a spiked-pole, about eight feet long, in our hands. Besides this, our shoes were furnished with short spikes at the heels to assist us in the descent. We were clothed as lightly as possible, that the motion of our limbs might not be impeded, for we were told to expect a march of eleven or twelve hours, the latter half of which was to be spent in climbing. (453–4)

In Huizinga’s terms, Dornford’s “caravan” provides his “play-community,” a group identity that creates “the feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms”

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(31). Dornford’s account of his climbing party also reveals that it exemplifies what Huizinga sees as the culminating physical expression of play – dressing up. Huizinga argues that the “differentness” of play is “most vividly expressed in ‘dressing up,’ in which the ‘extra-ordinary’ nature of play reaches perfection” (32). For Dornford, the members of his party are united in their difference from the ordinary by the trappings of mountaineering: large hats, spiked poles, and crampons. And this “dressing up” enables Dornford to claim a particular identity: Huizinga writes that “The disguised or masked individual ‘plays’ another part, another being. He is another being” (32). As he sets out on his journey to climb Mont Blanc, Joseph Dornford becomes that other being, the “mountaineer,” just like Joseph Budworth, who more than two decades earlier had described himself and Paul Postlethwaite as “setting out like hardy mountaineers.” Dornford saw his attempted ascent of Mont Blanc as a contest with the mountain. Seeing the intimidating route for the first time, he comments that “we felt equal to any thing; and if a thought of the danger of the enterprise crossed the mind, it was only to give an additional zest to the proud consciousness of having a heart that could brave it” (456). For Huizinga too, contest is central to play, and “like all other forms of play, the contest is largely devoid of purpose. That is to say, the action begins and ends in itself” (69). In the playful culture of Romantic-period mountaineering, the climbing of peaks was increasingly seen in this fashion as a contest, both with the mountain itself and with other climbers. As Huizinga writes: “The object for which we play and compete is first and foremost victory” (71). One physical testimony to the idea that the ascent of a mountain could be regarded as a victory was the changing landscape of the summits themselves. It was a long established tradition for those reaching the summit of mountains to leave a record by scratching their names and the dates of the climb onto a stone, which was often then added to a summit cairn made of similar stones. Alternatively, successful climbers would write their names on paper and place them in bottles. John Housman in his A Descriptive Tour, and Guide to the Lakes of 1800 describes how on Skiddaw “a heap of stones has been raised by the contribution of one from every visitant, generally with his name and date upon it,”45 while in an 1806 account of the ascent of the same mountain, Robert Southey comments that: “They who visit the summit usually scratch their names upon one of the loose stones which form the back to this rude seat.”46 Southey adds that he feels “how natural and how vain it was to leave behind us these rude memorials.” By

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the 1820s however, these summit memorials were being increasingly criticized due to their scale, their desecrations of the summit landscape, and particularly the motivations of those who had contributed to them. Robert Hasell Newell was acerbic about this culture of self-celebration, writing in 1821: “It is amusing to observe the anxiety of the adventurers to record their exploits: scraps of paper are carefully packed among stones at the top, with their names, and the date of their excursion.” To reinforce his point, Newell quotes Cowper: So strong the zeal to immortalize himself Beats in the breast of man, that e’en a few, Few transient years, won from th’ abyss abhorr’d Of blank oblivion, seems a glorious prize.47

Mountaineering has become a means of seeking satisfaction through achievement. In Britain, Ben Nevis was the ultimate prize for the mountaineer, the place where, as the guidebook An Account of the Pleasure Tours in Scotland (1821) put it, “When the tourist has gained this elevated station, the highest in Britain, he may be really contented with his situation, so far as regards altitude; he has here mankind in a manner at his feet.”48 Climbing Ben Nevis enacts what Huizinga sees as “winning”: “The primary thing is the desire to excel others, to be the first and to be honoured for that” (70). John MacCulloch argued in The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland of 1824 that “From the rarity of fair weather and a cloudless sky at Fort William, and because the distance to the top of Ben Nevis is considerable, and the ascent laborious, it is not often visited.”49 However, this made the sense of achievement in climbing it all the more impressive: Doubtless, the ascent of Ben Nevis is considered a mighty deed; and, in consequence, there are various names inscribed on the cairn within the plain; while some had been written on scraps of paper, and enclosed in bottles which had been drained of their whisky by the valiant who had reached this perilous point of honour. Such is the love of fame, “that the clear spirit doth raise,” to carve its aspiring initials on desks, and to scratch them on the windows of inns. Is there a man so unworthy of a name, were it even Macguffog or Bumfit, as not to desire that it should be heard of hereafter; even did it prove no more than that its owner had emptied a whisky bottle on Ben Nevis.50

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Despite his ironic and mocking tone, MacCulloch illustrates that for many of those “valiants” who undertook it, the climbing of Ben Nevis – the “perilous point of honour” – was a “mighty deed.” He also invokes the language and ideals of chivalry that would become central to Huizinga’s account of play, something that produces “honour, esteem, prestige” (71). As we shall see, MacCulloch himself was not entirely immune to the pride and pleasure produced by a successful ascent of a challenging climb. The history of the early ascents of Ben Arthur or “The Cobbler” in Scotland offers a powerful final example of how climbing developed in the Romantic period as a form of play. It illustrates how by the end of the period mountaineering had become a contest with both the mountain and with other climbers, offering the opportunities to overcome a challenge, prove character, and gain honour. Ben Arthur had gained a reputation as a difficult summit to reach by the time Thomas Wilkinson felt “a wish to visit the reputed Cobbler” in 1787.51 While Wilkinson got close to the top, he did not scale the “two perpendicular rocks, perhaps between fifty and a hundred feet high,” which constitute the peak’s true summit. In 1804, James Denholm reported that “very few ... chuse to scale its summit” because the peak “is precipitous and rocky, and the ascent is not only attended with difficulty, but danger.”52 Yet it was this sense of challenge that seems particularly to have appealed to John MacCulloch, who made the first known ascent of the precipice of the Cobbler some time between 1811 and 1821, and who locates the ascent of the “precipice” within a historic and heroic tradition: There is a tradition that the heir of the Campbells of this country, was obliged to seat himself on its loftiest peak, and that, in default of this heroic deed, his lands passed to the next heir. I had no lands to inherit or lose, no tenement but the uncertain lease of a worthless carcase, but was resolved to place it as high as ever did a Campbell. Not, however, to boast of more courage than was really my own, I could not shun the honour; for I found myself, unwarily, in that position, common enough in these cases, where it is easier to ascend than to go downwards.53

MacCulloch’s account highlights another of the characteristics of play that is a particular feature of climbing, the issue of what is “at stake.” Huizinga writes: “‘There is something at stake’ – the essence of play is contained in that phrase” (70). For MacCulloch, what is at stake in his ascent is his life, “the uncertain lease of a worthless carcase.”

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Mountaineering is a particularly high-risk form of play, an unsettling aspect of the pursuit, as we have seen from a number of the comments already quoted in this essay. Indeed, it is the high “stake” of mountaineering that for some commentators made it an unjustifiable form of play. Aware that he was staking his life on the climb, MacCulloch clambered to the summit, which he was surprised to find “so acute and so narrow,” comparing it to “the bridge Al Sirat, the very razor’s blade over which the faithful are to walk into Paradise.” On the summit, MacCulloch experienced the satisfaction that comes through his particular form of play: I … found myself astride on this rocky saddle, with one foot in Loch Long and the other in Glencro: in the very position, doubtless, of the bold Campbell’s bold heir. There is a pride and a pleasure in surmounting difficulties, even when there is no one present to applaud.54

MacCulloch’s invocation of absent spectators indicates that he regards his climb as a form of play, which would have brought greater gratification had others been present; as Huizinga writes, “The pleasurable feeling of satisfaction mounts with the presence of spectators, though these are not essential to it” (70). Yet even without such spectators, MacCulloch gains satisfaction through his contest with the mountain’s “rocky saddle” and with “Campbell’s bold heir.” Seated astride the lofty peak of Ben Arthur, having staked his life on the climb, aglow with pride and pleasure, John MacCulloch embodies the development of British mountaineering in the Romantic period as a form of play.

NOTES 1 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 32. References to this work are hereafter cited within parentheses within the text. 2 Budworth, A Fortnight’s Ramble, 265. References to this work are hereafter cited within parentheses within the text. 3 On the shifting meaning of the word “mountaineer,” especially as illustrated by Budworth, see my “Romantic Writers and Mountaineering,” 1. 4 For an introduction to Homo Ludens and an examination of the critical debates around it, see Anchor, “Johan Huizinga and His Critics.” 5 Coleridge, Collected Letters, 848.

At Play in the Mountains 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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Stephen, The Playground of Europe. Quoted in Mitchell, Scotland’s Mountains, 24. Denholm, Tour, 39. Denholm, Tour, 39. Wilkinson, Tours, 16. George Smith, Gleanings of a Wanderer, 107. Newell, Letters, 158. MacGillivray, History of British Birds, 204. A more positive response to the high numbers climbing Ben Lomond are the paintings of Glaswegian landscape artist, John Knox, which include several groupings of individuals high on the mountain, a good visual illustration of the popularity of climbing at the end of the Romantic period. See Vaughan, Arts of the 19th Century, 180. Hansen, Summits of Modern Man, 2. M.R., “Four Days’ Ramble,” 102. “Some Account of Chamouni and Mont Blanc. Part II,” The Saturday Magazine (London, England), 337 (30 September 1837): 135. “Some Account of Chamouni and Mont Blanc. Part III,” The Saturday Magazine (London, England), 347 (25 November 1837): 216. Crocket and Richardson, Ben Nevis, 20. See Nevil Maskeleyne, An Account of Observations made on the Mountain Schehallien for Finding its Attraction … Read at the Royal Society, July 6, 1775 (London: 1776). Mitchell, Scotland’s Mountains, 44, 127. Mitchell, Scotland’s Mountains, 87–94. Aikin, Journal of a Tour, vi–vii. For contrasting responses to the scientific and mountaineering legacy of Saussure, see my “A ‘Melancholy Occurrence’ in the Alps,” 150–67. See Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, 61. West, A Guide to the Lakes, 6. Hutchinson, An Excursion to the Lakes, 156. Otley, A Concise Description of the English Lakes, 43. See my “Reframing Nature,” 220–34. Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 4–5. Pennant, A Tour in Wales, 2:162–3. Baines, A Companion to the Lakes, 203. Matzewski, “Letter,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 4, no. 20 (Nov, 1818): 182. Howard, Narrative of a Journey, 2. Coxe, Travels in Switzerland, 1:305.

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Byron, The Oxford Authors, 117. Keats, Letters of John Keats, 108. Fisher, Three Weeks’ Tour, 34. Fisher, Three Weeks’ Tour, 36. Fisher, Three Weeks’ Tour, 34–5. Hucks, A Pedestrian Tour, 113. For a fuller account of Dornford, see my “A ‘Melancholy Occurrence’ in the Alps.” J.D., “Mont Blanc,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 1 (1821): 452. Further references are contained within parentheses within the text. See Robbins, “Sport, Hegemony and the Middle Class”; and Hansen, “Albert Smith, the Alpine Club.” Housman, A Descriptive Tour, 121. Southey, “Ascent of Skiddaw,” 1029. Newell, Letters, 160–1. An Account of the Pleasure Tours in Scotland, 73. MacCulloch, Highlands of Scotland, 1:323. MacCulloch, Highlands of Scotland, 1:323–4. Wilkinson, Tours, 42. Denholm, Tour, 39. MacCulloch, Highlands of Scotland, 1:254. MacCulloch, Highlands of Scotland, 1:253, 255.

PART FOUR The Sporting Body

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Chapter Ten

Sports, Recreation, and Medicine in Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Italy and France laurent turcot

The period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries saw the emergence of new physical practices stemming from a transformation of the medical model. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries humoral medicine was undermined, without the great physicians who contributed to its establishment, namely Galen and Hippocrates, necessarily being rejected. The idea that physical activity helps muscle stimulation, organ contraction, and digestion while at the same time expelling humour, the stagnation of which would be a cause for concern, was reiterated. Following a number of medical discoveries and violent criticism of the humoral model, neo-Hippocratism took hold, whose proponents considered that nature contains within itself all the means needed to sustain good health. A medical approach based on physical activity was thus developed leading to the notion of medical gymnastics. The latter became one of the eighteenth century’s dominant models for establishing a normative framework for physical exercise, and not long afterwards, for the practice of sports. I intend to give an overview of medical progress between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, with a focus on Italy and France, in order to grasp how the change of paradigm, i.e., from humoral theory to nascent physiology, directly transformed the relationship to the body, defining the practice of sports and recreation. The Renaissance of Bodies In the Renaissance the importance of physical shape was reaffirmed, not only in the work of painters, sculptors, and engravers, but also through the affirmation of systems of correspondence between the body and the

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world that surrounds it. The human body is referred to as the microcosm body, a widely accepted idea in the sixteenth century according to which the human epitomizes the universe, a notion underlying the theory of the mystical body. Imbued with ancient readings, humanists nevertheless remained beings marked by the correlates connecting parts of the body to the stars. Marsile Ficin, “a child of Saturn,” deplores being denied the “ease and security in life” that Jupiter bestows, for instance. Numerous representations breaking up the microcosm body and linking each part to an element, a planet, or a season, etc. can be found.1 This vision of the body was not stuck in a representation inherited from the Middle Ages.2 Rather, a revival was taking shape in Europe, in particular thanks to André Vésale, who dealt a hard blow to ancient medicine, challenging Galen head on. The latter based his explanation of human anatomy on dissections of pigs. Vésale, on the other hand, took care to make a direct observation. He stepped away from the ivory tower to which physicians ordinarily confined themselves to carry out anatomic demonstrations, and in the process was able to correct over 200 errors of ancient medicine, thus helping to reverse the assumption of the infallibility of the ancients and the primordial role of reading. Vésale’s world view stressed the importance of empiricism, severing without hesitation the cosmic tie.3 This attitude was not far removed from Leonardo da Vinci’s projects. Da Vinci was a man of many talents, and his anatomical plates, realized on the basis of thirty or so dissections of corpses carried out between 1490 and 1511 in Milan and Florence, helped him to achieve a better understanding of bone and muscle movement. He was always intent on depicting physical effort in his art, going so far as to theorize it in his Treatise on Painting. “Man has the greatest power in pulling, for in that action he has the united exertion of all the muscles of the arm, while some of them must be inactive when he is pushing.”4 The Renaissance is synonymous with the (re)discovery of numerous ancient texts, including a revisiting of the writings of Hippocrates, Galen, and all those who had contributed to defining medical gymnastics in a manner highly coloured by humanism, which makes the health of body, heart, and soul the focus of a new educational literature. The body became the object of acute attention on the part of humanists who bore an attachment to Neoplatonism. Human dignity was enhanced, and education, as a vehicle for this dignity, was modelled on ancient pedagogy. The Italians Vittorino da Feltre, Guarino Veronese, Silvio Antoniano, and Alessandro Piccolomini established a pedagogical model

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based on ancient texts.5 The idea spread that beauty and bodily fitness could be cultivated and were the mark of aristocratic identity. This very idea was also the focal point of a reinterpretation of Juvenal’s maxim “Mens sana in corpore sano.” Nurtured through readings of Aristotle and Plato, as well as by ancient medical tradition, a number of writers undertook the task of developing a physical education program as a means to social distinction, and also as a way of stressing the importance of keeping the body in shape in order to avoid illness. The notions of diet and a healthy lifestyle re-emerged and engaged bodies and minds alike. They were drawing directly on ancient systems, such as those of Sparta and the Roman Republic, where physical exercise was a necessary element in the formation of the citizen. One of the first treatises on the subject was Pier Paolo Vergerio’s (1370–1444) De Ingenuis moribus ac liberalibus studiis et de liberis educandis, written in 1395, in which he draws on the Spartan model in order to develop his own educational program combining exercise and recreation. To children of the most aristocratic families, he recommended the exercises which turned Lacedaemonians into ferocious warriors, in particular horseback riding, swimming, and endurance stimulation such as carrying heavy weights in preparation for handling weapons. He also promoted a game called jeu de paume, which while relaxing the mind, strengthened physical vigour. A few years later, in 1444, Maffeo Vegio (1406–58) published his De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus. Its sixteen editions by 1541 were testimony to the influence it had on a significant number of nobles. In this publication, Vegio intended to reconcile Christian ideals, which had for too long considered the body as the place of original sin, with the teachings of the ancients. Like his predecessors, he promoted preparing youth for military life by encouraging them to practise horseback riding and archery. However, this humanist from Lodi went even further. In chapter 5 entitled “De gymnastica quae et in pueris utilisis esse ostidentur” he opened up the prospect of reintroducing the principles of ancient medical gymnastics for its three essential functions: preparing for war, sustaining health, and allowing rest from studies.6 Pedagogical treatises proliferated and contributed to defining the ideal that education should be more than instruction, becoming a holistic training of the entire human being. Instruction should be general, intellectual, moral, and physical, and involve trust in the individual who was conditioned to aspire to self-transcendence through humanistic moral teaching, and therefore expended personal effort. Authors

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refer to this new manner of caring for and strengthening one’s body as maestria, i.e., dexterity and brilliance or a form of elegance combined with moderation, which looks forward to Castiglione’s sprezzatura in the next century. The maestria one could exhibit during physical exercises, the kindness cultivated, and the humbleness preached also proceeded from the Italian virtu praised by Machiavelli, in particular in his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy (1531), in other words, a dynamic power contrary to passivity.7 This theoretical arsenal was soon after put into practice by Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1446), who was in charge of the education of Gianfrancesco Gonzagua, Marquess of Mantua’s sons, and who founded a school for local noblemen’s children. As reported by W.H. Woodward, “He brought with him to Mantua a desire to combine the spirit of the Christian life with the educational apparatus of classical literature, whilst uniting with both something of the Greek passion for bodily culture and for dignity of the outer life.”8 The Mantua institution, Casa Gioiosa (House of Joy), was attended by about sixty young noblemen at the time. Along with the school in Deventer, Holland, and the Winchester and Eton colleges in England, it became one of Europe’s great pedagogical centres that developed independently of universities.9 As formerly prescribed to young Greeks and Romans, Vittorino da Felte set up a program skilfully combining mind and body exercise, or to sum it up differently, a healthy mind in a healthy body. For those aged under ten, lessons were interspersed with ball games and running for a total of two hours each day. When older, they practised horseback riding, swimming, wrestling, archery, and fencing in order to prepare for the challenges of combat. As in the time of the Spartans, antisocial tendencies, revealed through an unwillingness to join in group play activities, were suppressed. Fearing idleness, the mother to all vice, these exercises were presented as useful recreational occupations. Team games, like ball games and jeu de paume, became a school of social skills, teaching young noblemen to follow rules, to think on their feet, and to accept defeat with dignity.10 More than a utilitarian physical education program, it was a set of behavioural models to adopt on the battlefield as well as in all of a courtier’s ordinary social situations. Despite the leaps forward realized by strong spirits such as the physician André Vésale, Laurent Joubert, and the surgeon Ambroise Paré, resurgent medicine remained largely dependent on ancient medicine, more specifically on ancient Greek medicine.11 The vast repertoire of ancient texts resulted in the methodical application of philological

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principles. Between 1500 and 1600, some 590 editions of Galen’s writings and works were published. Hippocrates was also the subject of a substantial documentary inquiry aimed at retrieving the true sense of his writings. In 1491, Antoine Gazi from Padua published Florida Corona, the first work that brought ancient medical gymnastics back to life.12 Gazi did not attempt to organize ancient knowledge as much as to carry out a systematic classification of exercises inventoried according to age and physical constitution. Contrary to some of his predecessors, there was no question of tying Christian ideals to ancient thinkers, but simply organizing a sort of nosology of the quality of movements and their physiological effects.13 A process was initiated. Much like pedagogical treatises, medical treatises devoted large sections to physical exercise, each writer trying to stand out by insisting on a given author or aspect of an ancient physician’s thought. Gerolamo Cardano, a mathematician and professor of medicine, did so with his Commentary on Hippocrates in 1569, as did Andrea Baci, Pope Sixtus V’s physician, who in 1571 published Thermae, an authentic inventory of ancient Greek and Roman bathing practices.14 Yet Girolamo Mercuriale’s work of remarkable erudition remains unequalled, in comparison to which some historians have considered Gerolamo Cardano’s as superficial, and Thomas Elyot’s, the toils of a simple artisan.15 Mercuriale, a Pioneer Girolamo Mercuriale, born in Forli in 1530, began his studies in medicine in Bologna and later continued them in Padua. He received his doctorate from the Collegio dei Fisici of Venice in 1555 and started a practice in his native city. In 1562 he was chosen to defend the interests of his fellow citizens in Pope Pius IV’s court in Rome. The Papal City was at the time a lively philosophical and artistic centre, where Michelangelo was still working, as well as a centre for ancient studies. Mercuriale was aged 32 when he was noticed by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who convinced him to remain in Rome and to become his personal physician. Thanks to Cardinal Sirleto’s offices, Farnese gave Mercuriale access to his library. At Farnese’s court he met Fulvio Orsini, the Farnese palace librarian; the Florentine humanist Piero Vettori, author of Galateo, as significant a work as Castiglione’s Courtesan; as well as one Pirro Ligorio.16 Over the next seven years, Mercuriale established a program that he presented in the simplest manner in the first edition of his De Arte

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Gymnastica in 1569: “The art of gymnastics was once held in high esteem; it is now ignored and almost annihilated. I undertake to bring it back to light.” 17 His pledge is completely in line with the quest for knowledge that motivated erudite Roman circles, accelerated by the invention and dissemination of printing. Done in Rome, Mercuriale’s writing was characterized by philological and interpretive work produced against a backdrop of Christian teachings.18 Similar to Galen’s De sanitate tuenda, a wealth of inspiration for De Arte, Mercuriale divided his text into six books of unequal volume for an impressive total of 110,000 words.19 The author then addressed the subject with an organization of implacable logic, mirroring the resurgent Italian philological frameworks. Book I deals with the role and organization of gymnasiums; the second reviews the movements of ancient gymnastics, such as boxing, wrestling, and pankration, to which he adds jeu de paume and ball games; and the third addresses exercises done outside the gymnasium, such as swimming, hunting and fishing. In the fourth book, Mercuriale details each exercise according to season, place, the age of the subject, habit, etc. The last two books (V and VI) are entirely devoted to the effect on the body and health.20 In the interval between the first edition of 1569 and that of 1573, numerous changes were made, including the crucial addition of illustrations, which complement the writing in the manner of a physician illustrating anatomy or an artist theorizing upon his practice with supporting depictions. In so doing, Mercuriale followed the new conditions for publication of scientific literature that printing made possible. The first text was illustrated with woodcuts dated back to 1461, a few years after Gutenberg perfected the technique in 1450. A new artistic field was thus emerging, some artists specializing in scientific areas, the most challenging one being anatomy. The medical literature to which Mercuriale devoted himself after his studies is also accompanied by illustrations, for it was considered at the time that a serious scientific theory should include supporting illustration.21 He chose Latin rather than Italian, as in the medical literature, since science was disseminated in the language of antiquity, becoming the resurgent Republic of Letters form of expression as well. While in Farnese’s court, Mercuriale met Pirro Ligorio. The latter arrived in Rome in 1534 and did not leave, moving then to Ferrarre, until 1569. A painter and above all an antiquarian, he was hired by the Farnese family soon after he started working on an encyclopedia of Roman antiquities in 1540. He created maps of ancient Rome in 1552 and 1553 on which he reconstituted the Pantheon, the Coliseum, and Circus Maximus.22 He

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designed the Casina (Villa Pia) in the Vatican gardens and succeeded Michelangelo as the architect of St Peter’s Basilica. He was immersed in the Mannerist style characterizing the High Renaissance, in particular the compositional structures used to portray expression and gesture that are a feature of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536–41), an exalted and painful declaration of the anguish of the time. After he left Rome, Ligorio concurrently created the drawings for De Arte Gymnastica and the frescoes of Ferrarre Palace, their order of creation remaining impossible to establish. Ligorio erected a genuine monument to the glory of ancient gymnastics, the fruit of his numerous antiquarian explorations, in Duke Alfonso II’s main residence, the Este castle, in Ferrarre. It is still possible to admire the frescoes of “Salone dei guiochi” and “Saletta dei giuochui” in the castle’s Appartamento dello Specchio (Hall of the Mirror). The bodies resemble those of Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel, yet the subjects are different: chariot races, ball games, swimming, wrestling, pankration, and swinging – all of the ancient civilization of sports and recreation is exhibited therein. This private exposition of the roots of the intellectual, philosophical, and recreational revival was soon to be combined with a massive dissemination, thanks to Mercuriale. These works of art were commissioned by a person or persons unknown, but it seems that Ligorio was the project’s initiator, and that Mercuriale included engravings by Ligorio, among others, in the second edition of his book.23 Thus the second edition provided an occasion to illustrate the athletes’ nude bodies at the baths, around which we recognize all the objects involved in the activity, such as the strigil. Also depicted was the sequence of pankration moves, the way to immobilize the opponent with an arm lock, and the leather strips worn to protect the hands and add power to blows. Ancient-world athletics, and with them, a vision of the trained body, was making an entrance in the limelight of science. However, we would be mistaken to see in De Arte nothing but a compilation of ancient texts recalling how men in the past played physical games. It was rather a call to reform and to transform these exercises. It should be remembered that the writer, a physician and avid reader of Hippocrates, supported health sustenance through diet and exercise.24 Indeed, he thought his contemporaries were too prone to idleness; hence he did not stop at the exercises for which gymnasiums and baths were renowned, but proceeded to evoke fishing, discus throwing, suspended bed oscillation, and tightrope walking carrying a pole.25 He also acknowledged borrowing ideas from the works of

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some of his contemporaries, such as Guillaume du Choul’s Discours des bains et antiques exercitations grecques et romaines (Discourse on Baths and Ancient Greek and Roman Exercises), published in Lyon in 1558, and Guillaume Budé’s Annotationes in XXIV. Libros Pandectarum (1508), a confirmation of the revival of ancient gymnastics throughout Europe. In line with humoral theory, an essential framework for healing and prophylaxis, Mercuriale approached gymnastics as a distinct discipline rather than as an accessory to beauty. It is a well-known fact that during the Renaissance, thanks to Neoplatonism, the body was valued beyond the aesthetic, and body and soul were seen as going hand in hand. Caring for one’s body was also caring for one’s soul. Three kinds of gymnastics were presented: athletic, military, and therapeutic. In Mercuriale’s view, medical gymnastics was the most important of the three for it participated in the conservative medicine that was so dear to Hippocrates. The more we progress in the book, the more it becomes a physician’s treatise aimed at reforming his contemporaries’ habits. Albeit well trained, the Greeks let gymnastics degenerate to an extent that Mercuriale called vicious, its cult status ending up weakening the ancient Greeks and triggering their decadence and subservience. In his view, nature is a wise governess that needs no more than guidance. He used the example of running, illustrated by Ligorio at Este Castle, to convey that the purpose of instinct that humans are endowed with is preservation. Nature has given us legs, he wrote, “so that we can walk and thus be able to perform the actions inherent to existence.”26 His true intention was to adapt the knowledge and experience of the ancients to his contemporaries’ lifestyle, and this accounts for his reliance on the still-prevailing humoral theory, leading him to discourage hot and dry temperaments from doing gymnastics, which warms and dries up the body. For the same reason, he recommended that fever-stricken patients refrain from all but essential meals and therapeutic prescriptions, which did not exclude, however, what he called “a little agitation”: “nothing is as pernicious and fatal to the health of humans and animals alike as abstaining entirely from movement and continuous idleness. Both not only cool down the whole body, reduce natural heat, increase superfluous secretions and provoke a discomforting numbness of all energy, but also, as observed by Galen, make members thin, weak, and slack. Pernicious aches, essentially rooted in cold humors, then appear and result either in death, or in some painful chronic affliction.” 27 To draw upon their full beneficial potential, baths, ropes, weights, horseback riding, hunting, or any other activity must be practised with

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pleasure and cheerfulness, which become complementary to effort. Mercuriale went so far as to say that pleasure may sometimes come through suffering, a form of surpassing oneself, with a therapeutic purpose. In addition, exercise was said to purify the body of foul humours; as Aristotle pointed out, any form of evacuation is a source of pleasure. On the subject of ball games evoked by Galen, Mercuriale added that “even spectators, in all likelihood, derive great pleasure, all the more so that the elegance of movement is an objective in itself.”28 Mercuriale’s De Arte was soon distributed throughout Europe and its many reprints into the eighteenth century were testimony to its popularity, but more than that, to the desire to integrate the exercises beneficial to sustaining a healthy body in everyday life. Health practices through physical play were no longer limited to the aristocracy by virtue of its role in leadership and battle, but instead extended to representatives of all social conditions. Other influential figures were to lead gymnastics to its finest hours, but for the time being, Archangelo Tuccaro came on the scene, bridging antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the reality of his time. Little is known about the man, described variously as an acrobat, dancer, and tightrope walker. Born in Aquila, in the Abruzzo region, he put himself at the service of Emperor Maximilian II in 1570, whose daughter, Elisabeth of Austria, he later followed to France where she married Charles IX.29 His enchanting performances at the French court earned him the title “saltarin du roi de France” (the King of France’s jumping bean) during the court’s stay in Touraine for the festivities that took place in the summer of 1571. He later served the French crown as professor of dance for Henry III and Henry IV.30 In 1599, he published Trois dialogues de l’exercice de sauter et voltiger en l’Air (Three Dialogues on the Exercise of Jumping and Flipping in the Air). Like Mercuriale, he added engravings in his book, but used the vernacular, French, in particular to please the monarch, writing that the latter had “the utmost desire to perform these dangerous jumps and I was honoured to serve as his teacher … Many of these lords were filled with admiration when they saw a human body flying in the air with such ease as though it had wings to fly.”31 The master of dance rationalized gymnastics, connecting it to a current practice that defined elite sociability – dance. Montaigne, however, questioned the practice of these jumps and acrobatics in his Essays: “It is the same with our dancing: those men of low estate who teach it are unable to copy the deportment and propriety of our nobility and so try to gain favour by their daring footwork and other strange acrobatics.”32

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Castiglione had a different take on the matter: “Performing flips on horseback, wrestling, running and jumping – the courtier follows the multitude, for there isn’t a thing in the world, no matter how excellent, that the ignorant will not tire of and then despise.”33 Tuccaro made a point of pointing out that the Greeks, whose Olympic games were an important expression of the cult of the body, had made an art of each bodily movement. Spheristics, or ball games, orchestrics, or dance, and cubistics, comprised not only the various kinds of jumps, but also the feats and dexterity involved, such as standing on one’s head or doing cartwheels.34 In the first Dialogue, the author proposed preparatory gymnastic exercises before dancing; in the second, he studied the art of jumping and all related movements of prowess, such as jumping through hoops and standing on one’s head; and in the third, like Mercuriale, he suggested appropriate exercises for staying healthy. Tuccaro went well beyond the ancients’ teachings. His treatise was particularly original in that it discussed the physical practices belonging to the lower social strata along with the staging of these activities, which was specific to festivities of the court and to public performance. He also tied Mercuriale’s contribution and the revival of ancient texts, to jugglers, acrobats, and jumpers of the Middle Ages, and in so doing participated in the effort to geometrize body movement to a point where it developed into a science. Geometric descriptions, like those in fencing treatises, make extensive use of mathematical language.35 Yet his work was not a technical treatise. Tuccaro structured his Dialogues to appear as conversations, as did Castiglione, for the subject had to perform exercises in the prescribed form and abide by the standards of decency before his peers and the king. The engravings included in the treatise depict practices that seem to belong to the world of entertainment rather than to that of nobility, and the purpose of these exercises was indeed to improve the body’s agility and flexibility. Despite the focus on the physical condition, however, there was a moral end to these exercises: decency and composure were the mark of an elevated soul.36 Sprezzatura continued to occupy the minds and work on bodies into the seventeenth century. Like his predecessors, Tuccaro strengthened the influence of gymnastics in Renaissance Europe and attributed an even greater mark of nobility to the body. The moderate exercises he proposed, such as ball games and quintain, were non-violent and intended to maintain a healthy body while putting it on display. This certainly confirmed the passage from a theological world to a mechanical one, where room was made for the body to be exposed in private and public space.

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Prescribe a Dose of Nature Moral prescriptions contained in treatises on civility, particularly widespread in Louis XIV’s court, as well as the proliferating technical treatises on games, both use medical arguments to justify a given game, action, or behaviour. The frame of reference inherited from the ancient world nevertheless started dwindling in the seventeenth century. The hegemony of Galen and Hippocrates was undercut by new ideals inspired by recent discoveries.37 In his Discourse on the Method (1637), René Descartes intended to break with the ancients and rely solely on reason. The objective was to wipe the slate clean when it came to the science of the past and to turn to observable and quantifiable facts, with the principle of “methodological doubt” providing the foundation of scientific methodology. Promoted by André Vésale, this approach had already been developed in medicine in the previous century. Vésale harshly criticized the anatomical principles passed down from the ancients, in particular by way of his anatomical plates, created on the basis of dissections. The English physician William Harvey also preceded Descartes by proposing a new vision of the body in De Motu Cordis in 1628. The demonstration he made of blood circulation, a principle that partly invalidated the humoral theory, provoked a major shift in the perception of the body, its structure, health, and relationship to the soul.38 The idea that the body is a machine and that the physician’s role consists in repairing malfunction gradually made its way. The segmentation of organs gave birth to physiology. In the first half of the century, the primarily mechanical medical theory was grounded in anatomical experiments, and was supported by tissue observation through a microscope.39 In his work Man a Machine (1748), La Mettrie reduced the body to an automaton. It became possible to describe its functioning through rigorous clinical observation, which allowed for the development of a new vision, that of fibre. In Elementa Physiologiae Corporis Humani (1757–66), Albrecht Von Haller showed that the human body is composed of fibre and that sensation is perceptible in nerve irritability. The works of vitalists, primarily based at the University of Montpellier, simultaneously asserted that the so-called machine could not satisfactorily explain life. In their view, there is, within the human, a vital force, with the capacity to trigger and put an end to illness, the physician limiting himself to accompanying the natural healing process by controlling to the best of his ability the iatrogenic effects of his prescriptions.40 These conceptions and approaches combined led to the emergence of

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neo-Hippocratism, which heavily influenced the conception of health in the social sphere, and consequently exercise and training, throughout Europe. From there followed the development of a rational definition of gymnastics in the eighteenth century. The discovery of blood circulation and fibre had an impact on the medical community, but many practitioners continued to be influenced by the teachings of Hippocrates and the idea that nature encompassed all means to sustain health, as the vitalists understood it. Illness being natural, the physician was to guide the patient towards healing on the path prescribed by nature. In fact, Hippocrates wrote that “nature is the physician of illness.” A new reading and interpretation of Hippocrates took hold, hence neo-Hippocratism, with emphasis on natura medicatrix (healing nature) as a guiding principle and the notion of primum non nocere (first, do no harm). The idea that one can become one’s own physician41 by using simple and natural remedies became increasingly popular. The most common prescription at the time was a “dose of nature.” The views expressed by Mercuriale during the Renaissance found an enlightened new audience among physicians and philosophers alike. This led to the arrival of medical experts who defined new structures for exercise to be performed by patients, oftentimes in bucolic settings, amplifying the ideal of nature praised by philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. New practices were framed among others by Théodore Tronchin (who was born in Geneva in 1709 and died in Paris in 1781), no doubt one of Paris’s most renowned medical figures of the modern period. The influence of Tronchin’s medical doctrine did not lie in sophisticated theoretical expression – few of his writings are known – but in the fine application of practices tending towards recovering the balance of nature. Among the pieces of advice to be found in his prescriptions are the following: “Lead a more active lifestyle; any kind of exercise is good,” and “any excessive fatigue is harmful; one isn’t born an athlete, but becomes one.”42 Tronchin recommended walks, a frugal diet, and cold showers to stay healthy. In the second half of the century, the word “tronchiner” became synonymous with taking a walk. One of his colleagues wrote that “he advises walking, wearing flat shoes, stick in hand, for health purposes.”43 The tight tiny mules worn at the time gave way to shoes without heels that moulded to the shape of the foot. Petrus Camper made the same recommendation in his Dissertation on the Best Form of Shoe (1781). Exercise was also facilitated by the gradual shedding of sack-back gowns that enlarged the hips to allow for free movement. Physicians insisted on the need to preserve

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the natural dynamic. A new physical aesthetic was taking shape where personal freedom became the order of the day. Men adopted the British frock coat that the French called redingote, a garbled mistranslation of “riding coat.” The wig was abandoned to expose one’s natural hair. High leather boots offered protection from the Parisian mud and made it possible to mount a horse without having to change. Medical teaching encouraging the medicalization of the social body also bore a political project, that of perfecting the human species. This movement also engendered the notion of public health, i.e., a relationship between the physical and social environments and a political concern for the health of populations. This new approach made cities a medical observatory of predilection. The airing of social and body tissue was to produce a salutary renewal of fibre and muscle. Public health was henceforth approached from a social perspective. The inclusion of the terms “exercise” and “gymnastics” in the encyclopedia was indicative of this change, but the arrival of another Swiss, Samuel Tissot, further refined the nascent hygienist movement. His ambition was to impose a precise regime on the entire population, from the common people to the aristocracy. Together with his colleagues Félix Vicq d’Azir and Antoine-François Fourcroy, Tissot defined a medical practice that was at the heart of the social body. In his Essai sur les maladies des gens du monde (An Essay on the Disorders of People of Fashion) (1771), he asserted that “men of letters are victims of all the ills that idleness entails.”44 He concluded that activity is necessary in order to avoid the harm of a sedentary lifestyle. A few years earlier, in his Treatise on the Health of Men of Letters (1771) he had detailed the appropriate practices: regular horseback riding, walking, fencing, jeu de mail, paume, and playing ball. This current was particularly strong in the eighteenth century, and a number of publications, such as the Pocket Dictionary of Health, recommended a “regimen for men of letters”: “these individuals should exercise more than others in order to reverse as much as possible the effects of their habitual inactivity; they should go to the baths and walk often.”45 The forms of physical conditioning changed, with an abandoning of archaic classical practices such as bloodletting in favour of exercise as the new panacea. This fresh look at the body and the need to keep it active would gradually lead gymnastics to take centre stage, as recommended, in fact, by Clément-Joseph Tissot in Medicinal and Surgical Gymnastics in 1780, who after publishing a history of gymnastics from ancient Greece to the Renaissance, established a frame of reference for the practice of his

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contemporaries. It was then understood that the ideal set up by the Greeks, far from declining, was on the contrary reinvested at every period in history. The author also paid heed to the pleasure sought by those who practised exercise for “exercises were invented for the pleasure and relaxation of men, subsequently adopted by Medicine, for many, and there is a specific exercise for each of our members.”46 Here the mechanical segmentation of the body was associated with the power of nature, put forward by vitalists and neo-Hippocratists in order to legitimize the comeback of therapeutic, military, and athletic gymnastics, a distinction that was already present in Jaucourt’s article “Gymnastics” in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert. Tissot drew inspiration from the great treatises on pedagogy, such as those written by Jean-Charles Des Essartz, Jean-André Venel, and Jean Verdier, which established programs with particular precision. He was also influenced by writings such as Nicolas Andry de Boisregard’s Orthopedics (1741), which was partly aimed at correcting the deformities of the body through exercise – a subject that the author had already brilliantly developed in his doctoral thesis defended at the Faculté de Médecine de Paris in March 1723, annexed to his 1741 book. Its title was quite evocative: “Is moderate exercise the best way to remain in good health?” As expected, the twenty-six pages go to great lengths to explain the benefit of exercise on muscle fibre. “Nothing is more beneficial to health than moderate exercise: it has to be adapted to the age, the temperament, and the sex of the subject, regular and not excessive.” The author did not hesitate to invoke contemporary games: “Do you want to strengthen your arms and the tips of your feet? What could be better suited to this purpose than billiards?”47 Andry de Boisregard used and drew inspiration from German medicine, in particular the iatromathematical movement, viewing the human body as a machine in order to explain its functioning using the laws of mechanics. In it, he found new arguments in favour of the widespread promotion of exercise. Georg-Ernest Stahl affirmed that “it is through movement that the human soul achieves its purpose within and on the body as potently and for as long as it can.”48 A colleague of Stahl’s, Friedrich Hoffman, took up this theory of movement from a mechanical perspective, i.e., in order to understand the functions of the body as a set of physical practices that trigger a given effect, asking whether a certain movement, for instance, was capable of healing a given ailment provoked by a certain organ.49 The intention in this was not to rely exclusively on ancient Greek treatises, but rather to develop a medical approach to exercise that would serve to explain and justify its use.

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A number of physicians, and an even larger number of pedagogues, engaged in setting the limits to exercise in educational programs. One of them was Jacques Ballexserd, the majority of whose ideas were to be taken up by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Ballexserd, in the first years of life, bodily activity blends with learning to walk; then around the age of five or six, exercising in the open air becomes appropriate, for instance wall climbing and little wrestling games. Come adolescence, the machine should be pushed to take up moderate running and wrestling. Body activity forms a healthy and robust temperament, keeping the soul from passions and vices, and stimulates the working of the brain. This kind of discourse was reminiscent of ancient Greek gymnasiums, a set of views to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau acquiesced. According to the author of Émile, physical education is a means to establishing a natural contact with things, without which reason sinks and is lost in the realm of the unreal and the immoral. From Italy to France, sixteenth to eighteenth century medicine was more than a justification for exercise and training. It became a vital source and an active principle in their theory and practice. The evolution of medical discourse allows us to appreciate the forms of adaptation, transformation, and adjustment of exercise. Originally integrated into humoral theory, this discourse went on to affirm physiological function, and finally adopted the perspective of muscle theory. In the course of this evolution, it was enriched with arguments taken from other prevailing social rhetoric that reconstructed it in such a manner as to preserve its essential function in medical science and society. Physicians aimed at exerting a direct influence on society. Their prescriptions reflected new theories on muscle movement, which discoveries on fibre helped to regenerate. Thus exercise was not intended to help revolutionize humour in the body as much as to prompt the movement of tissue, to air it and purify it through extension and relaxing, facilitating digestion and the firming of muscle. Medical and educational discourse effectively demonstrated this new role of exercise. Confirming its physiological advantages, it was reinforced with educational arguments that helped to develop it into a social practice that allowed for a definition of sport. The model of exercise was sustained in nineteenth-century medical science but its social definitions and procedures differed significantly from those established in modern times. The need for a similar effort focusing on the contemporary age seems evident.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Jahan, Les Renaissances du corps, 169 and 16. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 67–98. Mandressi, Le regard de l’anatomiste. Leonardo de Vinci, Chapter CCXXXV, A Treatise on Painting, quoted in Laty, Histoire de la gymnastique, 84. See also Leonardo da Vinci, Chapter XLIX, Plate II, In which of the two Actions, Pulling or Pushing, a Man has the greatest power. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre; and Joseph, “Gymnastics during the Renaissance.” Laly, Histoire de la gymnastique, 84–6. See also Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 145–60. Pocok, The Machiavellian Moment; and Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre, 27. Margolin, “Une école d’humanisme.” Ulmann, De la gymnastique, 149–52. Grmek and Bernabeo, “La machine du corps.” Quoted in Dally, L’enseignement de la gymnastique, 7. Archangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance, 18–23. English, “Physical Education Principles.” Nutton, “Les exercices de la santé,” 302. Agasse, introduction to Girolamo Mercuriale, L’art de la gymnastique, XV. Quoted in Ulmann, De la gymnastique, 98. Agasse, “Le souci de soi,” 189. McIntosh, “Hieronymus Mercurialis,” 104. Laly, Histoire de la gymnastique, 104–5. All quotations are our translations, unless otherwise noted. Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science; and Barbier, L’Europe de Gutenberg. Coffin, Pirro Ligorio, 13–22. Lee, “Ligorio’s Contribution”; and Vagenheim, “Le dessin de L’essercitio.” Jouanna, Mercuriale. Agasse, “Le souci de soi,”190–1. Quoted in Ulmann, De la gymnastique, 102. Quoted in Ulmann, De la gymnastique, 103. Quoted in Agasse, “Le souci de soi,” 195. Boussiac, “Un traité acrobatique.” See also Arcangeli, “Renaissance Dance and Writing.” Schmidt, “‘Sauter et voltiger en l’air,’” 213–14.

Sports, Recreation, Medicine in Italy and France 235 31 Tuccaro, Trois dialogues, 1. 32 Montaigne, Essays, 462; “Tout ainsi qu’en nos bals, ces hommes de vile condition, qui en tiennent escole, pour ne pouvoir representer le port et la decence de nostre noblesse, cherchent à se recommander par des sauts perilleux et autres mouvemens estranges et báteleresques.” Les Essais, II, 10, 412 33 Castiglione, Le parfait courtisan, 157. 34 Tuccaro, Trois dialogues, 3. 35 Schmidt, “Trois dialogues de l’exercice,” 381; and Kopfübern und Luftspringen. 36 McClelland, Body and Mind, 134–6. 37 Lebrun, Se soigner autrefois, 18. 38 Sennett, La chair et la pierre, 190–1. 39 Porter and Vigarello, “Corps, santé et maladies.” 40 Bourdelais, Les nouvelles pratiques de santé. 41 Aziza-Shuster, Le Médecin de soi-même. 42 Mss. Tr. 4 février 1760, in Tronchin, Théodore Tronchin, 36. 43 Antoine Louis, Éloge de M. Tronchin, prononcé à la séance publique de l’Académie royale de chirurgie, le 11 avril 1782, quoted in Tronchin, Théodore Tronchin, 50. 44 Tissot, Essai sur les maladies, 32. 45 Dictionnaire portatif de santé, 2:417. 46 Clément-Joseph Tissot, Gymnastique, 49. 47 Boisregard, “L’exercice modéré,” 514. 48 Stahl, De la nécessité, 211. 49 Hoffmann, “Chapitre IX, Du mouvement,” 2:249.

Chapter Eleven

Healing Hysteric Bodies: Women and Physical Exercise in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries sylvie kleiman-lafon

If Jean-Martin Charcot’s striking photographs of hysteric women have shaped our representations of hysteria, it may seem strange to link gymnastics, or more generally physical exercise, to the arched, twisted bodies of the famous “Tuesday lessons” at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière and to the rictuses and distraught stares of the involuntary actresses of this edifying spectacle.1 This is, however, the subject of this paper, which will focus on a particular period in the history of hysteria: an interlude of almost a century, which started at the end of the seventeenth century and ended with the eighteenth century. During that period, a number of authors questioned the definition of hysteria as a strictly feminine disease, a definition which had been inherited from Galenic medicine and had hitherto prevailed. They also suggested that physical exercise could be an efficient treatment against the disease. As we shall see, it is precisely because hysteria came to be considered as an ailment which could equally affect men and women that the therapeutic exertion of the body became associated with its treatment, even though the physical activities of women were always treated separately. However, despite their theoretically ungendered conceptions of hysteria, many authors described the exercises intended to cure women in a way that actually perpetuated the specificity of hysteria as a typically female affection. By implying that hysteria was linked to the bodily frustration of women they heralded the conceptual change operated during the following century, when it became the disease of excessive lasciviousness.2 An Evolving Nosology Until the end of the seventeenth century, hysteria was generally considered as a strictly feminine affection due to the involuntary and disorderly motion of the uterus, to its obstruction or its “suffocation.” Also

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known as the “suffocation of the mother” or as “vapours,” hysteria was thought incurable and prompted variable medical responses almost systematically involving purgation and bleeding. Some also associated this complex affection with witchcraft and demonic possession.3 For a relatively brief period of time – slightly less than a century – some authors on both sides of the Channel ceased to consider hysteria as a disease that exclusively affected women, despite its etymology, and started to view it as a somewhat ungendered form of hypochondriac melancholy. Although a tradition in medical writing4 ascribed the “invention” of hysteria to Hippocrates, Helen King has shown that while the medical tradition associated the description of hysteric diseases with the Hippocratic corpus, the link with what would later be understood as hysteria was far from obvious.5 Hippocratic texts had indeed described a wide variety of physiological symptoms affecting the uterus of women that had not yet conceived, but the idea of hysteria as a violent, uncontrollable, and obscure disease striking women regardless of their age, and for some authors regardless of their condition, occurred later. For Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, the medical approach to women that prevailed at least until the end of the seventeenth century and had been established by Aristotle and Galen had barely evolved despite the progress of anatomy.6 In 1620, Jean Varandée dedicated some chapters of the first part of his treatise De Morbis Mulierum to various diseases of the uterus.7 He distinguished between “Mélancolie et fureur de matrice” (Melancholia and Fury of the Mother), characterized by excessive heat, and “Suffocation de matrice” (Suffocation of the Mother) induced by a cold temper or environment. The first, a form of feminine melancholy, is described as “une erreur de la faculté imaginatrice” (a figment of the imagination), triggered by the corruption of matter retained in the uterus and akin to hypochondria because of the vapours produced by this corruption. The accumulation of matter (semen) was thought to generate excessive and uncontrollable sexual desires in the brain, sadness, and frustration that could lead to mania and fury. The second is due to “la respiration offensée par le refroidissement de tout le corps & de la matrice, causé par une matière maligne, qui est dans ses vases ou sa cavité” (breathing being upset by the cooling of the whole body and of the mother, caused by malignant matter found in its vessels or its cavity), and women who suffer from it “s’appellent histériques” (are called hysteric): “le cerveau étant attaqué, l’esprit animal ne se répand plus dans les nerfs, ny dans les muscles qui abbaissent ou dilatent le thorax” (the brain being under attack, the animal spirit no longer spreads through the nerves or to the muscles that lower or dilate the thorax).8 According to Varandée,

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the same causes in men did not induce the same symptoms because unlike women, who were thought to have a humid and cold temper, men were protected by the natural heat of their body. However, Varandée’s description of hysteria as an affection of the brain corresponds to a pivotal shift in the conception of the disease, which eventually led to its being regarded as likely to occur in both men and women. Two years earlier, Charles Le Pois (1563–1633), a French physician from Nancy, had already offered another explanation for hysteria. He blamed it on the spleen, which, being for various reasons incapable of performing its duty, allows unrefined fluids to reach the brain.9 Over half a century later, Thomas Willis was first to suggest a purely neurological explanation and to declare the disease common to both sexes in a long chapter of The London Practice of Physick. To Willis, the term itself – these affections are “vulgarly call’d Uterine, or of the Mother” – was an abuse of language, and it was out of laziness and ignorance that some authors attributed fits of hysteria to an ill-functioning uterus while the real source of this affection was located in the brain: The cause of these Symptoms must not be imputed to the Ascent of the Womb, and to vapours rais’d from the same; nor to the Impetuous rushing of the Blood into the Lungs, as the Learned Highmore has Judg’d; But we say that the affect call’d Hysterical, chiefly, and primarily is Convulsive, and depends principally on the Brain and Genus Nervosum being affected, and is produc’d wholly by the explosions of the Animal Spirits, as other Convulsive Motions.10

The link with female anatomy being refuted, the proximity between hysteria and melancholy became increasingly obvious, and Willis thus wrote that “Men are sometimes troubled with such kinds of passions, instances of which are not wanting.”11 This proximity may have seemed all the more manifest since female genitalia had hitherto been represented as a mirror image of the male reproductive system (albeit an imperfect one).12 This representation, derived from the Galenic idea that the organs of generation of men were also found in women, still prevailed in the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century. Following Willis, many authors also underlined the close proximity between so-called hysteric and hypochondriac diseases (vapours) and therefore their ability to affect men as much as women. Willis’s contemporary Thomas Sydenham thus wrote in a letter to Dr Cole:

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For every few women, which sex is the half of grown People, are quite free from every assault of this disease, excepting those who being accustomed to labour live hardly; yea many Men that live sedentary lives, and are wont to study hard, are afflicted with the same Disease, and tho’ Hysterick symptoms were always heretofore supposed to come from a vicious Womb, yet if we compare Hypochondriack symptoms, which were thought to proceed from obstructions of the spleen, or Bowels, or from some other I know not what Obstruction, an Egg is scarce more like an Egg than these Symptoms are one another in all Respects.13

Almost twenty years later, Bernard Mandeville, who summed up the various existing theories on hypochondria and hysteria, also gathered under the same definition masculine and feminine forms of melancholy. He hardly ever mentions them separately and suggests they arise from a dysfunctional digestive system, and from the ensuing deregulation of the animal spirits and irritation of the nerves. The very title of his medical treatise clearly indicates that they should be treated as two expressions of a unique affection: A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, vulgarly call’d the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women. Pierre Pomme, a French specialist of nervous diseases, later published a Traité des Affections vaporeuses des deux sexes in 1763, in which he gives a detailed medical account of “l’hystérique invétérée et le vaporeux languissant” (the inveterate hysteric woman and the languid vapourous man).14 For Mandeville as for a majority of British authors after Willis and Sydenham, as well as some French authors later in the century, hysteria was indeed a nervous disease that could strike men as much as women, but it was also the disease of profusion and idleness – a physiological symptom of ennui. In the eighteenth century, it was generally thought to arise from a melancholic state of mind associated with a physical disorder of some sort, usually of a digestive nature, generated by sedentariness and an excess of food. In 1724, George Cheyne railed the deplorable voracity of the valetudinarians of both sexes: “There is nothing more ridiculous, than to see tender, hysterical and vapourish People, perpetually complaining and yet perpetually cramming; crying out, They are ready to sink to the Ground, and faint away, and yet gobbling down the richest and strongest Food, and highest Cordials, to oppress and overlay them quite.”15 And in 1786, on the eve of the French revolution, Claude Révillon pointed an accusatory finger at the comforts of modern life:

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Vous conviendrez, monsieur, que l’on doit chercher les causes premières de cette maladie dans nos dépravations modernes: nous voulons être logés dans des appartements superbement décorés et chauds; on n’y reçoit que la somme d’air nécessaire pour ne pas étouffer: l’appétit, qui est toujours nul, ne peut être excité que par des coulis: il faut du café, des liqueurs pour ranimer nos machines languissantes; on ne se promène que dans des voitures bien suspendues. (You will agree, Sir, that the origin of this disease is to be found in our modern depravations: we want to live in stylishly decorated and well heated apartments, where we barely receive enough fresh air not to suffocate; and our appetite, which is always non-existent, is hardly excited by anything but coulis. We need coffee and liqueurs to revive our languid machines, and we never go out but in comfortable cars.)16

While the rejection of the uterine explanation to the disease seems to be unanimous, this evolution of the nosology never incurred any change in the terminology used. The concomitant use of a dual vocabulary – hysteria for women and hypochondria for men – was retained consistently throughout the century by a large majority of authors.17 If the symptoms described were identical, some of the identified causes, such as excessive study, did not affect both sexes. Mandeville, for instance, linked the exhaustion of the animal spirits in women – although a common cause of hysteric and hypochondriac diseases – to a general weakening of the body rather than an excess of intellectual activity, which could only affect male patients. This causal distinction later led to the transformation of hypochondria into a fashionable disease connected to literary creation, while hysteria remained associated with physical (and psychological) weakness. Therapeutic Gymnastics Considering, however, that all “vaporous affections” had common causes and symptoms, most authors found it necessary to offer similar treatments to patients of both sexes. While most authors still advocated the use of pharmaceutical preparations, they all insisted on their negative side effects and even judged them ineffectual in the long run, recommending a set of curative and prophylactic measures that invariably included a change of diet and a regular physical activity. The healing properties of physical exercises were not new to early modern writers. Greek authors, from Hippocrates to Herodicus of

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Selymbria, from Soranos of Ephesus to Plato (in both Phædrus and The Republic), already advocated moderate exercise to cure melancholy. Following them and more recent physicians such as Mercurialis, Robert Burton expounded on the positive effects of moderate gymnastics on the body but also on the social interactions of individuals, and suggested (to melancholy men) a wide range of outdoor activities such as hawking, hunting, fishing, bowling, running, or fencing, with a marked preference for “a merry journey now and then with some good companions, to visit friend, see cities, castles, towns … to walk among orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts, and arbours.”18 Sydenham later recommended physical exercise and more particularly horseback riding in the treatment of several affections thought to be closely related – hysteria and hypochondria, but also phthisis, advising John Locke to “ride on horseback from Paris to Calais and from Dover to London.”19 Enlarging on Sydenham’s remarks, Francis Fuller dedicated a full treatise to “gymnastic medicine,” which he specifically applied to cases of hypochondria and hysteria. Although his definition of physical exercise is rather loose, Fuller underlines its role as an adjuvant and an auxiliary to the healing power of nature: “By exercise then, I understand all that motion or agitation of the body, of what kind soever, whether voluntary or involuntary, and all methods whatsoever, which without the use of internals may, (or without which internals alone may not always) suffice to enable Nature to expel the enemy which oppresses her.”20 Moderate exercise, such as walking or riding, practised regularly and followed by cold baths could prevail against a disease known to be drug-resistant. In addition to horseback riding, and for valetudinarians of weaker constitutions – “those weaker hysterical people” – Fuller also recommended the soft balancing motion of a carriage, echoing Soranos who prescribed the gentle movement of a hammock to cure some of his melancholy patients. George Cheyne extended an already varied list of physical activities, seen not only as part of a significant cure but also as prerequisites of long life: Of all the exercises that are, or may be used for health (such as walking, riding a horse-back, or in a coach, fencing, dancing, playing at billiards, bowls, or tennis, digging, working at a pump, ringing a dumb bell, etc.) walking is the most natural, as it would be also the most useful, if it did not spend too much of the spirits of the weakly. Riding is certainly the most manly, the most healthy, and the least laborious and expensive of spirits of any; shaking the whole machine … as new scenes amuse the mind.21

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In this long list of exercises, some are presented as more “manly” than others. This is not so much because they are considered improper for women, but rather because they are considered more prone to restore the health and vigour of “vapourish Gentlemen,” “men of voluptuousness, laziness, and poor constitutions,” in a word, effeminate melancholy men. Half a century later, Jean Baptiste Pressavin also considered those exercises fit to “fortify the animal fibre” of those men who, because of repeated medical treatments, had contracted “the limpness, the habits and the inclinations of women” (la mollesse, l’habitude and les inclinations des femmes).22 Addressing the torments of both his hypochondriac patient and his hysteric daughter, Bernard Mandeville also recommends physical activities (and a diet) to men and women, but he particularly underlines the benefits of exercise for the hysteric girl, and gives the following outline for a typical day: “Every Morning, as soon as she rises, (which I would have her do before Six) let her be swung for half an Hour, then eat her Breakfast, and get on Horseback for at least two Hours, either galloping or trotting as her Strength will permit her.”23 If physical exercises were equally beneficial to patients of both sexes, and prescribed indifferently to men and women, they were not prescribed for the same reasons. Hypochondriac men must exercise either because they drink or eat in excess, or because their immoderate taste for study forces them into pernicious inaction. Hysteric women, however, should exercise more because of their naturally weak constitutions and because they are retained indoors by their rank and their education. Robert Burton insists, like many others, on the fact that servants and country girls are protected against hysteria by physically demanding chores: For seldom should you see a hired servant, a poor handmaiden, though ancient, that is kept hard to her work and bodily labour, a coarse country wench, troubled in this kind, but noble virgins, nice gentlewomen, such as are solitary and idle, live at ease, lead a life out of action and employment, that fare well, in great houses and jovial companies … such for the most part are misaffected, and prone to this disease.24

Male or female hysteria is the physical embodiment of social status, but in eighteenth-century France, female hysteria is more particularly presented as the result of a form of physical restraint consented to by wealthy families. Claude Révillon thus gives his readers an updated version of Burton’s conclusions:

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Je ne vois rien d’aussi ridicule & d’aussi propre à détruire les constitutions, que la manière dont on élève les demoiselles … on néglige à fortifier leur tempérament par l’exercice; on les condamne à une vie sédentaire, à des occupations qui n’exercent que leur doigts … Une mère tendre … dévorée de vapeurs … ne veut pas se souvenir qu’elle ne doit les maux qui empoissonnent ses tristes jours qu’à une éducation vicieuse, & qu’elle prépare les mêmes maux à cette fille chérie. (There is nothing as ridiculous & likely to destroy constitutions as the manner after which young ladies are raised … We neglect to fortify their temperaments with exercise; we condemn them to a sedentary life, and to occupations that merely keep their fingers busy … A tender mother … prey to the vapours herself … refuses to remember that she owes the disease that poisons her sad existence to a vicious education, & that she is instilling the same disorder in her darling daughter.)25

Although Fuller reports the case of a maid “tormented with hysterick fits” (146), this possibility is dismissed by a majority of authors,26 and literature itself affords very few examples of vapourous servants. Richardson’s Pamela is subject to fits of hysteria, but they are to be interpreted as a sign of her delicate and noble nature, and in Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem, Archer – a fashionable gentleman disguised as a valet – gives a burlesque explanation to his proclaimed hypochondria: “Madam, like all other fashions, it wears out, and so descends to [the] servants; tho’ in a great many of us, I believe it proceeds from some melancholy particles in the blood, occasioned by the stagnation of wages.”27 If a splenetic footman is a laughable prospect, it is not because he is a man, but because he belongs to a class of workers who, being submitted on a daily basis to a regimen of diet and physical efforts outdoors, and having little time for idleness, are spared the necessity of a timeconsuming cure that would otherwise drastically affect their productivity, and replace their duties by leisure. Exercise and the Female Body Being predisposed to hysterick symptoms by their feeble constitutions and their upbringing, women are advised, like men, to exercise their bodies, although some of the prescribed activities had to be adapted to avoid impropriety. If a ride in a chaise is to be preferred to a ride on horseback for those patients of both sexes that are too weak to be

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shaken too violently, this adjustment is almost unanimously advised for women regardless of their age or vigour. In his Treatise on Vapours, John Purcell unequivocally underlines the benefits of promenading for women: As for Ladies who live in a large City, I would advise them to take the Air in their Coaches once or twice a day, for an hour or two at a time, and if they can bear it, to take it on Horseback or a-foot; it is unconceivable how much Riding, and Walking much about, in a clear fresh Air, enlivens the Blood of those who are used to a Town-life; let them, above all things, avoid all violent Passions.28

Francis Fuller recommends a nice stroll and a cold bath to “the people” who suffer from hypochondria and hysteria, adding that: “Instead of riding on Horse-back, Women may take a Chaise, which will allow a swift Motion, and comes little short of the Horse for Agitation of the Body; tho’ I can’t see any breach of Decorum, if a Lady, attended with a Servant, should ride on Horse-back daily for Health.”29 Fuller does not mention the supposed frailty of women as a reason to favour the use of a chaise but the alleged inappropriateness of horseback riding.30 Although not considered as altogether improper for women, it was traditionally left to men (“the most manly” of all useful exercises), if only because it could involve unforeseeable encounters and required the presence of a chaperon. But as Fuller rightly observes, horseback riding led to a beneficial change of atmosphere, but also to the “agitation of the body,” which was for many authors a key element in the physical treatment of hysteria. The descriptions of physical exercises listed as potential remedies all insist on the importance of motion, soft or swift, voluntary (walking) or involuntary (riding a horse or a see-saw). For Cheyne, patients (of both sexes) should aim at “shaking the whole Machine, promoting an universal Perspiration and Secretion of all the Fluids … and thereby, variously twitching the Nervous Fibres, to brace and contract them, as the new Scenes amuse the Mind.”31 Bernard Mandeville also gives a very detailed account of the routine by which his young patient was to reach the expected level of healthy agitation: Immediately after this let her be undrest, and by some Nurse of other chafed or dry-rubb’d for a considerable time, ’till her Skin looks red, and her Flesh glows all over … The Swing I speak of may be made of after what manner your Daughter fancies most: that which they call the Flying-horse,

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makes a very agreeable Motion; but if she be apt to be giddy, she may swing in a Chair, or other Seat to which she is fasten’d; otherwise a Rope tied with both ends to a Beam is sufficient.32

But the motion imparted by the swing or the horse (Mandeville uses the word “succussation”) is precisely what could make these outdoor activities redolent of more improper pastimes. Although Cheyne writes to Samuel Richardson to suggest the use of a chair “set on a long board, which must have acted like a joggling board, supported at both ends and limber in the middle, with hoops to brace the arms and a footstool to support the feet” (an instrument of torture not pleasure), and although Mandeville declares that he “could never meet with any thing so innocent, that was half so efficacious” as the motion of the swing, the very words used to describe the physical training of the young girl elicit other kinds of “agitation.”33 Mark Micale rightly notes that “in general eighteenth-century British writing on this subject, in sharp contrast to classical, renaissance, Victorian and Freudian discourses, is notably de-sexualized,” but this was mainly true of male hysteria.34 Sabine Arnaud offers a more nuanced analysis and underlines the sensual undertones of eighteenth-century perceptions of female hysteria. Using an example taken from an article on hysteria written by Jean-Baptiste Louyer-Villermay for Panckoucke’s Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1818), Arnaud contends that the “investigation on the pathology’s causes [gave] way to an examination of [the] patients’ sexual practices.”35 I wish to argue that the very description of the physical exercises prescribed to female patients suggests that the expected physical exertion was meant, at least to a degree, to neutralize overwhelming sexual desires, and that it partakes in the sexual differentiation that later characterized again the conception of hysteria and hypochondria. Mandeville’s list is deliberately suggestive: the girl has to be undressed, her “flesh” rubbed “for a considerable time” “all over,” and she has to be submitted to the “agreeable motion” of the swing, sitting astride the beam (as explained by Mandeville’s physician a few lines further) or “fasten’d” to her bouncing seat. The language is so evocative that the girl’s father immediately wonders if marriage would not “be as effectual as all these Exercises.” A painting by Francis Hayman entitled “See-saw” (1742) shows a group of men and women practising on what Mandeville describes as a “flying horse” (Plate 16). They are depicted in a rather unambiguous way, a man riding at one end of the long board and a young

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woman at the other. She seems almost ecstatic with pleasure, as if about to faint, while another young man sitting behind her grabs her breasts. Just like Mandeville, Hayman has rather straightforwardly captured the erotic flavour of this seemingly innocent pastime. The bouncing movement of the horse or of the swing, and the red and glowing body of the naked girl all conjure up images of sexual intercourse. Speaking more generally of the Hippocratic precepts regarding the preservation of health, Daniel Le Clerc lists “coitus” as a form of healthy exercise, alongside other forms of gymnastics, “provided one does not overestimate one’s strength.”36 Physical activity, however, should not be mistaken as a way to arouse desire, but understood as a way to suppress it, as a palliative. The necessary “agitation of the body” provided by matrimony is almost unanimously considered as the best remedy for hysteria: Burton concludes that “the best and surest remedy of all, is to see [daughters] well placed, and married to good husbands in due time,” while Riverius, commenting upon a case of hysteria, writes that “Les femmes sont souvent attaquées d’une suffocation de la matrice qui les menaces d’un danger de leur vie, principalement celles qui … privées de la communication des hommes ayant en une particulière recommandation leur chasteté et leur honneur, passent leur viduité dans une vie solitaire. (Women are often attacked by a suffocation of the mother, which is a danger to their lives. This is especially true of those who … being deprived of any conversation with men and particularly concerned with their chastity and honour, spend their widowhood in utter solitude.)”37 Although Cheyne’s suggestion of horseback riding and of “currying and rubbing [the] whole body, more especially [the] limbs, with a flesh brush” seems more concerned with the penitential chastisement of an overindulging body (starting with his own), the various types of bodily “agitation” recommended to vapourous women are meant to compensate for the effects of sexual restraint on the body and mind without generating lascivious thoughts.38 Physical exercises are supposed to restore the harmonious circulation of the animal spirits and the digestive functions of men and women as a prelude to the cure of their nervous imbalance, but they are also a substitute for sexuality (considered as one of the sources of this imbalance), although for opposite reasons. Mandeville thus blames conjugal lewdness or “excess of venery” as a cause of hypochondria, while sexual frustration remains ultimately understood as an agent of hysteria.39 If eighteenth-century medicine devised a uniform diagnosis for hypochondriac and hysteric melancholy and offered a seemingly

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identical treatment for similar symptoms, the sexual differentiation of the disease persisted in the prescribed cure, involving physical exercises that offered a mitigated version of sexual intercourse to distract the female patients from the bodily frustration thought to be among the leading causes of their nervous disorder. If Riverius prescribed the application of “cupping-glasses onto the lower abdomen,” the “vigorous rubbing of the nether regions,” and the application of “fragrant oils and ointments to the shameful parts,”40 his more modern counterparts kept away from any explicit discourse. The outdoor exercises suggested by eighteenth-century practitioners in the treatment of hysteria carefully evade any association with onanism, offering instead an anodyne, outwardly gender-neutral course of action. But in so doing, they nonetheless paved the way for the Victorian redefinition of hysteria and the re-emergence of the centrality of the womb, not as a disturbingly mobile organ of generation but as an insatiable organ of pleasure.

NOTES 1 On Charcot’s sessions and photographs, see Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria. 2 Elizabeth Williams argues that, at least in France, the shift back to a gendered conception of hysteria and hypochondria occurred after the French Revolution, not so much because hysteria became “‘re-eroticized’ in the late eighteenth century,” but rather because of what she describes as “those developments of the Revolutionary era that encouraged legal, medical, and other measures to control women.” Although Williams also observes “a steady progression toward a clear gendering of the malady,” she contends that the influence of the court physicians (who had a pecuniary interest in treating their male and female patients for the same luxury-related disease) slowed the evolution of the nosology. In my view, if Williams has a strong case as far as France is concerned, the situation was different in Britain. While considering hysteria as a nervous disease afflicting patients of both sexes, a lot of British physicians had retained the ancient idea that sexual deprivation could trigger hysteria in women (but not in men). This is shown by their use of physical exercise in the treatment of male and female hysteria. The erotization of the physical exercises they advocated for hysterical women later led to what Williams aptly describes as the reversal of the Hippocratic tradition and the “blaming [of] hysteria

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on sexual overindulgence rather than sexual deprivation.” See Williams, “Hysteria.” See also Micale, Approaching Hysteria. On hysteria and witchcraft, see MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria. Epitomized by Veith’s Hysteria. King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 205 ff. Berriot-Salvadore, “The Discourse of Medicine,” 348 ff. Varandée, De Morbis Mulierum (Lyon: P. & J. Chouët, 1620); I used the French translation: Traité des maladies des femmes. See Varandée, Traité des maladies des femmes, 128, 142, and 143. See Piso, Selectiorum observationum et consiliorum; Saucerotte, Éloge historique de Charles Le Pois, 15–16; and Boss, “The Seventeenth-century Transformation.” Willis, The London Practice of Physick, Part II, “Of Convulsive Diseases,” chapter 8, “Of the Affects Which Are Vulgarly Call’d Hysterical,” 297–8. Willis had published his first treatise on hysteria and hypochondria in Latin fifteen years earlier, in reaction to Nathaniel Highmore’s Exercitationes Duæ; Willis, Hypochondriacæ Pathologia Spasmodica Vindicata. Willis, The London Practice of Physick, 297. On the representation of the female organs of reproduction, see Galen, On the Usefulness, 2:630–2; see also Thomas Laqueur’s controversial account, Making Sex; and two critical responses to Laqueur: Giulia Sissa, “Membres à fantasmes”; and King, The One-sex Body on Trial. Sydenham, The Whole Works, 302. Mandeville, A Treatise; Pomme, Traité des affections vaporeuses. Cheyne, Essay on Health, 115. Révillon, Recherches, 87. For a very clear history of the conception of hysteria in the eighteenth century, see Sabine Arnaud’s excellent book On Hysteria; see also Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology. On the evolution of the nosology of hysteria, see also Williams, “Hysteria,” esp. 247–51. Burton, Anatomy, 2:84; Mercurialis, De Arte Gymnastica. On the therapeutic use of physical exercise as advocated by Galen, see Berryman, “Motion and Rest.” Locke, MS. 1228, ff. 106–22; quoted in Dewhurst, “Thomas Sydenham.” Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 4–5. Cheyne, Essay on Health, 94–5. See also Pressavin, L’Art de prolonger la vie, ch. 3, “De l’exercice et du repos,” 143–59. Cheyne, Essay on Health, 34 and 39. Pressavin, Nouveau traité des vapeurs, viii and 288. Mandeville, A Treatise, 305. Burton, Anatomy, 1:417.

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25 Révillon, Recherches, 87–8: On the particular subject of the education of the daughters of genteel families in its relation to hysteria, see Wenger, La Fibre littéraire, 222 ff. 26 Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 146. 27 Farquhar, The Beaux Stratagem, act III, scene 3, p. 33. 28 Purcell, A Treatise on Vapours, 147. Like Mandeville, Cheyne thought horseback riding was good for both men and women and strongly recommended it to the Countess of Huntingdon. 29 Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 155 30 For a comprehensive study of women’s sports (from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century), see Guttmann, Women’s Sports. 31 Cheyne, Essay on Health, 95. 32 Mandeville, Treatise, 305. 33 The description of Cheyne’s “chamber horse” comes from Flynn, “Running out of Matter.” Mandeville, Treatise, 306. 34 Micale, Hysterical Men, 37. 35 Arnaud, On Hysteria, 27. 36 Le Clerc, Histoire de la médecine, 440–4. 37 Burton, Anatomy, 1:416; Rivière, Les Observations de Médecine, Observation XXXI, 812. 38 On Cheyne and the female body, see Guerrini, “The Hungry Soul.” On female chastity and illness, see Dixon, Perilous Chastity. 39 See Mandeville, Treatise, 212; on the dangers of “conjugal lewdness” for men’s health and for the fate of nations, see Mandeville, A Modest Defence. 40 Rivière, Observations de médecine, 812–13: “Les ventouses appliquées au bas-ventre, les frictions aux parties inférieures ... appliquant aux parties inférieures à l’entrée de la matrice des choses de bonne odeur … oignant les parties honteuses.”

Chapter Twelve

“The Physical Powers of Man”: The Emergence of Physical Training in the Eighteenth Century alexis tadié

It is a received opinion that physical exercise, health, and well-being are intricately connected. The 2007 European Commission White Paper on sports, for instance, explains that “as a tool for health-enhancing physical activity, the sport movement has a greater influence than any other social movement.” It adds that “[s]port organisations are encouraged to take into account their potential for health-enhancing physical activity and to undertake activities for this purpose.”1 But the connection is not obvious and was reached at the end of a long historical process. Its relevance might also be questioned were one to think of professional sports, of the neurological consequences of certain contact sports, of the effects of performance-enhancing drugs on the life-expectancy of professional sportsmen, of the many injuries sustained by those who train excessively. In this chapter I examine the formation and progress of the idea of physical training during the course of the eighteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century physical training had developed as an activity geared towards sports and performance; previously the connections of physical training with issues such as health were not directly aimed at improving performance or ability. In ancient Greece, for instance, physical training enabled the development of a more robust body, which in turn was essential in various occupations such as agriculture or war. In the English Renaissance, it was thought that sports should, by and large, be the preserve of the leisurely (ruling) classes, whereas the people should go about their lives – although archery, for instance, was essential for military reasons. In the early seventeenth century, a controversy around the Book of Sports (1617), which had been published by James I, showed clearly that the issue of physical activity, and its connections with leisure, had a strong

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religious dimension. Puritans wanted to forbid all games and sports on the Sabbath, whereas James was keen to allow some activities, as a way both to make sure that Puritans would conform to Anglican rites and that Catholics would stop using games and sports to disrupt the Sabbath – hoping that they would eventually convert to Anglicanism. But it is also in the Renaissance that the relationship between physical training and health began to emerge, first in Italy and then in France and England.2 By the time Locke was imparting his thoughts on education, physical exercise could be viewed as complementary to intellectual work: “the useful Exercises of the Body and Mind, taking their turns, make their Lives and Improvement pleasant in a continued train of Recreations, wherein the wearied part is constantly relieved, and refresh’d.”3 Athleticism became progressively part of the argument about sports. Finally, the emergence of sports training at the end of the eighteenth century was a consequence of the merging of the medical and athletic dimensions of physical training. Thus while exercise was not traditionally geared towards physical training and performance, it became one of the components of an approach to sports towards the end of the eighteenth century. Physical Exercise and Medicine: Why Should One Exercise? The Encyclopédie provides a convenient starting point for an understanding of prevalent conceptions of physical exercise in the eighteenth century. It defined physical exercise thus: “l’action par laquelle les animaux mettent leur corps en mouvement, ou quelqu’une de ses parties, d’une manière continuée pendant un tems considérable, pour le plaisir ou pour le bien de la santé.”4 The mention of pleasure in the definition was meant to differentiate between physical exercise and work, but the bulk of the entry is about health (“le bien de la santé”) and its corollary, hygiene. The Encyclopédie shows signs of indebtedness to Galenic medicine – the movement of the body encourages excretions and the purification of the blood through the rejection of excremential humours. Exercise further favours nutrition and reinforces the physical condition of whomsoever practises. But the Encyclopédie insists that exercise should be moderate since excess would expose the humours to putrefaction. The entry also insists on the medical importance of exercise: “l’exercice est très – utile dans ces différens cas, pourvû que l’on en choisisse le genre convenable à la situation du malade; qu’il soit réglé à proportion des forces, & varié suivant les besoins.”5

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The medical importance ascribed to gymnastics by the Encyclopédie represents the endpoint of an evolution in thinking about physical exercise which goes back to the Renaissance – the medieval ideal of the knight had given way to a Renaissance culture of the body, aimed at mastering a variety of physical exercises.6 This tradition was particularly indebted to the publication of Mercuriale’s De Arte Gymnastica (1569), which marked a revival of interest in the physical exercises of the ancients. Numerous editions of this book point to its importance and to its widespread influence.7 Mercuriale’s perspective combined physical and mental health, history of gymnastics and analyses of exercise. It was addressed both to physicians and to patients. His conceptions were based on Galenic medicine, on the balance of the humours – because a number of diseases proceed from an alteration of this balance, the human body becoming hot or cold, wet or dry, the cure should strive to restore the equilibrium and increase or decrease heat, cold, humidity, or dryness. Specifically, Mercuriale defined the aims of gymnastics, following Galen, as the preservation of health and he saw in medical gymnastics the true art. He also found in nature the principles of gymnastics. But, unlike Galen, Mercuriale integrated the whole of ancient gymnastics into his consideration of physical activity,8 and envisaged its possible adaptation to modern life. The six-book structure of his work reflects this dual concern: the first three books are devoted to the history and archaeology of ancient exercises, while the next three books deal with the medical dimension of physical activity and its possible benefits to contemporary readers and practitioners. Mercuriale’s analysis of the art of gymnastics thus inaugurated the links between exercise and health and led physicians to include gymnastics with medicine. Later, with the growing critique of Galenic medicine, gymnastics and the theory of humours eventually separated, which led to new approaches to the relationship between medicine and gymastics. The Encyclopédie also followed explicitly Thomas Sydenham, who was generally – although perhaps not totally accurately – regarded as having developed and perfected an attention to symptoms and diagnosis, in particular in his Observationes Medicae (1666).9 Sydenham’s conception of medicine derived chiefly from two sources. The first was Baconian. He referred repeatedly to the author of the Novum Organum and followed the philosopher’s program in striving to build knowledge and treatment on a preliminary natural history: “There must be, in the first place, a history of the disease; in other words, a description that shall be at once graphic and natural. There must be, in the second place, a Praxis, or Methodus, respecting the same, and this must be regular

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and exact.”10 Sydenham’s attention to empirical phenomena and observation also shows the marks of a tradition inherited from Hypocratic medicine. Sydenham analysed diseases as inappropriate workings of the humours, but he did not focus on specific humours: We must begin with noticing that humours may be retained in the body longer than is proper; Nature being unable to begin with their concoction, and to end with their expulsion. They may also contract a morbisic disposition from the existing atmospheric constitution. Finally, they may act the part of poisons from the influence of some venomous contagion.11

He thus ascribed the manifestation of the diseases to the ineffectual expulsion of the humours; he thought that nature should be the appropriate cure; he identified in the environment the causes of some diseases; he focused on epidemic diseases whose causes lay outside the patient. But he did not think that the cure should address a specific imbalance of humours. Since diseases were caused by the absence of expulsion of the humours, Sydenham concluded that “many different diseases are cured by their different appropriate evacuations; but it is the evacuation that performs the cure, the medicine being specific to the evacuation.”12 Sydenham’s innovation lay in identifying exercise as a remedy for certain diseases because, in conjunction with medicines and an appropriate diet, it favoured the expulsion of humours which nature was unable to effect. Whether it be for curing consumption, for treating bilious cholick13 or the gout,14 exercise was considered by Sydenham as an essential part of the cure for acute illnesses. The overall principle relied on daily practise in order to transform the body: There is nothing that contributes so effectually to the Digestion of the Humours, and to the strengthening of the Blood and Parts of the Body, as Exercise. But ’tis to be observ’d, as I hinted before, that since ’tis necessary in this, even more than in any other Chronical Disease, to alter the whole Habit of the Body; the Patient must exercise his Body daily and constantly. For those Exercises that are sometimes intermitted, and after a while resum’d, are not only unable to change the Habit of the Body, after it had been enervated and render’d languid by Ease and Sloth: But they may even prove hurtful, and hasten the Return of the Paroxysm.15

Among the exercises that Sydenham recommended, horseback riding was first and foremost; but should it be problematic for a patient to ride a horse, Sydenham suggested that travelling in a coach provided

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equivalent exercise, because it produced movement which was beneficial to the body.16 This work established his reputation as a clinician, marked by reprints and translations of his works. Sydenham’s conceptions spread across England and the Continent, partly through John Pechey, a physician who translated some of Thomas Sydenham’s works into English, included Sydenham’s principles in his own publications, and was eventually responsible for The Whole Works of Sydenham (1696). Reprints of this work, already in its ninth edition by 1729, testify to its popularity; Sydenham’s views on clinical observation became relatively widespread and a number of physicians, such as Francis Fuller, developed his suggestions. Following Sydenham, the author of Medicina Gymnastica: or, a Treatise Concerning the Power of Exercise (1705), Francis Fuller, recommended physical exercise as an appropriate cure for a number of diseases. He ascribed to Sydenham his interest in such therapy: it happen’d that I was casually directed to the Use of Riding by the great Alteration I found in me, upon being one Day carried out in a Coach about a quarter of Mile, when I was in that low Condition, that made me reflect on some of Dr. Sydenham’s Notions, which, like others, I had before slighted and disregarded, and I determined to try what Riding would do.17

Fuller advocated moderate exercise as a way of augmenting the natural heat of the body, and so, by enriching the fluids, to increase the circulation of blood and therefore “every the minutest Particle will be brought much oftner to the Test of the Strainers, than otherwise it would have been; so that both the Venous Fluid and the Spirits will after an Eminent Manner be exalted, and as it were Rectifi’d in the Making.”18 Fuller’s definition of exercise was explicitly based on clinical observations: “By Exercise then, I understand all that Motion or Agitation of the Body, of what kind soever, whether voluntary or involuntary, and all Methods whatsoever, which without the Use of Internals, may … suffice to enable Nature to expel the Enemy which oppresses her.”19 This approach originated in Sydenham’s suggestion that exercise would expel the humours not otherwise eliminated by nature. Exercise is in accordance with nature, helps it clear all distempers, and is therefore superior to the sole use of medicines. Fuller’s justifications for the necessity of exercise were quite diverse, as when he found in the cone-shaped blood-vessels the reason why exercise must be practised. He argued more generally that exercise improved the fluids of the body because it favoured the circulation of blood.

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Fuller moved away from prevalent conceptions of diseases. Unlike Galenic medicine which concentrated on the balance of the humours, Fuller saw exercise as a way of improving the solids in equal measure. He based his observations on the general tension which the body must maintain even to perform its most basic functions such as standing or sitting. The general strength of the body could therefore be increased by exercise, through the combined operation of nerves and animal spirits: “a proper or due degree of Exercise, enables the Nerves to dilate themselves sufficiently to take a greater Quantity of Animal Spirits, or some other way, to us unknown, gives ’em a better Tone, or Elater, and consequently fits ’em for more vigorous Actions.”20 More generally, Fuller examined the importance of exercise in curing diseases, and thus restoring a languid body to its initial strength. He conceded that knowledge of these processes was somewhat mysterious, thereby acknowledging a certain lack of medical knowledge. Exercise, in Fuller’s mind, was clearly linked to medicine, “a common Aid to Physick.”21 He argued that exercise was more beneficial to human health and to curing diseases than a variety of medicines which, by acting only on the internal and fluid parts of the body, could not obtain the comprehensive effect achieved by physical exercise and specifically could not act on the solids. On the other hand, physical exercise, by affecting the solids, also had a beneficial effect on the fluids. Following Sydenham, Fuller identified a number of diseases which could be treated by “gymnasticks.” They ranged from consumption, which was to be cured with mild medicines and gentle exercise, to dropsy, where the movements of the body were conducive to the elimination of water, to hypocondriacal distemper which, being a distemper of the spirits and of the vessels which convey them, would be improved by gentle exercise.22 For Fuller as for Sydenham the most appropriate type of exercise was riding, which, being a mixed form of exercise, partly active partly passive, was best suited to a number of diseases: “there is a better Disposition towards an equal Secretion of the Morbisick Particles, and less Expence of the Animal Spirits, the chief Agents in all regular Secretions; so that a Sick Person may by this means be greatly reliev’d and not tir’d, whereas by other more violent ones, it is possible he may be tir’d and not reliev’d.”23 Fuller next examined chafing, a practice which he regretted had fallen into oblivion since the ancients, and yet was useful in that it caused discharge. Fuller also noted after the ancients the beneficial effects of rubbing the limbs, following violent athletic exercise or in the case of a “Hysterick Fit,” “for it diverts the Spirits

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from flowing too much to the Parts affected, and long acting upon the extremity, of those most sensible Fibres of the Skin, must needs agitate the Spirits considerably, and give some Strength likewise to those Parts that are so Chafed.”24 The last exercise which Fuller described was the cold bath, which “makes the Spirits recoil, and act with more united Vigour, upon the Subject-matter of the Disease, and so a Cure may be made by them alone, without any Medicinal Virtue, receiv’d through the Pores, as in other outward and Topical Applications.”25 More generally, Fuller traced to the ancients such interest in gymnastics and exercise for the cure of diseases, finding in Hippocrates, in Galen, or again in the Romans, precedents for interest in such practices, including rubbing: “Asclepiades … call’d Exercises the common Aids of Physick, and Wrote a Treatise, de Frictione, & Gestatione, which is mention’d by Celsus, in his Chapter de Frictione, but the Book is lost.”26 He argued that the reason why the Romans sent the people afflicted with consumption to Egypt was to cure them not only thanks to the change of air, but also by the movement of the ship on their way to Alexandria – which of course acted as a rather powerful emetic. But the difference between Fuller and the ancients was that he regarded gymnastics as an integral part of the cure of diseases, whereas the ancients thought it an assistance to the cures; for Fuller the ancients were so deficient in theoretical knowledge that they could not connect uses of medicine and uses of exercise.27 Fuller was certainly not a great physician nor did he display deep medical knowledge. But he developed a way of thinking about physical exercise along medical lines which was partly derived from the Renaissance tradition, and partly developed from some of Sydenham’s theories. His treatise, which was reprinted several times throughout the century,28 counterbalanced what he viewed as an excessive reliance on medicines on the part of physicians, and argued persuasively for integrating physical exercise into the treatment of a number of diseases. This continued Sydenham’s departure from Galenic medicine through an insistence on solids as much as on fluids and stressed the necessity, for medicine, of relying on gymnastics. Such a conception endured until the turn of the century. It was developed in other directions by Andry de Boisregard and Tissot.29 Sir John Sinclair, a member of parliament who promoted “useful knowledge” and published a number of papers on such topics as agriculture, political economy, or again health, published in 1806, one year before he promoted a compendium of texts entitled Code of Health and Longevity (1807), A Collection of Papers on the Subject of Athletic Exercises. In this

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publication, he generated conversations between different correspondents, including physicians but also sportsmen: he derived the main principles of training from John Jackson, a famous boxer whom he quotes in his Papers.30 Sinclair argued, possibly following Fuller, that the solids of the body were in constant renewal and that physical exercise favoured the renewal: “The health of all the parts, and their soundness of structure, depends on this perpetual absorption, and perpetual renovation; and exercise, by promoting at once absorption and secretion, promotes life, without hurrying it; renovates all the parts and preserves them apt and fit for every office.”31 The only way to bring this about, according to Sinclair, was through exercise accompanied by adequate nutrition, and through a proper balance between breathing, perspiration, and digestion: [An athlete] is purged with very drastic purges, to reduce his grossness. He is made to walk out under a load of clothes; his walks are regularly increased, and a certain number of times a-week; he is laid between two feather-beds; sweat promoted by drinks; his limbs taken from between the feather-beds successively, and rubbed very roughly. After enduring for many hours this state of suffocation, he is comforted with a draught of ale or wine.32

Sinclair believed that such a diet would prolong the duration of life, which was indeed the aim of medicine. Further developments in the concerns for health and for the benefits of exercise can be found early in the nineteenth century in the publications of Donald Walker, the author of many treatises on physical exercise, such as Manly Exercises or the more sedate Exercises for Ladies. Walker pursued the mode of thinking about exercise and health promoted by Sydenham, Fuller, and others, and concentrated specifically on the general balance of the body. Physical training, according to Walker, improves health provided it is based on a combination of evacuation, perspiration, daily exercise, and appropriate diet. The improvements in muscles and in breathing are the mark of efficient training. Walker considered that perfection in these arts, and the ensuing balance of the body, could be reached through sufficient practice. Exercise for ladies, on the other hand, was more specifically geared towards the aesthetic dimension of exercise and the advantages which it might impart to the physical appearance of ladies.33 In the early modern period physical exercise was intricately linked to health and could indeed be seen as an aid or a supplement to medicine. The evolution of medicine, which was both a cause and a consequence

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Figure 12.1 “Indian Club Exercises,” Donald Walker, Walker’s Manly exercises (London: n.p., 1855), plate IV, page 22.

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of its relationship to exercise, imparted traces of Galenism to conceptions of physical activity but the growing importance given to solids modified the nature of training. One trained to improve one’s health, to extend human life, and to cure certain diseases. As argued by Ulmann, even if the main tenets of Galenic medicine had been progressively abandoned by the new conceptions of physical training, they retained the same fundamental trust in Nature.34 Athletic Training: How Does One Exercise? Following Sydenham and Fuller, the Encyclopédie entry distinguished between three types of exercises – games which exercise all parts of the body; movements provoked by the vehicle in which one is travelling (passive exercise); and mixed exercise, such as horseback riding. Each type was appropriate to one category of patients (for instance, languid people needed moderate shocks in order to involve the system of solids and the mass of humours). The timing of training was also crucial – the best time to train is before dinner, a long time after eating. The duration of exercise should never be excessive, for medical reasons. Treatises all insisted on diet, with variations – some treatises banned all vegetables and preferred animal diets (easier to digest, it seems), others relied on stale bread, biscuits, and ale. Sinclair for instance believed that one should not drink more than three pints of beer a day, a little red wine perhaps, and was adamant that milk (not easily digested) must be banned. Certain treatises offered physical exercises, sometimes inspired by military drills – the Indian club exercises for instance could develop the muscles of the upper body (see Figure 12.1). For Walker, running and walking were important because they developed certain muscles as well as breathing ability – although he examined a number of other exercises such as jumping, disc-throwing, swimming (see Figure 12.2), and above all horseback riding. Whereas the Greeks had been happy to indulge in physical activities because they would make future soldiers fit, the improvement of physical condition was increasingly seen by eighteenth-century treatises as an end in itself: “The skilful trainer attends to the state of the bowels, the lungs, and the skin; and he uses such means as will reduce the fat, and at the same time invigorate the muscular fibre.”35 Conceptions of physical training in England were therefore empirical, stressing both the importance of a description of ailments and suggesting appropriate exercises, based on a loose conception of the movements of the fluids and the solids.

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Figure 12.2 “Swimming-Action of the Feet,” Donald Walker, Walker’s Manly exercises (London: n.p., 1855), plate XXII, page 85.

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The first significant changes came from Germany with the publication of GutsMuths’s Gymnastik für die Jugend in 1793, translated into English in 1800 – as Gymnastics for Youth: or A Practical Guide to Healthful and Amusing Exercises for the Use of Schools – as well as in a number of other European languages. Although GutsMuths insisted that his treatise was chiefly based on his experience as an instructor, his work represented a departure from previous modes of thinking about physical education. He claimed in particular that physical training should move away from purely medical concerns: Suppose the most able physician in Europe to be a teacher of youth, to exercise his pupils under the guidance of the most consummate medical skill, and compose a physiological system of gymnastics; by whom could it be carried into practice? Is it not clear, that such only, as possessed equal medical knowledge with himself, could apply it to youth in general, and to every individual in particular?36

The first part of the treatise examined the theory of gymnastics. It ascribed to the want of exercise in the youth the main cause of debilitation, stressing “an unnatural education and way of life.”37 GutsMuths opposed in particular the effeminacy of his contemporaries which proceeded from a concern for fashion and luxury rather than from heeding the advice of such men as Locke or Rousseau. The work of these philosophers had remained in books and had not been implemented in practice, in schools or families. GutsMuths condemned the perceived spirit of the age in no uncertain terms: it is but too true, that many slaves of luxury, effeminacy, and fashion, consider affected sentimentality as a mark of refined understanding; delicate health, and bodily debility, as indications of a mind highly cultivated; womanish softness, as a token of noble descent, and superiour education; and, in short, all these, as no less certain proofs of high birth, than the long nails of the chinese.38

This softness needed to be hardened, the effeminacy to become manly. The ancients, both Greeks and Romans, held for GutsMuths as they had for Mercuriale the key to such improvements; like in antiquity the proposed curriculum must strive to establish the harmony between mind and body: If we harden the body more, it will acquire more stability, and firmness of nerve; if we exercise it, it will become strong and active; in this state it

262 Alexis Tadié will invigorate the mind, it will render it manly, energetic, indefatigable, firm, and courageous; serenity will be diffused over it; it will be active as Nature; it will never experience the poison of ennui.39

But unlike the Greeks and Romans who had primarily military reasons for promoting gymnastics, GutsMuths believed that exercise must be appropriate to the times. Further, although GutsMuths payed lip service to the effect of exercise on both fluids and solids – and indeed he quoted Fuller – he insisted on the visible effects of daily exercise on children. His concern was not only with physical improvement but also with moral enhancement – a fit body strengthens the will and the power of action. GutsMuths departed as well from the physicians who wrote about physical exercise in that the second and larger part of his treatise was devoted to a careful examination of a number of physical activities. Having taught geography, technology, and gymnastics in the Schnepfenthal Philanthropium he derived from his observations the principles of the second part of his treatise. He aimed to offer a number of exercises, working towards a system based on the human body and in particular on the study of the limbs and the muscles. Each chapter is devoted to one type of activity (e.g., leaping, running, etc.) and examines, where applicable, the doctrine of the ancients in such matters before suggesting present practice. GutsMuths’s was therefore chiefly a work of pedagogy, aimed at improving the youth of the day. While he derived part of his thinking about physical education from the ancients, the ultimate aim, inspired in part by Rousseau’s Emile,40 in part by Johann Bernhard Basedow’s Philanthropinism, was to usher in a more courageous, more vigorous man, who, being physically able, would be equally fit for life in society. With GutsMuths, physical training was seen as the fundamental mode of the training of a social man. Physical exercise was no longer to be treated as a mode of curing or preventing diseases but as an integral part of education and of dealing with the perceived excesses of the times. It was also a practical art, one which was an important constituent of pedagogical programs implemented in such institutions as the Philanthropium. GutsMuths was thus at the centre of a network of renewed interest for physical training at the turn of the century in Europe. Correspondents in a number of countries passed on descriptions of physical exercises. He was influenced by a number of writers from the Continent and was translated into various European languages. The interest for such an approach was no doubt fostered by the perceived degeneration of society and by the effects of Napoleonic and

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other wars of the turn of the century. In Prussia GutsMuths’s approach was to be superseded by F.L. Jahn, who reinterpreted GutsMuths’s principles with a stronger national bias, thus hoping to unite the various German states.41 The example of Sweden makes these connections apparent. While Gymnastics for Youth came out in English in 1800, it was published in Sweden in 1813. The concerns voiced by GutsMuths’s treatise found an echo in an environment which was implementing its own reflections on gymnastics. Per Henrik Ling, sometimes described as the father of Swedish gymnastics, had started developing ideas about physical exercise after some extensive travel around Europe. Ling, who was originally a fencing master, also celebrated the mythic roots of the Swedish nation, Viking and otherwise. In 1813, he founded the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics whose brief was to train physical instructors and to supervise physical training in schools. Although such a program was meant to benefit the civilians, it also had a strong military bias, the training of physically strong men being naturally of importance to the army. More specifically, Ling’s program aimed at restoring a balance between mind and body, and he devised exercises which were geared towards establishing this harmony. Of the four branches of gymnastics which he identified, Ling only ever concentrated on the first three: pedagogical, military, medical. He saw them as complementary and to be approached as parts of a whole, so that physical instructors were treated in all three forms of activities. This had two consequences for the nature of physical training. The first was that even if physical instructors concentrated on one of the three branches (say, training soldiers), Ling effectively argued for the merging of medical, pedagogical, and military gymnastics. He considered physical training as a wide-ranging competence and not only as a purely medical endeavour, as argued by Fuller for instance, nor as a mainly pedagogical practice as exemplified by GutsMuths. At the same time, such an approach emphasized the connections between physical activity and nation-building, where physical education was deemed to lie at the heart of the relationship between the army and the school.42 Towards Performance Training By the turn of the century a relatively broad-based argument was thus being made across Europe in favour of a serious consideration of physical exercise, encompassing its medical importance as well as its pedagogical

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benefits, and its social and even nation-building (through the army for instance) potential. The new engagement with physical practise also led certain writers to consider training and exercises as a means to improve performance, and to integrate physical exercise into the practice of sport. Two sports seem to have caught attention, boxing and “pedestrianism”: “The great object of training, for running, or boxing matches, is, to increase the muscular strength, and to improve the free action of the lungs, or WIND, of the person subjected to the process, which is done by medicines, regimen, and exercise.”43 In both fields, the figure of Robert “Captain” Barclay Allardice looms large. In his columns for “the Fancy” – the sporting set of fashionable society – Pierce Egan offered a sketch of this character, a pedestrian who performed a number of feats (most of them for a substantial wager) such as walking one thousand miles for one thousand consecutive hours (one mile in every hour) or running twenty-four hour races. The portrait of Barclay painted by Egan was, in fact, largely derived from Walter Thom’s Pedestrianism, which reflected on his numerous achievements, suggesting in particular the advances in training which he enacted, and insisting on the scientific approach – Thom’s medical conception of training was, in turn, inspired by Sinclair’s Collection of Papers. The last section in Thom’s treatise is entitled “On the Physical Powers of Man.” It reflects on the construction of the human frame and maintains that it is “admirably adapted to his destination.”44 It insists on the strength of man, in particular in comparison with horses, who are found wanting in the comparison.45 It puts forward the importance of training, and reminds readers that a man used to walking or hunting, such as American Indians, will travel farther than a horse and even outrun him. Indeed, men have raced horses since the sixteenth century, and there are still races nowadays which involve such confrontations, such as the Man vs Horse Marathon held every year in Llanwrtyd Wells. This suggests that reflections on training, and in particular on pedestrianism, involved a meditation on the relationship between man and animal – indeed one of the themes of this book. Barclay developed ideas about physical training based on his trainer’s ideas, the pedestrian John Smith from Yorkshire, and on his own experience. As a coach, he made his reputation through the training of Tom Cribb for the revenge of his match against Tom Molyneaux in 1811, a match which Cribb, who was much fitter than for his first match, won. Like the ancient Greeks who thought that physical exercise helped build bodies fit for the military and for agriculture, Thom connected Barclay’s principal occupation, agriculture – the improvement of his

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Scottish estate – with his recreation, the manly sports. Thom identified his style of walking, his habits, his equipment. He recounted extraordinary feats, such as lifting with his arms half a ton in weight. From the outset, Barclay appeared in a line of heroes of great myths: “Many popular stories are told of the feats of strength performed by his great grandfather: and the late Mr. Barclay of Ury, it is well known, was uncommonly powerful. The name of Barclay is of Celtic origin, and implies great strength.”46 As with great heroes, the long list of Barclay’s own achievements followed. And as is perhaps appropriate for modern heroes, these feats and races were also the occasion for complex betting activities, sometimes ending in acrimony. Thom devoted a section of Pedestrianism to training – often reprinted in various periodicals, including in another column by Egan. Unlike previous writings about physical exercise, Thom insisted on the relevance of training to sporting achievements, while retaining from Sinclair the importance of its medical benefits (“health and longevity”). He identified as crucial the conjunction between medicines, regimen, and exercise in order to improve muscles and breathing. These ideas about improving performance through systematic training had, for these authors, a distinct scientific foundation, of which they reminded the reader through quotations from Sinclair’s Code of Health, and insisting on the precise and technical approach exemplified by Barclay: the Pedestrian, who feels anxious to accomplish ten miles within an hour, or continue his race for a longer distance, can never attempt such an exploit with any chance of success, without undergoing the process of training. The scientific Pugilist also gains wind and strength by this operation; and to mankind in general, its rules hold out the blessings of health and longevity. It is thus, Captain Barclay speaks of its utility.47

In Captain Barclay’s conception, the conjunction of medicines, diet, and exercise is articulated in a precise program of training, lasting several weeks.48 The pedestrian starts with a course of Glauber salts, and then proceeds with regular exercise. The pedestrian then exercises for about twenty miles a day: he gets up at five in the morning, runs half a mile uphill and then walks six miles at a moderate pace before eating a breakfast which consists of under-done beef steaks or mutton chops with stale bread. After breakfast he walks again six miles at a moderate pace and at midday lies down in bed without his clothes for half an hour. He then resumes both training and diet in the afternoon. After a few weeks of

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this course, the pedestrian can indulge in sweats, produced by running four miles in flannel at top speed, and then, on returning, a hot liquour (the sweating liquour) is prescribed, which helps perspiration. And to divert his body and mind the pedestrian can indulge in cricket, bowls, and other games.49 Such training is what Cribb, in the preparation for his rematch with Molyneux, was subjected to, leading to loss of weight, a fitter body, and an eventual win: “Training for pugilism is nearly the same as for pedestrianism, the object in both being principally to obtain additional wind and strength.”50 Thom remarked further that the role of the trainer was crucial in assessing the capabilities of the trainee, in adapting to alterations in his constitution, in judging the process to be complete (about two to three months in all). Although such a regimen was deemed appropriate for those who wished to perform feats beyond their ordinary powers, Thom connected intensive training of this kind with the general benefits for human health: “were training generally introduced, instead of medicines, as an expedient for the prevention and cure of diseases, its beneficial consequences would promote his happiness and prolong his life.”51 Echoes of the medical dimension of training, of Sinclair, and beyond perhaps even of Sydenham and Fuller, are also to be heard in a further suggestion that training might be effective in curing such diseases as the gout or rheumatism.52 Taking broadly in their stride the medical dimension of physical training, the principles put forward by Barclay were directly aimed at improving the condition of the sportsman, and can be said to have inaugurated a new conception of the human body, one which would be developed in the nineteenth century.53 In the methods developed by Barclay and made popular by a number of writers such as Thom, the various strands of thinking about physical training come together. Thom reminded his readers that the Greeks and the Romans had developed an interest in such activities. He echoed approaches to Galenic medicine and its reinterpretations in eighteenth-century treatises, suggesting that the constant renewal of liquids and solids, and the necessary process of evacuation all pointed towards the beneficial effects of training: “1st, The evacuating, which cleanses the stomach and intestines.—2d, The sweating, which takes off the superfluities of flesh and fat.—3d, The daily course of exercise , which improves the wind, and strengthens the muscles. —and, lastly, the regimen, which nourishes and invigorates the body.”54 And although he did not, like GutsMuths, signal an interest in the pedagogical function of physical training he underlined its general benefits, beyond the quest for performance.

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Conclusion: Why Should We Train? The eighteenth century was an important moment in the evolution of conceptions of physical training, one when various modes of thinking about exercise merged and developed in new directions. The ancients thought that physical training was important in order to make sure that bodies were apt for war and agriculture. In the Renaissance, the debates shifted towards medical consideration, prolongation of life, and curing of diseases – physical exercise was thus articulated to medicine. In eighteenth-century Europe the pedagogical dimension transformed reflections on, and indeed the teaching of, physical exercise. GutsMuths provided the arch-example of physical training meant both to escape from the great refinements of the era and to usher in a new man, fit for social life. In the context of late eighteenth-century wars, conceptions of exercise revisited the ancient views on the preparation of the body for war, and emphasized a more nation-based vision of physical activity. The connections between exercise and the nation, with faint military overtones, adapted an ancient concern to modern days. With Captain Barclay, whose celebrity extended to both sides of the Atlantic and whose principles of training were often taken up and reprinted,55 the idea of physical training with the aim of improving performance began to mature. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Galenic conceptions of physical exercise had all but died out, only to subsist in the general, vague principle of expulsion and renewal. Performance training therefore came to existence at the turn of the century, in England in particular, in the context of the transformed links between medicine and exercise, of the more systematic approach advocated in Germany and Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, and in the development of the quest for performance induced in part by betting. In this sense performance training is the inheritor of these traditions. At the same time it opened up new conceptions of physical exercise which were not only directed towards the ailing body but were aimed at enhancing performance and achieving results. Reports on Barclay’s principles of training emphasized their scientific foundation, the connections between diet, exercise, and practice, and hailed the crucial gains to the sportsman brought about by training. At the same time as he was the inheritor of certain traditions of looking after the human body, Barclay inaugurated an approach to exercise which was based on the “physical powers of man” and whose principal aim was to improve performance. And if nowadays sportsmen perhaps

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drink lower quantities of ale than was allowed in treatises of the time, if we might hope that in the preparatory phase their intake of “Glauber salts” – or their modern equivalents – is rather less important, it is the parameters rather than the spirit of physical training that have evolved since the heyday of Captain Barclay.

NOTES 1 “White Paper on Sport,” EUR-Lex: Access to European Law. 2 For further analyses of the connections between physical exercise and medicine see chapters 10 and 11 in this volume. 3 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §108, 68. 4 “the action whereby animals put their bodies in motion, or some of their parts, in a continuous manner for a considerable amount of time, for pleasure of or for the benefit of health” (my translation). 5 “Exercise is very useful in these different cases, provided it is appropriate to the patient’s condition, proportional to the patient’s strength, and varied according to his needs” (my translation). 6 See Fontaine, “L’athlète et l’homme moyen,” and Libertés et savoirs du corps. 7 There were four more editions during Mercuriale’s lifetime: 1573, 1577, 1587, and 1601, and two more editions in the seventeenth century, 1644 and 1672. 8 Cf. Ulmann, De la gymnastique, 108–9. 9 This is indeed debatable; see, for instance, Ian Maclean, Logic, 331. On Sydenham, see also chapter 11 above. 10 Sydenham, Preface to Observationes Medicae, §5, p. 102. Cf. Sydenham, Preface, §14, p. 105: “So much does this statement hold good, that I have often thought, that provided with a thorough insight into the history of any disease whatsoever, I could invariably apply an equivalent remedy; a clear path being thus marked out for me by the different phenomena of the complaint.” Cf. “And as for the footesteps of diseases, and their deuastations of the inward parts … they ought to haue beene exactly obserued by multitude of Anatomies, and the contribution of mens seuerall experiences; and carefully set downe both historically according to the appearances, and artificially with a reference to the diseases and symptomes which resulted from them, in case where the Anatomy is of a defunct patient” (Bacon, The Aduancement of Learning, 100). Incidentally, Sydenham did not have much belief in anatomical studies.

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11 Sydenham, Preface to Observationes Medicae, §18, p. 106. Harold Cook notes further that the alchemical influence of Helmontian principles would have reinforced Sydenham’s belief in experimental clinical medicine (“Sydenham, Thomas [bap. 1624, d. 1689],” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26864 [accessed 6 July 2015]). Cf. Sydenham, Preface to Observationes Medicae, §18, p. 106: “every specific disease is a disorder that originates from this or that specific exaltation, or (changing the phrase) from the specification of some juice in the living body.” 12 Sydenham, Preface to Observationes Medicae, §23, p. 108. 13 Sydenham, The Whole Works, 145: “if as often as the use of the Anodyne is omitted, the Pain now and then returns, as it sometimes happens, I do not know any thing that will so certainly perfect the Cure as the riding on horseback, or in a Coach a long Journey.” 14 Sydenham, The Whole Works, 373: “the Exercise of the Body is more advantageous than all other Things that are used, to hinder the Indigestion of the Humours (which I reckon the chief Cause of the Gout) and to corroborate the Blood, and to restore Strength to the Parts.” 15 Sydenham, Dr. Sydenham’s Compleat Method, 134–5. 16 Sydenham, Dr. Sydenham’s Compleat Method, 136. The Encyclopédie followed this excellent suggestion. 17 Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 260. Ulmann, De la gymnastique, 131, suggests that Fuller was the first to draw attention to the importance of exercise for curing diseases whereas he clearly takes his cue from Sydenham. 18 Fuller, Preface to Medicina Gymnastica, 2. 19 Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 4–5. 20 Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 35. Fuller further hypothesises the processes by which such strength is conveyed to the body: “by frequent Distension the Nerves receive a greater quantity of Animal Spirits, because the Limb which is most us’d, grows biggest ; and there is reason to suspect, that Fibre it self strengthens by Use, has a peculiar Faculty to exert it self more and more, as often as the Imperium Voluntatis, the Fiat of the Will, sets it upon Motion” (39). 21 Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 68. 22 “Wherever there is a Dejection of the Mind, and a Propensity to Phantastick and Imaginary Fears, there is reason to suspect the Solids, that is, the Nerves are more in fault than we think for”; Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 150. Chapter 11 analyses more specifically treatments for hysteria. 23 Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 167.

270 Alexis Tadié 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 218. Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 219. Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, 237. Fuller concludes his treatise on an examination of his own diseases and to the methods of cure which he advocates. The ninth edition is dated 1777, which testifies to the enduring presence of his thinking about health and exercise. See chapter 10 in this volume for the developments of conceptions of physical exercise in France. See also Ulmann, De la gymnastique, 130–7. Sinclair, Collection of Papers, 15–27. Sinclair, Collection of Papers, 3. Sinclair, Collection of Papers, 9. The issue of the physical education of girls was also linked, in the late eighteenth century, to the emancipation of women. Mary Wollestonecraft advocated physical exercise for children, as a means of experiencing freedom, in particular for girls who are never left to govern themselves and are therefore totally dependent. Ulmann, De la gymnastique, 138. Walker, Manly Exercises, 13. GutsMuths, Gymnastics for Youth, ix. GutsMuths, Gymnastics for Youth, 48. For GutsMuths exercise is natural and the cause of debilitation of the youth cannot be found in nature. GutsMuths, Gymnastics for Youth, 99. GutsMuths, Gymnastics for Youth, 101–2. See chapter 7 in this volume. See Naul, “History of Sport,” 15–16. See Ottosson, “The First Historical Movements of Kinesiology” for a detailed presentation of Ling’s conceptions of gymnastics. Thom, Pedestrianism, 225. Thom, Pedestrianism, 249. “The bulk of the body of a horse is to that of a man as six or seven are to one; so that if his strength were proportionate to that of our species, he ought to bear a load of twelve or fourteen thousand pounds; but no horse could carry such a weight; and his strength, therefore, allowing for the difference of size, is not equal to that of man.” Thom, Pedestrianism, 250–1. Thom, Pedestrianism, 209. Egan, Sporting Anecdotes, 73. See also Sinclair, Collection of Papers, 15–21 where Sinclair quotes John Jackson’s remarks on training, which display similar principles. Thom, Pedestrianism, 229–31.

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Thom, Pedestrianism, 244. Thom, Pedestrianism, 238. Thom, Pedestrianism, 239. See chapter 13 in this volume. Thom, Pedestrianism, 242. Following Thom, Barclay’s conceptions were often quoted and reprinted in periodicals as well as in various treatises – by Walker, in his Manly Exercises, or by Egan, for instance.

Chapter Thirteen

What Is Training? alexander regier

R.V. Somers-Smith, the 1869 and 1870 English half-mile amateur champion, opens his essay “Athletic Training” (1884) with one of the most philosophically allusive moments of nineteenth-century sports writing. He begins with a question: “let us … first ask, what is training, and what are the objects aimed at by it?”1 In many ways, my essay is a response to both Somers-Smith’s questions and his answers. They are historically significant and pertinent to our own thinking about sports, especially as it relates to the political regimentation of the body. The specific context of sports is critical here. Questions of training, and related ones of regimentation and codification, have long been of central importance to our study of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historical and theoretical scholarship has paid attention to various forms of professional training, be they vocational or educational, with highly illuminating results. Athletic training, however, is a field less well-trodden, though it provides us with an especially powerful example of how training becomes part of a cultural practice we still display today. With the rapidly growing popularity of sports in the eighteenth century came an increasing interest in the methods of how to achieve excellence in different athletic disciplines. It soon was evident that sustained and regular practice was one of the main ingredients for physical sporting achievement. As a result, sports training became one of the most widely practiced and intense methods of bodily discipline and self-regimentation. The exact regimentation of the body, especially through nutrition and exercise, quickly becomes identified as a necessary condition for sporting excellence. Pace Michel Foucault, alongside this change in habits also comes its explicit theorization. The developing discourse on training

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introduces new aesthetic and ethical standards into sports and becomes a marker for the shifting conception of excellence. Crucially, the ample literature on the topic does not restrict the importance of training to specialized athletes. By rooting the origin of training in antiquity, the historical and theoretical accounts reveal a set of deep-seated assumptions about training’s wider significance, as the 1799 Art of Manual Defence illustrates: “[t]he method of training which I would most recommend is, to live temperately, but not abstemiously, and to take a great deal of exercise, but not so much as shall prove fatiguing.”2 What is being proposed in this passage is not only a method of training but also an aesthetics and a politics. The political dimensions of theories about athletic training become even more evident when they discuss how an individual citizen should and ought to train in order to be a productive member of the polis. Obviously, Foucault’s seminal work on the role of training and the coercion of the body forms the background for my discussion, as it still is the main touchstone for an analysis of organized, institutionalized apparatuses such as schools, the military, or hospitals.3 The debates on athletic training share some of the regimenting characteristics Foucault analyses, including the tendency for the internalization of discipline. Yet the voluntary self-coercion of athletic training is also crucially different from classic Foucauldian topics.4 One main difference that needs our scholarly attention is how athletic training develops as a mass activity that is linked to the ideas of citizenship and leisure. Such training is not part of an overseen military drill or a regimented professional formation but an activity in which the members of society self-codify their body in their “free” time. One of the aims of my essay is to lay some historical and conceptual groundwork for a discussion along these lines. As scholarship on athletic training is pretty scarce, I will begin by providing a few contextualizing historical definitions, followed by a very brief explanation why my mainly historical approach differs from some prominent invocations of sports in more theoretically inclined works. The remainder of the essay will focus on two main issues. First, I will discuss how the establishment of the discourse about athletic training changes the aesthetic and ethical parameters of sports in eighteenthcentury Britain. Such a change is significant as it allows me to chart an important change of the way many people begin to think about their own bodies’ physical well-being as tied to athletic training. Second, I will provide an analysis of how regular activity becomes not only

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normalized but also politicized as part of a drive to self-regulate citizens through athletic training. Together, these two discussions allow me to reveal how deeply our contemporary celebration of regular bodily exercise is bound up with these eighteenth-century discussions on sports. Eighteenth-century discourse on athletic training shapes the construction of our modern body. Somers-Smith’s answer to his own question, “what is training[?],” is that “‘training’ … is a course of preparation the object of which is to bring the human frame into that state which will enable it to perform a given task as well as it is capable of doing it.”5 Training takes time; it is a “course” that has a particular, regularized rhythm, which, in turn, is directed towards a goal, the performance of a “task.” This directionality of training invokes the etymological roots of the verb: “to train” traces back to Middle French and includes a sense of movement or direction, interestingly enough often against the person’s will (traîner still has this connotation of movement, of course).6 The type of movement that Somers-Smith’s answer invokes focuses on the body, the human “frame.” His formulation stresses the importance of the physical dimension of sports training to the administration and regulation of the body. Such focus on the body is an integral part of much training literature. These writings sometimes produce extreme versions of this fixation, such as Vincent George Dowling’s numerically confused pronouncement that, “in one word, training is nothing more than diet and exercise.”7 No sports psychology here. Yet, as a rule, the period’s writings on training are not always so centred on the body alone, especially once we look further back into the eighteenth century. More representative of this period is a relatively general definition such as we find in the 1799 Art of Manual Defence: “TRAINING is undergoing a particular exercise and regimen, for the purpose of gaining additional strength against engaging in any battle.”8 The battle will be physical, that is for sure, but it will also be mental. The focus lies on the specificity of the “exercise and regimen,” a formulation that illustrates the connection to bodily discipline and its proximity to military codification (further stressed by describing the goal as a “battle”). A number of these answers to the question as to the definition, function, and purpose of training seem to invite an analysis along the lines of the work of two scholars who refer to wider issues of sports and training, namely Pierre Bourdieu and Peter Sloterdijk. Bourdieu invokes sports and training frequently in his discussion of habitus, especially when he likens deep-seated behavioural patterns to muscular memory (a memory that has become unconscious through training),

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and when he uses tennis as an effective and sophisticated example for the immense complexity of social indexicality.9 In both cases a particular sport for Bourdieu becomes an illustration for a much larger, systematic, sociological account of human behaviour tout court. However, while his use of tennis as an example is certainly inspired, it is important to remember that it remains precisely that – an example. Bourdieu is not really invested in the specificity, historical or otherwise, of athletic training as a distinctive activity. In contrast, my argument wants to give sports a central role, including its historically precise formation, rather than understand it as an illustrative or subsidiary example. Sloterdijk’s recent discussion of sport and religion is closer to my overall aim, though again with important differences. He reminds us that religion and sports are related and integral to the complex history of the codification of the human body through ritual preparation. The parallels between training and prayer, for instance, are a fascinating instance of how the seemingly different worlds of athletics and spirituality overlap.10 While conceptually this approach is very generative, the historical rationale of the discussion points towards an aim different from my own. Sloterdijk is mostly interested in the analysis of institutional structures in the context of modernity, which is why ultimately his attention turns towards Pierre de Coubertin and the modern Olympic Games. Thus, while both Bourdieu and Sloterdijk form part of the general background to this essay, we need to turn towards historically specific sources, texts, and definitions if we want to get a handle on how the eighteenth-century context shapes much of our investment in training today. It turns out that many writings on athletics in the period contain themselves highly suggestive and sophisticated models for thinking about the role of training and provide direct and important forerunners to contemporary concerns about it. Much of the extensive eighteenth-century writing on sports training contains a wealth of concrete material, especially regarding concrete methods of bodily discipline. A good example for this is the “Essay on Training” that forms part of Walter Thom’s popular Pedestrianism (1813): “THE art of training for athletic exercises, consists in purifying the body and strengthening its powers, by certain processes, which thus qualify a person for the accomplishment of laborious exertions.”11 In a common rhetorical move, Thom ties training, elevated to an art form, to concrete methods of purification: “the whole process may be resolved into the following principles: 1st, The evacuating, which cleanses the stomach and intestines. – 2d, The sweating, which takes off

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the superfluities of flesh and fat. – 3d, The daily course of exercise, which improves the wind, and strengthens the muscles; – and, lastly, The regimen, which nourishes and invigorates the body.”12 These four principles are, in one form or another, almost universally adopted in the literature on training. We can observe a trend that training, especially with the increasing popularity of boxing and rowing, becomes a central topic for people who perform and consume sports. It becomes a form of knowledge in which athletes, critics, and consumers participate. The remarkable development of training as a form of knowledge finds a powerful illustration in the publications around the CribbMolineaux fights of 1810. These were among the most celebrated fights in Britain, not least because the matches were presented as symbolically highly laden events. Tom Molineaux, the black fighter, an ex-slave from the New World, who had boxed his way into freedom, challenges Tom Cribb, the English champion, white and the heavy favourite to win. Shockingly for all involved, their first contest was a close call. Cribb, illprepared and rather rotund, came close to losing the fight – and it was plain for everyone to see. The extensive literature on this event offers us a sense of how many ways this near loss has been read, especially in how the British public dealt with what must have been a terrifying realization that such a symbol of English strength could have lost. Daniel O’Quinn puts well the multiplicity of political and sexual dimensions of this dynamic, especially in relation to class, when he reminds us that Cribb became “a crucial nodal point for the celebration of white Englishness.”13 In addition to the terrified public, there is also the pragmatic fighter himself, who takes a decisive consequence often deemed too biographical to be of interest. It is not just that Britain cannot afford to lose a rematch; it is also that Cribb himself cannot possibly allow it. As a boxer, Cribb probably knew that he had underestimated Molineaux and that he needed to address this if he wanted to dominate the rematch. It must have become clear to him that he could no longer solely rely on himself in readying for the next contest. The solution was to prepare differently, to submit to the “art of training.”14 This may seem obvious to us now, after having watched countless movies that adopt the same trope, but it was less evident at the time. The way Cribb did this also prefigures a movie script we are familiar with: he returns to his old teacher for help. This teacher is the famous Captain Barclay, the foremost pedestrian of the age – a sport that, along with boxing and rowing, is one of the most important in relation to the development of training as a discipline. Barclay’s best-known feat was

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to walk one mile in each of one thousand successive hours, and he had established himself both as a legendary sportsman and an author on training. Early in his career, “CRIBB was … getting fast into notice, a pugilist of rare pretensions, and Captain Barclay, who perceived those hitherto hidden qualities in him, took TOM into training.”15 Cribb became one of the best champions of the age. However, as the fight with Molineaux made clear, he had started to neglect what Barclay had initially taught him. Thus, Cribb returned to training as the basis for his pugilistic science. Thankfully for Cribb, “Captain Barclay, whose knowledge of the capability of the human frame appears to be better than most men, took the CHAMPION under his immediate eye.”16 Barclay became almost a physician and shepherd, looking after Cribb’s “frame” with the particular knowledge that training was producing. He took Cribb up to Scotland and submitted him to what we would now term a training camp with remarkable results: Barclay “trained him upon a system peculiar to himself, reducing CRIBB from upwards of sixteen stone, to about thirteen stone six pounds, yet kept his stamina unimpaired.”17 Barclay manages to make Cribb leaner and meaner by submitting him to a regime that was individualized, “peculiar to himself.” We are not told where the data on Cribb’s exact body weight came from, but the numbers certainly add another layer of supposed scientific tone. Pierce Egan places this discussion of training in the middle of his description of Cribb’s rematch in the first volume of Boxiana (1823), making training a key part of the narrative. And lest we forget how critical it is, Egan returns to the topic later on: “It should seem that CRIBB was peculiarly indebted to Capt. Barclay for his excellent condition: having spent three months previously to the battle, at his countryseat in Scotland, living entirely by rules laid down by the Captain, and adhering to the strictest regimen and discipline. CRIBB, it appears, would most willingly at times have relaxed from this mode of life had not his patron pointed out the great advantages resulting from such training – shewing that the body was invigorated by the prescribed means, and that nothing gross or puffy appertained to it.”18 Barclay saves Cribb from indulgence by pointing out the “great advantages” of his training method and thus making sure that the body of the English champion does not become “gross or puffy,” precisely the reason for which he almost lost his championship. The main point here is that Egan prepares a narrative that will hail training’s significance well beyond the boxer’s bodily recovery. Crucially, training will enable Cribb to become a fighter who can truly represent the superior qualities

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that a British champion needs to embody and which go well beyond the purely physical. Let us have a closer look at the “strictest regimen and discipline” that Barclay and his contemporaries report as critical for invigorating the body and preparing it for “battle.” Thom’s principles, cited earlier, give a good indication of the way sports training proceeded. The cornerstones are remarkably similar to today, including, for instance, nutrition, diet, digestion, repetition, regularity of exercise, and sexual abstinence. The writing on training especially abounds with detailed instructions on exactly what, when, and how much to eat. There is a veritable obsession with food, discussed by an ever-increasing number of publications in the Sporting Magazine and elsewhere around the turn of the century. The debate is especially lively when it comes to the ideal and specific intakes of particular meat products or alcoholic beverages. The general tone of these writings, and their level of specificity, is provided in an 1818 “paper on Training” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.19 The “paper” functions as a critical review of Barclay’s methods, further evidence of how there is an increasingly important and welldefined discursive field around the topic of training. More to the point, it gives us a good idea of how these wider ideas about the body and its function intersect with specific instruction for its regimentation: Captain Barclay first commences his training with a course of physic which consists of three doses. Glauber salts, are, in his opinion, to be preferred, and he directs that two ounces shall be taken at a time, with an interval of four days between each dose … The patient now commences his regular exercise, which is gradually increased as he proceeds in his training … He must rise at five in the morning, run half a mile up hill at the top of his speed, and then walk six or seven miles, coming in about seven to breakfast. This, according to Captain Barclay, should consist of beefsteaks or mutton chops under done, with stale bread and old beer. To all this there can be no objection, except with regard to old beer, for which I am convinced, wine and water sufficiently weak would afford an advantageous substitute. In training, the use of beer and ale is uniformly to be condemned. They are of a narcotic nature, and produce a disinclination to exercise, and, from the acid they contain, are liable to produce indigestion. After breakfast he is directed to walk six miles at a moderate pace, and at twelve to lie down in bed for half an hour without his clothes. On getting up he must walk four miles and return by four to dinner, which should also be beefsteaks or mutton chops, with bread and beer as at breakfast.

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Immediately after dinner he must resume his exercise, by running half a mile at the top of his speed, and walking six miles at a moderate pace. To this part of Captain Barclay’s practice I have two objections to make. The first is, that from seven o’clock to four is much too long an interval of fasting, and cannot fail to be prejudicial. I would certainly prescribe a lunch in the forenoon, by way of taking the edge off the patient’s appetite. When Crib [sic] was in training at Captain Barclay’s in Scotland, I have been told he daily devoured about five pounds of beefsteaks for dinner! The bad effects of such a quantity of solid food being thrown into the stomach at once may easily be conceived. My next objection is to the violent exercise which he directs to be taken immediately after dinner. This is plainly a violation of the order of nature, whose great rule is rest after repletion. Exercise on a full stomach not only impedes digestion but injures the play of the lungs and diaphragm. Nor should the running which Captain Barclay prescribes take place either at the commencement or the conclusion of the exercise, but should invariably be preceded and followed by walking. When the course of training has thus proceeded for three or four weeks, Captain Barclay directs the pedestrian to take a four mile sweat. This is produced by running four miles enveloped in a profusion of flannel. On his return he is put to bed, and covered with a feather-bed and a dozen pairs of blankets, where he must remain about half an hour. Before getting into this pleasant situation, however, he must drink a pint of what is called the sweating liquor, which consists of one ounce of caraway seeds, half an ounce of coriander seeds, an ounce of liquorice root, and half an ounce of sugar candy, mixed with two bottles of cider, which must be boiled down to one half. In the efficacy of this liquor I have not much faith, and should be inclined to substitute a pint of white wine whey, with a little tartar emetic, or antimonial wine … Such is the general outline of Capt. Barclay’s mode of training, which, on the whole, must be confessed to be extremely well calculated to attain the object in view. In addition, however, to the observations which I have already hazarded on different parts of it, there is one great omission which I deem it necessary to point out. I allude to the total silence he observes with regard to the use of the tepid bath. Without the use of the bath, it is quite impossible to cleanse the skin of the patient from the perspiration emitted in the process above described. Quantities of fetid grease are left to clog up his pores, their healthy action is destroyed, and there can be no doubt that the muscular power of the individual must thus be in some degree impaired. The frequent use of the tepid bath, therefore, I have no hesitation in declaring, should invariably form a prominent feature in

280 Alexander Regier every system of training; and that Captain Barclay should have altogether omitted it, is not easily accounted for.20

This very detailed answer to the question, “what is training[?],” is not just a review of Captain Barclay’s 1816 book Training for Pedestrianism and Boxing and his explanation of how the athlete “commences his regular exercise, which is gradually increased as he proceeds in his training.”21 It also gives us a very clear sense of the intersection of disciplines that the discourse on training facilitates. A scientific and medical treatment of the athlete as “patient” combines with the exact and detailed regimentation of food intake and assumptions about the “order of nature.” It is critical how this review participates in a larger discussion that develops the art and science of training as part of a larger development and progress. This review is typical in how it emphasizes the supposedly new and novel methods that training has adopted. These are the beginnings of a version of sports science that we recognize today, albeit with a slightly more relaxed attitude vis-à-vis intoxicating substances. And obviously the social assumptions and implications of such training regimes are fascinating (what class of athlete has access to so much meat, so much produce?). What I want to focus on particularly, though, is how such ideas of specific training and regimes help redefine the sport itself. Once there is a distinct sense of how we ought to train, adhering to these insights becomes part of what it means to compete in the sport. Training becomes a dimension of athletic excellence and performance whose success is suddenly tied much closer to the successful adherence of a regime than it was before. The development of this new science both allows the sport itself to progress and helps the individual athletes fulfil their potential. Because he trains, Cribb wins the return fight in September 1811 without any of the problems that plagued him in his first round. It is because he has attended to his body, because he has submitted to a regime, that Cribb can win. And this is something that is recognized in the press and openly articulated in a way that suggests that training is seen as central to this sport now (and all that hangs by it). Egan’s narrative highlights this part of Cribb’s victory when he links the successful title defence to the physical and mental results of training: “placed under the immediate direction of Capt. Barclay, and secluded from the world, at the estate of that gentleman, his [Cribb’s] stamina became invigorated to the finest tone possible, his mind cheerful and independent, and feeling a confidence that every chance was

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in favour of his success. MOLINEAUX, in spite of his alleged ferocity, laboured under considerable depression.”22 Part of this depression is that Molineaux did not “under[go] any thing [sic] like a regular training … on the contrary, he indulged himself to excess.”23 The “gymnastic art” and the “science” of training result in the mental and physical preparation that ultimately decides the fate of this competition.24 This is where training becomes part of something larger, since Cribb’s victory is a sign of “whether OLD ENGLAND should still retain her proud characteristic of conquering, or that an AMERICAN, and a man of colour, should win the honour, wear it, and carry it away from the shores of Britain.”25 Training, then, is essential to help save white England from black Molineaux. Scholarship, then, has much to gain from turning to athletic training and consider its role in the Romantic period in much more detail. The story of the Cribb-Molineaux rematch is only one of the many ways to illustrate the emergent importance of training and its discourse. It should be clear that the discourse on training went well beyond the discussions of this particular fight in the sporting press. Training manuals are only one example of such conversations, and writers applied their interest in training to the description of most fights. Throughout nineteenth-century sports writing the references to training belie an awareness that repeated exercise had introduced a qualitatively different level of competition, which has direct consequences in the way that we view the sport itself. Egan in his Boxiana and Book of Sports (1830) becomes a veritable chronicler of the increasing normalization of a bodily regime and discipline. In connection with the 1828 fight between Isaac Dobell and Tom Brown (the so-called Big Ones), he connects Dobell’s overconfidence with his lack of application: “to use an expression of many careless fellows, ‘let those train that like it,’ was the maxim of Dobell; and he trained on and off.”26 As Egan identifies, Dobell lacks continuity and regularity; he lacks a regimentation of the body that follows a certain discipline and logic of coercion. Training has become a systematized business for the body, not something loose: “It is true that he went into the country for a day or two, now and then, at Hendon, to get off his superfluous flesh, exercise himself, and enjoy the fresh air; but it would be a mockery to give it the name of training.”27 The term “training” is now reserved for the continued discipline of the body, not something to be picked up in an occasional bodily exercise or talent. So, not only has training become a standard, but also the idea of training itself has become standardized. Both sociological and historical discussions of

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the role and importance of the body need to incorporate that insight into their accounts of the period. The discourse of training in Egan becomes part of the background to the fight. Since it has a direct bearing on the physique, it is not surprising that Egan would make it also part of his often very sexualized descriptions of athletes: “On stripping, Shelton appeared in the highest state of condition; and so careful and attentive had he been to the rules of training, that it was asserted a glass of spirits had not sluiced his ivory for the last four months.”28 The ivory whiteness is both inside and outside: the alcohol has not tainted either of them. Training puts the human body in the “highest state of condition,” the perfect specimen of the male body for our gaze. In this fight, the opponent also followed the newly expected course of training, though his supporters hoped he had started a little earlier with his discipline: “Cooper looked pale, and his backers, it seems, wished that he had had the advantage of one more week’s training.”29 By the time of this match between George Cooper and Tom Shelton (ca. 1820), training has become common knowledge and good practice between fighters. There are enough guides written about it that every fighter should know about the results of neglecting this aspect of athletics. As an author in the Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832) puts it succinctly, “[w]ithout training, a man is a mere lath, when it comes to the push; and that closes the philosophy of the subject.”30 Importantly, the knowledge that the advancement in training methods produces is not purely theoretical. As Egan remarks, “[t]he effects of good training are so obvious in renovating the constitution, and infusing a light and vigorous spirit toward victory, that a volume expressly written on the subject could not prove its vast utility half so much, as a practical reference witnessed in the efforts of the Champion of England and Tom Oliver.”31 We have reached a point at which we have amassed sufficient knowledge about the topic that looking at its practical consequences renders its effects “obvious.” The fight Egan refers to is a mismatch between an untrained fighter who “was in bad condition” (“his stomach could not contain the contents of his breakfast, on the morning of the battle”) and, as a result, is knocked down in thirty-eight consecutive rounds.32 The point is that this disadvantage is not accidental or the result of a mishap, but rather a way in which the importance of training has become “obvious” for all to see and expect. The new regimes of training apply to all. Former champions, however celebrated, still have to adapt. Unless he comes

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prepared, even a mythical figure like Jack Broughton will lose against an otherwise inferior opponent: “the FATHER OF BOXING, BROUGHTON, deprived of all his laurels! Hear it ye CHAMPIONS! Weep for the veteran’s downfall! and profit by his loss – BE NOT TOO CONFIDENT – and remember, that it was occasioned by one fatal error – neglect of training!!!”33 Broughton was, of course, the figure who codified boxing and was responsible for its basic rules. What he had not done was to keep up with the changing rules of the practice of his profession. As such, the negative examples Egan cites are notable exceptions to the norm: training by now is more common than not, and its absence becomes noteworthy. As with many other forms of bodily discipline, deviations from the norm point towards a standard; in this case it allows us to consider not only how athletics is changing but also how a new method of practising sports starts to change people’s expectations about it. Egan’s chronicle of training is also the chronicle of increasing disappointment with athletes who are not self-disciplined and rigorous enough. A fight will lose its purpose as a spectacle of sporting prowess if the fighters do not “exhibit that sort of character which is expected from a boxer who had all the advantages of training.”34 One of the operative terms here is “expected.” We can expect certain things from athletes since we know that the quality of their performance is tied to their regimented preparation. If that sounds familiar, then it is because many of us continue to hold Egan’s expectations. Should it be disappointed, we feel let down, even cheated. And rightly so, as Egan explains in relation to a fight we mentioned before: “That the friends of SAM had reason to feel themselves deceived in the above contest, there can be no doubt, but such an opinion is strictly correct. He has DECEIVED them in this particular point of view. Instead of endeavouring to repair the debility his constitution had experienced from intemperance, by a scrupulous adherence to the system of TRAINING, which they had naturally a right to expect from a man, whom they had backed with such large sums of money, and on whom they had betted such great odds; his conduct was highly reprehensible in deviating from such an approved system.”35 It has become the duty of the athlete to submit scrupulously to training. His backers “naturally” have the right to expect him to prepare adequately. And while Egan highlights that there is a monetary aspect to this feeling of deception, there is quite clearly a more general moral dimension to his tone. Similarly, Egan’s writings on the fight between Dobell and Brown further illuminate this change in attitude and rhetoric. Theirs also turns

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out to be a disappointing match in which neither boxer lives up to the standard that the new methods of bodily regulation are setting. Egan puts it in a legalistic phrasing: “to speak of them as well-trained men, would be a libel on CONDITION; and bad, very bad, was the best of the two big ones.”36 It would be libellous to lie to the readers and describe these fighters in idealized terms. It is almost as if keeping quiet about their bad condition would be in itself breaking the conduct of sports writing. Intriguingly, Egan follows his legal phrase with an observation about the quality and aesthetics of the resulting match. “Both of the combatants, by such neglect, had thrown a chance away; and the strongest man was the most likely to win the battle.”37 As a result, the potential quality of the fight suffered greatly. Egan’s language indicates that bodily regimentation has produced a new standard not only of boxing but also of spectatorship and the aesthetic standard of the sporting spectacle. Dobell and Brown do not live up to the new laws that training has produced and that, crucially, we are entitled to expect. The raised expectations, almost akin to a form of professionalization, include a change of aesthetic standards. It develops alongside the assessment of the athletic body itself which, in much sports writing, is at the crossroads between beauty and excellence: “Nothing is more obvious than by a comparison of the trained man with one who cannot feel or submit to the utility of it; the flesh of the former does not so soon turn black, or become inflamed with the effect of blows; while, on the contrary, the untrained would become blind from those hits, which the pugilist in good condition would not even show the marks.”38 Training prevents the undesirable blackness of the skin in the athlete; it guarantees the integrity of the body and its ability for basic perception. Egan imagines the sculpted body of an athlete, and, just as he is interested in the aesthetics of the fight itself, he wants to keep the shape of that male figure intact and able to respond to our gaze. The athlete needs training to guarantee that this desire continues to be satisfied. When Young Sam fights Ned Neal, we learn of his well-toned body: “his neck, handsome, his arms long; his shoulders good; and his loins muscular, and indicating strength, such as the lovers of anatomical beauty would pronounce a fine picture of the human frame, and the patrons of boxing a complete representative of a milling cove. Neal, to our peepers, never appeared in finer condition; in truth, he had answered all the purposes of training, and better health he could not enjoy.”39 Once we answer the “purposes of training,” we not only will win the fight but also produce the best object of “peep[ing]” desires. Neal becomes both: the

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ideal representative of the boxing body, he produces a “fine picture” – an artistic representation – of the human figure.40 This is refinement through regimentation. It is worth highlighting the strongly gendered aspect of these texts. Athletic training, in the eighteenth century, generally, is the training of the male body. It is the standard in relation to which ideas of normativity and harmoniousness are constructed and thus it becomes important that training is adopted as a regime for the codification of the human body tout court. Many writings and meditations on training during the period try to balance a set of conceptual impulses that pull in two different directions. On the one hand, the developing sports science insists that its character is completely different, new, and revolutionary. Training is, as many writers highlight, a new science: its methods of exercise are innovative, its regimes of nutrition are cutting edge. We encountered this rhetoric above. Yet there is also a pull into the past, a desire to give these methods of discipline a historical anchor. The author of the “paper on Training” in Blackwood’s tells us that “THE art of training, although till lately very imperfectly understood, is one of ancient origin and very general diffusion. Its elements may be discovered among every people, however rude and barbarous, who are led either by necessity or choice to undergo long and violent exertion.”41 In many ways, training is associated with a universal ability to develop a techne, to respond to our environment in an increasingly adaptive way. In Pedestrianism, Thom echoes the formulation in the Blackwood’s article: “THE art of training … was known to the ancients, who paid much attention to the means of augmenting corporeal vigour and activity; and accordingly, among the Greeks and Romans, certain rules of regimen and exercise were prescribed to the candidates for gymnastic celebrity.”42 Training is not just a new science but has a long and distinguished history, which gives it authority and, it turns out, points towards a more political dimension of athletics. It is, of course, true, as Thom points out, that training played a central role in both Athenian and Spartan education. Some of it was related to military exercises, but the gymnasium was mostly a place that illustrated the attitudes regarding the relation between intellectual and physical training. For Aristotle, this was primarily a political issue, and his Politics is full of references to training such as this: “Since it is evident that education through habituation must come before education through reason, and that education of the body must come before education of the mind, it clearly follows that children must be put in the hands

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of physical trainers who will bring their bodies into a certain condition, and coaches who will teach them to do certain physical tasks.”43 While Thom and Egan do not discuss Aristotle’s exact attitudes regarding the relation between physical and intellectual training, it is evident that these eighteenth-century texts use antiquity as a conscious reference point, historical and conceptual, to define a new standard of athletic excellence. Though we might lack the specifics of the “mode of training adopted by the Greeks… it cannot be doubted, that a course of dietetic discipline was undergone by the candidates for distinction at the Pythian and Olympic Games.”44 It becomes clear that this form of distinction goes way beyond winning a singular contest between individuals and that it connects up with the construction of civic society. And thus “it surely … would be [a] matter of curiosity to know the nature of the invigorating regimen adopted by Ajax before his contest with Hector. It cannot be conceived, that in a case so important, with the hopes and prospects of the Grecian army depending on his success, he should have confined himself to the usual camp-fare of lean beef and a few miserable herbs.”45 It is not only a matter, as Thomas Crochunis correctly points out, that “In Captain Barclay’s era, training … was discussed as often in terms of what it might contribute to society as in terms of its particular effects on the athlete’s physical performance.”46 It is also that training will equip us to be the representative of a whole society, a way of life, if you will. Although the description of Ajax and Hector contains more than a little humour, it does bring home again the metonymic power of the athletic contest, for which the participants need to be thoroughly prepared. Training, then, raises the aesthetic bar, but its political and ethical dimensions are no less important. The specifically Aristotelian flavour is crucial to the way much writing on training connects theory, bodily practices, and historical genealogies of discipline. Training needs temperance and measurement. Most commentators agree that training is not something that should produce extremes, nor excess, nor what Anthony Trollope will later call “overdoing our Sports.”47 Balance is a key element of training. It ensures a controlled and monitored way of producing the best result. All the literature on training during this time makes clear that training does not simply work cumulatively; it has to be controlled, timed, itself regimented, to find the “perfection of form” and achieve the desired result.48 Egan notes that we need to put “bounds” on our regimes to avoid the negative consequences of “excessive training.”49 Somers-Smith similarly suggests that “temperance and perseverance” are central to training.50

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The “benefits derived from training are the natural results of the system itself, the injuries are almost invariably brought about by the imprudence or folly of the sufferer.”51 If there is ever a problem it is never the fault of the system of codification, but rather the fault of its mistaken application. Just as the lack of training makes it impossible to successfully participate in the highest levels of sports, a diametrically opposed approach guarantees failure too. As Egan describes, a boxer can fail not just by not training but also “In the wear and tear points” by “OVER TRAINING” that will “fritter [ ] them away.”52 Temperance is the key to our form of bodily (and thus also mental) regimentation. The ideal of training without “OVER TRAINING” does not only invoke the Aristotelian idea of a golden mean of regimentation. It also connects the general principle to the individual case. We can easily embrace the abstract principle that “OVER TRAINING” is a bad idea, but to implement it in practice we have to individualize athletic regimentation. SomersSmith remarks that “while for any one particular task the general style of preparation must be similar in all cases, the peculiar qualities of each individual must be studied, with a view to discovering the treatment most suitable to his idiosyncrasies.”53 Training needs to take into account the individual differences (bodily and mental) for achieving the best possible regime of codification. This is a matter of no small importance. Here is Somers-Smith again: “too much stress cannot be laid on the necessity for constantly bearing in mind that the constitution of every human body differs in a greater or less degree, and that consequently the same rules of training cannot apply without deviation to any large number of men.”54 We must study our peculiarities and adopt our individual ability; we must pay attention to the condition of each individual subject. In the case of training, attention to “deviation” will allow us to prevent excess. The key is that the idea of “any large number of men” is much wider than any large number of dedicated athletes. Regimented and balanced physical activity constitutes a critical activity not only for sportsmen but, even more important, also for the individual citizen of a polis: “the advantages of the training system … extend to every man; and were training generally introduced, instead of medicines, as an expedient for the prevention and cure of diseases, its beneficial consequences would promote his happiness, and prolong his life.”55 The “system” not only ensures individual athletic excellence but also provides a program for keeping the whole nation healthier and happier.56 This wide reach goes beyond the strictly militaristic aspect of physical exercise. Crochunis

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is right to point out that “Thom frames his history of British pedestrianism as an argument for the training of the nation’s soldiers, and these purposes and meanings inform the scientistic meticulousness of training regimens outlines for would-be pedestrian athletes – including strict adherence to codes governing sleep, exercise, diet, bathing, and even dress.”57 Yet, as I just suggested, it is not just the nation’s soldiers that are being trained: it is every member of society. Thom wants to transform the practice of training to include the whole nation, make all of its constituents into trained members, if not exactly soldiers. In a similar way, Dowling in his Fistiana (1841) extends Thom’s arguments by drawing on the distinction between athlete versus common citizen and simultaneously arguing that both are in need of training. In the case of the athlete things are clear: “the boxer, the wrestler, the pedestrian, the jockey, the rower, the swimmer, are little or nothing without training, for they have to perform extraordinary feats within a given time.”58 For the broader public, the spectators or citizens, training is vital in a different way: “the mass of mankind who indulge in excesses of every kind – in too much eating, drinking, venery, sleep, sloth, smoking, sitting, &c., would go through the task of life, would discharge their respective duties much better, far quicker, and with vastly greater ease to themselves, did they submit to training.”59 The societal consequences of athletic training are articulated in a way that is recognizably political. The discursive move is to link the health of the individual and the health of the nation via athletic training and regimentation. Crucially, the discourse on training combines the insights that, on the one hand, training is important for both athletes and common citizens and, on the other hand, that every body is slightly different and so requires a different training regime. In one of its more sophisticated forms, athletic training turns out to be a mixture between general principles of disciplining the body and forms of highly individualized (and, as Foucault would point out, internalized) self-coercion. We find, quite literally, an illustration of these tendencies in a 1799 training manual written by a “Pupil Both of Humphreys and Mendoza.”60 As the title suggests, the manual provides a “Series of Lessons” that explain a training “System.” In one of the chapters, the author gives some practical advice on how to go about implementing this system: “you may aid yourself considerably, by practicing before a glass. Thus the motion used in parrying blows at the head and face [Lesson I.] may be performed; that in striking straight forward [Lesson II.] giving the return, [Lesson III.] that of guarding the face and stomach, [Lesson IV.] & c. You may likewise learn

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Figure 13.1 “Single figure striking strait forward, before a looking glass,” Art of Manual Defence, London: for G. Kearsley, 1799.

to adjust your guard, by seeing which appears the safest and most manly posture of defence, and to Box by striking opposite of those places in your body which appear to lie open, and parrying the different imaginary blows.”61 Inserted in this discussion is the striking image of an individual training in front of a mirror. This is a fascinating visual representation of the completely internalized mechanisms of athletic training. After having read the training literature of the period, we can see how the illustration draws together many of the important strands of my larger argument, about the multilayered significance of athletic training in the period. It shows that training by the turn of the century had become a crucial factor for the way that people conceived of the body – the athletic body in particular. It shows the tight link between the regimentation of the body, its disciplining, and standards of excellence. Most distinctively, it shows that the internalization of the standards of training are not only relevant to the professional athlete but also crucial to the conceptualization of an individual citizen, including developing forms of self-policing these newly found training standards. What makes this last insight so relevant is that it is not just

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historical. It also locates for us an origin of a type of discipline that many of us contemporaries have adopted and perfected. Plenty of us agree with Thom and Dowling about the commendable role of physical exercise for all. This regular exercise is also a regulating exercise, of course; and it plays a crucial part in our discursive formations as they relate the human body and politics. Something very interesting happens when training is perceived to be simultaneously a general necessity and also as a marker for the individual differences of subjects. What Barclay starts, and Egan, Thom, Dowling, Strutt, Somers-Smith, and many more continue and refine, is an account of how sports becomes the central practice for the self-discipline of the body.62 The figure in front of the mirror suggests an early instantiation of this trajectory. He is one of the “mass of mankind” that improves through training. Crucially, he has decided he will train in his leisure, use his “free” time to get, in today’s parlance, “in shape.” He trains with himself, exercises, and fights with the figure who is simultaneously supervising him and his body. The illustration, then, points us towards an almost paradoxical link between athletic training and leisure that persists until today. Many of us exercise, and most of us do that in our so-called free time. Leisure becomes the category which we use to protect our regimes of physical self-coercion. This slightly presentist conclusion suggests how eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writings on sports and training do more than simplistically slot into a Foucauldian narrative. These texts verbalize the contradictory dynamic at the starting point of the status of training as a form of theorizing the treatment of the athletic, the aesthetic, and the political body. It allows us to pinpoint a moment in the history of theorizing the body that has been neglected so far. As scholars and sports enthusiasts, we are, of course, continuously surrounded by forms of training. We, who work and critically analyse the excesses of bodily codification and implementation, who know the importance of discipline for the study of sports and beyond, can, I argue, learn a lot from the history of sports training, especially when it comes to tracing its genealogy into the present. Because many of us have, at least in the physical arena, become our own personal trainers – Captain Barclay and Cribb in one – it is surprising that we, as sports scholars, have not investigated more thoroughly the ample body of literature that surrounds the topic of training. As I have suggested in this essay, it is an immensely fertile field, theoretically and historically. It makes this essay’s title question “What is training?” more complex and disturbing, yet it also makes it clear why it is so pressing that we continue to answer it.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Somers-Smith, “Athletic Training,” 3. “Explanation of the Technical Terms,” 88–9. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The fact that Foucault himself never wrote about sports in any detail is an intriguing detail in this regard. Somers-Smith, “Athletic Training,” 4. The other main sense of the verb connects with the senses of “involving improvement or development.” The idea of rearing, of shaping things towards a goal, is central to these meanings. It is no surprise that the early use of the vocabulary of training is centred around non-human animals, especially horses, something that haunts much writing on the topic (multiple authors across the century draw a parallel between training a human body and breaking a horse), though it goes too far to suggest that “eighteenth and the bulk of nineteenth century training practices revealed little difference in the training of horses, fighting cocks, greyhounds, pugilists (boxers), and runners” (Bourne, preface to “Fast Science,” vii). Dowling, “Indispensable Attributes,” 88. This is evidently an early version of the old sports commentary chestnut: “In one word: very poor.” “Explanation of the Technical Terms,” 88. All emphases in the quotations are in the originals. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 11. Bourdieu discusses sports throughout his work. See Bourdieu, Homo Academicus; and Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class.” Also see Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology; and Noble and Watkins, “So, How Did Bourdieu Learn to Play Tennis?” Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 83–108. Also see a reference to training and prayer in Dowling, “Indispensable Attributes,” 87. Thom, “On Training,” in Pedestrianism, 221. Thom, “On Training,” 242–3. Emphasis in the original. O’Quinn, “In the Face of Difference,” 235. Also see Whale, “Daniel Mendoza’s Contests of Identity.” Thom, “On Training,” 221. Egan, “Tom Cribb,” in Boxiana; or, Sketches of Ancient & Modern Pugilism, 1:392. Egan, “Tom Cribb,” 1:410. In relation to this training regime, O’Quinn perceptively argues that it “saved him [Cribb] from both Molineux and the Fancy” (the latter having a rather unhealthy influence upon Cribb) and allowed that the boxer restore his “model of normative homosociality” (O’Quinn, “In the Face of Difference,” 231).

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Egan, “Tom Cribb,” 1:410. Egan, “Tom Cribb,” 1:415–16. Maret, “Remarks on Training,” 314. Maret, “Remarks on Training,” 317–18. Maret, “Remarks on Training,” 317. Barclay himself had understood the importance of preparation; at the beginning of his own career he “went into training under Mr. Smith, an old farmer on Lord Faulconberg’s estate, who was reckoned very knowing in all sporting science, and very skillful in the best mode of training for pedestrian feats” (Thom, “Captain Barclay’s Public and Private Matches,” in Pedestrianism, 104). Egan, “Tom Molineaux,” in Boxiana, 1:368. Egan, “Tom Molineaux,” 1:368. Egan, “Tom Cribb,” 1:408; and Egan, “Tom Molineaux,” 1:369. Egan, “Tom Cribb,” 1:409. Egan, “THE BIG ONES!” 188. Egan, “THE BIG ONES!” 191. Egan, “George Cooper,” in Boxiana, 3:48–9. Egan, “George Cooper,” 3:49. “Another Column for the Fancy,” 255. Egan, “Bill Nosworthy, the Baker; (Conqueror of the Renowned Dutch Sam),” in Boxiana, 2:76. Egan, “Bill Nosworthy,” 2:76. Egan, “Jack Broughton,” in Boxiana, 1: 58–9. Egan, “THE BIG ONES!” 189. Egan, “Bill Nosworthy,” 2:74. Egan, “THE BIG ONES!” 189. Egan, “THE BIG ONES!” 189. Egan, “Tom Cribb,” 1:416. Emphasis in the original. Egan, “Doings and Sayings in the Prize Ring,” 298–9. Anthony Trollope, in a similarly charged manner, combines the homoerotic and the aesthetic in his 1868 British Sports and Pastimes. He describes the trainer as an artist shaping the male body: the coach is the “sculptor” who “finish his statue by touches imperceptible to vulgar eyes … the poet who knows that perfection of form is as necessary to the genuine vitality of his work as force and vigour of conception” (British Sports and Pastimes, 234). Maret, “Remarks on Training,” 314. Thom, “On Training,” 221. Aristotle, Politics, 231. On Aristotle and physical education, see Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, 102–32; and Anderson, Man’s Quest.

What Is Training? 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59

60 61 62

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Maret, “Remarks on Training,” 314. Maret, “Remarks on Training,” 315. Crochunis, “Captain Barclay’s Performance,” 255. Trollope, British Sports, 5. Trollope, British Sports, 234. Egan, “A Sketch of Newmarket Races by a German Prince,” in Egan’s Book of Sports, 128. Somers-Smith, “Athletic Training,” 11. Somers-Smith, “Athletic Training,” 11. Egan, “Doings and Sayings in the Prize Ring,” 205. Somers-Smith, “Athletic Training,” 4. Somers-Smith, “Athletic Training,” 4. Thom, “On Training,” 238. It is no accident that this more general and openly political aspect of training is linked, at least by some, to a narrative of decline. This is Dowling on the matter: “It is a consequence of the mode of life we now lead, that our health must be impaired; and the only remedy will be discovered by him who reads the principles of training” (“Indispensable Attributes,” 89). As a nation, we have become soft and unguarded (a little like Cribb was with Molineux) and are in need of training. Crochunis, “Captain Barclay’s Performance,” 255. Dowling, “Indispensable Attributes,” 88. Dowling, “Indispensable Attributes,” 88. Dowling goes on in this vein: “We do not want them to train rigidly like the boxer – their occupations would not permit it – but to imitate his mode of training as far as circumstances will allow. If they did, the doctor’s profession would be a poor one, and instead of every third house in our thoroughfares being a chemist’s shop, every second one would be a baker’s or butcher’s. Quack pills would not be manufactured by machines as thickly as shot in the Waterloo-bridge factory, and instead of British colleges of health (by ‘health’ understand ‘disease’), we should have colleges for all sorts of athletic games and exercises” (88). Title page to the Art of Manual Defense. “Of SPARRING,” 32–3. Two examples for training literature in the nineteenth century are Charles Westhall’s Modern Method of Training (1863) and Archibald MacLaren’s Training in Theory and Practice (1866).

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Coda

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Pilgrim, Pundit, Photographer, Spy: The Ambiguous Origins of Himalayan Mountaineering supriya chaudhuri

Northwards soared The stainless ramps of huge Himāla’s wall Ranged in white ranks against the blue – untrod Infinite, wonderful – whose uplands vast, And lifted universe of crest and crag, Shoulder and shelf, green slope and icy horn, Riven ravine, and splintered precipice Led climbing thought higher and higher, until It seemed to stand in heaven and speak with Gods. Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia, 18791

This pseudo-Miltonic effusion, produced in the late nineteenth century by the colonial civil servant, scholar, and mystic Sir Edwin Arnold in an epic poem on the life of the Buddha, was used as an epigraph to Kenneth Mason’s Abode of Snow (1955), one of the early classics of Himalayan mountaineering literature. Mason, who had been a Superintendent with the Survey of India, founded the Himalayan Journal in 1929, and became the first statutory Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford in 1932. He would not have missed the secondary meaning his textual appropriation gave to Arnold’s phrase “climbing thought.” In fact the passage, with its combination of topographical detail, subjective intensity, and mystical fervour, is in many ways characteristic of the combination of interests that drove “climbing thought” higher and higher up the Himalaya, though neither Arnold nor Mason were mountaineers. As a sporting discipline, mountaineering emerges relatively late (though perhaps not much later than the emergence of

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organized sport per se), establishing itself with the formation of the Alpine Club in 1857. Both in its emergence and in its modern practice it tests the definition of sport as such, and places the discipline, along with its major protagonists, at “the dangerous edge of things” where life and sport are equally in question.2 Despite the fact that the Himalaya was seen as the last frontier for the European sport mountaineer in the nineteenth century, there is no simple continuity from Alpine to Himalayan mountaineering. The latter has a problematic and uncertain history, almost as problematic as its status as a sport. In my title (“pilgrim, pundit, photographer, spy”), I first of all acknowledge the guises, or disguises, in which ascent of the Himalayan heights presented itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But at the end, I will also seek to question the category of sport and its distinction, if any, from life, in the practice of what the anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner calls “serious games.”3 In Europe, mountain climbing is linked to the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century cult of the sublime, as expressed in a muchquoted letter by John Dennis, written from Turin in 1688 after crossing the Alps. For Dennis this experience of “terrible Joy,” exceeded the limits of language: “It is impossible to set a Mountain before your eyes.”4 Views of mountains, and in some cases actual Alpine journeys, lie behind eighteenth-century theorizations of the sublime by writers such as Shaftesbury, Addison, and, more influentially, Burke and Kant: they are central to Wordsworth’s Prelude.5 Sport mountaineering, with its attendant risks and dangers, becomes popular from the late eighteenth century. Mont Blanc was summited in 1786 by Michel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, at the instance of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure who made the ascent himself in 1787. When Sir Alfred Wills ascended the Hasle Jungfrau peak of the Wetterhorn in 1854 (usually taken as a founding moment) he may have been the fourth person to have done so. Albert Smith’s Mont Blanc show ran at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for six years and over 2000 performances, after he had himself made the ascent in 1851 and published The Story of Mont Blanc in 1853; Smith was one of the founding members of the Alpine Club.6 The Himalayan Club was only formed some seventy years later, at Shimla on 6 October 1927 (amalgamated, on 14 December 1928, with the Mountain Club of India, formed at Calcutta on 23 September 1927), but the idea for such a club had been suggested to the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Frederick Drew and W.H. Johnson in 1866. In 1884 Douglas Freshfield was proposing the idea to the Alpine Journal, as a means to publish “Narratives

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of Science and Adventure” concerning the high Himalaya. When the Club was founded at last in 1927 (the name “The Alpine Club of India” was considered and dismissed), its members, all British, white, and male, noted that nine-tenths of those who visited the Himalaya did so for shikar (hunting) but sought to include “mountain climbing and ski-running” within the category of “sport” in their stated aims: “To encourage and assist Himalayan travel and exploration, and to extend knowledge of the Himalaya and adjoining mountain ranges through science, art, literature and sport.”7 Pilgrims The epistemological aim appears to sit uneasily with the sporting one, but is linked by the nature of colonial exploration, which superimposed its interests on regions “known” differently in pre-colonial periods. In its entirety, that is, including the adjoining ranges of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, the Himalaya is the highest mountain range on earth, not longer than the Andes but much higher, containing all fourteen of the world’s 8000 metre peaks, and thirty in excess of 25,000 feet. It is also the youngest, and it is rising by half a centimetre per year. For Hindus it is not simply the abode of snow but of the gods, and beginning from the mythical journey into the mountains of the five Pandava brothers and their wife Draupadi in the Mahāprasthānika Parva of the epic Mahābhārata, pilgrim routes have drawn believers to the ice-caves, glaciers, and lower peaks of the Himalaya. Of special sanctity, not just for Hindus but also for Buddhists and Jains, is Mount Kailash, a peak of relatively modest elevation (6,638 m) in the Transhimalaya in Tibet, a major pilgrimage site for followers of at least four religions, who carry out a demanding circumambulation of the mountain (preferably in a day) along a 52 km route beginning at 15,000 feet and going up to over 18,000 feet. Kailash is adjacent to two lakes, the sacred Manas Sarovar and the Rakshastal, and near the sources of the Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Karnali, a tributary of the Ganges. It has never been climbed, even the great Reinhold Messner refusing to make the attempt on account of its peculiar sanctity for Tibetans, though colonial explorers in the 1920s, R.C. Wilson and Hugh Ruttledge, planned an ascent they could not complete. Technically, even the third highest mountain on earth, Kangchenjunga (8,586 m), lying on the NepalSikkim border in the eastern Himalaya, and first ascended on 25 May 1955 by Joe Brown and George Band, has not been summited, since in

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deference to the beliefs of the Sikkimese, no climber is permitted to set foot on the peak. But the Himalaya is full of sacred sites, not only drawing pilgrims but producing an extensive pilgrim and travel literature in the north Indian vernaculars. In the eighth century CE the Adi Sankaracharya designated Badrinath, a small Vaishnava temple at an elevation of 3,100 m/10,170 feet in the Garhwal Himalaya, as one of the chārdhām, or four sites that form the holy axis of Hindu pilgrimage. Whether or not the existing temple, situated beside the Alakananda glacier between the Nar and Narayana mountain ranges, 9 km from Mt Nilkanth (6,596 m) and 62 km northwest of Nanda Devi (7,816 m) is at the legendary site mentioned in the Mahābhārata, pilgrims have been coming to Badrinath, and to the temple of Shiva at Kedarnath (3,583 m/11,755 ft), the site that precedes it on the Himalayan pilgrim route, for hundreds of years, originally making the arduous journey on foot from the plains. There is now a motorable road to Badrinath, and the volume of pilgrims has grown to over 600,000 in a single season. In June 2013, thousands of pilgrims at Kedarnath were killed in a landslide and flash floods triggered by torrential rains in Uttarakhand that washed virtually everything away, though the temple survived. This disaster and others like it bear witness to the environmental degradation of the Himalayan foothills as a result of tree-felling, dams, and the pilgrimage and tourism industries, the last including a form of “sport mountaineering.” The circle of very high mountains around Nanda Devi and the peak itself are protected under law as a sanctuary and national park, and the peak has been closed to climbers since 1983 (though there are other reasons for this). Vernacular pilgrim narratives describing journeys to Himalayan sites, including Kailash-Manas Sarovar, Gangotri-Gomukh, Jamunotri, Kedarnath, Badrinath, and Amarnath exist in many Indian languages but have rarely been considered part of mountaineering literature. In Bengali there are printed accounts by travellers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards, ranging from the semi-mystical to vividly detailed ethnographic records of local customs, beliefs, and myths, by such writers as Ramananda Bharati (1838–1900), Jadunath Sarbadhikari (1805–?), Jaladhar Sen (1860–1939), and Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay (1902–92). Some of these pilgrims made arduous ascents and traversed difficult passes, though detailed evidence is usually lacking. At some point these narratives overlap with secular travel writing, of which the most encyclopedic author is probably the twentieth-century

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polymath Rahul Sankrityayan, who travelled extensively in Nepal and Tibet. The pilgrim is the most enduring but least recognized figure in mountain writing considered from a European perspective, however ubiquitous he or she may be in vernacular perceptions of the Himalaya. It may also be worth remembering here that the first European map of the Himalaya was drawn in 1590 by the Spanish Jesuit Antonio Monserrate, envoy to the court of Akbar, and that in 1624 Antonio de Andrade and Manuel Marques travelled from Agra with a group of Hindu pilgrims to Badrinath and succeeded in reaching Tsaparang in Tibet, returning there the following year with other Jesuit missionaries to set up a mission that survived until 1640. So it would be a mistake to discount a religious motive even for Europeans, though the Jesuits were not pilgrims, but rather looking for lost Christians in a fabled mountain kingdom. Pundits, Photographers, Spies I will turn next to the pundits, who as any reader of Himalayan mountain literature knows, were Indian surveyors trained for the task of mapping the mountains by British officials of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, commenced by Sir William Lambton in 1818 and christened as such by Warren Hastings. Required to survey in regions largely beyond British control – Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim, Tibet – the pundits were also in effect spies, and even their surveying tasks had to be accomplished covertly, by using rosary beads to count off their paces, and carrying minimal equipment such as that listed by Sarat Chandra Das: (1) one pocket sextant (2) one prismatic compass (3) two hypsometers, one thermometer (4) one field-glass.8 Thomas George Montgomerie of the Royal Engineers, who had first proposed the idea of using “natives” for surveying and spying simultaneously, had successfully dispatched the “Munshee,” Mohamed-i-Hameed, with similar implements, arguing that “if a sharp enough man could be found he would have no difficulty in carrying a few instruments amongst his merchandize, and with their aid … good service might be rendered to geography.”9 In fact, the first secret missions to Himalayan kingdoms – such as those of George Bogle, assisted by Purangir Gosain, to Tibet in the mideighteenth century, and of Rammohun Ray and Krishna Kanta Basu to Bhutan in the early nineteenth – precede the era of pundit expeditions, but they demonstrated the value of using native emissaries. Montgomerie’s suggestion to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in a letter dated 21 July

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1862, was approved by the Government of India, and the “Munshee,” his first trainee, set out on 12 June 1863 from Kashmir to Leh, capital of Ladakh, and from there to Yarkand in Chinese Turkestan, to gather topographical and military intelligence. Unfortunately, Hameed died on the return journey, but Montgomerie received his notes and instruments, and reported on his findings to the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1866.10 He also engaged the cousins Nain Singh (Pundit, or Pundit No. 1), Mani Singh, Kalian Singh (GK), and Kishen Singh (AK), among the first of around twenty native pundits in the pay of the Survey of India. Nain Singh crossed the Himalaya from Kathmandu in 1865 and reached Lhasa; two years later he and Kalian Singh crossed the Man Pass from Badrinath and undertook the first systematic survey of western Tibet. The most famous of the pundits – both for his scholarship and his literary productions – was the Bengali Sarat Chandra Das (SCD), but from the mountaineering point of view the most impressive feats were those of Hari Ram (No. 9) who made the first known circuit of the Everest group, traversed Nepal from west to east as far as the Kali Gandaki between the Dhaulagiri and Annapurna massifs, led an expedition up the Dudh Kosi to Solu Khumbu, and reached Tibet by the Nangpa La, between Cho Oyu and Gaurishankar. In 1892–3 Hari Ram visited Tibet again, and this was the last pundit journey before political tensions in the region were exacerbated out of all measure by Sir Francis Younghusband’s ill-advised invasion of Tibet in 1904, where he massacred more than 700 Tibetans and effectively pushed Tibet into the hands of China. Prior to this, in 1885–6, Younghusband, not a professed mountaineer, had made an amazing crossing of the Muztagh Pass with his Balti guide Wali. The great age of pundit exploration was roughly between 1860 and 1890, and ever since Kipling created the immortal Hurree Babu in Kim (modelled on Sarat Chandra Das) they have become legendary, almost romantic figures, heroes of the Great Game.11 Michael Ward, a doctor who took part in the Everest expeditions of 1951 and 1953, claimed to have taught himself the pundit surveying techniques while at school and applied them on his own journeys in Bhutan, so that he was called “the last Pundit.”12 Sarat Chandra Das undertook two secret missions to Tibet in 1879 and 1881 with the Tibetan-Sikkimese monk Ugyen Gyatso (UG), crossing by the difficult Cha-thang-la pass, at an altitude of 20,000 feet. On his first visit he spent days conversing with the revered Sengchen Lama, teaching him Hindi and Sanskrit, learning Tibetan in return, training him in the techniques of wet-plate

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collodion process photography, and translating a photographic text (Gaston Tassindier’s 1878 manual) for him.13 In 1882 he travelled again as far as Lhasa, but rumours that he was a spy had begun to circulate, his informant the Sengchen Lama was later arrested, imprisoned, flogged, and drowned in the Tsangpo River (in June 1887), and British intelligence gathering in Tibet was exposed. Das’s writings were embargoed for twenty years while Das retired to Darjeeling, where he worked on his Anglo-Tibetan dictionary and other scholarly works. Not until the late 1890s were Das’s travel accounts released from “confidential” status in the government archives. Both narratives, from 1879 and 1882 (the latter not published until 1902), contain fascinating cultural material as well as detailed, sometimes poetic accounts of the journey: The roar of the cataract deafened me for nearly two hours. The stupendous scenery of the peak from which it issues, the irregular disposition of the rocks through which it cuts its way, the immense height from which it falls, combine to make it one of the most sublime spectacles in the Himalayas.14

Das reportedly took a camera to Tashilhunpo, and his friend the Lama ordered a lithographic press before the second visit.15 Clare Harris, however, doubts the authenticity of the ethnographic photographs illustrating A Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet, and argues that they were manufactured later in Darjeeling, revealing a complex relation between “espionage, publishing, and photographic dissembling.”16 Whatever the merits of Harris’s argument, there can be no doubt that Das’s photographic activities were primarily related to his interests in ethnography and documentation. By contrast, a new vogue of Himalayan photography, repeatedly evoking the sublime, had been established by the British photographer Samuel Bourne’s journeys in the Himalaya in the 1860s, described in essays sent to the British Journal of Photography between 1 July 1863 and 1 April 1870. In drawing on the Himalayan sublime, rather than the picturesque, Bourne was directly continuing the tradition established by Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Himalayan Journals, which had evoked Turner and Ruskin in their appreciation of mountain gloom and glory. Bourne’s views, created by immense human labour, anticipate the work of Himalayan travellers like Kurt Boeck, the German photographer who produced a journal in the 1890s. Crossing into Spiti, Bourne cites the Alpine Club journal, Peaks, Passes and Glaciers, but asserts that the Himalaya exceeds anything within

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European experience, that the mind fails “to comprehend the whole in one grand conception”: It was impossible to gaze on this tumultuous sea of mountains without being deeply attached with their terrible majesty and awful grandeur, without an elevation of the soul’s capacities, and without a silent uplifting of the heart to Him who formed such stupendous works, and whose eye alone has scanned the dead depths of their sunless recesses … it must be to the credit of Photography that it teaches the mind to see the beauty and power of such scenes as these … Everything wore an air of the wildest solitude and the most profound desolation, and while I looked on it, I almost shuddered with awe at the terrific dreariness of the scene … I was anxious, if possible, to try a picture.17

Despite these evidences of lofty feeling, Bourne was the worst type of colonial traveller, embarking on his journey in a litter with six servants and forty-two porters carrying heavy loads under abominable conditions, and beating them mercilessly when they refused to go on: I plainly told them that their excuses were idle and vain … But they were very resolute and stubborn and declared they would not go while 2 or 3 of them showed a disposition to bolt. On seeing this I took a handy stick and layed it smartly about the shoulders of several of them till they lay whining on the ground. I gave them little time for this luxury, but made them buckle to their tasks in double quick time. This bit of seasonable sovereignty had a good effect, as I never afterwards had the least trouble with these men, they stuck to me through heat and cold, climbing the highest and most difficult passes, and carrying their loads bravely over glaciers and places so difficult and dangerous that I, empty-handed, only passed with fear and trembling.18

Bourne’s highest achievement was the crossing of the Manirung Pass, 18,600 feet above sea level, at which point he shows some sympathy for his starved and ill-shod porters, unfed for three days. Subsequently, he began to ascend the Neela Pass, feeling intimations of the sublime while his porters were close to revolt and supplies late in coming. “How small and frail a thing seemed man when placed in juxtaposition with these mighty mountains!” he reflected, as he stood on

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the crest of the Pass, “deeply impressed with the sublimity and majesty of nature when beheld in scenes like these.”19 Fortunately, Bourne was not arrested as a spy (something that happened to Hooker and his companions, in revenge for which the British annexed lower Sikkim), but his journeys overlapped with a still active culture of espionage in the Himalaya, which continues to be a hotbed of surveillance activity. Not only did the CIA plant a nuclear device at the top of Nanda Devi in the 1960s, which was subsequently lost and may therefore be a source of active radiation (one reason why the peak was closed in the late 1960s and 1970s), but Sydney Wignall has described his experiences in a Chinese prison while in the employ of the Indian secret service.20 What have these forms of activity in the high Himalaya to do with mountaineering? The alpinist Douglas Freshfield, one of the founders of the Himalayan Club, included an appendix of pundit narratives in the account of his circuit of Mt Kangchenjunga, acknowledging that “these brave and intelligent men” were – after Sir Joseph Hooker – his predecessors in those regions, and that “as regards mountains and mountaineering I regard the stories of the Pundits’ adventures as essentially ‘true tales’ – from their point of view.” But he was disappointed with his own tour: “in the technical Alpine sense we had far too little mountaineering for my taste. Rope and ice-axe played but a very subordinate part in our journey.”21 Freshfield’s discontent points to an unresolved problem within the history of Himalayan mountaineering, only partly addressed by the distinction between “expedition mountaineering” and “alpine style.” The nature, difficulty, and extent of the Himalayan terrain resist the extraction of “pure” alpinism for consideration as a sport within the history of exploration and climbing. Early ascents made “expedition-style” (large parties, heavy loads, many camps, hired porters, and fixed lines) share some motives and even some techniques with alpinism – in particular, the desire to summit a difficult peak, and the pursuit of climbing as a “leisure” activity. Many who made such ascents are mountaineering legends, no less than modern alpinists who climb solo and do not use porters, supplemental oxygen, or fixed lines. The mountains have not changed, but mountaineering has, and one reason for my interest in origins is that we are not always talking about the same thing, just as sport is not the same activity over time. The relatively late development of sport mountaineering in India has to be set against the numbers who, from the earliest periods, climbed

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mountains for reasons other than leisure. As Kenneth Mason noted, the unnamed khalasi or bearer engaged by the Survey of India on a salary of six rupees a month, who in 1860 fixed a signal pole on the summit of Shilla (23,050 ft), may hold a climbing record.22 Our need to distinguish sport from work is complicated by the similarity of feats achieved by working Sherpas and sporting alpinists, especially while mountaineering remains obsessed with summits and records. This is a special problem in the Himalaya. Work and Play, Sport and Life Himalayan mountaineering commands an extensive textual and visual archive, and my purpose here is not to summarize that history, but to frame some questions about sport itself. Western mountaineers repeatedly express surprise that Sherpas – a small community of Tibetan origin resident in the Solu Khumbu valley in Nepal – did not climb mountains despite their native ability to do so, and Indians are often defensive about the relatively late beginnings of sport and amateur civilian mountaineering in India. Early in the twentieth century, Francis Younghusband attributed this to a lack of spirit: So there, right at the spot, must be dozens of men who could, as far as bodily fitness goes, reach the summit of Everest any year they liked. Yet the fact remains that they don’t. They have not even the desire to. They have not the spirit.23

This notion of “spirit” is, of course, extremely dubious. Most Sherpas interviewed by Sherry Ortner saw no logic in mountaineering: they worked for wages, although they were capable of extraordinary feats of heroism and self-sacrifice as part of an expedition or ascent team.24 An early exception was Tenzing Norgay, personally drawn to the thrill of the ascent, and there is today in Nepal, Pakistan, and India, a small but dedicated and highly skilled community of sport climbers, both men and women, who have made remarkable ascents. Equally, mountaineering is both a leisure industry and an extremely dangerous profession in the Himalaya. Most at risk, not only from climbing accidents but through repeated exposure to the debilitating effects of high altitude in the course of the guiding, portering, and search and rescue tasks they are hired to perform, are Sherpas, and to a lesser extent, Tamang and Balti porters. Even their fabled endurance, as studied by A.M. Kellas

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in the first decades of the twentieth century, is tested to the limit in the “death zone” above 7500 metres.25 Eric Shipton wrote in his diary in 1938: “a climber on the upper part of Everest is like a sick man climbing in a dream.”26 Still, the problems of high altitude were insufficiently understood right through the first period of Himalayan mountaineering. Alfred Mummery, whose death with two Gurkha companions, Raghubir and Guman Singh, in an attempted ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1895, was the first recorded climbing tragedy in the Himalaya, wrote to his wife in a letter dated 10 July, “as for climbing difficulties, there are no serious ones to encounter, and though the rarity of the air may bother us, it can’t hurt us in any way.”27 On 9 August he is still regretting that “of mountaineering, as we know it in the Alps, there is little or none.” Yet in his last (undated) letter he has realized that “the air affects us when we get beyond 18,000 ft.”28 Nanga Parbat claimed thirty-one lives before it was climbed in 1953 by the Austrian Hermann Buhl. C.G. Bruce, who wrote an account of Mummery’s last expedition in the Himalayan Journal of 1931, quoted his companion J. Norman Collie: The pitiless mountains have claimed him and among the snow-laden glaciers of the mighty hills he rests; the curves of the wind-moulded cornice, the delicate undulations of the fissured snow cover him, while the grim precipice and the great brown rocks, bending down into an immeasurable space, and the snow peaks he loved so well keep and guard and watch over the spot where he lies.29

Ironically, Mummery’s death marks the beginning of sport mountaineering in the Himalaya (though some point to William Martin Conway’s proposal of a Kangchenjunga ascent in 1891, or the mid-century attempts of the Schlagintweit brothers). It also marks the close of a period that I have attempted to sketch in my Le Carre-ish title, when interests in the Himalaya were complicated by so many contending factors that pure alpinism seemed only a distant possibility. As Collie’s tribute suggests, a philosophy of mountaineering, as a way of life – and death – is being evoked through Mummery here. From the expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s to the first successful ascent of an 8000+ peak, Annapurna, by Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal in 1950, without supplemental oxygen and at the first attempt – there was an extraordinary growth in Himalayan mountaineering, and a corresponding growth of remarkable writing about it, as well as

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exceptional mountain photography. Not only do sport mountaineers tend to be educated persons who write well, their sport requires representation and memorialization because it is, of its nature, solitary and lacking spectators. The early expeditions, even those which did not use supplemental oxygen (to which Bill Tilman was bitterly opposed) were huge affairs supported by armies of porters that ferried equipment and supplies up a succession of camps. The 1953 Everest expedition under John Hunt was organized like a military campaign, Eric Shipton excluding himself by his comment on 28 July 1952: “My well-known dislike of large expeditions and my abhorrence of a competitive element in mountaineering might well seem out of place in the present situation.”30 That situation, though it may have favoured triumphs like that of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, changed fairly rapidly. The greatest modern mountaineers climb alpine style, making very fast ascents without oxygen, but their practice cannot be called non-competitive. Not only is there a race to the summit in terms of times, routes, and conditions, but mountaineers are also prone to challenging themselves, and to speaking in terms of self-proving, or of self-discovery in extreme situations. More than most sports, mountaineering requires very high levels of mental and physical skill and dedication, its personal dangers rewarded by deep though lonely satisfactions. At the same time, climbers are divided not just over goals but over methods: Cesare Maestri’s driving of some 400 bolts into the Cerro Torre in 1970 prompted Reinhold Messner’s essay on mountaineering ethics, “The Murder of the Impossible,”asking rhetorically, “Who has polluted the pure spring of mountaineering?” While Messner, himself perhaps the greatest of all modern climbers, acknowledged that people climbed to be free from rules, to expect the unpredictable, that “we young people don’t want a mountaineering code,” he felt that acts like Maestri’s might lead to rules being imposed: as they were, with Messner’s support, by the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (UIAA). For himself, he declared, he was “ready for anything – even for retreat, if I meet the impossible.”31 Modern sport, of course, thrives on competition, and much sporting practice would be unintelligible without it. Mountaineering does not sit well with rule-bound competition, though it is worth remembering that Baron Pierre de Coubertin wanted it to be an Olympic sport, that there was intense international rivalry over ascents, and that rock-climbing figures in the 2020 Olympics. Doug Scott, discussing

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the debate over awards, defends the institution of the Piolets d’Or, reconstituted in 2009 to recognize exceptional climbers. At the same time he cites Wojciech (Voytek) Kurtyka’s refusal of an invitation to be on the jury: The world is suspended on a monstrous structure of wild competition and consequently of award and distinction … this structure is an enemy of true art … where award and distinction rules the true art ends … Taking part in the game of award and distinction is dangerous for the climber … I cannot accept your offer.32

Kurtyka himself, in his essay “The Art of Suffering” speaks of pure “near-naked” assaults, as quick and high as possible, and of the mystical and creative aspects of mountaineering, not just technique and skill. He mentions Bill Tilman, Naomi Uemura, and Gary Hemming as others to whom alpinism was an art. For Kurtyka, it was “impossible to cram mountaineering into a sport framework.”33 Yet we should note that in 2016, Kurtyka was honoured with the Piolet d’Or Carrière, barely two months after the climbing death of Kei Taniguchi, the first woman recipient. The point is not the award as such, or the purism of those to whom climbing is an art rather than a sport. Mountaineers tend to be enigmatic, often difficult personalities, living by what has been called a “philosophy of risk,” dying young, and prone to testing not just physical but ethical limits (at what stage does one turn back? Does one stop to rescue others? What equipment can one carry?). Ethics in high places entail the acceptance of risk as well as the duty of care.34 Yet, placed in boundary situations between imminence and immanence, where extreme danger is complemented – for some – by a near-spiritual aesthetic experience, climbers are reluctant to systematize their practice as sport. In fact, despite the immersion of the climber in the intensely practical and immediate necessities of the climb, there is a persistence of the sublime in the ethos of mountaineering (and in mountaineering literature and photography), surviving commercialization and banalization.35 Explaining her idea of “serious games,” Sherry Ortner argues that people “do not simply enact either material necessity or cultural scripts but live life with often intense purpose and intention … history constructs both people and the games they play and people make history by enacting, reproducing and transforming those games. Himalayan climbing is both a dream and a practice.”36 In another essay, she uses

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Geertz’s notion of deep play, borrowed from the gambling culture of the eighteenth century, to characterize Himalayan mountaineering: Geertz had borrowed the idea of deep play from Jeremy Bentham, who used it to think about games in which the stakes are so high that it does not appear worthwhile to play the game – yet people play anyway. Geertz’s point is that people engage in certain forms of deep play all the time, not because they fail to recognize the poor odds or the nonutility of the game, but because such play pays off in terms of the production of meaning, of insight into important dimensions of life and experience.37

Elsewhere, Ortner suggests that this risk-taking, this desire to produce meaning in absolute terms, has something to do with the nature of modernity, with boredom, and with mountaineering as a way of “dropping out of the continuity of life,” as Georg Simmel puts it.38 There is a close link between “the modern” and the emergence of sport as a category, a point made by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu about organized sports in a “public school” culture as well as for large-scale spectator sports.39 Mountaineering does not appear to fit these categories, yet there can be no doubt that it emerged during the period of social and economic reorganization that we call modernity, and can be seen as a by-product of capitalism’s investment in leisure time, its alienation of the workforce, and its consequences in isolation, boredom, and the impulse to escape. In fact Himalayan mountaineering, with its ethos of risk-taking, hubris, and hapticity, cast an unmistakable shadow upon modernist literary culture in the 1930s and 1940s, a shadow that darkens W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s play The Ascent of F6 (1936), dedicated to Auden’s brother the mountaineer and geologist John Bicknell Auden, after whom a Himalayan col is named. Yet as we all know, Everest today is like a tourist spot where inexperienced climbers are taken up on fixed ropes by guides if they can afford to pay the high charges. Bitter disputes regarding decisions by guides and failure to help climbers in trouble surround climbing disasters like the Everest tragedy of May 1996, when eleven persons died on the mountain over two days.40 What defines such activity as sport? Leisure, personal aspiration, and the call of the mountains are undoubtedly involved, together with work for guides and porters, many of whom are exposed to extreme risk. In the total Himalayan context, we cannot isolate alpine style climbing as “pure” sport, contrasted to expedition or tourist climbing (recreation), and we must always be mindful of the insistence of great

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alpinists such as Messner and Kurtyka on the “art” – not sport – of the mountaineer. That art, however solitary and intense, cannot afford to neglect the larger context within which it operates, and it is important to remember this even as we celebrate Ueli Steck’s Annapurna south-face solo (undocumented, 2013), or Simone Moro, Alex Txikon, and Muhammad Ali Sadpara’s winter ascent of Nanga Parbat, with Tamara Lunger turning back 70 metres from the summit, in February 2016. The most recent Everest climbing tragedy took place on 18 April 2014, when sixteen Nepalese guides fixing ropes on the South Col route died in an avalanche on the Khumbu Icefall. The avalanche was triggered by a serac falling from an ice bulge on Mount Everest’s western shoulder, a notorious hazard that had worried mountaineers for years, to the extent that Russell Brice pulled out his company Himalayan Experience’s guided tour in 2012. The latest deaths drew attention once more to the fact that the majority of deaths in the Himalayan ranges are of Sherpa, Tamang, or Balti guides and porters, men who are driven by their profession to take extreme risks and to compromise their health by repeated ascents to the highest altitudes while carrying heavy loads. In the context of the April tragedy, Sherpa guides renewed negotiations with the Nepal government for better insurance coverage and higher compensation, while Western commentators veered between expressions of support for the community and bitter critique of the long-standing practices of Himalayan mountaineering. For on the one hand mountaineering as a Himalayan “sport” provides means of livelihood to impoverished mountain communities and revenue to the developing Nepalese economy, while on the other hand, it is not only a high-risk occupation for sport climbers, it exposes whole groups of support staff, who are not necessarily in it for “sport,” to danger and death.41 Relations between pure alpine style extreme climbers and working Sherpas have on occasion been hostile: in early 2013, Simone Moro, Ueli Steck, and Jonathan Griffiths were assaulted by Sherpa guides on Everest in an altercation over fixing ropes. They were saved by the American climber Melissa Arnot, and attracted criticism for their reportedly arrogant behaviour towards a community who can justifiably assert their own claim to the mountains.42 Himalayan mountaineering carries what we might call the burden of its past: its origin in the training-fields and playgrounds of empire, and its struggle to push at the limits of the human in conditions of extreme height and extreme cold. It therefore also pushes at the boundary that we seek to erect between sport and work, and puts

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the two not only in close proximity but in a relation of uncomfortable dependence. Without working Sherpas, there would be no history of Himalayan ascents, and this is true even though the great soloists of modern climbing like Messner, Steck, or Moro appear to disdain team support and do not use fixed ropes. One might say that the same is true to a greater or lesser degree for all modern sports, which are increasingly dependent on armies of coaches and trainers or machines (as in Formula One racing). Yet mountaineering confuses the categories of sport and non-sport (or work) to an extent that might be thought unacceptable in other arenas, exposing workers and sportspersons to the same risks, yet claiming an unprovable privilege for sport. It is for this reason that we must remind ourselves that sport itself rests upon an unverifiable claim of autonomy and privilege, one that is, like all such claims, not “natural” or self-sustaining, but intertwined with other historical sources of power.

NOTES My thanks to Siddhartha Chaudhuri for comments and suggested reading. 1 Arnold, The Light of Asia, 42–3. 2 Browning’s phrase, in his poem “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” The Complete Works, 307, line 395. 3 Ortner, Making Gender, 129–30. 4 Dennis, “Letter,” 2:380–2. Cf. the classic Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 184–224 on Thomas Burnet, and 276–89 on Dennis and the aesthetics of the sublime. On Victorian devaluations, see Ann C. Colley, Victorians in the Mountains. 5 See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 148; Kant, Observations, 46–7; and Wordsworth, The Prelude, XIII:40–76; VI:524–75. 6 On mountaineering as spectacle, see Ann C. Colley, Victorians in the Mountains, 57–100. 7 See Corbett, “The Founding,” in The Himalayan Journal 1, no. 1 (1929): 1–3. Women too posted accounts of shikar in the Himalaya; see Lethbridge, “A Journey,” 77–81. 8 Das, “Equipments, etc., for the Journey,” 310. 9 Montgomerie, “On the Geographical Position of Yarkund,” 157. The instruments carried by his “Munshee” were “1 Pocket sextant, 1 Dark glass artificial horizon, 1 Prismatic compass, 1 Pocket compass, 2 Thermometers, 2

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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Plain silver watches, 1 Copper jug and oil lamp for boiling the thermometers, 1 Small tin lantern for reading off the sextant at night, 2 Books for recording; spare paper, &c. &c” (158). See Montgomerie, “On the Geographical Position of Yarkund.” For one account of the pundits, see Raj, “When Human Travellers Become Instruments,” 156–88. Kipling, Kim, 353–4. See Sale, Mapping the Himalayas, 10. Das, Narrative of a Journey to Tashilhunpo, 23. Das, Narrative of a Journey to Tashilhunpo, 10. Das, Narrative of a Journey to Tashilhunpo, 1. See also Das, A Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet, 105. Harris, The Museum on the Roof of the World, 97. Samuel Bourne, “Ten Weeks with a Camera in the Himalayas,” 19–20. Samuel Bourne, “A Photographic Journey,” 71. Samuel Bourne, “A Photographic Journey, 93. See Wignall, Spy on the Roof of the World. Freshfield, Round Kangchenjunga, ix. Mason, Abode of Snow, 75. Younghusband, Preface to The Fight for Everest, 5. Ortner, Life and Death, 41–2. See Wyss-Dunant, “Acclimatisation,” 110–17. Quoted in Ortner, Life and Death, 65. Mummery, My Climbs, 24. Mummery, My Climbs, 32–3. J. Norman Collie, Climbing in the Himalayas, quoted in Bruce, “The Passing of Mummery,” Himalayan Journal 3 (1931), accessed 20 July 2016, https:// www.himalayanclub.org/hj/03/1/the-passing-of-mummery/. Quoted in Thompson, Unjustifiable Risk? 250. Messner, “The Murder of the Impossible.” See also “Mountain Ethics Declaration”; and “To Bolt or Not To Bolt?” Kurtyka quoted in Doug Scott, “Ego Trips.” Kurtyka, “The Art of Suffering,” 369. See “Mountain Ethics Declaration”; Connor, Dougal Haston; and Dhar, “The Unaccommodated.” On banalization, see Colley, Victorians in the Mountains. Ortner, Life and Death, 23–4. Ortner, “Thick Resistance,” 139. Ortner, Life and Death, 36. On Victorian risk-takers, see Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk, 99–131. See Bourdieu, “How can one be a Sportsman?” 119.

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40 See Krakauer, Into Thin Air, 251–4, 307–33; Boukreev, with DeWalt, The Climb; and Singh, Everest; Veale, “Word for Word/After Everest.” 41 See Schaffer, “The Disposable Man.” 42 Adhikari, “The Everest Brawl.”

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Contributors

Simon Bainbridge is Professor of Romantic Studies in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, where he is Co-director of the Wordsworth Centre. His research focuses on British literature of the Romantic period, especially in relation to its political context. He is the author of the monographs Napoleon and British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has edited Romanticism: A Sourcebook (Palgrave, 2008) and Wordsworth, War and Waterloo (The Wordsworth Trust, 2015) and has published numerous essays on Romanticism. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Romanticism and Mountaineering: The Literary Cultures of Climbing, 1760–1837. Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor of English (Emerita) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has worked on European Renaissance literature, cultural history, modernism, narrative, cinema, translation, critical theory and sport, and published widely in these fields. Recent publications include the co-edited Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (Routledge, in press), Fields of Play: Sport, Literature and Culture (Orient Blackswan, 2015) Sport, Literature, Society: Cultural Historical Studies (Routledge, 2013), and Petrarch: The Self and the World (Jadavpur University Press, 2012). She has contributed chapters to A Companion to Virginia Woolf (Blackwell, 2016); Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2015), A History of the Indian Novel in English (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Renaissance Shakespeare/ Shakespeare Renaissances (University of Delaware Press, 2014).

348

Contributors

Ashley L. Cohen is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. Her research on British imperialism and the British class system has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Comparative Literature. She is also the editor of Lady Nugent's East India Journal (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is currently completing a book manuscript that explores the convergence of the East and West Indies in the worldview of late Georgian Britons. Sarah R. Cohen is Professor of Art History and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. In addition to a book, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge University Press, 2000), she has published widely on the body – both human and non-human – in early modern European art and culture. A second book, Picturing the Animal in Early Modern Europe: Art and Soul, is forthcoming. Frans De Bruyn is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form (Oxford University Press, 1996) and co-editor (with Shaun Regan) of The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (University of Toronto Press, 2014). He is the author of numerous publications on a variety of subjects in eighteenth-century studies, including the cultural impact of the South Sea bubble, the reception and influence in Britain of Don Quixote and Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. His contribution to this volume forms part of a larger research project on georgic writing in the long eighteenth century. Philip Dine is Personal Professor and Head of French at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the author of Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954–1992 (Clarendon Press, 1994) and has published widely on representations of the French colonial empire, including particularly decolonization, in fields ranging from children’s literature to professional sport. Other published research includes French Rugby Football: A Cultural History (Berg, 2001) and Sport and Identity in France: Practices, Locations, Representations (Peter Lang, 2012), as part of a broader reflection on leisure and popular culture in France. He was the joint editor, with Seán Crosson, of Sport, Representation and Evolving Identities in Europe (Peter Lang, 2010), as

Contributors 349

part of a continuing investigation of the role of sport in the project of European construction. Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon is senior lecturer in English at the Université Paris VIII-Saint-Denis. Her current research focuses on eighteenthcentury British literature and on the use of literary forms in scientific discourse, with an emphasis on medical treatises. She has written on early modern medicine, in particular on Bernard Mandeville, whose Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passion she has edited and translated in French (Ellug, 2012). She has also prepared the English annotated edition of the same text that will be published later this year by Springer. Ourida Mostefai is Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is the author of Le Citoyen de Genève et la République des Lettres: étude de la controverse autour de la “Lettre à d’Alembert” de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Peter Lang, 2003) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique (Rodopi Brill, 2016). She has edited Lectures de “la Nouvelle Héloïse”/Reading “la Nouvelle Héloïse” (Pensée libre, 1993) and co-edited Approaches to Teaching Rousseau’s “Confessions” and “Rêveries,” (Modern Language Association Publications, 2003) and Rousseau and l’Infâme: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Rodopi, 2009). She currently serves as the President of the Rousseau Association. Richard Nash is Professor of British Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century in the Department of English at the Indiana University-Bloomington with a special interest in literature and science, concentrating on the Restoration and early eighteenth century. His award-winning book, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Virginia 2003), was on the figure of the Wild Man in eighteenth-century England. His current project focuses on the origins of the thoroughbred racehorse and what it means to invent an animal. In both projects he explores nature/ culture hybridity and the origins of modernity. Emerging from this recent project has been both an increasing interest in the mediating work of early modern georgic in the context of AgriCultural Studies, and the ways in which Karen Barad’s agential realism may offer theoretical tools for re-situating a “non-Modern” historical reconsideration of modernity.

350

Contributors

Daniel O’Quinn is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (University of Johns Hopkins Press, 2011) and Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (University of Johns Hopkins Press, 2005). He also co-edited the Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 (2007) with Jane Moody. Georgian Theatre in an Information Age, co-edited with Gillian Russell, was published in a special double issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction in August 2015. In addition to this work on the theatre he has been editing a number of eighteenth-century travel narratives. Gorgias Press brought out Lady Craven’s Travels through the Crimea to Constantinople in 2007 and his edition of the Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan was published by Broadview Press in 2008. A new edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, co-edited with Teresa Heffernan, was published by Broadview in the fall of 2012. His new monograph, Vexed Mediations: Engaging the Ottoman Empire, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Alexander Regier is Associate Professor of English at Rice University and editor of the scholarly journal SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. He is the author of Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the co-editor of Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience (Palgrave, 2010); he has edited special journal issues on “Mobilities” and “Genealogies.” His articles on rhetoric, William Wordsworth, William Blake, Johann Georg Hamann, Walter Benjamin, ruins, utopianism, contemporary poetry, the aesthetics of sport, and other topics have appeared in Forum for Modern Language Studies, European Romantic Review, Germanic Review, Sport in History, and elsewhere. Alexis Tadié is Professor of English Literature at the University of ParisSorbonne and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. He has published on the eighteenth-century novel, as well as on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy. His most recent book is Francis Bacon (Classiques Garnier, 2014). He has also published a number of essays on literature and sport and has coedited with J.A. Mangan and Supriya Chaudhuri Sport, Literature, Society (Routledge, 2012). He has edited in French novels by Swift, Sterne, Conrad, and Kipling.

Contributors 351

Laurent Turcot is Professor of History at l’Université du Québec à TroisRivières (Canada). He holds the Canada Research Chair in History of Leisure and Entertainment. He studies social and cultural history in early modern France, Britain, and Canada. He is the author of Le promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Gallimard, 2007), L’ordinaire parisien des Lumières (Hermann, 2010) and recently: Sports et Loisirs. Une histoire des origins à nos jours (Gallimard, 2016). John Whale is the author of books on Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and imagination in the period 1789–1832, the editor of collections of essays on Edmund Burke and Romanticism, and a contributor to The Works of Thomas De Quincey. He is currently working on the culture of pugilism in the long eighteenth century and on Georgian Liverpool. He is also a poet with two published collections from Carcanet: Waterloo Teeth (2010) and Frieze (2013).

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Index

Abd el-Kader, Emir, 147–53, 156 Abdessemed, Adel, 12 Account of the Pleasure Tours in Scotland, An, 212 Addison, Joseph, 64, 298; “An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” 23, 33 Adi Sankaracharya, 300 Agassi, André, 7, 17n13 Aikin, Arthur, 204 Akbar, Emperor, 301 Alakananda glacier, 300 Alfonso II, Duke, 225 Algeria, 15 Ali, Muhammad, 8 Alken, Henry Thomas, 139 Alpine Club, 298–9, 303 Alpine Journal, The, 298 Amarnath, 300 American War, 74, 88n54 Ancaster, Duke of, 93–5, 97, 100, 106, 108, 111 Andersen, Hans Christian, 151 Andrade, Antonio de, 301 Andry de Boisregard, Nicolas, 232, 256 Angelo, Domenico, 66–85 Angelo, Henry, 68, 72–4, 76, 78, 82, 84; L’Ecole Des Armes, 69–72, 79

angling, 26–33, 40; angling poetry, 25–33; theme of representation in, 28–33 Annapurna, 302, 307, 311 Antoniano, Silvio, 220 archery, 85, 87n34 aristocracy, 67–9, 73–5, 77–82, 85, 116, 122, 144, 150, 231; and martial masculinity, 66, 69, 74, 80; and vice, 66–7, 85. See also peerage Aristotle, 221, 227, 237, 285–6; Politics, 285–6 Arnaud, Sabine, 245 Arnold, Sir Edwin, 297 Arnott, Melissa, 311 Art of Manual Defence, 273, 274, 288–9 arts, analogy of the, 24, 31–2, 38–9 Asclepiades, 256 Ashe, Arthur, 7, 17nn10, 11 Ashe, Elizabeth, 109 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 301 Auden, John Bicknell, 310 Auden, W.H., The Ascent of F.6, 310 Audran, Claude III, 122–3, 133n37 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 141 Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’, 123

354

Index

Aumale, Henri d’Orléans, Duke of, 149, 152 autarkeia, 166 Bach, Johann Christian, 75 Baci, Andrea, 223 Bacon, Francis, 252 Badcock, John (alias Bio-Dev, John Bee, John Hinds, Jon Bee), 9, 11, 15, 179–95; Domestic Amusements, 185, 191; Fancy-ana, 183; The Fancy; or True Sportman’s Guide, 186, 188–9, 191; Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, The Chase, The Pit, of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life, 184; Sportman’s Slang, 181 Badrinath, 300 Baillet de Saint-Julien, LouisGuillaume, 129–30 Baines, Edward, 206 ballet, 66, 70–1, 74, 76–8, 86n24 Ballexserd, Jacques, 233 Balmat, Jacques, 298 Balti, 302, 306, 311 Band, George, 299 Bannister, John, 75 Barclay Allardice, Robert “Captain,” 264–8, 271n55, 276–80, 286, 290, 292n21 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 262 Basu, Krishna Kanta, 301 Baudelaire, Charles, 145 Bedford, Duke of, 108–9, 111 Belgrade, 51–3 Ben Arthur, 213–14 Ben Ledi, 201, 203 Ben Lomond, 200–1, 203 Ben Nevis, 203, 212–13 Bennett, Deb, 140–1 Bennison, Amira K., 148

Bentham, Jeremy, 310 Bernaerts, Nicasius, 117, 130, 132n14 Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne, 237 Bharati, Ramananda, 300 Bhutan, 302 Bigland, Edward, 105–6, 108 billiards, 241 Blixen, Karen, 151 Blomac, Nicole de, 140, 147, 148, 150 body in sports, the, 272, 274, 275, 277, 278, 281–2, 284–5, 287, 288–9, 290; sweating, 275, 279 Boeck, Kurt, 303 Bogle, George, 301 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon, 136, 152, 155 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 138, 139–40, 142, 145, 147–8, 155–6 Bonnet, Charles, 120, 127, 134n59 Bouchet, Guillaume, 121 Bourdieu, Pierre, 274–5, 291n9, 310 Bourne, Samuel, 303–5 bowling, 241 boxing, 3, 179–95, 224, 276–8, 282–5, 287, 289 boxing matches: (George) Cooper– (Tom) Shelton match, 282; (Tom) Cribb–(Tom) Molineaux matches, 276, 277, 280, 281, 291n16; (Isaac) Dobell–(Tom) Brown match, 281, 283–4; Dutch Sam–(Ned) Neal match, 282–3; (Bill) Nosworthy– Dutch Sam match, 282–3; (Tom) Oliver–(Bill) Nosworthy match, 282. See also Cribb, Tom Brahmaputra, 299 Brice, Russell, 311 British Journal of Photography, 303 Brompton, Richard, 75 Broughton, Jack, 283

Index 355 Brown, Joe, 299 Browning, Robert, 312n2 Bruce, C.G., 307 Budé, Guillaume, 226 Budworth, Joseph, 196–9, 201, 205, 206–7 Bugeaud, General Thomas-Robert, 151, 152–3, 156 Buhl, Hermann, 307 Bullingdon Club, 96, 104–5 Burke, Edmund, 298 Burrows, James, 105 Burton, Robert, 241–2 Byron, Lord, 207 Cadair Idris (Cader), 208 Caesar, Julius, 59–60 Caillois, Roger, 15 Calcutta, 81, 155, 298 Camper, Petrus, 230 Cardano, Gerolamo, 223 Carlisle House, 72–7, 80–2 Carlton House, 84–5 cartoons, satirical, 79–80 Castiglione, Baldassare, 222–3, 228 Cerro Torre, 308 Cha-Thang-La, 302 Chabry, Jean, 115–16, 129, 131n7 Chantilly, château, 123 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 236 chārdhām, 300 Chardin, Jean-Siméon, 120, 134n50, 135n73 Charles IX, 227 Charles VI of Austria, 60 Chartres, Louis-Philippe II, Duke of, 139 Chaudhuri, Siddhartha, 312 Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 172, 178n39 chess, 4

Cheyne, George, 239, 241, 244–5, 246 Cheyne’s “chamber horse,” 249n33 Cho Oyu, 302 Chudleigh, Elizabeth, 93–5, 97, 101 Churchill, Colonel Charles-Henry, 149 Cicero, 175n15 citizen, 167, 170–2, 177n33 Coke, Mary, 79–80 Cole, William, 238–9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 197 Collie, J. Norman, 307 Colman, George, the Elder, 72–3, 75 Compiègne, royal château, 120 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 125, 127, 130, 134n58 Conway, William Martin, 307 Cornelys, Teresa, 75–6, 85 Coubertin, Baron Pierre de, 275, 308 Cowper, Thomas, 212 Coxe, William, 207 Cribb, Tom, 10, 264, 266, 276–7, 280–1, 290 cricket, 3, 5, 96, 108–9 Crochunis, Thomas, 286, 287–8 Cumberland, Duke of, 99, 108, 111 dancing, 241 Darjeeling, 303 Das, Sarat Chandra (SCD), 301–3 Daumas, General Eugène, 144–50 Deards, John, 106 Degas, Edgar, 142 Delacroix, Eugène, 144–5 Denholm, James, 200, 213 Dennis, John, 298 Dennys, John, Secrets of Angling, 25 Descartes, René, 120, 125, 128, 134n56, 135n70, 229 Des Essartz, Jean-Charles, 232

356

Index

Desportes, Alexandre-François, 115–24, 130, 132nn17, 20, 23, 132–3n27, 133nn29, 33, 38 DeWalt, G. Weston, 314n40 Dhar Amrita, 313n34 Dhaulagiri, 302 Dinesen, Lieutenant Adolph Vilhelm, 151 Dornford, Joseph, 209–11 Dowling, Vincent George, 274, 288, 290, 293nn56, 59; Fistiana, 288 Drew, Frederick, 298 Drouais, François-Hubert, 129 Du Choul, Guillaume, 226 Dudh Kosi, 302 duelling, 66–9, 85 education, 13–15, 22, 55, 69, 77, 81, 167–9, 171–3, 175n18, 176nn19–21, 177–8n37, 178n39, 220–2, 233, 243, 249n25, 251, 261–2, 270n33, 285 Egan, Pierce, 9–10, 11, 15, 179–80, 183–4, 189–91, 193, 193–4n1, 195n11, 264, 265, 271n55, 277, 280–4, 286, 290; Boxiana, 277, 281 Eglinton, Earl of, 106, 108–9, 111 Elisabeth of Austria, 227 Elyot, Thomas, 223 Encyclopédie, 232, 251–2, 259, 269n16 Eon, Chevalier d’, 75, 84 espionage, 301–5 Eugene of Savoy, Prince, 52, 55–6, 58 European Commission (White Paper on sports), 250 Everest, Mount, 302, 307, 308, 310–11 Fancy, the, 183, 188–93 Farnese, Cardinal Alessandro, 223–4 Farquhar, George, 243

fashionable world, 66, 72, 74–6, 82. See also sociability Federer, Roger, 6–7, 17n13 fencing, competitions, 67–8, 70, 72, 76, 82–5, 86n9, 222, 231, 241; intelligence, 84; manuals, 67–72, 80, 87n39; rules, 68, 86n9 Ficin, Marsile, 220 field sports, social qualifications for, 21–2, 26–7, 35 45n2. See also angling; hunting: chasing; hunting: coursing defined; hunting: shooting Fielding, Henry, 103, 107, 111 Fisher, Paul Hawkins, 207–9 fishing, 4, 24–7, 29, 31, 224, 225, 241. See also angling “flash” subculture, 180 Fletcher, James, 102–6, 108 flying-horse (or see-saw), 244–5 Foote, Samuel, 75, 89n62 Foucault, Michel, 273, 288, 291n4 Fouilloux, Jacques de, 121, 129, 131nn1, 5, 133nn28, 30, 31, 135nn66, 67 Fourcroy, Antoine-François, 231 Frampton, Tregonwell, 94 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 75, 84–5 Freedgood, Elaine, 313n38 freedom, 163–4, 167–71, 173 French revolution, 239 Freshfield, Douglas, 298, 305 Friedrich, Caspar David, 207 Fromentin, Eugène, 145–6, 156 Fuller, Francis, 241, 243, 244, 254–6, 257, 259, 266 Gainsborough, Thomas, 75 Galen, 219, 220, 223–4, 226–7, 229, 236–7, 248n12, 251, 256, 258 games, 169, 171–3 Ganges, 299

Index 357 Gangotri-Gomukh, 300 Garrick, David, 75–6 Garrison, Zina, 7, 17n11 Gaurishankar, 302 Gautier, Théophile, 145 Gay, John, Rural Sports, 32–3 Gazi, Antoine, 223 Geertz, Clifford, 310 George II, King, 68 George III, King, 88n54 georgic poetry, 21–44; authorial self-reflection in, 22, 27, 43–4 Géricault, Théodore, 142 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 145 Gibson, Althea, 7, 17n9 Gillum, John, 99–101 Girardon, François, 118 Gonzagua, Gianfrancesco, 222 Gosain, Purandar, 301 Greece (Ancient), 13, 167, 222, 228, 231–2, 250 Gretzky, Wayne, 8 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 129 Griffiths, Jonathan, 311 Grimshaw, Harry, 139 Grose, Francis, Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 182 grotesques, 122, 124, 133n37 Gsell, Stéphane, 142–3 Gunning sisters, 94–5, 104 Gurkha, 307 Gutenberg, Johannes, 224 GutsMuths, Johann Christoph Friedrich, 261–3, 267 Guttman, Allen, 3 Gyatso, Ugyen, 302 gymnastic medicine, 241 Habsburg-Ottoman wars, 50 Hall, Harry, 139

Halsband, Robert, 49 Hamel, Joseph, 209–10 Hamilton, Duke of, 93–4 Hansen, Peter J., 199, 201 Hari Ram, 302 Harris, Clare, 303 Harvey, William, 229 Hastings, Warren, 301 hawking, 241 Hayman, Francis, 245–6 Hazlitt, William, 9–12, 194 Healy, 105–6, 108 Helm Crag, 196, 199, 200 Hemming, Gary, 309 Henry III, 227 Henry IV, 227 Herodicus of Selymbria, 240–1 Hervey, Augustus, 93, 97, 101–2, 105–6, 108 Herzog, Maurice, 307 Hickman, Tom, 9–10 Highmore, Nathaniel, 238, 248n10 Hill, Aaron, 64 Hillary, Edmund, 308 Himalaya, 297–314 Himalayan Club, 298, 305 Himalayan Journal, 307 Hindu Kush, 299 Hippocrates, 219, 223, 225–6, 229, 230, 237, 240, 256 Hobbes, Thomas, 54, 165, 174n11 Hoffman, Friedrich, 232 Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d’, 130, 135n74 Homer, Iliad, 14; Alexander Pope’s translation of, 50 Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 303, 305; Himalayan Journals, 303 horseback riding, 222, 241–6, 249n28 horse racing, 4, 14, 93–113

358

Index

hospitality, 55 Housman, John, 211 Howard, William, 206 Hucks, Joseph, 208–9 Huet, Christophe, 123, 130 Huizinga, Johan, 15, 196–214 Hunt, Sir John, 308 hunting, 4, 14, 21–5, 28, 30, 33–4, 56, 81, 117, 120–3, 125, 127, 129, 143–7, 150, 158n38, 224, 226, 241, 264, 299; chasing, 34, 36–9; coursing defined, 33–4; cruelty of, 40–3; shooting, 34–5, 42 hunting poetry, 33–43; and poetic inspiration, 33–7 Hunts of Maximilian, 117 Hutchinson, William, 205 hybridity, 138, 140 Hyde, Catherine. See Queensberry, Duchess of hypochondria, 237, 239, 240–1, 245 hysteria: as an affection of the nerves, 237–9, 246–7; and animal spirits, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 246; and chastity, 246–7, 249n38; as a digestive illness, 239; as a feminine disease, 236–7, 239, 243, 244; and marriage, 245, 246; as a masculine disease, 239, 240, 242, 245; and physical exercise, 236; and physical weakness, 240–1; servants immune to, 242–3; and sexuality, 237, 245–7, 247–8n2; as triggered by the spleen, 238, 239; as an ungendered disease, 238–40, 242, 244–5, 247n2; and witchcraft, 237

Isherwood, Christopher, The Ascent of F.6, 310 Islam, 138, 142, 144, 148, 151

India, 16, 80–1, 88n54, 301–2, 305–6 Indus, 299 International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (UIAA), 308

L’Abadie, Monsieur, 83–5 L’Piere, Monsieur, 83–5 La Fontaine, Jean de, 123, 125, 127 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 229

Jackson, John, 257, 270n48 James I, Book of Sports, 250 Jamunotri, 300 Jennings, Tom, 139 jeu de paume, 4, 13, 222, 224, 231 Jockey Club, 95–9, 101–2, 106–7 Johnson, Samuel, 40-1; Dictionary of the English Language, 182–3 Johnson, W.H., 298 Jordan, Michael, 8 Joubert, Laurent, 222 Juvenal, 221 Kali Gandaki, 302 Kangchenjunga, 299, 305 Kant, Immanuel, 298 Kara Mustapha Pasha, Grand Vizier, 50 Karakoram, 299 Karlowitz, Treaty of (1699), 50–1 Karnali, 299 Kashmir, 301 Keats, John, 208 Kedarnath, 300 Kellas, A.M., 306 Khumbu Icefall, 311 King, Helen, 237 King’s Plate, 99–100, 102 King’s Theatre, 76, 82 Krakauer, Jon, 314n40 Kurtyka, Wojciech (Voytek), 309, 311

Index 359 La Moricière, General ChristopheLéon-Louis Juchault de, 150, 152 Lachenal, Louis, 307 Ladakh, 302 Lagrange, Comte Frédéric de, 138–9 Lambton, Sir William, 301 Landry, Donna, 36, 43, 137–8, 143 Le Brun, Charles, 127, 134n57 Le Clerc, Daniel, 246 Le Pois, Charles, 238, 248n9 Leask, Nigel, 205–6 Leh, 302 leisure and athletic training, 273, 290 Leonardo da Vinci, 220 Lhasa, 302, 303 liberty, 165–7, 170, 172 Life in London, 189–91 Ligorio, Pirro, 223–6 Ling, Per Henrik, 263 Linley, Ann, 75 Locke, John, 36–8, 125, 169, 174n10, 241, 251, 261 Louis XIV, King, 78, 116–18, 120, 122, 229 Louis XV, King, 114, 120 Louis-Philippe, King, 140 Louyer-Villermay, Jean-Baptiste, 245 Ludi, types, 60 Lunger, Tamara, 311 MacCarthy, Oscar, 145 MacCulloch, John, 203–4, 212–14 MacGillivray, William, 201, 203, 204, 207 Machiavelli, 222 Maclean, Ian, 269n9 Madras, 80 Maestri, Cesare, 308 Mahābhārata, 299 Mahāprasthānika Parva, 299

Mailly, chevalier de, 121, 132nn26, 34 Manas Sarovar, 299 Mandeville, Bernard, 239, 240, 242, 244–6; A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, 239 Manirung Pass, 304 March, Lord, 108–9, 111 Margueritte, Général Auguste, 146–7 Maria Amalia of Austria, Arch Duchess, 56 Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, duchesse de Bourgogne, 120 Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, 139 Marly, royal château, 118, 120, 123 Marques, Manuel, 301 masculinity. See aristocracy Maskelyne, Nevil, 203 Mason, Kenneth, 297, 306 masquerade, 116, 122, 123 Materazzi, Marco, 12 Matzewski, Count, 206 Maximilian II, Emperor, 227 McClelland, John, 4, 5 Mercurialis, Hyeronimus (Girolamo Mercuriale), 223–8, 230, 241, 252 Merrilees, Brian, 5 Messner, Reinhold, 299, 308, 311, 312 Meudon, royal château, 122 Micale, Mark, 245 Michelangelo, 223, 225 Miller, John, 139 Mitchell, Ian, 203 Mohamed-i-Hameed, “Munshee,” 301 Molineaux, Tom, 10, 264, 266, 276–7, 281. See also boxing matches: (Tom) Cribb–(Tom) Molineaux matches Monserrate, Antonio, Jesuit envoy, 301 Mont Blanc, 199, 202–3, 204, 206, 209–11

360

Index

Montagu, Edward Wortley, 49, 58, 109, 111 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 14, 49–65 Montaigne, Michel de, 116, 167, 169, 175n18, 227 Montgomerie, Thomas George, 301 Moody, William, 99 Morier, David, 75 Moro, Simone, 311–12 Mount Kailash, 299 Mount Nilkanth, 300 mountaineering, 15, 16, 196–214, 297–314 Mukhopadhyay, Umaprasad, 300 Mummery, Alfred, 307 Muztagh Pass, 302 Nadal, Raphael, 7 Nanda Devi, 300 Nanga Parbat, 307, 311 Nangpa La, 302 Nar and Narayana mountain ranges, 300 natural history, 4, 15, 252 nature, 164–7 Naylor, Phillip C., 155 Neat, Bill, 9–10 Neela Pass, 304 neo-Hippocratism, 219, 230, 232 neoplatonism, 220, 226 Nepal, 301, 306, 311 Newcastle, Duke of, 104, 108–9 Newell, Robert Hassell, 212 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 312 Norgay, Tenzing, 306, 307 Octavian (Caesur Augustus), 59–60 Old Man of Coniston, 196 Olympic games, 228, 275, 286, 308

onanism, 247 opera, 74, 76–7, 82–4 O’Quinn, Daniel, 276 Ordnance Survey, 203 orientalism, 138, 142, 144, 145, 146 Orléans, Ferdinand-Philippe, Duke of, 156 Orley, Bernard van, 117 Orsini, Fulvio, 223 Ortner, Sherry B., 298, 306, 309–10 Otley, Jonathan, 205 Ottoman Empire, 14, 49–65, 137–8, 141–3, 148 Oudry, Jean-Baptiste, 114–17, 120, 122–30, 131nn2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 132n22, 134nn60, 61, 135nn62, 65, 68–74 Paccard, Michel, 298 Paiba, Abraham, 109, 111 painting, 142–6, 149, 156 Pakistan, 306 Pancoucke, C.L.F., Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 245 Pantheon, 76–7 Panton, Mary, 94–5 Panton, Thomas, 94 Paré, Ambroise, 222 parforce hunt, 114, 121, 124, 131nn1, 5, 8 Passarowitz, Treaty of (1718), 50–1 Paulin, Tom, 9 Peaks, Passes and Glaciers, 303 Pechey, John, 254 peerage, 66, 78, 88n54. See also aristocracy Pelham, Henry, 104, 108 Pélissier, General Aimable, 153 Pennant, Thomas, 206 Perrault, Charles, 123, 133nn40, 42 Petrovaradin, 51–3, 55

Index 361 photography, 303–4 physical exercise, 4, 15, 16, 240–7; lack of, 239, 242, 243; and sex, 245–7 Piccolomini, Alessandro, 220 Pike o’ Stickle, 196–9, 206 pilgrim(s), 299–301 Pinault, François, 12 Piolets d’Or, 309 Plato, 164, 173, 175n15, 178n39, 221, 240–1 play, 15, 196–214; “deep play,” 310 poetry of rural sport, 21–44; poetry and sport compared (analogy between), 23–8, 33–5; Renaissance, 25–6. See also angling: angling poetry; hunting poetry politics, 164–78 Pomme, Pierre, 239 Pope, Alexander, 32–3, 35, 37 Pope Pius IV, 223 Pope Sixtus V, 223 popular enlightenment, 181 portraits of royal dogs, 118–20, 132nn23, 27 Postlethwaite, Paul, 196–201, 203, 206 Prentice, George, 98–102, 104, 111–12 Pressavin, Jean-Baptiste, 241–2 princes, English royal, 66, 68, 79, 88n46 pugilism, 4, 179–95 Purcell, John, 244 Queensberry, Duchess of, 77–80, 89n56 Rabelais, François, 167 race, 78–80 Rakshastal, 299 Ranelagh Gardens, 93 Rankine, Claudia, 6–8, 12

Ravel, Gabriel, 118 Ray, Rammohun, 301 Régis, Augustin, 149 Révillon, Claude, 239–40, 242 Reynolds, Joshua, Sir, 75 Rheda, Mr, 83–4 Richardson, Samuel, 243, 245 riding, horseback, 66, 68, 72–3, 76–8, 81–2, 221, 226, 231 Riverius, Lazarus (Lazare Rivière), 246, 247 romanticism, 136, 142, 144, 147, 156 Ross, Charles, 200 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 10, 15, 16, 163–78, 201, 230, 233, 261–2 Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 116–18, 124, 130, 132n18, 134n57, 135n73 Royal Geographical Society, 302 running, 171, 226, 228, 233, 241, 259, 262, 264, 279 Russell, Gillian, 75–6, 78 Ruttledge, Hugh, 299 Sadpara, Muhammad Ali, 311 Said, Edward, 138, 139, 144 Saint-Georges, Chevalier de, 84 Sale, Richard, 313n12 Salinas, Michèle, 144 Salon, 115, 129, 130, 135nn69, 73 salons, 125, 130 Sandwich, Earl of, 108–9, 111 Sankrityayan, Rahul, 301 Sarbadhikari, Jadunath, 300 Saturday Magazine, 202–3, 204 Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de, 201, 202, 204–5, 298 Schiehallion, 203 Schlagintweit brothers, 307 Scott, Doug, 308–9

362

Index

Scott, Thomas, The Anglers, 26, 29–30, 43–4 see-saw (or flying-horse), 244–5 Sen, Jaladhar, 300 Seneca, 175n15 Sengchen Lama, 302, 303 Seven Years’ War, 77–8 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 298 Shakespeare, William, 189 Shaw, Thomas, 143, 145 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 75 Sheridan, Thomas, 68, 75 sherpas, 306, 311–12 Shipton, Eric, 307, 308 shooting, 4, 8, 49, 57–63. See also hunting Sikkim, 300, 301, 305 Simmel, George, 310 Sinclair, Sir John, 256–7, 259, 264–6 singeries, 122, 123, 133n39 Singh, Guman, 307 Singh, Kalian (GK), 302 Singh, Kishen (AK), 302 Singh, Mani, 302 Singh, Mohinder, 314n40 Singh, Nain (Pundit, or Pundit No. 1), 302 Singh, Raghubir, 307 Sirleto, Cardinal, 223 Skiddaw, 196, 199, 205, 207, 211 slang dictionaries, 179, 180, 181, 192 slavery, 77 Sloterdijk, Peter, 274, 275 Smith, Albert, 298 Smith, George, 200 Snowdon, 201–2, 206, 207–9 Snyders, Frans, 117, 120, 132nn12, 14 Sobieski, Jan, 50

sociability, 72–7, 81–2, 85, 87n26. See also fashionable world Solu Khumbu, 302, 306 Somers-Smith, R.V., 272, 274, 286–7, 290 Somervile, William, The Chace, 34, 36–9 Soranos of Ephesus, 241 Soubise, Julius, 14, 67, 77–81, 89n56 Southey, Robert, 211 spectacle, 13 Spiti, 303 sport, definition of, 3–4, 5, 13–14, 21, 23, 26–7, 45n1 sport, psychology of, 38–40 sport and religion, 275, 291n10 Sporting Magazine, 278 sports discourse: of ancient times, 273, 285–6; of the nineteenth century, 272–3, 274–6, 277, 278–90, 293n62 sports regimen and discipline, 272, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281–4, 285–7, 288, 290; in ancient cultures, 221, 285–6; baths, 279, 288; diet, 272, 274, 278–9, 286, 288; exercise, 273, 274, 276, 278–9, 280, 281, 286, 287–90; “Remarks on Training” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine), 278–80, 285 sportsmanship, 26–7, 34, 41–2 St Leger, John, 103–4, 106 Stahl, Georg-Ernest, 232 Steck, Ueli, 311, 312 Stephen, Leslie, 199 Strutt, Joseph, 290 Stubbs, George, 75, 138 Survey of India, Great Trigonometrical Survey, 297, 301, 306

Index 363 Sutlej, 299 Swift, Jonathan, 7, 138 Sydenham, Thomas, 238, 239, 241, 252–7, 259, 266 Taaffe, Theobald, 108–9, 111 Tamang, 306, 311 Taniguchi, Kei, 309 Tashilhunpo, 303 Tassindier, Gaston, 303 tennis, 3, 6–9, 167, 175, 241, 275 Thom, Walter, 264–6, 275, 278, 285, 286, 288, 290 Thompson, Simon, 313n30 Thomson, James, The Seasons, 30–1, 33, 40–1 Tibet, 299–303 Tilman, Bill, 308, 309 Tissot, Clément-Joseph, 231, 232, 256 Tissot, Samuel, 231 Tombs, Robert, 139 Tooke, John Horne, 75 Toussaint, Jean-Philippe, 12–13 training (athletic): in Greek and Roman cultures, 285–6; military, 273, 274, 285, 287–8; as new science, 285; in nineteenth century, 272–90, 291n6, 293n59; politicized, 272, 273–4, 281, 285–6, 287, 288, 290, 293n56; in Romantic period, 281 Trimmer, 99–100 Trollope, Anthony, 286, 292n40 Tronchin, Théodore, 230 Trump, Donald, 8 Tsangpo River, 303 Tubervile, Georges de, 121 Tuccaro, Archangelo, 227–8 Txikon, Alex, 311

Uemura, Naomi, 309 Ulmann, Jacques, 259 Varandée, Jean, 237–8 Vegio, Maffeo, 221 Veigel, Eva Marie, 75 Venel, Jean-André, 232 Verdier, Jean, 232 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 221 Vernet, Horace, 145, 148, 156 Veronese, Guarino, 220 Versailles, royal palace and park, 117–18, 120, 122, 123–4, 133n44 Vésale, André, 220, 222, 229 Vestris, Gaetan Balthasar, 71, 74 Vettori, Piero, 223 Vicq d’ Azir, Félix, 231 Vienna, Siege of (1683), 50 Vigarello, Georges, 140 Virgil, 31, 37; Aeneid, 14, 50, 58–9, 60–1; Dryden’s translation of Aeneid, 61–2; Georgics, 22–5; writing as labour in, 22–4, 27 virtue, 163–4, 167–8, 171, 222 Vittorino da Feltre, 220, 222 Von Haller, Albrecht, 229 Wade, Laura, 96, 107 Wales, Princess of, 68 Wali, guide, 302 Walker, Donald, 257–60 walking, 241, 244 Wallace, David Foster, 6, 7–9 Walpole, Horace, 94–5, 104 Walton, Izaak, 25, 30, 43; Compleat Angler, 28–9 Ward, Michael, 302 West, Benjamin, 75

364

Index

West, Thomas, 205 White’s Club, 104, 111 Wignall, Sydney, 305 Wilkes, John, 75 Wilkinson, Thomas, 200, 213 Willes, Lord Chief Justice, 105 Williams, Serena, 6, 12, 16n6 Willis, Thomas, 238, 239 Wills, Alfred, 298 Wilson, R.C., 299 Woffington, Margaret (Peg), 76

Wollestonecraft, Mary, 270n33 Woodward, W.H., 222 Wordsworth, William, 298 Wright, Barbara, 145–6 Yarkand, 302 Younghusband, Sir Francis, 302, 306 Ziani, Hocine, 156 Zidane, Zinedine, 11–12