Regency Men: Pierce Egan

Pierce Egan was a suburban Londoner, likely from Irish parents, who established himself as a sportswriter and then became a huge cultural influencer, particularly for Regency gentlemen.  While he stayed most of his life in the London suburbs in the North, where he raised his family, Egan was known to travel throughout Britain to races, prizefights or other amusements. By 1812, he had a solid reputation as a sports journalist, particularly following the 1804 publication of Sporting Anecdotes: Original and Select Including Characteristic Sketches of Eminent Persons Who Have Appeared on the Turf. The book was so well received, it would be updated and reprinted in 1820 and 1825, at the height of his career (Dictionary of National Biography. (1889). United Kingdom: Smith, Elder.)

I recently featured one anecdote from this collection here.  If you click on the text in that post, it will take you directly to the Google Book version from 1804.  There is a wonderful cast of characters throughout these stories, including a city sportsman, a London sportsman (Cockney), and several peers of the realm. I like that he covers not just the upper class, however, in this collection.  I also have found, even in his early work, that Egan is very fair to feature some mentions of women and sports.

In 1814, Egan was published again with a book called The Mistress of Royalty; or the Loves of Florizel and Perdita which is said to be about the Prince Regent and Miss Mary Robinson. It was an epistolary account featuring the Effusions letters Mary had used to blackmail the Prince for making good on his shirking payment for her being his mistress.  This had all happened when the Prince was 17 and she was 21, an actress on the stage who starred as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale (https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/makhist10_prog2b.shtml). Mary had a very interesting life, including her later days as a best selling novelist at the very end of the Georgian era.  Interestingly enough, this book is often left out of his official biographies (Dictionary of National Biography. (1889). United Kingdom: Smith, Elder.)  Robinson had written her own memoir that was published posthumously in 1801 or 1802, so the letters were already public knowledge by the time of Egan’s publication. Egan was also well established by the publication, having published the enduring and popular serial Boxiana, beginning in 1812.

Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, by most accounts, is what put Egan in the seat of a cultural influencer.

Covering a brief history on boxing in England, he then goes on to feature all the key fighters from the Georgian and Regency era, infusing boxing cant, humour, and an emphasis on the “science” of bareknuckle boxing. The imagery, linguistic technique, and allusions within Egan’s writing are seen as a spectacle itself, emphasing the theatrical elements of prizefighting as a way to legitimize it as a sport (Snowdon, 2007).  Snowdon credits Egan with influence writers like George Bernard Shaw, William Hazlitt, George Orwell, and Norman Mailer, as well as Charles Dickens.

Snowdon (2015) highlights the impact of pugilism on the British Army in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, with honour and chivalry as important in the prize-fighting ring as it was on the battlefield.  By setting it up as a science, too, it walked in step with the systemisation happening within the military and militia.

I would also argue, that along with trends in fashion and on other fronts, it was book devoted to a new idea of manliness/masculinity that involved not only raw power, but also skill. This was evident in one of Egan’s last publications, Every Gentleman’s Manual; A Lecture on the Art of Self-Defence:

Before this take, there was his collaboration with the Cruikshank brothers George and Isaac, to produce the Town focused Life in London; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthornm Esq and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, which would be a runaway hit. While at court, Egan asked to dedicate this publication to George IV, and he approved despite the non-stop lampooning by the Cruikshanks.

If you haven’t yet looked at Life in London, its worth it. I talk briefly about it in Masquerade Balls in Regency Britain, because a Haymarket masquerade features, but the 1821 publication goes beyond that to really tell a slice of life story about gentlemen in London. The success both in town and country was unprecedented, and would churn out imitators as well as a stage production that was a record breaker (Dictionary of National Biography. (1889). United Kingdom: Smith, Elder.)  As the introduction to a much later edition (1869) tells us “This was the book – the literature – of that period, the one work which elderly gentlemen remember..” It was a decade after Doctor Syntax, so another play on that sort of first foray into comic book/graphic novel territory with archaetypal characters that could be understood by boys, men, and of course women.

Conversely, WM Thackeray was said to say around 1840 that the book did not stand up to the test of time, that despite brilliant images the writing was vulgar and interesting but immature. Other criticisms were of how heavily entrenched in cant the book was. But Tom and Jerry was used afterwards to describe young men on the rake about, as well as the American egg nog like beverage (I have had one or two, they are delicious).

You can see one of the imitators, Real Life in London; or, The Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and his cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, &c, through the Metropolis. Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life. on the Internet Archive at the link

Sick of the plagiarists and imitators, Egan would revisit the story in 1828 with Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry, and Logic, which Robert Cruikshank illustrated. This version was a bit more dour, featuring miserable ends to some of the characters and the reform of others.

Egan would write on other matters, including the trial for the murder of William Weare, the life of a highwayman, SD Hayward who was executed in 1821, a humorous account of a tailor versus a quaker in a round of fisticuffs, and some contributions to Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1823).  He also opened his own weekly newspaper, Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide.

Egan, in the end, would publish a novel and several other sporting or theatrical-related books until he passed away in 1849 at his home in Islington. His son and namesake would go on to be a novelist and journalist, who was also a talented illustrator that would contribute to his father’s The Pilgrims of the Thames in Search of the National (1837).

Its hard to overstate Egan’s influence on Regency culture, particularly gentlemen and masculinity, as well as his contributions to the legitimisation of pugilism. He is also credited with influencing prominent writers like George Orwell, William Hazlitt, and even Charles Dickens.

 

Snowdon, D. (2007). Drama Boxiana: Spectacle and Theatricality in Pierce Egan’s Pugilistic Writing. Romanticism on the Net, (46).

Snowdon, D. (2015). Waterloo’s prizefight factor: Pierce Egan celebrates the Boxiana touch as Napoleon is floored. Historian (02651076), (126).