Martial Arts
William Hazlitt’s account of an 1821 bare-knuckle fight in an English field is considered one of the first examples of modern sportswriting, and remains a triumphant example of the genre. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
The bare-knuckle origins of modern sportswriting
Boxing was theoretically outlawed in Britain in the early 19th century, but it persisted in meadows on the edge of cities – most often in counties where the gaze of the local magistrate could be depended upon to be sympathetically averted.
Officially the sport was branded vulgar and dangerous – not to its participants but to British decency and industriousness. Its prohibition in 1750 was justified on the grounds that prize-fighting “attracted the idle, the criminal and the cheat” and the judiciary’s scorn had not changed by 1803 when Lord Ellenborough, presiding over the trial of four boxers, said of the sport: “It draws industrious people away from the subject of their industry; and when great multitudes are so collected, they are likely enough to be engaged in broils. It affords an opportunity for people of the most mischievous disposition to assemble … In short it is a practice that is extremely injurious in every respect and must be repressed.”
In the judiciary’s wisdom, boxing not only attracted the wicked and idle but could corrupt the decent. In the meadows the fights attracted thousands of all classes. These illicit fights were a rare place where Britain’s severe stratification of class collapsed and butchers mingled with lords.
Such a fight – bare-knuckled, as these fights were – was the subject of a once-revered, now mostly forgotten, essay that anticipated modern sportswriting by well over a century.
He’s largely forgotten today, almost two centuries since his death, but occasionally the work and reputation of William Hazlitt is revived. Born in 1778 in Kent, England, Hazlitt was the son of an Irish minister – a rare man in publicly supporting the independence that the United States declared two years before his son’s birth. A lifelong radical, Hazlitt was himself devoted to Napoleon as his country raged war against France. This was a family unafraid of pronouncing unpopular opinions.
By several accounts, Hazlitt was an incurably irritable man and captive to his abundant passions, both sexual and intellectual. As a young man, he befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, but the friendships dissolved as so many others did. Coleridge once wrote of Hazlitt that his “manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive; brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange” and his partners for fives – a handball game similar to squash and to which Hazlitt was devoted – would testify to his intolerable rages when playing poorly.
Regardless, Hazlitt’s eclipse is a great shame because he was one of Britain’s supreme essayists – he wrote with a casual elegance, was both confessional and thrillingly bellicose, and was possessed of a flowering curiosity. He was also a member of “The Fancy” – the delightful name then given for lovers of sport, especially prize-fighting, and in his love he gave us one of its great essays.
“The Fight” was first published in The New Monthly Magazine in February 1822, despite the misgivings of its editors. To run a piece about so squalid a subject seemed not only harmful to the magazine’s reputation but also to the country’s – why declare its people’s furtive love of so vulgar and criminal an activity? Its assistant editor was still cursing the piece’s publication 30 years later, when he said he’d “received an article on boxing, a thoroughly blackguard subject. It was disgracing our literature in the eyes of other nations; why not a paper on American gouging, Stamford bull-baiting, or similar elegancies? It was a picture of existing manners, it was true – the more the pity – and that it could not sooner be a record only of our barbarities.”
But life is short and art is long and “The Fight” would become a classic well after Hazlitt’s death in 1830. The essay begins with Hazlitt making furtive inquiries in London about the fight’s date and location – given its illegality, details were withheld until the last moment and shared through select pubs and chophouses. In lushly describing his attempts to learn the whereabouts of the fight – and the journey there – Hazlitt anticipated the modern style, perhaps best exemplified by American magazine writing in the 1970s, of the writer assuming a conspicuous presence and describing not merely the event itself but also everything that surrounds it.
The fight took place in December 1821 on the Hungerford Common, some 110 kilometres from London, between Tom “The Gas Man” Hickman and Bill “The Bristol Bull” Neate. The men would engage per the rules established by the Pugilistic Club – we were still more than half a century from the ratification of the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules that largely remain today – and which permitted all manner of violence: wrestling, headbutting, hair-pulling.
Journeying 110 kilometres in 1821 on short notice wasn’t easy, and Hazlitt records the trials of finding mail carriages and accommodation. After a sleepless night in a tavern that had no beds for the travelling fans, Hazlitt then sets out to walk the final 15 kilometres to the meadow.
He finds there a great scene. “The crowd was very great when we arrived on the spot; open carriages were coming up, with streamers flying and music playing, and the country-people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in all directions, to see their hero beat or be beaten.”
In the middle of the crowd is a square of bright green grass, preserved from the encroachments of The Fancy and reserved for battle. The Gas Man – so named for his impulsive loquacity – enters the ring while sucking an orange “with a supercilious air” and Hazlitt chastises him for his immodest strutting. Then the Bristol Bull enters and baptises his giant right fist as the “grave digger”. Pre-fight braggadocio, it turns out, is not unique to the age of television.
“There was now a dead pause – attention was awe-struck,” Hazlitt writes. Then began 18 rounds of gruesome attrition before a uniquely unified gathering of England’s classes.
Rounds had no set time, but were determined by a fighter going down, and just 30 seconds was granted between them. This invited Hazlitt’s astonishment. “The wonder was the half-minute time,” he wrote. “If there had been a minute or more allowed between each round, it would have been intelligible how they should by degrees recover strength and resolution; but to see two men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies; and then, before you recover from the shock, to see them rise up with new strength and courage, stand ready to inflict or receive mortal offence … this is the most astonishing thing of all.”
Hazlitt loved it. There was courage here, and great spectacle, even if he preferred his heroes to be modest. He was unafraid to not only write about the illicit fight, but to find virtue in it, and he defied his readers to contradict him. “Ye who despise the FANCY, do something to shew as much pluck, or as much self-possession as this, before you assume a superiority which you have never given a single proof of by one action in the whole course of your lives!”
Fighting words.
After the Bristol Bull lands an almighty punch to the face of the Gas Man, Hazlitt feels time pause. “It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw anything 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.”
The Bristol Bull won that day, and Hazlitt describes the carrier pigeon sent to inform his wife of his victory. “Alas, for Mrs. Hickman!” and then it’s time to hitch a ride back to London. That’s described here too, and with it his conversations with strangers about the fight.
Hazlitt didn’t mean to, but he presaged modern sportswriting – a form, in its literary detail and panache, that has largely been lost. We have high-definition cameras these days, and player mics and a thousand chat shows. So it goes.
I think it’s also true, however outlandish it might seem, that Hazlitt anticipated modern sports psychology too. In his 1822 essay “On Great and Little Things”, Hazlitt reflects upon his handball game and finds that: “If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory. If you hesitate in striking at the ball, it is ten to one but you miss it. If you are apprehensive of committing some particular error (such as striking the ball foul) you will be nearly sure to do it. While thinking of that which you are so earnestly bent upon avoiding, your hand mechanically follows the strongest idea, and obeys the imagination rather than the intention of the striker.”
This sounds to me like the exalted state of thoughtlessness that athletes strive for – the easy, fluid deployment of muscle memory and liberation from self-consciousness. And there’s evident wisdom here too when he writes: “One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it. This is in no doubt in part or chiefly because the prospect of success irritates the subsequent disappointment.”
Well indeed, Mr Hazlitt. Dead almost 200 years, I hope his reputation might emerge victorious from retirement.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "A lover of the fighters".
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