Further information about my novel can be found at:

http://www.deathandmrpickwick.com

Best wishes

Stephen Jarvis

A new book devotes attention to Egan’s metropolitan writing, as well as its principal subject; his prizefight reporting. The mixture of slang and sporting jargon overlaps.

‘Writing the Prizefight: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World’ (Peter Lang Ltd: 2013)

As John Camden Hotten put it, writing the introduction to his 1869 reprint of Egan’s ‘novel’ Life in London (1821) ‘In his particular line, he was the greatest man in England. […] His peculiar phraseology, and his superior knowledge of the business, soon rendered him eminent beyond all rivalry and competition. He was flattered and petted by pugilists and peers: his patronage and countenance were sought for by all who considered the road to a prizefight the road to reputation and honor. Sixty years ago, his presence was understood to convey respectability on any meeting convened for the furtherance of bull-baiting, cock-fighting, cudgelling, wrestling, boxing, and all that comes within the category of “manly sports”.’

Egan’s journal mixed round-by-round reports of fights, with biographies of those who fought them, but as Liebling notes, as well as these unsurpassed technical skills what Egan achieved was to portray the links that held together the Fancy – its ‘trulls and lushes, toffs and toddlers’ – and its world of flash. ‘He also saw the ring as a juicy chunk of English life, in no way separable from the rest. His accounts of the extra-annular lives of the Heroes, coal-heavers, watermen, and butchers’ boys, are a panorama of low, dirty, happy, brutal, sentimental Regency England that you’ll never get from Jane Austen. The fighter’s relations with their patrons, the Swells, present that curious pattern of good fellowship and snobbery, not mutually exclusive, that has always existed between Gentleman and Player in England.’

Like Tom Moore’s satire, Boxiana was a showcase of ‘Fancy slang’. As the writer Don Atyeo has explained, ‘“Ogles” were blackened, “peepers” plunged into darkness, “tripe-shops” received “staggerers”, “ivories” were cracked, “domino boxes” shattered, and “claret” flowed in a steady stream’. Egan’s synonymy made him the father of every sportswriter who has followed.

In 1821 he announced the publication of a regular journal: Life in London, to appear monthly at a shilling a time. It was to be illustrated by George Cruikshank (1792-1878), who had succeeded Hogarth and Rowlandson as London’s leading satirist of urban life. The journal was dedicated to the King, George IV, who at one time had received Egan at court. The first edition of Life in London ‘or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis’ appeared on 15 July. Egan’s creation was an enormous, instant success, with its circulation mounting every month. Pirate versions appeared, featuring such figures as ‘Bob Tallyho’, ‘Dick Wildfire’ and the like. Print-makers speedily knocked off cuts featuring the various ‘stars’ and the real-life public flocked to the ‘sporting’ addresses that Egan had his heroes frequent. There was a translation into French. At least six plays were based on Egan’s characters, contributing to yet more sales. One of these was exported to America, launching the ‘Tom and Jerry’ craze there. The version created by William Moncrieff, whose knowledge of London and of its slang, equalled Egan’s was cited, not without justification, as ‘The Beggar’s Opera of its day’. Moncrieff (1794-1857) was one of contemporary London’s most successful dramatists and theatrical managers. His production of Tom and Jerry, or, Life in London ran continuously at the Adelphi Theatre for two seasons; it was Moncrieff as much as Egan who, as the original DNB had it ‘introduced slang into the drawing room’. . And, à la Shadwell, some theatrical versions (of 1822 and 1823) felt it worth offering audiences a small glossary, mainly derived from the footnotes in Egan’s prose original. In all, Egan suggested in his follow-up The Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic (1830) some 65 works were created on the back of his own. And added that, ‘We have been pirated, COPIED, traduced; but, unfortunately, not ENRICHED.’

‘We’ had also come to epitomise a whole world. The adjectival use of tom and jerry lasted into the mid-century. Young men went on ‘Tom-and-Jerry frolics’, which usually featured the picking of drunken fights and the destruction of property, and in 1853, in Surtees’ Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, the ageing rake Mr Puffington, ever-assuring his friends that, like Corinthian Tom, he could show them ‘Life’, can be found reminiscing and ‘[t]elling how Deuceace and he floored a Charley, or Blueun and he pitched a snob out of the boxes into the pit. This was in the old Tom-and-Jerry days, when fisticuffs were the fashion.’ There were tom-and-jerry shops, which were cheap, rough taverns, tom-and-jerry gangs of rowdy, hedonistic young men, and a verb use which mean to go out on a spree. By 1840 the names had come to christen a highly spiced punch, still being served up by Damon Runyon in ‘Dancing Dan’s Christmas’ a century later. At some stage it was adopted by London costermongers to mean a cherry in rhyming slang.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011ddx7

Catch it while you can!