Sayers and Heenan's fight offers insight into time of Anglo-American animosity

Lion and the Eagle, The

The world in which England's Tom Sayers and America's John Heenan met for boxing's first world championship bout, on 17 April, 1860, was one in violent flux.

Driven inexorably forward by the flames of Industrial Revolution, the mid-Nineteenth century was an age of cruel contradictions: on the one hand, an era of romantic progress, with unparalleled advances in transport, medicine and commerce; on the other, an endurance of misery, disease and intolerable poverty. This was Dickensian England and Hawthorne's America, the former, barrel-chested, belligerent, smog-filled and riven by Empirical notions of class; the latter brimming with post-colonial impudence, energy and straining under the paradox of mass immigration and the extraordinary racism of indigenous slaughter and a slave trade. That these two nations should find some symbolic resolution to their festering animosity in the prizefighter's ring, felt entirely appropriate.

Pugilism then was an out-of-favour, illegal and ugly pastime, practised by brutish, gnarled but finely-tuned toughs and devoured by the "Fancy", men with "concave faces trampled in, as if with the iron hoof of sin". Survival in the square ring, in bouts often extended over three hours, required more than a passing familiarity with the harsher realities of Victorian deficiency. In Sayers and Heenan, the Fancy, their respective countries had two such men. Sayers, a small but teak-tough and ferociously hard-hitting bricklayer, champion and man educated in violence among the rogue's gallery of the neglected and abused, was unbeaten and adored. Heenan, one of the thousands of Irish Catholics who descended on American shores in the great migration, was relatively inexperienced but no less sturdy, unknown in England and less revered in his homeland. Yet his impertinence in challenging the popular Englishman rallied a disparate nation. Amid unprecedented fanfare, and with both sides of the Atlantic at a standstill, this was a fight for their nation's honour.

The book is an absorbing account of the build-up to, and climax of, that meeting and is as much a tale of the turmoil of an era as it is of boxing. Packed with charming detail and atmosphere it is a primer into the brutality of bare-knuckle prizefighting and should be enjoyed by fight fans and non-fans alike.