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⁷ Flegel, Conceptualizing Cruelty, 23–24.

⁸ Ibid., 148, 180.

⁹ Wiener, Martin J., Men of Blood (Cambridge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 11.

¹⁰ Wiener, Martin J., “The Victorian Criminalization of Men,” in Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Spierenburg, Pieter (Columbus, 1998)Google Scholar, 198, 203.

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¹² Emsley, Clive, Hard Men: The English and Violence Since 1750 (London 2005), 7–8Google Scholar. The documents in question were occurrence books and refused charge books. These were used to record events that demanded police attention yet did not lead to action being brought against those involved.

¹³ Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England, 94.

¹⁴ One sees this in late Victorian conceptions of self–defense, in which the notion of a gentlemanly fistfight was taken as a sign of civilization. See Godfrey, Emelyne, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Basingstoke, 2011), particularly 128–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁶ Wiener, Men of Blood, xi. Wiener is aware of this issue, pointing out that his work tackles what he calls a “statistically minor part” of criminality. See Wiener, Men of Blood, 7.

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³⁷ Kenney, Rowland, Westering (London, 1939)Google Scholar, 14. See also Brooks, Joseph Barlow, Lancashire Bred: An Autobiography (Cowley, 1950)Google Scholar, 56. One should note that this is distinctly different from the adult notion of a “fair fight,” in which kicking was seen as underhanded. See Wiener, Men of Blood, 55.

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⁵⁴ Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 322–23. Rose noted that of those boys whose education terminated at the age of fourteen, one in every eight books they read was a school story.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 322–31.

⁵⁶ O'Donovan, Michael [“Frank O'Connor”], An Only Child (London, 1961)Google Scholar, 120. There are many other examples from which one might choose; see, for instance, Willis, Frederick, Peace and Dripping Toast (London, 1950), 56–57Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ West, Paul, I, Said the Sparrow (London, 1963)Google Scholar, 44. It is, of course, important to note that literature can be both an expression of popular culture and a means by which it was transmitted. It was possible to reject such literature yet still respond to the underlying cultural forces that were responsible for its production.

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⁵⁹ Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, particularly 22–23.

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⁶⁴ O'Reilly, Septimus, The Tiger of the Legion (London, 1936)Google Scholar, 18. O'Reilly was not the only individual who claimed that dispensing with preliminaries and simply attacking an opponent was an effective tactic; a similar notion was put forward by Cecil Rolph Hewitt. See Hewitt, London Particulars, 89.

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⁸² Ezard, Battersea Boy, 98. This is reflected in punishment books of the era, where entries that relate to playground fights are infrequent. For instance, the punishment book for Salters Hill Boys' School in London covers 1,544 acts of punishment over a period of three years, from the beginning of 1927 to the end of 1929, yet only five instances of punishment relate to fighting. See Salter's Hill School Punishment Book, f. EO/DIV8/SAL/MISC/3, London Metropolitan Archive.

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¹¹⁶ Although not without its proponents: James Hipkiss, in the 1941 book, Unarmed Combat, promised on the cover that the martial art ju-jitsu was “your answer to invasion.” That we now find the idea of fighting off panzer divisions with the use of martial arts absurd is a sign that we inhabit a different economy of violence than Hipkiss. See Hipkiss, James, Unarmed Combat (London, 1941)Google Scholar.

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