Boxiana

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Boxiana is a series of books by English writer Pierce Egan that collects his articles about prizefighting. The articles describe bare-knuckle boxing under the London Prize Ring rules, which were illegal in England at the time. Egan loved boxing and called it “The Sweet Science of Bruising.” He gathered his magazine pieces into bound volumes titled Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism. The first volume appeared in 1813 (the title page shows 1812 because books were often released to subscribers in installments before a public release).

Five more volumes followed—in 1818, 1821, 1824, 1828, and 1829. The 1824 volume was by a writer named Jon Bee after a legal dispute; the court allowed Egan to keep the Boxiana title but required the words “New Series.” Two volumes of the New Series Boxiana were published in 1828–29.

Egan’s writing was revived in popularity by A. J. Liebling in The New Yorker, who published boxing pieces from 1950 to 1964 and named his own boxing collections in Egan’s honor: The Sweet Science and A Neutral Corner.

Today, Boxiana volumes are hard to find. The Folio Society reprinted the first volume in 1976. Nicol Island Publishers of Toronto reissued the first volume in 1998 and announced plans to reprint all five volumes; by February 2006 they had published Volumes 1–3. A modern reference on Egan is David Snowdon’s Writing the Prizefight: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World (2013).