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STAGING THE STREETS: THE THEATRICALITY OF SCIENCE IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE MARTIAL ARTS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2016
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As they near the conclusion of their 1890 treatise Broad-Sword and Single-Stick With Chapters on Quarter-Staff, Bayonet, Cudgel, Shillalah, Walking-Stick, Umbrella and Other Weapons of Self-Defense, Baron Headley (Rowland George Allanson-Winn) and C. Phillips-Wolley imagine skeptical readers who resist their admonitions to vigilance: “I can almost hear people say, ‘Oh, this is all rubbish; I'm not going to be attacked; life would not be worth living if one had to be always “on guard” in this way’” (Headley and Phillips-Wolley 111). But, Headley and Phillips-Wolley counter, “this world, from the time we are born to the time we die, is made up of uncertainties” (111). Throughout the text, lurking hoodlums and deceitful beggars embody these “uncertainties,” and at every moment destabilize the security of the unsuspecting gentleman or lady. Uncertainty gathers in these shadowy bodies with such force that the authors declare, “we are never really secure from attack at any moment of our lives” (111). As a remedy for the threat of the uncertain attacker, they suggest “the pursuit of a science,… which may… enable you to turn a defeat into a victory, and save yourself from being mauled and possibly killed in a fight which was none of your own making” (111). In short, the science of self-defense.
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