Overview

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Edwardian London was gripped by newspaper panics over ""hooligan"" street violence, a booming culture of athletic self-improvement and a growing fascination with ""Oriental"" arts and cultures. That combination created the perfect conditions for Bartitsu; a radical experiment in personal combat. Created by engineer-adventurer Edward William Barton-Wright, Bartitsu combined Japanese jujutsu with English boxing, French savate and a unique method of walking-stick defence. For a few remarkable years, the Bartitsu School of Arms stood at the international crossroads of physical culture, self defence and spectacle, staging music-hall challenges, provoking public controversies and attracting an elite and eccentric clientele. Then, in mid-1902, it disappeared almost without a trace. The New Art of Self Defence: How Bartitsu Reimagined Antagonistics in Edwardian England tells the full story of this long-forgotten movement. Drawing on contemporary journalism and archival research, it vividly reconstructs the rise and fall of Barton-Wright's ""New Art"". Bartitsu is thus revealed as a rare thing: an early, artisanal attempt to rethink personal combat for the modern age, decades before the world was ready. This book is an expanded, updated and revised version of the long-form essay ""The Bartitsu Story,"" first published in The Bartitsu Compendium, Vol. III (2022).

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