Now available from Amazon, this new book is a revised, updated and significantly expanded version of the “Bartitsu Story” section of The Bartitsu Compendium, Vol. III (2022). As the third volume of the Compendium was a bookshelf-busting 629 large-format pages, readers interested in the complete social history of Bartitsu may prefer this shorter work.
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 into a single, modern system of antagonistics. It was designed not for the battlefield nor the prize ring, but for the dangerous new realities of urban life. 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 and speculative attempt to rethink personal combat for the modern age, decades before the world was ready.