'The Best Developed Man in Great Britain and Ireland? Eugen Sandow and the Commercialization of Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Britain' by Conor Heffernan in (2023) 28(2) Journal of Victorian Culture 302–320 comments
In 1901 Eugen Sandow, a strong man performer turned health authority, hosted a competition in the Royal Albert Hall to determine the ‘best developed man in Great Britain and Ireland’. At the contest, members of the public, the military, and the scientific community watched as Sandow and his judges compared men’s physiques. Typically depicted by historians as a pivotal step in the development of bodybuilding as a sport, this article repositions Sandow’s contest as a public manifestation of British eugenics and concerns about physical deterioration. Welcoming a thousand competitors in its qualifying rounds, Sandow’s contest was advertised with reference to perfecting the British male body and stemming the tide of British degeneration. When the outbreak of the Second South African War in 1899 delayed the contest’s finale, Sandow’s marketers redoubled efforts to depict the contest as an antidote to the physical deterioration of British troops said to have become evident in the conflict. Here it is argued that Sandow simultaneously magnified, and profited, from a broader British eugenic concern about the male body. His competition served as a strong reminder for how widespread such concerns were in late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain and, more importantly, how they could be commercialized.
The youth of Great Britain are becoming “the prime o’ the world” for strength and symmetry — Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture, 1899
Eugen Sandow, a former circus performer, hosted a physique competition which promised to discover the ‘best developed man’ in Ireland and Great Britain in the early twentieth century. Begun in 1899, the contest was conducted over a two-year period before the grand finale in London’s Royal Albert Hall in September 1901. Leisure for many in Britain was already defined by sport, but Sandow’s contest was different. Prior to Sandow’s competition, concerns about the physical degeneracy of the British male were growing. Popular claims that the British race was deteriorating permeated social and political debates during this period. Where for some, concerns related to the need to improve physical education in schools, municipal sanitation and/or nutritional deficits, others cited a poorly explained relationship between luxury and degeneracy. It is within this milieu that Sandow, and other physical culturists, thrived.
Originally a vagabond circus performer, Sandow attained celebrity in Britain in the late 1880s, which lasted until his death in 1925. During Sandow’s tour of the United States in the mid-1890s, his measurements were taken by the Harvard physical educationalist Dudley Allen-Sargent who labelled Sandow as the ‘most perfectly developed’ man. This description was used ad nauseum in later promotional material alongside other equally aggrandizing claims that Sandow was the ‘monarch of muscle’. Sandow and his agents were adept at capitalizing on a British interest in Grecian culture, concerns with degeneracy, and the belief that the male physique could be perfected. From 1890 to 1925, Sandow sold several monographs, produced a magazine, marketed nutritional aids, workout devices, cigars, children’s toys, women’s corsets and a host of other dubious products. He operated his own gymnasiums which, in 1907, he converted into ‘curative institutes of physical culture’ that were said to have treated thousands of patients by the outbreak of the Great War. It is for this reason that a great deal of attention has been given to Sandow and his significance.
What has received considerably less attention is Sandow’s Great Competition. Positioning Sandow’s competition as a popular expression of the broader eugenic interest in Britain, the purpose of this article is to examine Sandow’s rhetoric, and the favour he courted. It is argued here that Sandow’s contest represented a commercial effort to capitalize on broader fears of physical degeneracy in Britain as well as the growing popular importance of race science. To do this, attention is first given to Sandow’s emergence in British life, the popular eugenics movement and a growing interest in corporal masculinities. From here, the article discusses the promotion of Sandow’s ‘Great Competition’, noting its advertising, reception, and regional impact. The article concludes with an examination of the contest’s finale at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1901.
