'The dawn of the Victorian Age extinguished British ardor for the sweet science. In a time marked by the desire for all things moral and upright, pugilism’s violence, both in the ring and behind the scenes, rumors of thrown fights, and its association with gambling, doomed boxing to be labeled a “a low and demoralizing pursuit,” unfit for the interest of a respectable gentleman.
But the British weren’t through in adding their legacy to the sport. In 1867, the Queensberry rules were published, barring any wrestling moves, and essentially setting up the structure of modern boxing. Perhaps the most important of these new rules required pugilists to don gloves. The wearing of gloves drastically changed the nature of the sport. The bare knuckled fisticuffer stood upright, leaned back slightly, and held his arms with forearms facing outward. The gloved boxer leans forward and protects his face with his gloves. While gloves made the sport less brutal in some ways, they made boxing more dangerous and deadly by allowing fighters to punch with far greater strength (the bare knuckled boxer had to mitigate the impact of his blows for fear of winding up with a broken hand). The bones of one’s head are harder than those in the hand; thus, gloves helped the hitter and hurt the hittee. This accelerated the development of the more defensive style of boxing that Mendoza had begun, with a greater emphasis placed on bobbing, slipping, blocking, ect. Nonetheless, gloves greatly increased the frequency of knockouts and the battering boxers took often led to long term head injuries and the so-called “punch-drunk” syndrome.'

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'As the sport rose to prominence in the States, its popularity continued to decline in England. Brits waxed nostalgic about their Golden Age and saw boxing’s ascendancy in America as another symbol of the way in which that country was eclipsing them in power and growth. Like many Britons, Arthur Doyle linked his country’s loss of dominance in the sport with what he perceived to be a parallel drop in manliness. When Doyle chose to have boxing figure prominently in his novel Rodney Stone, he was asked by his publisher, “Why that subject of all subjects on earth?” Doyle answered, “Better our sports should be a little too rough than that we should run the risk of effeminacy.” Indeed, in the book Stone looks back at boxing’s golden age longingly:
“The ale drinking, the rude good-fellowship, the heartiness, the laughter at discomforts, the craving to see the fight-all these may be set down as vulgar and trivial by those to whom they are distasteful; but to me, listening to the far off and uncertain echoes of our distant past, they seem to have been the very bones upon which much that is most solid and virile in this ancient race was molded.”
Brett & Kate McKay