jack_babalon | Sir Reginald J. Dartcock's Guide to the Gentlemanly Science of Improvised Combat

Sir Reginald J. Dartcock's Guide to the Gentlemanly Science of Improvised Combat (Crest & Dodgers, 1905) has long been considered one of the most controversial books of the Edwardian era - ranking perhaps only with Mirbeau's incendiary The Hysterical Orchid or Well's suffragette themed science fiction novella - Annabella Redd.

Excerpts from Sir Reginald J. Dartcock's Guide to the Gentlemanly Art of Improvised Combat

'The Guide' is basically a 156 page self-defense manual, whose contents are comprised primarily by a series of photopictorial instructions, each professing to teach the reader - "... how to survive, through the science of improvised combat, any ambush that might be inflicted upon a gentleman by scallywags, wastrels, ne'er-do-wells and other members of the lower classes that may be encountered on a leisurely evening's stroll."

Within these pages Dartcock offers a series of unorthodox fighting techniques including but not limited to:

- 'The Dancing Pugilist and the Crafty Vicar'.

- 'Irish Style!'

- 'Mysterious Foot Boxing Secrets of the Far East'.

- 'Proper Etiquette for impaling an Opponent with a Sharpened Mustache'.

- 'Flashing Cane of Death' (a maneuver Dartcock claims was taught to him by the spirit of an ancient Samurai warrior channeled one well opiated evening spent with his old friend Madame Blavatsky).

- 'Twenty-two ways to kill a man with a Boater'.

- 'The Overcoat's Gambit'.

It should come as no surprise then that Dartcock's Guide was later to become must reading amongst the burdgeoning Surrealist movement that rose in the ensuing deaces; with André Breton declaring it to be 'a murderous herald of great beauty and inspiration'. Conversely, it has been recently disclosed that some of the techniques outlined in the Guide were actually taught to select Allied intelligence officers in the First World War and that some of these methods are still being employed by the S.A.S. to this day.

Though rare with a limited print run, the Guide has appeared in the libraries of men as diverse as Aleister Crowley (who claimed to have discovered a kabbalistic code outlined in the instructions) and James Joyce (who having found a copy left abandoned in a pub promptly declared it to be one of the most scathing social satires he had read since Swift). A lone copy was recovered out of the frigid waters after the sinking of the RMS Titanic and another found left ominously in the cab of the assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria.

All this despite the fact that, besides the scant remaining copies of his Guide, there has never been any actual evidence of a one Sir Reginald J. Dartcock having ever existed. Nor of an actual publishing house called 'Crest & Dodgers' (whose 1,000 copy print run of the Guide seems to be the only book they've ever published).

Whether the Guide was an inexplicable prank released upon a unsuspecting public or an accidental shipping error from a parallel dimension remains an arguement academics still have not settled some hundred years later.