Eugen sandow biography samples

One winter’s day in 1904, Arthur Conan Doyle steered his Wolseley Motoring Machine too quickly into the drive of his Surrey country home. The car clipped a gatepost and ran up a high bank before overturning completely. Doyle’s passenger was thrown clear but the author was pinioned by the heavy vehicle. “The steering wheel projected slightly from the rest,” he wrote later, “and broke the impact and undoubtedly saved my life, but it gave way under the strain, and the weight of the car settled across my spine just below the neck, pinning my face down onto the gravel, and pressing with such terrible force as to make it impossible to utter a sound…”

The creator of Sherlock Holmes remained under the car until a crowd gathered and was able to lift the vehicle from him. “I should think there are few who can say that they have held up a ton weight and lived unparalysed to talk about it,” he recalled. “It is an acrobatic feat which I have no desire to repeat.” In correspondence, Doyle subsequently attributed his narrow escape to a course of muscular development he had undertaken with Eugen Sandow, the world-famous strongman and music-hall performer who provided personal fitness coaching from his Institute of Physical Culture at 33a, St James’s Street, in the heart of London’s fashionable Clubland. The training had left Doyle in superb physical condition and provided Sandow with what today we call “celebrity endorsement” for the near-miraculous efficacy of his method.

Readers who come across this anecdote in a biography of Doyle may be forgiven for regarding Eugen Sandow (pronounced “You-jean Sand-ow” to rhyme with “how” or “now”) as a mere footnote in late Victorian and Edwardian cultural history. Sandow (1867-1925) is now almost totally forgotten by the broader p

During the prime of his career, Eugen Sandow was known for having ‘the perfect physique’ and for being one of the foremost proponents of physical culture. Physical culture being broadly understood as the social movement concerned with health and strength that swept across Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century. A man built to a Grecian ideal of beauty and presented as the ideal of what good health should be, Sandow toured the world performing and lecturing the masses about the importance of physical and spiritual health. Such was Sandow’s mass appeal in the late 19 and early 20 century, that some commentators have credited him with launching the body obsessive societies of today. His influence stretched from America to Australia and many places in between. Much has been written about Sandow’s time in Great Britain and the United States, but few have examined Sandow’s time in the south of Ireland in the late 1890s. His time in Ireland was brief but it was to leave lasting results.

Sandow’s Coming to Town

On May 6 1898, Eugen Sandow and his tour company opened their first show in Ireland for over five years. When Sandow had toured Ireland in 1893 he had been met with moderate support from pockets of Irish fans. When he came back in 1898 he was treated like the celebrity he had become. Reports from the Irish Times suggested that the opening night of Sandow’s performance saw over 1,300 fans cram into the Empire Palace Theatre to see the “modern day Hercules” in the flesh. They weren’t to be disappointed. First in the running order came a preliminary posing routine from the Prussian strongman during which members of the audience were permitted to touch Sandow’s well-sculpted muscles. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence for the Prussian. Indeed he often earned additional income by holding private shows for groups to behold his physique. Sandow was more than a body however, as David Chapman eloquently argued in his bi