The New Art of Self Defence: How Bartitsu Reimagined "Antagonistics" in Edwardian England Paperback – February 15, 2026

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. 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 attempt to rethink personal combat for the modern age, decades before the world was ready.This book is an expanded, updated and revised version of the long-form essay “The Bartitsu Story,” first published in The Bartitsu Compendium, Vol. III (2022). Read more