Thus far I have considered the physicality of gentlemanly society, and those species of quarrel that were most likely to conclude in an actual duel. However, I have also suggested that there were many countervailing considerations that induced gentlemen to compromise with each other; the absence of which would have made society very precarious indeed. Two questions then fall to be answered in this and Chapter 5. First, how common a phenomenon actually was the duel during the period under consideration? Second, were duellists distributed evenly throughout gentlemanly society or were there particular species of gentlemen who were more prone than others to resort to combat?

Unfortunately, assessing both the general incidence of duelling and the authenticity of individual accounts of duels has always been difficult. Early on the duel captured the popular imagination, and periodicals did not refrain from presenting, as authentic, accounts of duels which appear, upon investigation, to have been entirely fictional. Such accounts reflected a range of contemporary social prejudices and narrative practices, as did those others which, while containing a historical core, were nevertheless clearly embellished, either to lampoon or to lionise. The researcher quickly becomes aware that in the history of the duel fact and fiction are closely intertwined and that while the historical fact of the duel served to fuel its fictional history, the continual production of the duel in the realm of the imagination also served to propagate the institution in the realm of the real.

The bald statements contained in memoirs or conduct books are quite unreliable. There are, for example, numerous contemporary statements and assertions attesting to the propensity of Irishmen to duel, as though duelling were a daily and ubiquitous affair in Ireland. However, a recent study of Irish duelling presents a much more sober picture. Occasional statistics as to the incidence of the duel may be found in duelling histories and newspapers, but their authority is in fact illusory. Donna Andrew has correctly described these statistics as ‘hopelessly inconclusive, unscientific and perhaps contradictory’. The Times, for example, asserted in 1844 that there had been only 200 duels fought between 1760 and 1837, whereas in fact the newspaper had itself reported more than 800 encounters since 1785 alone.