Thomas Rowlandson, “E. O., or the Fashionable Vowels.” Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University
The Laws against Gaming are not only severe in their Penalties, but recite in their Preambles such Consequences attending this Vice, as shew that, of all others, it deserves most the Cognizance of the Magistrate and the Censor; since the Offended, as well as the Offenders, are alike cautious of speaking, and the Injured agree with the Criminals in burying all Things in Oblivion.1
Gambling is an activity found almost everywhere and among all sorts of people. Both men and women indulge in it, both the great and the small, and its excesses have always been, and will continue to be, denounced and deprecated. In this chapter we will concentrate mainly on the condemnations of the gaming of the Great, and the relation between their gaming habits and the impact of these on the national weal. Omitted will be those sorts of gambling which did not involve cards, dice, or gaming tables; i.e., private bets on agreed-upon outcomes, horse-racing or boxing bets. It is not that these activities do not partake of the gaming spirit, but that they were less part of the everyday sociable life of the men and women of the bon ton. What is most striking about the condemnations of sociable gaming is their reiterative quality; whether in the 1730s, the 1760s, or the 1790s, many of the same criticisms were repeated, many of the same calls to action voiced.
In chapter 3 we saw suicide referred to as “the fashionable vice”; here we wish to look at that other act, also described in the quote above as “the fashionable vice” and frequently seen as conjoined or leading to suicide, that is, gaming or gambling. The link between the two vices was an eighteenth-century commonplace. The Connoisseur of 1755 published a mock Bill of Suicides in which three of the nineteen causes of death were various forms of gaming—on lotteries, at the races, or at gaming tables. In a poetical Essay on Gaming, in a epistle to a young Nobleman published just a few years later, the anonymous author argued:
Gross Food, thick Air, a cold inclement Sky,
Are not the Cause so many rashly die;
But Vice, Profuseness, modern Unbelief,
Despair, high Play, and Pride that spurns Relief.3
The newspapers were full of stories of wretches who, unable to pay their gaming debts, did away with themselves. For example, this vignette from the pages of the Public Advertiser:
Last Thursday a young gentleman shot himself at his apartments near Hatton Gardens. A note was found in this pocket giving his reasons for committing the rash action, viz his having been enticed to gaming-tables, where he lost his whole fortune, which was sufficient to have supported him, and was reduced to the last shilling. He concludes the note with wishing that the Magistrates would use their authority to suppress all gaming-houses, as it would be a means of saving many a person from destruction.4
There were also contemporary studies which connected these vices, and joined them to the evil of duelling. The best known of these were Richard Hey’s Three Dissertations on the Pernicious Effects of Gaming (1783), on Duelling (1784) and on Suicide (1785) and Charles Moore’s A full inquiry into the Subject of Suicide to which are added (as being closely connected with the subject) Two Treatises on Duelling and Gambling. In this later work, Moore, talking of the three subjects of his inquiry, argued that “these are crimes so great in themselves, so intimately connected with each other, and such increasing evils … as to require every nerve to be strained in reprobating their practice.” A few years after Moore’s work appeared, another clergyman, in a sermon against suicide, connected self-murder with gaming, noting that the practice “involves almost every human vice; almost every evil and detestable passion.” It was in this same spirit that an allegory, entitled The Origin of Gaming, and her two Children, Duelling and Suicide, appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Gaming, according to this tale, was the offspring of the rape of the goddess Fortune by the God of War. In her infancy the child was soothed only by the sound of dice, and in her maturity, by some unknown “man of the sword,” she became the mother of twins, duelling and suicide, who resembled both their parents and grandparents in their inclinations and illegitimacy.5 Finally, this “triple-headed Cerberus” of vice often had another “head” engrafted onto its vicious neck, that of adultery. Thus the Times denouncing “the vice of gaming” argued that it led inevitably to “SUICIDE, ADULTERY, BANKRUPTCY and the GALLOWS.”6
If gaming was seen to be like other vices, that is, in being conjoined in a grand constellation of misdeeds, all springing from the prevalence of fashion, custom, and pride, all deriving from an unheeding and selfish pursuit of passion and pleasure, it was strikingly different in at least one major respect—unlike duelling, its votaries came from all classes and genders, from all walks and occupations of life; unlike suicide, it seemed inextricably intertwined with the sociability of large sections of the population; unlike adultery, it offered its attractions to young and old alike, to the married as well as the single. Thus, for many, its ubiquity made it not only the most prevalent but also the most dangerous of the vices. However, in two important respects, which we will consider in more detail below, gaming shared some basic characteristics with the other vices under review: that one major source of its corruption, like that of the others, seemed to be found in the practices of the Great and that the Law seemed unable to cope either with successfully regulating or with eliminating any of these practices.
In this chapter we will consider the evolution of thinking about gambling by beginning with a consideration and comparison of James Shirley’s 1637 play The Gamester with Edward Moore’s drama The Gamester of 1753. We will also examine the way in which discussions of gaming changed in the periodical literature through the first half of the century, paying particular attention to questions of public versus private gaming, and the gender of the archetypical gamester. These themes will be continued with a more detailed scrutiny of the intersection between public political life and private gambling. In addition the question of the stance of the law towards both private and public gaming must be treated, in terms of both legislative action and enforcement.
In 1637, James Shirley published his play The Gamester, ostensibly based on a story that Charles I had given him. Its plot was simple and predictable, its main characters were a circle of reckless, fast-living young men, down on their luck, but of “family”: Wilding and Hazard, the two main heroes, Beaumont and Delamore, two others who became involved in a drunken and nearly fatal duel, and a trio of minor male libertines, Acreless, Littlestock, and Sellaway, who were seldom found away from the gaming tables. Along the way, a wealthy “cit” and his pusillanimous nephew are ridiculed, a husband is duped into faithfulness, a ward and the man she loves receive her withheld fortune and marry. The play ends in celebration and partying. In so far as there is any criticism of the characters or their acts, it consists of a rather smug tittering at the follies of those who wish to appear “better than they are,” and at the foolishness of a man wishing both to fornicate and to game, who loses at both in consequence. Though this play was quite successful in its day, and continued to be performed through the eighteenth century (though largely in David Garrick’s emendation, which condensed and simplified the plot somewhat), the tone of the play is more Stuart and courtly than Hanoverian and popular. As an early twentieth-century commentator on Shirley has noted:
One closes a volume of Shirley with the same feeling with which the poet’s audience of courtly ladies and gentlemen must have left the Cockpit, that of having been pleasantly and worthily entertained, without a rankling thought or startling fact left in the memory to disturb one’s ordinary view of life.7
When, in the early eighteenth century, Susanna Centlivre wrote her own Gamester, the play was interestingly different, though still set in high life. Its hero, Valere, is a compulsive and uncontrolled gambler. His love interest, Angelica, determined to save him from his downward gambling spiral, first gives him a ring which she makes him swear to preserve, then, in the guise of a rakish young gentleman, wins it from him. Not surprisingly, the play ends well, with Valere promising to abstain from all gaming, and the couple wed. A triple wedding also culminated the next play Centlivre wrote about gambling, The Basset Table. In this play, the gambler is a female, Lady Reveller, but for her gambling is only one part of an interesting and complex life; she is the proprietor of a high stakes gambling establishment, whose exclusivity is an infallible lure to wealthy citizens who wish to move in fashionable circles. She also uses her position to flirt shamelessly and yet remain free of all restrictions, being a young and very beautiful widow. Only when Sir James Courtly, best friend of the hero, Lord Worthy, pretends, in order to aid Worthy, to attempt a rape, does Reveller realize the desirability of marriage and of the reliability of Worthy, and thus gives up the business of gaming. However, the similarity of setting and moral demonstrate that, in the theater at any rate, gaming in high life, whether male or female, was, until the mid-century, largely comedic. Beautifully clothed and coiffed, the gambling Great preyed on the ambitious citizen, and, to some extent on each other, only to be redeemed by love to a path of more prudential play, rather than total abstention from gaming activity.
The success of George Lillo’s The London Merchant, first performed in 1731, a new kind of tragedy with its characters and protagonist belonging not to the great of society but to its middling ranks, is often credited with serving as the model for Edward Moore’s tragedy The Gamester of 1753. This drama, by portraying the terrible perils into which an untrammeled passion for gaming could lead an otherwise honest and honorable man, sought to convince its audiences “that the want of prudence is the want of virtue.” The tale of the drama is quickly told; Beverley, married to a virtuous and beautiful wife, is convinced to game by his false friend Stukeley, who not only has contrived to be the secret recipient of Beverley’s gaming losses, but also hopes, by his inevitable bankruptcy, to corrupt the virtue of his faithful wife. Thrown into prison for debt after having pawned his wife’s jewels and sold his heirship to an elderly uncle’s rich estate, Beverley takes poison from self-disgust and disdain for life. Just before his death, however, the villain, Stukeley, is punished, and Beverley dies proclaiming his affection for his spouse and his hopes for divine mercy. Its moral is perhaps too obvious, and the play’s popularity can only be explained by the growing enthusiasm for dramatic sentiment, and by the opportunities it afforded to some of the great dramatic actors and actresses of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Its prologue, written by Garrick himself, announced and underlined what was to come:
Ye slaves of passion, and ye dupes of chance,
Wake all your pow’rs from this destructive trance!
Shake all the shackles of this tyrant vice:
Hear other calls than those of cards and dice:
Be learn’d in nobler arts, than arts of play,
And other debts, than those of honour pay:
These prefatory lines indicate that Garrick, if not Moore as well, hoped that the regenerative actions of this play would not only convince ordinary folk to watch their gaming proclivities, but would also awaken the consciences of those denizens of the world of honor, those persons for whom gambling debts were called debts of honor, to reject its trivializing and addictive pleasures for the nobler arts of conversation and governance.8
If one considers the performances of these three gamester plays through the eighteenth century, an interesting pattern emerges. While the two comedies (that is Centlivre’s Gamester and Garrick’s version of Shirley’s Gamester) were performed more often in total than Moore’s play, fewer than one-quarter of these comedic performances occurred after 1760, while more than three-quarters of the performances of the tragedy were in the last forty years of the century. Of course this figure is only suggestive, but the difference in late-century popularity between the two sorts of dramas might well indicate a changing attitude toward the central activity with which each of these plays dealt.9
Looking back at eighteenth-century gaming from the vantage point of the later nineteenth century, Andrew Steinmetz, one of England’s first historians of the practice, thought “that the rise of modern gaming in England may be dated from the year 1777 or 1778.”11 In fact, gambling, both public and private, had been an important topic of debate for at least three quarters of a century before the date assigned by Steinmetz. That men, and especially young men, gambled and had always done so, seemed obvious. That aristocratic men lost large sums in this way was not surprising to anyone. And, in 1709 the Tatler argued that it was the very virtues of young noblemen that led them to these two undesirable circumstances. The magnanimity, the courage, and the forthrightness of such young men caused them to become the prey to those whom they thought also gentlemen because they “seemed” gentle, i.e., looked well-dressed and acted in a polite and easy manner. Thus the Connoisseur described the sharper, the professional gambler who employed various cheats to effect the ruin of the young sprigs of the nobility, as possessed of coolness, politeness, quick and lively parts, and a seeming openness of behavior. Such sharpers seemed almost biologically destined to devour the substance of young and inexperienced men of wealth. Gaming “is now become rather the business than amusement of our persons of quality.…” noted the Connoisseur. “Thus it happens, that estates are now almost as frequently made over by whist and hazard, as by deeds and settlements.…”12 “How many Young Heirs have fall’n Prey to this rooking Generation of Men?” lamented Josiah Woodward in 1726. The anonymous author of The Whole Art and Mystery of Gaming agreed: “The Sons of our Nobility, and the Heirs to large and plentiful Estates, especially those who become too early their own Masters, are the Victims of Sharpers.…”13
While the gaming of Society was bemoaned in theory, for much of its early modern history the gambling that was considered criminal was largely that in which the lower classes engaged. Gambling, night-walking, and riotous living were all associated, and all perceived to be serious breaches of public order. In addition, such gaming was often joined to other forms of fraud, such as employing false dice or marked cards. By the early eighteenth century a variety of books were available which offered the inexperienced insights into the tricks of the various gambling societies, whose members were often described collectively as “rooks.” Cotton’s Compleat Gamester [1674], Ward’s London Spy [1703], and Lucas’s Memoirs of the Lives, Intrigues and Comical Adventures of the Most Famous Gamesters and Celebrated Sharpers [1714] were just three of the better-known examples of this genre.
The descriptions of gaming professionals and their victims employed, from the outset, a language of predatory animality. Gamesters were dubbed “cormorants, sharks, vultures, hawks, foxes, or wolves” as well as “rooks” or “anthropophagi.” These flesh-eaters, hunting in packs, dined off “pigeons, geese and sheep,” as their victims were called. A gamester was described as “a hawk among pidgeons; a fox among geese, a wolf among sheep.”14 The gambling inns or public houses in which these predators operated were presented, not surprisingly, as scenes of rage and violence: “every night, almost, some one or other, who, either heated with Wine, or made cholerick with the loss of his Money, raises a quarrel, swords are drawn, box and candlesticks thrown at one another’s heads.” The poet Richard Ames made such a scene of rapine, blasphemy, and malice the motif of his poem:
Would you my Muse of Hell the Picture view,
And what Distracted Looks the Damned shew;
Go to some Gaming-Ordinary where,
Shamwell and Cheatly and such Rooks repair,
To sharp the Citty-Prigg or Country-Heir.
… The Pox, the Plague, and all the Ills that fall,
On wretched Mortals on themselves they call;
While they by the uncertain chance of Dice,
Loose Mannours, Lands, and Lordships in a Trice.15
“Publick Gaming,” said one correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine, is nothing but “Publick Theft and Robbery.” And so, to prevent these sorts of violent eruptions and disturbances of the peace, two laws against such houses were passed in 1739 and 1745. Thus, shortly after the passage of the second Act, a meeting was called of all the petty-constables of the City of London and the Liberty of Westminster, to make “a proper Return of all Gaming Houses, Bawdy Houses, Night Cellars, and other Houses of ill Fame … in order that they may be prosecuted to the utmost Severity of the Law.”16 It was not that only lower-class men frequented such places, or that men of wealth and position disdained them, but rather that their clientele was socially varied and their “staff” professional, that made them seem especially dangerous. The desire to control or eliminate such places had something to do both with the desire to establish order and control crime and with the wish to protect property in “Mannours, Lands, and Lordships” from being squandered away.
It seems that these laws had some effect, though, as we shall see, not as much as many had hoped for. In June 1742, both the Gentleman’s and London Magazine published a brief account of a remarkable case, tried at King’s Bench. Having been the loser at the forbidden game of Hazard seven years before, an unnamed victim prosecuted the successful gambler, and, “after a long trial, … the Jury found a Gentleman guilty of the Penalty of 2500l for winning 500l from another Gentleman.…” Though the crime had occurred before the passage of the Act, the new environment may have convinced the loser that a prosecution was now possible. However, a decade later, in his capacity as Bow-Street magistrate, Henry Fielding was regularly breaking up similar gaming establishments, and attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to fine the proprietors, and more successfully, to destroy their gaming tables.17
As early as the 1740s, gaming houses were occasionally found at a different sort of venue—the homes of two aristocratic ladies, Mordington and Casselis, who claimed that their peerage protected their establishments from legal prosecution, but such upper-class involvement was still, it seems, rather unusual.18 Just seven years before, after a trip to Paris, the young Horace Walpole had commented in tones of disgust and horror, at the number of gaming houses kept by French people of fashion. “[I]t is no dishonour to keep public gaming houses,” he noted; “there are at least an hundred and fifty people of the first quality in Paris who live by it.… Even the princesses of the blood are dirty enough to have shares in the banks kept at their houses.”19 In England, the implication seemed to be, such things were rare and never so casually accepted.
After the passage of two mid-century acts to control gaming, an ongoing discussion was waged in pamphlets and the press for the next two decades about the relative destruction occasioned by private versus public gaming. While a few thought that public gambling houses were the source of England’s gambling mania, many felt that the real problem was with gambling in private houses. As early as 1736, a correspondent stated that “Play in private houses,” which had, he felt, shown a “great Encrease,” would “if not timely prevented, … end in the Ruin of the young and unwary of both Sexes.…” Two decades later, “M. E.,” in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine, arguing that gaming was one of those practices that could not be obliterated but only controlled, declared the desirability of an establishment of “public games of chance, under the direction of a groom porter.” This regulated and non-fraudulent amusement would allow people to have their “flutter” without being cheated; furthermore he also recommended that games of skill could continue to be played in private homes, but that “none be permitted to win or lose above a certain sum, at one time, under severe penalties.” Many thought the distinction between public houses and private homes had become abused, and that all should come under the eye of the law. The polite world, and especially women of the ton, wrote the St. James’s Chronicle, spend much of their days at “routs,” gambling parties at private dwellings. But, “instead of a few select Friends” such as they might meet for tea or conversation, they spend their days “with a Croud of Half-acquaintances and Strangers.” Routs, this essay argued, were nothing more than “private-publick Gaming Houses.” Though its author satirically proposed that “two publick Routs should be instituted, with AUTHORITY to open their doors every night, like the theatres,” such a suggestion had been seriously made by Henry Fielding a decade before: “Resolved, that all places of general rendezvous, tho’ at a private house, shall be deemed public places, and the masters and mistresses of all such houses shall be considered in the same light as the managers of our public theatres, and shall be equally subject to the jurisdiction of this court.” Writing almost a year before Fielding, “Sunderlandensis” went even farther. “Gaming for money, or gain of any kind,” he argued, “either in publick or private, by great or small, ought to be prohibited under the severest penalties, and a mark of infamy fixed upon it.”20
By the late 1760s opinion seemed unanimous; “few, if any, men ever lost a considerable sum at play in public; but that private parties … are the marts of imposition and villainy.” “A Halfcrown Whist Player,” writing to the Town and Country Magazine agreed, noting that “private parties and card clubs” had become infiltrated by professional gamblers, and, he argued, “there are, at least, one hundred thousand gamesters of both sexes, who live entirely by play.” But what was to be done? Few seemed willing to pursue the suggestion that the homes of the Great should be invaded and illegal gaming prosecuted. One of the few who thought this the correct policy, the anonymous author of a 1750 pamphlet identified only as a “County Justice,” proposed the passage of a law which stipulated that, among other penalties
all and every Person or Persons who shall be convicted of any Offence against the Laws and Statutes for preventing of excessive or deceitful Gaming, shall, from the Time of that Conviction, be deemed and adjudged to be incapable of, and disabled from holding or executing any Office, Place, Trust, or Employment, Civil or Military, in the Kingdom of Great Britain.…
Another, a correspondent to the Morning Chronicle, expressed a rather wistful hope that the rise of private theatricals, in which sprigs of the nobility “have lately acted some pieces themselves, for their own and friends amusement” would replace the attraction of the gaming table, while providing “noble and manly relaxation.” This hope was destined to be doomed, as many of the young men and women most involved in such performances also found time and inclination for truly heroic gaming stints and monumental gaming loses.21
Thus while gaming dens were condemned and the law called on to eliminate them, other sorts of criticisms were being made of a different type of gambling, that which took place in Society, in the world of the great, the leisured, and the beautiful. This body of criticism revolved around four sorts of destructive effects that, it was argued, this activity involved: harm to individuals, to society, and to the economic as well as political life of the nation. Much rested, it was frequently claimed, on the control of such noble play. Upper-class gambling was contrasted to, and seen as the enemy of polite conversation. Furthermore, the publication of Hoyle’s guides to “scientific” game-playing raised the question of whether sociable or recreational gaming was being transformed into a more efficient engine for avarice and moneymaking, with the creation of “knowing” scientific gamblers and ignorant dupes. Not only would the purported growth of gaming have serious effects on the property of men of family, it was claimed, but it would do even greater moral damage to their womenfolk. And, with the leaders of society, male and female, enthralled by the lure of the game, the direct and indirect effects of such degeneration would be widespread and potentially fatal.
The gaming of both the town and the ton, of high society and ordinary folk, was frequently presented in the journals and pamphlets of early eighteenth-century England as one of the predominant afflictions affecting the public weal. Josiah Woodward called it “the Mother of Many Vices”; an essay in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1731 spelled out its effects: it “destroys the Mind, Body and Estate; it contracts the Soul, and narrows the Genius; it gives a Disrelish of more noble and exalted Pleasures, and puts us upon a Thousand mean Things which our Souls abhorr’d.” The poet Robert Colvill saw in the popularity of gaming “Th’ignoble scandal of degenerate times, Baneful to public and to private good!”23 This theme continued to be presented and reworked through the succeeding decades. Thus the anonymous author of The Essay on Gaming of 1761 concluded that
Gaming’s a Fiend with Harpy Claws and Eyes,
Of Paper Substance, but prodigious Size:
Which like Eve’s Serpent wears seducing Smiles,
And when it proffers most, the most beguiles:
The sight of Gold its Appetite creates,
And dread Destruction on its Meal awaits.…
The London Magazine, a decade later, declared that “[t]his vice of gaming, originally descended from the worst of passions, is certainly the most pernicious of any to society.” And, in 1784, following the loss of the American colonies, a “Member of Parliament” blamed gaming for the defeat: “To this dreadful vice must every misfortune which has lately fallen on this country be attributed!”24 What seemed extraordinary about this activity was its addictive quality; it led not only to the derogation of duty, but even to the neglect of other pleasures. This first sort of complaint was traditional, yet oft repeated. Thus, in a general lamentation addressed to gaming, and the avarice which fed it, the London Magazine thundered:
the nation that harbours thee sacrifices her liberty to its pursuits; the statesman, when he becomes thy votary, proves false to his country; and every glowing passion for the publick welfare is chill’d in its embryo by the over-ruling power of self-interest; justice herself is stagger’d by thy enormities, her sword is blunted by thy outrages; when she calls in feeble accents, for assistance, her faithless patrons are deaf to all her entreaties.…
A more modern twist was given to this dirge in Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, which noted “a fatal passion for cards and dice which seems to have overturned not only the ambition of excellence, but the desire of pleasure; to have extinguished the flames of the lover, as well as of the patriot; … [and left him] without wishes, but for lucky hands.” The situation had become so serious that in 1754 the Gray’s Inn Journal, discussing gaming, remarked that it was then “the Grand Business of Life, which Mr. Pope, in his usual emphatic Manner, calls the Nation’s last great Trade.”25 Forty years later the influence of gaming seemed equally grave, and the cleric Thomas Rennell, arguing against the notion that private vice could be, if not public virtue, then at least publicly neutral, hotly contended that
I would not be thought to acquiesce in that mischievous distinction, invented by Knaves and current only with Fools; a distinction I mean between PRIVATE and PUBLIC morals, as if any vice or mode of immorality could exist, which doth not by some channel convey its poison to the body politick … the vice of gaming strikes immediately at the vitals of public virtue, public order, and public happiness.
Thus, from the beginning of the eighteenth century and throughout its course, opinion both clerical and popular saw in gaming a dreadful national evil. And many objected to what they dubbed its “fascination” operating in every station and walk of life. Well before the mid-century, critics pointed out the effects that gaming had on the various classes, on the great as well as the small. Though it was the crime of the poor that seemed more threatening to the commonweal than the imprudent vice of the noble, both were lamented. Thus in the 1722 tract An Account of the Endeavours that have been used to suppress Gaming-Houses, its author noted: “I am sorry to say it, but I verily believe, that the great Corruptions of late, and the daily Immoralities among People of the first Rank, are entirely owing to extravagant Living, and such Distresses as they have brought themselves into by Gaming only.…” While the Whole Art and Mystery of Modern Gaming fully expos’d and detected commented that current gambling was “the most fatal and epidemical folly and madness, especially among the persons of superior degree, and quality.…”26 observers could still maintain that the truly dangerous gaming, the gaming that might overturn public peace, occurred among the common folk. Everyone knows of Henry Fielding’s surprising mitigation of upper-class gambling in his Essay on Robbers; speaking in a similar tone, the editors of the Connoisseur concurred, and argued that it was the licentiousness of ordinary folk that was truly dangerous. Writing about the baneful influence that such works as Bolingbroke’s might have on the common people, they argued that if such notions were to spread “among the vulgar, we shall be knocked down at noon-day in our streets, and nothing will go forward but robberies and murders.” However, even here, the vices of the Great were satirized, not ignored or made light of. Unlike the vulgar, “As they [the Great] are placed above extreme indigence and absolute want of bread, their loose notions would have carried them no farther than cheating at cards, or perhaps plundering their country.…” This comparison and equation of a particular sort of private and public upper-class immorality had a long and growing significance, perhaps most visibly depicted and argued in the attempt to pass anti-gaming legislation later in the century, which we will subsequently consider. For now, however, let us examine the ways in which, by mid-century and after, such upper-class gaming was thought to hurt the national interest and strength.27
Though the notion that the upper orders in a healthy and well-regulated polity should serve as examples of virtue and propriety to the rest of society was something of a time-worn cliché, this view was repeatedly brought to the attention of the Great by those opposed to gambling. Thus the Essay on Gaming noted that: “the meanest Sons of Earth,/Embrace the follies of exalted Birth.” A decade later, in a letter to the Town and Country Magazine, a correspondent commented that, despite the fact that “our nobility and gentry, both male and female, … should be the great examples and encouragers of all virtue and industry,” they were badly remiss on the question of gaming. And again, almost twenty years after this complaint, Charles Moore, contrasting the gaming habits of the various classes, commented, “Pernicious as gambling has been discovered to be in the middle ranks of life, yet its consequences are still more dreadful (if possible) in those of superior station; since the influence of their example is so powerful.”28
A more novel criticism of upper-class gaming was the effect, it was claimed, that it would inevitably have on that small elite who were responsible for governing the nation. Invoking the goddess of gaming, the London Magazine concluded that “the statesman, when he becomes thy votary, proves false to his country; and every glowing passion for the publick welfare is chill’d in its embryo by the over-ruling power of self-interest.…” Having lost all his possessions by his unchecked infatuation for gaming, the statesman would be forced to beg the Court or Crown, for monetary relief, for “places, Pensions, and Gratuities of every Kind.” Trading his independence for a mess of pottage, he would soon find himself a mere pawn, and with the collapse of an independent nobility, the nation’s freedoms would, it was feared, soon disappear as well. Addressing the well-born members of the gambling club at White’s, Erasmus Mumford warned that “we may expect in a little time to see, by the Progress of this Science [of gaming] only, our liberty as it ought to be, … entirely in the Hands, and at the Disposal of the Reigning Monarch, whoever He is.…” Equally foreboding was the likelihood that, after having lost their fortunes, well-born members of Parliament would “cringe for places to administrations of any complexion, and thus, after having ruined themselves, contribute to the destruction of the nation at large.”29 And in the collapse of a self-supporting aristocracy, both private and public corruption must follow. “Do we not see noblemen squandering away large estates, and then patching up their broken fortunes by fatal marriages and venal places at court?” asked a correspondent to the Oxford Magazine. Some not only thought that gaming led to political venality, but went further, arguing that, in a variety of ways, gaming was deliberately encouraged and fostered to entrap or decoy segments of the nation. They thought that “this destructive fashion of gaming” was the method that “a corrupt administration introduced to engage the people’s attention, and prevent them from minding their misconduct, and discerning their bad designs”; others held that “our most crafty Ministers make it a Practice to encourage Gaming in our young Nobility, in order by their Distresses to make them become dependent on the Court.…” In either case, however, all agreed that when the political classes became devotees of gaming, “Dupes they commense, and terminate in knaves.” Thus the Oxford Magazine warned statesmen-gamesters of what “was on the cards” for the nation, if their gaming was not halted. “Ye wicked ministers of night, quit White’s, and devote a little time to serious study, to save us from all the horrors of a bloody civil war.”30
Following the loss of the American colonies, and even more after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the condemnation of venal, gaming politicians became darker and more disapproving. Describing such men as “convicts of a higher order,” the Gazetteer asked: “what makes so many false patriots?” The answer was simple “—gaming.” Such men, they claimed, “pretend to adopt the cause of the people until they go into place, then plunder the public to pay their gaming debts.” Charles Moore argued that the gaming statesman “barters his abilities and his conscience for gold: he procures, by a slavish submission to the nod of power, some rich command or government, in which he may fleece those unfortunate people, over whom he is appointed.” “Gambling and modern patriotism are not dissimilar,” commented the Times in a similar vein. “The benefit of the public is never taken into consideration.”31
In addition to the actual corrupt practices of gaming politicians, many held up two other moral and psychological national ill effects of such amusements. First was the widely held view that being a gambling addict led to psychological and ratiocinative weakness. Thus the Monthly Review, in its 1776 appraisal of Reflections on Gaming, Annuities and Usurious Contracts, excerpted the following discussion of the moral and intellectual incapacities of the gaming Parliamentarian: “The science of legislation and the intricacy of political calculation is a very different study from the chances at hazard; the honour that must stand the siege of corruption, and fulfil the sacred trust of the people is not the same principle with the honour of a gamester.” Moore reiterated, varied, and elaborated on the theme in a rich rhetoric of condemnation: “[W]hat prevents the improvement of the understanding—what deprives society of the rich fruits of liberal endowments and political abilities—what makes a wreck of virtue, honour, fame, religion—in short, what absorbs all the generous, useful, ornamental, and social faculties of the soul, like the vortex of the gaming-table?” And Thomas Rennell, sounding a dire warning through his use of capitalization, asked “What is it that converts Those designed by Providence to be the GUARDIANS and PROTECTORS, into the BANE and CURSE of their Country? I will answer—the GAMING TABLE.”32
Furthermore, from the mid-century, fears about England’s international power were connected with concerns about the devastating effects of gaming. This theme, which was not unusual in the 1750s, became even more commonplace in the years preceding and following the American war. Along with other vices associated with French luxury, gaming was castigated for allowing Britain’s “ever-vigilant and enterprizing enemies to win by stealth what they could not conquer by might.” “Shall then French Fashions and French Modes bring about, what French Arms, and even French Politicks have so long in vain attempted?” asked Thomas McDonnell in a 1760 sermon. Reprinting an essay that had first appeared in the Spectator, the Matrimonial Preceptor of 1765 stressed the deleterious military effects of gaming women: “What a race of worthies, what patriots, what heroes must we expect from mothers of this make?” Comparing the degenerate military leaders of her own day with the military leaders of Greece and Rome, Mary Wollstonecraft commented that, in contrast, “our British heroes are oftener sent from the gaming table than from the plow; and their passions have been rather inflamed by hanging with dumb suspense on the turn of a die, than sublimated by panting after the adventurous march of virtue in the historic page.”33
In addition to its corrupting influence on politics and its dissipating effects on mental and martial acuity, gaming was further seen to have two most significant and destructive repercussions on the nation’s well-being, which, while general, had even graver consequences when indulged in by society’s leaders. The first of these was that each citizen, and especially each member of the political classes, had a duty to devote at least some of his time and best efforts to the public weal. “Whoever devotes his time to Gaming withdraws from the Publick Good, and is both an Enemy to his Country and himself,” said the author of the Whole Art and Mystery of Modern Gaming. Another, in a letter to the St. James’s Chronicle of 1765, made the connection, and the point, even more clearly: “Persons of Fortune … from a false Notion of Independency … imagine they are at Liberty to do any thing, or nothing; to dispose of themselves or Time; and to fill up their vacant Hours with such Expedients as Folly or Caprice may bring into Vogue.… For is not every one, as a Member of Society, accountable for his publick Actions, and the Tenor of his Conduct to Society?”
Thus the suggestion was made, only half satirically, that since “among the many useless members of society, there are none so unprofitable as the fraternity of Gamesters,” it would be a gain to the national strength if members of the brotherhood were pressed into the armed forces, were compelled “in handling a musket [rather] than in shuffling a pack of cards, or shaking the dice-box.”34 All members of the polity owed the nation some significant service.
This notion of the duty one owed to one’s society and nation was often only part of a larger duty incumbent on all Christians. Whether winning one’s personal salvation or assisting in the maintenance and stability of public order, time taken in gaming was time lost from worthier goals. Though half a century apart, both Josiah Woodward and Jonas Hanway agreed on the need to use time and effort frugally and toward proper ends. While Woodward, stressing the individual and eternal, argued that “It is most certain, That no Person, in the short space of this probational Life, can have much Time to spare for Diversion: considering that he has the great Concern of eternal Life to secure.…” Hanway’s emphasis was on the national and political, “That the service of God is perfect freedom, is as true in a political, as in a moral sense; for free government is built on the foundation of religion.” Though we sometimes speak of eighteenth-century England as a secularized society, where neither God’s law nor the Devil’s temptations were seen as having major moral influence, most social critics agreed that a polity depended for its continuance, for its prosperity and its proper running, on a bed-rock of a firm Christian practice. Combining the emphases of Woodward and Hanway, Thomas Rennell proclaimed that “Religion as it is the perfection of individuals, so is it the preservation of communities.”35
For many the most visible indication of the deleterious effects of gaming on Christian practice was the fact that Sunday was, it was said, being devoted not to prayer nor to church attendance, but to cards and dice. Voltaire’s notice, though acute, was more ironic and satiric than condemnatory: “No opera, no plays, no concerts in London on Sunday; even cards are so expressly forbidden that only the aristocracy, and those we call well-bred people, play on that day.” A decade later, Fielding’s Covent Garden Journal gave in its dictionary of contemporary usage, under the heading “Sunday” the definition: “The best time for playing at cards.” A similar definition was given in the Town and Country Magazine of “Boar” as “an old woman who refuses to play cards on Sundays etc.” And in the same vein, the foppish aristocrat Lord Aimwell in the satiric Essay on Gaming, noting that “Cards on Sundays are my chief Delight,” contrasted the pleasure thus afforded with the pains of Sabbath observance: “A Church and Parson would my Soul affright; Of Graves and cold Mortality they smell, Nor can I bear to hear the tolling Bell.” Aimwell concluded (in language remarkably similar, though opposite in belief to the letter to the St. James’s Chronicle) that “I think the Pow’rs above, Who shed o’er Nature their divinest Love, Have left Mankind their Lives and Fortunes free, To be dispos’d of as they best shall see.”36
As we have seen, while most ranks of people were criticized for gaming, it was the Great who were especially denounced for such activity on the Sabbath, both in print and in practice. Thus we read an odd story of an upper-class woman harassed and kept from her Sunday gaming by the actions of an outraged Christian mob. “Pluto,” in a letter to the Gazetteer denounced “the scandalous practice of persons of distinction and fortune, in playing at cards on the Lords day, and that in so open and indecent a manner, as not to conceal themselves from the notice of passengers, by neglecting to shut up their windows.”37 Moralists often presented the specter of empty churches, abandoned by the Great, and of Sabbath gaming parties, where other sorts of adoration occurred.
[They] devote to the pitiful Service of Cards, or Dice, the Evening of that Day, which CHRIST, the LORD of Heaven and Earth, hath, eminently, set apart for his sacred Praise and Worship.… The Prince of Darkness is served and attended with all the artificial Blaze of Jewels, Dress, and borrowed Radiance; while he, who brought Life and Immortality to Light, is left forsaken to unfrequented Walls, echoing the languid Prayers of a few, unfashionable, superannuated christians.
And, by the century’s end, the tone of such condemnation had become shriller, deeper, and more apocryphal.
May Almighty God, by his preventing grace, bring it home to the hearts of all those in the higher ranks, who carelessly or contemptuously devote themselves to this practice [of gaming] on the Sabbath, [the account which] is to be given in the hour of death and the day of judgment, that they had been, “innocent of the blood of all Men!”38
When, in Henry Fielding’s Amelia, its heroine announced that she “mortally detest[ed] Cards,” she not only affirmed her position as the book’s moral center, but also evoked the following comment from one of the novel’s less virtuous women. “Detest Cards!” cried Mrs. James. “How can you be so stupid? I would not live a Day without them—Nay, indeed, I do not believe I should be able to exist.” This satiric interchange, in which what was at stake was not the national interest, but the nature of normal quotidian sociability, reveals another aspect of the eighteenth-century critique of gaming; that it made men and women, to return to the fragment that started this section, not only unprofitable to the nation, but unsocial.40
By the mid-century, according to the Connoisseur, fashionable life so much revolved around various forms of gambling that “most of our fashionable diversions are nothing else but different branches of gaming.” But why was this sort of amusement especially reprobated, why was this form of passing the time especially censured? We have seen some of the answers already—that gaming was addictive, that it was mind-numbing and unimproving, and that it exerted an alluring counter-pull to religious and spiritual improvement. But in terms of sociability and a life of leisure, what could be said against it? Several ironists in fact commented that it had a positive social role in that, once engrossed in cards, men and women lost their taste for scandalous gossip, and even for illicit amours, thus protecting their various virtues by the indulgence of this absorbing hobby. “Why,” asked a “Respecter of Sabbath” in a letter to the Public Advertiser, “should an innocent game of cards be more profane than common conversation, which will be taken up perhaps in descanting on Fashions, public places of amusement, or private scandal?” His answer to his own question, and to the conundrum of how a social activity like gaming could be seen as “unsociable,” was “that card-playing excludes all possibility, or chance of serious conversation.”41
For both serious social commentators and newspaper correspondents, the centrality of conversation to a properly ordered sociability could not be overemphasized. Thus the Rambler noted that “it is scarcely possible to pass an hour in honest conversation, without being able, when we rise from it, to please ourselves by having given or received some advantages.…” There was nothing like conversation with “the most ingenious and entertaining of his equals” to improve the understanding of a young gentleman, maintained the Gentleman’s Magazine. It was conversation, said “J. G.,” a correspondent to the Gazetteer, that “was one of the noblest privileges of reason, and which more properly sets mankind above the brute part of creation.”42 Gaming, however, not only stole time and interest from this far more valuable, far more instructive social activity, but actually diminished the capacity of people to converse. Gaming made conversation impossible, or at best, unlikely. “The universal practice of card playing is particularly pernicious in this respect, that, whilst it keeps people perpetually in company, it excludes conversation,” noted the Universal Magazine. The Town and Country agreed: “It may be true, that in general we are too little qualified for rational conversation; but we shall be less so if we give it up.…” Thus, in monopolizing sociability, in diminishing conversational ability and interchange, gaming hurt both the social and national sphere simultaneously. Contrasting the gaming present with the conversational past, the Lady’s Magazine reminisced:
People used formerly to meet together for the sake of conversation; but ever since the card table has been in fashion all the pleasures of speech has been suppressed … When our visits were intended either to improve our friends or ourselves, several noble hints were thrown out, which might be of service to mankind in general.…43
Beyond the harmful effect of gaming on the conversational circle, and on solid sociability, gaming was consistently represented as more than just a neutral way of spending time. Instead, it was a form of anti-social sociability, a miniature war of all-against-all. This strand of complaint, unbroken from at least the mid-century, continued to be rearticulated, re-emphasized through the century’s end. Unsurprisingly, clerics used this trope in denouncing gaming. Thus in 1760 Thomas McDonnell, attempting to describe the horror of a gaming scene, calling it “so dismal and shocking; and yet so lively and strong,” argued that “nothing but an Assembly of Fiends, mutually contending to destroy one another, can, in any Sort, be imagined to equal, much less to exceed it.” Thirty-five years later, another cleric commented that “jealousy, rage and revenge exist among gamesters in their worst and most frantic excesses, and end frequently in consequences of the most atrocious violence and outrage.…”44 Much more surprising, perhaps, was the frequency with which this view was expressed in the popular periodical press, both in the form of letters to the editor and in miscellaneous articles in both poetry and prose. Thus in a poem on gaming, which appeared in the British Magazine of 1748, we read that when gaming has replaced the pleasures of conversation, “Instead of this delightful grand repast, Noise, discord, animosity, and strife, Deep hatred, rancour foul, and hot revenge, Oft spread their terrors o’er the sporting board.…” The Connoisseur characterized the gamester as one who “would ruin his own brother, if it might be of any advantage to himself.” Friendship was banished, for “friends turn into enemies, and sensible men into madmen; it [gaming] nevertheless is pursued with continual ardour.”45 And the language employed at the gaming table was as debased as the activity itself. Rather than the rational tone of mutual improvement and innocent pleasure that typified the best conversation, at the gaming table “lies, oaths, and the most bitter and opprobrious expressions are vented, which often destroy the most sacred bonds of friendship, and produce in their stead, envy, dissimulation, malice and revenge, with a long train of other diabolic passions.” And the man or woman who exhibited the character of the “professed gamester” would have lost most of his or her human qualities; he “must be devoid of every humane, every generous sentiment: callous to all social sensations, he lives the vulture of mankind, to prey upon innocence and credulity.”46 By 1784, the anonymous Member of Parliament whose Hints were designed to diagnose as well as recommend remedies for the evil effects of gambling, wrote that “There is now no society.… It is vain to attempt conversation. All is croud and confusion. The social pleasures are entirely banished, and those who have any relish for them, or who are fond of early hours, are necessarily banished.” Thus, in a sociable age, gaming acted as an insidious agent of corruption, an engine of disunion and disaffection, emphasizing individual gain over the calls of friendship, or of family. Gamesters were solitaries by choice, alone and self-absorbed in the largest crowds and gatherings. But the object of their devotions not only devoured the gaming addict himself, and anyone who loved or trusted him, but spread its devastation much more widely. Thus a correspondent to the Town and Country Magazine argued that “four knaves and the dice-box have been the causes of more quarrels, than ever the king of Prussia and all the monarchs of Europe have been engaged in from the thirst of conquest.”47
Of course, the most obviously detrimental effect of gaming, both for the gamester and his connections, and for the nation at large, was the loss of estate and of wealth that inevitably ensued when large sums were staked and lost. Both the Connoisseur and the Rambler considered the activity and its votaries to be “unprofitable” to the nation; Johnson explained his opinion thus: “Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good. Trade gives employment to numbers, and so produces intermediate good.” This commonplace, that the good of the nation could be measured by the numbers of people it employed, seemed an irrefragable condemnation of gaming, though a few facetious commentators tried to make such claims for it. Thus one noted that although card playing seems “a very idle and fruitless occupation” this languid amusement “furnishes work for the cardmakers, who set the paper mills in motion, by which the poor rag-man is supported: not to mention the builders and workers in wood and iron, who are employed in the erection of those mills.” “These artizans would,” another quipped, “if unemployed in their different vocations, become a burthen to the public, or a pest to society.” But the satire depended for its humor on the well-known ridiculousness of the claim, as well as on the fact that the nom de plume of one of these satirists was “Matthew Mandeville,” who argued, like his forebear Bernard, for the public benefits of private vices.48
Contemporaries thought that gaming was more than just unprofitable, but anti-profitable. It hurt the economic interests of both individual and nation simultaneously in three ways: first, by increasing the number of bankruptcies and insolvencies, second by robbing the tradesmen, to whom the Great were indebted, of their just payment, and third, by alienating landed estates from their traditional owners and thus depriving their progeny of their inheritance. In an almost unbroken rant beginning in the late 1730s, the magazines and papers of the day railed against that bankruptcy caused by gaming. The Gentleman’s Magazine thought that “many of our late Bankruptcies and Insolvencies” resulted from gaming, because it unsettled men’s hardworking habits and “naturally introduces Extravagance, Luxury and the Neglect of Business.” It was because of this inattention to business caused by the fascination with gambling, wrote a correspondent to London Magazine “that so many shops, once in a most flourishing condition, are now shut up in the very heart of the city, and their owners either bankrupts, or miserable fugitives to foreign countries.” And the calamity did not stop with the immiseration of the gamesters themselves, but spread its devastation amongst “the innocent and fair traders, who, by connexions and credit, are involved in the same misfortunes.”49
However, since gaming was illegal, why did people who lost vast sums voluntarily pay the sums owing? Why did they not just smile and walk away from such debts? There were two answers given to such questions; the first, that pigeons who refused to pay up were intimidated into doing so, since, it was said, many sharpers were also excellent duelists. The second, and more frequently cited reason, though it would only operate on the sentiments of gentlemanly pigeons, was that “a false and most ridiculous notion of Honour hath such an Influence on the Minds of most Gentlemen, that they think it scandalous to put the Laws into Execution, or not to be punctual in the Discharge of all gaming Debts, In Preference to their honest Creditors.…”50
Thomas McDonnell characterized the spurious honor which paid “debts of honour,” i.e., gaming debts, in preference to settling outstanding bills as “the Robbery of our Dependants, our Tradesfolk, and those we deal with for the common Necessaries of Life, not to mention the Ornaments and Luxuries of it.” A novel of 1780, entitled The Relapse, argued that: “Debts of honour must be repaid. Ridiculous! To pay a set of known villains and to refuse the same justice to the industrious trader! Horrid as this is, it is the maxim of the world.” The Oxford Magazine painted a still more horrifying and sentimental picture of the fate of the poor tradesman, cheated out of his payment: “By such beings as these the industrious tradesman is immured in the narrow confines of a prison, and perhaps a wife and helpless progeny, brought to beggary through his credulity; while the author of their ruin, move in an exalted sphere, above the reach of punishment, for actions, which in the eye of humanity, are highly criminal.”51
As distressing as is this picture of the imprisoned and ruined tradesman and his innocent family brought to ruin by others’ gaming debts, more distressing still, and even more common was the complaint that gaming severed the primary care that parents had of their families, especially the financial well-being that a father was expected to provide for his wife and children. The British Magazine broke into verse to describe this heart-wrenching scene:
A thrifty and penurious dame at home,
A lovely race of harmless heav’nly babes,
Must now perhaps participate his gloom,
And bear with all the miseries of want;
Sad prospect! when a family’s support
Is boldly lavish’d by a knave—on knaves.
Women wrote letters to the magazines, asking for guidance for such well-loved, but feckless husbands. And a correspondent to the Morning Chronicle attempted to rouse the shame of such men by pointing out that
To the man of affluence, [such debts led to] inevitable ruin or disgrace; nor are their inoffensive wives, and perhaps deserted children, excluded from the dire misfortune; for how many amiable women are there, who after being fleeced by the sacrilegious hands of fortune hunters, are left to brood over the most fatal misery of nature, and watch the lisping cries of their starving babes!
While all gaming hurt the innocent family of the losing gamester, the most flagrant and egregious of such losses were those that occurred when landed estates were the stakes that were lost. We have seen the poet Ames bemoaning the loss of “Mannours, Lands, and Lordships”; three decades later, the author of the Whole Art of Gaming wrote his treatise to warn “young Gentlemen of Fortune” to beware of false friends who, under the guise of play, would win their property and inheritance, reducing themselves “to so low and wretched a state, as to support a set of men in ease and luxury, whose ancestors were beggars.” Still later, and in phrases redolent of Ames, Henry Baker also broke into verse in his condemnation of estates lost through gaming. “But Gamesters for whole Patrimonies play:/The Steward brings the Deeds which must convey/The lost Estate:—What more than Madness reigns,/When one short Sitting many hundreds drains.…” It is therefore not surprising that the Gentleman’s Magazine, after the passage of the 1739 Gaming Act, said that they had “wish’d that an express Clause had been inserted in this Act, for the Recovery of all Estates, Lands, or Sums of Money … which could be fairly prov’d to have been won by fraudulent Gaming.…”53
Of course, like the arguments for the salutary effects of card-playing drawn from the increased manufacture of playing cards, satirists applied the same notions to estates lost through excessive gaming. Using the common metaphor of the nation as the body politic, and its wealth as the blood which circulates through it, nourishing and enlivening it, such ironists praised professional sharpers and gamblers as “Friends to Policy, because they make Money circulate, and teach Industry the way to thrive.…” This is the same tongue-in-cheek tone taken in Christopher Anstey’s enormously popular The New Bath Guide. In a letter to his mother, back home in the country, Anstey’s Bath tourist explained the virtues of gaming: “And gaming, no doubt, is of infinite use/That same circulation of cash to produce./What true public spirited people are here,/Who for that very purpose come every year!/All eminent men, who no trade ever knew/But gaming, the only good trade to pursue.…” But much more frequently the tone was grimmer and the warnings thunderous. Thus, when “Homo” in a letter to the Morning Chronicle, addressed to a Nobleman, warned him against gaming, he insisted that “an habit of gaming must make your richest possessions constantly precarious; that your forests may sink beneath the axe, and your acres be transferred to some more fortunate master. Therefore let me beg you to be guarded against the prevalence of so fashionable a vice.” Equally dire were the warnings that the author of Hints on Gaming gave to gamesters, but this time the emphasis was on the woes that their progeny and heirs would face: “The father frequently ruins his children; and sons, and even grandsons, long before the succession opens to them, are involved so deeply, that during their future lives their circumstances are rendered narrow; and they have rank, or family honours, without being able to support them.”54
For women the economic consequences of gaming were even greater. We can perhaps get some sense of the grave outcome awaiting the female gamester by examining the sad tale of Miss Frances Braddock.
On September 22, 1792, a story appeared in the American periodical The Weekly Museum, entitled “The Fatal Effects of Gaming, Exemplified in the History of Miss Braddock.” The story of Fanny Braddock’s short and tragic life, addressed as a warning to other women, was employed to illustrate the truth “that Vice that renders the most beautiful among you disgusting, which debases the most exalted, is GAMING.” Braddock, who killed herself in Bath in 1731 because of her gaming debts, and whose story was several times repeated through the century, both in Britain and abroad, offers us an interesting introduction to the fear and concern that the female gambler seemed to evoke.
Braddock’s story, at least as told by most of the press accounts, was brief but affecting. Left a fortune at her father’s death, and another by her sister’s demise a few years later, the young Frances became “a great Admirer of that hazardous Dependance, Gaming.” Having, inevitably, lost her last shilling, she hanged herself in her apartment, with her “Golden Girdle.” All reports praised her for her “courteous and genteel Behavior, and good sense.” And it was not long before other details appeared: an account of her burial at Bath Abbey, and perhaps most poignantly, the verses found written on her window, praising death.56
How was the initial coverage of Braddock’s death in 1731 different from the coverage of similar male deaths? It is in the answer to this question that we can begin to see how heinous contemporaries found female gaming. Thus, it is important to understand that for most of the first six decades of the eighteenth century, the periodical press exhibits a remarkable reluctance to discuss the misdeeds and wasted lives of specific and named individuals of the upper classes. While the great essay-journals of these decades frequently excoriated male as well as female gambling, calling it the grave of every social and civil affection, neither they nor the news-sheets of the period “named names” or revealed the scandalous lives and exits of the great and not-so-good. No one, for example, wrote of the de facto prime minister Henry Pelham’s great gambling losses, while everyone “in society” knew of them. It is perhaps instructive to consider the comments made on the deaths of two upper-class men who killed themselves a generation later, in the 1750s, for the same reasons as Braddock had in the 1730s. Thus when, in 1754, William Bromley, Lord Montfort, a broken gamester, was refused a government pension, he spent New Year’s eve playing whist at White’s, a great male gambling club, and then shot himself through the head on New Year’s Day, after making a foolproof will. The London Evening Post, after reporting that he had “died at his house, in Arlington Street,” and listing the public positions he had held and who his children were, said no more about either the nature of his death or the reasons for his self-murder. Similarly, when, nine months later, after having lost, according to Horace Walpole, more than £32,000 at one night’s play, Sir John Bland shot and killed himself “on the Road between Paris and Calais,” the London Evening Post merely noted that he had “died suddenly” and that, as he had no heirs, his titles were extinct. In both of these cases, the beau monde knew the truth of these lives and deaths, gossiping about the details, but the world at large, the newspaper-reading public, was kept discreetly ignorant.57
It must be said, however, that not only this silence protected men, but legal processes as well served to exonerate both men and women of the upper classes who were investigated by coroners’ juries, from receiving the same harsh verdicts that men and women of the lower classes occasionally got. Thus, in a mock Bill of Suicide for the month of November (the month in which the English were thought to be most prone to kill themselves) Gray’s Inn Journal listed the self-inflicted deaths of several men of wealth and family, all of whom were found “lunatic” and thus not culpable of properly understanding the wickedness of their enormity, while the verdict on “Thomas Hopeless, formerly a warm Housekeeper in Holborn, but reduced by a Series of Misfortunes to extreme Misery, with a Wife and seven Children” who killed himself, was guilty of felo de se, i.e., self-murder. Morally innocent, the wealthy lunatic was buried, as was Miss Braddock, in a place of sanctity and honor. In contrast, the felo de se was buried at a crossroads, with a stake through his or her heart. While, in this case, class trumped gender, it was clear that the press was not prepared to hold up the lives and deaths of upper-class male gamblers as exemplary warnings, in the same way that an upper-class female, like poor Frances Braddock, was “available” for such useful moralizing. Let us look more closely then at the female of the species; let us consider the woman of fashion as she was portrayed on stage, in some of the plays of David Garrick.
In his play of 1749, Lethe, a character notes that a “fine lady lies in bed all morning, rattles about all day, and sits up all night. She goes everywhere and sees everything, knows everybody and loves nobody, ridicules her friends, coquettes with her lovers, sets ’em together by the ears, tells fibs, makes mischief, buys china, cheats at cards, keeps a pug-dog, and hates the parsons. She laughs much, talks aloud, never blushes, says what she will, does what she will, goes where she will, marries whom she pleases, hates her husband in a month, slips from her gallants, and begins the world again.…” Two years before, in Miss in Her Teens, Garrick’s anti-hero, Fribble, promised the girl he was wooing that if she accepted him, he would provide her with the “life of a woman of quality, for she will have nothing to do but lie in bed, play at cards, and scold the servants.” The activity common to both long and short descriptions is playing, or cheating, at cards. In gambling we have the epitome of luxurious expenditure, of waste both of substance and time, driven by the addictive and expansive pursuit of sensation. If both men and women of fashion were criticized for their gambling practices, for their vast gaming expenditures, women were thought to be particularly liable to its allure. As Justine Crump has thoughtfully remarked: “Female gaming seems disproportionately represented in literature and non-fictional texts, suggesting that it was the focus for powerful social anxieties.” A few instances of such representation, which stress the continued concern about the gambling habits of genteel women, can serve as useful illustrations of this insight. Thus in 1713, The Guardian, defending his title, noted that he “should ill deserve the Name of Guardian, did I not caution all my fair Wards against a Practice, which when it runs to Excess, is the most shameful, but one, that the Female World can fall into.” Similarly, almost half a century later, a letter to the London Magazine, comparing the effects of gaming on men and women, commented:
It is remarked of men, that they are apt to grow reprobates by gaming, and gradually to desert all principles of honour and humanity.… Ought not women, then, to be particularly guarded, against such baits to indecorum, and seductions to turpitude? They should be, in an especial manner, the promoters of delicacy, and the cherishers of innocence; as all their happiness depends on the prevalency of the tender passions; and the brightest ornament they can of course adorn themselves with, is a sanctity of manners.58
It was said that women who gamed, lost, at least metaphorically, their human natures. Thus The Spectator argued that women who, in the ordinary course of life, were “Gentle, Good-humoured, and the very Pinks of good Breeding” became, as soon as they began to gamble, “immediately Transmigrated into the veriest Wasps in Nature.” A “mere carding woman” was characterized by an anonymous letter-writer to the Public Advertiser in 1765 as “at best but a chienne savante, and too frequently an half-human tiger in petticoats.”59
What accounts for these fierce denunciations of female gambling? Why were contemporaries so alarmed about the growth of this seemingly innocuous activity among upper-class women? How did eighteenth-century critics explain the prevalence of these habits among such women? To take the last question first, eighteenth-century commentators gave a three-part answer to the question of female vulnerability to such vicious behavior, arguing that in part this was due to their lack of public occupations, in part to their mis-education, and in part to their greater nervous susceptibility. Women were particularly warned to beware “how they suffer this passion [for play] to steal upon them.” For, since women had no ordinary paying jobs, they could employ their talents at cards. The author of A Modest Defence of Gaming noted that “the Card Assemblies are still open to their Industry; the noblest Scene, wherein the Female Talents can be exerted: neither is any great Fund necessary for this, if we consider the known Prerogatives of the Sex: when they win, they have speedier Payment; when they lose—they have longer Credit. And certain it is, whatever Pain it may give us to confess it, the Ladies have the Powers of Gaming in greater Perfection than the Men.…”60 In a less satiric vein, another author argued that the source of “the vanity and degeneracy of the present female world upon the bon ton” was that women, “instead of being taught housewifry, and other useful female pursuits like their ancestors, Hoyle is put into their hands every morning instead of a Bible; and the polite manoeuvres of fleecing the pool are considered as more valuable acquisitions than needlework, and the barbarous morality of musty writers.” Since fashionable women did not work, they could not be accused of unprofitably wasting time, but nevertheless they were chastised for misusing such hours “without any improvement, or rational delight; … all conversation is suspended amongst them, except the frequent repetitions of a few gambling phrases and poignant altercations.”61 Increasingly the vice of gambling in women was attributed to their faulty or misdirected upbringing. “Parents,” said one correspondent to the Town and Country Magazine of 1787, “are very generally to blame for being so ready to finish this branch of education in their daughters.” As a consequence, many women become “accomplished gamester[s].” “There are no bad passions,” he concluded, “which cards do not excite in some degree; a reflection which ought never to be forgotten by those whose task it is to rear the female mind.” One critic went so far as to urge that all young women be taught geometry as a preservative to their ability to reason clearly and act prudentially. “No young lady should be admitted to a card table, until she had perfected herself under that regulation.… [T]he study of geometry,” he continued, “will fix the attention of the most volatile female, teach her to think with propriety, compare with caution, and judge with precision.”62
In addition to the wastefulness of female gambling, it was widely believed that such practices had more destructive consequences ranging from loss of beauty to loss of honor and of life itself. The luxurious practices of female gaming inevitably led to ruin and the grave. That women who gambled would become horrid in appearance was an eighteenth-century cliché. Not only were women’s countenances unpleasantly distorted by the fears and disappointments involved in high play, but were the female gamester “only to reflect upon the ill effects of anxiety upon beauty, and that frequent vigils antedate old age, a woman who has the least regard for her complexion or her features, would forego such a dangerous pastime.…” Another commented: “Could a pretty female know that she often forfeits even temporary beauty in being bested, she would probably never touch a card again. I have seen one of the finest women in England so agonized at the loss of her last guinea, that could she have seen the distortion of her features, she would have fainted: I therefore recommend to all ladies who play deep, constantly to have a looking-glass before them.” And even if the gambling woman felt she had nothing to lose, or was not deterred from gaming by the prospect of ugliness, if she was unmarried she risked matrimony itself by the continuance of her luxuriant pastime, for “what man of common sense,” it was said, “would wed a female gambler?” “In trade it would be signing his own certificate as a bankrupt; in private life it would be subscribing for his lodging in the King’s-Bench. Many married women have lost their husbands at play; but no spinster ever got one by it, though she were ever so successful.”63 More serious, however, than either of these two criticisms, were the well-established views that female gambling led inevitably and inextricably to loss of chastity and/or to suicide. Female gamesters appeared more unnatural, more morally reprehensible because originally purer than men of the same sort. Thus Mrs. Carter remarked: “… a male gamester is a most disgraceful and shocking character; but a female gamester seems to be a blot in nature. She must forego all that is good and great belonging to her sex, before she can boldly shake the dice, or offer bets.” Richard Hey agreed. In his Three Dissertations on the Pernicious Effects of Gaming, he argued that: “to become a Gamester, is to cease to be a Woman in the highest and best sense of the word.… The impetuosity of Gaming breaks the bonds of consanguinity, and yet more endearing ties of conjugal union … engaged in far other solicitudes, she departs from the truly feminine character; she is worked up to rancorous envy, to masculine revenge, to indecorous violence.”64 The female gambler became unsexed: neither man nor woman, she stood as an emblem of vice. For in losing her money, it was inevitable she would lose her honor, her virtue, and, in a sense, her sex itself. When a woman’s money was lost, her chastity, it was frequently said, “must supply the deficiency. Hence the numerous divorces which every day take place, hence the misery of whole families and the ruin of posterity.” Thus, in The Fatal Concession, a Moral Tale, published in 1771, after the foolish wife of a young gentleman of fortune had lost both her money and her honor through the machinations of an aristocratic cad, Sir James Frolick, her husband challenged and killed her seducer, only to return to find his wife “in her last moments, and in agonies which pierced his soul.”65 The wages of such exorbitant female expenditure were, almost inevitably, adultery and death. Moreover, such tales were not only to be found in novels: an anonymous author, examining “the fatal effects of high gaming,” recounted the fate of a clergyman’s wife of his acquaintance, who had “lately fallen a victim to this fatal vice.” When her husband remonstrated with her on the grave financial difficulties in which she had placed him and her children, the woman, “unable to bear the pangs of conscience which she felt at the horrid prospective … attempted to destroy herself; but not having accomplished her design, she still breathes a shocking spectacle of the terrible effects of high gaming.” Seldom did a woman escape in time, or with her honor intact, as did the fortunate Letitia Halton, heroine of the tale The Perplexed Wife. Despite her great gaming loses to Lord Fleecer, Letitia’s husband, Sir James, forgave her, paid her debts, and thus defeated “lord Fleecer’s infamous designs.” Like all addicts, Letitia realized that she could never gamble moderately, and so, “to prevent the return of a passion which had nearly proved fatal to her, never played cards again.”66
Miss Frances Braddock, as we have noted, was not so lucky. But her personal tragedy became the stuff of moral lessons, repeated frequently through the century. Her story first appeared in a scandal-mongering book, Modern Amours, published just two years after her death. Her suicide, that “execrable Deed,” like her reckless gaming, was the effect, it claimed, of “the Wiles of the great Enemy of Mankind,” Beelzebub himself. Less than a decade later, Bath’s great architect, who also was both Braddock’s landlord and employer for the last year of her life, wrote of her end in his Essay towards a description of Bath. His account of her life and death revealed that after she had lost most of her wealth, she had served as a respectable decoy to lure other upper-class folk into a local gambling den, though he maintained “her Behavior was such as manifested nothing but Virtue, Regularity and good Nature.”67 The manner of her life and death were also discussed and lamented in Oliver Goldsmith’s account of the life of Richard Nash and given even more exposure by the reprinting of parts of that work in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Twenty-five years later, her story appeared again, both as an article in the Times, and in a miscellaneous work called Pleasing Reflections on life and manners, in a form that was almost identical to that published in the Weekly Museum, though without the opening invocation to the “frail daughter of Eve.” This version, however, ended with a brief doggerel verse:
O CARDS! ye vain diverters of our woe!
Ye waste of life! ye greatest curse below!
May beauty never fall again your slave,
Nor your delusion thus destroy the brave.68
A decade later, two more versions of Miss Braddock’s life appeared: one largely drawn from Goldsmith’s account, the other by Charles Crawford, a sentimentalized “Essay Upon Gaming.” Crawford concluded his retelling with the following injunction, which again stressed the use that could be made even of a tragically misspent life: “O ignominious, horrible, and accursed end of beauty, elegance, talents and humanity! It is painful to think of this end, yet it is useful, that the young and undesigning may be warned.” Thus, almost from the day of her demise through the rest of the century, Braddock’s life served as salutary dissuasive in the many moralizing accounts warning all the frail daughters of Eve of the delusive dangers of “deep play.”69
In our survey of attitudes towards gaming we have, to this point, concentrated largely on the literary, periodic, and admonitory, on plays, sermons, and pamphlets. We get differing, though complementary views when we consider its coverage in the newspaper press.
Through the first five decades of the century, though the press included numerous essays and comments critical of gaming, almost all the press accounts of its practices were of the actions of magistrates in shutting down notorious gaming dens. Here is a typical report of one such attack:
Last Night, about Eleven o’Clock, the Constables of St. Martin’s, St. Paul Covent Garden, &c. assisted by a Party of Soldiers, by Virtue of a Search Warrant, went to the New Gaming-House, late the Fountain Tavern in the Strand, where they secured upwards of Thirty Persons, differently employed in unlawful Gaming, and conducted them in great Order, two and two, to Clerkenwell Bridewell; where, it is hoped, they will not only meet with Reward for their Labour, but Labour for their Reward.71
By the 1760s and 1770s, the coverage was more varied, and, while still not giving the names of individuals, more personal and pointed. Thus, in 1765, two items appeared which reported on upper-class, male and female, gaming. The first told of an action to be brought against “a Man of Fashion” for having challenged “a Right Hon. Personage, about some misunderstanding which arose at cards.” The second, more poignant though still anonymous, involved the “lady of a right honourable personage” who had attempted to kill herself “on account of some losses at play, which she did not choose should come to the ears of her husband.”72 By the 1770s, and the rise of the Wilkite press, accounts of upper-class gaming, and the corruption that such gaming could entail, became more commonplace. The pages of Bingley’s Journal contained many such stories, giving broad hints as to the identity of the gamester. Thus, for example, in 1771, Bingley’s reported that “A certain noble Lord, now in the administration of naval affairs, has mortgaged his salary for three years to come to a gentleman, in part of the payment of 50,000l. lost at hazard.” Less than a year later, as part of a longer article about upper-class gaming, Bingley’s noted that “General Scott lost at one sitting, very lately upwards of 10,000l.” Other newspapers joined in the attack. In April 1772, the Middlesex Journal recounted how, in 1765, “the Rt. Hon. Richard Rigby was so fortunate as to win in one night 60,000l. of Lord Weymouth.” When Weymouth, unable to pay this debt of honor in full, tried to amortize the sum, Rigby, wishing a speedier payment, proposed that he would exert “all his interest to procure him [Weymouth] the Viceroyship of Ireland, on condition of paying him the whole sum in three years.” Unfortunately for both Rigby and Weymouth, a man with “superior interest,” George Townshend, secured the appointment for his own brother. Not content with this, Rigby, at least according to the Middlesex Journal, “laboured to sow the seeds of dissent between such members of government as he, or his friends, have any influence over” and so skillful were his machinations, that the Middlesex foretold a probable opening in Ireland for Weymouth, and a full repayment for Rigby. A month earlier, the same paper, in commenting on the “astonishment of the public” in reading “accounts of sums daily won and lost by young men of quality at the fashionable gaming houses,” cited the losses of “the young Cub” (a popular reference to Charles James Fox) who, by a “few unfortunate casts” of the dice, was “at this time charged with annuities to the full amount of six thousand pounds on this score only.”73 Fox and his friends, though by no means the only young men of fashion who gambled for large stakes, came increasingly, as we shall see, to epitomize the gaming craze that seemed to be sweeping the haut ton.
During the 1770s, in a series of letters and articles in the newspapers and the magazines, various writers were beginning to insist that Britain’s domestic and international difficulties were exacerbated by, if they did not stem from, the deep play indulged in by several of her young Parliamentarians. Some of these pieces, though mildly scolding, were affable and forgiving, like the illustrated letter to the Oxford Magazine, of the “young Cub” having been called from his play to sign legislation in the kitchen of his gaming-club. Increasingly, however, the portrayals became blacker and more censorious: by 1774, when the London Magazine’s commentator “Harlequin” visited White’s gaming club, he saw two young men playing cards so intently that they “had not been in bed for two nights.” Of course, one of these was Charles Volpone (another nickname for Fox), and “Harlequin” related that
Charles yawned, damned his fortune, slipped into his chair, went home, washed and shifted himself; then in his sulky rattled down to the House of Commons, played with his hat, beat his breast, talked for an hour in favour of the administration, without knowing a word of the matter debated, and then returned again to White’s to try his luck at hazard.
And, lest his readers mistake or miss his point, “Harlequin” concluded: “Thus does a modern man of the mode pass his time for the benefit of himself and family, and the GREAT GOOD OF HIS COUNTRY.”74 By the later years of the decade, the commentaries grew harsher still; “Every man incumbered with the consequences of his vices or his follies,” argued the author of an essay in the London Magazine, “Reflections on Gaming,” “is a millstone around the neck of his country,” on whose shoulders would fall the responsibility for “the destruction of the purest and most durable constitution.” How can such perfidious fellows,” asked “A Friend to Youth” in a letter to the Gazetteer, be promoted “to places of important trust, and considerable emolument, in preference to men of unimpeached integrity?” “Every friend to virtue and his country,” he concluded, “must shudder at the prospect.”75
And shudder many did, especially at the news coming from America, from the Caribbean, and from the war with France, Spain, and Holland. By the early 1780s, it seemed increasingly likely that the war would not end well, that, in addition to the imperial and fiscal losses, such an eventuality would only lead to an increase in crime and internal upheaval. And, consequently from 1781 onwards, for the two decades, in two great waves of publicity, the press seemed full of gaming and its deleterious effect on the morals and future of the nation.
Even before the introduction of the bill formally called The Act to Prevent the Pernicious Practice of Gaming, but commonly known as the EO Table Bill76 was brought to the House of Commons in June 1782, the press had launched a unprecedented, four-fold attack not only on this one game, but on the whole unregulated, reckless, and socially harmful panoply of gaming practices. EO was an early form of roulette. It was played on a special table, often shaped like an octagon or circle, and punters bet not only against each other, but against the table’s proprietor. In some curious way, the EO Table, and its extirpation, became a symbol of what needed to be rehabilitated in the English polity.
The press quickly seized on the popularity of this sort of gambling. Some of the most common of such press items were the reports of the magistrates’ doings, and either their negligence or their activities in controlling illegal gaming. Though these sorts of reports were not new, the frequency of their appearance dramatically increased from the early months of 1782. These newspaper comments often stressed the inability of magistrates to properly police gaming shops. “The doors leading to the EO Tables in and about Covent garden are illuminated with additional lamps, and every evening set wide open for the reception of all comers—Yet the proper officers wisely refrain crossing the threshold of those profane dwellings. Let us hear no more of the reformed police of Westminster,” remarked the Morning Herald. The same paper, however, noting that “a great deal of ill-founded invective has been lavished on the magistrates of the Westminster police, for not suppressing the various EO tables that are played at within their jurisdiction,” argued that, without complaints from the public, no action could be taken.77 More important, perhaps, and more important to their readers, were the numerous items of magisterial action, of break-ins of gaming houses, and arrests of their denizens. Between April and December of 1782, as many as a dozen such incidents were reported, many simultaneously noted, by most of London’s newspapers. But whether reporting police activities, or scolding police inaction, throughout this year the press encouraged and prodded the magistrates and their agents to greater activity. By August 1782, the Morning Post confidently asserted that “[t]he interposition of the Justices in the suppression of EO tables, is an act that will gain them the most unbounded applause of the public, and give every reason to hope that the long looked for reform in that body, so necessary to the protection of the subject, and the honour of the city of Westminster, is near at hand.”78
Throughout the year, as well, the press featured a number of items about gaming and gamesters. The reports of suicides were almost always of young men who had killed themselves because of gaming losses, and the following account was quite typical:
The young man taken out of the canal in the Park on Sunday morning, proves to be the son of a Mr. Reading, a reputable tradesman of Corke, and is supposed to have put an end to his existence, in consequence of losing a very considerable sum the preceding evening at an EO table.79
These acts often led not only to press report; the publicity also generated letters from correspondents, from their grieving parents and their concerned employers. In addition to the accounts of vast sums lost were those, equally disturbing, of large sums won. Perhaps, inevitably, an advertisement appeared, proposing to teach young men “a method to avoid losing” at play, specifically at the EO Tables. The advertiser, addressing his notice to “those gentlemen who have lost money at that too frequented game of E.O.,” specified that since he did not wish “to encourage Gaming, he hopes none but persons of property will apply.” The Public Advertiser reported another, perhaps even more satisfying, solution to gaming losses:
A Certain Keeper of an EO Table was horsewhipped last Saturday Morning till he implored Mercy on his Knees, by a Gentleman in Westminster, whose Son he had the impudence to arrest for Money he had lent him to Sport with at his own Table. The Gentleman obliged him to kiss the Whip that chastised him.80
The press also derived many gaming stories from the sad fate of Dr. Graham’s Temple of Health. Dr. James Graham was a Scot who, after extensive travels abroad, returned to London and set up his spectacular Temple of Health and Hymen, which promised both medical and procreative cures for those willing to pay the Temple’s incredible fees. Perhaps the most famous element in this opulent theater of promises was the electro-magnetic “Celestial Bed” which promised its users perfectly formed heirs for a fee of 50 guineas a night. By 1782, Graham’s “medical” enterprise was in parlous condition, and so one John Wiltshire either rented or bought the Temple of Health and converted it into what the press called “The Temple of Thieves,” “The Temple of Hymen,” or “The Temple of Destruction.” In August 1782, officers of the peace, infiltrating the room, destroyed the EO table with one mighty slash of an axe, “the first intimation that the company received” that their play was ended. In the fray that followed, “Mr. Addington was very severely hurt by a stroke of a bludgeon on his head.” Addington recovered, and eventually Wiltshire was found guilty of keeping an EO table and punished.81
This story formed the kernel of at least one, perhaps two pantomimes presented in London that summer. The first, called “The Genius of Nonsense,” described the arrest of the Goddess of Health at the EO table, and her committal to Bridewell. This quip, the Morning Chronicle reported, “produced one of the loudest bursts of laughter and applause ever heard in a theatre.” Another pantomine, playing at Sadler’s Wells, featured the transformation of Graham’s “Celestial Bed” into an EO table, and the entertainment, according to the report, was “executed in a manner as deservedly attracts and merits the applause of the spectators.”82
In addition to reporting such satires of current gaming concerns, the papers also included a wide variety of satires on gaming practices; a comparison of gaming to the influenza then prevalent; several ironic poems and odes; a “found” letter from Fox to his associates about the purchase of EO Tables; and a “Cross-Reading” in which, by reading across rather than down a newspaper column, some anomalous pairings could be created (in this instance the following: “The Right Hon. the Earl of Effingham’s white wand is to go to—Preside at an EO table, to the great disgrace of morality”).83
When the EO Table Bill came to be voted on early in July 1782, it was “lost” and, though many hoped a new version would be introduced and enacted in the next session, this never materialized. We can never know exactly why the bill did not pass or why a new one was not introduced in the next session, but we can find clues about what some contemporaries thought might have happened and indications of what objections others had to it. When a variety of amendments were made to the bill in the House of Lords, the Duke of Chandos objected that he thought this would cause the bill to be lost, as prorogation of the session was imminent. Lord Effingham assured his colleagues of a number of seemingly contradictory things; that the bill could still be passed, that it really was for the best if it were not, since in its unamended form it was badly flawed, and that, in his discussions with London’s magistrates, he had been told that they did not need new powers, but just wanted the authority to control EO tables. For whatever reason, the Lords agreed, and when the King prorogued Parliament, the bill was not signed.84
Less than a week later, the Morning Herald reported a correspondent as saying that “The EO Bill … was lost by one of those kind of accidents which seem as if it happened on purpose!” The Herald, in fact blamed Fox for its loss; once he had lost his post as Secretary of State by the fall of the Rockingham ministry with its leader’s death, an event his supporters, it said, had foreseen, “his imps were the loudest against the bill, as they foresaw that their master and themselves would soon have occasion for [such] a resource.” And a “found account” of a conversation between Fox and Sheridan made the nature of this resource clear; in it Fox noted that he had ordered a dozen EO tables, which, with himself and his friends as proprietors, would “pick up cash sufficient to support us all the winter.” Still others blamed Effingham, satirically suggesting that a “Corps of Sharpers and Pidgeon Pluckers,” in addition to presenting him with an inlaid EO table, worth three hundred guineas, had “unanimously agreed to present an Address of Thanks to the Right Honourable the Earl of Effingham” for ensuring the failure of the Bill.85
A more potent problem for the success of the bill was that it would have allowed magistrates and constables to enter private dwellings, as opposed to only permitting them to enter taverns or inns where gambling was practiced, to pursue illicit and upper-class gaming. Though this was not a new proposal, having been made, as we have seen, almost thirty years before, it still roused anger and distrust. For, it was clear that it would allow for the punishment of the gaming of the ton as well as of the hoi polloi, and that, in a Parliament that contained a large number of extraordinary gamesters, such a piece of legislation was anathema. In its discussion in the Commons, this objection was strongly voiced. Sir P. J. Clerke argued that this was a “bill militating with the liberty of the subject.… What a shocking thing would it be, to have private houses disturbed by this new authority at all hours, and to have ladies made liable to be sent to the house of correction, at the will of any magistrate.”86
In addition to the enhanced powers of entry into both private and public places by constables that the bill proposed and that was objected to by its opponents, an older trope was also frequently invoked; that the men who were to be given these extensive powers were themselves venal and corrupt. As early as July 1769, a long editorial letter in the Oxford Magazine, addressed to Sir J[ohn] F[ieldin]g and entitled “Police,” argued that, since the “civil magistrate is pensioned by bawds, pimps, whores, vintners and gamblers,” it was clear that he would not “enforce the execution of the laws against all transgressors, in all times, and at all places, however highly distinguished by rank or title.” Nor, it continued, would he visit those “polite places of private resort for the practice of public vices, and … insist that the makers of the laws should be the first on whom they should be obligatory and binding.”87 So too, in the discussions surrounding the EO bill, some argued that it would be “dangerous to extend the authority of Justices of the Peace,” for, it was asserted, their existing summary proceedings exhibited only “corruption of heart, and ignorance of head, displayed in the most glaring colours.” And the anonymous author of a letter to the Lord Chancellor, published in the Morning Herald before the bill’s final reading, noting that constables were “a set of fellows, who have no means whatever of livelihood, but those which arise from taking up thieves and other felons, and prosecuting them to conviction, for rewards,” prophesied that were the bill to become law, he would not “be surprised if midnight robbers should assume the name of constables, and under the authority of one absurd law, violate all the others.” After such banner-waving about the need to preserve inviolate “the sanctuary of private houses” and the venality of London’s police, the bill was allowed to fail.88
Despite the failure of the EO bill to become law, in the two months following its defeat the magistrates of Middlesex and the City were busy shutting down EO houses and prosecuting their keepers. Almost a dozen reports of such crackdowns were published in this period, and the Morning Chronicle reported that they were “credibly informed, that the justices throughout every city, town and borough in the kingdom, are determined to exert themselves, and put a stop to the game of EO, especially at the time of races.” By the end of August, the Morning Herald crowed that “The vigilance of the magistracy has at length obtained a compleat victory over the various keepers of EO tables, those combined foes to every order of civil society,” and added four months later that “the almost total extirpation of the pernicious game of EO has gained Sir Sampson Wright the universal esteem of every friend of social virtue and honest industry.”90 Although, when it became clear that a new EO bill was not going to be introduced, the exertions of the magistrates diminished and the reports of EO’s reappearance emerged, and within a year or two another game had become the focus of public concern and execration—the game of Faro.91
Although there is no reason to think that Faro, like EO, was not played in low houses of resort, the most frequent references made to its site in the press were to private homes, often the homes of the great or fashionable. Unlike the genuine hospitality of “the middling and lower class of people,” opined the Times, young men were only invited into the homes of “the higher orders” so that they could ruin themselves at Faro, Hazard, or cards. The owners of these houses were well paid for their use, and were often the silent partners of those professional gamblers who actually conducted the games. It was said that “the best place in this country, in regard to an employment of profit under the Crown, is not the Prime Minister’s, nor the Duke of Newcastle’s nor Lord Mansfield’s, though now a sinecure—but the keeper of the Faro tables, moving about at the different great houses of the nobility.” One Mr. M, the Times reported, by this employment, earns “clear near 30,000l. a year.”92
With the rise of this new form of gaming, run by gamblers but in private homes, and as part of an evening’s social entertainment, the language of gaming underwent an interesting expansion. When, in his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson had defined the activity of gaming, he described it as “to play wantonly and extravagantly for money” and illustrated the character of the gamester by quoting Bacon, “the greater master he is in his art, the worse man he is.” Johnson supposed “gambler” to be a cant word which was applied to a “knave whose practice it is to invite the unwary to game and cheat them.” By the later 1780s, the Times, in an item called “Modern Definitions,” described the gamester as one who employed skill and “a very clear head … without violating the rules of any game, [to] win the money of hot-headed, inebriated young people of fashion” while the gambler “by the arts of false dice, packing cards, signs and confederates, or by any other means, will, under the title of play, pick the pockets of any one who falls in his way.” Another ironic column in the same paper, called “Errata in the Newspapers for the last Three Years,” clearly illustrated the way in which contemporaries increasingly viewed social wagering: “For ‘play—read ‘cheating.”93 From a leisure activity, play increasingly became seen as a corrupt, money-making deception. As shocking as were the large sums reported lost by such activities was the fact that the men and women of the haut ton were inviting their friends and acquaintances into their homes to fleece them, that “Faro has become a matter of business, as well as a game of chance, in the polite world, and almost all the houses of fashion are now dealers and chapmen in this lucrative concern.”94 This “vortex” that drew most of the male, and some of the female upper classes seemed so irresistible, that the newspapers started praising aristocrats who did not gamble, as though such restraint was itself a positive virtue.95
By the end of June 1787, London’s press reported the promulgation of the King’s Proclamation against Vice. This edict, while directed at vice of all sorts, took special aim at the profanation of the Sabbath, and forbade “all our loving subjects, of what degree or quality soever, from playing on the Lord’s Day at dice, cards or any other game whatsoever, either in public or private houses, or other place or places whatsoever.…” Yet, while measures were undertaken to control various kinds of Sunday activities among the middling and plebeian classes, nothing seems to have been directed towards halting fashionable Sabbath gaming.96 Just a few days after the proclamation’s announcement, the Times noted that, in response to its regulations, fashionable soirées were now beginning even later on Sunday evenings, and that, at “half after twelve the company then sit down to cards, the time being according to law Monday morning. Thus gaming on Sunday is prevented!” The blatant inequity of regulation was not missed by the press. As one correspondent noted:
While every pains are taken by the Magistrates to reform the lower class of people, a correspondent wishes that the good effects of the proclamation could be carried a little higher—“Sunday shines no sabbath day” to the great. Routs are formed, and cards played at every nobleman’s house on that day, and all the difference between these routs and public houses, is, that the visitors do not pay for their liquor … but many pay dearly for their amusement otherwise.
And, in a satirical column entitled “Wants” the following was noted: “Wanted, in the houses of several persons of fashion, a little more respect for religion, and less affection for cards on the Lord’s day.”97
With the growing prominence of Faro and Hazard came renewed attacks on the laxity and corruption of magistrates, new reports of suicides attempted or accomplished because of “debts of honor,” and renewed calls for more punitive laws against gambling and gamblers. “Some very strict bill should immediately be brought into Parliament,” the Times demanded, “making it a felony of death to keep a Faro or Hazard Table.” For, added the Morning Chronicle “All fashionable pleasures appear now to centre in gaming; people of fashion, in the gratification of their favorite pursuit, display all the ardour of juvenile lovers: ‘In Love with ruin, pleased to be undone.’ ”98
Thus the decade following the defeat of the EO Table Bill was decried almost daily by the press as a decade of gaming ruin. Several sarcastically claimed that Thomas Holcroft had stolen the title of his popular play, “The Road to Ruin,” from the daily depredations of gambling establishments. That the vice was ancient, all agreed; however the extent, enormity of loss, and new personnel made these practices novel. The first of these innovations, written about so eloquently by Gillian Russell, was the centrality of tonish women as hostesses and organizers of such venues. Lamenting their role, the Times remarked:
That women of rank should so notoriously conduct themselves as to revel in all the luxuries of life through open plunder, is a circumstance which would never be credited, were it less public than they themselves make it. What would the ancient honour of our forefathers say to women of title and fortune keeping a FARO TABLE?—and by the indubitable frauds at it, sickening all that is like honest fame and virtue in the metropolis, by the splendours of corruption.99
The second novelty, the growing presence of French gaming-house proprietors and gamblers, was also noted and condemned. Describing the Faro Bank in Pall Mall, “on the French firm [which] holds out the temptation of 18,000l.,” the Times thundered “—that such a gang so notorious in their own country, should be so audacious as to brave the laws and common sense of this, is a proof of the relaxation of our laws in this respect.—John Bull should be let loose among them.” Three years later, the World’s comment was apocalyptic. “Public professed GAMBLING,, made fashionable by great Persons, and current from high authority, taints all the purer sources of life,” it noted, and concluded, “It is the last sad sign of a ruined EMPIRE, and a CONSTITUTION tottering to its decay—shall no way be found out, shall no intervening hand of Justice stop this torrent of corruption and debased morals?”100
But, by the early 1790s two new forces, two new “white knights,” had appeared to combat the proliferation of vicious play and immorality; the press as a champion of civic virtue and enemy of gambling, and the courts and police as agents of legal rectitude and retribution. Writing to the Whitehall Evening Post, a correspondent remarked that he knew “that the Press chastizes many crimes to which the law does not reach.” Stung by some criticism of their report that “a certain Lady in St. James’s square has ruined herself by FARO!!” the Times responded by arguing that since “[s]uch publications … will always meet the approbation of the virtuous mind—and ensured of success there, the Press bids defiance to the whole host of gamblers.”101 By the late 1790s, the Times stated that since “it is a justice due to the rising generation to guard them” against vices like gaming, it “had taken some pains to expose the Faro-tables, even among the higher ranks of society”; in this effort of moral hygiene its “endeavours ha[d] been aided by the magistracy of the country.”102
Both before and after the establishment of a stipendiary magistracy in London in 1792, the press frequently attacked the supineness and hinted at the corruption of both magistrates and their constables. “Pray why do not the Bow-street Magistrates, attended by their thief-takers, go to all the infamous haunts of gamblers, at the West-end of the town, let their rank be ever so high?” asked the Times. Challenged by the justices to “point us out the gambling-houses … and we will present them to the Grand Jury,” the paper printed the names of six such establishments of “the higher order” and four of the lower.103 Though they prided themselves on having shamed the magistrates into action, it seems reasonably clear that it was judicial pressure from the high courts, especially from King’s Bench, that was responsible for the perceived increase in magisterial activity. Not only had Mr. Justice Ashurst delivered two stinging charges to the Grand Jury, instructing them of their duty to shut down gaming houses in the early 1790s, but after the mid-decade, the many comments and actions that Chief Justice Kenyon launched against the heinous vice of gambling led to a significant rise in the number of stories of increased magisterial vigilance. A good example of this robustness and determination to eliminate gaming “hells,” as they were coming to be called, was the application, by the lawyer William Garrow, for a writ of Mandamus “directed to Mr. Addington, the presiding Magistrate at Bow-street, commanding him to proceed to hear certain informations” against proprietors of gaming houses. Kenyon readily agreed to issue the writ, and warned that “every branch of the Magistracy from the highest to the lowest ought to exert themselves to suppress this growing evil.” Later the same year, in a case where Garrow accused the London magistrates of inattention to information from those they adjudged “common informers,” Kenyon responded, “If the conduct of any Magistrate has been improper—if any witness has been brow-beat or improperly treated, as being an informer, and his evidence considered as inadmissible in a court of justice, … I shall hand their names to the Lord Chancellor, who I know, will strike them out of the commission of the peace.”104
Most of London’s papers presented Kenyon as the leader of the fight against deep play; it was “in consequence of the very strong manner in which Lord Kenyon lately recommended prosecutions against the keepers &c of gaming houses, [that] the master of a Hazard table, was yesterday taken before the Magistrates in Marlborough street,” noted the Times. A few months later, when a well-known gambler and gaming proprietor, a Captain Wheeler, was brought before the magistrates at Bow Street and released as innocent, the Times lamented: “Could these people be brought before Lord Kenyon, we have no doubt but that great and moral judge, whose administration of justice has been always distinguished by an unqualified reprobation of vice, would punish them to the utmost extent which the laws would warrant.” And both Kenyon and the press repeatedly argued that the law had rather to be overly severe against the offences of the Great in an age of revolutionary upset than to appear to condone or overlook their iniquities. “The higher the station of the person, the higher the offence, and proportionally higher must be the punishment.”105
Beyond the press’s clear and repeated self-descriptions as the outraged voices of “the public,” who wished, they asserted, to eliminate or control the spiraling vice of gambling, their coverage of such activity and their assessments of its scope in the last decade of the century were uneven and ambiguous. That such activities, led by England’s higher orders, were ruinous to a flourishing state was a commonplace; but what was happening “on the ground”? From late in 1792 the press started suggesting that the great gambling houses were in decline, that gambling among the ton at any rate was diminishing. “The profits at Faro are become so considerably reduced, that most of the banks now lose most every evening, after defraying the expenses of the house, which are very considerable,” said one account. By September 1794 the decline of press stories of upper-class immorality was attributed to the horrific realities of the Terror; “The Faro Bank Ladies, old Q, Johnny Wilkes, and several other prominent characters, seem to have walked out of the public papers into obscurity. The axe of the guillotine, Robespierre and the French Revolution, have taken the lead of all other diurnal communications.”106 A far greater proportion of newspaper stories, however, were accounts of the actions of the courts and the magistrates against gambling than had appeared earlier in the decade. Still, in the last years of the century, fashionable gaming seemed to have made a comeback as a topic of newspaper tattle. “The gaming tables of our noble dames are thronged with the profligate, the profuse, and the trifling part of creation,” the Morning Post reported in February 1798; by September of that year the Times also noted gambling’s resurgence: “Gaming, that hydra of calamities, has again made its appearance with its catalogue of horrors. Notwithstanding the late interference of the police, there are at present, exclusive of subscription tables, no less than eighteen public gambling houses at the west end of the town.”107 But newspaper reportage of gaming and its flamboyant upper-class proprietors was almost at an end; by 1800, if the presence of newspaper reports were any guide, such gambling activities in England hardly existed. The number of such accounts in the Times had already started a decline by 1798, and it was not until 1817 that the Times once again included as many gaming stories as it had featured almost twenty years before. The average number of such stories for the decade beginning in 1800 was three, the average number in the two preceding years was thirteen.108
How are we to understand this precipitous decline? What factors drove the press to so severely reduce such accounts? Some reason may simply be the pressure of the times; with the accession of Napoleon to the head of the French army and state, warfare and foreign affairs were, not surprisingly, the main objects of public interest. Insurrectionary movements in Ireland and an expected invasion from France, as well as the unending wars in India, also took up much newspaper space. However, press reporting of adultery, while sharing some similarities with gaming stories, also showed interesting and different frequencies. In the first two years of the nineteenth century, twice as many adultery stories appeared in the press as had appeared in the previous two years. And while the number of gambling stories in the century’s first decade was an average of 3 a year, there were approximately 13 adultery and divorce stories during the same period.109 So the pressure of more respectable, more significant news events cannot entirely explain the decline of gaming coverage.
Now it may be that stories involving illicit sexuality are more salacious, more “attractive” to newspaper readers than stories of illegal gaming. It may be, in an era of “the world turned upside down” abroad, that newspaper editors thought that only so many stories of corruption in high life were prudent. And while criminal conversation cases and divorces involving fashionable society were matters of public fact, gambling activities of this set were more frequently matters of rumor and innuendo. When, after the family of the newly deceased Earl Cowper sued both the Times and the Morning Herald for carrying a story about the gambling debts of an unnamed young nobleman, who they claimed was clearly Cowper, a story which, they said, libeled his memory and cast shame on his honor, and won their case against both papers, this may have created an unfavorable climate for the dissemination of other scandalous, tonish gaming reports.110 Still, perhaps this is not the entire picture.
When, after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, the number of gambling stories once again appeared to rise, we are offered another clue to an explanation of the virtual newspaper blackout on gambling accounts among the ton for the first fifteen years of the century. From 1816 through 1820, the Times published 51 stories about or comments on gambling of one sort or another; of these, 22, or almost forty percent, were negative comments on public lotteries. In addition five accounts dealt with men who, falling into losses at gaming, went on to steal money or bonds to extricate themselves from debt, and six accounts were of the need to repress penny-ante gambling at fairs or roadsides. The tone of these reports is quite different from that of the clichéd comment of the 1790s that “The example [in gaming] should be set by the great, that the little might imitate.” Instead, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, the emphasis was almost entirely on the moral condition and the immoral practices of the lower orders. Perhaps this was because some, like the author of the Microcosm of London of 1809, in his comments on the history of Brookes’s gaming club, noted that “a few years since … [the] destructive propensity [for gambling] was carried beyond all the purposes of amusement or pleasure, and that some of our great popular characters have been accused of indulging a most inordinate passion for it; but the taste for play seems, in a considerable degree, to have abated.” More likely, however, was the apprehension expressed by a “Hertfordshire Clergyman” in a newspaper letter to Lord Sidmouth. Noting that Sidmouth was an “official guardian of the public morals,” he urged him to discharge “your duty to the country.”
That duty, at all times important, is peculiarly so in times like the present, when distress is rapidly demoralizing the lower orders of people, and making them instruments in the hands of turbulent men for subverting that beautiful fabric of social order under which Englishmen have hitherto lived and prospered.…
A plebeian gaming loser, said a judge of King’s Bench at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was “forgetful or negligent of every true principal of honour and of duty. He was hurried into acts of thefts, forgery, robbery and sometimes murder.” This then was the new focus for anxieties about gambling, which explains perhaps the enormous emphasis on such activities in fairs and prisons, or about public lotteries in the years after 1815.111
And yet a final thought about the surprising disappearance of stories about fashionable gambling in the newspaper press. When, in 1819, “Orator” Hunt delivered a rousing speech to the Smithfield Reform Meeting, he reflected, in passing, on what he claimed was a widespread press campaign to smear the reform movement with charges of immorality. The press, he argued,
had made a system of attacking the Prince Regent, in order to keep the people and the Royal Family at variance. Yet of the two the Duke of York was surely a fairer object of animadversion, he having lost in a gambling debt the money given to him to visit an infirm father. This was, he supposed, an example of the morality of the higher orders.112
As the vicious immorality of the Great, and the size and scope of their gambling losses, had become part of the political rhetoric of reform, it is perhaps unsurprising that the newspapers chose not to ally themselves too closely or sympathetically with these trouble-making advocates of change in an era of dislocation.