The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print General Editors: Professor Anne K. Mellor and Professor Clifford Siskin Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck & IES; John Bender, Stanford; Alan Bewell, Toronto; Peter de Bolla, Cambridge; Robert Miles, Victoria; Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton; Saree Makdisi, UCLA; Felicity Nussbaum, UCLA; Mary Poovey, NYU; Janet Todd, Cambridge Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print will feature work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries – whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it will combine efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series will enable a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity. Titles include: Scott Black OF ESSAYS AND READING IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN Claire Brock THE FEMINIZATION OF FAME, 1750–1830 Brycchan Carey BRITISH ABOLITIONISM AND THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 E. J. Clery THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Literature, Commerce and Luxury Adriana Craciun BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Citizens of the World Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (editors) LAND, NATION AND CULTURE, 1740–1840 Thinking the Republic of Taste Elizabeth Eger BLUESTOCKINGS Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (editors) BOOKISH HISTORIES Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 George C. Grinnell THE AGE OF HYPOCHONDRIA Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness Ian Haywood BLOODY ROMANTICISM Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 Anthony S. Jarrells BRITAIN’S BLOODLESS REVOLUTIONS 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature

Michelle Levy FAMILY AUTHORSHIP AND ROMANTIC PRINT CULTURE April London LITERARY HISTORY WRITING, 1770–1820 Robert Miles ROMANTIC MISFITS Tom Mole BYRON’S ROMANTIC CELEBRITY Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy Nicola Parsons READING GOSSIP IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Jessica Richard THE ROMANCE OF GAMBLING IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL Andrew Rudd SYMPATHY AND INDIA IN BRITISH LITERATURE, 1770–1830 Erik Simpson LITERARY MINSTRELSY, 1770–1830 Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature Anne H. Stevens BRITISH HISTORICAL FICTION BEFORE SCOTT David Stewart ROMANTIC MAGAZINES AND METROPOLITAN LITERARY CULTURE Mary Waters BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROFESSION OF LITERARY CRITICISM, 1789–1832 Esther Wohlgemut ROMANTIC COSMOPOLITANISM David Worrall THE POLITICS OF ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY, 1787–1832 The Road to the Stage

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–3408–6 hardback 978–1–4039–3409–3 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel Jessica Richard

© Jessica Richard 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Jessica Richard has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27887–5

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richard, Jessica, 1974– The romance of gambling in the eighteenth-century british novel / Jessica Richard. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–27887–5 (hardback) 1. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Gambling in literature. I. Title. PR858.G32R53 2011 823'.5093579—dc22 2011008046 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Timothy C. Blackburn, with love

This page intentionally left blank

Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Gambling Culture of Eighteenth-Century Britain 1

2

3

“Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England Sir Charles Grandison, The Excursion

18

Cheating, Calculation, and the Episodic Romance of Gambling Hoyle’s Short Treatise, Ferdinand Count Fathom, Amelia

45

The Gambling Man of Feeling: Sublime and Sentimental Gambling Cecilia, The Adventures of David Simple, The Mysteries of Udolpho

4 The Lady’s Last Stake: Camilla and the Female Gambler 5 6

1

86

111

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home”: Belinda, Education, and Empire

127

The Confidence Man: Persuasion and the Romance of Risk

146

Afterword: The Eighteenth-Century Risk Society

169

Notes

172

Bibliography

183

Index

193

vii

List of Illustrations 1

William Hogarth, The Gaming House, from A Rake’s Progress (1733)

2

2

William Hogarth, Assembly at Wanstead House (c.1728)

3

3

Philip Mercier, The Schutz Family and Their Friends on a Terrace (1725)

viii

16

Acknowledgments Though I never took any “research trips” to Atlantic City or Las Vegas (indeed I have never gambled), I have become intimately familiar, during the long process of writing The Romance of Gambling, with what I call in Chapter 3 “sublime gambling,” simultaneously experiencing ecstasy and despair as the outcome of my wager on this project was still unknown. I could not have sustained such emotional heights and depths without the support of those with whom I have contracted numerous debts of honor as I repeatedly made this wager. It gives me great pleasure to thank these generous creditors here, though I offer this book only in partial payment, since I will be forever in their debt. I am grateful for the vigorous support and encouragement of all my colleagues in the English Department at Wake Forest University; I thank especially Dean Franco, Scott Klein, and Eric Wilson for reading various parts of the manuscript. Special mention must be made of former colleagues Janice Caldwell, Evie Shockley, and Lisa Sternlieb, whose friendship has been irreplaceable. I thank Peggy Barret and Connie Green for their friendship and support. I also thank the graduate students who worked as my research assistants over the course of this project. Before I began my career at Wake Forest, I was improbably lucky in the mentors and teachers who taught me the discipline of literary studies and who directly or indirectly shaped my work on this book. I thank all my professors at Goucher College, and in particular Fred H. White, whose iconoclasm and love of the eighteenth century are truly inspiring. Thanks are also due to Nancy Magnuson, College Librarian, and Tara Olivero, Special Collections Librarian and College Archivist, both of Goucher College, for their generous assistance during my week of research in their Jane Austen Collection. The faculty of the English Department at Princeton created an environment (unique among graduate programs) that both challenged and nurtured students, and I am immensely grateful to all with whom I studied there. Jonathan Lamb first sparked my interest in gambling in his seminar on miracles in the eighteenth century. I am grateful to Esther Schor for her support as Director of Graduate Studies, and to Elaine Showalter for sponsoring teaching colloquia that helped me become an effective teacher. To Susan Wolfson I owe a special debt for her vigorous and ongoing support of my career despite my not being a Romanticist. ix

x

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support that made my research on this project possible: the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellowship, the Hyde Summer Research Grant, and two Archie Research Grants. The Wake Forest University Publication and Research Fund paid for the images in this book. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appears as “Games of Chance: Belinda, Education, and Empire,” in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, edited by Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 192–212. A shorter version of Chapter 1 appears as “‘Putting to Hazard a Certainty’: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, volume 40. I thank Anne K. Mellor and Clifford Siskin, editors of the Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print series, and Paula Kennedy and Benjamin Doyle at Palgrave for their invaluable guidance throughout the publication process. The far-flung colleagues, friends, and family I wish to thank have been instrumental in different ways and at different points in my work on this book, but I am immensely grateful to them all. Lorna Brittan, Paul Kelleher, and Christopher Rovee provided trenchant readings at crucial stages. Deidre Lynch’s summer seminar at the National Humanities Center introduced me to other young scholars at a crucial point in my development of this book, and I thank her, the National Humanities Center, and all the seminar participants. Marah Gubar and Kieran Setiya fielded tearful phone calls, helped decode readers’ reports, and read many drafts; their friendship is an inestimable treasure. I am deeply grateful for the friendship and support of Elissa Bell Bayraktar, Jacqueline Carrasco, Amanda Minks, Scott Newstok, Hugh Parker, and Donna Salisbury. I would like to express my love and thanks to my parents William and Carlotta Richard and my siblings Jacob Richard and Lucinda Woodward. Special mention goes to my beloved sister Emily Richard for not only reading versions of various chapters but even reading some of the eighteenth-century novels I write about. My deep affection and gratitude goes to Julia Blackburn and Anne Blackburn Cuneo, my nominal stepdaughters and true friends of the heart. I wish to acknowledge the patience of my young son Norris Blackburn, for whom the final two years of this project were particularly trying. Though he could never really fathom why I was writing this book instead of a children’s novel, he gamely bore with my absences and dutifully kept the study door closed when I worked at home. To him, my love. The final three debts I acknowledge are the largest. I would not have completed nor even begun this book without the indefatigable

Acknowledgments xi

and strenuous support of the women I call my two Claudias. Claudia Thomas Kairoff, my fellow dix-huitièmiste, former chair, and very dear friend at Wake Forest, has championed my career with flattering enthusiasm from the first moment I arrived on campus. I am deeply grateful for her tenacity in seeing me through to this book’s completion. She is the reader I turn to when I need reassurance, for she always finds the latent strengths in my work, no matter how small or buried they are, and helps me bring them out. She is a model scholar, teacher, and leader (not to mention fellow clotheshorse and costume-drama devotee). I am profoundly grateful for and humbled by the support of Claudia L. Johnson, whom I am proud to call my mentor. It is no hyperbole to say that I owe my career to her. Her seminal book on Austen, the very first book of literary criticism I ever read, at age 16, introduced me to the very heights of scholarly achievement. Her engaged guidance during my graduate study was exemplary and her exertions on my behalf far beyond graduate school smoothed my path. As a mentor, teacher, and scholar, she is unrivalled. Timothy C. Blackburn first introduced me to the work of Claudia Johnson, and that is the least of the debts I owe him. A rigorous thinker, constant questioner, devoted teacher, and passionate advocate of literature and the arts, he is a challenging interlocutor and inspiring life partner. It is impossible to express my gratitude for his love and unstinting support. This book, like its author, is dedicated to him.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: The Gambling Culture of Eighteenth-Century Britain

Hogarth’s The Gaming House from A Rake’s Progress (1733) might strike a twenty-first-century viewer as a typical image of the gambling that was ubiquitous in eighteenth-century British social life (Figure 1). It depicts a raucous assemblage of men gathered around gaming tables with wigs askew, swords drawn, and chairs overturned. One player pulls his hat over his face in despair at a recent loss while others, looking treacherous, count their money, perhaps unfairly won. As in so many of his satirical paintings and prints, Hogarth captures the sordidness of supposedly genteel men’s pastimes. This scene conforms both to what we might expect from an eighteenth-century image of gambling – it seems like something out of one of Smollett’s novels – and to the critical view of gambling as corrupting and decadent that persists in our own era. In contrast, a commissioned portrait painted by Hogarth, Assembly at Wanstead House (c.1728), shows a family group seated decorously at a game of cards in a formal parlor (Figure 2). Commemorating a twentyfifth wedding anniversary, the painting portrays an elegant woman surreptitiously revealing the winning card, the ace of spades, to a male onlooker. In this painting, the practice of gambling dramatizes social cohesion through marriage, rather than the social disruption depicted in the tavern scene. Holding the ace of spades, in some games the trump or highest card, she has drawn a winning hand in marriage.1 The representational range of these two paintings suggests that gambling in the period did not have a single, simple meaning; although there were many voices denouncing play, gambling was not always disreputable. In these seemingly opposite pictorial representations of gambling, the satirical painting and the conversation portrait, we see the dynamic tension between chance and control that constitutes the romance of gambling.2 1

2

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Figure 1 William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress: 6. The Gaming House (1733). By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

In Hogarth’s The Gaming House, encounters with chance elicit men’s most venal passions beyond their efforts at self-control, while cheaters minimize the chance elements of the gamble, controlling outcomes by their manipulations. In Assembly at Wanstead House, passions are perfectly in control, yet the card game highlights the chance disposition of life’s events, subtly undermining the smooth surface of family unity in the dynastic gathering depicted. In gambling, luck, not merit or social standing, determines happiness and the woman holding the ace of spades could just as easily have drawn a less satisfactory card or lot in life. The satirical and the domestic images of gambling represent both the range of gambling experiences in eighteenth-century England as well as the dynamic tension between chance and control within any gambling experience. The range of meaning we see in these two paintings – sordid gambling raging out of control versus genteel gambling that is appropriately modulated – is an internal feature of gambling

Introduction 3

Figure 2 William Hogarth, Assembly at Wanstead House. Oil on canvas, 1728–31, 25 1/2 ⫻ 30 inches (64.8 ⫻ 76.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art: The John Howard McFadden Collection, 1928.

itself, as I show throughout this book; a fundamental appeal of gambling is its tension between chance and control, between an unknowable and a predictable outcome. This tension is also a function of the eighteenth century’s cultural and economic shift to capitalism inspired by and dependent on gambling: the transforming economy gave greater scope to the operations of chance, creating new opportunities and presenting challenges for traditional hierarchical social controls. As Hogarth’s gambling paintings indicate, from high-stakes faro to lottery insurance to petty wagers, gambling permeated the daily lives of eighteenth-century Britons of all classes and economic strata. Gambling was so common a feature of daily life that it can be included in conversation portraits such as Assembly at Wanstead House without any hint of the scandal that saturates Hogarth’s The Gaming House; indeed Assembly at Wanstead House was by no means the only “conversation” group portrait to depict genteel domestic gambling.3 In such paintings Britons

4

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

are depicted gambling, encountering chance, risking money courteously at specially made card tables in their homes because gambling is an activity that fundamentally defines their leisured lives – and their lives beyond leisure as well – much as a gentleman’s horse defines his status in a portrait. To interpret paintings in which gambling (whether sordid or genteel) is used as an emblem of the sitters’ identities, we can use Dror Wahrman’s persuasive description of identity in this period as protean and performative, characterized by “malleability: the sense that one’s ‘personal identity’… could be imagined as unfixed and potentially changeable – sometimes perceived as double, other times as sheddable, replaceable, or moldable” (168). The tension between control and chance in gambling make it an especially apt expression of this double and malleable model of identity, in which roles are clearly defined yet open to play, appropriation, and experimentation.4 If, following Wahrman, we see eighteenth-century identity as a “set of positions within which one identified oneself – a set of coordinates, or a matrix,” the romance of gambling highlights the contingency of one’s role in the matrix of identity: perhaps one is the victim of unpredictable cheaters, or perhaps against all odds one has drawn the winning card (168). The concept of identity as one of many points in a matrix of possibilities, one of many possible outcomes, is expressed by gambling but it is also generated by gambling. The gambler is both a private actor, making wagers and choosing risks, and a model for the public economy; examinations of his gambling illuminate the tension between chance and control within the discrete gambling act and within an economy inspired by gambling. The Romance of Gambling studies representations of gambling in eighteenth-century England.5 Of course, gambling is not exclusive to this time or place. The fact that gambling is practiced across the globe and throughout history, from Bali to Las Vegas, from China to the Roman Empire, suggests that it has a universal human appeal, for which theorists including Georges Bataille and Johan Huizinga have attempted to account anthropologically.6 But Thomas Kavanagh argues compellingly that “there can be no general or universal history of gambling. The way people gamble, and what that activity says of them, are parts of a larger cultural whole defined by the contours and tensions of a given society at a given time” (Dice 4). What makes eighteenth-century British gambling a particularly compelling emblem of identity is the foundational role gambling played in the development of public credit and the forms of early finance capitalism that transformed not only the British economy but culture at large. I do not give a comprehensive account of

Introduction 5

this crucial economic transformation in this book; instead I examine as a touchstone the role played by lotteries in the system of carefully managed public borrowing that underwrote England’s worldwide expansion in the eighteenth century, a system of control inspired by encounters with chance.7 I focus primarily on the lottery to show the direct relationship between private gambling and public economic developments. In other areas of the eighteenth-century economy the role of gambling may be less direct but these areas are nonetheless permeated by the romance of gambling. In addition to lotteries, joint-stock companies, stock-jobbing, options contracts, insurance, horse racing, the establishment of the Bank of England, business lending, and trade credit are all examples of the era’s myriad new or expanding ventures which depend on forms of gambling, wagers on the unpredictable, speculation. My examination of lotteries shows that the gambler does not merely reflect a culture of mutable, performative identity but actually inspired that culture in the era’s economic transformations based on gambling. An economy inspired by gambling is an economy of romance. In describing “the romance of gambling,” I do not mean that the experience of gambling is homologous to romance, but that the gambler practices a mode of engaging with the world that we can call romance, a mode that, with rhythms of repetition that promise control, celebrates the chance incalculable event, the heroic achievement against all odds, the lucky break, the unpredictable outcome, “the wish-fulfillment dream” (Frye 186).8 Even as the developing calculus of probabilities – a mathematics that originated in gambling – spreads through Europe, the eighteenth-century gambler frequently resists probability theory and remains committed to the unpredictability of gambling.9 The gambler courts the possibility of loss in a culture increasingly pursuing financial gain, yet loss is only one part of the gambler’s story. While Georges Bataille and Clifford Geertz interpret gambling as ostentatious loss that displays one’s wealth and status, one’s ability to lose, The Romance of Gambling shows that the narratives imagined in the wager – the unpredictable possibilities of extravagant winnings or crippling losses, the unforeseeable events that might influence outcomes – constitute the wager’s allure.10 Gamblers experience their wagers as romance narratives with pleasurably unpredictable outcomes. Thus the gambler resists the ostensible moral lessons of his losses, returning instead again and again to throw the dice, to begin the tale anew. The romance of gambling gives the player an opportunity to confront and enact the capriciousness of daily life in a world where comfort, success, and happiness seem to be blessings bestowed with increasing randomness. Some scholars have

6

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

argued that gambling was a way of controlling contingency, of bringing about the worst yourself instead of waiting powerlessly for catastrophe to strike, but eighteenth-century examples suggest that at the same time the ecstasy of gambling is in that moment just before the dice fall, when the outcome is still unknown. The gambler revels in this moment of the unknowable, of utter submission to contingency, again and again with each throw of the dice against the green baize of the table, even as he hopes to control its outcome with luck, calculation, intuitive hunches, or methods of cheating. Recognizing the mutual interactions of romance and economics in the eighteenth century allows us to historicize Northrop Frye’s transhistorical or ahistorical anatomy of romance, to chart the specific functions of romance at a specific time.11 How does the gambler’s romance, his ecstatic toss of the dice, his calculation of odds, impact our understanding of the eighteenth-century economy? Instead of seeing nascent capitalism as a major break from earlier economic modes, the romance of gambling in the eighteenth century is a marker of what Frederic Jameson calls the “historical coexistence within the social order itself between two distinct moments of socioeconomic development,” or, I suggest, two moments that are more mutually constitutive than distinct (158). This analysis reveals an eighteenth-century economy saturated in a romance that both (in Frederic Jameson words) “springs from a precapitalist, essentially agricultural way of life” and is at the same time (borrowing Mary Poovey’s terminology) one of the modern “genres of the credit economy” (Jameson 141; Poovey passim). Franco Moretti’s description of form “as the most profoundly social aspect of literature, form as force,” his call to “Deduc[e] from the form of an object the forces that have been at work,” underpins my reading of the romance of gambling in early capitalism and the romance of gambling in the novel not as analogous but as mutually informing developments (92, 57). While new and expanding forms of capitalism depend on the romance of gambling, the new and expanding narrative form of this era, the novel, draws on romance (and on the romance of gambling in particular) to examine the new economy. Early theorists of the novel such as William Congreve were keen to differentiate it from romance by highlighting the novel’s carefully controlled use of chance. Ian Duncan argues that, “following the political revolutions of the seventeenth century, romance came to signify those cultural elements from which the new hegemony … progressively strove to differentiate itself. From the mid-eighteenth century, romance thus denoted a variable (and unstable) antithetical category: the discredited stories of the

Introduction 7

other” (1113). Yet the fact that, as Geoffrey Day points out, the terms “romance” and “novel” were conflated as often as they were differentiated indicates that the supposedly “discredited stories” of romance play a constitutive role in novel (3–6).12 Whatever novelists write in their Prefaces, their capacious narratives continue to take full advantage of the resources of romance throughout the eighteenth century. The rapidly expanding eighteenth-century print market was especially responsive to the role played by gambling in contemporary culture. Gambling frequently appears in parliamentary legislation, in moral writing, in literary texts ranging from periodicals and plays to poetry and fiction, and in visual representations such engravings and even images printed on playing cards.13 We find gamblers in texts by Denham, Defoe, Addison, Steele, Butler, Centlivre, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Hawkesworth, Haywood, Burney, Edgeworth, Godwin, and Austen, as well as in anonymous novels such as The Female Gamester, or the Pupil of Fashion and The Adventures of Dick Hazard. While I discuss a broad range of print iterations of gambling in this book, from playing cards to tracts to games manuals, I focus primarily on novels both because novels in particular take as their unique mandate the representation of contemporary socioeconomic life and because the same tension between chance and control that is a feature of economic developments at this time is also a feature of the novel as it was understood during this period. Novelists use gambling figures to explore the tension between chance and control that is both a feature of gambling-inspired capitalism and an animating formal concern of novels as the new genre develops. Novelists are writing in a new form with two major, interrelated claims to generic distinction: first, to represent life with probability and thus, second, to control their use of chance events, as William Congreve explains in the Preface to his short prose narrative Incognita (1691), where he contrasts the “lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances” of romances with the “more familiar nature” of novels, which “delight us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unprecedented” (Congreve 474). Novelists write about gamblers both because gambling was a significant feature of the world their texts represent and because gamblers introduce opportunities to explore the tension between chance and control as novelists interrogate their relationship with ancient prose romances. But perhaps the elegant gentlefolk in Hogarth’s conversation portrait described above or in the novels examined throughout this book are not gambling at all, but simply playing cards. I use the term “gambling”

8

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

in this book to bring together a wide range of encounters with chance in which money was staked on the uncertain outcome of an event; in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to gamble is “to play games of chance for money, … to stake money … on some fortuitous event.”14 To use “gambling” in reference to the eighteenth century is somewhat anachronistic; as the OED notes, the verb “to gamble” “has not been found till about 1775–86,” though “gambler” and “gambling” occur around mid-century as slang (Samuel Johnson called “gambler” “a cant word” in his Dictionary). “To game,” “gaming,” “gamester,” and “gamestress” are the terms used by most of the writers examined in this book and I will use these words as well, but I use the word “gambling” in part because “gaming” has acquired a quite different connotation in the twenty-first century, namely “the playing of war-games or role-playing games” or video or online games, divorced from wagering money (OED).15 To restrict my usage to “gaming” feels uncomfortably and self-consciously archaic and I have not done so, but in fact the range of eighteenth-century connotations of “gaming” and the eventual shift to “gambling” epitomize the tension between chance and control in the culture of eighteenth-century gambling that is central to this study. Johnson’s Dictionary gives two senses of “to game” that convey a dynamic of chance and control in discourses of gambling and suggest a rich range of meaning less accessible in our modern use of “gambling”: “1. To play at any sport. 2. To play wantonly and extravagantly for money.” Johnson glosses sense 2 with a quotation from Locke that makes clear Johnson’s own assessment of this activity, at least in its “wanton” and “extravagant” form: “Gaming leaves no satisfaction behind it: it no way profits either body or mind.” Yet the adverbs seem to imply that those who play for money without doing so “wantonly and extravagantly” might not be so dissatisfied. Furthermore, the moral neutrality of the first sense reflects cultural acceptance of an activity that later, when called “gambling,” would have a distinctly negative connotation. We can see a similar tension in “gamester,” defined as both “1. One who is vitiously [sic] addicted to play” and more simply, “2. One who is engaged at play.” Again Johnson’s moral stance is clear. He marshals an array of five quotations (and even adds a sixth in the revised fourth edition of 1773) indicating the ruinous consequences of gaming, while the neutral sense 2 is supported only by two quotations. Yet I would argue that the coexistence of neutral and negative connotations suggests that the negative associations of “to game” and “gamester” were by no means universal. The dual definitions of both words indicate the characteristic tension between chance and control that

Introduction 9

animates gambling, especially in the eighteenth century. Johnson provides neutral definitions of gaming as exposure to chance, but cannot let these stand without attempting to exert some control over his readers’ perceptions with his morally inflected negative definitions and exemplary quotations. The shift from “game” to “gamble” in the nineteenth century foregrounds the negative connotations of staking money on uncertain outcomes, demonstrating a shift in the cultural perception of this activity and an increasing dominance of control over chance in some elements of Victorian culture. The tension between the competing definitions of “game” to “gamble” in the second half of the eighteenth century is part of an ongoing interrogation of the relationship between gambling and activities of finance capitalism, a relationship that is itself marked by dynamic tension between chance and control. Given these usage histories, I will use the term “gambling” in this book not simply in reference to high-stakes or “extravagant” wagers, but in the broader sense that “gaming” conveyed in the eighteenth century. Thus, I include in the category of “gambling” both high-stakes wagers and “the action of playing for stakes of trifling amount,” despite the OED’s caveat that the term is not usually applied to small-stakes play “except by those who condemn playing for money altogether.” I certainly do not refer to small-stakes play as “gambling” because I condemn the activity. Instead, I analyze a range of aleatory activities as “gambling” in order to emphasize continuities in experiences of chance, so as to tell a more comprehensive story about gambling that links the pleasures and risks experienced by both the infamous, such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who gambled vast sums, and the anonymous, everyday lottery players and petty wagerers in eighteenthcentury England.16 For players of all ranks and walks of life, legal statutes ostensibly defined the contours of gambling in eighteenth-century England. Yet statutory history illustrates the dynamic tension between chance and control in gambling. Even as it inspired aspects of the credit economy, gambling was illegal in most places and at most times of the year, and had been for much of British history. Richard I, Richard II, Edward IV, and Henry VIII all made dice, cards, and other leisure activities illegal except during the 12 days of Christmas; at the same time that the general populace’s gambling was subject to control, chance was given free rein at court, where play was legal all year round. Gambling had been a recorded pastime at court since at least Henry VIII’s time, when it was superintended by an officer of the Royal Household called the GroomPorter. He supplied fair dice, tables, and chairs for games, and watched

10

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

for cheating. Under both Charles I and II, the Groom-Porter’s office was revived and members of the public, such as Samuel Pepys, joined or watched members of the court play for very high stakes. Play at court was often opened by the king’s roll of the dice. George III and Queen Charlotte were unsympathetic to gaming and the office of GroomPorter was finally abolished in 1772, although elite gambling continued (unprotected by the court but for the most part not prosecuted) at various London clubs such as White’s, Almack’s, or Brooke’s. Historians agree that eighteenth-century efforts to control play with laws banning gambling outside the court were ineffectual.17 When Parliament banned specific games by name, such as bassett, they simply reappeared in gambling circles under new names, such as faro. Given such resistance, Parliament tried throughout the eighteenth century to limit high-stakes gambling and at the same time to capitalize on gamblers’ wagers in order to redirect some of the cash exchanged between players into the state economy via fines and penalties. In the reign of William and Mary, though the previous statutes outlawing games altogether were still technically in force, Parliament recognized that people were gambling despite laws to the contrary and limited allowable losses to £100; if a player lost more, he could take the winner to court to recover his money. During the reign of Anne the loss limit was reduced to £10 and if a gamester was discovered to be cheating, the loser could sue for recovery of three times the money lost. He kept one third, one third went to the government, and one third to the local parish. In other words, during most of the eighteenth century, a gambler could take another gambler to court if he lost more than £10 in the illegal activity in which they were engaged; if the winner was proven to have cheated, the loser could recover his money while the church and state profited from the penalties levied on the cheater. The records of case law reveal many prosecutions for such recoveries, though since we also know that hundreds of men and women were ruined through huge gambling losses, it seems that not all players wanted to resolve such matters in the courts.18 While the state simultaneously capitalized on and tried to control gamblers’ encounters with chance, many gamblers eluded state control by considering their gambling liabilities “debts of honor,” since play debts over £10 were unenforceable by law. In fact, some historians have suggested that the new statutes limiting losses to £10 simply liberated gamblers to play for even higher stakes (Munting 12). Debts of honor, which I discuss at length in Chapter 3, take part in an alternative economy of chance, unregulated by legal statutes yet controlled by the gentleman’s code of honor.

Introduction 11

Just as the elegant figures in some conversation paintings use card games to signal their gentility, gambling was a crucial, though to some controversial, component of gentlemanly identity, as the concept of debts of honor shows. Indeed, some observers suggested that gambling, especially in the form of wagering, was so widespread as to be a British national trait. Especially renowned eighteenth-century British wagers include bets on the true sex of the French ambassador, on the sex of a public-house landlady’s unborn child, on the outcome of battles with France, on who would win impromptu swimming or foot races, on which of two people would live longer, on whether a waiter who fell down in a fit was dead, on whether a man could live 12 hours under water (J. Ashton 150–5). An anecdote told in the Spectator shows a literal use of wagering to assert identity. A correspondent complains that as he was telling a group of friends seated with him in a coffee house about an incident in Tacitus, a young man jumped up and bet him ten guineas that he was mistaken. The correspondent could not respond for lack of such a large sum, whereupon the young man declared victory, “telling the whole Room he had read Tacitus twenty times over, and such a remarkable Incident as that could not escape him.” The writer complains, “There are several of these Fellows in Town, who Wager themselves into Statesmen, Historians, Geographers, Mathematicians, and every other Art, when the Persons with whom they talk have not Wealth equal to their Learning” (Bond 72). Here a gambler uses a highstakes wager to assert an identity and to intimidate any who would challenge the legitimacy of the identity claimed. The gambler takes a risk in order to control the way he is perceived in his community. Efforts to control Britons’ gambling inclinations were hampered by the fact that wagers were generally considered contracts in law and were thus legal and enforceable in court (Disney 2). This paradox, that gambling games were illegal but wagers were not, is another example of the control–chance dynamic in eighteenth-century gambling; the law restricts gambling losses yet enforces wagers of any amount as legal contracts. Although Parliament tried to limit betting on public events in the early eighteenth century and continued throughout the century to try to limit high-stakes gambling on cards and dice, bets such as those on the sex of a landlady’s unborn child, what the justice Lord Mansfield called “indifferent wagers upon indifferent matters, without interest to either of the parties,” again reflect the dynamic tension between chance and control endemic in gambling (quoted in Disney 2). In a pervasive culture of indeterminacy, where not only the outcome of events but social status itself are seen as subject to unpredictable chance, wagering

12

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

gives bettors a stake in randomness that might otherwise seem meaningless. The rage for wagering suggests both the increasing scope of such randomness opened up by a capitalist economy that was erasing traditional distinctions as well as an insistent desire to be invested, as it were, to control this culture of unpredictability by giving it meaning. The profit the winning bettor makes gives the event significance, but, more importantly, both winners and losers derive meaning from the emotional investment in an event that a wager fosters. Wagerers become, in all senses of the word, interested in otherwise meaningless outcomes. Wagers between two parties on the outcome of events that would otherwise be of no direct significance to them create passionate, imaginative engagement in those events. Wagers create a series of narrative trajectories as bettors imagine chains of events that will give them winning or losing outcomes. At the same time wagers give the present moment a peculiar intensity as each instant is both complete pleasure in itself and might be discerned as a step on one of those imagined narrative trajectories. This duality of the moment and the outcome in the wager is another form of the tension between chance and control that is at the heart of eighteenth-century British gambling. In the multiple potential narratives offered by the wager, we can see the possibilities gambling presents to novelists. Thomas Kavanagh points out that “cards and dice … have no memory. A given roll of the dice is never, in other words, part of a ‘well-told story,’ a story in which what precedes the roll as event can determine what point will appear” (Enlightenment 113). But The Romance of Gambling argues both that the unpredictable outcome of the wager or dice-toss is in itself a well-told story, albeit an episodic story of a discrete moment, and that the very fact that the past cannot determine the future of the dice or the wager gives them vast narrative potential. British novelists exploit all aspects of the narrative potential of gambling in episodic tales as well as in fictions of probability as they represent a culture transformed by gambling-inspired capitalism. By exploring a central dynamic tension between chance and control in gambling and in the capitalizing culture that gambling inspired, I am revising histories that emphasize what Ian Hacking calls “the taming of chance” in the eighteenth century.19 Hacking maintains that over the course of the eighteenth century developments in statistics collection and the mathematics of probability meant that “In 1800 ‘chance’ … was a mere word, signifying nothing – or else it was a notion of the vulgar, denoting fortune or even lawlessness, and thus to be excluded from the thought of enlightened people”: determinist theories of probability in

Introduction 13

this period demystified chance by purporting to reveal its underlying logic (Taming vii). Similarly, Kavanagh sees a crucial opposition between Enlightenment “ideals presupposing coherent systems of reason, law, or nature” and a “repressed … fascination” with “chance, gambling and the aleatory in all their forms” (Enlightenment 1). Instead of this narrative of the Enlightenment triumph of the rational and repression of the irrational – control dominating chance I demonstrate that control and chance were in dynamic tension throughout the eighteenth century. This is a subtle but significant difference. Rather than dismiss the fascination with chance as something that was repressed or limited to the unenlightened, I highlight the continuing centrality of chance in eighteenth-century culture. The model of dynamic tension between chance and control most accurately explains the appeal of gambling itself while also accounting for the ongoing use of chance even as probability calculations were disseminated. Lorraine Daston points out that although the mathematics of probability originated in a gambling question, it did not influence the play of many gamblers: “despite the best efforts of the mathematicians, the practice of risk was almost wholly untouched by the theory” (114). My interest in eighteenth-century gambling began with this apparent gulf between the theory and practice of risk; The Romance of Gambling shows that this gulf is only evident if we expect the practice of risk to be reformed by developments in theory. For the gambler, the relation between the theory and practice of risk – control and chance – is not one of reform and submission but of productive, constitutive tension. As I show in Chapter 2, the gambler does not ignore probability, but draws on it and manipulates it for his own ends, while at the same maintaining such a strong allegiance to chance that successful explicators of probability calculations, such as Edmond Hoyle, had to acknowledge the gambler’s perception of play as a series of unquantifiable encounters with chance. As it turns out, the eighteenth-century gambler’s persistent belief in the power of chance and his resistance to the claims of probability to tame chance has been vindicated by modern theories of risk and chance, which affirm the central role of the unpredictable in our world. In Kavanagh’s account, Enlightenment thought represented a “triumphant faith in the ambitious yet fragile constructs of reason” while “chance implied a resolutely tragic vision. To recognize chance was, more than anything else, to recognize our inability to reason toward and become part of any natural order” (5). In contrast, I see the control–chance dynamic as thoroughly optimistic on both sides. On one hand, the gambler hopes that calculations will accurately predict

14

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

the outcome of his wager; on the other, he bets the long odds, believing in the romance of the unlikely heroic achievement, the lucky break, the unpredictable outcome. Far from indicating a tragic vision, the persistence of chance signals the sense of possibility and opportunity that the gambling-based capitalizing economy appeared to promise. The triumph of probability and “the Enlightenment’s refusal of chance” in Kavanagh’s account is reflected and effected in the eighteenthcentury French novel, which he argues “consolidated reason’s claim that chance was an absurdity” (248). Again, rather than argue that the novel “evacuat[ed] the uncertainties of chance,” The Romance of Gambling shows British novelists capitalizing on chance’s uncertainties, using gamblers to examine the complex relationship between control and chance in their rapidly changing culture and their developing narrative form (Kavanagh 248). The novels I examine in The Romance of Gambling do not represent a monolithic approach to gambling, to the transforming economy, or to the roles played by chance in narrative form. Instead, they chart a broad range of approaches to these issues. After charting the role played by gambling in the state lotteries that founded the national debt, Chapter 1 examines gambling in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753) and Frances Brooke’s The Excursion (1777), novels which use gamblers to interrogate the romance of chance both in the economy in which their characters circulate and in their plots. This chapter lays out the foundational argument of The Romance of Gambling; the succeeding chapters examine different facets of the romance of gambling in the eighteenth-century British novel, from gender roles and fictional form to education and empire. Chapter 2 explores the episodic nature of gambling and two responses to the tension between chance and control that constitutes these episodes – cheating and calculation – in games manuals, in Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) by Tobias Smollett, and in Amelia (1751) by Henry Fielding. In Chapter 3, I examine two types of men who use gambling to define their status as men of feeling: the sublime gambler (exemplified in Frances Burney’s Cecilia [1782]), who revels in the multiple simultaneous possibilities of the ecstatic gambling episode, and the sentimental gambler (in Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple [1744] and in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794]), who wagers to show that his real feelings are spent elsewhere, that he cares for people, not money. Chapter 4 examines the female gambler, who extends and complicates our understanding of women’s roles in the credit economy founded on gambling. Since gambling both inspired the credit economy and was a leisure activity in everyday culture in eighteenth-century England, it played an important role in the thinking

Introduction 15

of educational theorists, which I examine in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 examines Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), a novel that uses a fictional form heavily dependent on elements of romance – improbable chance events such as fortuitous meetings and fortunate falls – to celebrate the gambler’s romance, the wager made on the unknowable outcome, the sublime present moment of happiness in a transforming economy. The satirical and domestic gambling paintings by Hogarth that I discussed in the opening of this Introduction represent the narrative potential of gambling: in one a story of control, of beating the system of capital accumulation through gambling (and cheating) while in the other a tale of chance, of the unpredictable outcome of marital commitments. Such narratives are inherent in gambling, as the wagerer imagines a range of possible outcomes when he tosses the dice or turns over a card. Yet as much as Hogarth exploited gambling’s narratives, painting is not simply a narrative art and the implied narratives in gambling conversation paintings are not always clear. Like Hogarth’s Assembly at Wanstead House, The Schutz Family and Their Friends on a Terrace (1725) by Philip Mercier also features domestic genteel gambling in a scene of dynastic consolidation through marriage, as Augustus Schutz leads his bride toward members of his extended family playing cards on a terrace (Figure 3). Mercier’s more elusive work highlights the limitation of paintings for shedding light on the culture of gambling in eighteenth-century England. The painting is unusual in Mercier’s oeuvre because it uses symbolic imagery rather than the “precise topographical references” found in his other portraits, yet the painting is not a “‘fancy’ picture” such as he commonly painted later in his career (Ingamells 515). Scholars have been unable to determine absolutely who the sitters are, what setting is depicted in the painting, and what the painting’s precise purpose might have been.20 The genteel gambling represented in the picture is as ambiguous as the other elements of painting. If the painting shows, as the Tate Britain’s description suggests, Augustus Schutz leading his bride toward his family, some of whom are on the raised terrace seated at card tables, we might say that the card games, as in Hogarth’s Assembly at Wanstead House, symbolize a winning hand in marriage. Yet neither the bride nor groom participates in the card games, nor are the visible cards significant in any game, unlike the wife’s ace of spades in Hogarth’s painting. If Schutz’s family members are on the elevated terrace playing cards on the right of the painting and his bride’s family is on the left of the painting, do the card games suggest the Schutz family’s winning affiliation with the House of

16

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Figure 3 Philip Mercier, The Schutz Family and their Friends on a Terrace (1725). © Tate, London 2010.

Hanover? Or do they unintentionally suggest the risk of wagering all on the House of Hanover in its “early unsettled years” (Ingamells 512)? Beyond possible symbolic interpretations, there are elements of this genteel gambling scene that remain enigmatic even at a level of literal signification. It seems somewhat unusual to set card tables (neither of which are in a common form for the time), an interior furnishing, outside, or for that matter to depict people playing cards out on a terrace (other conversation pictures featuring card playing with which I am familiar are interior scenes). The oddity of an outdoor card-playing scene is consistent with Ingamells’s reading of this painting as neither a realistic portrayal of domestic life, as in typical conversation paintings, nor as far removed from realism as a “fancy” piece might be. It also seems odd that there are two separate, gender-segregated tables; other conversation paintings show a larger mixed-gender group seated at a single table. Here the two tables clutter the right side of the painting and form two of three distinct groupings on the terrace, undermining

Introduction 17

the Tate’s suggestion that the people on the terrace form a family unit. Two men at the far right table are engaged at play while another man looks on; the woman at the second table does not seem to be playing a game – yet. The ostensible bride in the painting’s center points to this woman as if she is about to join her, but there is no chair awaiting her. The woman seated at the card table has her left hand on a pack of cards; another pack of cards is on the table edge closest to the approaching bride and the table also holds a pink purse with coins spilling out of it. Are these verisimilar details of a leisured elite life or do they mean something more? If there is a narrative imagined in this scene of genteel gambling, it is not entirely clear what it might be. The Romance of Gambling focuses on novels precisely because their capacious and flexible form gives novelists the space to follow the multiple narrative trajectories imagined in the wager, to depict the outcomes of the toss of the dice and the turn of a card. Novels, while preserving Hogarth’s emphasis on the originary episode of the gambling narrative in the discrete moment of multiple possibilities when the dice are tossed in the air, can also examine what happens when those dice land on the baize-covered table. In its ambiguity, Mercier’s “Schutz Family” painting suggests (perhaps unintentionally) the resistance of gambling to rational analysis; gamblers’ motives are complex and to some extent irrational. Telling stories of the tension between chance and control in gambling and in the broader culture of eighteenth-century England, novels represent at the same time the ambiguity and the complexity of gambling suggested in Mercier’s painting. The Romance of Gambling seeks as well to preserve the ambiguity, complexity, and irrationality of gambling even while analyzing its roles in eighteenth-century British culture. My claim is that this irrationality at the heart of the romance of gambling is central to that culture, not as a repressed but as a constitutive force.

1 “Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England

In London, on January 6, 1662 (n.s.) Charles II opened the first Epiphany revels of the Restoration, celebrating the final night of an especially festive Christmas season “by throwing the Dice himselfe, in the Privy Chamber, where a table was set on purpose, & lost his 100 pounds” (Evelyn 3.308).1 The king’s throne was secure, the Cavalier Parliament was seated, and the serious gambling could begin: “The Ladys also plaied very deepe,” diarist John Evelyn recorded, “I came away when the Duke of Ormond had won about 1000 pounds & left them still at passage, Cards, &c: at other Tables, both there and at the Groome-porters” (Evelyn 3.308). This gambling scene represents a significant nexus in economic history, where archaic symbolic expenditure meets and indeed inspires modern capitalism, for, as I shall discuss in this chapter, the same Groom-Porter who was responsible for overseeing the gambling at the royal residences also introduced the lottery loans that initiated the national debt and thus modern finance capitalism. In scholarship on the English financial revolution, especially in work by literary scholars, the South Sea Bubble receives significant attention.2 This scholarship highlights for us the prominent role of irrational speculation in the early days of finance capitalism. Catherine Ingrassia notes that “imagination and fantasy, unleashed emotions, and unregulated passions … were seen as driving the engines of Exchange Alley” (Ingrassia 7). As Laura Brown puts it, “the modern legacy of this period is not the rationalized system of capitalist exchange, but the flights of fancy and credulity of the free market and stock speculation” (102). I concur with these readings of the economic irrationality revealed by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, but I hope to enrich our understanding of the early decades of the financial revolution by examining a financial instrument that has received much less attention (at least 18

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 19

from literary scholars with interests in financial and economic history): the lottery. I focus on the lottery to show the deep foundations of the financial revolution in gambling. While contemporaneous critics of the South Sea scheme compared its frenzied investors to frivolous gamblers, the origins of the national debt in lotteries reveals this critique to be not merely an analogy but literally true: the founding instruments of the national debt were lotteries, and the South Sea scheme was developed to relieve the government’s debt burden generated by these lotteries. Attention to the origins of the national debt in lotteries contradicts Georges Bataille’s reading of the transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism proper as a desacralization of the economy in favor of a proto-bourgeois ethic of work and accumulation, indicating instead the persistence of gambling in capitalism. As novels flourish in the markets generated by lottery-inspired capitalism, gambling characters offer novelists opportunities to interrogate both the role of gambling within the capital economy as well the broader romance of chance within the fictional economies of novelistic plots.

Lotteries and the romance of the national debt The oldest recorded lottery in England was organized by the government in 1568 “to provide finance for the improvement of the harbours,” but it was not very successful and despite the extensive use of lotteries on the Continent, and particularly in the Low Countries, the English did not evince much interest in lotteries until the Restoration, though they were used intermittently to raise money for large projects such as aqueducts or in support of the Virginia colonies (Ewen 29). From the Restoration until 1699, however, private lotteries were extremely popular. “Within a few weeks of Charles II’s arrival in London,” adventurers began petitioning the King to grant them permission to hold lotteries to raise money to support indigent and/or injured Loyalist military officers, to develop a new Thames waterworks, and to build up the English fishery (Ewen 93–96). At the same time as these money-raising ventures were being promoted, many games of chance that had no charitable or civic purpose were advanced under the name “lottery,” often by the “numerous foreign gamesters” who had attached themselves to Charles’s circle in the Interregnum and followed him back to London (Ewen 95). It was often difficult to distinguish between lotteries for charitable purposes and lotteries for individual profit, and to ascertain whether the lottery promoter was honest or had the competence to organize a lottery, the full mechanics and mathematics of which were

20

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

barely understood. For example, Evelyn writes on July 19, 1664 that the drawing of a lottery at the Banqueting House at Whitehall “was thought to be contrived very unhandsomely by the master of it, who was, in truth, a mere shark” (3.376). Fraud became so prevalent that a proceeding to dispose of the late Prince Rupert’s jewels by lottery in 1684 had to be publicly guaranteed by the king and the prizes drawn in his presence. Advertisements in the London Gazette claimed that the king would mix the blanks and read the prizes out himself, though whether he actually did so is unknown (Ewen 121). In the Restoration period, then, as card and dice games spread from the palace across the kingdom, lotteries were used both for pleasure and as engines of economic development, both in England and in the colonies. In this climate of economic opportunity and expansion, Thomas Neale (1641–99), projector and Groom-Porter to Charles II and William, floated several successful private lotteries while also fulfilling his duties in the royal household. As Groom-Porter, Neale oversaw all gambling in the royal residences, which were supposed to be the only legal venues for gambling, according to the statute of Henry VIII banning all games outside of the royal residences, except during the 12 days of Christmas (Viner 4). At court he provided fair dice, cards, and tables, and adjudicated any disputes between gamblers (Challis). In 1684, following the precedent of Charles I’s Groom-Porter, Clement Cottrell, who was granted permission to license bowling greens and dice and cards in taverns throughout London (despite the fact that this violated the gambling statute of Henry VIII), Neale’s perks expanded “to include the licensing or suppression of gaming houses, with powers to prosecute those who kept unlicensed premises” (Challis). The financial windfall of this licensing perk was just one of many ways Neale benefited from his position at court. He was also affiliated with and eventually took sole control of the Royal Mint; he received a grant to search for mines in the American colonies; and he was the developer of the celebrated Seven Dials housing properties in Westminster. Neale’s official and extracurricular activities as Groom-Porter elegantly symbolize the centrality of gambling to the enterprising, projecting spirit of the era in which finance capitalism developed. In 1693, Neale promoted a private lottery in which tickets sold for 10 shillings and stood a chance of netting prizes ranging from £2 to £3000; he made a profit of £2500, not counting the commission he paid to the goldsmiths who sold the tickets and guaranteed the prizes (Challis; Ewen 125). In contrast to recent fraudulent or mismanaged lotteries, Neale’s successful, profitable lottery “created a very favorable

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 21

impression in Government circles” (Ewen 125). In the 1690s, as war with France escalated, the Crown had no mechanism for long-term borrowing to cover increasing military expenditures. The Crown did not have access to the range of new instruments for raising capital that were available to other segments of society, and, even if it could raise the vast sums needed, repayment would have to be deferred. Neale’s lottery venture provided a model for raising cash and deferring payment; in the government lottery, the prizes would be annuities of varying amounts paid for by duties on salt and beer. Thus, shortly after the conclusion of Neale’s personal lottery, “probably as a step to clearing the way for a State Lottery,” a bill was introduced that would abolish all private lotteries. Then, in 1694, the Million Lottery Act (5 & 6 Will. & Mary c. 7) laid out the terms for the first instance of large-scale public borrowing in England. “The ability of the Groom-Porter as an organizer of such adventures being recognized, he was … appointed by Act of Parliament head-manager of the new financial scheme” (Ewen 127). Thus the Groom-Porter, a courtier whose job definition was originally ensuring fair play among the king’s gambling guests at court, first inspires and then oversees the implementation of a system of national debt to whose effectiveness in raising money, especially for use in military exploits, the financial historian P. G. M. Dickson attributes England’s eventual dominance in the game of empire. The Million Lottery marked the true beginning of the financial revolution because among other early attempts at public investment, including government-backed annuities, “the most successful financial innovations proved to be the state lotteries” (Neal 14). The Million Lottery of 1694 was so successful because, like Neale’s previous private lottery, large quantities of relatively low-priced tickets were available at many locations throughout London, especially at “ticket offices set up in major pubs” (Neal 14). Other factors particular to late seventeenth-century culture contributed to the Million Lottery’s success. The expanding print media of the time played an important role, because “advertising was a key feature of the promotion of lotteries. Handbills were posted in coffee houses and advertisements were placed in newspapers” (Murphy 235). Anne Murphy also suggests that “patriotism seems to have been a common justification,” since the purpose of the Million Lottery was to raise money for military endeavors (241). Despite the fact that the government sometimes had difficulty meeting its annual payment obligations to the lottery winners, Neale’s first Million Lottery inaugurated one of the state’s most reliable modes of raising revenue, and there were 170 state lotteries held between 1694 and 1826, when they were

22

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

abolished (Ewen 130; Raven “Abolition” 371). Eventually, the success of the lotteries necessitated the infamous South Sea scheme. The revenue from taxes was not enough to cover the annual payments to lottery participants, so the annuitants were given the opportunity to trade in their lottery claims for stock in the South Sea Company. Thus the South Sea scheme was literally based on the initial speculative ventures of lottery participants. How does attention to the lottery affect our understanding of the transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism proper with the founding of the national debt? To answer this, let us return to what we might call the primal scene of the lottery, the gambling at court supervised by the Groom-Porter Thomas Neale that I described in the opening of this chapter. On one hand, we can read this scene of Charles II and his courtiers gambling at the Restoration as Bataille (in “The Notion of Expenditure”) reads potlatch in primitive societies.3 The king and courtiers demonstrate and thus further solidify the newfound security of their position through what Bataille calls “this so-called unproductive expenditure,” in this case high-stakes gambling (118). Not only can they afford to gamble, but their gambling defines them; like the gift in potlatch, the courtiers’ deep play constitutes what Bataille terms “a positive property of loss – from which spring nobility, honor, and rank in a hierarchy” (122). The king demonstrates his right to his throne, the acme of the hierarchy, by ritually sitting down to lose “his 100 pounds.” Yet a Bataille-style interpretation of this scene is insufficient. The high-stakes gambling of Charles II’s court did not ultimately differentiate aristocrats from plebian society because at this transitional economic moment, court gambling was merely one element of a widespread culture of gambling in England, which seemed to be unprecedented in English history and to outstrip contemporary gambling in other European countries. In the complex gambling culture of late seventeenth-century England, gambling was not merely an aristocratic pastime through which the powerful displayed their privileged status. Though the players at the Groom-Porter’s rooms at court were an elite set, across London myriad gambling scenes were noted sites of social mixing and there were many different kinds of gambling available, from lotteries to cards to dice to wagers, at all stakes levels. The presence of the Groom-Porter himself in this scene undermines a Bataille-style reading of court gambling simply as unproductive expenditure, since the Groom-Porter’s private lotteries inspired the productive expenditure of money raised by state lotteries. The consanguinity of private and state lotteries is part of a broader culture of risk that did not distinguish in the same way that we do between

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 23

frivolous and serious, or unproductive and productive, expenditure. We can see in the personal papers of Sir Stephen Evance, a goldsmith and financier who was “one of the crown’s main domestic lenders” in the 1690s, no distinction between what we would call recreational wagers and financial speculations; he records option contracts for stock (wagers on the stock’s value in six months) as well as contracts stipulating, for example, that one man will pay another five guineas if he drinks alcohol before Michaelmas, or that one man will pay another 20 guineas if war is not declared before Christmas (Lancaster; Dickson 492). This commingling of recreational and financial speculations in Sir Stephen Evance’s dealings and in Neale’s personal and state lotteries contradicts Bataille’s understanding of history as (in Jean-Joseph Goux’s words) “marked by a break” (208). In Bataille’s account of economic history, until the birth of capitalism every society is one of sacrificial expenditure … With the birth of the bourgeois world a radical change takes place. Productive expenditure now entirely dominates social life. In a desacralized world, where human labor is guided in the short or long term by the imperative of utility, the surplus has lost its meaning of glorious consumption and becomes capital to be reinvested productively, a constantly multiplying surplus-value. (Goux 208) Instead, rather than marking a break with sacrificial expenditure, the early forms of capitalism were built on the commingling of what we would now call recreational and serious speculations in the 1690s. In the transformation of the lottery from private adventure to legitimate mode of public finance, the sacrificial expenditure of gambling is not abandoned but is central to the new economy. The tension between chance and control that constitutes gambling is inherent in participation in the lottery. Buying a lottery ticket is both unproductive sacrificial expenditure and productive proto-capitalist investment. Anne Murphy suggests that participation in the lottery was aspirational; just as the king’s sacrificial, ritual £100 loss secures his political position, buying a lottery ticket demonstrates the purchaser’s ability to participate in the new economy of finance capital. For those previously excluded from the emergent financial markets “that had conferred increasing affluence on a select section of society,” the £10 lottery ticket represented what Gerd Gigerenzer calls “a rational if desperate strategy for the ambitious” (Murphy 241, quoting Gigerenzer 120). Each ticket in the government’s Million Lottery of 1694 cost £10, and “entitles the Bearer to an annuity of one Pound or (by Chance)

24

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

to a greater yearly sum for Sixteen Years” (Ewen 128). A ticket buyer is guaranteed an eventual profit of £6, and has a chance to win an annual payment of not £1 but between £10 and £1000. As Murphy writes, “The Million Adventure was, in many respects, a solid form of investment and a method by which the investor of limited means could gain entry into the public funds” (Murphy 245). Thus the state lotteries seemed to offer a controlled experience of gambling, with all the appeal of the adventure but little, if any, of the risk. Yet we should not overstate the security of the lottery as an investment. The winners of the first Million Lottery “had difficulty in obtaining their annuities” and had to petition Parliament for payment; as I noted above, eventually the government had to concoct the South Sea scheme to meet its obligations to the lottery annuitants – and those who traded their annuities for South Sea stock traded security for risk, control for chance (Ewen 130). For those in the lower economic strata who could not afford to buy a whole ticket, participating in the lottery was equally aspirational but much more sacrificial since it carried much greater risk and no guaranteed return. Those “hiring” or “insuring” lottery tickets through myriad unofficial third-party brokers – that is, buying small fractions of a ticket because they could not afford a £10 ticket – were not guaranteed any return and risked losing their entire outlay. Thus the lottery players’ mingled experience of productive and unproductive expenditure mirrors the mingled relationship of productive and unproductive expenditure in the founding of the lottery and, by extension, the system of public credit in England. Recognizing the romance of gambling in English state finance, the lack of differentiation between the unproductive expenditure of the king’s wagers, of Neale’s private lottery, of Sir Stephen Evance’s drinking bet, and the productive expenditures of the state lotteries and other early instruments of finance capital reveals a history of capitalism in which the frenzy of the South Sea Bubble (and any number of booms and busts since) is not an aberration from what Bataille saw as the desacralized discipline of a bourgeois, productive economy. Instead, the wild speculation of the South Sea scheme was the inevitable result of its basis in gambling. After studying Neale’s inaugural state lotteries, we must briefly examine the series of lotteries that led to the founding of the South Sea Company, whose rise also depended on gambling. To meet further monetary needs in 1711–12, the government floated a series of lottery loans in which the purchasers of £10 tickets would receive 6 percent interest on prizes and blanks and would receive the prize itself after 32 years (Dickson 74). Like the earlier lotteries, these

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 25

were funded by taxes, but the taxes, though heavy, were insufficient to meet repayment obligations (Dickson 84). After capitalizing on gambling to raise money for war with lotteries, the government sought to reduce the burden of its lottery-loan repayment obligations by drawing again on the appeal of gambling in the South Sea scheme. In 1711, the government’s short-term creditors were incorporated as the South Sea Company and granted a monopoly on trade with South America. The founding of the company “was a deliberate attempt to placate the government’s creditors with the lure of high profits” promised by this rich region, despite Spain’s dominance of South American trade (Dickson 66). Creditors were given the opportunity to exchange their government debts for stock in the new company. The Treaty of Utrecht signed with Spain in 1713, however, did not open South American markets for English traders as had been hoped; instead, the main business of the South Sea Company was supplying the Spanish colonies with enslaved African laborers. The company made meager profits at best and, in 1720, its desire to improve returns and the government’s desire to reduce its debt burden coincided. The Company offered holders of long-term, non-negotiable, high-interest annuities the opportunity to exchange them for South Sea stock. This would give the Company capital, drive up its stock, and at the same time allow the government to pay the debt formerly held by annuitants at lower interest rates. Speculation ensued as annuitants rushed to trade their government debts for rising stock that they then hoped to sell to those who were eagerly making down payments on South Sea stock and scrip. The scheme depended on the romance of gambling that made the government lotteries so popular, and, as Dickson points out, participants were not only gullible or uninformed average men and women, but “individuals of wealth, power and presumably sound judgment” as well as “powerful institutions like the Bank of England” (134, 133). These participants were not pursuing long-term investments in a proven company, but were “stock-jobbing,” wagering that prices would continue to rise and they could quickly sell their stock to realize a profit. Giving up the security of control for the possibilities of chance in Exchange Alley, the annuitants staked the fixed income of the interest owed them on the sums they’d lent the government by exchanging their annuities for stock while purchasers of stocks wagered cash; all subscribers “hoped for the steadily increasing market value” that seemed virtually assured by the fact that the government had entered into this scheme with the South Sea Company (Ingrassia 18). Additional gambling in South Sea stock could be seen in numerous option and

26

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

futures contracts and in the practice of buying on margin. In an option contract, for example, a seller will deliver stock at a set price in six months’ time; the seller is betting that the market will fall and thus he will be selling at a profit, while the buyer is betting the market will rise above the set price and he will be getting a bargain. The gambling atmosphere of the South Sea rush was enhanced by the numerous joint-stock companies that suddenly appeared in order to provide (sometimes fraudulent) outlets for speculators’ enthusiasm. “A flood of proposals for new companies appeared, whose scrip was hawked up and down Exchange Alley” (Dickson 145). Between 1717 and 1720, investment in joint-stock companies more than doubled (Sherman 18). Like the South Sea subscriptions, these companies encouraged speculation by “marketing stock on very deferred terms” so that investors could obtain scrip for a large quantity of stock with only a small down payment in hopes that the value of the stock would rise before they had to pay in full (Dickson 145). The possibilities for quick enrichment these stock speculations seemed to promise created a giddy atmosphere later described by one of the South Sea directors as “the Frenzy of the Times”; another investor claimed she was “South Sea mad” (quoted in Ingrassia 19). The stock offerings of all these companies did not depend on the rational behavior of knowledgeable investors, but on gamblers betting on unlikely possibilities. In August of 1720, five months after the first offering of South Sea stock, the inevitable sell-off began and prices started to fall precipitously, ruining widows, orphans, tradesmen, statesmen. Individuals lost tens of thousands of pounds. More than 30,000 stockholders were involved. The bursting of the South Sea Bubble revealed fraud, backroom deals, insider trading, and parliamentary corruption. South Sea Company employees fled abroad as Parliament began enquiries into their methods of propping up stock prices and various periodical journals decried the avarice both of the Company directors and of the speculators of all ranks who had joined in the frenzy of stock-jobbing. In the aftermath of the bubble, strenuous efforts were made to regulate stock trading and to restore public confidence in Exchange Alley. This was accomplished in part by attempting to diminish the gambling nature of stock trading and finance capitalism more generally. The House of Commons considered, but did not enact, a bill “preventing, for the future, the infamous Practice of Stock-Jobbing” in December 1720 (quoted in Dickson 518), and throughout the century, whenever prices were falling, bills against stock-jobbing were introduced (Dickson 520). In 1734, option contracts were outlawed so effectively that by the 1770s they were said to be

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 27

quite rare in London, although this ban may simply have made buying stock on margin more popular (Dickson 508).4 In the 1740s Parliament exerted more control over state lotteries by banning the speculative practices of hiring and insuring tickets, reducing risk to ticket buyers and maximizing its revenues, since the government did not benefit from the private sales of ticket shares, lottery insurance, or ticket hiring. Throughout the century, reactionary critics continued to refer to stock trading as gambling, but such criticism seems to have had little impact. Efforts to exert control over stock speculators and the market itself could not be thoroughly successful, but they did contribute to discourse that eventually established stock trading as a legitimate, rationally calculable market activity, just as stock-jobbers recast themselves as responsible professionals.5 The aftermath of the South Sea Bubble led to the stabilization of a system of public credit initially founded on gambling. Indeed, Edward Copeland’s suggestion that by the end of the eighteenth century novel readers would automatically translate a lumpsum inheritance into the annual income it would yield when invested in the 5 percent government funds indicates how commonplace such investing would eventually become, how effective was the work of separating gambling from investing in government-issued instruments of credit (23). Thus, after capitalizing on gambling first to raise money for war with lotteries and then to reduce the burden of its borrowing with the South Sea scheme, the government exerted control in order to restore public faith in the developing public credit economy that would be so crucial to England’s ultimate military and colonial dominance. England developed its system of public borrowing in order to prosecute numerous wars for dominance in the colonies, on which its economic future was thought to depend (Dickson 9, 8). Although its early system of borrowing, dependent on the lottery model and on the appeal of gambling, was “marked by haste, carelessness, and episodic failure,” Dickson argues that England eventually defeated France in the long-running struggle for colonial dominance by effectively controlling the spirit of gambling that underwrote the institutions of the national debt and thus running “a well-organized system of long-term public borrowing” (11). Government borrowing “enabled England to spend on war out of all proportion to its tax revenue” (9). Furthermore, England’s victory in the various wars of the eighteenth century facilitated its external economic development by preserving and extending export markets, as well as its internal development by creating a wide range of investment opportunities in “the new partnership banks, the new insurance offices, [and] the trading companies” which gave the City of London the financial

28

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

sophistication that later underwrote England’s industrialization (11–12). “Naval power,” funded by the national debt, “forestalled, repelled and protected the British Isles from invasion and provided its capitalists with the security required to invest in the long-term future of their economy and empire” (O’Brien 23). Just as Dickson attributes England’s victory to its successful management of the national debt, he argues that “a badly organized system of borrowing, on the other hand, would deliver the state into the hands of financial cliques, discredit it in the eyes of its citizens, and necessitate further tightening of the screws of taxation. This was what happened in eighteenth-century France, and there is no reason to doubt that the fiscal incompetence of the French monarchy was the main reason for its ultimate collapse” (11). Though the government continued to rely on lotteries throughout the eighteenth century, controlling its use of chance in the instruments of public credit was crucial for English global dominance. Yet this Whiggish history of the inexorably rational rise of English capitalism is itself part of the romance of early capitalism, in the sense that its truth is difficult to determine. Financial historians have debated both the extent to which the South Sea Bubble was actually a significant crisis and the extent to which the financial system was reformed and stabilized in response to the Bubble (Hoppit “Crises” 39–40). In fact, we can see the continuing presence of gambling in the financial crises of varying degrees and types that continued to occur after the Bubble and throughout the eighteenth century in England. Surveying these crises, Julian Hoppit argues that as the new financial system becomes more extensive, the financial crises later in the century affect a broader range of people. So while the South Sea Bubble was infamous, “by and large the bulk of the crises before 1770 had a limited effect whereas after that date their effect was both general and spectacular” (Hoppit 45). When the Bubble burst, there was not a broad depression in trade and industry; private credit was insulated from crises in public credit (Hoppit 47). As public credit was stabilized and its origins in gambling minimized, however, the economy expanded rapidly and after 1770 there were numerous crises in private credit that had much broader-ranging consequences as “growth encouraged risk-taking and speculation” (Hoppit 51). The romance of gambling was an engine of the expansion of private credit in the second half of the eighteenth century. Growth in trade credit, that is credit used by businessmen to expand their businesses, and in retail credit given by merchants to customers, was “inextricably linked” to gambling and because such credit was so easy to obtain, “the gambling spirit was encouraged” (Hoppit “Credit” 315). While the

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 29

development of public credit was inspired by a form of gambling, the lottery, the expansion of private credit built on Britons’ increasing comfort with risk. Hoppit points out that “[e]conomic growth must in part be the product of speculative decisions, or what is usually called risktaking. In the late eighteenth century that uncertainty was encouraged by, and in turn encouraged, a particular structure of credit” for tradesmen (“Crises” 56). This structure of credit, like gambling itself, looked forward to possible profits rather than backward at past losses. “To seize the opportunities that were emerging in the late 1760s often demanded greater financial freedom” than the traditional methods of raising capital allowed. “A new means of raising funds was developed whereby businessmen paid more attention to the future than to the past: ‘raising money by circulation’ was the process by which businessmen created credit, drawing and redrawing bills of exchange and accommodation notes upon one another without actually having traded goods at all” (Hoppit “Crises” 53). As in the early days of public credit, the circulation of bills and notes would often take place alongside recreational gambling. To describe forms of private credit as gambling is not to use an analogy; the shaky foundations and rapid expansion of private credit in the second half of the eighteenth century justify the term as a literal descriptor. As Hoppit writes, “Gambling, irresponsibility, extortion, usury, avarice and excessive ambition were all seen as intimately and inevitably connected to the extensive and intensive use of credit” (“Credit” 316). Long after the Million Lottery and the South Sea Bubble, in private credit relations gambling defined Britons’ experience of the expanding economy of capitalism. Accounting for early capitalism’s continuity with the so-called archaic expenditure of gambling is essential for understanding credit relations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While many scholars have emphasized the advent of public credit in this period, they have not always considered its emergence from an established economy of private credit networks, what Craig Muldrew calls “a culture of credit” (2). Muldrew argues that this economy “was a system of cultural, as well as material, exchanges in which the central mediating factor was credit or trust … [T]he market was not only a structure through which people exchanged material goods, but was also a way in which social trust was communicated” (4, 5). In other words, the economy of private credit facilitated both productive and unproductive expenditures. In this culture of credit, whose origins Muldrew traces to the midsixteenth century and which was well established by the seventeenth century, “each individual unit of creditworthiness was serially linked

30

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

with others” and both community and commerce could be maintained only “through trust in the credit of others” (4). The culture of private credit continued to be crucial to the eighteenth-century economy, given the chronic shortage of coins and the complex “network of financial intermediaries (merchants, bill brokers, London and country bankers) developed to fill the gap and to provide convenient and elastic forms of paper substitutes (banknotes, bills of exchange, book credit, cheques) for metallic money” (O’Brien 19). As gambling inspired the institutions of financial capitalism – the national debt, public credit, and joint-stock companies – and thus transformed the English economy, private credit networks expanded and became even more important to the economy of the eighteenth century (and beyond).6 Though Adam Smith did not recognize the interpersonal, long-term credit relations that characterized eighteenth-century English market activity, and Karl Marx did not “distinguish systematically between cash and credit,” private credit was the foundation of an individual’s experience of the eighteenth-century economy (Finn 6).7 Thus just as gambling-inspired capitalism continues rather than breaks from archaic models of expenditure, the emergence of public credit from an economy of private credit and the expansion of that private credit economy due to the establishment of finance capitalism also undermines Bataille’s Weberian economic history as a rupture with the romantic past. Any engagement in a private credit network in the long eighteenth century was a wager, albeit often hedged by family ties and social trust. Just as gambling-inspired early capitalism drew on models of archaic sacrificial expenditure, Margot Finn argues that we can see in the continuity of private credit networks that sacrificial expenditure or “gift-related behaviours” were not merely “rendered marginal to the modern market by the growth of contractual individualism” (Finn 9). Rather, just as gambling performs both pre- and post-capitalist functions, as a superfluous expenditure that cements social relationships between people and as a productive expenditure that finances the state’s military and imperial endeavors, private credit networks perform both pre- and post-capitalist functions: in private credit networks, loss is risked in order to cement relationships between members of communities while at the same time facilitating the exchange of material goods and the expansion of markets for those goods. The continuation into the capitalist era of what Muldrew describes as a private credit “economy of obligation” indicates a continuation of the non-productive expenditure of gambling during the era of capitalism’s rise. If we recognize gambling-inspired capitalism and the private credit economy in which capitalism developed as continuous with the pre-capitalist past

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 31

of archaic, sacrificial, non-productive expenditure rather than decisively breaking with it, we recognize capitalism as romance.

Gambling and the romance of capitalism in the eighteenth-century novel The foundational role played by gambling in capitalism illuminates the complex relationship between romance and novel in the eighteenth century both because gambling-inspired capitalism underwrote the socioeconomic transformations of the period and because representing that transformation has long been recognized as one of the novel’s particular generic mandates. As Mary Poovey notes, “one of the functions performed by imaginative writing in general was to mediate value – that is, to help people understand the new credit economy and the market model of value that it promoted” (Genres 1–2). James Raven argues that in representing the new regime of finance capitalism, the novel “legitimized specific modes of economic and social behavior” and “defined in practical terms … acceptable and unacceptable methods of gaining, retaining, and deploying wealth during a period of often bewildering change and instability” (Judging 13). As a new form made possible by the expanding markets of the capitalist economy, the novel does not simply “legitimize” but interrogates the effects of those markets on the individuals whose stories it tells. This focus on individual stories means that novels’ examinations of the economy usually center on private, rather than public, credit; the proliferation of novels in the second half of the eighteenth century, when public credit was more secure and when financial crises were common in the realm of private credit, also explains novels’ emphasis on private credit. The fact that gamblers figure most prominently in novels published in the second half of the eighteenth century as the economy of private credit is rapidly expanding and long after the lottery inspired the instruments of public credit is a testament to the continuing significance of the romance of gambling in eighteenth-century culture.8 I argue that the foundational role of gambling in the transformation of the economy by finance capitalism is visible at two levels in eighteenth-century novels. First, gamblers provide novelists with opportunities to interrogate the role gambling plays in the economy, and second, the tension between chance and control within gambling provides novelists with opportunities to explore the role of chance in novelistic plot and in the individual lives that unfold in those plots. Gamblers in novels highlight the tension between chance and control in capitalism

32

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

and in fictional form, thus suggesting the novel’s ongoing productive relationship with romance, the earlier form of narrative fiction that celebrates unpredictable chance, that rewards the gamble. Samuel Johnson in Rambler No. 4 (1750) argues for a distinction between “The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted” – novels – and “heroic romance” by claiming that the former are “diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world” (19). Johnson thus claims a difference between commonplace everyday chance events, which are admissible in novels, and the unlikely, uncommon chance events that make up the everyday of romance. But other readers find novels themselves, just like romances, littered with improbable chance occurrences. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu comments after reading Charlotte Lennox’s novel The Female Quixote (1752) that “All these sorts of Books have the same fault, which I cannot easily pardon, being very mischievous. They … encourage young people to hope for impossible events to draw them out of the misery they chuse to plunge themselves into, expecting legacys from unknown Relations, and generous Benefactors to distress’d Virtue, as much out of Nature as Fairy Treasures” (Vol. III.66). Wortley Montagu recognizes the persistence of romance in the central role played by chance in the eighteenth-century novel.9 It is especially telling that the unlikely chance events she decries are specifically unearned financial windfalls. The implication is that such chance acquisitions of monetary fortunes are jarringly out of place in novels that claim to represent realistically modern capitalist life. The irony of an aristocrat (whose place in society was granted her by the accident of her birth but who also speculated on her own and others’ behalf in South Sea stock) leveling this critique of chance elegantly illustrates the tensions between control and chance in this era of socioeconomic transition.10 In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753) and Frances Brooke’s The Excursion (1777), but, first, a brief discussion of gambling in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Eliza Haywood’s The City Jilt (1726) will highlight by contrast the complexity of this topic in later eighteenth-century novels. In the early period of both the novel’s development and that of capitalism, gambling does not seem to inspire the multifaceted examination of the capitalist economy that it does in later eighteenth-century novels. Instead, just as seemingly recreational wagers were catalogued in a banker’s papers alongside stock options contracts in the early eighteenth century, in the early novels of the period gambling generally appears unproblematically as one of a range of undifferentiated opportunities afforded by the

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 33

new capitalist economy. The mobility of money afforded by financial capitalism’s various instruments of exchange and the proliferation of luxury goods in the commercial economy provide numerous occasions for the eponymous heroine of Defoe’s novel to reinvent and enrich herself.11 In this context we see Moll use gambling as one element of her career as a shape-shifting thief and pickpocket. Her gambling is firmly in her control and she does not seem to engage the tension between chance and control typical in gambling. She both wins money and steals it unbeknownst from other players; in this way her gambling is merely another example of her unregenerate thievery. Furthermore, she has a strong enough instinct for self-preservation to quit gambling while she is ahead and before she can contract “the Itch of Play” (Defoe 206). Later novels almost invariably represent gambling as uniquely, ineluctably compelling, but for Moll gambling is simply one more economic opportunity for her to take advantage of when it profits her, and to abandon before her manipulations are revealed. Just as Moll does not experience the tension between chance and control in gambling, in Defoe’s novel capitalism is not in tension with gambling, as it often is in later novels; instead gambling is merely one example of an entire economy rife with opportunities for cheating and theft. At the level of form, while the role of chance in Moll Flanders is certainly complicated, gambling does not offer a particular lens through which that role might be viewed, as is the case in later novels. Thus (despite Defoe’s own apparent involvement in Neale’s lotteries) a novel rich with economic analysis does not use gambling as a tool for that analysis or as an occasion for questions of novelistic form, as novels in the century’s second half will do.12 In Eliza Haywood’s novel The City Jilt (1726), gambling is thoroughly in the heroine Glicera’s control as one of several means she uses to exact economic vengeance on a lover who has injured her. Gambling provides a format for exchange between Grubguard, an old man who wants to have sex with Glicera, and Glicera, who wants to possess the mortgage of her erstwhile lover, held by Grubguard, in order to have her former lover in her power.13 Glicera sees gambling as providing a genteel substitute for “Change Alley, where they chaffer one Transfer for another” (48). For Haywood’s characters, “Change Alley” and a game of “Picquet” are perfect equivalents. I will discuss women’s use of gambling in sexual exchanges in detail in Chapter 4, but it is important to note here that in The City Jilt, as in Moll Flanders, gambling is not represented as significantly different from other capitalist acts, especially from those of the Royal Exchange and its environs. Like Moll’s, Glicera’s gambling does not invoke the typical tension between chance and control; she is in perfect control of

34

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

her game with the foolish Grubguard, and winning the game gives her further control over her former lover, Melladore. In fiction of the early eighteenth century, gambling is merely another economic opportunity indistinguishable from the new activities of finance capitalism, and thus presents no particular challenge to chance and control in fictional form. Until the gambling-inspired economy of public credit leads to a broad expansion of the economy of private credit in the second half of the eighteenth century, and until the expanding market for novels leads to renewed interest in articulating the relationship between romance and novel, gambling does not have the particular “artistic usefulness” for early novelists that it does for later writers (Moretti 17).14 In Richardson’s final novel Sir Charles Grandison, however, the dynamic tension between chance and control in gambling leads to broader examinations of chance and control in characters’ economic behavior as well as in the plotting of the novel. Richardson envisioned Grandison as presenting a male counterpart to his portraits of virtuous femininity in Pamela and Clarissa. While there were financial components of female virtue in his previous novels, in Grandison financial choices make up a larger proportion of the examination of virtuous masculinity. In the transforming eighteenth-century economy, where chance seems to present new opportunities and pitfalls, Richardson contrasts the financial probity of the hero Sir Charles with the irresponsibility of his gambling relatives, his father, Sir Thomas, and his cousin, Everard Grandison. The three men exemplify different approaches to gambling and to the financial responsibilities attendant on their class positions. Through Sir Thomas, Richardson critiques the aristocratic abuses of gambling-inspired capitalism, while Everard’s gambling losses are eventually redeemed by his marriage in trade; both men showcase the pleasures of chance. Sir Charles’s rejection of gambling and his rational approach to financial management represents an ethics of control over chance. In this mid-century novel, when public credit is effectively under control and underwriting the expansion of the private credit economy, gambling for all three men is in tension not with the lottery-inspired instruments of public credit (in contrast, for example, to the equivalence of piquet and Exchange Alley in The City Jilt) but with the realm of private credit, represented in the novel by debts of honor, estate management, trade debt, and the prudent management of cash legacies and women’s fortunes. Sir Charles’s father, Sir Thomas Grandison (whose death before the main action of the novel is recounted within the text by his daughters), was a spendthrift libertine who wagered extensively on horses and

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 35

mortgaged some of his estates to pay debts of honor. Sir Thomas’s gambling is one of many attributes that affiliate him with an aristocratic style of masculinity in contrast with Sir Charles’s modern, protobourgeois attentiveness to budgets and prudent money management. Sir Thomas’s gambling shows us how gentry-class men responded to the eighteenth-century transition from a land-based economy to a capitalist one. Sir Thomas exemplifies what Colin Nicholson, drawing on J. G. A. Pocock, describes as the “conflict between traditional forms of civic personality grounded in real property and endowed with classical virtue, and market-oriented perceptions of individuality where passion and fantasy are encouraged to operate in flux” (xii). Sir Thomas is a landowner and thus has a guaranteed social position in the land-based economy but he does not exercise his traditional duties as owner of multiple estates; he leaves those details to stewards who are, of course, cheating him. Instead of fulfilling his civic humanist role as landowner in the traditional economy, Sir Thomas tries to wring as much capital as he can out of his land through mortgages in order to enjoy gambling. His gambling on horse races and his extensive and expensive involvement in breeding racehorses suggest the appeal of the economy of chance, even for a man whose social prestige supposedly derives from the old land-based order. Breeding horses, running them in races on the new racing grounds that were laid out in the early eighteenth century, and wagering on the outcome of horse races were activities associated with the upper ranks of society (although attendance at races spanned the classes), particularly since Charles II and other noblemen imported Arabian stallions to breed more excitable, spirited race horses (Plumb 281). Emulating, perhaps, the aristocratic gambling modeled by Charles II and his courtiers, Sir Thomas’s race wagers are sacrificial, aspirational losses that identify him with the upper ranks of the aristocracy. At the same time, his involvement in horse racing is modeled on capitalist investment. He raises cash from his estates to invest in horse breeding and tries to improve the return on his investment by wagering on races. Like the lotteries, Sir Thomas’s involvement in horse racing has elements of both non-productive and productive expenditure. Though he rejects the control offered by his position as a member of the landed gentry and seeks the thrills of chance in gambling, Sir Thomas’s horseracing activities are characterized by the tension between chance and control inherent in gambling. He seeks to control outcomes by investing in race horses while at the same time submitting to the emotional vicissitudes of chance in the frequent race meetings and the inevitable scramble to find funds to cover losses.

36

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

The end result of Sir Thomas’s gambling is a reactionary attempt to exert control over his dependents – particularly over his daughters – in order to generate cash to pay his gambling debts. He tries to force his daughters into marriages that would be financially beneficial to him rather than allowing them to marry men they love. Though his gambling seems like a modern act and a rejection of his traditional civic humanist landowning duty, it leads him to fall back on an oldfashioned practice of paternal tyranny so often critiqued in novels. Yet Sir Thomas’s old-fashioned paternal tyranny is not motivated by a civic humanist imperative to consolidate land holdings or forge political alliances with other men in his class. Instead, Richardson critiques the new gambling-inspired economy by showing how Sir Thomas’s gambling puts him at odds with the model of companionate marriage that he had shown in Pamela to be an agent of reform and regeneration for landed estates. Through Sir Thomas, Richardson critiques the excess and corruption of a gambling-inspired capitalism and shows how it undermines Sir Thomas’s ability to be an effective father and member of civic society. The gambling of Sir Charles Grandison’s cousin, Mr. Everard Grandison, also contrasts with the prudent economic values of the hero, Sir Charles; like Sir Thomas’s gambling, Everard’s gambling reveals the tension between chance and control in gambling and critiques non-productive gentry-class gambling by showing its unsustainability. A young man, Everard gambles because this is one of the standard leisure activities of men of his age and class. Like Sir Thomas, he rejects the control offered to him by his inherited social position and financial assets for the pleasures of chance. For Everard, gambling offers both the opportunity to conform to expectations for masculine behavior as well as the possibility of a big win that would supplement his income; thus Everard’s gambling, like that of Sir Thomas, is both sacrificial and (he hopes) productive. It is Sir Charles himself who explains Everard’s gambling as wagering control, or, in his words, “putting to hazard a certainty”; at stake in this wager are Everard’s inherited social and financial positions. When Everard appeals to Sir Charles for advice about the repayment of his very heavy gambling debts, Sir Charles responds, “Were I my cousin, I would divest myself of my whole estate (were it necessary) for the satisfaction of my creditors … as a just punishment for not being satisfied with my own ampler fortune, and for putting to hazard a certainty, in hopes of obtaining a share of the property of others” (2:513). Later Sir Charles repeats the sentiment: “Good God! That a man should be so infatuated, as to put on the cast of a dye, the estate of

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 37

which he is in unquestioned possession from his ancestors!” (2:652). Of course this is exactly the point: Everard, though a modern young dandy rather than an old rake like Sir Thomas, follows his uncle in rejecting the old model of civic humanist masculinity based on the land of his ancestors. What Sir Charles sees as infatuation is for Everard the thrilling tension between chance and control that characterizes gambling and the style of masculinity defined by gambling. Richardson critiques this model of masculinity based on gambling by showing it to be unsustainable; because his income is derived from land, Everard doesn’t have an endless supply of cash to wager. Instead, he loses much of his real property in gambling debts. The humiliation of these losses leads him to give up gambling, but he compensates for his loss of land by marrying the wealthy widow of his wine merchant; her fortune, amassed in trade, allows him to regain his dignity as a wealthy man and allies him with the capitalist economy (underwritten by gambling) that had devalued the land-based model of masculinity. In other words, although Everard can’t gamble forever, he continues to live according to the values of capitalism, not of land. Though he seems to give up chance for control, he benefits from the economy of chance through his marriage to a merchant’s widow. At the same time, however, both Everard and his new wife have a romantic regard for his former status as a landed gentleman despite Sir Charles’s view that “the general tenor of his life was not a credit to it” (3:3). Just as Sir Thomas’s gambling led him back to a reactionary paternal role that he hoped would generate additional funds for his gambling, Everard’s gambling leads eventually to his nostalgic appreciation for the role he rejected as a gambler, a nostalgia he conveniently indulges in from the financial comfort generated by trade. Though he rejected the masculine role suggested by his ancestry and property through his gambling and through his marriage, the pride Everard and his wife take in that ancestry indicates the continuing coexistence of the two models of masculinity based on control or on chance. While Sir Thomas and Everard reject their traditional roles as landowning gentlemen for a masculinity defined by the vicissitudes of chance, Sir Charles assesses a man’s worth not by his land but by his works. Although he reforms the management of the Grandison family estates after his father’s death in order to bring them in line with his general principles of prudence and careful charity, the novel pays only passing attention to Sir Charles’s role as a landed gentleman. Rather, his model masculinity based on works is demonstrated through Sir Charles’s direct engagement in the capitalist economy; he is depicted

38

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

in a variety of circumstances as an eminently able investor and money manager. Sir Charles thus rejects the control offered by land for the chance of capitalism, yet the novel depicts his activities as a rationally benevolent capitalist as utterly devoid of risk or at least not risky for someone as skilled as Sir Charles apparently is. For example, Sir Charles is the guardian to a young heiress; “by his management, [he] has augmented” her fortune to the sum of £50,000 (1:385). In another instance, he is made the executor and residual legatee of a merchant’s will; rather than pocket the substantial windfall, he carefully inquires into the circumstances of the niece and nephews of the merchant and invests £5000 in each of them, giving the niece a dowry for her marriage to a “Turky Merchant,” enabling one nephew to become a quarter-partner with the West India merchant to whom he was apprenticed, and giving the other the means to buy out the stock of the retiring wine merchant to whom he was apprenticed. Richardson thus presents Sir Charles, in contrast to the gambling Grandisons, not as a model of a reactionary or nostalgic desire for the control offered by land, but as a model of an engagement with chance that, due to his superior wisdom and skill, is perfectly controlled. Since perfect control of capital investments is impossible without cheating, this illusion of control in the economy of chance is one of the many ways that Richardson’s novel in its characterization of Sir Charles draws on elements of romance, presenting its hero as almost superhumanly virtuous. Gambling in Grandison reveals the tension between chance and control in men’s participation in the economy. Sir Thomas and Everard each give up control of their inherited positions for the pleasures of chance in gambling, but then reassert control (through paternal tyranny or through a stable, middle-class mercantile marriage) when their wagers don’t pay off. Sir Charles rejects chance for carefully controlled investing yet ironically his life is not at all under his control as he waits throughout the novel for Clementina della Poretta and her family to decide his marital fate. The tension between chance and control in gambling and in capitalism also sheds light on tension between chance and control at the level of narrative construction, drawing our attention to the role of romance in Grandison’s plot and characterizations. From his first appearance in the novel, Sir Charles seems like a figure of romance: improbably good, turning up at opportune moments to perform heroic deeds. As Albert J. Rivero notes, “without romance, there is no Sir Charles Grandison,” but Richardson was intensely uncomfortable with romance and its association with dangerously inciting the passions of readers, especially female readers (216). Richardson is aware of at least

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 39

some of the many ways his novel relies on romance conventions; in a “Concluding Note” to the novel, he defends his hero from the charge that he “approaches too near the faultless character which Critics censure as above nature” (3:464). Within the novel, a circle of English women debate the dangers of romance reading, as Rivero discusses, and warn each other about ways in which their actions are sometimes influenced by romance ideals. Harriet Byron notes that in writing letters about the glorious character of Sir Charles, “she is writing romance” (Rivero 216). Harriet relives in nightmares the episode in which Sir Charles rescues her from abduction by the rake Sir Hargrave Pollexfen; at the crucial moment in these dreams, she tells her correspondent, “then comes my rescuer, my deliverer; and he is sometimes a mighty prince (dreams then make me a perfect romancer) and I am a damsel in distress. The milkwhite palfrey once came in. All the marvellous takes place; and the lions and tygers are slain, and armies routed, by the puissance of his single arm” (1.285). Harriet means to mock her own romantic tendencies, but her dreams are founded on her actual experience with Sir Charles, which was no less the stuff of romance despite an absence of lions and tigers. While Richardson’s novel criticizes the gambling Grandisons, Sir Thomas and Everard, for succumbing to the romance of chance and thus perverting their traditional masculine roles in a land-based economy, Sir Charles’s perfectly controlled participation in the gambling-inspired capital economy is itself an unlikely romance and consistent with his “faultless character.” A product of the transforming economy, the novel itself cannot resist the romance of the improbable. In Sir Charles Grandison, gambling offers Richardson a means of examining the role played by chance and control in the masculine financial behaviors necessitated by a transforming economy and this examination in turn sheds light on the romance elements in the novel. In Frances Brooke’s novel The Excursion (1777), a similar pattern is at work, but with a focus on feminine financial behaviors. The heroine Maria Villiers leaves her country home in Rutland to spend some time in London and the story, like many English novels about young women published after 1750, details the various faux-pas she makes as she explores the complex social terrain of London.15 Her voyage is inspired by romantic visions of “coaches, coronets, titles,” and she hopes to enjoy the pleasures of elegant London society after an obscure life in the country (Brooke 8). She enters London with “an hundred and ninetyfour pounds thirteen shillings and six-pence, a sum which she supposed would last her a good part of the winter” (16). In addition, she considers the manuscript writings she has brought with her the equivalent of cash

40

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

reserves, since she is confident that she can easily sell them and thus live by her pen if necessary. Maria’s romantic misunderstanding of the marketplace she enters when she goes to London extends to her inflated assessment of the value of her unpublished literary works. She includes in her account of her financial resources “a considerable sum in bank in her portmanteau: she estimated her epic poem at 100l., her novel at 200l., and her play, including the copy, at 500l.; on the whole 800l.; a sum, in the aggregate, to which the little additional expences she was going to incur bore no manner of proportion” (55). Maria’s romantic view of her “genius” and her expectation of its immediate recognition and remuneration poignantly supposes her paper fictions have a direct exchange value, that they are literally money in the bank, negotiable paper specie (16). It turns out, of course, that Maria spends money much more quickly than she expected, and that her paper fictions have no value, as her attempts to sell her writing are laughed off by the theatre manager and by booksellers. So, just as Moll Flanders considers gambling one of many economic opportunities in capitalist London, Maria turns to gambling as a way of raising cash to pay off debts she has incurred during her circulation through the London marriage market. “A thought started; this rout – she had still twenty pounds remaining, she owed the milliner fifty; thirty was not much to win – she was determined to try – This was a possible resource; she desired no more; her sanguine temper elevated it to a certain one” (98). Yet while Moll’s gambling was a certain success, both because she cheated and because the tension between chance and control in gambling is not examined in Defoe’s novel, Maria’s proposed gambling is a risky encounter with chance. Not only can she not control the outcome of her wager but, unlike Moll, who easily avoids contracting the “Itch of Play,” Maria cannot fully control herself in the face of chance’s seductions. Under social pressure she plays several times despite prior resolutions to abstain; she has recently experienced a 50 guinea loss at play, which might make her consideration of gambling at the upcoming rout as a way of redressing her debts seem particularly irrational, but her loss makes her desperate and makes the possibility of a big win increasingly tantalizing. She believes she can control the gamble, that it will be a “certain” resource, and fails to recognize the risks of chance even though she has already experienced them. Maria does not calculate prudently or rationally, but lives in the socioeconomic culture of capitalism as if it were a romance, as if improbable luck will resolve her financial impecuniousness. Maria’s temptation to gamble is based on the same romantic belief in chance that motivated her excursion to

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 41

London in the first place; spurred by “fairy dreams of greatness,” she hopes to marry an aristocrat and return to her country home “with a ducal cornet on her coach,” a hope that is about as likely to be fulfilled as her gambling is to be successful (23, 10). Maria’s approach to gambling reveals its characteristic tension between chance and control as her “sanguine temper” leads her to believe she can count as certain an outcome that is actually subject to long odds and she is similarly blind to the unlikelihood of her “fairy dreams of greatness.” Maria’s romantic engagement in the economy is also evident in her sentimental view of money’s utility in testifying to the ineffable value friends have for each other. Before she considers gambling as a solution to her debts, Maria asks one of the fashionable ladies with whom she plays cards for a loan. She couches her loan request to Lady Hardy in sentimental, romantic language: “she knew she was laying her under a distinguished obligation by making a request which gave her an opportunity of evincing the sincerity of her regard, and of those obliging offers of service so often repeated” (96). Maria imagines this society lady will be pleased to have an opportunity to display her regard for Maria by lending her money. Instead of fulfilling this request, Lady Hardy and her friends mock Maria’s sentimental view of money, particularly since they believe she is the kept mistress of Lord Melville. Not only do they deny her loan request, but they exclude Maria from the rout at which, after Lady Hardy’s refusal, she planned to gamble. Thus despite her belief in chance, Maria does not have the opportunity to try her hand at cards again to repair her finances. The novel thus critiques Maria’s romantic economics as naïve and even potentially self-destructive, though endorsing her sentimental sweetness of temper. Her hopes for a grand marriage nearly lead to the ruin of her reputation, she overestimates her financial assets because she assumes her manuscripts have monetary value, she expects friends to be honored to lend her money, and, despite previous gambling losses, she foolishly believes in her ability to win the money she needs to pay her debts. Despite this critique of all aspects of Maria’s romantic economics, however, Brooke’s novel doesn’t fully repudiate romance. Instead, it rescues her by the very romance mechanisms that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu criticizes in The Female Quixote: mysterious benefactors, chance meetings, and unexpected legacies from distant relatives. The morning after she is excluded from the gambling table, Maria receives by private messenger an anonymous gift of £100, more than enough to pay her debts. We later learn that Maria’s anonymous benefactor is Mr. Hammond, an old acquaintance of her uncle/guardian who pities

42

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Maria’s naïve floundering in London and means his gift to mark his value of her virtue and to rescue her from the path leading toward prostitution on which she has unwittingly embarked. Thus, though she doesn’t gamble in the last extremity, Maria’s romantic beliefs in lucky, unlikely chance events, represented by her decision to gamble, and her belief in a sentimental economy of friendship are reaffirmed by Mr. Hammond’s unexpected monetary gift. Furthermore, her belief in the value of her writing is affirmed by this gift and by her uncle’s unexpected inheritance of an earldom. As Jodi Wyett points out, Maria’s naïve misunderstanding of the literary marketplace is resolved in the novel by another kind of romance, a retreat from the urban literary market into a patronage economy in the countryside, for Maria’s benefactor suggests that her uncle “build a theatre in his country retreat outside the terms of exchange in London. Hammond suggests that there … he and Maria could ‘in defiance of managers, write tragedies, and play them ourselves’” (Wyett 147, quoting Brooke 152). The novel’s conclusion, as Wyett notes, “endorses a phantasmatic English country economy without questioning its foundation in urban mercantilism and imperialism” (151). Gambling plays an interesting role in this mystification of the country as entirely separate from and independent of urban capitalism, for gambling in the country is, in contrast with Maria’s earlier urban gambling, integral to the novel’s happy ending. Over a game of piquet in the country, Maria begins to look closely at Col. Herbert, measuring him against the urban fops with whom she had gambled in town: “Miss Villiers had never observed him so attentively before; the fire of his eyes, the spirit of his whole countenance, formed such a contrast with the maukish, unmeaning, uninformed macaroni faces about town, as could not fail to strike very forcibly a woman of her turn of mind” (144–5). This card game marks a turning point for Maria, the beginning of her affection for Col. Herbert, her rejection of the city, and her eventual incorporation in a country network of landed estate owners. Although Maria and Col. Herbert have shared conversations and walks prior to this card game, it is the game itself that gives Maria the opportunity to “observe him attentively” and that seems to animate him so appealingly; this benign country gambling in which players can observe each other is in striking contrast to the narrator’s description of London gambling earlier in the novel, where she decries Play; that passion which levels youth and age, wisdom and folly, dignity and meanness, vice and virtue; which quenches every spark

Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 43

of divine fire within us; blunts the edge of wit, renders knowledge useless, undermines the empire of beauty, and tears the palm from the brow of honour; that passion which contracts the understanding, hardens the heart, annihilates all the finer feelings of the soul. (17) Rather than annihilating “finer feelings,” the country game of piquet fosters Maria’s eventual love for Col. Herbert. The country game of piquet also contrasts with the description Col. Herbert’s sister-in-law gives him earlier of the self-absorbed urban gambling group in which she found Maria: “a set who are wholly engrossed by play, intrigue and scandal; and so particularly devoted to the first, that they see the approach of the genial spring with horror” (138). If urban gambling is at odds with the natural rhythms of the seasons (instead of anticipating spring with pleasure, they dread it because their gambling coteries will be broken up as the fashionable London season ends and the elite leave town), Maria and Col. Herbert’s country gambling leads them to a life in a country “neighborhood of persons endeared to each other by the most tender ties,” where they will, in her uncle’s words “build a little, plant a great deal, and above all, garden to infinity” (152). This romance vision of country life is even more nostalgic than Everard Grandison’s regard for his ancestral status that he indulged from a position of financial comfort derived from urban trade, for the romantic country life of Maria’s family circle is made possible by old-fashioned property inheritance. Maria’s uncle’s unexpected accession to the peerage by the surprise terms of the will of a distant relation who had treated him cruelly in life gives Maria the “greatness” she had sought at the beginning of the novel and enables her to marry Col. Herbert. The ending affirms Maria’s romance of status climbing, since her desire for a higher rank is more than satisfied by her uncle’s inheritance of an earldom. The financial challenges of modern urban life as represented in the novel, where consumer goods and social pressure tempt Maria to spend money irrationally, are brought to our attention by her flirtation with chance in the romance of urban gambling, but eventually the novel uses romance’s recourse to unlikely chance events to elude these financial challenges. Thus gambling in The Excursion first reveals the tension between chance and control in the modern economy as Maria is unable to restrict her spending to match her limited financial resources or to keep her resolution not to gamble. Her faith in gambling as a financial resource reveals how Britons might experience eighteenth-century capitalism as a romance of luck, rather than a rational system that rewards prudence

44

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

and diligence. Eventually, gambling in the countryside reveals the novel’s reliance on the conventions of romance, especially the romance of unlikely chance events, to conclude the novel’s plot. Whether providing an unlikely legacy, as in The Excursion, or describing the hero of capitalism, as in Sir Charles Grandison, eighteenth-century novels use gambling to examine the ongoing appeal of romance in a transforming economy that was experienced by participants as anything but predictable. Novelists both critique and capitalize on the romance of gambling. By “putting to hazard a certainty,” the gamblinginspired economy inaugurated by lotteries gave greater scope – for better and worse – to the operations of chance in eighteenth-century English society, making long odds and lucky breaks the engines of fiscal development. Novelists attentive to this economy take unique advantage of the flexible and responsive form of their emergent genre and its particular mandate to represent contemporary socioeconomic life, depicting the romance of eighteenth-century capitalism in all its incalculable complexity.

2 Cheating, Calculation, and the Episodic Romance of Gambling

The politician Charles James Fox was an infamously prolific gambler. Horace Walpole reported, for example, that before the parliamentary debate on a new Marriage Bill in January 1772, Fox had sat up playing hazard at Almack’s, from Tuesday evening 6th, till five in the afternoon of Wednesday 7th. An hour before, he had recovered £12,000 that he had lost, and by dinner, which was at five o’clock, he had ended losing £11,000. On Thursday he spoke in this debate, went to dinner at past eleven at night: from thence to White’s, where he drank till seven the next morning; thence to Almack’s, where he won £6,000; and between three and four in the afternoon he had set out for Newmarket. (Quoted in Lascelles 43) We might see Fox’s gambling as a performative, sacrificial loss demonstrating his right to his leadership position in the manner of Charles II ritually tossing the dice and losing his £100 as he returned to his throne 90 years earlier, as I discuss in Chapter 1. If so, Fox’s gambling is also like the king’s in that at the same time it does not differentiate him from but unites him with the common gambler. While most gamblers didn’t have the finances or the constitutions to sustain a gambling spree of this magnitude, Fox’s gambling is nonetheless typical as he throws the dice again and again, hoping to rectify losses or extend winning streaks. Despite the odds, which are almost always against winning, despite even the experience of loss, the gambler plays another game, and another, and another. This rhythm of hopeful repetition is central to the romance of gambling, and it is made possible by the inherent tension between chance and control in each new game. The gambler submits again and again to 45

46

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

chance, reveling in the unknowability of the outcome, yet hoping that at the very least the force of his desire to win will control that outcome. To gamble is to be in a heightened present full of possibility. The past doesn’t matter; the future is unknown. The thrill of gambling is in this moment at the start of each new game, just as the dice are tossed but before the result. The romance of gambling is in the episode, as the gambler seeks this particular moment again and again and resists combining episodes into a longer narrative, a narrative that would perforce suggest walking away from the tables. We can see in Walpole’s description of Fox’s play the gambler’s tendency to emphasize the episode, to resist calculating the overall odds and totaling up complete gains and losses accurately; we get an account of milestone wins and losses, but no overall total as first he loses an unspecified amount greater than £12,000, then he wins £12,000, then he loses £11,000, then he wins £6000, then he goes to Newmarket, presumably to wager on thrillingly episodic horse races. An examination of the episodic nature of gambling illuminates two responses to the tension between chance and control that constitutes these episodes: cheating and calculation. Cheating and calculation were each central to the gambling culture of the eighteenth century, and when we understand the episodic nature of gambling, we gain a particular appreciation for the threats that cheating and calculation pose to the invigorating tension between chance and control that gives each episode its appeal. Both cheating and calculation are a form of control. Cheating reinforces the episodic quality of gambling, undermining the effectiveness of any attempts to combine discrete gambling episodes into aggregate long averages. At the same time cheating takes advantage of the episodic habits of the gambler; his tendency to play game after game facilitates certain modes of cheating, such as marking cards. Calculation worked against the episodic nature of gambling, encouraging the player to look beyond the game at hand to calculate odds and formulate long-term strategy. Yet because it seemed to offer the player a heightened level of control over his game, calculating was considered by some players to be itself a form of cheating (just as many US casinos today forbid the practice of card counting when playing at their blackjack tables because this method of mentally keeping track of cards reduces the casino’s advantage in the game, making the player more likely to win). Cheating was a widespread concern in the eighteenth century as gambling seemed increasingly popular, and many saw cheating at play as a symptom of a broader culture of cheating in the changing economy. For

Cheating and Calculation 47

example, Hogarth’s Election III: The Polling (1754), a painting that depicts an expansive scene of corruption, includes as a small detail coachmen cheating at cards in the background. Bemoaning the vices of the age, Jonathan Swift complains in A Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners (1709) that “beside those Corruptions already mentioned, it would be endless to enumerate such as arise from the Excess of Play, or Gaming: The Cheats, the Quarrels, the Oaths and Blasphemies, among the Men” (Vol. II. 46). Visual representations of gambling frequently make reference to cheating: a late seventeenthcentury playing card, for example, shows sharpers gulling a naïve dice player out of his money; Rowlandson’s print Smithfield Sharpers, or the Countrymen Defrauded (c.1787) depicts the obvious collusion of several players in a Smollettian scene of tavern gambling.1 As I will show, cheating was facilitated by episodic play and widespread cheating reinforced the gambler’s experience of play as episodic, resistant to the cumulative narrative of calculation. At the same time, the eighteenth century saw the development of probability calculations, which themselves were born in gambling; Pascal and Fermat’s epistolary discussion of the “problem of points,” or how to divide the stakes of an interrupted game, is traditionally considered the beginning of mathematical probability theory (Daston 15). Probability calculations contend with cheating as an alternative model for controlling chance in gambling, yet some players saw calculations as a cheat precisely because of the control of the game that they offered. This chapter examines cheating and probability calculations in games manuals – with a particular focus on Hoyle – that take an episodic narrative form to cater to gamblers’ perceptions of their experiences at play as episodic, a series of discrete moments. I then examine gambling scenes in two episodic novels – Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) by Tobias Smollett and Amelia (1751) by Henry Fielding – because episodic novels are particularly suited to representing gambling as an episodic succession of moments that resist totalization. In both novels, cheating and calculation are especially prominent and pose challenges for novelistic form, challenges that are resolved through providential endings that seem at odds with the episodic narratives that precede them. Despite their providentially happy endings, these novels use gambling scenes to critique a capitalist culture in which fraud is rampant and is facilitated by those in power. Charles James Fox’s episodic gambling 20 years after these novels appear suggests their continuing relevance in the gambling culture of eighteenth-century England.

48

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Cheater’s paradise In Tobias Smollett’s novel Roderick Random (1748), Roderick and his friend Strap are wandering around London when a man passing them says, “Sir you have dropt half a crown” (69).2 Thus striking up conversation, Roderick, Strap, and the stranger proceed to a tavern for a drink together. Soon they begin playing whist with a fourth man who seems to be there by chance. Roderick and Strap win considerable sums at first; then, as the stakes get higher, the strangers proceed to strip them of all their money. The next day, Roderick and Strap learn from their landlord that the man they met in the street was a rascally money-dropper, who made it his business to decoy strangers in that manner, to one of his own haunts, where an accomplice or two was always waiting to assist in pillaging the prey they had run down. – Here the good man recounted many stories of people who had been seduced, cheated, pilfered, beat, – nay even murdered by such villains … Strap lifting up his eyes and hands to heaven, prayed that God would deliver him from scenes of such iniquity; for surely the devil had set up his throne in London. (73) Circulating through London in their episodic adventures, Roderick and Strap are decoyed into gambling with cheaters by the very agent of circulation in this newly capitalizing economy, a half-crown that cannot be recognizable as anyone’s inalienable property. The gambler’s experience of play as unquantifiably episodic makes Roderick and Strap susceptible to the cabal of cheaters who win their money as the night’s play progresses. The gambler’s tendency to perceive his experience of play as episodic, to remember and try to recreate a winning hand of cards rather than to calculate the overall odds and to total up complete gains and losses accurately was facilitated by the modes of play in eighteenthcentury England and exacerbated by a concern with the cheating that was thought to be rampant. The common practice of playing long series of games over the course of an evening particularly lends itself to both to episodic perception and to cheating: it can encourage the probable calculation of frequencies and odds, but it also encourages a gambler to give undue weight to a particular episode; early success in a series of games whets her desperation when she begins to lose. She berates herself for not quitting while ahead and at the same time thinks her luck might turn and she could win back her losses if she keeps playing. Cheaters play on this tendency by allowing those early, enticing victories that seduce their

Cheating and Calculation 49

victims into playing for higher stakes later in the evening, as in the scene from Roderick Random. A player’s concern about cheating also makes his perception of play episodic. He focuses on particular episodes of cards or dice, watching for manipulations of the game at each particular moment rather than calculating the net results of a series of episodes. The methods described by contemporaries of cheating at games of chance in the eighteenth century, involving marked cards, loaded dice, or sleights of hand, relied both on the practice of playing long series of games and on the gambler’s experience of her play as untotalizable episodes. Cards were sold in packs packaged in a “duty wrapper” sealed and stamped to show that the appropriate tax had been paid by the purchaser; this also assured players that they were using a complete and fair deck. The backs of eighteenth-century English playing cards were blank and were not printed with any pattern or device; even during the course of fair play they were bound to get dirty. As a group of players proceeded through a series of games during an evening, without intending to cheat, one might notice a greasy fingerprint on the back of the ace of spades and thus track that crucial card’s movement. Players were accused of making spots on the cards, of marking the soft, uncoated paper backs with their fingernails while they played, or of notching the cards’ edges to assist in dealing. Because players usually initially sat down to play with a fresh pack of cards, these cheating methods required multiple games in one sitting in order to be implemented. If, on the other hand, a sharper wanted to gain control of the proceedings before playing several games and marking the cards, he could slip a favorable card into his hand from his sleeve, his lap, or from under the table, relying on his victim’s reluctance to look beyond the current episode of play to calculate the improbability of the appearance of the sharper’s favorable cards. To cheat at dice, one could load the dice before sitting down to play. Dice were made of bone; a sharper could drill into the center through the pips, load the die with mercury, and paint back over the pips. Without an understanding of probability that would enable a player to calculate whether some faces of the dice were turning up with more than equiprobable frequency, it was difficult to detect loaded dice. Most players lacked just this mathematical skill, but instead of explaining the calculation of equiprobable frequencies, games manuals explained other methods of cheating with dice that players would be able to detect (or practice) more easily, whether or not they understood probability theory. The elaborate canting terminology that describes the unfair manipulation of dice testifies to its popularity. Hazard, by far the most popular dice game, is purely

50

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

a game of chance; there is no skill involved beyond a cheater’s manipulations. Because it is a quick game and a player wins or loses his money in a few throws, dice players tended to play long series of hazard. As Ian Hacking notes, one would expect that the common practice of playing long series of games of chance would have led to the quantified mathematics of probability much sooner; indeed, he suggests that dice players may have had an intuitive sense of probability from repeated throws, without quantifying it (2). But the persistent threat of cheating kept players, even during a long series of throws, focused on the particular case at hand. Loaded dice would skew any intuitive sense of probability a player might develop, and, more importantly, the player watching for his opponent’s unfair manipulations of the dice during the throw would be distracted and thus less able to develop this intuitive sense. The equivocal legal status of gambling and the inconsistent application of gaming laws in the eighteenth century contributed to a gambling culture that gave priority to the individual episode by making it impossible to determine in advance whether a particular wager or a particular gaming house would be considered illegal. Laws dealing with gambling and cheating reinforced the gambler’s experience of play as episodic and thus militated (unintentionally) against the acceptance of the “laws” of probability calculations by gamblers. Legislation against play was contradictory and inconsistently enforced and seemed to give priority to the individual case before the over-arching legal principle, just as the gambler preferred to remember the episode before the series. As I discussed in the Introduction, gambling itself was, under most circumstances, illegal. Richard I, Richard II, Edward IV, and Henry VIII all made dice, cards, and other leisure activities illegal except during the 12 days of Christmas (at court play was legal all year round) (Munting 10). Keeping establishments solely for gambling, such as White’s or Almack’s, was illegal throughout the eighteenth century, but the statute was rarely enforced until the 1790s.3 Once the statute began to be enforced in the nineteenth century, gambling “hells” that served the working class were subject to raids while clubs that catered to the rich and powerful evaded prosecution. The laws limiting losses at play implicitly acknowledge the ineffectuality of the laws banning play altogether. Similarly, laws providing punishment for cheaters and protection for their victims indicate that gambling continued unabated; indeed anticheating laws complicated the issue by considering cheating as a distinct, more serious offense. A law enacted under Charles II states that They that by any fraud, shift, cousenage, circumvention, deceit, or unlawful device, or ill practice whatsoever in playing at or with cards,

Cheating and Calculation 51

dice, tables, tennis, bowles, kittles, shovelboard, or in cock-fightings, horse-races, dog-matches, or foot-races, or other pastime or games, or by bearing a part in the stakes, wager, or adventures, or by betting on the side of such as play, act, ride, &c. and acquire to themselves, or others, money or things of value, shall ipso facto forfeit treble value. (16 & 17 Car. 2 cap. 7 S. 2; Disney 70–1) In 1711, Parliament extended the cheater’s punishment under the gaming acts at the same time as it reduced the amount that could be legally won at play from £100 to £10: “Persons cheating at play, or winning above 10 l. and being convicted thereof, on an information or indictment to forfeit 5 times the value of their winnings to the informer, and suffer corporal punishment as for perjury” (9 Ann. cap. 14 S. 5; Viner 5). Under most of the statutes prohibiting gaming, the punishment is monetary; usually the convicted gambler must pay three times the sum won, as in 16 Car. 2 cap. 7, cited above. Here, in 9 Ann. 14, the corporal punishment added to a higher than usual fine, underscored by the link drawn between cheating and perjury, suggests that cheating is a serious threat to social order. As John Disney explains in The Laws of Gaming (1806), “the law … considers the crime of playing with false dice as an offence against the public, and as such, punishable by the common law” (74). Thus a man was convicted of playing with false dice and was sentenced by the Court of King’s Bench to stand in the pillory six times because, in the words of his sentencing, “he was a common cozener of the King’s people.”4 Despite instances of indictments “for a cheat with false cards” or “for fraudulently winning money at dice,” the law regulating cheating at play was not straightforward (Disney 130–1). In some examples from case law where cheating is mentioned, the point being adjudicated is not whether a player cheated and is thus subject to the punishment under 9 Ann. 14. Instead the plaintiff is suing to avoid a gaming debt under the statute that declares gaming debts over £100 void. Thus, a plaintiff hoped to avoid a gambling debt of £106 because £66 of it was won with false dice, but he was held liable for the £40 that was fairly won (Viner 6). One wonders why the cheater is not being prosecuted for using false dice, or indeed how gamblers can go to court to enforce payment of debts contracted at illegal games. At one point a judge did rule that actions could not be brought “on wagers respecting the mode of playing an illegal game” (Viner 10), but this did not by any means deter the numerous court cases brought either to decide wagers or to determine whether particular wagers were enforceable by law or only by honor: “So far as the civil law was concerned, gaming and

52

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

betting contracts remained enforceable in the courts, except where they related to certain forms of excessive gaming” (Royal Commission 8–9). Multiple, occasionally conflicting statutes remained in force until Select Committees appointed by the Houses of Parliament in 1844 recommended consolidating and regularizing the gaming laws. This legal indeterminacy predisposed players against a probability theory of universally applicable laws. Not only did a player’s experience at gaming tables with cheaters make calculating odds impractical; his experience of conflicting and inconsistently applied gaming laws made him suspicious of the claims of probability theory. Why would a law of long averages be universal when 9 Ann. 14 was not? At the same time the law reinforces the gambler’s concern with cheating in a particular episode of play by portraying cheating as a more serious threat to the social order than gambling itself. The law’s and the gambler’s focus on the problem of cheating in gambling is mirrored in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century games manuals, whose form reflects the episodic experience of the gambler in picaresque, serial narratives of cheating at play. The episodic narrative of games manuals highlights tension between chance and control in the conflict between the gambler’s and the mathematician’s perspectives, a conflict that hindered the dissemination of probability theory, as I will discuss below, before Hoyle. The episodic narratives of games manuals provide templates both for Hoyle and for novelists who represent the gambler’s experience. The English games manual narrative was more or less invented by Charles Cotton, who published his Compleat Gamester in 1674. This work established some key conventions of a genre that became increasingly popular in the eighteenth century as gambling spread to a broad range of social classes: namely, in the preface Cotton rejects high-stakes gambling and warns of its dire consequences; cheating is a prominent concern throughout the book; and the descriptions of the games read like fictional narratives with characters, plot developments, and lessons to be drawn. Cotton betrays some anxiety about how his motives for writing about such dissolute activities will be judged; he justifies his book in an “Epistle to the Reader” by explaining that recreation is necessary, and to this end he has collected the pastimes laid out in the book. “Mistake me not,” he continues, “it is not my intention to make gamesters by this collection, but to inform all in part how to avoid being cheated by them” (xxvi). Indeed, the reader of The Compleat Gamester could easily learn how to become a complete cheater. Cotton explains games and cheaters’ ploys in compelling narrative vignettes

Cheating and Calculation 53

that become the signal convention of the games manual genre. In his chapter on “Putt,” for example, his description of cheating methods features characters, dialogue, and a moral lesson. After explaining in great detail how the cheater, or “Rook,” can slip crucial cards into his lap prior to a round of the game, Cotton narrates a scene in which the Rook and his friends run up the victim’s, or “Col’s” bets before beginning the rigged round: Now do the gamesters smile at the goodness of each others game, one … cries “who would not put at such cards?” The other in as brisk a tone says, “Come if you dare.” “What will you lay of the game?” says the Rook. “What you dare,” says the Col; then pausing while the Rook seems to consult with his friends, who cry, they know not what to think on’t. “Five a pound,” cries a rooking confederate on this gentleman’s side. The Col encouraged hereby, cries ten pound more: and thus the rook holds him in play till there be a good sum of money on the board; then answers the Putt of the now ruin’d Cully. They now play … the rook wins the day … Let these and former cheats be a sufficient warning. (65) Cotton’s narratives of cheating make his manual read like a picaresque, episodic novel, a series of scenes in which wily rogues and brotherhoods of cheaters victimize naïve players.5 This glamorization of the “picaro-cheater,” casting him as a romance hero, in a text that claims to disdain gambling and reject fraudulent play is even more pronounced in Theophilus Lucas’s Memoirs of the Lives, Intrigues, and Comical Adventures of the most Famous Gamesters and Celebrated Sharpers in the Reigns of Charles II, James II, William III, and Queen Anne (1714). Echoing Cotton, Lucas declares that his purpose is to serve unknowing victims of fraud: My Design in publishing these Memoirs is to detect the several Cheats which the Sharpers use in all sorts of Games on Cards or Dice: And tho’ I have here shew’d the true way of playing the chief Games in use among us, whether they be English, French, Dutch, Spanish, or Italian, yet I would not have the Reader think my Intention is to make Gamesters, but only to inform People how they may avoid being cheated by ’em. (Preface) Yet the ensuing book provides scant instruction in “the true way of playing the chief Games”; instead it comprises a series of romantic,

54

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

pithy, racy tales on the model of criminal biography.6 Sometimes Lucas briefly outlines the rules for a character’s favorite game after chronicling his life, but these explanations are cursory and hard to follow. Cotton narrated gambling scenes to demonstrate methods of cheating but Lucas’s purported accounts of a game’s rules are subsumed by narrative. Each “memoir” follows a basic formula – the character’s rakish adventures, his gambling and cheating, his death (often by hanging) – and the disjunction between the conventional moral frame of the Preface and the evident pleasure Lucas takes in recounting these tales undermines the civic and divine justice duly (and dully) meted out at each memoir’s end. This disjunction can be compared to criminal biography’s “characteristic tension between the historicizing truth of the individual life and a countervailing movement of moralizing and repentance”; in Lucas’s games manual, this tension is between chance, the freewheeling events of the gamester’s life, and control, the punishment imposed for his transgressions (McKeon 100). The episodic narrative is nominally reined in by a concluding punishment that merely leads to the beginning of another tale, just as the gambler immediately picks up the dice to throw again after a losing toss. The individual memoirs are analogous to picaresque fiction in their focus on the adventures of rogues, and the aggregate text reads like an episodic novel, a series of tales and incidents ungoverned by a controlling narrative trajectory. I suggest that the episodic nature of gambling influences the form both of the games manual and of episodic novels such as those of Smollett and Fielding. My aim thus far has been to show how the eighteenth-century gambler experiences her wagers as discrete repeatable episodes, in part because they were subject to cheating; this is reinforced by the application of inconsistent gaming laws on a case-by-case basis and represented in the episodic narratives of games manuals. Practitioners of the new science of probability wanted fundamentally to redirect the gambler’s attention away from the individual episode, the particular winning or losing hand, to the long average, the sum of a series of games, in order to help gamblers make more effective bets, or to encourage them to give up gambling altogether. Yet this attempted enlightenment was not immediately successful. Mathematicians in England such as John Arbuthnot, Abraham DeMoivre, and Samuel Clark tried to explain Continental probability theory to the reading public and some even specifically addressed their treatises to gamblers, but there is little evidence that these works reached a wide audience.7 Clark’s anxious preface to The Laws of Chance (1758) indicates that players often found these works too abstruse: “I have honestly done my best endeavors to

Cheating and Calculation 55

render what is here published as easy to be understood, as the nature of the subject would admit” (Preface). As Lorraine Daston notes, before Hoyle, “despite the best efforts of the mathematicians, the practice of risk was almost wholly untouched by the theory” (114). The mathematics of probability was elucidated by gambling, yet probability theorists were unable to communicate with gamblers, not simply because the concepts were difficult to understand, but at least in part because the ubiquitous cheating gamblers faced made probability’s calculations irrelevant (Daston 157–8). Calculating the odds of throwing a particular combination of dice in a game of hazard would be of no use if the dice were loaded with mercury and thus weighted toward one face. The rational calculations of probability theory would not have helped Roderick Random and Strap play any better against the cheating cabal who had marked them for plunder. Though we can enumerate methods of cheating at different games, it is nearly impossible to quantify one’s chances when playing with cheaters, so the developing calculus of probability simply did not apply. The cheater’s manipulations infringe on the equiprobable disposition of outcomes, undermining the probability theorist’s ability to calculate. Thanks to cheating, probability theory’s claim to control chance was itself a kind of improbable fiction, a romance. As the author of an essay in the periodical The Connoisseur (1756; primarily written and edited by George Colman and Bonnell Thornton) explains, It is vulgarly supposed, that “the events of Gaming are regulated by blind chance and fortune:” but the wise and polite, that is, the Knowing Ones, cannot but smile at the absurdity of this notion; though even the sagacious Hoyle and Demoivre themselves, by the nicety of their calculations of chances, seem to have adopted this ridiculous doctrine. The professors at Arthur’s, and the experienced adepts in the mysteries of Gaming, kindly condescend to give lessons, at reasonable rates, to those novices, who imagine that the events of play, like those of war, are uncertain: and so cogent is their method of instruction, that they never fail to convince their pupils, that success at dice, as well as bowls, depends upon a skilful management of the Biass, and that the cards are not shuffled by the blind hand of fortune. (Colman Connoisseur 35–6) This passage parodies the lessons Hoyle gave whist players, which I will discuss below, by describing encounters between cheaters and their victims as “lessons” that will teach those victims that hazard is not

56

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

a game of chance, subject to calculation, but consists of the skillful (fraudulent) manipulation of dice as they hit the baize playing surface and that in card games an expert shuffler can distribute crucial cards as he pleases. Cheaters, or “Knowing Ones” (a cant term for cheaters, who know, as their dupes do not, that the game is rigged), are called “the professors at Arthur’s” because their lessons reveal the irrelevance of probable calculations. Probability theory claims to tame chance by revealing its operations to be calculable, but to cheaters this is a “ridiculous doctrine” since they have already tamed chance by their methods – loading and cogging dice, nudging the baize cloth on which dice are thrown to achieve a desired outcome, marking cards, stacking decks, signaling, etc. Despite its irrelevance in cheating situations, probability theory begins to reach a wide audience through Hoyle’s popular treatises, studied by gamblers who do not cheat or worry about being cheated. Yet as it becomes more familiar, some gamblers criticize probability theory itself as a cheat precisely because it, like cheaters, tames chance. For some gamblers, probability theory disrupts the dynamic tension between chance and control that constitutes the appeal of gambling. Probability theory claimed to control chance entirely. For seventeenthand eighteenth-century probability theorists, “the events of the universe were fully determined. Chance was merely apparent, the figment of human ignorance” (Daston 10). Probability theorists believed that all apparently random outcomes were governed by discernible rules and their goal was to elucidate this rational order (10–11, 35).8 Not only does the player who has learned from Hoyle a game’s rules and his methods of calculating odds have an advantage over an unlearned player, but because such calculations are based on the determinism of probability theory, from the gamesters’ point of view, calculation robs a game of its chance disposition just as loaded dice or marked cards did. To gamble with a calculator is to engage with someone who does not believe in luck but who believes he knows precisely what range of outcomes are and are not possible. The gambler’s resistance to probability theory represents a desire to preserve the romance of gambling as an encounter with chance that has not been controlled, rationally quantified, and regulated. The gamblers who reject probability theory don’t want the kind of control it promises; they want a felicitous encounter with chance. Hoyle countered the gambler’s resistance to probability theory in his Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742), which went into numerous editions and was pirated widely, by writing probability theory in the language of the episodic games manuals of Cotton and Lucas, disguising

Cheating and Calculation 57

the rational prescription of probability in the familiar clothes of irrational, unquantifiable encounters with chance. Hoyle explained probability from the player’s perspective as a series of cases, of individual encounters with chance – as episodic – rather than as a collection of universal laws. Of course, Hoyle’s very name stands today for controlled chance, for the codification of the rules of popular games, as the phrase “according to Hoyle” testifies.9 M. M. McDowell writes, “Hoyle’s great contributions to the crystallizing of whist rules … are, and always were, indisputable” (169). Peter Linebaugh lists Hoyle’s whist treatise among the “rules to the national pastimes” that were published in the period of “early conflicts in the formation of British markets” when “the symbols of the British nation came into being” (116–17). Hoyle thus plays a role (albeit only in passing) in Linebaugh’s account of the drama of regulation that the emerging British nationalism (and simultaneous market expansion) enabled. Hoyle’s treatise lists “laws” for situations in which, for example, a card is accidentally turned face up during the dealing; these laws number 14 in the first edition and are expanded to 25 in the second edition, which also advertises for separate sale “the Laws of the Game … Printed on a Fine Imperial Paper, proper to be Fram’d, or made Screens of, that the Players may have them before them, to refer to if any Dispute should arise” (Hoyle 10; Marshall 43). Yet I argue that Hoyle was successful not because he was a law giver but because he explained optimal play on a case-by-case basis. By following the episodic narrative model of earlier games manuals, Hoyle preserves the dynamic tension between control and chance that is so central to gambling. The famous “Laws of the Game at Whist” occupy only a few of the 90 pages of the treatise. Because the treatise is based on a manuscript handbook Hoyle used in the 1-guinea whist lessons he gave in London in 1741–2, it assumes the reader has a basic knowledge of the game and thus illustrates how understanding odds can guide the gamester’s play turn by turn. The bulk of the text elucidates strategies for optimal play in the form of “Calculations,” “Computations,” “Particular Games,” “Cases,” “Directions,” and “Rules” (Hoyle “The Contents” unnumbered). Because trump is determined randomly in eighteenth-century whist (by drawing a card, rather than by bid or contract as in later forms of the game) and the object is to make tricks with the available cards, whist is a game of combinatory mathematics. Hoyle’s “Rules” and “Directions” guide the gamester in playing cards according to probability calculations both to improve his chances of taking tricks and to signal to his partner the strengths and weaknesses of his hand through these conventions of play: “When you lead, begin

58

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

with the best Suit in your Hand” (11). Furthermore, the whist treatise is aimed not just at players but at the onlookers “who will bet the Odds on any Points of the Score of the Game then playing and depending,” and includes tables headed “Some Computations for laying of your Money at the Game of Whist” (title page; 4). Hoyle’s treatise is as much a betting manual as a rule book. The format of Hoyle’s book mirrors the gambler’s experience of play as an episodic narrative of successive cases. Just as the gambler plays one hand after another, Hoyle elucidates a series of scenarios that expands with each edition of the treatise. Like the inveterate player, he adds in successive editions one more game, and one more, and one more in an effort to illuminate all the situations the gambler might encounter. Probability’s language of calculation and odds is prominent early in the book, but is subsumed by the narrative description of cases as the treatise continues. Early in the treatise Hoyle writes, “It is 5 to 4 at least that your Partner has 1 Card out of any 2 certain Cards” (4). After explaining the mathematical basis of this guideline, he proceeds, “therefore, suppose you have 2 Honours in any Suit, and knowing it is 5 to 4 that your Partner holds one of the other 2 Honours, you do by this Knowledge, play your Game to a greater Degree of Certainty.” As the treatise progresses, there are more and more cases and fewer probability-based guidelines, so that the text is punctuated with phrases such as “Suppose you have …”; “Suppose in the course of play …”; “The following Case happens frequently”; “A case which frequently happens”; and, in a later edition, “Additional Cases at Whist, never published till 1748.” Like the earlier episodic games manuals of Cotton and Lucas, and like contemporaneous episodic fictions, Hoyle’s work is made up of case after slightly different case, incident after slightly varying incident, without the overarching, ordering structure that one would expect from a treatise famous for laying down the law. As an experienced whist tutor, Hoyle recognizes that for the card player individual cases are more relevant than general rules because the cases more accurately reflect the player’s perception of a game as a series of unique situations. Popular though Hoyle’s whist treatise was, however, it did not completely bridge the gap between the theory and the practice of risk in the eighteenth century. One of the key reasons for this gap was beyond Hoyle’s control. Classical probability was calculated in terms of expectation: the odds of the game multiplied by the sum of a wagerer’s bet equals his expectation. In other words, if you bet £100 that your next cast of a die will be a six, your expectation is £16.60 (1/6 ⫻ £100 = £16.60).10 This puts the wager into perspective by showing a gambler the true value of

Cheating and Calculation 59

his stake in relation to the odds, but the terminology of expectation has the disadvantage of suggesting that probability theory can actually predict outcomes, instead of merely delineating a range of outcomes. As Gerd Gigerenzer explains, “expectation was … understood in terms of a fair exchange or contract” (3). For example, Hoyle published An essay towards making the doctrine of chances easy to those who understand vulgar arithmetick only (1754) in which he explains how to find out, in a lottery, “the Number of Tickets, which is requisite to entitle you to a Prize, upon an Equality of Chance” (59). The wording of the ensuing section suggests that in a lottery where there are 12 blanks to every prize, purchasing eight tickets will “entitle you to a Prize.” This is what Kavanagh calls probability theory’s “enormously seductive sleight of hand … Probability theory can say a great deal about the expectations I might legitimately entertain that a given number will appear when I roll two dice … Probability theory has, however, nothing to say about what number will actually come with the next roll” (16, 15). Probability theory gave the illusion of control through its emphasis on “expectation,” but many did not recognize that this was merely an illusion. Before Hoyle’s treatise appeared, Henry Fielding satirized the average lottery player’s misunderstanding of expectation in his farce The Lottery (1732), in which a young woman from the country gives herself out to be, and considers herself, an heiress because she has purchased a ticket in the £10,000 lottery. The satire is effective because she is not trying to cheat the men who court her by appearing as an heiress, but actually believes the prize is hers simply because she bought a ticket. An advertisement in The Covent-Garden magazine; or, Amorous repository (1774) indicates that the lottery continued to be misunderstood enough throughout the century to afford opportunities to sharpers who offer probability theory’s illusion of controlling chance. One John Molesworth offers tickets for the state lottery with numbers selected by a machine that are said to bear better odds for winning than randomly selected numbers. Furthermore, the advertisement promises, “Mr. Molesworth can direct Adventurers in such manner that the Chances shall be in favor of their Succeeding” (320). Molesworth capitalizes on the language of probability theory to make his scam convincing, claiming the improved odds he offers are the result of “Curious Calculations.” In the intervening years between Fielding’s farce and Molesworth’s advertisement, the years of Hoyle’s popular treatises, it seems clear that the language of probability theory permeated the culture, with the effect at least in some instances of confusing more than clarifying gamblers’ understanding of probable expectation and the calculation of chances.

60

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Hoyle’s treatise on whist was the most popular games manual published in English because its depiction of probability as an episodic narrative acknowledged the gamester’s experience of play as a series of unique situations, but it could not stop the cheating which made this experience of play particularly relevant. Indeed, unlike his predecessors in the games manual genre, Hoyle is surprisingly silent on the subject of cheating. The only implicit acknowledgment of the cheating that would undermine his rules for probable calculation is in the Essay on Chances, where a table lists the odds of losing a string of fair games in a row. Though Hoyle does not explain how the reader would use this table, a player who found himself the loser of 15 consecutive games of hazard could consult the table and decide whether the unlikely odds listed for this occurrence suggested he has been cheated. Beyond this table, however, Hoyle does not discuss cheating because it is fundamentally irreconcilable both with probability theory and with the gentrified, domesticated version of whist that, as a tutor to gentlemen and ladies in their homes, Hoyle promotes. Furthermore, rampant cheating makes Hoyle’s manual of little value, since, as noted above, his calculations and guidelines only apply to fair play. Hoyle does have a personal concern in his whist treatise, however, with cheating of a different sort. The popular treatise was extensively pirated and cheap unauthorized editions appeared under titles such as The Polite Gamester and The Humours of Whist. To counteract this piracy, Hoyle lowered the considerable price of the treatise and he and his publisher, Thomas Osborne, personally signed every volume printed to guarantee authenticity.11 Though Hoyle effaces the problem of cheating in the treatise itself, a broader culture of fraud threatened his profits. Hoyle did not make a connection between publishing piracy and cheating at cards, but satirists taking aim at Hoyle did. An anonymous play named after one of the pirated editions, The Humours of Whist. A Dramatic Satire, As Acted Every Day at White’s and other Coffee Houses and Assemblies (1743), mocks Hoyle’s anxiety about piracy in a mockhysterical “Author’s Protest,” complaining that “Authors are every Day invaded in their Properties, in so flagrant a Manner, as no other Nation can parallel” and threatening prosecution against “all Booksellers, Publishers, Mercuries, Hedge-Printers, Hawkers, and others … [who] print or vend any pirated Copies” (3–4). Further mocking Hoyle, the anonymous author promises all genuine editions of this play will be signed with his name (of course there is no signature). He then links Hoyle’s problem with piracy to cheating at play with an announcement of a soon-to-be-published “Dissertation upon Signs at Whist, in which

Cheating and Calculation 61

will be contained all manual and ocular Intimations in the most elaborate Exactness, was well as the most secret, yet most significant Manner of Conveyance; calculated for the Emolument of weak Players, and which will be explained for the further easy Price of Five Pieces” – in other words, how to cheat at whist by using hand and eye signals to tell your partner what cards you hold and to sneak crucial cards to the table from your sleeve or lap (5). The author of this satire classes Hoyle’s treatise with the earlier games manuals that in effect instructed the reader, supposedly for his own protection, in methods of cheating, and thus considers Hoyle’s anxiety about the fraudulent publication of his treatise disingenuous in London’s pervasive culture of cheating at play. One of the perpetrators of the piracy that so frustrated Hoyle emphasizes the common concern that probability calculations themselves constitute a kind of cheating. The person responsible for one of the first pirated editions (published in 1743) of Hoyle’s treatise justifies his theft of Hoyle’s work in an advertisement that links the skillful play that Hoyle advocates with cheating. The writer promotes his piracy as a charitable act that will give the unskilled player who cannot afford Hoyle’s treatise access to the skills that will make him less susceptible to the quasi-cheating of the calculating player who could pay for Hoyle’s tuition: “tho’ a Man of superior Skill, that takes advantage of an ignorant Player, cannot, according to common Acceptance of the Word, be deemed a Sharper, yet, when he pursues that Advantage, after he has found out the Weakness of his Antagonist, it must be confessed that if he is not a Sharper, he is at least very near a-kin to one” (quoted in Marshall 42). The student of Hoyle is “very near a-kin” to a cheater, and the printer of the pirated edition is simply trying to level the playing field by making Hoyle’s quasi-cheating methods more widely available. Beyond the prefatory material to the satirical play The Humours of Whist, the action of the comedy portrays Hoyle himself as a cheater. Probability theory, in this play, is merely a cover for fraud. The Hoylecharacter, Professor Whiston, is in league with Lord Bubbleboy and Lord Stakeland (“sharpers of Fashion”) to send his pupils to them, where the pupils lose all they have in spite of the professor’s lessons (6). Sir Calculation Puzzle gets tied up in figuring the odds according to the professor’s methods; his fellow whist players can easily cheat him while he is trying to calculate the odds of his partner having particular cards in his hand. The satire suggests cheating is too pervasive for Hoyle’s probability theory to have broad relevance. But the picture of Hoyle as Professor Whiston also proposes that probability theory itself is a cheat, not simply because the Professor is cheating, but because even

62

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

if he weren’t, calculation at play is a violation of honor. Furthermore, the play suggests that probability calculations will not have the good effects their advocates hope for. One character complains that probability calculations have hampered his ability to make a living as a gambler: “But if this damn’d Book of the Professor’s answers, as he pretends, to put Players more upon a Par, what will avail our superior Skill in the Game? We are undone to all Intents and Purposes” (10). But another argues that rather than “preventing the less knowing in the Game, from being imposed upon by those of superior Skill,” Hoyle’s book will “make the Generality of them worse Players. It may confirm the Adept, but will only confound the Unskilfull. And with respect to its Utility, where one will use it to prevent his being impos’d upon himself, I dare say a Hundred will study it in order to impose upon others” (16). The Humours of Whist was reprinted in a bawdy periodical that was itself more or less a manual for cheating at cards, The Covent-Garden magazine; or, Amorous repository, in 1774 as “The Humours of White’s Chocolate House.” The reappearance of this satire 31 years after its (and Hoyle’s) initial publication suggests the continuing relevance of its depiction of cheating long after Hoyle’s death. Tension between chance and control is evident as the player gambles because he doesn’t know the outcome of his wager, even as he fantasizes about or even calculates what it might be. We can also see this characteristic tension in the threats that both cheating and probability theory seem to pose to the chance disposition of gambling, as they offer methods for controlling outcomes. Modeled on earlier episodic games manuals, Hoyle’s treatise of episodes or cases introduces English players to probability theory, but probability theory remained controversial among sharpers whose methods might be exposed by calculation and among players who thought calculation itself was cheating. The widespread concern with cheating at play that I have explored here, from visual representations to games manuals to legal statutes, suggests a cultural preoccupation with what was perceived to be a pervasive problem. Examining this problem, the nexus of cheating and calculation in gambling, is essential for the episodic novel, which was seen as having the capacity to be as inclusive as a narrative form could be. Indeed, H. K. Russell claims that episodic narrative “is inevitable if the novelist is to give the impression of a full representation of life including the varied types of men and social conditions he has chosen for his fictional world” (186). But the tension between chance and control in gambling and in the concern with cheating and calculation also provides novelists opportunities to make use of the romance of unlikely chance in

Cheating and Calculation 63

their works. The flexible novel form allows writers to craft providential endings that flagrantly violate the fictional economies of their episodic narratives in order to provide happy endings for their main characters that are at odds with the critiques of the capitalizing culture revealed by episodic gambling.

Episodic romances Episodic narratives, or what Deidre Lynch calls “fictions of social circulation,” seem to have been particularly popular at mid-century, an important transitional point both for capitalism and for the development of the novel (87). Episodic fiction is propelled primarily by chance events: rather than showing a controlling pattern, episodes are only tenuously connected and rarely revealed to have more significance than first appears. Characters and readers are refused a comforting sense of order but operate in a mode of circulation that can be liberating or alienating. This contrasts with teleological – or what I call here providential – fiction, which controls chance’s operations to show the divine order of the world it represents, giving its characters and readers happy endings and secure places in that order. If happy endings are supplied in episodic novels, they are added on with a strong sense of disjunction from the circulatory, episodic economy of the preceding text, and the tension between chance and control in the engineering of such endings is palpable. The cultural preoccupation with cheating I have outlined above is prominent in episodic novels that use gambling as one of many examples of corruption in London. In Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom and Fielding’s Amelia, London is a cheater’s paradise where political influence is bought and sold, where a wife’s sexual favors are traded for a husband’s advancement, where the unsuspicious are everyone’s dupes. Smollett and Fielding use episodic fiction to represent a society that seems to have abandoned traditional moral codes in the process of its economic transformation. These episodic fictions tell tales of chance events and are ungoverned by a controlling teleological narrative trajectory as their central male characters, Ferdinand Fathom and Billy Booth, both of whom are gamblers, move from one incident to the next. In both novels, mathematical probability fails to account for the cheating at play that is a symptom of a larger culture of fraud; in Fathom, probability calculation is clearly depicted as a form of cheating. Gambling is part of the corruption depicted in Smollett’s text and his villain-hero cheats and calculates at play when it suits his purposes, though at times

64

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

even he is scared off by the vast extent of cheating and calculation on the London gambling circuit. Smollett’s response to the nexus of cheating, calculation, and chance his episodic narrative depicts is to impose on it a divinely ordered providential ending. The tension between chance and control is resolved by positing a world where chance is an illusion and all events are part of a general providential plan, though I argue that at the same time Smollett subtly qualifies the universal providential order his ending instates. Fielding’s gambler is not the villain but the victim; though his adventures are represented in an episodic plot, Booth finds himself in a world of cheating and calculation where nothing is left to chance. Thus Fielding’s use of the improbable ending as a kind of special providence rectifies the imbalance between chance and control caused by cheaters and calculators and restores the episodic gambler’s faith in chance, in the romance of the lucky break. Ferdinand Count Fathom, since it was first reviewed in 1753, has never been popular, but the formal disjunctions that have concerned critics are precisely what make this novel interesting, as Smollett brings together a range of narrative forms in the novel’s construction.12 The novel consists primarily of an episodic narrative (indebted to the picaresque tradition) with a short matrimonial narrative tacked on the end.13 A low-born orphan, Ferdinand Fathom was adopted by a Hungarian aristocrat and raised in his family. Most of the book details his miscellaneous adventures and scams as a young man in the army, and then running away from the army, throughout Europe. When Fathom goes to England, he assumes the title “Count” in order to get into higher social circles and to engage in a fraudulent jewel trade. He also appears as a doctor and a violinist, and he marries several times. In England he is reunited with his Hungarian foster-brother, Renaldo, who has been Fathom’s life-long dupe. Fathom’s scams finally catch up with him and Renaldo discovers Fathom’s perfidy; Fathom then reforms and everyone lives happily ever after. Smollett uses episodic form particularly effectively to deal with what we might call the episodic historical setting of his tale. As Beasley explains, Smollett “employed an anachronistic method in all of his novels, which strive for wholeness and simultaneity of effect through the accumulation of assorted imaginary and historical episodes, or ‘moments’” (ed. Fathom xxxvi). Smollett begins the action of his novel with his rogue-hero’s birth in 1711, but the novel’s events do not correspond in a straightforward way with the actual historical events to which the novel alludes. For example, as Beasley points out, in Chapter 29, Fathom is mistaken in England in 1735 or 1736 for Prince

Cheating and Calculation 65

Charles Edward Stuart; this incident alludes to the Jacobite rebellion and the Young Pretender’s escape, which occurred 10 years later (Fathom xxxiv). Other references to events that took place in the late 1740s and early 1750s are also placed in the midst of novelistic action that must be dated to the early 1740s. To explain this Beasley argues that “Smollett was deliberately experimenting with some unconventional relations between fiction and the historical reality it reflects” (xxxiv). Smollett uses episodic form (which makes possible his cavalier approach to historical allusion) to narrate Fathom’s experience (and manipulation) of the new economy because episodic narrative creates that very experience – “disjointed, fragmented, resistant to all yearning for order and regularity” – on the level of form (Beasley “Life’s Episodes” 22). Just as Hoyle’s serial cases approximate gamblers’ episodic experiences at the tables, the form of episodic fiction presents its characters’ experiences as they happen, without the interpretive commentary of a retrospective narrator who knows their story’s teleology, thus presenting a series of incidents that cannot, as they occur, confidently be fitted into a larger pattern of meaning.14 Following what Robert Alter calls the “realistic tradition” of the picaresque, which “extends the scope of the narrative form to embrace varieties of people and places and activities which in the past were not ordinarily considered proper subject matter,” Smollett makes clear that he intends his novels to represent realistically a range of social classes (59).15 He explains in the preface to Roderick Random that “mean scenes” are indispensable in a novel that depicts the various incidents of Roderick’s career: “the judicious will … perceive the necessity of describing those situations to which [Roderick] must of course be confined in his low estate” (xxxv). In Ferdinand Count Fathom, Smollett defends “having chosen my principle [sic] character from the purlieus of treachery and fraud” in language echoing disclaimers Cotton and Lucas made in their games manuals as well as the conventional apology commonly made, as Beasley points out, “in contemporary literature of roguery”: “I declare my purpose is to set him [Fathom] up as beacon for the benefit of the unexperienced and unwary, who from the perusal of these memoirs, may learn to avoid the manifold snares with which they are constantly surrounded in life” (5, 363). Indeed, Smollett’s anxiety about the critical censure he expects his rogue-hero to receive leads him to claim in the Dedication that Ferdinand Count Fathom is not an episodic fiction but follows “an uniform plan … to which every individual figure is subservient …[,] executed with propriety, probability” (4). Yet, instead of revealing “an uniform plan,” the narrative following this declaration of controlled purpose is made up of

66

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

a series of episodes governed by chance that take place in a pervasive culture of cheating; there is no evidence of “an uniform plan” until the providential conclusion. Douglas Lane Patey argues that Ferdinand Count Fathom is a novel of probability that teaches its characters and its readers to interpret probable signs. This didactic reading, however, casts Ferdinand as the model practitioner of the interpretation of probable signs despite his increasing villainy and without accounting for the abrupt narrative reorientation at the book’s end that serves to contain this villainy. Patey argues that in the corrupt world the novel represents its virtuous characters need to learn from Fathom to be better calculators. Yet such a lesson is of questionable utility in the face of the rampant cheating that makes the reading of probable signs futile even for Fathom. Smollett seems more suspicious of Ferdinand’s arts of calculation than Patey acknowledges, not only because he uses calculation for nefarious ends but because calculation fails him; he is just as susceptible to cheating as his less calculating victims are. I read his name, “Fathom,” not as an indication of the “sagacity” that “makes him an excellent judge of … manifest signs” but as an ironic moniker that reveals the limits of calculation in a world made unfathomable by universal cheating (Patey 193). The efficacy of reading probable signs is undermined by the fact that, as Patey notes, characters “know one another only by signs and conjectures from signs, indications that all too often, because either of dissimulation or simple insagacity, lead astray” (189). The novel resolves the problem of what Patey calls “dangerously fallible” signs not by teaching its characters how to interpret them but by resorting in the conclusion to an entirely different narrative economy, a romance of providential rewards and punishments. In the episodic economy elucidated in three-quarters of the text, the failures of mathematical probability in the novel’s gambling scenes symbolize Smollett’s skepticism of the utility of calculation in a culture of fraud. The final quarter of the novel elucidates a very different providential narrative economy in which signs are suddenly no longer fallible, but illuminate divine order and facilitate justice. Gambling episodes in Ferdinand Count Fathom allow Smollett to criticize mathematical probability theory as a kind of cheating while at the same time showing its irrelevance in the culture of fraud that his novel represents. Calculation may be a species of cheating, but it is no match for all the other cheating methods practiced by the gamblers Ferdinand encounters. Ferdinand’s vocation in all his schemes is fraud but as he plans “a thousand crafty ambuscades for the destruction of the ignorant and the unwary,” he rules out gambling as a reliable career path (42–3).

Cheating and Calculation 67

Ferdinand is skilled at calculating probabilities and at conventional cheating by manipulating cards or dice, but he sees other players cheating so extensively that he knows his skills, including calculation, will do him little good, so he hesitates to rely on play to make his fortune: “He was already pretty well versed in all the sciences of play; but he had every day, occasion to see these arts carried to such a surprising pitch of finesse and dexterity, as discouraged him from building his schemes on that foundation” (43). The “sciences of play,” or the calculation of probabilities, are in this sentence on a continuum but cannot compete with cheating, the “arts” of “finesse and dexterity,” or the unfair manipulations of cards and dice. As in The Humours of Whist, the dramatic satire on Hoyle’s treatise discussed above, Ferdinand views probability calculation as a form of cheating that can give him an unfair advantage over other players, but he also recognizes the inefficacy of calculation in the face of widespread cheating by other means. Despite his awareness of the problem of cheating, Fathom twice is tempted to try to make money as a gamester, much to his regret. Over the course of the book, Fathom travels through Hungary, Austria, and France, but England is the epitome of cheating; when he first turns to gambling for sustenance, he is of course cheated by two English baronets. In a scene that highlights the inability of mathematical probability to account for cheating, Fathom plays quadrille with Sir Giles Squirrel and a miscellaneous, international group of grifters he meets in a tavern in Paris; he immediately mistrusts them because he wins money from them too easily. “He justly suspected that they had concealed their skill, with a view of stripping him on some other occasion; for he could not suppose that persons of their figure and character should be in reality such novices as they affected to appear” (99). Fathom expects a player to use his skills to his utmost advantage. If these gentlemanly players appear surprisingly unskillful now, they can only be planning to cheat him later. This sentiment does not simply illuminate Ferdinand’s corrupt point of view as a man constantly seeking to swindle others; his assumption that everyone he encounters is a cheater is generally borne out by the novel’s depiction of a culture of fraud spread across Europe but especially rife in England. Ferdinand’s skill at play renders him proof to the subsequent attacks of Sir Giles and his cohort, and they begin to hint that he should join rather than compete against them. Ferdinand wants to operate independently and refuses to connect himself “with a set of raw adventurers whose talents he despised” (100). Soon after, another Englishman, Sir Stentor Stile, appears as if newly arrived on the Continent, boasting of his well-lined pockets. He proposes dice to

68

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Fathom, who “found some difficulty concealing his joy, at the mention of this last amusement, which has been one of his chief studies, and in which he had made such progress, that he could calculate all the chances with the utmost exactness and certainty” (105). Ferdinand lets Sir Stentor win for a while, and then begins “to avail himself of his arithmetic” (105). Sir Stentor then loses a series and throws the dice out the window, declaring them to be false. Another pair of dice is brought, and Fathom quickly loses all he has. The next morning, Ferdinand finds himself poor and “robbed of all those gay expectations he had indulged from his own supposed excellence in the wiles of fraud … [H]e plainly perceived he had fallen a sacrifice to the confederacy he had refused to join; and did not at all doubt that the dice were loaded for his destruction” (106). The two definitions of cheating outlined above are at play here. Ferdinand considers “his arithmetic” to be one of his tools of fraud, because he hopes to use it, along with his discernment in choosing likely victims and his insinuation in operating on their passions as they play, to gain advantage over his fellow gamesters. By endowing the rogue Fathom with a facility for gamester’s calculation, Smollett indicates his low opinion of mathematical probability. But though Ferdinand considers himself skilled in “the wiles of fraud,” he does not cheat in this instance by unfairly manipulating the cards or dice. That kind of cheating is the province of the English baronets Squirrel and Stile. Soon after he loses to them, he discovers that they “were notorious sharpers, who … hunted in couple” (107). The single time Fathom gambles in England, he appears to take advantage of the culture of cheating, for his delight in calculation is not mentioned. Instead, his “dexterity” at whist, piquet, and hazard “arouse the suspicion of some people” (173). After exposing the English cheaters Squirrel and Stile on the Continent, Smollett’s depiction of gambling in England takes aim at Hoyle and at the system of calculation that failed Fathom earlier. Usually bold, Fathom is thoroughly intimidated by the style of play in London, “where the art of gaming is reduced into a regular system” and its “professors” spend their days in “algebraical calculations” (148). Just as critics of Hoyle recognize that the determinism of probability theory undermines their experience of luck and chance in gambling, Fathom sees that the mathematics of probability has “reduced” gambling from a felicitous encounter with chance (albeit an encounter he hopes to manipulate to his advantage) to a controlled “regular system.” Smollett’s use of “reduce” here depends on a meaning now uncommon, “to bring (into or) to a certain order or arrangement,” that highlights the transformation of gambling by

Cheating and Calculation 69

probability theory from an inchoate, episodic activity into an ordered system.16 I also sense the modern meaning, “to lower, diminish, lessen,” at work here, implying loss of pleasure and possibility in the reduction of gambling through calculation to a narrative of design. Smollett goes on to indict the calculators precisely because their reduction of gambling to a system not only robs the activity of its pleasure (Fathom decides not to join their cabal because “he was too much addicted to pleasure to forego every other enjoyment but that of amassing”) but turns them into irrational fools (148). Probability’s “professors” go to such ridiculous lengths in their devotion to their science that Smollett can only describe them with a fantastic mixture of metaphors, comparing their greed to the rapacity of hunting dogs and their bizarre rituals designed to keep their minds clear for calculations to both the priestly Indian caste of Brahmins and the sixth-century Greek followers of the mathematician and vegetarian Pythagoras all in one sentence. Such a representation of calculation undermines Patey’s claim that “it is not his [Fathom’s] skill in calculation and conjecture that Smollett means to question, but merely the uses to which he puts his skills” (195). On the contrary, Smollett attacks probable calculation from all angles. Calculation reduces its practitioners to irrational money-grubbers enslaved to a system that is both a type of cheating and is ineffective in the face of traditional forms of cheating. When Ferdinand once more considers gambling as a source of income, Smollett satirizes another aspect of England’s gaming culture that caused much wonder among other Europeans, namely “the lust of laying wagers” (240). Fathom is deterred from venturing as a gamester not only by the memory of the cheating baronets, which still haunts him, but because the vogue for wagering “rendered skill and dexterity of no advantage” (240). Neither mathematical probability nor cheating by manipulating cards or dice would do Fathom any good in the wagering contests he witnesses “in a certain gaming-house not far from St. James’s”: In one corner of the room might be heard a pair of lordlings running their grandmothers against each other, that is, betting sums on the longest liver; in another, the success of the wager depended upon the sex of the landlady’s next child; and one of the waiters happening to drop down in an apoplectic fit, a certain noble peer exclaimed, “Dead for a thousand pounds.” The challenge was immediately accepted; and when the master of the house sent for a surgeon to attempt the cure, the nobleman who set the price upon the patient’s head, insisted upon his being left to the efforts of nature alone, otherwise the wager should be void: nay, when the landlord harped upon the

70

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

loss he should sustain by the death of a trusty servant, his lordship obviated the objection, by desiring that the fellow might be charged in the bill. (240)17 As I discussed in the Introduction, such “indifferent wagers upon indifferent matters” (as Lord Mansfield described them) both celebrate the unpredictability of events and give bettors an emotional stake in their outcome (quoted in Disney 2). Ferdinand finds the English rage for wagering unfathomable because as a cheater and a calculator, he does all he can to minimize unpredictability, and he eschews emotional entanglements that might impede his schemes. The nobleman’s reaction to the attempted intervention of a surgeon demonstrates the extent to which wagering draws its significance from the chance disposition of the events at issue. The bet depends on the apoplectic waiter “being left to the efforts of nature alone”; by attempting to save the man’s life, the surgeon would be intervening in the chance disposition of the wager’s outcome, would in effect be cheating on behalf of the wagerer who bet the waiter would recover. The wagers Ferdinand witnesses all depend on events such as life expectancy, a baby’s sex, or the effects of illness that were considered by most people to be unpredictable (although probability theorists did begin calculating life expectancy and sex distribution in the eighteenth century, they disagreed on how to interpret their calculations).18 It may be that wagering became popular as cheating and calculation were thought increasingly to undermine the chance disposition of other forms of gambling. Until statistical calculations make life expectancy or recovery from illness more predictable in the nineteenth century, wagering offers a financial reward for a bettor’s engagement with unpredictability. If wagering gives bettors an emotional investment in otherwise “indifferent events,” it can be said to create community; thus we see gamblers interested in the birth of a child who would otherwise be all but invisible to them. Yet this emotional investment can also encourage gamblers to view the subjects of their bets as dehumanized monetary equivalents. Each of the noblemen betting on the length of his grandmother’s life must hope for the death of his opponent’s grandmother in order to realize his profit. The noble peer who prevents the surgeon from attending to the apoplectic waiter assures the landlord of the gaming house that his financial loss in case of the waiter’s death could be added to the peer’s bill as yet another of his evening’s expenses. Though the English lust for wagering seems so unfathomable to Ferdinand, he, like the wagerers, uses people as instruments for his greater profit.

Cheating and Calculation 71

Smollett expresses his disapproval of the English culture of wagering both by showing Ferdinand’s discomfort with it and by showing its similarity to Ferdinand’s discredited methods. Smollett uses medical, oriental, and classical metaphors to indict wagerers driven to risk whole fortunes “upon issues equally extravagant, childish, and absurd” (240). Those who lay wagers are “infected” with a “spirit of play” that is like a “pestilence”; this infection causes a much more serious madness that makes gamblers behave like “the inhabitants of Malacca” who “run a muck” (241). Smollett draws on Western fascination with the Malay behavior of amok, which was represented frequently in Dutch and British colonial accounts that describe “a primitive Malay suddenly seizing dagger or spear and embarking on a murderous rampage” (Spores 1). Smollett uses the amok metaphor in a general sense, comparing the irrationality of the English “rage of gaming” to the “rash enthusiasm” of the amok-runner’s inexplicable behavior (Smollett 241). But he may have known that gambling losses were sometimes included in the list of events that could cause the despair that was thought to precipitate a Malay’s amok (Spores 64). Whether Smollett means to draw a parallel between the destructive effects of gambling in English and Malay cultures or is merely drawing an analogy between the specific destructiveness of English gaming and a broader destructive behavior among the Malay, in one way the amok metaphor is particularly apt.19 Western observers were perhaps most perplexed by the “element of cultural sanction and legitimacy” granted to amok by the Malay (Spores 7). By proposing a similarity between English gaming and Malay amokrunning, Smollett highlights the implicit acceptance of gambling in English culture despite laws to the contrary, just as the Malay purportedly accept and almost expect amok as an expression of despair even though it is usually punished by death. The amok metaphor conjures an English society run mad, the tension between chance and control tipped entirely too far toward unregulated chance. Gambling scenes such as these in Ferdinand Count Fathom demonstrate Smollett’s skepticism of mathematical probability by representing tension between control and chance in gambling through the cheating and irrational enthusiasm for unquantifiable gaming that make Hoyle-style calculation ineffective. But in the final quarter of the book, Smollett abruptly abandons his picaresque, episodic narrative and turns instead to the romance of the providential ending. As Melvin New explains, The patterned world of an overarching, if not immediately obvious, order; the dispensation of rewards and punishments according to

72

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

an accepted, eternal justice; the surprise discoveries and last-minute rescues which are taken as signs of God’s enduring interest and concern in human affairs … these are the essential characteristic of the romance, and they are as well the essential characteristics of a world governed by a providential God. (238) The providential economy depicts a very different world from that we see in the cheater’s paradise of the episodic narrative. Providential narratives, like mathematical probability, are closed systems in which the action follows discernible laws (most notably the reward of goodness and the punishment of evil) that are traceable to divine causes. Conventional providential narrative, of which Fielding’s Tom Jones is perhaps the most masterful example, organizes the seemingly random contingencies of daily life into patterns that reveal divine justice. A providential narrative adheres to internal probability, so that its felicitous resolution, however unlikely it may seem, has been prepared for and is the culmination of the work’s design. As noted above, mathematical probability as it developed in the eighteenth century was determinist, describing – just as the doctrine of general providence does – a world carefully and divinely designed. In The Doctrine of Chances (3rd ed. 1756), Abraham DeMoivre, a mathematician working on probability in England, describes the laws of probability as part of the larger “Order of the Universe”: “again, as it is thus demonstrable that there are, in the constitution of things, certain Laws according to which Events happen, it is no less evident from Observation, that those Laws serve to wise, useful and beneficent purposes; … And hence, if we blind not ourselves with metaphysical dust, we shall be led, by a short and obvious way, to the acknowledgment of the great Maker and Governour of all” (quoted in David 264–5). Mathematical probability theory and the doctrine of general providence are both epistemologies of a divinely designed universe. I will use the consanguinity, as it were, of these epistemologies to argue that Smollett’s abrupt turn to the providential narrative that concludes Ferdinand Count Fathom, rather than affirming the divine order it seems to demonstrate, ultimately continues the skepticism of design represented by his critiques of mathematical probability earlier in the novel by revealing the improbable romance of these visions of divine control. Ferdinand Count Fathom’s new, providential order begins when Fathom, contrary to the conventions of picaresque, episodic narratives, engages in a retrospective survey of his conduct. His various fraudulent schemes appear to have unraveled beyond even his ability to retrieve

Cheating and Calculation 73

them, and, in the most distasteful episode in the book, he has seduced the affections of his foster-brother’s fiancée and attempted to rape her, whereupon she dies of grief. Fathom asks himself, “Shall the author of these crimes pass with impunity? Shall he hope to prosper in the midst of such enormous guilt? It were an imputation upon providence to suppose it – Ah, no! I begin to feel myself overtaken by the eternal justice of heaven!” This is the first appearance of the word “providence” in the novel, and it introduces the features of the providential narrative that closes the book, namely, the hero’s retrospective reflection and penitence, and an “eternal justice” that rewards good and punishes evil.20 The chapter closes with Fathom in prison, where, “for the first time, his cheeks were bedewed with the drops of penitence and sorrow” (275). Smollett tries to qualify this sudden turn to providence in Chapter 56 when Fathom first reflects on his conduct. He points out that Fathom’s penitence is due not to the “misery of his fellow creatures” but to “the sensation of his own calamities,” and that he could easily relapse (275). Indeed, he would “in all probability” have deceived his own father at that moment if an opportunity occurred that would extricate him from his present troubles (275). The juxtaposition of “probability” and “providence” on this page of the novel is telling. Fathom’s continued deceit is more likely in the episodic narrative that we have read up to this point; his sudden anxiety about providential justice is so unlikely as to need an explanation. In the concluding quarter of the novel, then, Smollett leaves Fathom in prison and follows the adventures of Fathom’s virtuous Hungarian foster-brother, Renaldo, substituting the episodic narrative’s focus on a villain-hero for the providential narrative’s focus on a conventional virtuous hero. The novel up to this point had been episodic in structure; although occasionally a character would reappear in a later episode, for the most part Fathom moved to a new location (usually just before his current scam was discovered) and met new people who became either his partners, victims, or antagonists in deception. In contrast, in the last quarter of the novel, everywhere Renaldo goes he meets people who turn out to have a connection to him and to Fathom. Every apparently chance encounter is designed to further Renaldo’s understanding of the wrongs Fathom has committed and to lay the foundation for the tale’s happy ending. Driving through Belgium on his way back to England, for example, Renaldo rescues from a group of banditti a gentleman, Don Diego de Zelos, who has not only been robbed by Fathom earlier in the book, but who is later revealed to be the father of Renaldo’s fiancée, Monimia. Don Diego accompanies Renaldo to England, so that when

74

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Monimia is discovered not to be dead after all, she is reunited with both lover and father. Though Ferdinand Count Fathom, unlike many picaresque novels, is told in the third person, there is little interpretative commentary on the book’s action or the meaning of its episodes until the turn to providential narrative at the end. Smollett does not employ an intrusive narrator such as Fielding uses in Tom Jones to guide the reader’s understanding of his novel. Thus it is not a didactic narrator, but the characters themselves who, after Fathom’s retrospective character analysis in Chapter 56, tell each other (and the reader) that providence designed the seemingly random coincidences of their lives and has brought about their happiness. The woman who cared for Monimia in her last illness, Madame Clement, tells Renaldo, “We must acquiesce in the dispensations of providence; and quiet the transports of our grief, with a full assurance that Monimia is happy” (315). When Monimia is reunited with Renaldo, a clergyman congratulates her for reaping “the fruits of that pious resignation to the will of heaven, which she had so devoutly practised” (321). When Don Diego discovers that Monimia is actually his daughter Serafina, whom he had attempted to poison long ago, he cries out, “merciful providence! thy ways are past finding out!” (328). Later when the full story is explained to him, Don Diego says, “Heaven hath visited me for the sins and errors of my youth” (335). Fathom himself, when his own redemption is complete, exclaims, “All gracious power! this was the work of thy own bounteous hand” (354). The characters thus reiterate the providential order organizing the narrative in the final quarter of the book. This providential narrative is not predictable but, unlike the episodic narrative, it metes out divine justice in the end, giving order to all preceding events. Despite the characters’ insistence, however, that their world has been designed by general providence, Smollett’s narrator seems less sure. The book’s final sentence not only gives the foregoing events a secular interpretation, it reintroduces the world that the providential narrative had displaced: “In a word, all parties were as happy as good fortune could make them” (359). After all, Smollett ascribes the happy ending to fortune, not to divine providence, and fortune rules the gambler’s world, where luck is incalculable and chance events do not conform to a discernible pattern, whether mathematical or divine. This final sentence undermines the characters’ providentialism, and, upon closer examination, we can see the authority of the providential narrative destabilized in other ways as well. First, Madame Clement’s invocation of providence in order to comfort Renaldo, cited above, is disingenuous.

Cheating and Calculation 75

It is easy for her to counsel him to “acquiesce in the dispensations of providence; and quiet the transports of … grief, with a full assurance that Monimia is happy,” because she knows that Monimia is actually alive (315). Providence may indeed have brought all the parties together again, and before that may even have insured that Monimia fell into the hands of the caring Madame Clement, who preserved her life. Providential theology gives order to seeming randomness by promising a plot line that will work out for the best in the end, whether that end is in this world or the next. But Madame Clement trivializes providentialism by invoking this theology for a story to which she already knows the ending, making her words to Renaldo sound less like a statement of the ordering principle of the last quarter of this novel than like a mere cliché meant to tide him over while she prepares to reveal the living Monimia to him. In another instance, Smollett’s description of Renaldo’s discovery of the ill and impoverished Fathom doesn’t quite match the providential interpretation that the characters themselves have of this event. For the narrator, the discovery “seemed to have been concerted by supernatural prescience”; in contrast, for Madame Clement, “heaven … had undoubtedly directed them that way, for the purpose they had fulfilled” (352, 353 emphasis mine). Not only does the narrator’s “seemed” suggest Smollett’s hesitation to overplay the providential interpretation, but this rare interpretive comment on the plot also betrays his self-consciousness about the improbable romance he is constructing, justifying the unlikely coincidence by adducing, however hesitantly, a divine plan. Providentialism is thus, tautologically, both the reason that seemingly chance events all work together in the novel’s conclusion, and an apology for the author’s convenient, improbable assemblage of the work’s main characters together in the same inn. Similar uses of providential doctrine as apology for plot were common even to authors who, like Fielding, were much more confident of the relevance of the providential narrative. The abrupt narrative shift in the novel’s last quarter and the narrator’s hesitancy to endorse the characters’ providential interpretation of events suggest Smollett’s continued skepticism of providential design – a skepticism first explored in the novel’s depiction of the irrelevance of mathematical design in the cheater’s paradise represented in episodic narrative form. Smollett’s conclusion does not remove the impression the episodic narrative has given us of London as a cheater’s paradise, “a vast masquerade, in which a man of stratagem may wear a thousand different disguises, without danger of detection” (145). The impressions

76

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

created by this representation of London, and Smollett’s mistrust of the design used in the novel’s ending, remain stronger than the providential romance by which Fathom is redeemed.21 In a letter to David Garrick, Smollett explains his skeptical view of the world by way of a gambling metaphor that denies design, both mathematical and providential: “I am old enough to have seen and observed that we are all playthings of fortune, and that it depends upon something as insignificant and precarious as the tossing up of a halfpenny whether a man rises to affluence and honours, or continues to his dying day struggling with the difficulties and disgraces of life” (Knapp 98). This passage suggests the way that gambling could express for eighteenth-century Britons the contingency, the indeterminacy, the incalculability of daily life. Probability theory purports to control this indeterminacy through the law of long averages; over a long run, both sides of the coin will appear with equal frequency.22 But Smollett sees the coin toss as governed not by the divine determinacy of probability but by the whimsical fortune for whom “we are all playthings.” The over-arching narrative of long averages, the rational, determinist vision of probability theory was felt to be irrelevant in this context – an improbable romance – while the divinely ordered universe of providential narrative, though a convenient device for concluding a novel, evades the problems raised by the representation of London as a cheater’s paradise. Instead, episodic narrative form represented for Hoyle, Smollett, and the gamblers who read their books the romance of chance in a world where one’s fortunes are as capricious, as “precarious,” as a coin toss. Like Ferdinand Count Fathom, Henry Fielding’s last novel, Amelia (1751), has never been a favorite with critics. From the first reviews mocking Amelia’s broken nose to more recent critiques of its narrative mode as an infelicitous combination of satire and sentiment, Amelia has been thought to fall short of the achievement of the perfectly plotted Tom Jones.23 Comparing Amelia to Fielding’s earlier novels should reveal, however, not the failure of his final work but its experimental quality as Fielding takes full advantage of the capacious and inclusive novel form. While the novel is named after a character, it is not merely the story of one person’s life; as David Blewett notes, “Amelia is the only novel of Fielding’s not described on its title-page as a ‘history,’ that is, as a biography; rather it is a social document” (xx). As such, it draws on episodic narrative to paint a full picture of London as a cheaters’ paradise that forces the usually optimistic heroine to conclude at one point that “sure all mankind almost are villains in their hearts” (381). Richard A. Rosengarten points out “a dramatically stronger sense of evil’s random

Cheating and Calculation 77

nature” in Amelia than in Fielding’s earlier novels (93). Instead of being organized by the teleological narrative of a hero’s maturation and his courtship of and eventual marriage to a virtuous heroine, Amelia begins where other novels end, in the early years of a young couple’s married life. Not ordered by the teleology of the marriage plot, Amelia’s episodic narrative follows the couple’s miscellaneous attempts to secure a steady income in an economy transformed by capitalism. Amelia and Billy Booth are not settled on some country estate, but struggling to live in London on the officer’s half-pay that Booth receives. As Booth seeks to supplement that income, Fielding exposes the corruption of a socioeconomic system that claimed to reward merit and punish vice, but was instead manipulated by men with money and power for their own gain. The inclusive episodic form of the novel, propelled by chance, stands in counterpoint to the world of cheaters it represents; it depicts and critiques a culture which, having created myriad ostensible opportunities for advancement though gambling-inspired capitalism, now will not give the gambler fair play as all seeming chance events are in fact controlled by cheaters and calculators. In the central gambling scene in the novel, Booth loses money to cheaters in the employ (unbeknownst to Booth) of a noble peer who hopes to use Booth’s increasingly desperate finances to gain sexual access to Amelia. Thus, not only is the card game rigged by cheaters, but this cheating is in the service of a larger fraud. In this scene, Booth plays game after game of cards over the course of an evening; he loses all his cash, borrows more from his friend, and loses that too: “The other two honourable gentlemen were not only greater masters of the game, and somewhat soberer than poor Booth … but they had moreover another small advantage over their adversaries, both of them, by means of some certain private signs, previously agreed upon by them, being always acquainted with the principle cards in each other’s hands” (438). This card game has been robbed of its chance disposition and is entirely in the control of cheaters. This scene is an emblem for Booth’s inability to provide for his family in an economy that is being manipulated by others for their own benefit. He can’t get a lucky break. Indeed, the corruption Fielding describes is so thorough that he has no way to end the novel except by resort to special providence. While Smollett abruptly shifts narrative gears from episodic form to a narrative of general providence to supply a happy ending to Ferdinand Count Fathom, Fielding’s novel suggests an alternative perhaps even more skeptical, that justice and happiness are made possible only by the incalculable intervention of special providence. Jill Campbell suggests

78

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

that “the events of this plot resolution are so unprepared-for by what precedes them – the recovery of Amelia’s inheritance intervenes so abruptly in what seems a nearly hopeless, ever-worsening financial situation – that these events themselves have the status almost of a dream (of wish elevated to fictional plot)” (204). The romance of the providential ending is at odds with the episodic depiction of corruption delineated throughout Amelia, but this kind of improbable outcome, the lucky win, the sudden windfall, is exactly what keeps the gambler at the table tossing the dice again and again. The difficulty of sustaining providential theology in the face of various eighteenth-century challenges to religious belief led to the development of the contradictory doctrines of “general” providence and “special” providence. General providence describes the world as ordered and directed by God; all occurrences, whether they seem good or evil, are part of the providential plan, though this plan may not always be discernible, and indeed will not be completed until the day of judgment. Special providence describes God’s intervention in the world he designed for the benefit of the faithful or the punishment of the wicked. As Rev. Isaac Barrow explained, “Another character of special Providence is, the Seasonableness and Suddenness of Events. When that which in it self is not ordinary, nor could well be expected, doth fall out happily, in the nick of an exigency, for the relief of innocence, the encouragement of goodness, the support of a good cause, the furtherance of any good purpose … [it] is a shrewd indication, that God’s Hand is then concerned” (quoted in Williams 270). The contradiction of these two doctrines of providence can be demonstrated in their relation to probability. General providence has internal probability; it is an ordered system of laws in which every apparently chance event serves God’s design. Special providence is improbable; violating the design of his cosmos, God manipulates the ordinary course of events in his system to assist goodness (which according to the doctrine of general providence should need no assistance). The doctrine of special providence arose out of skepticism that the world was operating according to the design of general providence. As Rosengarten explains, the doctrine of general providence could not always account for evil in a world where “the wicked prosper” (28). The doctrine of special providence offered consolation when chance did not always seem to adhere to divine design. Facing misfortune, the believer could hope that God might intervene against all odds, like a deity from romance, to give events a favorable turn. Patey suggests that the episodic form of Amelia is a result of “Booth’s misguided and irreligious devotion to Fortune rather than Providence,”

Cheating and Calculation 79

that “Booth’s active belief in Fortune rather than an ordering God … throws out of proper relation to each other events and their consequences, internal states and their external expressions, causes and signs” (212). In other words, London appears to be a cheater’s paradise to Booth because he doesn’t view the city through the lens of general providence. Booth’s careful reading near the novel’s end of the sermons of the providential theologian Dr. Isaac Barrow seems to support Patey’s argument; leading him to reject his previously held near-atheism and affirm his Christian faith, Booth’s perusal of Barrow precipitates the novel’s happy ending (Amelia 522). Once Booth views the world through the lens of providence, he sees providential justice rewarding the virtuous and punishing the vicious. Yet I argue that Fielding is more sympathetic to Booth’s original skepticism than Patey allows. Rosengarten suggests that the “affirmation of providence” in the ending is “at odds with the world of the novel” (93). I contend that the prominence of special providence, which I have suggested above is a kind of skeptic’s providence, rather than general providence in the machinery of the novel’s conclusion, vindicates the gambler’s faith in luck within the novel’s episodic narrative of unpredictable disorder, cheating, and corruption. The very improbability – the romance – of the conclusion based on special providence justifies rather than undermines Booth’s previous devotion to Fortune. A gambler in the early pages of the novel symbolizes the world Fielding depicts in Amelia before the intervention of special providence at the novel’s end. Billy Booth, convicted of assault after assisting a man who was outnumbered two to one in a street fight, has just come from Judge Thrasher’s corrupt court, where guilt is presumed and freedom can only be bought. In jail he meets Robinson, a tall, gaunt man in a threadbare coat whose freethinking philosophy appeals to Booth. Robinson takes Booth on a tour of the prison, detailing the distressing inequities of a judicial system that gives a perjurer bail while a starving girl who feloniously received a stolen loaf of bread from her impoverished father remains incarcerated. Robinson’s sympathetic introduction of the inmates gives him credibility as a vehicle for Fielding’s social commentary, but this credibility seems to be compromised when Robinson abruptly invites Booth to a game of cards; another inmate warns Booth that Robinson “is a gambler, and is committed for cheating at play” (27). That a cheating gambler voices the novel’s opening critique indicates the problems of a country that is said to be “as corrupt a nation as ever existed under the sun” but also highlights the gambler as a figure who critiques the culture in which he operates (467). As in

80

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Ferdinand Count Fathom, cheating is rampant in Amelia. In such a world, the innocent are easy prey because of their “want of suspicion”; it is nearly impossible for a “man who was not himself a villain” to discern the “degree of villainy” in everyday life (351, 352). Gambling metaphors and gambling scenes reveal this villainy to the reader. Fielding suggests that the noble peer and other dispensers of patronage are sharpers who “cheat poor men of their thanks without ever designing to deserve them at all” (199). Booth waits on the noble peer again and again to thank him for offering his assistance, wagering that his gratitude will pay off with employment. But Booth is not a winner in this “lottery of preferment”: Thus did this poor man support his hopes by a dependence on that ticket which he had so dearly purchased of one who pretended to manage the wheels in the great state lottery of preferment. A lottery indeed which hath this to recommend it, that many poor wretches feed their imaginations with the prospect of a prize during their whole lives, and never discover they have drawn a blank. (509) The lottery metaphor perfectly expresses not only the randomness of the patronage process, but its susceptibility to cheaters. Just as Molesworth advertised lottery tickets that were supposed to have improved odds of winning derived from “curious calculations,” the noble peer claims he can “manage the wheels” or influence the outcome of the preferment lottery; he “pretended to be a man of great interest and consequence; by which means he … actually bubbled several of their money by undertaking to do them services which, in reality, were not within his power” (480). In an economy of chance, the noble peer offered desperate men clinging to romantic visions of success an illusion of control, but by promising corruptly to exercise a control he didn’t have, he actually robbed them of their chance for employment. It is especially appropriate that a gambler introduces us (and Booth) to the corruption of London society early in the novel, since, as in Smollett’s fiction, this corruption is represented in Amelia in the gambler’s favorite form, episodic narrative. Fielding uses the picaresque’s journey motif, an important aspect of episodic form, in his earlier novels, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, while in contrast Amelia is his most urban novel and takes place almost entirely in London. Indeed, much of the tension in Amelia comes from the claustrophobia of the Booths’ virtual imprisonment in their London lodgings within the verge of the court. Though in Amelia Fielding omits the picaro’s usual

Cheating and Calculation 81

physical journeying, he nonetheless draws extensively on other elements of episodic narrative form: episodic plot and an episodic mode of characterization. The accidents and coincidences by which the plot is forwarded are often truly surprising; they do not suggest a universe where accidents serve a larger, designed purpose, but signify radical contingency. The chapter titles in Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones are often ironic reflections on the content of the chapters or their place in the larger machinery of the plot, but in Amelia, when Book 9, Chapter 6 is described as “containing as surprizing an accident as is perhaps recorded in history,” hyperbole is at play, but not irony. The events of this chapter are surprising; furthermore, they do not have much overall significance for the plot, as supposedly “surprising accidents” do in narratives of design. Fielding draws our attention to the contingency of Amelia and reminds us of the English obsession with wagering when he invites his readers to bet on the plot. “What this cordial was, we shall inform the reader in due time. In the mean while, he must suspend his curiosity; and the gentlemen at White’s may lay wagers whether it was Ward’s pill, or Dr. James’ powder” (351). If we view the providential narrative of Tom Jones as Fielding’s gold standard, this invitation to wager reveals the difficulty Fielding has in maintaining control of his material in Amelia and is simply an excuse for Fielding’s rather awkward effort to create suspense by withholding information.24 As it happens, the wager the narrator proposes is a red herring; the “cordial” is neither Ward’s pill nor James’s powder, but is Dr. Harrison himself, come to comfort Amelia. I suggest, nonetheless, that this invitation to wager on the plot aligns the novel and its readers with the “gentlemen at White’s” it seems to satirize. Faced with the unpredictability of the episodic world as it is represented in Amelia, we wager on outcomes that are otherwise unfathomable. This gives us some preparation, perhaps, for the surprising ending of the novel. Complementing his episodic plot structure, Fielding uses an episodic mode of characterization in Amelia. In Ferdinand Count Fathom, most minor characters appear and disappear in each episode; few are of sustained importance to the novel. In Amelia, while characters may play long-lasting roles in the tale, characterization itself, at least in some instances, is episodic, contingent on the events of a particular episode. Campbell notes that the narrator “frequently offers incompatible descriptions of characters or accounts of events in succession, seeming to hold himself responsible for local coherence but not for a sustained and total vision of the novelistic world he describes” (206). Characters such as Mrs. Bennett and Mrs. James play important roles in

82

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

long stretches of the novel’s action, but identifying elements of their personalities change surprisingly, as suits Fielding’s purpose and the aims of particular episodes. When Mrs. Bennett first appears, she serves as a monitory example to Amelia of the noble peer’s lasciviousness; later her identifying trait is her classical learning that so irritates some of the men in the Booths’ circle. No hint was given of this learning earlier in the novel; it is introduced at this point as an expedient vehicle for satire. Similarly, when the Booths first knew Mrs. James (then Miss Bath) in Europe, she was a demure and relatively featureless friend to Amelia. When they are reunited in London, Mrs. James exemplifies the corrupt mores of ladies’ society life. Neither her fondness for cards nor her willingness to assist her husband’s designs against Amelia in exchange for a larger allowance and a longer residence in London were prepared for in her character as it appeared earlier in the book. This episodic mode of characterization highlights the unpredictability of London society and facilitates the operations of cheaters; when characters are so variable, villainy is difficult to detect. Although Booth’s characterization is not episodic in the same sense as the characterization of these minor figures (his characterization has general consistency throughout the text), his identity as a gentleman is challenged by his experience of contemporary London life. Facing an economy transformed by capitalism, Campbell notes, “Booth’s preservation of old notions of upper-class masculine identity seems to place him at an economic impasse: the time-honored gentlemanly choice of a military career does not offer Booth a viable form of support, but he finds it unthinkable to look for other means to support his family in trade or manual labor” (206). His response to this “economic impasse” created by the incompatibility of gentlemanly soldiery and modern capitalism is what we might call a philosophy of the episode. Having suffered “a larger share of misfortunes” than he feels he deserves, Booth doubts the disposition of providence and instead believes that events have no more significant explanation than can be found in men’s dominant passion at any given moment or episode (23). “[H]e did not believe men were under any blind impulse or direction of fate, but that every man acted merely from the force of that passion which was uppermost in his mind, and could do no otherwise” (24). This is an episodic philosophy in that it denies any larger pattern or purpose governing men’s actions and emphasizes the capriciousness of the motivating passions a man might feel at any particular moment. There is no predicting how a man might act in any given episode or from one episode to the next. As Booth explains to Amelia, the same man might be charitable in one moment

Cheating and Calculation 83

when benevolence is his “uppermost passion” and close-fisted a moment later when “ambition, avarice, pride, or any other passion governs the man” (458). Booth’s episodic experiences throughout most of the novel affirm his philosophy, much to Amelia’s chagrin, who fears “that he was little better than an atheist” (458). Yet the force of their experience of London’s cheater’s paradise makes it difficult for Amelia to refute Booth’s doctrine of uppermost passions. She can only refer him to Dr. Harrison (“I have often wished, my dear … to hear you converse with Dr. Harrison on this subject; for I am sure he would convince you, though I can’t, that there are really such things as religion and virtue”), who is eventually instrumental in Booth’s embrace of providentialism (458). Before that embrace, however, Booth’s episodic, gambling philosophy is reflected the narrator’s episodic analysis of his own art. The opening of Amelia is distinctive for its inability to assign a single metaphor to the project it undertakes, to tell the tale of the “various accidents” that befell Booth and Amelia and the “distresses which they waded through” (13). Unlike the commanding metaphors of the ordinary and bill of fare that organize the presentation of Tom Jones, Amelia’s narrator introduces “Fortune,” “predominant passion,” a game of chess, and the art of statuary in an attempt to explain how the novel will proceed. Thus the “exordium, etc” of Chapter 1 simply enacts the confusion of the picaresque world it introduces. In particular, the narrator’s ambivalence regarding Fortune is significant: “whether there be any such being in the universe, is a matter which I by no means presume to determine in the affirmative” (13). If the narrator refuses to declare Fortune, or random chance, the ruling deity of the book, neither does he offer Providence in her place. The characters’ own beliefs explaining the events they experience are notable for their variety. Robinson, Booth’s jail-mate, believes “all things happen by an inevitable fatality,” a reasonable belief for a gambler who experiences events as beyond his control, but one undermined by the cheaters in the book who manipulate events for their own purposes. Booth had suffered so many more misfortunes than would have been his share if the world followed a divine design that he held “a disadvantageous opinion of providence” (23). Amelia, who represents Fielding’s hopeful optimism in the face of the sordid realities of London life, is the only significant figure who is not described in an episodic mode of characterization; not coincidentally, she has a general providential outlook and believes that “no human accident can happen” without “divine will and pleasure” (325). The ending of the book vindicates Amelia’s optimism by resort to special providence. Robinson, the gambling character who disappeared

84

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

from the novel after Chapter 1, improbably turns up in the same jail where Booth is held for debt. Having recently chanced to witness Amelia pawn her miniature portrait in order to feed her children, Robinson confesses to Booth to assisting long ago in the fraudulent exclusion of Amelia from her rightful inheritance. The chance events that led to this confession are hailed by Dr. Harrison with cries of “Good Heaven! How wonderful is thy providence” (528). Booth has supposedly rendered himself worthy of this sudden reversal of fortune because by chance he read Barrow’s sermons while imprisoned for debt. His conversion, however, is simply asserted, unprepared for and unexplained. Dr. Harrison congratulates Booth that “providence hath done you the justice at last,” but the recovery of Amelia’s fortune, together with Robinson’s sudden reappearance and Booth’s unmotivated conversion, do not feel like the careful work of general providence revealing “at last” the way apparently chance events have been designed to reward good (533). Instead, the frenetic events of the novel’s last chapters show Fielding pulling strings to make miracles happen for his hero and heroine, miracles that in the foregoing world represented in the novel would be simply improbable. The resort to special providence to bring Amelia to a close evinces a skepticism, similar to Smollett’s, of the designed system of general providence onto which Fielding had mapped the plots of his earlier fictions, and of the conventions of fictional endings to account fully for the cheaters’ paradise he saw regularly as a magistrate. In Ferdinand Count Fathom the narrator’s reference to “good fortune” undermined the characters’ providentialism; the narrator of Amelia also prevaricates in the novel’s final paragraph. Of Amelia and Booth, he notes, “Fortune seems to have made them large amends for the tricks she played them in their youth” (545, emphasis mine). After disavowing Fortune in the novel’s opening and ascribing the happy conclusion of the couple’s suffering to providence, this recurrence to Fortune is surprising and destabilizing. It suggests the romance of the gambler has been rewarded and Booths’ losses rectified with a big win, which undermines the moral lesson Amelia and her mentor Dr. Harrison want to derive from these events. Yet at the same time, the use of “seems” introduces a note of doubt, either whether to ascribe the events to Fortune, or whether the events are as happy as they seem. Finally, the Booth family’s retreat to Amelia’s country estate, like that of Maria Villiers in The Excursion, leaves unsolved the corruptions of London life that had so plagued them. Novels represent the episodic romance of gambling in an episodic fictional form that both captures the appeal of the discrete moment for a

Cheating and Calculation 85

gambler such as Charles James Fox and that seems especially appropriate for representing an unpredictable world that is dominated by cheaters of all kinds. The challenge of writing a satisfying conclusion to the gambler’s episodic experiences highlights the tension between chance and control in narrative form and in the broader gambling culture of the era. Understanding the episodic nature of the romance of gambling is crucial for appreciating the gambler’s experience of his play, his resistance to probability theory, and his preoccupation with cheating. The episodic romance of gambling makes it difficult to generalize about eighteenth-century gambling; each episode appears to be unique to the gambler, incomparable to the episodes before and since. Thus episodic gambling and the economy it inspired offer countless opportunities – episodes – for self-invention. The following chapters examine a range of identities articulated in the romance of gambling.

3 The Gambling Man of Feeling: Sublime and Sentimental Gambling

As a group of gentlemen discuss fashionable masculine pastimes in Frances Burney’s third novel, Camilla (1796), an Irishman named Macdersey defends himself against their assumption that because he has expressed superlative passions for women, wine, and hunting (declaring each is “the first pleasure in life”), he doesn’t care for cards, dice, or betting: Why what do you take me for, gentlemen? … Do you think I have no soul? no fire? no feeling? Do you suppose me a stone? a block? a lump of lead? I scorn such suspicions; I don’t hold them worth answering. I am none of that torpid, morbid, drowsy tribe. I hold nobody to have an idea of life that has not rattled in his own hand the dear little box of promise. What ecstasy not to know if, in two seconds, one mayn’t be worth ten thousand pounds! or else without a farthing! how it puts one on the rack! There’s nothing to compare with it. I would not give up that moment to be sovereign of the East Indies! no, not if the West were to be put into the bargain. (480) If the gambler’s experience is that of discrete episodes, as I argue in Chapter 2, Macdersey offers us a vivid description of what makes each episode so compelling. In Macdersey’s account, the gambler is not merely a greedy man trying to make money easily. Rather, he gambles to experience a particular type of emotion, and to express his identity as a man of feeling who appreciates such emotions. As Macdersey describes it, the emotional ecstasy of gambling does not come from the big win, as non-gamblers might assume. Instead, the pleasure and purpose of gambling is in the precise moment when the dice are out of the cup, in the air, not yet on the table, when the gambler imagines all possible 86

The Gambling Man of Feeling 87

outcomes at once. Macdersey claims he would rather experience that sublime moment when he is simultaneously anticipating both extreme outcomes, great fortune or ruination, than to have vast colonial holdings in his actual possession. Macdersey courts in gambling a Burkean sublime imaginative encounter with the possibilities both of the vast heights of a huge win (£10,000 on one throw) and of the depths of financial ruin. Edmund Burke explains in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) that “Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime” just as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (66, 36). For the sublime gambler, the purpose of gambling is not to acquire wealth, but to experience this vertiginous ecstatic moment when all possible outcomes are imagined and felt at once. This is the romance of gambling. To appreciate, to revel in this sublime moment, defines the man of feeling, shows that he has “soul,” “fire,” “feeling,” rather than being a “stone,” “block,” or “lump of lead.” Indeed, the sublime moment before the outcome of a wager is known, according to Macdersey, is the very “idea of life” itself! In this chapter, I examine two types of men who use gambling to define their status as men of feeling: the sublime gambler, who revels in the multiple simultaneous possibilities of the ecstatic gambling episode, and the sentimental gambler, who wagers to show that his real feelings are spent elsewhere, that he cares for people, not money. Like Charles II tossing the dice, when sublime and sentimental gamblers place their bets their gambling is both non-productive (displaying status) and productive (interacting with an economy founded on gambling). Both types of gambling men of feeling demonstrate ongoing productive tension between gambling and capitalism. Although the state continued to run public lotteries throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, the discursive separation of public credit and gambling meant that gambling came to be associated with the economy of private credit whose expansion was underwritten by public credit. There continue to be occasional moments, such as the critique of the Royal Exchange in Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744), in which we are reminded of finance capital’s links to gambling. But by and large, when gambling becomes primarily a concern of the private sphere, it becomes intimately connected with the ways people thought not about public credit and the national debt, as earlier in the century, but about the

88

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

increasing complexity of the economy of private credit. In eighteenthcentury British fiction, the relationship between gambling and private credit is dynamic, constituted by tension between chance and control. This dynamic relationship between gambling and private credit sometimes reveals their similarities, such as the exhilaration of living in the present moment (in a wager or in a purchase on credit) and refusing to think about the future, and sometimes reveals threats that gambling poses to private credit networks by, for example, giving priority to debts of honor over trade debts and by removing money from private credit networks to circulate it within a closed network of gamblers. The gambling man of feeling also reveals the difficulties individuals face in the expanding and sometimes ruthless economy of private credit. Both types of gambling men of feeling illuminate Britons’ experience of the expanding economy of private credit. The sublime gambler shows that if gambling has been generally excised from public credit, it still plays a significant role in the private credit economy. The sublime gambler, privileging the emotional gratification of the particular moment the wager is placed and defining gambling pleasure in the discrete episode rather than the long-term narrative of wins or losses, is a romantic, a believer in the possibilities of the moment against all odds. The sublime gambler reveals the sublimity of the episode, the present moment, in the private credit economy, where the consumer strives to take full advantage of the indulgences of the commercial economy even as such behavior brings the threat of financial ruin. The sublime gambler’s relationship with private credit makes him an especially modern figure, inconceivable before the consumer revolution of goods and gratification. The sublime gambler, particularly as we see him in Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), as he reveals the structural similarity of gambling and credit, demonstrates the near impossibility of living in the economy of private credit in any way other than as a sublime gambler. Like the sublime gambler, the sentimental gambler places his wagers not to make money but to display his emotional qualifications as a man of feeling, though the feelings he prizes are not the same as those the sublime gambler values. As the expanding economy seems to depend more than ever on private credit networks, relations between people come to be defined monetarily – by assessment of financial worth, of creditworthiness, of the ability to repay a debt. The sentimental gambler’s stoicism in the face of gambling losses is meant to critique the primacy of financial considerations in interpersonal networks. The sentimental gambler’s romance is his belief in an emotional economy that is an alternative to the money economy, and his belief that his

The Gambling Man of Feeling 89

gambling shows his investment in this emotional economy. The sentimental gambler hopes to provide an alternative to the economy of private credit, which is prone to abuse by creditors. The sentimental gambler’s romance is his belief in non-monetary ties that oblige people to each other against all odds. The sublime gambler gives novelists the opportunity to interrogate the similarity between the ecstatic wagering episode and the pleasures and dangers of an economy of private credit that brings the vast range of the expanding empire’s riches within reach, while with the sentimental gambler, novelists examine private credit’s victims and the role of money in the romantic economy of sensibility.

The sublime gambling man of feeling Why do men gamble? Eighteenth-century novels, littered with minor characters who are gamblers, repeatedly pose this question by contrasting a hero or heroine’s virtuous rejection of gambling and his or her shock at the discovery of a character’s gambling, with the gambler’s romantic, passionate, unashamed wagering. Novels cast this contrast between the gambler and the hero as tension between chance and control. The gambler rejects the capitalist innovations that regulate the economy: the rational calculations of probability theory that predict his losses, the prioritization of trade debts over play debts. Yet this conflict between gambler and virtuous hero can reveal the structural similarity between their actions. Thus in the final volume of Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793), the hero Orlando Somerive finds his gambling brother Philip held for his debts in the Fleet prison, unrepentant, unchastened, gambling still. Orlando sentimentally views his brother’s “neglected and altered figure” with “the deepest concern,” but Philip himself, “sitting at piquet with another prisoner,” mocks his brother, jocularly ascribes his imprisonment to bad luck, and tries to borrow money. “‘Good God!’ exclaimed Orlando, ‘will you never, my brother, be reasonable?’” (445). But Philip quickly deconstructs the opposition Orlando posits between his supposedly unreasonable gambling and Orlando’s supposedly reasonable dependence on the capricious will of his great aunt, Mrs. Rayland. “Why, to be sure,” Philip says when Orlando laments the sight of his brother in prison, “pleasanter sights may be seen if a man is in luck – For example, it would have been pleasanter for thee to have come home master of Rayland Hall – Eh! Sir Knight!” (445). The Somerive family has staked all on the romance of inheritance, hoping by Orlando’s assiduous attendance on Mrs. Rayland to restore to the family the propertied status that several generations of

90

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

love matches forfeited. But Philip notes that both he and Orlando have had bad luck and have lost their wagers, implying that the Somerives’ romantic hope for the Rayland Hall windfall is no more a rational approach to life in the contemporary economy than his gambling is. If the actions of gambler and hero are structurally similar, if the hero is yet another gambler, then the emotions of the gambler are of interest not because they are mysterious, exotic, or unimaginable, but because they represent the emotional experiences of anyone or everyone in a socioeconomy of private credit transformed by public credit. For both Philip and Orlando Somerive, gambling is a romance of unlikely possibilities. Philip gambles on cards and dice for the same reason that Orlando gambles on inheriting Rayland Hall: as would-be gentlemen in a capitalizing economy, their financial path is unclear. The Somerive family’s romantic attachment to their higher-status, landowning past limits both Philip and Orlando’s options. Family pride and limited financial means prohibit their direct participation in the economy through trade or speculation. Instead, Philip gambles to keep company with the gentlemen whose peer he aspires to be; at the same time gambling offers that tantalizing possibility that he might win enough to live the life of a gentleman. Orlando dances attendance on the capricious Mrs. Rayland and even joins the army to fight in America hoping to live up to her romantic ideals of gentlemanly heroism. Though they seem to be opposites, both Somerive brothers reveal the romance of gambling at the heart of the eighteenth-century experience of a capricious capital economy. Orlando is shocked to see Philip gambling in prison because instead of being laid low by his losses, learning a lesson about financial responsibility, and reforming his economic practices, Philip the sublime gambler continues to revel in the moment of his wager. Orlando does not understand, however, that the gambler’s imprisonment does not really change anything for him, does not make a significant difference in the purpose for which he gambles. Whether in prison or not, Philip experiences in gambling a heady rush of uncertainty, a sublime range of possibilities; every turn of a card promises a great or disastrous outcome that might raise him up or lay him low. Though Orlando doesn’t understand the exhilaration of the tension between chance and control that Philip experiences in his gambling episodes, Orlando’s own behavior courts precisely this tension between chance and control as he indulges in a forbidden courtship with Monimia while at the same time hoping to be Mrs. Rayland’s heir. Philip’s recognition of the structural similarity between his gambling and Orlando’s romance of inheritance reveals

The Gambling Man of Feeling 91

the sublime tension between great riches and ruination that also marks Orlando’s simultaneous pursuit of Mrs. Rayland’s estate and his love for Monimia, which, if discovered by Mrs. Rayland, would make her disinherit him. For both young men, sublime gambling seems to be the central activity for a man of feeling in the eighteenth-century economy. Like Camilla’s Macdersey, with whom this chapter began, like Philip Somerive, like all sublime gambling men of feeling, Mr. Harrel, Cecilia’s gambling guardian in Burney’s second novel, Cecilia, lives in and for the ecstatic gambling episode. In Cecilia the structural similarities between sublime gambling and unfettered access to private credit make possible a critique of credit. Burney draws a detailed picture of Harrel’s economic interactions so that we learn about his extensive use of personal credit for purchases and estate improvements; these credit relations are revealed to us (and to Cecilia) alongside his gambling debts. By thus linking Harrel’s gambling debts to the vast debts he has incurred with tradespeople, Burney questions their relationship to each other. Are play debts different in kind from trade debts? Both Harrel and Cecilia believe (though for opposite reasons) that play debts and trade debts are fundamentally different from each other and that this difference is located in the role that honor plays in each type of debt. Harrel believes honor requires him to pay his gambling debts (so-called “debts of honour”) and is ready to flee the country when he cannot pay up, while Cecilia believes that a gentleman of honor should first pay his worthy trade creditors, that his honorableness is evident in his treatment of those whose livelihood depends on him. The novel itself, however, reveals not a fundamental difference between play debts and trade debts, but their structural similarity. As I discussed in Chapter 1, in the latter half of the eighteenth century when there are frequent financial crises in private credit, the relationship between private credit and gambling comes under scrutiny. Julian Hoppit argues that “before about 1770 financial crises tended to be restricted to the sphere of public credit and the national debt … After 1770 crises were more general, often hitting both public and private finance” (“Crises” 56). The increasingly frequent financial crises of the last 30 years of the eighteenth century “were mainly caused and structured by the very nature of private credit” (51). Rapid economic growth in this period “encouraged risk-taking and speculation” since “in times of prosperity the willingness to give credit and to contract debts increases” (Hoppit 51, 53). Financial crises in private credit were so frequent in the last 30 years of the eighteenth century because “the impetus for growth itself rested on a financial edifice that was so flexible that it was capricious” (56). Burney’s novel

92

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

examines whether ethical and responsible financial behavior is possible in an economy in which private credit is no different from gambling. Burney explores the dangerously speculative nature of credit by highlighting private credit’s similarity to gambling. In the sublime gambler Harrel, we see the focus on the ecstatic present moment that both gambling and the private credit economy encourage. Seeming to revel in the ecstatic present, Harrel takes on vast private debt to underwrite a sublimely lavish lifestyle over which constantly hangs the threat of “execution,” or bankruptcy proceedings. It is the simultaneous luxury and threat of loss that make the Harrels’ credit relations sublime. Though his continuing non-payment should make Harrel uncreditworthy, he goes on to gain further lines of credit from merchants and tradesmen. Such creditors’ willingness to continue gambling on Harrel is a symptom of the instability of private credit practices and indicates the degree to which gambling still informs the economic practices of both consumers and capitalists. At the same time that Harrel consumes material goods and his trade debts mount, he engages nightly in high-stakes gambling, using Cecilia’s inheritance as security for his gambling both by promising her (without her knowledge or consent) in marriage to several gambling associates and then extorting loans from her by threatening suicide. His proceedings as a consumer and as a gambler are identical, and identically fraught; he repeats the episodic sublime moment, ordering goods, placing wagers, forestalling the reckoning again and again. Burney extends this critique by showing Cecilia herself susceptible on several levels to private credit’s seductive deferral of payment. Though she is an enemy to gambling, Cecilia’s acculturation to private credit’s emphasis on the ecstatic present moment impairs her judgment and she amasses debts that hamper her ability to act independently. When Cecilia joins the Harrel household in London until she comes of age, she is introduced to – and shocked by – the economy of private credit on which London commerce depends. The Harrels have been granted credit beyond their means for immediate payment by a range of tradespeople. In fact, as Harrel’s debts mount, he claims he cannot pay off even the smaller bills, because his larger creditors will hear of it and demand their payments as well. Her discovery of Harrel’s inability to pay his debts “opened to Cecilia a new view of life; that a young man could appear so gay and happy, yet be guilty of such injustice and inhumanity, that he could take pride in the works which not even money had made his own, and live with undiminished splendour, when his credit itself began to fail, seemed to her incongruities so irrational, that hitherto she had supposed them impossible” (85). As Cecilia implicitly recognizes

The Gambling Man of Feeling 93

here, private credit makes possible an entirely “new view of life” in which one’s appearance can suggest a socioeconomic status untethered from true financial worth and from one’s moral worth as well. Harrel lives a life of material splendor, thanks to long lines of credit that are unimpaired even by his inhumane refusal to pay the debt he owes to the suffering family of a carpenter who was injured while working on a fanciful temple at the Harrels’ country property. Despite Cecilia’s shock, however, this “new view of life” is entirely typical of eighteenth-century socioeconomic culture. As Margot Finn points out, “By awarding differential credit terms according to perceived differences of personal character and social standing, tradesmen not only responded to consumers’ efforts at self-fashioning but also helped to position these individuals within hierarchical social relations” (Character 10). In this way, private credit functions like Bataille’s potlatch, facilitating status display, at the same time that private credit drives the expanding economy. The nexus of gambling and private credit is demonstrated in a central chapter in Burney’s novel ironically called “A Man of Business.” Harrel, ostensibly on the eve of fleeing to the Continent to escape his trade debts, takes his wife to Vauxhall; Cecilia unwillingly accompanies them at Mrs. Harrel’s request. They are met by several of their trade creditors, who breach polite protocol by dunning them in the pleasure garden; to avoid their requests for payment Mr. Harrel seeks to flatter them by inviting them to join him in his Vauxhall supper box. Soon they are joined by two of Harrel’s gambling companions, Sir Robert Floyer and Mr. Marriot, who have been privately pressing Harrel to pay the debts of honor he owes them. This “mixed company” so shocking to Mrs. Harrel visually demonstrates the confluence of play and trade debts by bringing all Harrel’s creditors of both types together. On one hand, the scene demonstrates the extent to which private credit was reordering society. Mr. and Mrs. Harrel’s consumption of luxury goods, though it is meant to elevate them, brings them and their creditors to the same social level. As one trade creditor, Mr. Hobson, claims, “I have as good a right to shew my head where I please as ever a member of parliament in all England: and I wish every body here could say as much” (411). On the other hand, Harrel still gives his play debts priority; an inquiry into his affairs later reveals that Harrel gambled money lent him by Cecilia and his brother-in-law to pay his trade debts, hoping to double the sum so his could pay off his gambling debts. “For though with tolerable ease, he could forget accounts innumerable with his tradesmen, one neglected debt of honour rendered his existence insupportable!” (433). Indeed, this inability to pay his debt of honor renders Mr. Harrel

94

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

himself the “Man of Business” of the chapter’s title, and the business he conducts is to pay both play and trade debts in the only coin remaining to him; he commits suicide by shooting himself at Vauxhall. In his suicide note, Harrel describes his sublime gambling as much more agonizing than, for example, the sublime ecstasy of Camilla’s Macdersey, yet he still uses the terms of the sublime. “This is what I have wished; wholly to be freed, or ruined past all resource” (431). Clearly Burney does not endorse this sublimity, since his final sublime wager leads to his suicide, yet after demonstrating the structural similarity between sublime gambling and private credit, the novel is hard pressed to present an alternative model of engaging in the private credit economy. In John Moore’s novel Zeluco (1789), for example, the virtuous Bertram, a foil for the eponymous gambling villain-hero, responds to the similarity of trade and play debts by avoiding debt altogether. Likewise, in Cecilia one of Harrel’s creditors, Mr. Hobson, opines “Let every man keep clear of the world [i.e. free from debt], that’s my notion, and then he will be in no such hurry to get out of it” (444). Yet this is hardly a tenable solution, as Mr. Hobson himself, whose business depends on credit, should know. Credit is necessary to the parties on both sides of the debtor–creditor relationship; the expanding economy and chronic shortage of specie make it near impossible to participate in the economy, whether as buyer or purveyor, without credit. The Hill family, trade creditors to Mr. Harrel, demonstrate the necessity of credit relations as well as their similarity to gambling. Mr. Hill took the job renovating the Harrels’ country property, Violet-Bank, despite knowing it was a financial risk: “We were told from the first we should not get our money; but we were willing to hope for the best, for we had nothing to do, and were hard run, and had never had the offer of so good a job before” (85).1 Mr. Hill gives Mr. Harrel his labor on credit, hoping against the odds that he’ll be paid. In this economy, there is no other way for Mr. Hill to proceed than to gamble in this way. Despite her surprise when she first comes to London at the Harrels’ extensive use of credit, Cecilia quickly engages in her own rather extravagant expenditures, most of which involve her entering into credit relations either with merchants and tradesmen, or with moneylenders. While some critics such as D. Grant Campbell who have discussed the importance of credit in Burney’s novel see Cecilia as a “responsible heiress” who “practices economic restraint,” critics including Terry Castle, James Thompson, Catherine Gallagher, and Catherine Keohane examine how deeply Cecilia is embedded in the culture of credit and debt (Campbell 141). Cecilia is not really more fiscally responsible than

The Gambling Man of Feeling 95

the Harrels. One of her first economic acts in the novel is to contract a £600 debt with a bookseller, despite the fact that as a minor she does not yet have any direct access to her inheritance; she does not pay the bookseller until much later in the novel. She repeatedly borrows against her inheritance from moneylenders in order to lend money to Harrel despite his obvious inability to repay her. When she comes of age and takes possession of her house, she starts expensive renovations much as the Harrels had. She believes she holds her fortune in trust for the poor, and thus is very liberal in her many charitable donations. It is not until very late in the book that she realizes “the error she had committed, in living constantly to the utmost extent of her income, without ever preparing, though so able to have done it, against any unfortunate contingency” (873). Like Harrel, she lived in an ecstatic present without accounting for the outcome of her expenditures, though her spending was in the form of donations to others rather than gambling. Before long, the £10,000 legacy that she had received unencumbered from her father was gone, leaving her the annual income of £3000 from her uncle’s estate, subject to the infamous name clause. For Cecilia, the challenges of the credit economy are compounded by her gender, by being in the age of minority for a significant portion of the book, and by the unusual name clause specifying that if she marries, her husband must take her surname or she will forfeit her inheritance. Her full participation in the eighteenth century’s typical private credit relations ultimately limits her agency; if she had restricted her spending and preserved most of her £10,000 paternal inheritance, she could have given up her uncle’s estate without being dowerless when Delvile and his family refuse to accede to the name clause. As she explains to Delvile, “I have ever thought myself secure of more wealth than I could require, and regarded the want of money as an evil from which I was unavoidably exempted. My own fortune, therefore, appeared to me of small consequence, while the revenue of my uncle ensured me perpetual prosperity. – Oh had I but foreseen this moment! – ” (808). The same emphasis on the ecstatic present moment that is central to sublime gambling characterizes the emphasis on the present in the era’s credit relations; Cecilia, like the sublime gambler, did not look beyond the present to calculate her losses or the consequences of her expenditures. Despite realizing this error, she and Delvile repeat it when they finally marry, living in the present moment without planning for the future. Though they know that in their marriage Cecilia forfeits her uncle’s estate, they make no provision for her immediate financial needs. She

96

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

returns to an estate she no longer owns while Delvile travels abroad; when she cannot continue to live there, she suddenly realizes that as a married woman she cannot even enter into credit relations for herself: “to continue her present way of living was deeply involving Delvile in debt, a circumstance she had never considered, in the confusion and hurry attending all their plans and conversations, and a circumstance which, though to him it might have occurred, he could not in common delicacy mention” (859). The sublime wager of finally marrying Delvile despite his father’s prohibition (and both bride and groom shake with terror throughout the marriage ceremony as they expect their union at any moment to be thwarted) prevents them from making prudent calculations for the future. Though their circumstances are certainly unique, by linking their financial choices with those of the Harrels as well as the Hills, Burney’s novel suggests that Delvile and Cecilia’s sublime romance of private credit is entirely typical and indeed unavoidable in the eighteenth-century economy. Cecilia and Delvile’s sublime wager, their marriage, yields both the deep loss of Cecilia’s madness and near-death (as well as the loss of her fortune) and the ultimate victory of acceptance by the Delvile family. The costs of their sublime wager are duly noted, but its successful outcome mitigates the critique that seems implied by the structural similarity of their sublime wager and those of Harrel. This critique is further mitigated in the final pages of the novel by recourse to the romantic device so maligned by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the unexpected legacy from a relative, which renews Cecilia’s independent financial agency, allowing her to re-enter the economy like a sublime gambler rolling the dice again. Delvile’s aunt “in a fit of sudden enthusiasm” gives to Cecilia the fortune she had intended to give to Delvile (941). This legacy gives Cecilia the opportunity to resume on a more prudent scale the charity through which she previously disbursed the entirety of her paternal fortune, though the preceding action of the novel has evinced skepticism of the efficacy of these charitable donations. At the same time, we are told in the novel’s conclusion that the spendthrift widow Mrs. Harrel, whose private credit relations were interwoven with Mr. Harrel’s gambling, remarries “and quickly forgetting all the past, thoughtlessly began the world again, with new hopes, new connections, – new equipages and new engagements!” (940). Thus while the novel certainly critiques Harrel’s sublime gambling by showing its inevitable end, Cecilia’s renewed romantic wagers on the objects of her charity after her marriage and Mrs. Harrel’s unregenerate luxury consumption in her new marriage show both women living in the

The Gambling Man of Feeling 97

sublime present moment, resisting the ostensible moral lessons of their previous economic engagements, not unlike Philip Somerive gambling in debtor’s prison. Cecilia provides no viable alternative to sublime gambling in the eighteenth-century economy. The obsessive, controlled accumulation of Cecilia’s miserly guardian Mr. Briggs, who refuses nearly all expenditure, is clearly not an acceptable approach. While Harrel’s suicide would seem to similarly rule him out as a model economic agent, the outcome of his gambling is in some ways irrelevant; the point is not the end, but the moment when the dice are in the air. While soberly registering the risks of sublime gambling, this novel suggests that in the contemporary economy sublime gambling may well be, as Camilla’s Macdersey suggests, the only way to live.

The sentimental gambling man of feeling Though sublime gambling is often agonizing, as Cecilia’s Harrel describes it, and the sublime economy of private credit to which it is kin can be destructive, the sublime gambler cannot help but throw the dice. The man of feeling, however, resists this culture of chance and seeks to critique and hopes to reform it through sensibility.2 J. G. A. Pocock argues that as eighteenth-century society commercialized, a conservative ideal of the virtuous citizen landowner was adduced to counter the landless, self-interested man who could not “become involved in exchange relationships, or in relationships governed by the media of exchange (especially when these took the form of paper tokens of public credit) without becoming involved in dependence and corruption” (48). The discourse of manners, however, mediated this apparent impasse between land and exchange and provided a means of being virtuous in commercial society; Richardson’s hero Sir Charles Grandison exemplifies this virtuous masculinity within rather than opposed to capitalism. Sentimentalism takes this discourse of manners a step further. The sentimental novel in which this virtuous man of feeling appears flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century and was based on “a moral philosophy that insisted on the value of the virtuous sensation as the root of goodness and benevolence” (Todd 1206).3 Thus sentimental fiction redefines virtue not as derived from the incorruptibility of landed wealth, but as sensation. These fictions, often episodic, sometimes fragmentary, feature scenes in which the hero experiences “virtuous sensation” and acts accordingly.4 Linda Bree suggests that the cult of sensibility represents a “deeply felt suspicion of the commercial and capitalist principles perceived increasingly to dominate

98

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

human relations and society’s structures” but, as scholars such as Gillian Skinner and Markman Ellis have shown, this suspicion leads sentimentalists neither to reject commercial society nor to mystify money’s increasing importance, but to attempt to humanize the marketplace, to use money for benevolent ends (Bree 34).5 While the model of landbased virtue simply opposes the “monied interest,” sensibility actually enlists money in the performance of virtue (Pocock 48). As Skinner argues, in fictions of sensibility, money and feeling are inextricable; the former expresses the latter. “The classic sentimental tableau … in which the spectator weeps at another’s distress, is based not simply on feeling, but on feeling and money: money which the spectator generally has, and which the object of his or her gaze does not” (Skinner 1). Moreover, “in the sentimental scale of value, the ability to dispose of money charitably becomes a measure of personal worth. The more you give, the more you prove your feeling response to the sentimental stimuli of suffering and distress” (Skinner 4). The primary subjects of my analysis of sentimental gambling, Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple (1744), and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), frame the literary and cultural phenomenon of sensibility. Fielding’s novel portrays an early exemplar of the man of feeling while Radcliffe’s novel shows sensibility transformed in the Gothic mode. In both novels, gambling plays a crucial role in defining the hero’s status as a man of feeling; given the prominence of money in performances of sensibility and the foundational role gambling played in the development of capitalism, the presence of gambling in sentimental discourse should not be surprising.6 In Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple, the gambling man of feeling shows through dispassionate gambling that he reserves his emotional expenditures for more worthy objects, while in Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, the gambling man of feeling wagers vast sums in hopes of winning money to spend on sentimental charitable cases. In each novel, the gambling man of feeling exemplifies the romance of gambling in opposition to the increasingly dominant capitalist economy. The man of feeling uses gambling to express his alienation from capitalism and to assist sentimental victims of capitalism. Before examining the gambling man of feeling in Fielding and Radcliffe, I will briefly show how gambling can be used to define the man of feeling in Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). Though her epistolary novel is not episodic or fragmentary in the typical style of classic sentimental fiction, Burney’s book features a hero whose affinities to the man of feeling type are signaled by his attitude toward gambling.7

The Gambling Man of Feeling 99

Like the other men of feeling this chapter examines, Lord Orville briefly imagines the possibility of sentimental gambling, but eventually he articulates the conventional incompatibility of gambling and sensibility and thus serves as a foil for Fielding and Radcliffe’s gambling men of feeling. Lord Orville’s feminine delicacy of manner and refined sentiments mark him as a man of feeling. G. J. Barker-Benfield argues that the man of feeling was a figure meant to induce reform and promote an ideology of affectionate domesticity by repudiating traditional masculine manners: “sentimental heroes opposed gambling, oaths, drinking, idleness, cruelty to animals, and other elements of popular male culture” (247–8). Concerned about the conventionally rakish behavior of Lord Merton, the man to whom Lady Louisa, Orville’s sister, is engaged, Orville draws particular attention to Merton’s gambling. Merton, like Sir Thomas Grandison in Richardson’s novel, gambles to display his status as an aristocrat who can afford to lose.8 Orville wants to turn this unproductive expenditure to productive or at least charitable ends, so he proposes that Lord Merton and Mr. Coverly’s wager to race each other in their phaetons for £1000 be settled by an alternative contest: “the money should be his due who, according to the opinion of the judges, should bring the worthiest object with whom to share it” (Burney 241). Orville explains to Evelina that his rather “unseasonable gravity” in making this proposal was occasioned by “the particular interest that I now take in the affairs of Lord Merton” (242). Thus the rakish man’s gambling is to be replaced by the benevolent man’s charity, elegantly demonstrating the contrasting values of these two types of masculinity. In Merton and Coverly’s original bet, the gamble would reward the man who exhibits the most extreme of traits coded as masculine: he who fearlessly drives the fastest without wrecking his vehicle. In Orville’s alternative wager, the gamble would reward the man who is both attentive to others’ needs (able to find someone in want) and to his society’s taste (able to please the “judges” of the wager with his selection). Orville’s alternative wager would use gambling to display sensibility. But Orville’s proposed substitute wager is not taken up by Merton and Coverly. Instead, the wager is lowered from £1000 to £100 and will be decided by a race between two women of “more than eighty years of age” (243). Orville claims that this substitution of old ladies for phaetons in a race for a less significant sum satisfies his anti-gaming scruples; nonetheless its cruel use of frail, elderly women reintroduces rakish gambling as a display of traditional masculinity rather than Orville’s proposed benevolent gambling as a display of sensibility. When the race between the old ladies takes place, Merton and Coverly’s

100

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

behavior exceeds decorum’s bounds. They get drunk, handle the aged competitors roughly, abuse them verbally, insult Lady Louisa, and harass Evelina. As a man of feeling, Orville is nearly helpless in countering their aggression. His alternative wager proposed a model of gambling as benevolence, but in the end his status as a man of feeling is confirmed by his opposition to gambling. Both his proposed alternative wager and his belated rescue of Evelina from the drunken Merton’s near assault after the old-lady race show he is “no friend to gaming” (244). The conflict between Lords Merton and Orville in Evelina shows the typical opposition between gambling and sensibility, chance and control. The gambler throws himself wholeheartedly into the culture of risk while the man of feeling stands apart from and wishes to reform or control that culture. Proponents of sensibility usually criticize gambling as a waste of money that could be spent in charity. As Evelina exclaims after learning that wagers can be settled by drawing straws, “does it not seem as if money were of no value or service, since those who possess, squander it away in a manner so infinitely absurd!” (241). In the introduction to an anonymous novel called The Adventures of a Cork-Screw (1775), the author exclaims, “Say, ye libertines, ye gamblers and others, who idly and wantonly squander away your spare hours and your pence, did you but know the superlative felicity a good action affords, you would quit your favorite sports for proper objects to exercise your benevolence upon, and sleep happy and contented under the pleasing heart elated satisfaction of having made others so” (xiii–xiv). David Simple, however, imagines the gambling man of feeling as a man who enacts his sensibility not through opposition to gambling but by becoming a gambler. The gambling man of feeling lays his wagers to express his resistance to the new capitalism, to demonstrate his emotional investment in an alternative economy. He gambles to show that he does not care about money. The romance of the gambling man of feeling is found not in a moment of sublime possibility, but in his belief that his gambling can indeed effectively symbolize a rejection of capitalist values. In his exploration of London as he searches for a disinterested friend, David Simple finds contemporary society dominated by an obsession with money that erases class distinctions and distorts the finer feelings of all he meets. David’s first experience in London, a visit to the Royal Exchange, forces him to define himself as a man of feeling against the dominance of capitalist culture and the distressingly intense passions money elicits. Pocock suggests that “it was preeminently the function of commerce to refine the passions and polish the manners” but in David’s experience, commerce fails to perform this function (49). The

The Gambling Man of Feeling 101

frenzied stock-jobbing at the Royal Exchange shocks him. He sees “Men of all Ages and all Nations … assembled,” not for urbane conversation or elegant amusement, but “with no other View than to barter for Interest” (22). G. Skinner argues that “central to sentimentalism is the idea of community: community of feelings, ideas, and opinions or, as it is expressed in David Simple, the ‘Union of Hearts.’ In such a community, self-interest or selfish behavior is unknown; the interests of all the individuals comprising it are the same and all wish to promote the happiness of the others” (12). This communitarian ideal makes the self-interest of the heterogeneous, international crowd assembled at the Exchange especially troubling to David. The intense emotions induced by stock trading further surprise David. He sees “Anxiety” on the faces of most men at the Change; even where he sees expressions of pleasure “it was with a mixture of Fear.” He shrinks from the “Treachery” of a trader who, pretending to “advise you as a Friend,” tries to sell David stock by lying about its value, but he is far more distressed by the passions he witnesses (22). David knows he won’t find a friend among men whose deepest feelings are engaged not in personal relationships but in impersonal financial exchange. David’s worst shock, however, comes when he hears the treacherous trader called “a good Man” and he learns that this epithet denotes a man worth a “Plumb,” or £100,000. This discovery effectively symbolizes the conflicting values of the man of feeling and the men on the Exchange. For traders, the possession of money itself makes a man “good” without any reference to actions or feelings, while for the sentimentalist, money is merely a means of responding to and making visible one’s virtuous sensations. “David was now in quite a Rage; and resolved to stay no longer in a Place, where Riches were esteemed Goodness, and Deceit, Low-Cunning; and giving up all things to the love of Gain, thought Wisdom” (23). What David sees as money’s perversion of virtuous qualities drives him from the Exchange, one of the centers of the new capitalism, to seek a friend elsewhere in the capital. Though he recoils from money’s seemingly boundless ascendance at the Exchange, where he learns that “Riches were esteemed Goodness,” money is, of course, crucial to David Simple’s continuing inquiry throughout the novel. Even though he nearly despairs as he learns again and again that money, not character or class, defines social value, money makes it possible for him to pursue his quest for a friend comfortably and to express his sensibility through charity. Fielding does not mystify the origins of David’s money: this “novel is about a man who belongs to the class of gentlemen newly created by the previous

102

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

generation’s success in trade” (Skinner 22). David and his brother are the sons of a successful mercer and a woman “who originally got her Living by Plain Work” (7). As social climbers, they attend a public school where both their finances and their behavior elicit treatment “as if they had been born in a much higher Station” (7). Fielding does not credit the deference the Simple brothers receive only to their genteel behavior but makes it clear that their classmates respect money. David himself, however, does not seem to recognize the crucial role his parents’ money plays in his carefree childhood or his sentimental quest as an adult. As a man of feeling, then, David is a man of leisure and means, gentry but not aristocracy, who displays his sensibility through benevolent expenditure. For example, David is chagrined when he hears the sad history of Isabelle because her sufferings could not be alleviated by any monetary gift: “David cried out, ‘How unhappy am I to meet with a Person of so much Merit under a Sorrow, in which it is impossible for me to hope to afford her the least Consolation!’” (194).9 Isabella’s pain exists outside the system of exchange and thus frustrates David’s means of sympathizing with her. Isabella is an unusual case, however; David is usually more than able to give monetary “Proof that he was not insensible of his Fellow-Creatures Sufferings” when he gives Cynthia the financial means to leave her position as companion to a tyrannical lady and when he pays the debts and medical bills of Camilla and Valentine (98). Discussing a later sentimental novel, Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1766–70), Ellis points out that “faith in money to relieve suffering and assuage sentimental distress is odd, since it is often the instability and mutability of money and paper credit that has led to the misfortunes of the characters in the first place” (134–5). This observation can be applied to David Simple as well. Yet David’s sentimental expenditures eventually lead to the fulfillment of his quest, for he finds in Camilla, Cynthia, and Valentine the disinterested friends he sought. If sentimental exchange paradoxically underpins the man of feeling’s attempt to distinguish himself from those stock-jobbers at the Royal Exchange who feel only for money, he can also differentiate himself by remaining emotionally unengaged in the activity that inspired early capitalism: gambling. While we might expect the man of feeling to condemn gambling altogether as an unproductive waste of money that might otherwise be used for charitable purposes, as Evelina does, his reaction is more complicated. Of course David Simple is shocked by the fashionable world’s financial investment in gambling, by the “Whist-books” bought to learn the odds, by the lavish “Routs” thrown nightly. David is skeptical that he will find an ideal friend “by going

The Gambling Man of Feeling 103

amongst People, who place their whole Happiness in Gaming,” but an acquaintance assures him that “People’s Minds, and the Bent of their Inclination, is no where so much discovered as at a Gaming-Table” (62). Indeed, this emotional investment in gambling deeply troubles David. Anti-gambling writers commonly protest the sublime passions evoked by gambling.10 An anonymous novel called Squire Randal’s Excursion Round London (1777) provides an example of the kind of scene David Simple witnesses, where fellow-feeling turns to self-interest and the players are disfigured by their fervor for the game: The first thing I took notice of was, that there was no such thing as friendship or sensibility ever admitted into a gambling-room, after the first shuffle; and that all which gives beauty and elegance to a man’s character, was immediately cut clean out of the question … As soon as the cards are dealt round, every body takes them up tremblingly, and every body is in agitation before half the game is up. This damns – that thanks God – this gnaws his lips – that scratches his head – one slaps his hand upon the table, and swears he is bamboozled – another vows ’tis all fair play … One man broke a chair in fidgeting up and down; another, in the distraction of his disappointment, seizes the cards in a fury, and with many horrible oaths and imprecations, tears them into twenty pieces, bites them with his teeth, and even stamps upon every one like a mad-man. (72–3) Similarly, David sees “Eagerness and Fierceness,” “Tumult and Anxiety,” “Joy,” “black Despair” in all the players. David himself despairs, as he did at the Royal Exchange, of finding a friend among people who care so desperately about winning and losing money. “The Competitors seemed to lay as great a stress on either their Victory, or Defeat, as if the whole Happiness of their Lives depended on it” (62). What is worse, these fashionable gamblers seem to be people of sensibility until the cards appear: “Those very people, who, before they sat down to play, conversed with each other in a strain so polite and well-bred, that an unexperienced Man would have thought the greatest Pleasure they could have had, would have been in serving each other, were in a moment turned into Enemies, and the winning of a Guinea, or perhaps five, (according to the Sum played for) was the only Idea that possessed the Minds of a whole Company of People, none of whom were in any manner of want of it” (63). An “unexperienced Man,” David thought these well-bred people would use their money to purchase “Pleasure” by “serving each other” as the code of sensibility suggests. Instead, their

104

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

pleasure comes from winning money from each other. “Nothing could be a stronger Proof of the selfish and mercenary Tempers of Mankind,” David discovers, than these gambling scenes in which players turn from the pleasures of giving money in a friend’s service to the pleasures of winning unneeded money from a friend. David’s reaction to these scenes becomes more interesting than we might expect, however, when he assesses a few gamblers “who played quite carelessly, and did not appear to trouble themselves whether they won or lost” (64). David is drawn to these gamblers, and imagines that they, of all the players he observes, might share his sensibility. He “entertain’d some Hopes, that those few People in whom he had seen a Calmness at Play, were disinterested, and had that contempt for Money, which he esteemed necessary to make a good Character” (64). A man of feeling can identify himself as such and can distinguish himself from other men who care too much about money by gambling without emotional expenditure. Gambling “carelessly,” with “Calmness,” allows the man of feeling to show that he reserves his passions for more worthy objects and pursuits. Sentimental gambling is similar to unproductive aristocratic gambling which shows the landed, titled man’s disdain for the money economy, but sentimental gambling shows the man of feeling’s disdain not only for money itself but for emotional investment in money.11 The man of feeling, though his manners depend on money through which he can display his sensibility and perform charitable acts, shows through his dispassionate gambling that money is not what he cares about. David is disappointed to learn, however, that the careless gamblers he observes are not kindred spirits who share his “contempt for Money” but instead are sycophants who use gambling as a means of rubbing shoulders with “people of Quality” (64). They don’t care if they win or lose because their object is to spend evenings with the fashionable and then to tell their less fashionable acquaintance about it afterwards. Though David doesn’t recognize it, this careless gambling is a bathetic version of David’s ideal disinterested gambling. Like David, the careless gamblers have no emotional investment in the money they wager; rather their goal is social exchange. The careless gamblers David observes hope to trade on the social capital they earn when they lose money at play to “people of Quality”; as Bataille points out in his analysis of potlatch, even this seemingly unproductive loss has a socially productive purpose. Though, like David, the careless gamblers don’t care about the money they wager but care instead about the people they meet, the careless gamblers do not seek, as David does, sentimental exchanges

The Gambling Man of Feeling 105

of true friendship and benevolent charity. Rather, they parody David’s quest by turning seemingly disinterested gambling into a site for the status-obsessed social climbing that David abhors and associates with money’s dominance in the new economy. Thus, David’s hope of finding a friend in a gambling man of feeling is thwarted. Though David’s quest is not fulfilled by the gamblers, his articulation of gambling as one possible defining activity of the man of feeling highlights the complicated relationship between financial and emotional expenditure at this pivotal moment in eighteenth-century British social, economic, and literary history. Because performances of sensibility depend on monetary expenditure, the man of feeling must distinguish his expenditures from those of the consuming, shopping, money-obsessed fashionable classes.12 One way he can make this distinction is by performing his lack of concern for money itself at the gaming tables. By winning or losing “carelessly,” the gambling man of feeling shows that he reserves his emotional expenditures for more worthy objects, for the people his money can assist rather than for money itself. We are unable to determine whether a gambling man of feeling would be able maintain his distinction from ordinary gamblers and consumers by refusing to expend emotions at the table, however, for in David Simple, the gambling man of feeling remains a phantom. David’s failure to find a gambling man of feeling is just one example of the inefficacy of his sentimental world view. At the same time that the novel applauds David’s sentimental quests, it repeatedly exposes his naïveté. As an early example of what would become a wildly popular type of novel, Fielding’s sentimental novel reveals some ambivalence about the new mode of sentimental masculinity it heralds. Thus, by both commemorating and criticizing sensibility, presenting its hero simultaneously sincerely and ironically, David Simple draws on the tension between chance and control in gambling and anticipates the classic doubleness of sentimental fiction as Barbara Benedict has outlined it; sentimental fiction uses a variety of techniques to frame and control the unruly feelings it celebrates and evokes (4). This ambivalence comes to the foreground in David Simple’s Book IV, where Cynthia delineates the character of a man whose actions are too strongly motivated by his feelings. Cynthia critiques sentimentalism as the basis for moral action because feelings are too changeable and inconsistent. In Cynthia’s description, there is little to distinguish the man of sensibility from the sensualist. Such a critique is troubling, for it could clearly apply to David Simple himself. Though neither Cynthia nor the novel make any explicit connection between David and the character she criticizes, the

106

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

man of feeling’s implicit similarity to the sensualist suggests that his financial and emotional expenditures may be too difficult to distinguish from those that drive the fashionable world. The man of feeling spends money – albeit charitably – to indulge himself. Not only do David’s supposed gambling men of feeling turn out to be sycophants rather than sentimentalists, but the novel casts further doubt on the possibility of sentimental gambling by following Cynthia’s critique of sensibility with the story of an atheist who indulges his passions by gambling. This character, who is later revealed as David’s estranged younger brother, Daniel, leads a life that parodies David’s episodic quest for a disinterested friend and further discredits his romantic ideal of a gambling man of feeling. Daniel pursues different swindling schemes in a variety of scenes of life, including “Canting amongst the Men, of the Value of real Friendship, to try if by that means I could draw any Person into my Net, in order to make a Prey of them” (225). Whenever his schemes fail, Daniel returns to cheating at cards and dice as a sure source of cash. David had long ago been the first victim of Daniel’s fraudulent sentimentality; at school the brothers’ “strict Friendship” was signaled, in typical sentimental style, by their habit of pooling financial resources. “While there was any Money in either of their Pockets, the other was sure never to want it: the Notion of whose Property it was, being the last thing that ever entered into their Heads” (7). But when their father dies, Daniel, “notwithstanding the Appearance of Friendship he had all along kept up to David,” steals the will and forges a new document favoring himself and disinheriting David (8).13 In implicit contrast to David’s ideal of affectionate financial commonality, practiced first in childhood with Daniel and eventually in his communal arrangements with Camilla, Valentine, and Cynthia, Daniel’s vice is described as a pernicious individualism: he was “in reality one of those Wretches, whose only Happiness centers in themselves” (8). Daniel is a sublime gambler who believes in focusing on the present ecstatic episode: “the wisest thing a Man could do, was to give a Loose to all his Passions, and take hold of the present Moment for Pleasure, without depending on uncertain Futurity” (223). As both a false friend and a sublime gambler who revels in that incalculable moment when he tosses the dice, Daniel shows the dangers of trusting in appearances of friendship and the dominance of financial individualism over communitarianism. Given this example of a gambling man of false feeling dedicated to self-interest, it is hardly surprising that David’s gambling man of feeling proves to be a phantom. Indeed, the fulfillment of David’s central sentimental quest, his marriage and his establishment

The Gambling Man of Feeling 107

of a little community of sensibility, is itself a romance, an anomalous, lucky outcome in a society where true friends usually turn out to be false, where gambling men of feeling turn out simply to be gamblers, where men of feeling turn out to be swindlers. Perhaps David Simple’s ambivalence about sentimental masculinity and the failure of David’s apparent gambling men of feeling to live up to his ideal can be attributed to the novel’s status as an early iteration of sentimentalism years before its true vogue in the 1760s and 1770s.14 Fielding’s pessimism about sensibility as a viable life philosophy, however, seems only to have increased; written nine years later, her continuation of David Simple, Volume the Last, shows the community of once-happy friends tormented by callous enemies precisely because of their sensibility. Terri Nickel argues that because spectacles of sentimental suffering generated David’s community in the first place, it is “a deliberately self-destroying arrangement of social relations” (235). If such dissolution is the fate of David’s communitarian ideal, his vision of gambling for any purpose but self-interest similarly has no chance for success. The picture of London that David Simple paints, a picture that shares features with those in Henry Fielding’s and Smollett’s novels of the same era, shows such thorough corruption, such single-minded pursuit of money, that we are much less surprised when David’s gambling man of feeling turns out to be a phantom than when he successfully forms a sentimental community with his true friends. Fielding calls her novel of sensibility a “Moral Romance” (the word “Romance” here suggests, perhaps, the tale’s improbability) but, as Bree notes of this moral tale, “David has converted no one from vice to virtue; in fact, he has made no attempt to change the society he has found so alien to his own ideals, having failed even to fulfill the secondary intention declared at the outset of his travels: ‘to assist all those, who had been thrown into Misfortune by the ill Usage of others’” (Fielding 3; Bree 45; Fielding 21). The failure of David’s vision of disinterested gambling foretells the general failure of his sentimental project. Although he finds friends, he is unable to perform his sensibility with charitable donations as he had envisioned and eventually he and his friends are themselves in dire need of such donations after David’s sensibility leads to his loss of financial independence in Volume the Last; the economy of private credit undoes his sentimental community. By returning to the novel and writing the tragic conclusion of Volume the Last, Fielding seems unwilling to let the romance of the happy ending stand. Instead she represents ruthlessly the toll that an unsentimental economy of private credit takes on men and women of feeling. In David Simple, sensibility

108

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

ultimately cannot mediate the conflicts between capitalism and virtue by humanizing commerce, but by the time Ann Radcliffe writes The Mysteries of Udolpho, 50 years later, sensibility does function in fiction as an effective mode of masculinity as well as an efficacious social force. In Radcliffe’s novel, the hero need only demonstrate his sensibility to be vindicated of all charges of vice and accepted as the heroine’s lover. Yet despite the passage of time between these two novels and sensibility’s journey from object of skepticism to acceptance, the means by which Radcliffe’s hero proves his worth, disinterested gambling, hews to the ideal David Simple first articulated as he searched for a man of feeling at the gaming tables. While David Simple’s gambling man of feeling is a phantom, in The Mysteries of Udolpho the resolution of the love plot depends on a successful gambling man of feeling. The affection between the main characters Valancourt and Emily that began as they traveled together in the Pyrenees early in the novel was threatened by Valancourt’s dissolute life in Paris where he gambled heavily, was rumored to have allowed wealthy women to pay his debts, and to have joined with sharpers to retrieve his ruined fortune. Seeing Emily’s temptation to forgive Valancourt and take him back, an adviser warns her, “We all know how fascinating the vice of gaming is, and how difficult it is, also, to conquer the habit; the Chevalier might, perhaps, reform for a while, but he would soon relapse into dissipation” (507). Though some of the charges against him turn out to be exaggerated, Valancourt is resuscitated by evidence that although he gambled, in one final instance he did so for what are revealed to be the right reasons. Valancourt had been imprisoned for his gambling debts; while in jail, we are told, he “emancipated himself from the bondage of vice” (652). Nonetheless, when released, he immediately takes the money his brother has given him to a gaming house where he wagers it all in one stake in order to win enough to release a fellow prisoner-in-debt named Mons. Bonnac, whose affectionate jailhouse meeting with his wife and family had touched Valancourt’s heart. We might see Valancourt’s sentimental wager as the very relapse that Emily’s advisers feared, but, perhaps because he wins his bet, the wager has a positive purport. In this case, sentimental gambling redresses the indignities of private credit. If we are worried that Valancourt will continue gambling for sentimental reasons, the narrator informs us that “while he had awaited the issue of this momentous stake, he made a solemn vow never again to yield to the destructive and fascinating vice of gaming” (653). After Emily has parted from Valancourt because his gambling and dissipation have

The Gambling Man of Feeling 109

debased his character and made him unworthy of her, Bonnac appears and explains how Valancourt’s act of charitable gambling facilitated Bonnac’s release from prison and reunion with his family. When they hear Bonnac’s story, Emily’s friends and advisers immediately forgive Valancourt. They are “charmed by the humanity, and noble, though rash generosity, which his conduct toward Mons. Bonnac exhibited” (654). Thus, although gambling seemed to have corrupted his sensibility and separated him from Emily, he is a gambling man of feeling and in the end gambling is the means of his vindication. Through gambling Valancourt demonstrates his sensibility, a sensibility so moved by a husband and wife’s affection that it prompts him to risk his own security in order to alleviate their suffering, a sensibility that makes him worthy of Emily (even as Emily has to learn over the course of the novel to repress her sensibility and act with fortitude). If this novel is concerned, as Claudia L. Johnson has argued, with demonstrating and celebrating “the sex of suffering,” or men’s sensibility, it is worth noting that gambling is the means of this demonstration (Equivocal 95). With an act of sentimental gambling, Valancourt shows that he has not been completely corrupted by the money culture of the metropolis. His willingness to risk large sums in the hopes of serving someone else shows his worthiness in a way that no other act would. Later, when Emily receives a legacy that she doesn’t need, she bequeaths it to Bonnac as a compliment honoring the sentimental, charitable gamble that reunited her with Valancourt, her gambling man of feeling. The gambling man of feeling’s relation to capitalism is reflected in the uses of romance in sentimental fictional form. The unlikely romance of David Simple’s original happy ending, the novel Fielding herself called “a Moral Romance,” in which the two main couples form a communal living arrangement in the country removed from the commercial depravities of London, is revealed to be no more than improbable romance by the sequel that she wrote nine years later. Volume the Last replaces sentimental romance with a dark vision of a harsh and unsympathetic economy of private credit. By the 1790s, on the other hand, Ann Radcliffe’s novel is able to fully realize the possibility of successful sentimental gambling through the displacement of the Gothic because the romance of the past licenses this vision of sentimental gambling in a renaissance European setting that is not eighteenth-century London. Nonetheless tension between chance and control animates the novel’s form as, according to Radcliffe’s infamous procedures for ending her Gothic romances, all seemingly supernatural events are given natural, though no less frightening, explanations. Rational explanations rein in

110

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

supernatural romance while at the same time the romance of one final successful sentimental gamble makes possible the conventional happy ending. Despite thus controlling the supernatural romance, however, The Mysteries of Udolpho ends, just like the original ending of David Simple, as well as The Excursion and Amelia, with a romance of seclusion and removal from the corruptions of the metropolis. The gambling man of feeling’s final wager made possible Valancourt’s reunion with Emily and their return or retreat to the idyllic paternal estate La Vallee, deep in the French forests. The sentimental gamblers in both Fielding and Radcliffe’s novels reveal that even when such gambling is successful, the gambling man of feeling, like the man of feeling more broadly conceived, cannot reform or reshape the unfeeling capitalism to which he objects but on which he, like everyone around him, increasingly depends. Macdersey, Philip Somerive, Mr. Harrel, David Simple, and Valancourt define their status as men of feeling in the transforming economy by way of gambling. Gambling facilitates a range of masculinities, as did the economy it inspired. Though the sublime and sentimental gambling men of feeling represent effectively oppositional modes of masculinity (the former wagers to show his passion for chance, his modernity, while the latter wagers dispassionately to show his emotional investment in those not seated at the card tables), both types illustrate the centrality of gambling to eighteenth-century urban culture. Gambling was not merely an old-fashioned aristocratic pastime. Instead, Macdersey’s “dear little box of promise” signifies the romance of possibility – whether one desires riches, luxury goods, or a true friend – that the new economy offers across classes. For both the sublime and the sentimental gambling men of feeling, this romance of possibility inextricably links loss and gain; both outcomes are imagined simultaneously by the gambler as he awaits the outcome of his wager. The gambling man of feeling’s willingness to risk great losses to achieve his desired outcome (and the pleasure he takes in risking those losses) is necessary in an expanding economy of private credit relations which requires more than ever before that its participants toss the dice.

4 The Lady’s Last Stake: Camilla and the Female Gambler

While I argued in Chapter 3 that the participation of Frances Burney’s eponymous heroine Cecilia in private credit relationships was structurally similar to the sublime gambling of her guardian Harrel, I also noted briefly that her participation in the economy was circumscribed by her gender, most notably once she is married and realizes that her husband is legally liable for any debt she contracts. Margot Finn argues that historians’ articulation of the “common law practice of coverture – which subsumed a married woman’s legal and financial identity under that of her husband” emphasizes “strict limits on the formal economic activities of English women” but does not capture the complexity of the financial activities of married women in the eighteenth century (“Women” 704). Married women’s commercial consumption was widely perceived in the eighteenth century to be a driving engine of the expanding economy, for better or worse depending on the critic, yet married women could not contract debts in their own name. Married women entered into credit relationships in their husbands’ names technically in order to supply their households; the extent to which husbands or wives could be held accountable for such purchases was frequently contested in court, as Finn’s analysis shows. As Finn explains, “an understanding of married women’s economic potential under the common law thus requires a recognition of the Janus-face of coverture, which at once stripped wives of all economic agency and bestowed vicarious consumer rights upon them” as the purchasers of necessary household goods (708). Because of wives’ role as the purchasers of “necessaries,” the principle of coverture was a kind of romance, a fiction of strict gendered separation of domestic and economic spheres that was in fact impracticable. In this chapter I examine the female gambler, who extends and complicates our understanding of women’s roles in the credit economy founded 111

112

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

on gambling. Married women’s gambling reveals an additional feature of their complex economic status, for these married women who were de facto participants in the economy entered the marriage state as objects exchanged between men; in gambling, women’s bodies have a specie-equivalent value since they can pay their play debts with sexual acts. Thus at the same time that they are quasi-legitimate agents in the credit economy through the “necessaries” provision of coverture, married women are both objects and specie-equivalents. Anti-gambling commentaries identify in the female gambler the unique position of women as purchasers, objects, and specie in the credit economy; as Richard Steele explains, “All play-debts must be paid in specie, or by an equivalent. The man that plays beyond his income pawns his estate; the woman must find out something else to mortgage, when her pinmoney is gone. The husband has his lands to dispose of, the wife her person” (Chalmers vol. 14, 330–1). Because she cannot own real property, a married woman uses her last stake, her own body, to pay her gambling debts. Steele of course sees the lady’s last stake as deplorable, but in a credit economy where her economic agency is at least partially curtailed by coverture, the lady’s last stake gives the woman gambler an additional economic resource. Is the woman gambler empowered by the economic opportunities of the card table, as for example Maria Villiers in Frances Brooke’s The Excursion believed she was? Or does the lady’s last stake limit her economy agency, reinscribing the sexual economy of the marriage market? Anti-gambling commentary demonstrates remarkable consistency in depictions of women gamblers throughout the eighteenth century. As gambling fads came and went, as the gambling scene shifted from aristocratic court circles to coffee houses, assembly rooms, and private (sometimes mixed-gender) clubs, as different monarchs expressed different levels of encouragement or disapproval of gambling, as Parliament repeatedly tried to toughen the ineffectual gaming laws, as women’s own gambling practices underwent numerous changes, the image of the female gambler in print seems almost unchanging.1 In tracts, sermons, plays, paintings, and novels, the female gambler displays a passion for play that is physically disfiguring, her absorption in play supplants her attention to lover, husband, or children, and her play inevitably leads her to pay her play debts with sexual favors. Charting a young woman’s economic entrance into the world, Frances Burney’s third novel, Camilla (1796), uses a female gambler whose gambling career draws on many features of the conventional image of the gamestress to critique a marriage market that objectifies women even as it subjects their

The Lady’s Last Stake 113

expenditures in the credit economy to minute scrutiny. Mrs. Berlinton, the novel’s gamestress, has been the subject of little critical commentary, but her gambling career rewards the kind of attention that critics elsewhere have given the novel’s lotteries and shopping expeditions.2 Mrs. Berlinton exemplifies the tension between chance and control in gambling: she wagers to demonstrate her agency even as she plays with male gamblers who control the seemingly chance disposition of their encounters with female gamblers in hopes of inducing them to play their last stake. At the same time that Mrs. Berlinton is the victim of a manipulative male gambler, she also uses gambling to exercise however transiently some control in an economy that commodifies her. Because the credit economy is informed by gambling, the lady’s last stake, or the female gambler’s resort to her body to pay her play debts, helps us understand why at the climax of the novel Camilla herself courts death, hoping to pay her creditors with her body, not with sex but with a nearly suicidal self-neglect. Burney uses women’s gambling to shed light on the complexity of women’s participation in an expanding economy built on gambling.

The lady’s last stake Gambling offers the married woman possibilities that are not fully available to her in the credit economy. Hogarth’s painting The Lady’s Last Stake (1758) captures this sense of possibility, showing “a virtuous married lady that had lost all at cards to a young officer, wavering at his suit whether she should part with her honor or no.”3 The cards scattered on the floor and a note nearby reading “four hund[red]” indicate the lady’s substantial loss. In keeping with the accounts that stressed the irregular hours a gaming woman keeps, the clock on the mantel tells the time at 4.55 a.m.; the moon is visible through the window. Yet despite the presence of these commonplace elements, Hogarth’s painting does not express simple moral outrage. As Paulson notes, “the painting is less an admonitory warning than a celebration of the piquancy of the lady’s situation: husband and honor on one side, flying time, youth, and chance on the other” (268). The lady does not seem terribly upset by the moral dilemma facing her. Her face has a placid expression; though turned away from the officer, she looks back toward him out of the corners of her eyes and she leans in his direction. Her parted lips, the visible contour of her leg under the rich fabric of her dress, the officer’s elbow resting on the lace edges of her sleeve, all suggest that the lady, having arrived at her last stake, will soon offer a sexual favor in order

114

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

to keep the knowledge of her debt from her husband and preserve her economic autonomy. Discussing women’s involvement in speculative activities such as stock trading in the first quarter of the century, Catherine Ingrassia describes the autonomous pleasures inherent in economies of chance and the concomitant threat these possibilities pose when women remove themselves from circulation within a sexual economy controlled by the variations in male affection and desire, to play an active role within a financial economy where they can benefit from the fluctuations in the price of stocks and other forms of negotiable paper … There is a persistent fear that the pleasure women derive from stock-jobbing will supplant the satisfaction they derive from men; they will find a vehicle for self-pleasuring. (35) Similarly, women’s gambling reveals their pleasure in the monetary risks, gains, and losses of the expanding capital economy, and we see the same concerns in depictions of gambling women where their absorption in play directly competes with their relationships with men. Gambling was thought to supplant women’s sexual desires; as Thomas Brown complains in A Legacy for the Ladies (1705), “She has no … Desire, nor Love for anything else” but cards (55). Sir George Etherege wryly laments the woman gambler’s preference for the “Knave” or Jack over “Witty Men” in his “Song of Basset” (1704): The Time, which should be kindly lent To Plays and Witty Men, In waiting for a Knave is spent, Or wishing for a Ten. […] What Pity ’tis, those Conqu’ring Eyes, Which all the World subdue, Shou’d, while the Lover gazing dies, Be only on Alpue. (287–8 [ll. 21–4, 29–32]) The woman gambler trades the role she is expected to play as a passive participant in courtship rituals listening “To Plays and Witty Men” for an attentiveness to cards that might bore the gazing lover but that offers her the pleasure of anticipating as-yet-unknown outcomes – the Knave, Ten, or Alpue (a valuable combination of cards in piquet). This self-sufficient pleasure in sublime gambling was recognized by gambling’s detractors as undermining the ideology of domesticity

The Lady’s Last Stake 115

expressed in practices such as coverture. Rev. Charles Moore of Kent inadvertently describes the appeal of gambling for women in his treatise called A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide. To which are added (as being closely connected with the subject) two treatises on duelling and gaming (1790); he points out that the pleasures of play increase as they are repeated, making home life increasingly dull. “For tell me ye daughters of play,” Moore asks, “does not its desire increase with its gratification? Does not every domestic employment in consequence pall and tire?” (369). The woman gambler’s answers to these questions would surely be “Yes!” Other commentators criticize the gambling woman for neglecting her children and husband for the romance of chance. Hannah More, writing in 1799 on female education, stressed the adverse effects that women’s gaming had on family life, and most importantly, on the care and education of children. Responding to the common charge that an educated woman will neglect her family, More suggests, “if families are to be found who are neglected through too much study in the mistress, it will probably be proved to be Hoyle, and not Homer, who has robbed her children of her time and affections. For one family which has been neglected by the mother’s passion for books, an hundred have been deserted through her passion for play” (224). Edward Ward in “Bad Luck to Him That Has Her: Or, The Gaming Lady” (1714) describes a female gamester who “is so bewitch’d to Gaming, that she loves a Pack of Cards much better than her Children … and thinks every Knave in the Pack, a much better Companion, than her husband”; Edward Thompson’s gamestress in The Demi-Rep (1756) exclaims, “‘Take Husband, Heav’n …’/ She felt no nuptial ties – nor dreaded ill, / Her cares were Ombre – and her joys Quadrille; / Children, House, Husband sunk without a sigh: / ‘What, live, and quit my cards! – I’d rather die’” (Ward 53, Thompson 19). In Vanbrugh and Cibber’s play The Provoked Husband (1728), Lady Townly seems “not to care for her husband … while she herself is solacing in one continual round of cards and good company, he, poor wretch, is left at large to take care of his own contentment” (I.15–16).4 Married women gamblers’ participation in the sublime romance of play and their alleged neglect of their domestic duties was repeatedly described by anti-gambling writers as physically disfiguring. As Moore writes, “What shall I say to see a female countenance writhed and tortured with every discordant and ugly passion! to behold vexation and anger distorting the fairest symmetry of grace and loveliness, and exposing the eager solicitude of the palpitating heart!” (367). At the same time that married women gamblers seem to remove themselves from sexual

116

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

or domestic economies that define their value as wives and caregivers, however, their play, at least in the view of anti-gambling writers, commodifies them all over again in the sexual economy of the lady’s last stake. In an oft-reprinted essay in the Guardian, Steele demonstrates the associative logic by which a woman’s passion for play is considered a form of prostitution that inevitably leads to literal prostitution: Who can consider, without a secret indignation, that all those affections of the mind which should be consecrated to their children, husbands, and parents, are thus vilely prostituted and thrown away upon a hand at loo! … we always find that play, when followed with assiduity, engrosses the whole woman. She quickly grows uneasy in her own family, takes but little pleasure in all the domestic innocent endearments of life, and grows more fond of Pam, than of her husband. (Chalmers vol. 14, 329) Writers criticizing female gambling were convinced that a woman whose affections were, in Steele’s words, “vilely prostituted” to “Pam,” the Knave (Jack) of Clubs that was trump in many games, would unavoidably be tempted to a more literal prostitution. In 1790, Moore describes the same process with a sentimental metaphor that expresses a woman’s dual position in the credit economy as object (a “jewel”) and participant: “But high gaming must often be accompanied with great losses; and after all the resources regular and irregular, honest and fraudulent, are dissipated, yet game-debts must be paid … and thus the last invaluable jewel of female possession is unavoidably resigned. This is indeed the sorest of all evils, but an evil to which every deep female gamester is inevitably exposed” (370). Women have nothing of value once their ready money is gone but their bodies, which are easily convertible into a specie-equivalent. The “jewel” of their sexual chastity that once defined their value on the marriage market becomes a form of payment at the card tables. This facet of anti-gambling rhetoric denies the dynamic tension between chance and control in women’s gambling. Instead, it is by these accounts inevitable that the woman gambler will come to her last stake. “The lady’s last stake” scenario always assumes that a woman gambler will without fail lose larger sums than she is able to pay. Writers warning women away from play preferred to represent gaming as an inexorable road to ruin rather than one where chance might at any juncture turn the player back to the path of wealth and winnings. And although women gamed in all-female clubs and private parties as well as in mixed company, the compromised

The Lady’s Last Stake 117

woman’s creditor in this scenario is always a man who is happy to take advantage of the situation, or who is in fact controlling the apparently chance disposition of the game to bring the lady player to her last stake. The titillating drama of this scenario in which a woman must decide whether to pay her debts of honor with her sexual honor was a popular one in early eighteenth-century drama, including Colley Cibber’s play The Lady’s Last Stake, or the Wife’s Resentment (1707), and Susanna Centlivre’s play The Basset Table (1705). The lady’s last stake scenario in Cibber’s and Centlivre’s plays is more sinister than the scene described above in Hogarth’s The Lady’s Last Stake. In Cibber’s The Lady’s Last Stake, Lady Gentle, a virtuous wife who enjoys gaming but has little skill at cards, loses £2000 to Lord George Brilliant. He offers her the usual release: Lord George: Come, come, you’re not so poor, as your hard Fears would make you. There are a thousand trifles in your power to grant, that you wou’d never miss, yet a Heart less sensible of your Concern than mine, wou’d prize beyond a tenfold value of your Losses. Lady Gentle: I’m poor in everything but Folly, and a just Will to answer for its Miscarriages. On this, my Lord, you may depend: I’ll strain my utmost to be just to you. Lord George: Alas! you do not know the plenty Nature has endow’d you with. There’s not a tender Sigh that heaves that lovely Bosom, but might, if giv’n in soft Compassion to a Lover’s Pain, release you of the Indies, had you lost ’em. (V.ii.24–38) Lady Gentle is, of course, offended at his suggestion, so Lord George offers a more delicate option. One turn of a card will determine whether he will forgive the debt entirely, with no sexual compensation, or whether she will allow him to hope that his love will be requited in the future. She considers the odds and hopes that providence, having taught her a lesson, will favor her in this last wager. What she cannot know, however, is that Lord George has been manipulating their games to bring her to this point. The apparent game of chance is being controlled by Lord George. He has played on her unwarranted confidence in her card sense, as well as cheated outright, to force her to accept him as her lover. His plot thus demonstrates why anti-gambling writers described illicit sex as the inevitable end of a woman’s gambling career: the man she plays with, foreseeing the possibility that, in Lord Townly’s words, “the lady may be reduced to try if, instead of gold, the

118

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

gentleman will accept of a trinket,” uses his superior card skills or cheats in order to bring this very end to pass (Vanbrugh and Cibber, III.343). Edward Thompson described it more crudely: “Yet there’s a way to gain her with great ease, / … if you can, win all she has at play, / Return the sum, – and take it out her way” (l. 8–9). While Cibber’s Lord George Brilliant cheats to gain advantage over Lady Gentle, in Centlivre’s play The Basset Table, a gambler, Sir James, threatens to rape the heroine, Lady Reveller, if she will not willingly pay her gambling debts in another coin. He accuses her of knowingly prostituting herself at cards and thus deserving what he threatens. He asks, Can a lady that loves play so passionately as you do, that takes as much pains to draw men in to lose their money as a town miss to their destruction, that caresses all sorts of people for your interest, that divides your time between toilet and basset table, can you, I say, boast of innate virtue? Fie, I am sure you must have guessed for what I played so deep. (284) From Sir James’ point of view, both the gamestress and the prostitute or “town miss” take great pains to engage men in an economic transaction that voids women’s claims to “innate virtue.” The analogy implies that the gamestress’s economic transaction is a sexual one, just as is the prostitute’s, even if the gamestress doesn’t actually grant any sexual favors. Simply to spend money at the gaming tables, and encouraging men to do the same, is to participate in a sexual economy. A woman’s gambling appears to be sexual even if she wins money, rather than loses it. Sir James explains, Each trifling toy would tempt in times of old, Now nothing melts a woman’s heart like gold. Some bargains drive others more nice than they, Who’d have you think they scorn to kiss for pay; To purchase them you must lose deep at play. With several women, several ways prevail But gold’s a certain way that cannot fail. (278) Sir James’s conflation of a woman’s economic acts with sexual acts suggests the possibility that women could launder money through gambling without appearing to prostitute themselves. Without tarnishing their reputations by “kiss[ing] for pay,” some women (according to Sir James, at least) will accept payment at the card tables for sexual

The Lady’s Last Stake 119

favors they’ve granted. It is possible that this reversal of the lady’s last stake scenario suggests that women are in control when they gamble, that they game the situation to get what they want (money or sexual adventure) without social costs. But Sir James implies that the game is completely in the male player’s control; he gratifies the gamestress’s vanity by deliberately losing to her, and he will demand from her the sexual favors he has paid for through his losses. Whether they win or lose their gambles, when married women gamblers stake their pin money in this economy, they are also, by definition, offering their “last stake,” their sexual favors. Simply by spending money at the tables, one way or another the gamestress by this logic sells sex. The lady’s last stake scenario highlights in an extreme form a married woman’s role as economic agent (a gambler placing a wager), medium of exchange as a specie-equivalent (she can use her body for payment), and object to be purchased (the male gambler buys her by allowing her to win at cards). In most of the depictions described above the characteristic tension between chance and control in gambling is notably absent. For anti-gambling writers, the lady’s last stake scenario is being controlled by men for predetermined ends. In contrast, with its explicit interest in the mutual relationship between chance and control, a novel’s examination of the lady’s last stake scenario paints a more nuanced picture. Furthermore, the novel’s use of gambling to examine the broader economy in which gambling takes place makes possible a fuller exploration of the relationship between women’s gambling, their economic acts, and their objectification on the marriage market.

Camilla and the female gambler Burney’s Camilla uses the conventional attributes of the female gambler to develop Mrs. Berlinton’s character. As one character describes Mrs. Berlinton and her brother, “they are all half crazy, romantic, lovelorn, studious, and sentimental” (418). Camilla first meets her when she is wandering in a field on a moonlight night reading a letter from a male friend. Mrs. Berlinton, 18 years old and recently married to an elderly wealthy man, is particularly susceptible to the romance of gambling, the illusion of autonomy that it offers a beautiful woman married off by her relatives for mercenary reasons. Gambling does not distract Mrs. Berlinton from her domestic duties, because she had already thoroughly neglected them, but play supplants her improperly passionate correspondence with the adventurer Alphonso Bellamy. Once she takes up gambling, even “her beloved correspondent was neglected” (686).

120

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

The faro table has more appeal for her than Bellamy’s letters, which had previously been her only comfort in her unhappy marriage. Once she becomes a dedicated gamestress, Mrs. Berlinton further neglects her social obligations, all but ignoring her houseguest and friend Camilla. When Mrs. Berlinton’s house is opened for faro, Camilla, who of course did not play, spent “lingering hours in her chamber, no longer even invited thence, except at meals, by Mrs. Berlinton; whose extreme and increasing dissipation, from first allowing no time, took off, next, all desire for social life” (811). Camilla’s friends express concern about the effect of her friend’s gambling on Camilla’s own reputation, since the fashionable world notes both Mrs. Berlinton’s absence from the usual assemblies and the miscellaneous company that assembled at her house to game.5 When Mrs. Berlinton’s “beloved correspondent” Bellamy forcibly elopes with Camilla’s heiress sister Eugenia, Mrs. Berlinton is mortified at having secretly loved such an adventurer and she devotes even greater energy to the faro table. While she continues to gamble heavily, the true appeal of the gambling scene for her becomes gaining the admiration of the company that gathered at her house. The narrator explains: “What she began but to divert disappointment and lassitude, she continued to attain celebrity; and the company which Faro and Fashion brought together, she soon grew ambitious to collect by motives of more appropriate flattery. All her aim, now, was to be universally alluring” (809–10). Mrs. Berlinton uses the gaming scene to objectify herself and thus re-enact on her own terms and under her control the monetary and sexual exchange that has made her so miserable: her marriage. Her aunt used her niece’s remarkable beauty to gain Mr. Berlinton’s fortune; Mrs. Berlinton strives in her gaming parlor for proper recognition of such highly valued beauty. As she was once in effect prostituted by her family, she, like Sir James Courtly’s “town miss” drawing men in to pay for sex, works to lure the men around her at the faro tables. Originally objectified by her mercenary marriage, her sexual value given a specific monetary equivalent, she forces all in the room to objectify her again. With a powerful gaze that compels an objectifying gaze in return from the assembled men, “she looked from object to object, in smiling discourse, till one by one, every object could look only at her” (810). Mrs. Berlinton relishes the control over her objectification that she seems to exercise at the gambling tables. Yet, by thus highlighting and re-enacting her objectification in a gambling venue where, as we have seen, women’s economic expenditures were sexualized, she also makes herself sexually available despite her marriage. The narrator explains that the “grace and softness which

The Lady’s Last Stake 121

had been secretly bewitching while she had the dignity to keep admiration aloof, were boldly declared to be invincible, since she permitted such professions to reach her ear” (810). By this logic, as soon as a woman allows a man to tell her she is “invincible,” she shows herself conquered, her virtue compromised. Having re-enacted her objectification and courted admiration at the gaming table, Mrs. Berlinton readily listens when Bellamy reappears and asks her “to grant him, from time to time, a few hours society, in a peaceful retirement” (835). Though she initially refuses this request on the grounds that the world would not understand “our exalted league of friendship” and deem an appointment that was only platonic a sexual one, she soon yields. Camilla warns her that such an appointment would indeed end in adulterous sex, but Mrs. Berlinton persists in the romance of platonic friendship that first sanctioned her relationship with Bellamy. When she agrees to meet him, it is “the eloquence of his friendship” that has convinced her (856). Platonism is irresistible to her because it represents the opposite end of the extreme by which she was objectified and married off. Though the sexualized atmosphere of the gaming tables made her more receptive to Bellamy’s request, she seems to grant his requested meeting out of a desperate desire for an economy in which she is not a sexual object. Bellamy reinstates himself in her friendship after his elopement with Eugenia by painting the two of them as similar victims to monetary pressures. Both, he says, were forced to marry for money. Though Camilla quickly points out that the two marriages were not parallel, Bellamy’s logic appeals to Mrs. Berlinton because it suggests they have both been turned by the marriage market into sexual objects with a monetary equivalent and that they can find, outside of marriage, a system of personal value not based on sex and money. Bellamy, however, was only masquerading as a man of feeling while he participated in exchanges of money and sex. At the novel’s end, we learn that he was the “younger son of the master of a great gaming-house” (892). After failing in business and the army, he turned to gaming, won largely, but then was discovered cheating and “chaced from the field of hazard” (892). He changed his name from Nicholas Gwigg to the more mellifluous Alphonso Bellamy and hoped thus to elope with an heiress and satisfy his debts of honor. He was as thoroughly mercenary as Mrs. Berlinton’s family, and feeling was, for him, only a disguise for force; his pose as a gambling man of feeling is fraudulent since, like the gambling men in Cibber’s and Centlivre’s plays, he has been cheating to take advantage of an unsuspecting female gambler by controlling their seemingly chance encounters.

122

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Bellamy’s accidental death prevents Mrs. Berlinton from committing adultery and puts a permanent stop to her gaming. The aunt who had educated and married Mrs. Berlinton off had raised her in an extreme Protestant sect; when Mrs. Berlinton secludes herself in penitence after Bellamy’s death, this aunt turns her niece’s overpowering feelings of shame and remorse toward the enthusiastic religion of her childhood. After her wild career at the gaming tables, Mrs. Berlinton’s passions are controlled and redirected; in the narrator’s words, “she was happily snatched from utter ruin by protecting, though eccentric enthusiasm” (912). Ironically, the aunt that first objectified her in a mercenary marriage finally showed her, in religion, the value system outside of sexual and monetary exchange that she had sought in Platonism. Mrs. Berlinton’s gambling was her desperate and futile attempt to act as agent in an economy that objectified her, but just like the conventional lady’s last stake scenarios described above, the man she gambles with is in control of the game. Only through removing herself entirely from the marketplace in enthusiastic religious seclusion can Mrs. Berlinton find solace from her experience as object and medium of exchange without agency. Burney’s account of Mrs. Berlinton’s experience of gambling and the marriage market does not suggest there is much room in this economy for the married woman’s financial agency. And upon first examination, Burney’s novel seems to criticize Camilla for her acts of economic agency in terms that are reminiscent of the condemnations of female gamblers. By going out shopping with her lower-class friend Mrs. Mitten, Camilla lays herself open to harassment by upper-class men and to damaging questions about her sexual virtue. Shopping, engaging in economic acts so openly, threatens to turn Camilla herself into an object to be purchased just as Mrs Berlinton’s gambling made her appear available to be won.6 Furthermore, just as the female gambler can become specie and pay her debts with her body through sexual favors, the debts Camilla contracts with a dressmaker nearly demand bodily payment. Camilla courts death through “wilful self-neglect,” imagining that her corpse will earn her parents’ forgiveness and Edgar’s long-withheld approval. Finally, just as Mrs. Berlinton can only resolve the problem of being economic agent, specie, and object by removing herself from circulation entirely in religious retreat, the novel resolves Camilla’s similar problem (she was an agent while shopping, an object to the men who witnessed her shopping, and attempted to pay her debt with the specie of her body) through a marriage that removes her from the dangerous credit relations in which she was entangled. After her marriage, Camilla

The Lady’s Last Stake 123

circulates entirely in a closed domestic economy, moving among her father’s, uncle’s, and husband’s houses, entirely sequestered from the markets where she had once shopped. Her economic and legal identity will be fully “covered” by her husband in her marriage. The structural similarities of Mrs. Berlinton’s gambling career and Camilla’s shopping license our reading of their mutually informing relationship. In Cecilia Burney examined the relationship between play debts and trade debts in an economy of private credit; in Camilla she continues that examination but considers in more detail the perspective of the women in that economy. Yet if the conclusion of the novel shows Camilla financially covered by her husband, whose “first care” was “to clear every debt in which Camilla had borne any share,” the novel also demonstrates what Finn calls the “Janus-face of coverture” in which a wife must be a de facto economic agent in an economy of consumption. Camilla apparently makes no more purchases as a wife, but she only becomes a wife because of literal and figurative gambling. Representing a world governed by mere luck, the novel celebrates the gambler’s wager and critiques paralyzing calculation. Though women’s expenditures are controlled in the end, the action of the novel discredits control and promotes chance. Camilla depicts a world not ordered by providence but marked only by luck. While her supremely virtuous younger sister Eugenia is disfigured by a fall and the smallpox, Camilla, though no more deserving, has all the luck, as exemplified by the fact that she wins a lottery not once but twice.7 In this world, the gambler’s wager is shown to be more productive than the endless calculations of those who try to hedge risk on all sides. Camilla’s uncle Sir Hugh’s obsessive attempts to arrange the lives of his nieces and nephews leads to no end of tribulations for the dependents he hopes to benefit. Furthermore, Camilla’s longstanding relationship with Edgar is suspended by his tutor Dr. Marchmont’s misogynistic advice that Edgar must eliminate all chance in their potential union, that he must in effect know the outcome before placing the bet. Marchmont, himself unsuccessful on the marriage market in “a lottery I had found so inauspicious,” counsels Edgar first to achieve “complete knowledge of her disposition” to guarantee his “ultimate peace” in the marriage lottery (644, 645). When monitoring Camilla’s behavior, Edgar laments “in how despicable a lottery I have risked the peace of my life!” (571). Edgar’s calculations and efforts at control to minimize his risk offend and alienate Camilla, with the unfortunate consequence of depriving her of his much-needed guidance as she circulates through the economy with Mrs. Berlinton and Mrs. Mitten.

124

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Camilla’s participation in two raffles or private lotteries (both of which she wins) while she is the object of Edgar’s scrutiny suggest embracing chance rather than trying to control it. The first raffle facilitates a rare moment of intimacy early in Camilla and Edgar’s relationship (an intimacy that is later diluted by Edgar’s doubts about Camilla’s value). After entering the half-guinea lottery for a locket, Camilla regrets that she only has a shilling to give to a family of beggars. Edgar promises to retrieve Camilla’s half-guinea, but when this is not feasible, unbeknownst to her he gives her money of his own to spend in charity; when she wins the locket she discovers Edgar’s sleight of hand. For Edgar, Camilla’s desire to withdraw from the lottery to spend money charitably instead signifies her worthiness as a potential wife who will spend her husband’s money appropriately. But when she wins the prize, Camilla has it both ways: her risk is rewarded at no cost to her character or to her generosity. Camilla’s second lottery similarly affirms her worth and endorses chance over calculation without disciplining her for gambling. Just before Camilla throws the dice in a raffle for a pair of earrings, she and Edgar discuss whether her current residence at Mrs. Berlinton’s house is damaging to Camilla’s reputation, since Mrs. Berlinton’s domestic gambling assemblies are becoming more public. Rather than follow Edgar’s advice that she leave Mrs. Berlinton, Camilla kindly suggests she ought to “stay by, and help to support her” so that Mrs. Berlinton can resist wrongdoing (477). Edgar is moved by Camilla’s generous willingness to risk her own reputation and her repudiation of selfish calculation. As he watches Camilla toss the dice, he thinks of this response as “the proof he had just received that her intrinsic worth was in its first state of excellence” and he recalls their former intimacy at the time of the previous raffle. That Camilla’s worth is in her openness to chance is affirmed as she wins the earrings with the highest dice toss; her victory is a “second testimony to the favour of fortune” (477). When Camilla wins the locket in the first lottery, her friend Mrs. Arlbery says, “I heartily wish you equally brilliant success, in the next and far more dangerous lottery, in which I presume, you will try your fate” (105). Although Edgar and Dr. Marchmont use the lottery metaphor for courtship and marriage to symbolize their unpredictability, Mrs. Arlbery’s lottery metaphor emphasizes the importance of making a wager. Above I suggested that Camilla’s attempt to pay her debts with her body is structurally similar to the lady’s last stake scenario; we can also read this gesture as a wager in the courtship lottery. Camilla stakes her body out of desperation, for there seems to be no way to resolve the various complications that have separated her from Edgar. After the seemingly

The Lady’s Last Stake 125

interminable suspension of her courtship with Edgar due to his aversion to risk, Camilla’s heedless actions finally induce an éclaircissement with Edgar. The romance of chance in this resolution is foregrounded through the series of improbable coincidences that brings Edgar (only recently returned from abroad) to the bedside of the delirious Camilla and puts in his hands a declaration of love she had written to be delivered to him if she died. Camilla puts her fate to chance by abandoning the rules of propriety, desperately traveling the countryside and writing an improperly passionate avowal of her affection for Edgar. Like any sublime wager, Camilla’s encompasses both the frightening possibility of total loss (“she felt herself worse every moment; flushed with fever, or shivering with cold, and her head nearly split asunder with agony”) and a vision of longed-for happiness (she hears Edgar call her “unchangeably generous Camilla” before she falls into “an hysteric fit”) (870, 878). Edgar and Camilla’s engagement is finally secured because Camilla makes a wager that demonstrates both her love and her value. The novel makes use of the improbable romance of unlikely coincidences and convenient chance events to reward Camilla’s wager, to continue her lucky streak. Thus her wager with chance is positively contrasted with Edgar and Marchmont’s cold-hearted calculation. If marriage is a lottery, one must wager; as Henderson explains, “Camilla and Edgar become for each other singular objects of desire who not only merit but require risk-taking to obtain” (Henderson 76). Camilla uses the (very) long form of the novel as well as the resources of romance to draw a complex version of the lady’s last stake scenario and its relationship to other economic acts undertaken by women. While the stereotypical lady’s last stake scenario was controlled by male players to lead to one obvious outcome, Camilla registers the tension between chance and control in a woman’s gambling and examines the possibilities for agency in a woman’s economic acts, whether at the gaming tables or in the shops. Camilla represents the contradictions of an economy that officially forbids the expenditures of married women on which it actually depends while also casting those women as both objects and specie. Mrs. Berlinton’s gambling offers her only temporary respite from objectification and Camilla’s trade debts lead to severe harrowing, yet Camilla’s risk-taking is the only solution to the courtship plot’s impasse. Rather than worry over the future of a society superintended by gambling women (as The Lady’s Curiosity melodramatically warns its readers in an essay on women’s expenditures at cards, “our youth are in the hands of these mothers”), Camilla’s ingenuousness, her refusal to calculate, her willingness to take risks for the right

126

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

reasons – all gambler’s traits – are celebrated (235). Though coverture removes Camilla from direct economic acts once she is married, Camilla’s “gaiety” is “no longer to be feared,” but still observable by all as evidence of “her exquisite lot” (913). Indeed, her gambler’s gaiety and ingenuousness is shown to especially suit her for maternity. One of the few moments early in the novel when Edgar is certain of Camilla’s wifely suitability is when he sees her playing with children; this sportive sweetness is unabated and unpunished at the novel’s end. It is tempting to see at least a partial explanation of this cautious celebration of the female gambler’s risk taking in Burney’s own acts of economic and personal agency in the years leading up to Camilla’s publication. Not only did she extricate herself from her secure but unpleasant position as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte over her father’s objections (1791), but without her father’s approval and on a shaky financial foundation she married the émigré Alexander D’Arblay (1793). She undertook the writing of Camilla shortly after the birth of her first and only child in order to provide more financial security for her new family. Motherhood required her to take an economic risk. Rather than allow booksellers to assume the risk (and thus the profits) of publication, she financed the novel’s publication by subscription; this wager paid handsomely and the £2000 made from the book enabled her and her husband to build the home they called “Camilla Cottage.” Burney’s economic wager on her novel did not undermine her domestic felicity, as anti-gambling commentators warned of women’s wagers, but promoted it. Through her actions, Burney debunks the improbable fiction of coverture; her novel uses the romance of the female gambler to contrast the fiction of coverture with the complexity of women’s economic acts in the eighteenth-century economy.

5 Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home”: Belinda, Education, and Empire

Since gambling both inspired the credit economy and was ubiquitous as a leisure activity in everyday culture in eighteenth-century England, it played an important role in the thinking of educational theorists. What was the impact of the gambling culture on children? What kinds of games should children play? Should they be allowed to wager, or to pretend to wager? Can gambling be harnessed for educational ends? While some writers lamented that gambling could distract a mother from caring for her children, others recognized that children themselves might be drawn to gambling. This chapter surveys the broad range of approaches to children’s games and gambling, with a particular focus on the innovative pedagogy of Maria Edgeworth and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth. I have argued throughout this book that gambling affords novelists opportunities to examine the economy transformed by gambling; in Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801), scenes of childhood gambling lead to an examination of the connection between gambling and slave owning in the expanding British colonies and obliquely to a consideration of the dependence of the capitalizing economy on slave labor. Near the halfway point of Belinda, the eponymous heroine plays jack straws with Charles Percival, a young boy. Belinda’s suitor, Mr. Vincent, quickly wagers “a hundred guineas on the steadiness of Miss Portman’s hand.” Charles answers with a bet of sixpence: “Done! Done!” cried Mr. Vincent. “Done! Done!” cried the boy, stretching out his hand, but his father caught it. “Softly! softly, Charles! No betting, if you please, my dear. Done! and done! – sometimes ends in – Undone.” 127

128

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

“It was my fault – it was I who was in the wrong,” cried Vincent. (248)1 This scene brings together seemingly discrete elements of Edgeworth’s novel under the aegis of gambling: the incorporation of the Edgeworths’ educational theory through the model family, the Percivals, and the presentation, through Vincent, a creole planter, of new types of British identity that grew out of the expanding empire. As a child and a colonial slave owner lay a wager against each other, the nexus of gambling, education, and empire in this scene draws our attention to the prominence of gambling in Edgeworth’s analyses of education and the expanding British empire in her pedagogical and fictional writing, and highlights the ineluctable relationship between educational and colonial projects. We can see the inherent tension between chance and control in gambling in Edgeworth’s ambivalent and even contradictory attitude toward the activity: children should avoid games of chance, but parents should use chance as an instructional tool, while the adult gamester’s fascination with chance is reprehensible. Richard and Maria Edgeworth’s philosophy of moral action celebrates personal control: both children and adults ought to act deliberately, from rational principles. Children should be taught that their own actions and choices can bring about their happiness, and adults should make decisions based on reason rather than on emotion. The Percivals, Belinda’s model Edgeworthian family, teach their children to prefer “game[s] of address, not chance” (249). Throughout her pedagogical and fictional writing, Edgeworth often promotes such “games of address” as billiards, which require skill and call for rational analysis, and suggests children avoid “games of chance,” thought to encourage indolence. This careful parsing of types of gaming reflects the metamorphosis in the eighteenth century of playing cards and other games from instruments of chance to educational tools used to teach children everything from grammar to morality to facts about other countries. By the end of the century, childhood gambling was discouraged by many educational writers, yet even as Edgeworth forbids gambling, she remains interested in the pedagogical uses of chance and encourages parents to harness its power for the formation of their children’s minds. The Edgeworthian prescription for carefully controlled encounters with chance does not recognize the constitutive tension between chance and control in gambling, and instead depends on the fiction that chance and control can be separated out, that one can indeed make a clear distinction

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 129

between games of address and games of chance, and that one can be exposed to chance without being seduced by its sublime pleasures. Yet in Belinda, at the same time that the Percivals recommend games of address to their children to develop their powers of reason, the novel shows the rational self being undone by the sublime emotions of gambling, by unpredictable chance, or by cheaters who control the game for their own ends. In representing gambling, Edgeworth’s novel presents a more complex view of chance and control than her pedagogy acknowledges, particularly as it examines the gambling of a West Indian slave owner. Though Belinda is set entirely in England, the novel is very much interested in the relationship between England and its colonies, as the title for Edgeworth’s preliminary sketch for the novel, “Abroad and at Home,” indicates. The eighteenth century’s expanding, gamblinginflected capital economy was dependent on slavery nearly from its start, as when the main business of the South Sea Company was supplying slaves to Spanish colonists. By the time Edgeworth was writing, British involvement in the slave trade was becoming controversial, and in her depiction of the creole planter Vincent she draws on extensive stereotypes of West Indians, including gambling, that were used by both sides of the abolition debate. Following these stereotypes, Edgeworth identifies Vincent’s gambling propensity as a specifically West Indian trait that he has brought to England. In the scene with which I opened this chapter, Vincent blames himself for encouraging young Charles Percival to wager, as if Charles could have had no other exposure to gambling. Vincent declares, “It was my fault – it was I who was in the wrong.” Because, in Edgeworth’s pedagogy, encounters with chance are crucial to the formation of the self, Vincent’s unsupervised childhood gambling among slaves on his father’s West Indian plantation molds his character, and ultimately disqualifies him as a suitor for the English heroine Belinda. In Edgeworth’s preliminary sketch for the novel, Belinda has only one suitor, Clarence Hervey, but in the completed novel, she comes close to marrying the creole Vincent.2 In the sketch, the Englishman Hervey is a dissipated gamester who gets ill after “drinking for a wager” (483), but in the novel, though he is eccentric and for a time deluded by Rousseauvian educational schemes, he “never play[s]” (483, 419). Instead, gambling is Vincent’s fatal flaw, and, though there are other minor, British characters who game, such as Lord Delacour and Mrs. Luttridge, the novel links the passion for play to Vincent’s upbringing in the West Indies. Vincent’s susceptibility to gambling enables the novel at once to highlight and ultimately to evade the dependence of the British

130

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

economy on slave labor. Vincent’s gambling, originating in the primal scene with his father’s slaves, draws our attention to his slave owning (as indeed does the presence in the novel of his former slave, Juba), yet the novel seems to vilify Vincent in the end as a gamester, rather than as a slave owner. At the end of the novel, even as the creole gamester Vincent and the gender non-conformist Harriet Freke are punished, the ex-slave Juba marries a white English servant, the cheating gamestress Mrs. Luttridge goes virtually unpunished, and West Indian slave-based wealth continues to underwrite British society, making the final resolution of the novel possible as Mr. Hartley, a Jamaican planter, and Captain Sunderland, fresh from putting down a slave revolt, are reunited with Virginia St. Pierre (a reunion that in turn makes Hervey and Belinda’s marriage possible). The romance of the unpredictable financial windfall once again makes the novel’s conclusion possible, but in this text the provenance of the windfall is given socioeconomic specificity. Despite the gambling slave owner’s exclusion, English society is dependent on West Indians, their wealth, and the labor that generates that wealth.

Gambling and education In Practical Education (1798; hereafter PE), their manual for parents teaching children at home, Maria Edgeworth and her father conclude a discussion of toys by explaining that although they have “recommended all trials of address and dexterity … games of chance, we think should be avoided, as they tend to give a taste for gambling” (53). The Edgeworths’ persistent interest in this opposition between games of address and games of chance illuminates quite effectively the appeal of gambling, though it is meant to do the opposite. Vain people, they believe, develop a taste for gaming because apparent “good luck” (though only a chance outcome) suggests personal merit. Indolent people prefer games of chance either because such play awakens them with little effort from “their habitual state of apathy” or because it makes them equal or superior to their competitors “without any mental exertion” (54). Without endorsing the Edgeworths’ character judgments of gamblers as vain or indolent, we can agree that gamblers often feel that they deserve the good luck that befalls them, that gambling is very absorbing and engaging to those who participate, and that in fairly conducted games of chance, all players are equals. These are not lessons the Edgeworths want to teach. Instead, they suggest that children who, unlike gamblers, learn the pleasure of “well-earned praise” will not look “to chance for the increase of self approbation” (55). This opposition

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 131

between games of address and of chance dovetails with a broad goal of Practical Education: to help parents teach their children the value of “practice and industry,” traits directly antithetical to the pleasures of gambling (28). As in Edgeworth’s story “Murad the Unlucky” (1804), where apparent good luck is shown to be the result of prudence and of careful exertion, in Practical Education the Edgeworths suggest that when a game seems to depend on “some knack or mystery,” parents should explain to children “how or why … they succeed or fail: we may show them, that, in reality, there is no knack or mystery in any thing, but that from certain causes certain effects will follow” (27). Instead of accommodating the tension between chance and control in games, the Edgeworths want to eliminate chance entirely. The Edgeworths’ pedagogy means to empower children by showing them how they can learn to control events. This is presented as a scientific process: when learning a game or a skill, “after trying a number of experiments, the circumstances essential to success may be discovered” (PE 27–8).3 The goals of this educational model are similar to those of probability theory, namely, to increase one’s feeling of power in the face of chance by analyzing its operations. The “sober lesson” that outcomes are the consequence of industry rather than luck “may be taught to children without putting it into grave words, or without formal precepts” (28). But even as this educational model demystifies chance in order to promote a scientific analysis of causes and effects that is supposed to develop children’s habits of industriousness, Edgeworthian pedagogy depends for its efficacy on chance events, or, more properly, on the parent’s manipulation of chance events for educational ends because the Edgeworths recognize the appeal of chance. The Edgeworths encourage the parent or educator to take advantage of children’s inherent love of toys and games, rather than to fight against it. In Practical Education, a father explains centrifugal motion after his children happen to see its effects; in Belinda, when the Percival children wonder whether their goldfish can hear, Dr. X–– tells them the history of a learned dispute on this subject.4 Education depends on developing the chance occurrence into an instructional occasion. Madame de Rosier, the eponym of Edgeworth’s “The Good French Governess,” “knew how much of the art of instruction depends upon seizing the proper moments to introduce new ideas” (Moral Tales 305). When Mr. Percival intervenes in Charles’ jack-straw wager with Vincent, rather than scold the boy, he uses the occasion to discuss different kinds of games and betting situations. An instructor can increase the probability of such chance educational moments arising; “it is surprising

132

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

how much children may learn from their playthings when they are judiciously chosen” (PE 29). “The Good French Governess” features a “rational toy-shop” filled with miniature printing presses, basketweaving kits, radish-seed kits, magnifying glasses, and other toys that promote children’s industry and provide instructional opportunities for parents. In Belinda, the Percival children have been guided toward amusements that give them pleasure but also afford instruction. They collect mineral specimens, look at sulfurs, and visit a bird seller to see the different breeds they have read about. Edgeworth’s interest in toys that co-opted the engrossing chance event for educational ends can be traced back to John Locke’s suggestion, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), that children wager with a 26-sided alphabetical die in order to learn their letters, “it being as good a sort of play to lay a stake who shall first throw an A or B, as who upon dice shall throw six or seven” (209). Eighteenth-century booksellers issued packs of playing cards that, like the alphabetical die and the toys in the “rational toy-shop” of “The Good French Governess,” tried, in Locke’s words, to “cozen [children] into Knowledge” by turning learning into a game (208). Playing cards quickly assumed a place in the iconography of childhood; paintings like William Hogarth’s The House of Cards (1730) and Joseph Francis Nollekens’s The Two Children of the Nollekens Family Playing with a Top and Playing Cards (1745) suggest both the fragility of childhood and children’s inventiveness with images of children building houses of cards. Building on this evident appeal of cards, not just as instruments of chance but as children’s toys, card makers issued geographical, alphabetical, grammatical, astronomical, and historical cards, some of which featured both the markings of regular playing cards and instructional material so that children could play card games and learn at the same time, while others abandoned the option of gaming and followed only the size and shape of playing cards. Indeed, an edition of Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children takes advantage of the popularity of the playing-card format even though one of the songs, “The Child’s Complaint,” denounces play with the verse: “Why should I love my sport so well. / So constant at my play; / And loose [sic] the thoughts of heav’n and hell / And then forget to pray?”5 These educational playing cards illustrated a range of lessons suitable to young subjects of the burgeoning empire. Card packs engraved with the arms of English and Scottish peers instructed children in the order of an aristocratic social and political system, while alphabet cards with proverbs such as “Be learn’d and polite / And quite cleanly

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 133

be seen / And you’ll merit the notice / Of Charlotte our Queen” and “Huzza! For King George / How noble he looks! He knows all his Letters / And reads well in Books” promote the monarchs as models of politeness and learning.6 Geographical card packs taught children about the global capitalizing economy, enumerating the counties and products of England and inscribing ethnic difference, as on the eight of spades in a circa 1790 pack where a child could read, among other facts about Turkey, that “The Turks have black hair and black eyes” (Tilley 75).7 Playing cards could encourage nationalist sentiment in the context of increasing unrest in France in the late eighteenth century, as on a card showing a “Yeoman” that reads “An English Beef-eater / Quite joyous see here / Who guards King and Queen / Good Beef and Strong Beer.”8 Bourgeois virtues were promoted on cards that denounced envy or that showed a child led away in fetters above the proverb, “Rogues are allways in fear / Till at length they are bound. / Peace Mirth and Content / With the Honest are found.”9 The irony of such didactic lessons of control in the format of playing cards highlights the inherent challenge of trying to harness gambling for educational purposes. The punishment for an unruly “rogue” child depicted on a playing card points to the tension between chance and control in educational games, as in gambling itself. Educational dice games, like cards, also demonstrate this tension between chance and control, as in an early board game called “The New Game of Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished” (1810). Players advanced on a board through symbolic scenes representing “Faith” and “Prudence” if they threw the dice on certain numbers, and retreated back to “The Stocks” or “The House of Correction” if they threw other numbers (Darton 153). Such games of chance are not thoroughly stable as pedagogical tools, however; this game metes out reward or punishment capriciously, based not on the virtue or vice of the player, but on the chance outcome of a dice throw. No wonder that even as some educators counseled parents to use chance for instructive ends, most, like the Edgeworths, remained fundamentally suspicious about children’s gaming. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, in her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), warned that “nothing can be more absurd than permitting girls to acquire a fondness for cards” (45). While some educators worried about the use of games of chance for instruction in virtue, other advisers actually recommended gaming itself as an important component of a child’s education. The late seventeenth-century French writers Maréchal de Caillière and the Chevalier de Méré both argued that gaming was an important skill

134

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

for a gentleman. Gaming could afford an impoverished nobleman the opportunity to replenish his fortune with honor, could cultivate a mastery over passion, and could provide admission to upper-class circles (Ariès 80–1). Given the ubiquity of gambling in England as well as in France, some skill in gaming was desirable, if only as a defense against sharpers. Richard Seymour claimed that his treatise The Court Gamester (1718) would help readers detect “Frauds in Play”; though it is dedicated to “the young Princesses,” it addressed middle-class aspirations. As he explained in his preface, “Gaming is become so much the fashion among the Beau Monde, that he who in Company should appear ignorant of the games in Vogue, would be reckoned low bred and hardly fit for conversation” (qtd. in Hargrave 205). Edmond Hoyle was the first to grasp fully the possible market in gaming instruction. In addition to publishing his Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742), which became the standard rule book for the game until 1869, he tutored would-be players of whist for one guinea a lesson. In 1753, a London newspaper remarked, “There is a new kind of tutor lately introduced into some Families of Fashion in this Kingdom principally to complete the education of the Young Ladies, namely a Gaming Master; who attends his Hour as regularly as the Music, Dancing, and French Master; in order to instruct young Misses in Principles of the fashionable Accomplishment of Card playing” (qtd. in Hargrave 206). Skill in gaming, then, was part of the display of status for both men and women, an important element in the assemblage of “accomplishments” and leisure occupations that parents hoped might help their children ascend the social hierarchy depicted, for example, in the ranks of peerage on the armorial packs of playing cards described above. While players might ascend a social ladder via gaming, they could of course just as easily descend an economic ladder through losses at play. The anonymous author of the satirical essay “A Modest Defence of Gaming” (1754) facetiously suggests that gaming is educational because it exposes and inures us to economic flux, “teach[ing] us to bear up against the Charms of Wealth and the Terrors of Poverty” in addition to inculcating a salutary disdain of riches (28). Again refusing the chance of positive outcomes, Edgeworth sees monetary loss in gaming as inevitable, so “practical education” must involve not only preparation for loss, but rational decisions about how much one is willing to lose. As with her recommendations for children’s carefully controlled exposure to chance, in Edgeworth’s later novel Ormond (1817), she recommends a perfectly controlled participation in gambling based on the assumption of loss. Surprisingly, the eponymous virtuous hero

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 135

enters enthusiastically into his host’s regular gaming parties. When a concerned onlooker warns him to take care, he responds, “But there is no danger of my acquiring a taste for play, because I am determined to lose.” “Bon!” said the abbé, “that is the most singular determination I ever heard; explain that to me then, Monsieur.” “I have determined to lose a certain sum – suppose five hundred guineas – I have won and lost backwards and forwards, and have been longer about it than you would conceive to be probable, but it is not yet lost. The moment it is, I shall stop short. By this means I have acquired all the advantages of yielding to the fashionable madness, without risking my future happiness.” (302) Not only does Ormond devise an ingenious way to participate in the gaming culture of France without compromising his virtue or fortune, but his exposure to gaming actually helps form his character. His controlled encounter with chance defines who he is both for himself and for those observing him. As I noted above, Edgeworth is fully aware of the romance of chance; gaming without safeguards such as Ormond’s is dangerous precisely because the chance event is so seductive. Throughout Practical Education, the Edgeworths advise parents to build on their children’s chance impressions because these operate with more force on their minds than irrelevant tasks or lectures. Edgeworth demonstrates the powerful effect of chance events on character formation in the subplot of Belinda involving Hervey’s attempt to “educate a wife for himself” after reading the works of Rousseau (362). Edgeworth critiques Book V of Rousseau’s Émile by having Clarence learn to prefer Belinda’s prudence and reason to Virginia’s innocence and sentiment. Virginia’s own story, however, illustrates the powerful effect of chance on the formation of character. She cannot love Hervey as she feels she ought, because her mind has been possessed by the image of a man in a miniature painting she once saw. Because she led a secluded life and was subject to none of the random experiences on which an Edgeworthian education would be based, this one chance sighting has an inordinate influence on her tastes and occupations, leading her to read romances where she can imagine the man in the painting as the hero of her books. Like Vincent’s gambling (as we shall see below), Virginia’s romance reading is an expenditure of passion that does not lead to social unions or to virtuous benevolence but to self-absorption. By demonstrating the power of chance events on

136

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

the mind of the young woman, Edgeworth further critiques Rousseau’s proposed method of educating women, for not only is Virginia’s unregulated sensibility unsuited for a man of sense, as Clarence learns, but the method of isolation from chance events is foolish, even dangerous. By secluding Virginia in the New Forest to protect her from preying men, her grandmother only made her more vulnerable, both to those preying men but also to self-absorption. By continuing her seclusion at Windsor, Clarence keeps Virginia from the random occurrences that could have prevented her obsession with the man in the miniature and made her more capable of intellectual growth and productive love for Hervey himself. While Virginia’s romance with a miniature painting demonstrates the power of the chance event, Vincent demonstrates the limits of Edgeworth’s prescription for a carefully controlled exposure to chance such as Ormond practices and Percival recommends. For Vincent, encounters with the sublime pleasures of chance in gambling are overpowering. When Vincent came to England as Percival’s ward at age 18, his guardian, before he discovered Vincent’s taste for gambling, noticed he had “that presumptuous belief in his special good fortune, which naturally leads to the love of gambling” (423). Demonstrating the method the Edgeworths recommend in Practical Education, Percival does not lecture his ward, but “appealed to his understanding, and took opportunities of showing him the ruinous effects of high play in real life” (423). Vincent’s response is, in keeping with his character, emotional rather than reasoned. He expresses his “detestation of the selfish character of a gamester” with vehemence and indignantly rejects the suggestion that he has this propensity. When the opportunity to gamble arises, therefore, Vincent courts sublime chance; he is “eager, rather than averse, to expose himself to the danger, that he might prove his superiority to the temptation” (423). He purposely maintains his acquaintance with Mrs. Luttridge even though he knows she is a “professed gambler” in order to demonstrate to Percival that his worry was needless. According to Edgeworthian pedagogy, this exposure to gaming would not necessarily be dangerous if it were carefully regulated, perhaps according to a plan like Ormond’s. Instead, of course, Vincent overestimates his own invincibility and he is drawn into high-stakes play at Mrs. Luttridge’s. The text blames Vincent’s susceptibility on his emotional “detestation” of gambling; his emotional reaction to Percival’s lessons, rather than a reasoned rejection of gambling, leaves him vulnerable to the sublimity he experiences in gambling. As the narrator says of Vincent, “Emotion of some kind or another was become necessary to him; he said that not

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 137

to feel, was not to live; and soon the suspense, the anxiety, the hopes, the fears, the perpetual vicissitudes of a gamester’s life, appeared almost as delightful as those of a lover” (424). Vincent justifies his initial gaming with the Luttridges by invoking the Percivals’ distinction between games of address and games of chance: Billiards, however, was a game of address, not chance; there was [a] billiard-table at Oakly-park, as well as at Mr. Luttridge’s and he had played with his guardian. Why then, should he not play with Mr. Luttridge? He did play: his skill was admired; he betted, and his bets were successful: but he did not call this gaming, for the bets were not to any great amount, and it was only playing at billiards. (424) Vincent allows himself to play and to wager on billiards because it is game of skill, but he forgets that in Percival’s view, though one can play a game of address, it is still dangerous to wager on it. Lady Delacour points this out to Belinda. Discussing the possibility that Vincent is a gamester, Belinda remarks, “I know he used to play at billiards at Oakly-park, but merely as an amusement. Games of address, however, as Mr. Percival says, are not be put on a footing with games of hazard.” To which Lady Delacour dryly answers, “A man may, however, contrive to lose a good deal of money at billiards, as poor lord Delacour can tell you” (347). Furthermore, extensive cheating renders the distinction between games of address and of chance moot as cheaters in this novel manipulate games for their own profit. Lord Delacour and Vincent lose at their game of skill, billiards, because the Luttridges’ table is “not perfectly even”; Vincent loses at E O, a game of chance, because the table had been “constructed for purposes of fraud”; a controlled game is merely masquerading as a game of chance (421). Playing with cheaters, there is no such thing as a game of address or a game of chance. Vincent’s proximity to cheaters (though unbeknownst to him) taints him and turns him into a kind of cheater himself. He is ultimately excluded from the novel’s happy resolution not just because he games, but because he is dishonest with Belinda about his gaming: “His former nice sense of honor had been considerably deadened at the gaming-table; and he could now stoop to that dissimulation, at which he would have shuddered but a few months before” (442). After Hervey saves Vincent from financial ruin by revealing that Mrs. Luttridge’s E O table was rigged, Vincent cannot bring himself to confess to Belinda as promised. When

138

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Belinda discovers the truth, her farewell letter expresses as much disappointment in having been deceived as in his actual gaming. “The hopes of enjoying domestic happiness with a person whose manners, temper, and tastes, were suited to my own, induced me to listen to your address. Your unfortunate propensity to a dangerous amusement, which is now, for the first time, made known to me, puts an end to these hopes for ever” (448). The discovery of Vincent’s gaming hits Belinda in a vulnerable spot, for after trying to understand Hervey’s confusing behavior earlier in the novel, Belinda had lamented to Lady Anne Percival that it was very difficult for women to bestow their affections where they were deserved, since “men have it in their power to assume the appearance of every thing that is amiable and estimable, and women have scarcely any opportunities of detecting the counterfeit” (240). Both Hervey and Vincent cheated Belinda by appearing to be what they were not; Vincent’s fall shows Belinda’s system of rational esteem, her attempt to minimize chance in the lottery of courtship, to be inadequate in the face of deceptive appearances. Belinda’s experience with Hervey and Vincent belies Lady Anne’s assurance that in “private society” a woman could discern a man’s “real character” (240). Belinda turned from passion to esteem as the proper basis for courtship after being disappointed by Hervey, a contrast we could see as analogous to games of chance versus games of address; Vincent’s dishonesty invalidates Belinda’s distinction between love and esteem just as the Luttridges’ cheating undermines the Percivals’ (and the Edgeworths’) differentiation between games of address and chance. Although both Vincent’s susceptibility to sublime gambling and the Luttridges’ cheating undermine the Edgeworths’ doctrine of controlled exposure to chance and their distinction between games of address and chance, Clarence Hervey is reinstated as Belinda’s lover at the novel’s end in no small part because Hervey models the Edgeworths’ educational theory both in his practice and in his pedagogy. Though Edgeworth critiqued Rousseau via Hervey’s wife-education project, later in the novel Hervey approaches problems with the Edgeworthian scientific method; faced with the suggestion that Mrs. Luttridge wins her money unfairly, “it occurred to him that, perhaps, the E O table might be so contrived, as to put the fortunes of all who played at it in the power of the proprietor. Clarence had sufficient ingenuity to invent the method by which this might be done” and he had sufficient intrepidity to sneak into the Luttridges’ drawing room and inspect the table on the sly (421). Proceeding from the principle laid out in Practical Education “that, in reality, there is no knack or mystery in any thing, but that from

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 139

certain causes certain effects will follow,” Hervey easily discovers the fraud that is posing as chance (PE 27). Then, following Edgeworth’s appreciation of the educative power of chance events rather than imposed tasks and lectures, Hervey allows Vincent to game at the fixed table and (seemingly) lose his whole fortune so that he will “feel all the horrours of a gamester’s fate” and vow to reform (421). Despite Edgeworth’s misgivings about children’s participation in games of chance, cards were well established as pedagogical instruments of the expanding empire, gambling was seen as an important component of the accomplished subject of this empire, and even in Edgeworth’s works, encounters with chance are crucial to the formation of the self. Ormond and Virginia demonstrate for better and worse the power of chance events on the constitution of the self, and Vincent’s sublime gambling suggests it is difficult to regulate one’s exposure to chance as the Edgeworths recommend. In Belinda cheating poses a threat to the pedagogical distinction between games of address and chance, but at the same time cheating is fully detectable by the Edgeworthian scientific method. While Hervey’s detection of cheating partially reaffirms the Edgeworthian pedagogy that Vincent’s gambling undermined, Vincent’s gambling also forces us to consider the conditions of the expanding empire so cheerily delineated in educational playing cards. The primal scene of Vincent’s gambling with enslaved laborers as a child on a West Indian plantation reminds us what is at stake in the education of children in an economy dependent on slavery.

Gambling and empire The Edgeworths’ educational model, both in their theoretical works and in Edgeworth’s fiction, is private and patriarchal. For the most part, they write for parents or tutors educating children within the home rather than for schoolteachers.10 As Julia Douthwaite suggests, the Edgeworths encourage parents to create a children’s room that is an educational laboratory; this is a room in the well-appointed town house or the manor house on the estate in which the children learn lessons of class privileges and duties. From the Edgeworths’ perspective, the proper fundamental social and political unit, both in England and in the colonies, is the estate.11 Although in Castle Rackrent (1800) Edgeworth mocked this view by showing generation after generation of estate owners to be incapable and sometimes downright vicious administrators, a later novel, The Absentee (1812), concludes with a utopian vision of the perfectly managed colonial estate. A significant element

140

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

of this management is the return to their proper places of the various characters who have tried to cross social (and geographical) boundaries. The Anglo-Irish landowners, the Clonbronys, leave England to reside permanently on their Irish estate; the over-reaching agent is replaced by one who will serve the Clonbronys’ interest, not his own. Even the Irish laborer, Paddy Brady, leaves his job in a coach-maker’s shop in London and returns to Ireland to work on the estate. By renouncing absenteeism and returning to Ireland, the Clonbronys and their son make sure that their Irish tenants are fairly treated, thus ensuring in turn that the tenants continue to accept English colonization. Edgeworth might logically have extended her critique of estate management and absentee landlords to the English colonies in the West Indies in Belinda.12 In the West Indies, however, responsible landowning entailed not only efficient and benevolent management that would keep tenants pacified, but also the administration of slave labor; in Belinda, Edgeworth is ambivalent about the role of slavery in the colonies and the prominence of slave-derived wealth in England. Unlike The Absentee, at the end of Belinda, characters are not consistently returned to their supposedly proper geographical locations. Mr. Hartley and Captain Sutherland, whose fortunes were both made in the West Indies, are allowed to stay in England, as is the former slave Juba. After his gaming proclivity is discovered, Vincent goes to Germany where he continues to live as an absentee off the proceeds of his Jamaican slaves’ labor.13 As Susan Greenfield has argued, Vincent’s eventual expulsion helps this novel maintain (however tenuously) the boundaries between “At Home” and “Abroad” that as a creole slave owner engaged to a British woman he had threatened. Yet the terms of his expulsion – as a gamester, rather than simply as a creole – need further attention. The novel carefully links Vincent’s gambling to his colonial upbringing by drawing on standard stereotypes of West Indians as adventurers who have the gambler’s disregard for future events and by explicitly blaming his gaming on the slaves with whom he associated in Jamaica. Giving the creole the vice of gaming thus intensifies Vincent’s representation of the “Abroad” of Edgeworth’s provisional title, the colonial fringe that must not contaminate the metropolis. To shape Vincent’s character, Edgeworth draws on the tendency of contemporary histories of Jamaica to describe white creoles as a new, mongrelized race and to isolate common English pastimes and concerns, in particular gambling, as endemic to the West Indies. The description of Vincent’s childhood gaming condenses these anxieties about creoles: “The taste for gambling he had acquired whilst he was a

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 141

child; but as it was then confined to trifles, it had been passed over, as a thing of no consequence, a boyish folly, that would never grow up with him: his father used to see him, day after day, playing with eagerness, at games of chance, with his negroes” (422). We can see the fear that the inheritor of the estate – the ambiguous possessive, “his negroes,” reminds us that the father’s slaves will some day be the son’s – is tainted by engaging in games of chance with slaves, for whom such games carried different moral and educational connotations. At the same time, gaming seems to be a specifically “negro” activity here, like obeah; the passage implicitly blames Vincent’s propensity to gamble as an adult on the “negroes” who introduced him to games of chance as a child. Edgeworth’s critique is complicated by the fact that the English colonies in the West Indies were in general thought to have attracted gamblers and speculators as settlers. As D. H. Murdoch explains, “plantation agriculture in the West Indies was a high-risk business; it attracted adventurers” (573). Nonetheless, as these colonial gamblers became wealthy, they wanted to return to England and to move in the opulent social circles that had once been closed to them. The social-climbing West Indian in London became a stock comic character in English drama alongside his fellow outsiders, the cit, the nabob, and the Irishman, expressing the privileged classes’ anxiety that their ranks were being infiltrated. English West Indian landowners, and especially creoles, were thought to be undeserving not just because they often had lower-class antecedents, but because their proximity to, and involvement with, slaves seemed to compromise not just their social standing but their very race. The word “creole,” meaning a person born in the West Indies, whether of European or African descent, suggests a concern with the fluidity of national and racial identities engendered by imperial ambitions.14 Discussing white creoles in his New History of Jamaica (1740), Vice Admiral Vernon claimed, “their Complection is muddy” (qtd. in Sypher 505). Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), describes the supposedly racial traits of white creoles in minute detail: The native white men, or Creoles, of Jamaica are in general tall and well shaped … Their cheeks are remarkably high-boned, and the sockets of their eyes deeper than is commonly observed among the natives of England … a light grey, and black, or deep hazel, are the more common colours of the pupil. The effect of climate is not only remarkable in the structure of their eyes, but likewise in the extraordinary freedom and suppleness of their joints, which enable them to move with ease, and give them a surprising agility. (III.261–2)

142

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

In addition to physical descriptions, such pseudo-anthropological accounts of this new race also listed creoles’ social occupations as if they were specifically determined by their birth and residence in slave colonies. Gaming was chief among these occupations. “They live well … make Money, and are quite careless of Futurity,” according to Vernon (qtd. in Sypher 505). Long claims, “they affect gaiety and diversions, which in general are cards, billiards, backgammon, chess, horse-racing … They are too much addicted to expensive living, costly entertainments, dress, and equipage.” To finance such tastes, planters would buy up new tracts of land to mortgage, thus “plung[ing] deeper and deeper into debt and distress” (II.262, 265, 266). This supposed West Indian addiction to gaming and high living and the unconcern for the future on which it is based are described as if the English had never confronted these problems in their own country. Carefully supervising children’s education in such an environment was crucial. Belinda blames Vincent’s father for passing over Vincent’s gambling as “a thing of no consequence.” While Mr. Percival quickly intervened in little Charles’s jack-straw wager, Vincent’s father “was never alarmed” by his son’s gambling; “he was too intent upon making a fortune for his family, to consider how they would spend it” (422–3). Here too Edgeworth draws on a standard concern in fiction about the West Indies: the supposed neglect of creole children’s education due to parents’ overwhelming concern with getting rich quickly. Most wealthy planters in the West Indies hoped eventually to return to England to live off the revenue of their estates as absentees; while in residence in the West Indies, however, they faced the problem of educating their children for the exalted class position they hoped one day to assume.15 The didactic novel Sanford and Merton (1783–9), by the Edgeworths’ friend Thomas Day, notes the difficulty of raising children in an atmosphere of slavery that was detrimental even to adults, whose character was supposed to be already formed. Merton, the wealthy owner of a large slave estate in Jamaica, moves back to England to educate his only son “properly,” that is, out of the slave environment. Tommy Merton is indolent and tyrannical because, though very young, he is used to commanding slaves to do everything for him. “While he lived in Jamaica, he had several black servants to wait upon him, who were forbidden upon any account to contradict him. If he walked, there always went two negroes with him; one of whom carried a large umbrella to keep the sun from him, and the other was to carry him in his arms whenever he was tired” (Day 9).16 The slaveholding hero of Sarah Scott’s novel The History of Sir George Ellison (1766) took the unusual step of hiring

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 143

a tutor to come from England to instruct “all the children of his negro slaves,” but his own son had to be sent to England at six years of age to counteract his creole mother’s unthinking overindulgence (Scott 17). As Constantia remarks in Helena Wells’s Constantia Neville; or the West Indian (1800), “Except where an uncommon degree of attention is paid by parents, young persons of both sexes, who continue there after seven years old, run great risk of contamination of the negroes” (qtd. in Sypher 515). English stereotypes of creole adults reflected the supposed neglect of their education. Creole women were almost universally described as indolent, lascivious, and cruel.17 Creole men were described as debased and cruel, tyrants and keepers of black concubines, or as morally weak and excessively sentimental, with an overdeveloped sense of chivalry and honor, or as a paradoxical combination of both types. Edgeworth casts Vincent in the sentimental creole mode, the most famous literary example of which is the hero of Richard Cumberland’s play, The West Indian (1771). Such a person was, in Long’s words, “sensible, of quick apprehension, brave, good-natured, affable, generous … unsuspicious, [a] lover of freedom, fond of social enjoyments … liable to sudden transports of anger; but these fits …, though violent while they last, are soon over.”18 Vincent is handsome and expressive, sunburnt and “foreign”-seeming. His repeated gesticulations during conversation indicate his emotionalism. “He had a frank ardent temper, incapable of art or dissimulation, and so unsuspicious of all mankind, that he could scarcely believe falsehood existed in the world” (217). He was “totally deficient” in the “power and habit of reasoning” (217). Perhaps most important, like the adventurer-planters of the West Indian colonies, who, in Vernon’s words, were “quite careless of Futurity,” Vincent “enjoyed the present, undisturbed by any unavailing regret for the past, or troublesome solicitude about the future” (218). These are a gambler’s traits. Edgeworth frequently calls Vincent a “man of feeling,” and even “our man of feeling” (427), blending the creole stereotype with that other literary type made famous by Henry Mackenzie and Laurence Sterne. Markman Ellis has shown that sentimentality and slavery are far from antithetical and the “man of feeling” trope is in many ways coterminous with the West Indian stereotype; indeed, Vincent demonstrates his sensibility by way of his sympathy for a slave, in a dramatic reading of Thomas Day’s poem, “The Dying Negro,” a performance enacted to distract Belinda from her fears about his gambling.19 When Belinda discovers that Vincent is a frequent gambler at Mrs. Luttridge’s E O table, Lady Delacour praises his generosity on the occasion of his

144

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

former slave Juba’s marriage to an English servant, hoping to “drive the E O table from Belinda’s thoughts … From thence she went on to the African slave trade, by way of contrast, and she finished precisely where she had intended, and where Mr. Vincent could have wished, by praising a poem called ‘The Dying Negro,’ which he had, the preceding evening, brought to read to Belinda” (347).20 Belinda’s anxiety about Vincent’s gaming is to be calmed by evidence that he is a man of feeling, though a slave owner. His generosity to Juba is remarkable precisely because Juba had been his slave, and, given the notoriously inconsistent application of the Mansfield Judgment, Vincent could have refused him his freedom.21 The tantalizing account of Lady Delacour’s segue (“From thence she went on to the African slave trade”) is similar to the unspecified question on the slave trade that Fanny Price asked Sir Thomas in Mansfield Park.22 What, one wonders, did Lady Delacour say about the slave trade? What did Vincent think about or say in response to Lady Delacour’s remarks? Whatever this conversation may have been, Vincent’s apparent sympathy for slaves on English soil – indicated by his appreciation for the poem and by his benevolent treatment of his former slave Juba – effaces his slave owning in the colonies. It is suggestive of Edgeworth’s ambivalence about slavery in this novel that although gambling was a standard trope for West Indian slave owners, Belinda is very upset by the possibility that Vincent gambles but never expresses concern that her fiancé’s wealth is built on slave labor. As both gambling and capitalism permeated eighteenth-century culture, children’s participation in experiences of chance was subject to debate. Edgeworth, like many education theorists as well as card- and game-makers before her, urges parents to capitalize on the appeal of gambling through a carefully controlled exposure to chance. Her novel Belinda reveals the insufficiency of this model, however, which does not adequately account for the seductive pleasures of chance. Multiple characters – even Belinda herself – experience the failure of calculation and the romance of chance. Vincent’s gambling highlights a gamblinginspired capitalism “At Home” ineluctably dependent on enslaved labor “Abroad.” Yet his gambling is ultimately no more than a convenient excuse for the heroine to break off her engagement; the novel shies away from a more forceful indictment of gambling-inspired capitalism sustained by slavery. Indeed, although the African former slave Juba marries an English servant and settles in England, Vincent the gambling slave owner is excluded from England, concluding the novel with a romance of an English economy isolated from the moral morass of its colonies. Yet the marriages and reunions that constitute the novel’s happy ending

Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home” 145

are facilitated by the romance of unexpected inheritances generated in the West Indies. Gambling gives Edgeworth a means both for examining slave owning and for displacing a full moral accounting of English responsibility for enslavement, yet the romance of her novel’s conclusion reinstates the prominent role played by slavery in the capitalized economy. The romance of gambling in Edgeworth’s novel highlights the mixed assessment of the structure of the economy at the end of the eighteenth century by a culture that was both aware of its dependence on slavery yet unable to muster the moral consensus to end it.

6 The Confidence Man: Persuasion and the Romance of Risk

As an astute reader of eighteenth-century novels who from at least age 13 was dissecting fictional conventions with aplomb in her own experimental writing, Jane Austen digests and transforms the romance of gambling in the eighteenth-century novel. Austen gestures to the history of gamblers in eighteenth-century novels by assigning the activity to so many of her works’ rogues: in Pride and Prejudice, Wickham’s gambling debts horrify Jane Bennet; in Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby’s gambling debts, among others, prevent him from marrying Marianne; in Mansfield Park, Tom Bertram’s gambling debts deprive his brother Edmund of the clerical living he expected to hold. A few domestic card-playing scenes in this novel also anticipate the psychologically symbolic uses of gambling in later nineteenth-century novels: for example, Henry Crawford’s ability to play his, Fanny’s, and Lady Bertram’s hands simultaneously in a game of Speculation signifies his multiple pursuits of Julia Bertram, Maria Bertram, and Fanny Price. Thus we can see Austen’s work as pivotal, looking back to the use of gambling as an activity that has economic significance in eighteenth-century fiction and forward to the use of gambling for psychological characterization in nineteenth-century fiction. Austen’s final novel, Persuasion (1818), is the culmination of the romance of gambling in the British novel of the (long) eighteenth century, for without directly representing gambling, Austen uses it to examine the tension between chance and control both in fictional form and in her characters’ personal choices in a transforming economy where the landed estate owner is supplanted by the risk-taking professional. Persuasion uses a fictional form heavily dependent on elements of romance – improbable chance events such as fortuitous meetings and fortunate falls – to celebrate the gambler’s romance, the wager made on 146

The Confidence Man 147

the unknowable outcome, the sublime present moment of happiness despite the “dread of a future war” (Austen 168). As the narrator tells us, Anne “had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older” (21). I argue that Austen uses “romance” here broadly; Anne does not simply learn to give love preference over prudence. Rather, Anne’s “romance” is to reject calculation, to embrace risk, to make decisions that will bring happiness in the present and to practice, like the ever-hopeful gambler, “a cheerful confidence in futurity” (21). Romance can be understood here in terms of genre. Romances are filled with improbable events and heroes; by learning romance, Anne learns not to calculate probabilities prudentially but to surrender herself to the improbable operations of chance, to the luck of a hero who “had seemed to foresee and to command his prosperous path,” to the sublime moment when the dice are in the air (Austen 21). Drawing on what had become archetypes of gambling, and with much of its action set in the gambling resort of Bath, Persuasion considers the conditions of risk taking and decision making in a world where traditional sources of authority are morally – and literally – bankrupt. Many of the uses of gambling that I have examined throughout this book are evident, if obliquely, in Austen’s novel. Smollett and Fielding explore the competing effects of chance and providence on fictional form; while deploying chance events to plot her novel, Austen considers the relation of chance and providence to personal decision-making in a novel that makes extensive use of the resources of romance. Austen draws on styles of masculinity defined by gambling and examines women’s risk-taking, following in a cultural and literary tradition that saw relations between the sexes created and maintained at card tables: Anne and Wentworth each see the Elliots’ card party as the event that will bring their tentative attempts at reconciliation to proof. Burney’s examination of women’s fraught role in the market economy as both purchasers and objects of exchange is reimagined in Anne’s forays into public places, first at Lyme and then in Bath. Rather than compromising her virtue, however, Anne’s circulation in public is salutary, literally brightening her cheeks. Not only do her attractions for other men reawaken Wentworth’s appreciation of her beauty but her appearance as an object of interest on the marriage market raises her own spirits. It is significant that Anne’s first conversation with Wentworth after Louisa’s engagement to Benwick has released him takes place in a crowded shop; after Anne departs, other shoppers in Wentworth’s hearing appraise Anne’s looks in contrast with her sister’s. The positive tenor of Anne’s objectification is part of the novel’s celebration of the

148

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

gambling-inspired economy over the rural land-based economy that had been so damaging to Anne’s health and psyche (where “quiet, confined … our feelings prey upon us” [155]). In Edgeworth’s Belinda, the financial resources that underwrite the happy resolution of the novel’s plot come from beyond England’s borders, from the speculative colonial slave economy; Edgeworth venerates the country estate of Oakly-park as a symbol of moral authority but it is nonetheless insufficient to facilitate a happy ending in the modern economy. Austen goes further, representing the hereditary owners of Kellynch as having in effect forfeited their moral right to inhabit the estate to a different class of overseas speculators, members of the Navy grown rich in war and prize-taking. Austen draws on all facets of the romance of gambling in her most formally innovative novel to narrate the radical embrace of chance required by an incalculable future.

The romance of chance The tension between chance and control in fictional narrative has a long history in Austen’s writing. Immersed in the protocols of fiction, exploiting them to extremes that expose the agendas they serve, in her early pieces Austen mocks novelists’ improbable over-use of chance events in constructing plots. In Love and Freindship, the odds that the heroine Laura’s rich grandfather would suddenly appear at a convenient moment are very slim (Catharine 88). But the grandfather’s appearance highlights the frequency of such expedient chance events in fiction; fortunate unlikely coincidences happen at such a high rate that they begin to seem probable even though they are not. Laura’s conventionally superfine sensibility works together with the convention of the happy chance event to make her immediately, and rightly, suspect the aged gentleman to be a wealthy relative who can offer her comfort and shelter. Austen’s parodies revel in fiction as a self-referential form. In her youthful works, the novel does not rise to realism by way of the probable but is saturated in the conventions of romance. Because the chance event has become such an over-used device and the improbable in fiction is so common as to seem probable, fiction refers more to other fiction than to the contingencies of the world beyond the text, and distinctions between romance and novel collapse. Austen’s youthful works expose the centrality of romance to the fictional forms of her day not in order to reject romance, but to prepare for its uses in her own narratives. In her full-length novels, Austen draws on the romance of chance in works that represent the consequences of contingency more soberly.

The Confidence Man 149

In Sense and Sensibility, all of Elinor’s self-control and rectitude cannot get her the husband she wants until Edward Ferrars is released from his engagement by the improbable chance event of Lucy and Robert Ferrars’ marriage. The chance event plays a structural role in Pride and Prejudice’s fantasia of fictional convention that fulfills readers’ wishes that novels are indeed realistic. By chance, Mr. Gardiner’s business prevents the Lakes tour that the Gardiners had planned to take with Elizabeth; instead they propose a journey to Derbyshire and to Lambton, a village five miles from Pemberley where Mrs. Gardiner once lived for a few years. Darcy happens to return to Pemberley one day earlier than expected, when Elizabeth is just finishing a tour of the house with the Gardiners: “Had they been only ten minutes sooner, they should have been beyond the reach of his discrimination” (206). The coincidental meeting allows Darcy to display the changed manner which, of course, begins to soften into gratitude Elizabeth’s feelings toward him. Completing this important turn of the plot toward its resolution, Darcy visits Elizabeth in Lambton just as she finishes reading Jane’s letters detailing Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, witnesses her distress, and resolves, though unbeknownst to her, to aid her family in Lydia’s recovery. Jane’s letters, having been accidentally misdirected because Jane wrote in haste, arrived while Elizabeth and the Gardiners were preparing to walk out; her aunt and uncle go walking anyway, leaving Elizabeth alone to read the letters. Had it happened otherwise and had Elizabeth not been alone, Darcy might not have learned the details of Lydia’s elopement. Furthermore, though we can speculate, we never learn why Darcy called on Elizabeth that day; he seems to be there purely for the expedience of the plot. The importance accorded these chance events in the conclusion of the plot highlights the elements of romance in this novel; Pride and Prejudice pleases not because of its realism, but because of its use of the conventions of formal romance. The improbability of Elizabeth’s ascension as mistress of Pemberley only makes it more delicious, feeding this novel’s fantasy that institutions of authority can be critiqued and reformed from within, even that such critiques might be rewarded with all the splendor those institutions have to offer, a conclusion that itself is an improbable romance. After scrutinizing the romance of chance in her juvenilia, Austen makes prominent use of its features in her mature novels; we should read her then not merely as England’s first major realist novelist but as an author deeply steeped in the tension between chance and control, romance and novel. At the same time that she gleefully uses fortuitous events in her plots, Austen goes out of her way to remind readers of the narrative control

150

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

she exercises over her texts, especially as her works move toward their conclusions, where she follows the likes of Smollett and Fielding, whose concluding narratives of control make use of the improbable romance of providential coherence. Austen’s reminders of authorial control undermine the apparent realism of the preceding texts, emphasizing their fictionality, a fictionality that uses the resources of romance. In Northanger Abbey Austen reminds readers that the “tell-tale compression of pages” indicates an impending happy ending, and flaunts her power as author by marrying Eleanor Tilney off to a hitherto non-existent character who is only described as “the most charming young man in the world” in order to facilitate the happy ending (185, 186). Conjuring a character out of thin air for the expedience of the plot (and mocking the reader’s desire for coherence by asking him to believe that this new character was in fact the origin of the misrecognized laundry bill that had so terrorized Catherine), Austen’s conclusion is not circumscribed by probability but is licensed by the broad possibilities of romance. Austen’s authorial control sometimes appears in her withholding of information that readers might expect to be told. “I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own,” she declares in Mansfield Park (319), and the reader is abruptly wrenched from the specific timelines of realism to a romance realm outside of time. This assertion of authorial control also gives the reader some measure of control over the narrative as he has liberty to assign his own standards of probability to the transferal of Edmund’s affections from Mary to Fanny. Similarly in Emma, we are abruptly reminded of the author’s control and of the text’s traffic in fictional conventions when Emma’s exact response to Knightley’s declaration is not recorded: “What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does” (339). Austen’s works are saturated in fictional conventions of narrative control that highlight texts’ referentiality rather than their realism. If we have read enough fiction, whether romance or novel, we know exactly how long it took Edmund to “learn to prefer soft light eyes to dark sparkling ones” and exactly what Emma says, or rather we do not need to know at all, for we fit these moments into the patterns of romance that offer us the pleasures of repetition and closure. Persuasion returns to the romance of chance events that characterizes Austen’s early novels. As Cheryl Ann Weissman has remarked, in Persuasion “Austen appears to have gone out of her way to focus attention on the artifice of fiction” (309). Austen constructs a narrative of chance events in Persuasion because the central ethical question the novel explores is how one should navigate an unpredictable world.

The Confidence Man 151

How should we act when we cannot predict outcomes? A plot built on chance events highlights the need for a theory of action that can accommodate the unpredictable; eventually this romance of chance can reward the heroine against all odds when she develops a theory of action for her unpredictable life. The plot of Persuasion would be impossible without a remarkable series of coincidences. First, Captain Wentworth is reintroduced to Anne’s circle because his sister and brother-in-law, the Crofts, though they no longer have any connection to the neighborhood (Mr. Edward Wentworth the curate having moved away some time ago), happened to search for a house just as Sir Walter Elliot began to contemplate letting his. As Mr. Shepherd describes it, the Crofts had come to look at other houses and only heard about Kellynch “accidentally” (15). In Mr. Shepherd’s reported speech describing the Crofts, the phrase “accidentally hearing” is repeated twice, perhaps suggesting Mr. Shepherd’s disingenuousness – he may have pursued them as possible tenants after receiving “a hint of the admiral from a London correspondent” – but also underlining the fortuitousness of the circumstances that bring Wentworth and Anne in company again (15).1 Next, Captain Wentworth’s crucial relationship with the Musgroves is strengthened by his chance connection with them; their son had briefly served under him in the Navy. With what Marilyn Butler calls “unusually clumsy stage management,” Mr. William Elliot appears at Lyme (when Anne is there for the first time in her life on a visit that lasts no more than a day and a half) for no apparent reason other than to admire Anne in passing, thus capturing Wentworth’s attention and securing a connection that Austen can use when Anne and Mr. Elliot meet in Bath to make his claims as a potential suitor more plausible (228). Mr. Elliot’s true character is revealed through coincidental connections: not only was Anne’s school friend Mrs. Smith (who suddenly appears, without previous notice to the reader of her existence, to play an important expository role in the second volume of the novel) an intimate friend of Mr. Elliot’s during the years of his estrangement from Sir Walter’s family, but Mrs. Smith’s nurse in Bath is also attending Mr. Elliot’s friend Mrs. Wallis and is thus privy to his current machinations. Such unlikely coincidences signal the mode of romance rather than a narrative of realism; amplifying her use of coincidence at key points in her earlier writing, Austen structures the entire narrative world of Persuasion with the improbable chance events of romance. The repetitive patterning of romance makes possible a crucial element of Persuasion’s examination of chance. An accident like Louisa’s fall from the Cobb might be realistic enough on its own, but its

152

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

foreshadowing in little Charles Musgrove’s earlier fall from a tree and its appropriateness as a conclusion to Wentworth’s hazelnut fable indicates the use of romance repetition to emphasize the significance of chance and the folly of excessive control. Wentworth laments an “indecisive character” because “no influence over it can be depended on. – You are never sure of a good impression being durable. Every body may sway it” (59). The tension between firmness and persuasion is parallel to the tension between control and chance here as Wentworth complains about the random influence of “every body.” Louisa falls and is injured because she takes Wentworth’s instructive fable too literally without questioning its inherent paradox. Wentworth describes an ideal woman who is steadfast, not subject to persuasion or vicissitudes, resistant to chance; he exemplifies this with a hazelnut “which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot any where” (59). Yet the unbruised hazelnut with which Wentworth illustrates his theory is unnatural in its robustness. While Wentworth imagines the smooth-surfaced hazelnut to be “in possession of all the happiness that a hazel-nut can be supposed capable of,” it is in fact exactly the opposite in its resistance to the natural rhythms of reproduction (59). The hazelnut must break open to give it a chance at sprouting and regenerating. Louisa, following Wentworth’s advice that she should “be firm,” insists on jumping from the high part of the Cobb; when she is first “taken up lifeless” from her fall, she illustrates the unnaturalness of Wentworth’s “beautiful glossy nut” (59, 74). With “no visible bruise,” Louisa’s “face was like death” (74). Yet by falling to the ground and sustaining injury (however invisible), contrary to Wentworth’s fable Louisa eventually fulfills the hazelnut’s destiny to change form: she is “altered … quite different,” not the wild running, dancing girl of the book’s early pages but the poetry-reading fiancée of Benwick (145). Louisa and Benwick’s engagement is described as a romance of chance, “a perfectly spontaneous, untaught feeling” (121). Austen’s use of romance patterns of repetition in these images of falling and regeneration not only undermines Wentworth’s prescription for firmness in the face of uncertainty but also conveniently removes Louisa as Anne’s rival for Wentworth’s affections. When Anne first learns of Louisa and Benwick’s engagement she thinks, “It was almost too wonderful for belief” (109). The sheer expedience of this plot device further signals the mode of romance rather than realism. Louisa’s leap from the Cobb reveals an approach to uncertainty that errs on the side of excessive control; following Wentworth’s prescription she refuses to cede control of her actions to her family’s persuasions. Her

The Confidence Man 153

fall robs her of control and subjects her to chance and change. We can see in the two extant endings to Persuasion that Austen was further exploring the tension between chance and control in one’s personal response to unpredictability. Her original (unpublished) ending depends for its resolution entirely on the romance of chance. The concluding chapters that Austen wrote by July 1816 and later revised show Anne happening to meet Admiral Croft in the street as she walks home from Mrs. Smith’s lodgings, where she has just learned of Mr. Elliot’s perfidy. The Admiral pressures Anne to stop and visit Mrs. Croft because they chanced to hear a gossip’s report that Anne and Mr. Elliot were to be married. Once inside, the Admiral employs Wentworth, who happened to be there, to ask her if she and Mr. Elliot would like the Crofts’ lease of Kellynch Hall cancelled. This string of chance occurrences – Anne passing the Admiral as he was leaving his house, the Crofts hearing gossip about Anne and Mr. Elliot, and Wentworth being commissioned to question her – facilitates Anne and Wentworth’s éclaircissement. Without these chance events, it is by no means certain (as Anne herself feels it is in the revised ending) that “their hearts must understand each other” (147). As A. Walton Litz has argued, the original ending is unsatisfying because it moves too quickly from the revelation of Mr. Elliot’s character, because the lovers come to understand each other not in speech but by means of a “silent, but a very powerful Dialogue” (171), and because most of their ensuing discussion of the past is summarized by the narrator rather than reported in their own words (Litz 222–3). Most importantly, the original ending is unsatisfying because the lovers are entirely dependent on chance events for the resolution of their mutual uncertainties. The revised ending is notable because it depends on tension between chance and control as Anne and Wentworth seize chance events and actively use them for their own ends. Litz suggests that the revised ending retains the novel’s emphasis on Anne’s isolation by making the éclaircissement indirect, the result not of direct conversation but of an overheard conversation and a hastily written note. Yet this is more satisfying than the “silent, but very powerful Dialogue”; instead of indicating her feelings by a “Countenance [that] did not discourage” and a look of “acceptance,” Anne eloquently, passionately defends women’s long-lived attachments, hoping that Wentworth is listening to her. In turn, he describes his love for her in his letter in more detail and at greater length than any of Austen’s heroes have before. Instead of remaining subject to chance, as they had been throughout the book, Anne and Wentworth each have to take a risk, to decide to act immediately, to exert some control in order to bring about their mutual

154

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

understanding. Even before this moment of indirect revelation at the White Hart, Anne knows, in the revised ending, that they will no longer allow chance alone to determine the course of their relationship: “our hearts must understand each other ere long. We are not boy and girl, to be captiously irritable, mislead by every moment’s inadvertence, and wantonly playing with our own happiness” (147). The romance that Anne has learned is comprised of tension between chance and control; she takes risks without knowing what the outcome of her actions will be, neither passively allowing her fate to be determined by chance nor allowing a bankrupt social system to control her.

Confidence men Austen foregrounds chance events in the plot of Persuasion not out of clumsiness but to unite the book’s formal romance features with its thematic examination of the romance of chance. The chance events of fictional plot become epistemological problems – problems of assessing risk and predicting outcomes – for the novel’s characters. As Robert Hopkins has argued, the evisceration of traditional authority in Persuasion places the burden of moral evaluation and action on individuals rather than institutions (273). In many of Austen’s novels characters are faced with the formidable problem of knowing people, of judging character. Judging character accurately can help defend against devastating chance events by rendering the actions of one’s acquaintance more predictable. But this proves a difficult endeavor. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth mistakenly associates easiness of manner with virtue of character and thus is misled by the gambler Wickham’s false tale of injury at Darcy’s hand. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor tries to assess Willoughby (also a gambler) by his family connections and by the property he owns or stands to inherit, while Marianne believes she can know him by his tastes. Elinor asks, “Who is he? Where does he come from? Has he a house at Allenham?” while Marianne asks, “What are his manners on more intimate acquaintance? What his pursuits, his talents and genius?” (34). Although Austen does allow Marianne to have been right in her belief that Willoughby loved her, neither sister knows him well enough, in the end, to predict his behavior and protect themselves from injury.2 Sense and Sensibility can’t solve the problem of knowing people, but can only suggest how to be more careful, more suspicious, in the face of this unknowability. In Persuasion, on the other hand, the risk that Anne faced in her short relationship with Wentworth eight years before the novel begins is not

The Confidence Man 155

the risk that she does not really know him, but the risk that he will not make enough money for them to live comfortably on. This is a significant difference from the situations of the heroines in the earlier novels. Elinor and Marianne, of course, are tormented by not knowing what is going through the minds of the men they love. Elizabeth and Emma, even once they know they love Darcy and Knightley, are crucially wrong about what these men are thinking in important situations. Elizabeth thinks that Darcy despises her when he hears of Lydia’s elopement (he later explains that he was contemplating the action he could take to assist her), and Emma thinks Knightley wants to ask her advice about marrying Harriet (he soon reveals his love for Emma herself instead). In contrast, Wentworth’s thoughts are often transparent to Anne, though they speak to each other very little. As she recalls when she first sees him again, during their short engagement “there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison” (42). Eight years later, as she watches him interact with the Musgrove family, she alone knows how to catch traces of his thought invisible to “any who understood him less than herself”; she alone can interpret “the momentary expression in Captain Wentworth’s face … a certain glance of his bright eye, and curl of his handsome mouth” at the mention of the dead brother Dick (45). When Mary tells Wentworth “it is very unpleasant, having such connexions” as the Hayters, he gives her an “artificial, assenting smile, followed by a contemptuous glance, as he turned away, which Anne perfectly knew the meaning of” (58). Even later in Bath, where he is slightly less transparent, she rightly attributes Wentworth’s behavior after the concert to his jealousy of Mr. Elliot. All of this knowledge of Wentworth’s thoughts and feelings was based on a short relationship; only “a few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance” (19). Anne’s intimate understanding of Wentworth cannot be accounted for in a novel of formal realism, but is acceptable in the realm of formal romance. Wentworth’s legible expressions contrast with Mr. Elliot’s opacity, an opacity that makes Anne’s relationship with him risky and that marks him as a calculator. “Though they had now been acquainted a month, she could not be satisfied that she really knew his character” (106). Without advocating their total overthrow, Persuasion is even more suspicious than Austen’s previous, already skeptical, works of the empty forms of traditional society; in this context, Mr. Elliot’s perfect manners give Anne pause precisely because they reveal no spontaneity of feeling. Like the calculator he is later revealed to be, he is always in control. While his manners make social intercourse easy and pleasant, they

156

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

never show “any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others” (106). Mr. Elliot’s constant presence of mind suggests to Anne even before she learns of his true character that he will never be moved by “warmth and enthusiasm” to moral action (106). Anne decides that “those who sometimes looked or said a careless or hasty thing” are more trustworthy than “those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped” (107). A man who is affected by chance events, who is not always perfectly in control of himself, has a sincerity “upon which she could so much more depend” (107). Shortly after reflecting on Mr. Elliot’s too-perfect manners, Anne meets Wentworth by chance for the first time since the events at Lyme and is struck precisely by his inability to control his emotions, to smooth their conversation with a veneer of politeness. The freedom that Louisa’s engagement to Benwick has granted him to act on his renewed appreciation of Anne renders him “embarrassed,” “less at ease than formerly,” “not comfortable, not easy, not able to feign that he was” (116). These emotions augur well for Wentworth and Anne’s eventual reunion, and Anne soon recognizes this. Wentworth, however, is unable to read his lover’s thoughts or to predict her actions. He writes in his letter, “I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine” (158). Mr. Elliot’s calculated, poker-faced illegibility disqualifies him as Anne’s suitor, while Wentworth is rewarded for his transparency and ingenuousness. Furthermore, Wentworth’s inability to read Anne highlights the necessary risk he must take when he writes the letter declaring his love without being able to predict Anne’s response. Despite Anne’s intimate knowledge of Wentworth’s thoughts, Lady Russell saw their prospective marriage in 1806 as exactly the kind of risk that the gentlewoman Elizabeth Kennedy described in a letter in 1801: “Do not marry a very young man, you know not how he may turn out; it is a lottery at best” (Vickery 40). As we saw in Camilla, eighteenth-century women seem frequently to have used the lottery or other gambling metaphors to describe their marriage prospects. Another woman wrote in 1742, “No woman of understanding can marry without infinite apprehensions … & if the woman has the good fortune to meet with a man that uses her well it is being happy so much by chance that she does not deserve it” (Vickery 39). As I discussed in this book’s Introduction, Hogarth’s Assembly at Wanstead House, a painting celebrating a wedding anniversary, shows a woman holding a winning card to signify her luck in marriage. As Charlotte Lucas remarks in Pride and Prejudice, “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance” (Austen 22). Feminist history has emphasized ways in which marriage

The Confidence Man 157

often functions in patriarchal societies as a transaction between men involving property exchanges that solidify alliances between families, sometimes for strategic or political purposes.3 The pleasure that Mansfield Park’s Sir Thomas Bertram takes in the prospect of his eldest daughter’s marriage exemplifies this patriarchal function; he is satisfied that Maria’s fiancé, Mr. Rushworth, is “in the same county, and the same interest” as himself (30). The passages quoted above suggest, on the other hand, how women themselves may have pictured marriage. Rather than seeing themselves only as objects advertised in the marriage market and then passed from father to husband, eighteenth-century British women also imagined themselves as drawing tickets in a lottery, hoping to get a winner, fearful of drawing a husband who was a blank. The image of marriage as a lottery pictures women as gamblers in marriage, rather than the objects exchanged; women in the marriage market are gambling in an economy of chance, contemplating how big a risk to take, how to control the outcome of their wagers, hoping for a big win and far too aware of the losses possible. Lady Russell suspects Wentworth’s temper – “He was brilliant, he was headstrong” – as well as his prospects as “a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in that profession” (19). Lady Russell recognizes what a gamble this marriage would be, given the uncertainty of naval careers and a lack of any way to manipulate the outcome through the “connexions” that were usually necessary for advancement in the Navy. Anne is persuaded to end her engagement to Wentworth because of Lady Russell’s doubts about Wentworth’s success and because Anne hopes that his success might be more likely if he were unencumbered by an engagement. The narrator tells us that Anne might have been able to withstand both her father’s displeasure in the match and her sister’s lack of enthusiasm and married Wentworth anyway, but Lady Russell’s disapproval meant more to her, because hers was not just the opinion of someone who effectively stood in both for her dead mother and for her ineffectual father, but also the advice of a friend (Johnson Jane Austen 146). Finally, though, Anne ends the engagement for what she thinks is Wentworth’s good: “it was not merely a selfish caution, under which she acted, in putting an end to it. Had she not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given him up. – The belief of being prudent, and self-denying principally for his advantage, was her chief consolation” (19). In other words, she ends the engagement in part from the belief that she might be a hindrance

158

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

to his attempt to make his fortune. Although, by the time the novel begins, Anne has a different view about what advice she would give in such a situation, she doesn’t seem to question whether she was right in this part of her reasoning. Did she in fact contribute to or make possible Wentworth’s good fortune by breaking off their engagement? We can describe Anne’s decision in 1806 as future-oriented, looking beyond the wager to its outcome. Lady Russell encourages her to calculate the chances Wentworth has of succeeding in the Navy and being able to support her rather than simply to rely on his own “confidence” (19). Anne’s belief that she is sacrificing for his sake is based on consideration of the future, of what is likely to happen to him. Wentworth, on the other hand, like a sublime gambler lives completely in the present moment. Prior to meeting Anne, “he had been lucky in his profession, but spending freely, what had come freely, had realized nothing” (19). Though he had no fortune, that is no inherited money, he has actually made money, but he hasn’t saved any of it. He has spent it as it came, because he had no reason to think beyond the present moment. When he does think of the future, he simply thinks it will be like the present, only even better. “But, he was confident that he should soon be rich; – full of life and ardour, he knew that he should soon have a ship, and soon be on a station that would lead to every thing he wanted. He had always been lucky; and knew that he should be so still” (19). The repeated use of “should” here – he should be rich, he should have a ship, he should continue to be lucky – is telling. “Should” implies not simply that events are likely or probable but that Wentworth deserves these events, that he has some kind of right to fortunate occurrence. Wentworth’s immersion in the present moment, and his sense of entitlement, are the qualities of a sublime gambler. The thrill of present luck makes the gambler, believing in his special right to the continuance of the luck he is now enjoying, refuse to calculate future odds. In the event, Wentworth’s belief in his luck in 1806 paid significant dividends. We are told that by chance, or, in the narrator’s words, “as it happened,” Wentworth achieved “earlier prosperity than could be reasonably calculated on” (20–1). When Wentworth tells the Musgroves about his experiences in his first ship, the Asp, both he and Admiral Croft emphasize his luck. Croft says, “Lucky fellow to get her! … Lucky fellow to get anything so soon” and Wentworth replies, “I felt my luck, admiral, I assure you” (43). He goes on, “I never had two days of foul weather all the time I was at sea in her; and after taking privateers enough to be very entertaining, I had the good luck, in my passage home the next autumn, to fall in with the very French frigate

The Confidence Man 159

I wanted. – I brought her in to Plymouth”; describing the Asp’s fortunate escape from a storm that would have sunk her, Wentworth reiterates, “here was another instance of luck” (44). Wentworth’s account of his state of mind when he took command of the Asp depicts a sublime gambler at a high-stakes game where the outcome is either complete ruin or spectacular winnings. “She was a dear old Asp to me. She did all that I wanted. I knew she would. – I knew that we should either go to the bottom together, or that she would be the making of me” (44). Wentworth had expected Anne to participate in this gamble with him, to “go to the bottom” with him or to “be the making of” him by way of confidence in his prospects. He gloats here (in Anne’s hearing) that the ship was able to supply Anne’s lack and thus justified his confidence in his luck, which Anne had been persuaded not to share. It seems just as plausible, however, that Anne’s rejection actually contributed to his success. Wentworth tells Admiral Croft, “I was as well satisfied with my appointment [to the Asp] as you can desire. It was a great object with me, at that time, to be at sea, – a very great object. I wanted to be doing something” (44). Anne knows that he wanted to be doing something because he was angry with her for rejecting him. By ending the engagement, Anne has allowed him to maintain the orientation in the present that seems to leave him particularly open to the operations of luck. He didn’t want to think about the past, about his short relationship with Anne, and he had no particular incentive to worry about the future, since he’s not working to support her. He threw himself into his command of the Asp, and let luck operate on him. Anne doesn’t ever consider whether this justification of her decision was well founded. But it does seem that the frame of mind in which she sent him off had been of service to him in making him even more willing to take big risks in hopes of big payoffs that will vindicate his confidence and prove Anne and Lady Russell wrong. Lest we think that all sailors are as lucky as Wentworth, Austen pointedly and poignantly contrasts his career with those of his naval friends Harville and Benwick, highlighting the improbable romance of Wentworth’s brilliant career. Both are at least as worthy of success as Wentworth, if not more. Harville has a wife and young children to support and Benwick, modeling exactly the situation in which Wentworth and Anne would have been if they had continued their engagement, was working for the fortune and promotion that would enable him to marry his long-betrothed fiancée Fanny Harville. But chance does not favor these men. Fanny Harville died just as Benwick received the promotion that would have enabled them to marry, and the

160

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

wounds Harville sustained in a naval battle disabled him for the active service upon which his income depended. Harville had made some money with Wentworth in the West Indies, but Wentworth “wished for him again the next summer, when I had still the same luck in the Mediterranean” (45). Wentworth is insulted when Anne and Lady Russell won’t trust his confidence in his luck. But Austen explores the dark side of confidence in Anne’s cousin, William Walter Elliot, the presumptive heir to Kellynch. Mr. Elliot is drawn, to the dismay of some readers, from stock villains in eighteenth-century fiction, including Austen’s earlier works; it is significant that when Sir Walter made social appearances with Mr. Elliot in London 13 years before the novel begins, one of the stages for their performances of patriarch-and-heir was Tattersall’s, a betting club. Without explicitly mentioning gambling beyond the early visit to Tattersall’s, Persuasion clearly casts Mr. Elliot in the same rakish mold as Wickham, Willoughby, and Tom Bertram. Gambling is such a commonplace aspect of this stereotypical male character that Austen takes no particular care to name it specifically: The names which occasionally dropt of former associates, the allusions to former practices and pursuits, suggested suspicions not favorable of what he had been. She saw that there had been bad habits; that Sunday-travelling had been a common thing; that there had been a period in his life (and probably not a short one) when he had been, at least, careless on all serious matters. (106) To be “careless on all serious matters,” like the stereotypical West Indian gambler’s carelessness of futurity, discussed in Chapter 5, or even like Wentworth’s “spending freely, what had come freely,” is to have a gambler’s outlook. Mrs. Smith described the circle in which Mr. Elliot moved as a young man as “a thoughtless, gay set, without any strict rules of conduct. We lived for enjoyment” (133–4). Persuasion marks a culminating moment in the gambling culture of the long eighteenth century when the qualities of the gambling rake can be easily evoked by broad gestures such as these; at the same time, Persuasion marks a turning point in novelists’ uses of gambling characters and situations. Instead of representing card or dice games, Persuasion uses tropes of gambling as metaphors for contrasting approaches to unpredictability and risk. For if Mr. Elliot is a gambler, he is a different type from Wentworth, despite the carelessness of futurity that they shared in youth. While Wentworth’s sublime gambling leaves him open to chance’s operations,

The Confidence Man 161

to sink to the bottom or to rise to riches as luck determines, Mr. Elliot’s gambling trait is careful, constant calculation, particularly later in his life when Anne meets him. Wentworth’s approach to an unpredictable future was that of romance, to live in the sublime present, to refuse to calculate the actual, probably unfavorable, odds of future success, and to trust in his sense of good luck, his confidence. Mr. Elliot, “an artful man,” “a clever, cautious man,” “designing,” assesses the range of possible outcomes and manipulates events to ensure the result most advantageous to him (137, 106, 132). Long before Mrs. Smith exposes his character, Anne can see his having “grown old enough to appreciate a fair character” as a disturbing sign of his calculating nature (106). His ability to please even Mrs. Clay, with whose presence at the Elliots’ he has, in conversation with Anne, found fault, suggests the social benefits of his calculated manners. Lady Russell “could not imagine a man more exactly what he ought to be” (107). Though Lady Russell means this as the highest praise, particularly after the fault she had found with Wentworth’s manners, her remark suggests that Mr. Elliot has studied his part and constructed his character from what a man “ought to be” in order to gain his object. Mr. Elliot’s explanation of the value of good company evinces his calculating tendency as he delineates “all the advantages of the connexion” with the Dalrymples and its utility in weakening Mrs. Clay’s attraction by introducing Sir Walter to a wider acquaintance among his own rank. He challenges Anne to calculate, to consider the stakes of her own preference for “the best” company: “Will it answer? Will it make you happy?” (99). In other words, will Anne’s “fastidious” partiality for “well-informed people” obtain for her, a marriageable woman, the social and monetary connections that could secure her future (99)? Mr. Elliot, like Lady Russell, advocates an approach to social life and thus to the lottery of marriage that will minimize risk and maximize security, offering control over chance. Mr. Elliot’s calculations are not limited to his manners in Bath in the Elliots’ circle. For someone who wants to control the future’s uncertainties, Mr. Elliot’s status as heir presumptive would have been particularly frustrating. His marriage to a wealthy woman of no rank indicates his impatience with the long, doubtful, and unremunerative process of “pushing his fortune in the line marked out for the heir of the house” by marrying Elizabeth Elliot (6). Although “his chance of the Kellynch estate was something,” the rich daughter of a grazier who was “thrown by chance into Mr. Elliot’s company” provided more certain gains. That they would be certain, Mr. Elliot made sure. “All his caution was spent in being secured of the real amount of her fortune, before he committed

162

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

himself” (134). Describing the errors into which he led her and her husband, Mrs. Smith perfectly captures the paradox of the calculating gambler: “for with all his self-indulgence, he had become a prudent man” (139). Prudence here is a negative, even a selfish attribute. His intimacy with the Elliots, even his courtship of Anne, proceeds from the same selfish, calculating prudence. Anne, much as she dislikes the possibility that her father might marry Mrs. Clay, concludes that there is nothing she can do to prevent it, that “everything must take its chance” (96). But Mr. Elliot, upon receiving a hint of their growing intimacy from Colonel Wallis, comes to Bath and orchestrates a reunion “as a means of ascertaining the degree of his danger, and of circumventing the lady if he found it material” (137). Indeed, Anne gives such credit to his powers of calculation that she would like to know “his present opinion, as to the probability of the event he has been in dread of; whether he considers the danger to be lessening or not” (138). Eventually, though his “best plan” for guarding his baronetcy by marrying Anne is thwarted, Mr. Elliot’s final act in the novel is still calculated to serve his interest (166). His establishment with Mrs. Clay, described with resonant gambling language, reveals “how double a game he had been playing,” but it prevented him from “being cut out by one artful woman, at least” (167). The novel’s resolution sidelines these calculators, their efforts at control irrelevant. In an unpredictable world, if prudence is synonymous with a nefarious style of calculation, and “designing” men like Mr. Elliot are “black at heart,” a different approach to chance must be found (132). The setting of Persuasion’s second volume in Bath is more than incidental. Although its popularity was in steep decline by the early nineteenth century, unable to compete with the Prince’s fashionable Pavilion at Brighton, Bath was the resort of gamblers that signified the risk, speculation, and calculation with which Persuasion is so thoroughly concerned. The ancient town’s eighteenth-century renaissance was the result of high-stakes speculation, much like that described by Austen in her late fragment Sanditon, where Mr. Parker has invested, along with Lady Denham, in the construction of new lodgings and public buildings in the hopes that Sanditon will become the next fashionable seaside resort. After Queen Anne’s visit in 1702 inaugurated the fashion of taking the Bath waters, entrepreneurs remodeled and built new lodgings such as the Circus and the Royal Crescent, and built a succession of Assembly Rooms for dancing, eating, and especially gambling, which made the fortunes of the speculators. Beau Nash “made gambling the chief attraction of the place, and during the season … all

The Confidence Man 163

the sharpers from London and the Continent travelled down to pluck the young lords and wealthy citizens” (Burke English Night Life 30). A contemporary describes a walk through Bath as one gambling scene after another, from “raffling shops” to wagering on games of nine-pins and impromptu horse or sedan-chair races, to the gaming rooms where players “were labouring like so many anchor smiths, at the Oak, BackGammon, Tick Tack, Basset, and throwing of Mains.” This observer emphasizes the rampant cheating, at dice, in particular: “There was palming, lodging, loaded dice, levant, and Gammoning with all speed imaginable” (qtd. in Burke 30). Nash enforced a greater degree of social mixing among the classes of visitors to Bath than could be found in London society and discouraged private receptions in lodgings (Sitwell 46–8; Burke 31). After Nash’s death, the succeeding masters of ceremonies did not care to enforce class mixing and Bath society became more stratified. Private receptions became more popular as the public gaming rooms seemed increasingly populated with professional gamblers, called “Greeks”; private gatherings also circumvented the stricter gaming laws of the second half of the eighteenth century that prohibited high play (laws that seem to have been executed much more rigorously in Bath by the local magistrates than they were in London), facilitating private higher-stakes gambling and illegal but wildly popular games such as E O and later faro (Fawcett 47). Nash’s legacy promoting interaction among classes while he encouraged the gambling that could bring about both upward and downward socioeconomic mobility is significant for Anne and Wentworth’s relationship, even if Bath society was more stratified by the time of their visit. Elizabeth and Sir Walter form their social calendar very selectively, but Anne worries about Wentworth and Lady Russell meeting, “so liable as every body was to meet every body in Bath” (118). In this way the city is an appropriate backdrop for a marriage that unites rank on one side and fortune on the other, for a couple that will spend most of their time with members of a profession of “obscure birth” raised to “honours that which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of” (14). Though she had never liked Bath in the past, its history of deliberately permeable social boundaries could appeal to Anne’s preference for the “best company” of intelligence over the “good company” of rank. Bath’s gambling culture creates a rich context for comparing Wentworth’s and Mr. Elliot’s different kinds of confidence and for evaluating Anne’s own approach to risk, to the lottery of marriage. Though it is generally said that Anne, unlike many fictional heroines, doesn’t learn significant lessons over the course of Persuasion, the book begins

164

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

by explaining an important revolution in her thinking that had taken place since the major event in the novel’s pre-history, and her philosophy of risk only grows richer as the novel proper unfolds.4 “Anne, at seven-and-twenty, thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen” about her brief engagement (20). Near the end of the text, after Anne declares that she’d rather attend a play with the Musgroves than her family’s evening card party, Wentworth engages her in the following conversation: “You have not been long enough in Bath,” said he, “to enjoy the evening parties of the place.” “Oh! no. The usual character of them has nothing for me. I am no card-player.” “You were not formerly, I know. You did not used to like cards; but time makes many changes.” “I am not yet so much changed,” cried Anne, and stopped, fearing she hardly knew what misconstruction. (150) Anne becomes flustered because while she is trying to indicate the constancy of her love for Wentworth – “I am not yet so much changed” – her views have changed in important ways. She is now a kind of card player, willing to take risks and to engage in the romance of risk. That Anne’s approach is that of romance is highlighted in the language used by the narrator to describe Anne’s commitment to Wentworth and her rejection of Elliot: be the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection would be his forever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation. Prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal constancy, could never have passed along the streets of Bath, than Anne was sporting with from Camden-place to Westgate-buildings. It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way (127). The sharp contrast between the verisimilar details common in novels (the specific place names “Camden-place” and “Westgate-buildings”) and the language of romance (“high-wrought love,” “eternal constancy”) indicates perhaps a slight self-consciousness on the part of the narrator or author about how far the text has departed from the norms of realism. Yet Bath the gambling resort is the perfect city for Anne’s revived wager on Wentworth; the walk from her father’s “lofty,

The Confidence Man 165

dignified” rented lodging in Camden-place to Mrs. Smith’s “humble” rooms in Westgate-buildings prefigures Anne’s rejection of the diminished grandeur of the Elliots for the uncertainty of marriage represented by Mrs. Smith. The narrator’s suggestion that Anne’s sentiments are “almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way” both deflates and reinforces the romance mode of the text. We know Anne’s pretty musings cannot actually purify the streets of Bath, yet it is on these very streets, as they walk through the city, that the éclaircissement of Anne and Wentworth’s romance takes place. This conclusion is made possible because over the course of Anne’s stay in Bath, she has come to appreciate risk as well as to take decisive action for herself, to wager on her happiness. Her stance contrasts with Lady Russell’s calculating approach. Although Lady Russell, considering the possibility of Mr. Elliot marrying Anne, describes herself as “much too well aware of the uncertainty of all human events and calculations,” she is in fact a calculator (105). She may not be so pernicious a calculator as Mr. Elliot (though they both value rank), but her advice in 1806 had been to calculate the odds of Wentworth’s success and to eschew risk. Eight years later, Anne’s assessment of this advice figures it as a kind of perversion of Pascal’s wager (in which the uncertain good of Heaven is a better bet than the possible consequences of unbelief); she had been persuaded to believe that, of the possible outcomes, “certain immediate wretchedness” was preferable to “uncertain future good” (20).5 This calculation is, in Anne’s newer view, “over-anxious caution” (21). Like the prudent Mr. Elliot, Lady Russell had counseled “safety” (163). But Anne now believes in Wentworth’s gambling spirit – “a cheerful confidence in futurity” – rather than in the wariness of confidence operators like Mr. Elliot who make choices that will ensure, not risk, their own security. An important aspect of Anne’s romance of improbability is that she consciously chooses to subject herself to chance’s operations rather than being persuaded to do so. To marry Mr. Elliot would be to yield to “persuasion exerted on the side of … risk,” the risk not only of marrying a man she doesn’t care for, but of making a decision not her own (163). Once she decides to face risk, she does so not heedlessly like Louisa jumping off the Cobb, but with the “resolution of a collected mind” (161). Furthermore, Anne believes she was right to be guided by Lady Russell, even though her advice was faulty, because otherwise she would have “suffered in my conscience”; torn by desire and duty at age 19, she could not have accepted Wentworth with the “collected mind” she has at age 27 (161).

166

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Once Anne has subjected herself to chance and given up prudential calculation, the process of moral decision making becomes more difficult and thus even more important. Anne finds it difficult to evaluate her past actions without being biased by the outcomes she already knows. She hesitates to condemn Lady Russell’s persuasion, suggesting that it is “perhaps one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides” (164). This kind of reasoning is called “consequentialism” by moral philosophers, a means of deciding whether something is right or wrong by the outcome of the event rather than by the motives of the actors (Hopkins 266). Consequentialism forestalls calculation; by this system of decision making, one can’t know if a decision was right until its consequences are not just predicted but experienced. The moral evaluation of one’s decision is subject to chance. In a world where traditional sources of authority such as Lady Russell and Sir Walter have erred, consequentialism makes action incalculable, unpredictable, and risky. Austen’s revised ending to Persuasion, where Anne and Wentworth each have to take risky action to facilitate their final understanding, thus takes on increased significance. Austen’s – and her characters’ – references to providence further elucidate Anne’s romance of risk. The heaviest charge Anne levels at Lady Russell’s mistaken advice is that her calculations “distrust Providence!” (21). In other words, Lady Russell violates the doctrine of general providence which holds that the universe is divinely designed and as such rewards good and punishes evil. She doesn’t trust that events will work together to reward Anne and Wentworth’s worth or goodness. Nor, given the details of mischance that the rest of the novel provides in the stories of Harville and Benwick, should she. Indeed, Wentworth himself mocks the idea of general providence when Mary expresses surprise that all the amazing circumstances that should have facilitated it did not secure an introduction of the man whom they discover too late is Mr. Elliot. In a novel representing a designed universe, such as Ferdinand Count Fathom (at least in its final quarter), such long-estranged cousins would certainly have discovered each other at the hotel. Wentworth remarks drily, “Putting all these very extraordinary circumstances together, we must consider it to be the arrangement of Providence that you should not be introduced” (71). Yet there is another kind of providence at work in this novel and which Anne may be accusing Lady Russell of mistrusting: special providence, or the doctrine that providence intervenes in the ordinary progress of affairs, improbably altering outcomes to favor good or to punish evil. Wentworth’s gambler-like belief in his good fortune, though notably

The Confidence Man 167

secularized as luck, has roots in the belief in special providence that characterized British mariners’ culture. The risks involved in maritime travel – the tiny ships, the primitive weather prediction – were compounded by the random dangers of naval battle. It was common for sailors to believe in the doctrine of special providence, that a watchful God would intervene on their behalf and would rescue them against all odds from a storm or battle (Hopkins 270). Such a belief made it possible to continue at sea without despairing, to face improbable risks with confidence. The operations of special providence are incalculable and are felt in the novel as luck. The narrator’s description of Sir Walter as a “foolish, spendthrift baronet, who had not had principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in which Providence had placed him” suggests not that Sir Walter belongs at Kellynch as part of a divinely ordered world, but that he was lucky to have been placed there, and clearly didn’t deserve or live up to that luck (165). Wentworth, despite the example of his brother-sailors, had “believ[ed] myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed.” Persuasion’s resolution forces Wentworth to appreciate the tenuousness of his luck and to take less credit for it as he “learn[s] to brook being happier than I deserve” (165). For both Anne and Wentworth, this lesson is both salutary and practical; their risks, their subjection to chance is far from over. Unlike The Excursion, Amelia, Camilla, or Belinda, Persuasion does not end on a country estate, safe from the vagaries of the gambling culture. Though united, Anne and Wentworth’s domestic security depends on politics – the “dread of a future war” looms large in the final paragraph (168). The price of Anne’s risk-taking is “the tax of quick alarm” she must pay as a sailor’s wife. But this is Persuasion’s – and the British gambling culture’s – modern condition. As Mrs. Croft explains, “We none of us expect to be in smooth waters all of our days” (47). Persuasion’s confidence men, William Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, exemplify two gambling models for approaching an unknown future. Elliot works strenuously to calculate probabilities and control outcomes, while Wentworth revels in the risk of the present moment, ever hopeful that chance is on his side. Elliot’s efforts at calculation and control are not only nefarious but ineffectual. Wentworth’s approach (also adopted by Anne) is the only possible choice, but not because it can guarantee outcomes. Austen draws on the conventions of gambling in eighteenthcentury novels in a narrative that takes full advantage of the resources of romance. But unlike most romance, which concludes with miraculous events that guarantee the happiness of the virtuous, Persuasion’s ending

168

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

emphasizes instability rather than closure. Wentworth and Anne took advantage of their improbable second chance after the dissolution of their first engagement, but the novel offers no hint as to how long they will be able to enjoy their union. In the final paragraph, the dice are still in the air, and the sublimity of Anne and Wentworth’s wager is clear as their friends contemplate both the happiness of their union and the potential tragedy of their separation, either for the duration of a “future war” or through death in battle. In the gambling-inspired economy, however, the sublimity of their wager is not tragic but is, no matter what the outcome, what Camilla’s Macdersey described as the very “idea of life” itself (480).

Afterword: The Eighteenth-Century Risk Society

In a New York Times op-ed essay published in 2008, the pundit David Brooks bemoans a supposed “deterioration of financial mores” in the United States that he feels betrays the “moral structure” of financial restraint built by the Puritans and Benjamin Franklin. Brooks blames this seeming decline on, among other factors, state governments that “aggressively hawk their lottery products.” In fact, lotteries were crucial funding instruments in the American colonial era and were used to raise money for a variety of institutions, including the Virginia Company, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities (Munting 13–14; Lears 70, 89). Financial history shows the inaccuracy of Brooks’s romance of financial probity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, the line separating what is considered illegitimate gambling from legitimate speculation has been contested since the very origins of capitalism. Debate over government controls on risk-taking has likewise animated Anglo-American financial culture since Parliament simultaneously outlawed private lotteries and instituted state lotteries in the 1690s. Controversies over hedge funds, banking reform legislation, and austerity measures in our own day repeat these debates. Meanwhile lotteries, video sweepstakes, and online gambling tempt legislators looking for seemingly painless revenue sources, just as did lotteries in the 1690s. What should we make of these resemblances between eighteenth- and twenty-first-century capitalism? Why is it important that we acknowledge the foundational role played by gambling in the origins of our economy? The similarities between eighteenth- and twenty-first-century capitalism indicate the cyclical history of romance rather than Brooks’s linear history of a decline from regulated finance to gambling. Sociologists in the 1990s coined the term “the Risk Society” to describe what they saw as a uniquely modern moment in human history when 169

170

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

due to environmental pollution and other invisible man-made ills, people have to assess risk and make choices based on unknown outcomes; today we have to live existentially with an unprecedented level of manmade risk. The risk society is characterized by the modern reframing of misfortune as risk, which offers the illusion of controlling outcomes through calculation. Yet “living with risk … may involve the acceptance of some degree of uncertainty and instability, however controversial this may seem to we late moderns who are obsessed with control and certainty” (Lupton 10). Ulrich Beck writes that “the concept of risk reverses the relationship of past, present, and future. The past loses its power to determine the present. Its place as the cause of present-day experience is taken by the future, that is to say, something non-existent, constructed and fictitious” (214). These descriptions of the risk society should resonate with the readers of this book; the risk society offers, yet doubts, the efficacy of calculation in a sublime present where a range of outcomes are imagined but unpredictable. Sociologists of risk see it as a fundamentally modern, post-industrial phenomenon, inextricably bound up in individuals’ relationships with modern institutions of government and corporations. Yet the structural parallels between the risk society and the culture of gambling suggest either that we can date the beginning of that modernity to the eighteenth century, or that, as Bruno Latour argues, we have never been modern. If the unproductive expenditure of gambling inspires the productive structures of capitalism that create the modern risk society, then our approaches to risk today are informed by the eighteenth-century romance of gambling. A lengthy quotation from Ulrich Beck illustrates the significance of the parallels between the eighteenth- and twenty-first-century risk societies: Many social theories (including those of Michel Foucault and those of the Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno) paint modern society as a technocratic prison of bureaucratic institutions and expert knowledge in which people are mere wheels in the giant machine of technocratic and bureaucratic rationality. The picture of modernity drawn by the theory of world risk society contrasts sharply with these images. After all, one of the most important characteristics of the theory of risk society, so far scarcely understood in science or politics, is to unfreeze – at least intellectually – the seemingly rigid circumstances and to set them in motion. Unlike most theories of modern societies, the theory of risk society develops an image that makes the circumstances of modernity contingent, ambivalent, and (involuntarily) susceptible to political rearrangement. (222)

Afterword: The Eighteenth-Century Risk Society 171

Beck sees the risk society as rich with radical potential because no one can predict outcomes and every individual must make his own assessments and choices. I have suggested throughout this book that the gambling-inspired eighteenth-century risk society was similarly rich with radical potential. Recall Charlotte Smith’s Philip Somerive or Henry Fielding’s Robinson, gamblers who elude the “technocratic prison” of rational calculation by gambling within the very prison walls. The resilience of the episodic gambler who tosses the dice again and again can be a radical model of individual agency. The romance of gambling in the eighteenth-century British novel provided a means for exploring this potential and thereby created an imagined community of readers whose narrative experience of the sublime tension between chance and control in the wager (described in gambling scenes and enacted in novelistic form) prepared them for the unknowable economic future inspired and defined by gambling. We are in another historical moment now, like that of our eighteenthcentury gambling forebears, rich with uncertainty and with productive potential. The eighteenth-century British novel can instruct us, as it did its first readers, in the romance of long odds, the lucky break, the happy ending.

Notes Introduction 1. Women commonly used gambling metaphors to describe their experience of the marriage market as a lottery or card game on whose unpredictable outcome a woman must wager, as I discuss in Chapter 6. 2. My argument about the dynamic tension in gambling is inspired by Poovey’s account of writing about finance in novels and financial journalism in Victorian England, in which the novelist “reproduces for the reader the very dynamic of disclosure and secrecy that was also essential to the emergent culture of investment” (“Writing about Finance” 33). My argument that this structural dynamic is constituted by tension between chance and control is inspired by Lears’s account of the “constantly shifting tensions between rivalrous American cultures of chance and control” in American debates about gambling (6). 3. Other examples include Gawen Hamilton’s DuCane and Boehm Family Group (1734–5), which shows the union of two financially powerful Huguenot families in marriage via a domestic scene including gambling. An Elegant Company Playing Cards (c.1725), also thought to be by Hamilton, uses gambling to demonstrate the subjects’ gentility. 4. See, for example, Wahrman’s brilliant analysis of eighteenth-century masquerade as a practice that offers both “momentary liberation from the shackles of identity” and a model for understanding “off-masquerade identity” as yet another costume (161). 5. Studies of gambling in eighteenth-century England include J. Ashton, The History of Gambling in England; Burke, English Night Life; Beresford Chancellor, Memorials of St. James’ Street; Disney, The Laws of Gaming, Wagers, Horse-Racing, and Gaming-Houses; Hargrave, A History of Playing Cards and a Bibliography of Cards and Gaming; McDowell, “A Cursory View of Cheating at Whist in the Eighteenth Century”; Miers, “A Social and Legal History of Gaming: From the Restoration to the Gaming Act of 1845”; Munting, An Economic and Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA. Shorter examinations of eighteenthcentury gambling include Gillian Russell’s article “‘Faro’s Daughters’: Female Gamesters, Politics, and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain,” and essays by D. G. Campbell and Evans. 6. See Bataille’s “The Notion of Expenditure” and Huizinga’s Homo Ludens; a Study of the Play-Element in Culture. 7. For eighteenth-century economic history, see Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit; Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England; Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture: 1740–1914; T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century; Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution; Cohen, “The Element of Lottery in British Government Bonds, 172

Notes 173

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

1694–1919”; Floud and McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain since 1700; Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason; O’Brien, “Political Structures and Grand Strategies for the Growth of the British Economy, 1688–1815.” As Poovey notes, crucial analyses of the relationship between money and literature as homologous include Jean-Joseph Goux’s Symbolic Economies and Marc Shell’s The Economy of Literature (Genres 25). Accounts of the origins of probability theory and the “problem of points” can be found in Daston, David, Hacking, Kavanagh, and Patey. See Bataille’s “The Notion of Expenditure” and Geertz’s “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” in The Interpretation of Cultures. See Jameson, Poovey, Duncan, and McKeon for discussions of historicizing romance. For a different explanation of the constitutive role of romance in the novel’s development, see Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, which refuses entirely to distinguish between romance and novel and, in arguing that “Romance and the Novel are one,” lays claim to the ancient origins of prose narrative (Doody 15). Though it is difficult to say with certainty whether or not rates of gambling or of representations of gambling increased, anecdotal evidence nonetheless suggests that eighteenth-century English culture provided an increasing variety of gambling opportunities. Justine Crump has urged caution in believing the assertions made by many eighteenth-century moralists, who warned of an epidemic of gambling sweeping across English culture. She suggests that “it is not possible to say whether there was a real increase in gambling in the eighteenth century or even, with any degree in certainty, whether there was an increase in writing about gambling since every kind of publication increased in the period with the expansion of the book trade” (“The Perils of Play” 4). See Crump, who uses “the terms ‘gambling’ and ‘play’ … to signify the behaviours that annex monetary exchange to the outcomes of uncertain events” (“The Perils of Play” 1). The term “gaming” has also been co-opted by the American casino industry in its efforts to market casinos as family-friendly locations for playing games (which happen to use money to keep score) rather than as sites for gambling. See Foreman’s biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Munting 11, 18. An Account of the Endeavors That have been used to suppress Gaming-Houses (London, 1722) cites examples of the enforcement of gambling laws. Other accounts of the rise of probability theory include those by Patey, Daston, and Gigerenzer et al. The various titles by which the painting has been known testify to its generic ambiguity. It was first described in print in 1855 when it was sold with the contents of Shotover House, Oxfordshire, and was called Card Party with Portraits, a title that highlights people and the two card games taking place in the foreground of the painting (Ingamells 511). Yet, as John Ingamells points out, “Portraits” is not a useful title since exact identifications of the figures in the painting must be conjectural and based primarily on the association of the

174

Notes painting with Shotover House, because “there is no comparative iconography for these sitters” (512). While one scholar identified the central figures as “Baron and Lady Schutz,” they are now thought to be Baron Schutz’s younger brother Augustus and his wife Penelope Madan (Ingamells 512). In 1907, art historian Randall Davies christened the painting A View on the Terrace of Shotover House, emphasizing the building in the background of the painting and the painting’s affiliation with a grand country house rather than the figures or their pastime. The identification of the building as Shotover House was disproved in 1948, however, and, given the Hanoverian associations of the sitters, Ralph Edwards suggested that the painting was made in Hanover and that the building is a house in Hanover. Ingamells asserts that “the seven-bayed two-storied house in the background can only be interpreted as a reference to (as opposed to a portrait of ) the Banqueting House at Whitehall” although “the grounds are, of course, impossible for Whitehall” and thus the painting is “symbolic of the protestant succession” in the “early, unsettled years of the House of Hanover” (512). Ingamells’s interpretation of the painting as primarily symbolic emphasizes the painting as a work of political patronage. Mercier owed his introduction in London to the court at Hanover, and Ingamells suggests that the ambitious Augustus Schutz, who eventually became Keeper of the Privy Purse and Master of the Robes to George II (who acceded to the throne two years after the painting was made), may have introduced the symbolic elements as a demonstration of his affiliation with the House of Hanover (515). Finally, the Tate Britain, which acquired the painting in 1980, calls the painting The Schutz Family and Their Friends on a Terrace, identifying the central figure as “probably” Augustus Schutz and noting the possible interpretation of the building, urn, and horse as Hanoverian symbols but not declaring them the absolute key to the painting’s meaning.

1 Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling 1. Evelyn goes on to say “the yeare before he [the King] won 150 pounds,” but this could not have been at Epiphany revels in 1661, since by Evelyn’s own account Charles II was absent from London January 2–10, 1661, accompanying his mother and sister to Portsmouth (3.267 n.2). Moreover, Epiphany in 1661 was marred by a violent rising of the Fifth Monarchy Men (see also Pepys, January 7–10, 1661). For the especially festive nature of the 1661–2 winter holiday, see De Beer’s note that the elaborate Christmas revels at the Inns of Court in 1661–2 were “remembered for a generation” (Evelyn 3.307 n.6). 2. For example, Nicholson, Sherman, and Ingrassia. 3. Bataille’s understanding of potlatch depends on Marcel Mauss’s account of the Iroquois practice in The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. 4. 7 Parliamentary Statute: Geo. II c. 8. 5. For the professionalization of stock-jobbers in the form of guilds, codes of conduct, etc. see Dickson and Neal. 6. Finn suggests that “informal retail credit flourished in and worked to sustain later nineteenth-century consumer markets” (Character 9). 7. Finn Character 6–7.

Notes 175 8. I model this claim on Franco Moretti’s useful graphs of eighteenth-century British novelistic genres to argue that a form persists as long as it has “artistic usefulness” in its historical context (17). 9. Note, however, Horace Walpole’s dissent from this general view of the dangerous prevalence of chance in the novel. In the Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1765), he suggests there is not romance enough in the eighteenth-century novel, that improbable chance events have been too rigorously restricted from the novel, in which “the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life” (Williams 266). 10. Ingrassia 32. See also Grundy’s biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 11. See Kibbie for a reading of usury and proto-capitalism in Moll Flanders and Roxana. 12. According to Novak, on November 1, 1695 “Defoe’s name appeared among thirteen ‘Managers trustees’ of ‘The Profitable and Golden Adventure for the Fortunate,’ a lottery with which Dalby Thomas and an associate, Thomas Neale, were involved” (114–15). 13. See Ingrassia 94 for discussion of this scene. Melissa Mowry also presents a compelling political reading of this scene. 14. See Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) for an example of the revived interest in examining the relationship between novel and romance in the second half of the eighteenth century. 15. As Backscheider and Cotton point out in the introduction to their edition of Brooke’s novel, Brooke is following in a tradition that includes such novels as Eliza Haywood’s The History of Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1775) (Backscheider and Cotton xxi–xxiii).

2 Cheating, Calculation, and the Episodic Romance of Gambling 1. Victoria and Albert Museum, E.56 (1-50) 1971, King of Clubs; Dighton and Rowlandson prints in the collection of the Corporation of London, Guildhall Museum; Hogarth reprinted in Einberg (213). 2. As I will discuss shortly, representations of cheating were a special hallmark of Smollett’s realism. Analogs of many of Smollett’s depictions of gambling have been found in non-fictional publications. Paul-Gabriel Boucé points out that the money-dropping scam played on Roderick and Strap was “a wellknown trick, described as ‘guinea-dropping’ or ‘sweetning’ in a pamphlet, The Tricks of the Town Laid Open (1747), letter xiii” (Roderick Random 443). Boucé suggests that incidents such as the money-dropping scam belong “to a socio-literary tradition both anterior and posterior to [Smollett’s] work” and that their appearance in Smollett’s work are evidence of “his fidelity to social reality. He did not write of this form of swindling from any morbid taste for low life or in order to decry his era, but simply because such fraudulent practices were still common in 1748, and long after” (The Novels of Tobias Smollett 265–6). 3. An Account of the Endeavors That have been used to Suppress the GamingHouses, and of the Discouragements That have been met with (1722) describes

176

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

Notes widespread collusion in London between constables and bribing gamblers to prevent warrants from being served and to stall gambling prosecutions. As G. Russell discusses, in 1796 the Lord Chief Justice Kenyon threatened to make a group of aristocratic ladies keeping a gaming house stand in the pillory. McKeon’s description of protagonists’ attractiveness in criminal biographies could be applied to the rogue gambler in Cotton’s and Lucas’s games manuals: “The delinquent folk-hero, whether Spanish pícaro or Tyburn highwayman, is compelling enough in his pursuit of freedom to suggest that the common way of ‘error’ may in fact be the road of individual truth” (98). McKeon and Gladfelter discuss the important role played by criminal biography in the development of the novel. Marshall does, however, suggest it is likely that Hoyle read DeMoivre (43). “The early probabilists from Pascal through Pierre Simon Laplace were determinists of the strictest persuasion” (Gigerenzer 2). Daston points out that for “classical probabilists from Jakob Bernoulli through Laplace … the events of the universe were fully determined. Chance was merely apparent, the figment of human ignorance. Until the nineteenth century, no mathematician, scientist, or philosopher appears to have contemplated the possibility of genuinely random phenomena except to dismiss the idea as nonsensical: causeless events were unthinkable” (10). OED, Hoyle, sense 2. Gigerenzer 3. Hoyle threatens that “the Author will not undertake to explain any Case but in such Copies as have been set forth by himself” (Preface). A scene in Tom Jones suggests that the authentic and pirated copies of Hoyle’s treatise became class markers because of their substantial price difference. A young gentleman returning home early finds his servants at whist and “my Hoyle, sir – my best Hoyle, which cost me a guinea – lying open on the table with a quantity of porter spilt on one of the most material leaves of the whole book.” The servant protests that “several of his acquaintance has bought the same for a shilling” and refuses to pay more for the ruined book (598). Ferdinand Count Fathom was not a commercial success, and the Monthly Review in March 1753 was troubled by Fathom’s character (Smollett The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom xxvi). Boucé calls the novel “a failure – because of the impossible coexistence of picaresque elements side by side with the avowed didactic aim of a moralizing sentimental romance” (“Smollett’s Pseudo-picaresque” 76). More sympathetic twentieth-century critical assessments include those by McAllister, Stevick, Treadwell, Douglas, and Beasley (“Smollett’s Novels”). Though Boucé describes the “coexistence” of picaresque and romance elements in Fathom as “impossible” (see previous note), Smollett’s hybrid form is not unique. As Alter notes, “many picaresque writers feel constrained to tag onto their novels a post-picaresque coda in which they can get the hero settled” (75). For a somewhat pedantic debate about the extent to which the label “picaresque” can be applied appropriately to Smollett’s novels, see Rousseau “Smollett and the Picaresque,” Boucé “Smollett’s Pseudopicaresque,” Stevick, J. Skinner, and Fredman. I hope to circumvent this

Notes 177

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

controversy by discussing Ferdinand Count Fathom as an episodic narrative (with some picaresque tendencies). In a single instance, apparently overwhelmed by his hero’s villainy, Smollett comments on his tale as he tells it, reasserting the moral purposes of his novel and promising providential justice: “Perfidious wretch! Thy crimes turn out so atrocious, that I half repent me of having undertaken to record thy memoirs: yet such monsters ought to be exhibited to public view, that mankind may be upon their guard against imposture; that the world may see how fraud is apt to overshoot itself: and that, as virtue, though it may suffer for a while, will triumph in the end; so iniquity, though it may prosper for a season, will at last be overtaken by that punishment and disgrace which are its due” (239). Except for this moment, there are no authorial comments framing the moral purpose of the novel after the Dedication. For a discussion of the relationship between picaresque, episodic novels, and other episodic fictional forms, see Beasley (Novels of the 1740s ch. 4). Smollett in particular, Beasley writes, “exploited the conventions of all kinds of rogue narrative, including criminal biography” (115). Furthermore, Smollett’s novels have such a convincing air of realism that since 1867 a significant portion of Smollett criticism has entailed identifying their historical allusions. See Beasley’s discussion of the historical-allusion branch of Smollett scholarship (Smollett The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom xiii). OED, “reduce” v. sense 14a. Smollett also uses these examples in an essay on wagering in the periodical The Connoisseur and they are retailed as factual anecdotes in J. Ashton history of gambling (150–5). As Hacking describes, much of the contemporary discussion of the relationship between mathematical probability and divine design grew out of John Arbuthnot’s 1710 paper, “An argument for divine providence, taken from the constant regularity observed in the births of both sexes.” Mathematicians disagreed about how to interpret the statistics taken from the Bills of Mortality that showed that every year, more boys were born than girls. Arbuthnot, and later William Derham, thought that such a regular surplus of boys when there was an equal chance of each birth being a boy or a girl was evidence of special providence, of God’s manipulation of the laws of equal chance. Nicholas Bernoulli showed that the surplus of boys did conform to the law of large numbers, and he and DeMoivre saw the surplus of boy births as evidence of general providence, of design (Hacking Emergence 166–75). Another interesting aspect of amok’s relationship to gambling is in its description as an act of exchange by a Western researcher who interviewed amokers. Burton-Bradley summarizes the rationale of the amoker thus: “I have nothing to lose except my life, which is nothing, so I trade my life for yours, as your life is favoured. The exchange is in my favour, so I shall not only kill you, but I shall kill many of you, and at the same time rehabilitate myself in the eyes of the group of which I am a member, even though I might be killed in the process” (254). We might also see destructive high-stakes gambling as a similar act of exchange; paradoxically, the gambler’s obstinate adherence to the code of honor, as I will examine in Chapter 3 in a discussion of Mr. Harrel in Burney’s Cecilia, rehabilitates him even as it destroys him.

178

Notes

20. Suggesting the influence of criminal biographies on English picaresque novels, Beasley notes, “The introduction of Providence is conventional in contemporary stories of criminals and other deviants, and many such tales ended with the redemption of the wayward character by a providential interposition leading to self-knowledge, and, finally, to reformation” (The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom 433–4). I argue, however, that Smollett’s use of these conventions is more thoroughly tinged with skepticism than Beasley allows. 21. Smollett’s continuing discomfort about the probability of Fathom’s reform can be adduced by Fathom’s appearance in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Smollett seems to desire to prove to his readers that Ferdinand’s reform really did stick and thus describes his career as a humble, hardworking Yorkshire apothecary. The providential order that concludes Fathom carries over to Clinker, where Fathom and Renaldo are reunited when Fathom dramatically rescues Renaldo from highwaymen (202–3). 22. Of course, as I discussed earlier, probability theory tells us nothing about what will actually happen in any specific instance; rather it delineates the range of possible outcomes. In this context I can’t help but think of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), where a long run of spun coins that come up heads may be, as Guildenstern reasons, “a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does” (16). 23. Coleridge famously remarked, “What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned” (Woodring 496 n. 12). To some extent I am exaggerating the current unpopularity of Amelia in order to emphasize its similarity to Ferdinand Count Fathom as an episodic fiction that remains challenging to modern critics. Certainly Amelia has been more fully rehabilitated than Ferdinand Count Fathom, as Alison Conway points out (136). Discussions of Amelia that have been important for my argument include those by Castle, J. Campbell, J. Thompson, Rawson, Battestin, Gladfelder, Benedict, and Crump (“Pascal’s Wager and Fielding’s Amelia”). 24. Folkenflik criticizes approaches to Amelia that lament the absence of that “old friend, the narrator of Tom Jones.” Instead, he suggests, “the question is why Fielding, who knew well the comic value of his narrator in Tom Jones, chose to avoid authorial narration throughout much of Amelia” (168).

3 The Gambling Man of Feeling: Sublime and Sentimental Gambling 1. See Keohane’s discussion of this quote, p. 389. 2. Barker-Benfield identifies the cult of sensibility as reformist in “A Culture of Reform,” ch. 5 of The Culture of Sensibility. 3. Todd dates “the cult of sensibility” “roughly from the 1740s to the 1770s; by the late eighteenth century, Ellis suggests, the sentimental novel was “the dominant literary form” (Todd 1206; Ellis 2). See Crane, Bredvold, Brissenden, Rousseau (“Nerves”), Greene, Benedict, Markely, Mullan, and Conger on the origins and philosophical background of sensibility.

Notes 179 4. As Benedict shows, sentimental episodes and fragments were often detached from the novels in which they originally appeared and were assembled in anthologies and miscellanies (133–71). 5. G. Skinner 2–3; Ellis 134–5. 6. Utter and Needham call David Simple “the first out-and-out novel of sensibility” (114). 7. While we might classify Evelina as a bildungsroman and a satirical novel rather than a novel of sensibility, nonetheless I follow Barker-Benfield and Barker in identifying Lord Orville as a man of feeling. Barker distinguishes between “the worldly Man of Feeling,” such as Orville, and “the naive Man of Feeling” such as David Simple (69). Gautier suggests that Evelina is a “model of sensibility, where ideological authority is overtly grounded in feelings rather than rational principles or objective hierarchies” (210). 8. G. Skinner notes the somewhat “schizophrenic” role of class in sentimental fiction: “Sentimental fiction is essentially a middle-class genre which both creates an idealised aristocracy and deplores the luxury and excess associated with aristocratic vices, while simultaneously exploiting the commercial opportunities those vices afford” (11). 9. Skinner briefly discusses David’s reaction to his inability to assist Isabelle financially (17). 10. See Morton (under whom Defoe studied) and Chalmers for examples of antigambling commentary on the dangerous passions play evokes. 11. See Kavanagh on aristocratic gambling as a reactionary repudiation of capitalism (Enlightenment 43). 12. As Skinner suggests, critics of sentimentalism were concerned that the man of feeling was simply profligate: “correspondence between the degree of financial generosity and the degree of proven sensibility immediately raises the possibility of the excessive response – extravagance of both financial and emotional (and … sexual) kinds” (4). 13. See Motooka for further discussion of Daniel’s actions (110). 14. Gautier suggests that David Simple’s “ambivalence about its own feelingcentered world” is “the very thing which is unresolvable in bourgeois culture” (209).

4 The Lady’s Last Stake: Camilla and the Female Gambler 1. While the iconography of the female gamester remained remarkably consistent throughout the eighteenth century, G. Russell delineates the political and economic contexts of specific caricatures of several real-life women gamblers from the 1790s known as the “Faro ladies.” 2. See Kowaleski-Wallace and Henderson. 3. The description is Lord Charlemont’s, who commissioned the painting (quoted in Paulson 267). 4. As Straub points out, Burney uses Vanbrugh and Cibber’s play, The Provoked Husband, in both Camilla, where Lionel is compared to the provincial couple Sir Francis and Lady Wronghead, and in The Wanderer (1814), where Juliet acts the part of the gambling Lady Townly opposite Harleigh’s Lord Townly (216, 219).

180

Notes

5. The complaint that gambling attracted a heterogeneous crowd of people from all classes was frequently used to warn women from play. For example, Sir Richard in Centlivre’s The Basset Table protests to his niece: “Can you who keeps a Basset Table, a public gaming house, be insensible of the shame on’t? I have often told you how much the vast concourse of people which day and night make my house their rendezvous incommode my health. Your apartment is a parade of men of all ranks, from the duke to the fiddle, and your vanity thinks they all pay devoir to your beauty – but you mistake: everyone has his several ends in meeting here, from the lord to the sharper, each their separate interests to pursue” (238–9). 6. See Henderson’s discussion of the shopping scene (76–8). 7. Henderson makes this observation about Camilla’s luck (80). I am indebted to Henderson’s essay for many of the succeeding details of Camilla’s participation in lotteries, but my argument about the relationship between lotteries and shopping is different from Henderson’s. She sees shopping and lotteries as activities in opposition; shopping represents a vulgar new mode of economic engagement while gambling is an aristocratic act (76).

5 Children’s Games “Abroad and at Home”: Belinda, Education, and Empire 1. Kirkpatrick’s edition and my argument here are based on the first edition of the novel. For discussions of Edgeworth’s changes to the novel, especially to Juba and Vincent, when Belinda was included in Barbauld’s British Novelists collection (1810), see Kirkpatrick, “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject’…” and Perera (16–17, 27–9.) 2. Kirkpatrick includes this sketch, which was printed in Frances Edgeworth’s A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth (London: 1867), in her edition of Belinda, 479–83. 3. See Douthwaite for a discussion of the influence of scientific experimentalism on the Edgeworths’ educational model. Lang argues that “since the enlightened eighteenth-century image of reality included an orderly rational universe that functioned predictably according to scientific laws, [Edgeworth’s] stories must demonstrate that the actions of the present lead to predictable consequences” (27). 4. Clarence Hervey’s ability to follow Dr X––’s lead by regaling the children with tales of animals in different cultures is supposed to be a sign of his good character, though his pride in this ability (he “piqued himself in being able always to suit his conversation to his companions” [Belinda 99]) marks his relative immaturity in the first half of the novel. Perera examines how Hervey’s most sparkling conversations, both with children and adults, draw on the resources of the expanding British empire (27). 5. Divine and Moral Songs for Children by Isaac Watts, D. D., (London: K. Miller, 1816). Victoria and Albert Museum, E2556-1953. 6. Tilley 74; “Alphabet Cards with Figures of Fun and Humorous Verses. A Reward for the Good,” (undated [late eighteenth century]). Victoria and Albert Museum, 27896. 7. Untitled, undated pack, Victoria and Albert Museum, E821.1939. See also Tilley 75–6.

Notes 181 8. “Alphabet Cards with Figures of Fun and Humorous Verses. A Reward for the Good,” (undated [late eighteenth century]). Victoria and Albert Museum, 27896. 9. “Alphabet Cards with Figures of Fun and Humorous Verses. A Reward for the Good.” 10. Some of Edgeworth’s stories, such as “The Orphans” and “Simple Susan” (in The Parent’s Assistant), feature lower-class, even impoverished children. Their admirable industriousness, however, is always ultimately in service of, rather than a threat to, paternalistic society. And their industriousness does not seem to be enough to support them, but it brings them to the attention of local benevolent landowners, who give the hard-working children pecuniary assistance. 11. Gallagher suggests that Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s practice and advocacy of benevolent paternalism on Irish estates derived from his sense of the tenuousness of the Anglo-Irish claim to their estates (289). 12. Edgeworth glances at, but does not develop, the analogy between Irish and West Indian absenteeism when a village innkeeper in The Absentee tells Lord Colambre that Lord Clonbrony “knows nothing of his property, nor of us. Never set foot among us, to my knowledge, since I was as high as the table. He might as well be a West India planter, and we negroes, for any thing he knows to the contrary – has no more care, nor thought about us, than if he were in Jamaica, or the other world” (125). The innkeeper’s implication, of course, is not that West Indian absenteeism is wrong, but that a landowner should pay more attention to his Irish tenants than he would to his slaves. In her story “The Grateful Negro” Edgeworth argues for ameliorative treatment of slaves (rather than abolition of slavery) by narrating the bonds of sympathy that tie a grateful slave to his master (Popular Tales 289–326). See Boulukos’s analysis of “The Grateful Negro.” 13. For an early fictionalized argument against West Indian absenteeism, see Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison. 14. The OED defines “creole” as “a person born and naturalized in the country, but of European (usually Spanish or French) or of African Negro race: the name having no connotation of colour, and in its reference to origin being distinguished on the one hand from born in Europe (or Africa), and on the other hand from aboriginal.” 15. Mansfield Park’s Sir Thomas Bertram is perhaps the best-known fictional example of such absentee West Indian planters. 16. The Mertons’ return to England in order to educate their child without the taint of slavery suggests a hope, evident in Belinda as well, that even as an increasing portion of the domestic economy derived from slave labor, the West Indies bore the moral weight of slavery and England itself was untainted. Day, by calling the slaves that care for Tommy his “servants,” shields his English child readers from confronting the difficult issue of slavery. 17. See Sypher; Bush; and the extensive critical discussions of Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason for the history of the female West Indian stereotype. 18. Long, II.261. 19. Ellis explores the extensive links between sensibility and slavery. Perera (30–1) and Greenfield (220) discuss this scene and the reading of Day’s poem.

182

Notes

20. E O is a game of chance similar to roulette, in which players wager on whether a ball will fall “into one of several niches marked E [Even] or O [Odd]” (OED, 2nd ed., “E O.”). Incidentally, the OED quotes from Belinda to exemplify this definition: “He likes the lady’s E O table better than the lady” (Edgeworth 346). 21. Ellis notes: “The test case of slavery in England was prosecuted by Granville Sharp in 1771, against Charles Stewart, a customs official from Boston, Massachusetts, who had brought with him from America, a slave, James Somerset … [Lord Mansfield’s] decision was held by some to abolish slavery in England, although its practical force was limited” (117). 22. “Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?” (Austen Mansfield 136).

6 The Confidence Man: Persuasion and the Romance of Risk 1. Zietlow notes, “that Admiral Croft happened to be looking for an estate to rent at the very time Kellynch became available seems almost too good to be true” (181). 2. As Johnson shows, Marianne’s belief in Willoughby’s love for her is vindicated, and Elinor’s “wariness” does not prevent her from being misled both by Willoughby and Edward Ferrars ( Jane Austen 62, 59). 3. See Rubin’s critique of Lévi-Strauss. 4. See Astell’s argument that Anne’s education continues throughout the novel. 5. See Hacking for Pascal’s wager (Emergence 62–73).

Bibliography Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965. Alter, Robert. Rogue’s Progress. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964. A Modest Defence of Gaming. London: Dodsley, 1754. Adventures of a Corkscrew. London: T. Bell 1775. An Account of the Endeavors That have been used to Suppress the Gaming-Houses, and of the Discouragements That have been met with. In a Letter to a Noble Lord. London, 1722. Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. London: Pimlico, 1962. Ashton, John. The History of Gambling in England. Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1969. Ashton, T. S. An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century. London: Methuen, 1955. Astell, Ann W. “Anne Elliot’s Education: The Learning of Romance in Persuasion.” Persuasion. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. New York: Norton, 1995. 275–85. Austen, Jane. Catherine and Other Writings. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. ——. Emma. Ed. James Kinsley. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. ——. Mansfield Park. Ed. Claudia L. Johnson. New York: Norton, 1998. ——. Northanger Abbey and Other Works. Ed. James Kinsley and John Davie. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. ——. Persuasion. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. New York: Norton, 1995. ——. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Vivian Jones. New York: Penguin, 1996. Backscheider, Paula R., and Cotton, Hope D., Introduction. The Excursion. By Frances Brooke. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1997. ix–xlvi. Barker, Gerard A. “David Simple: The Novel of Sensibility in Embryo.” Modern Language Studies 12.2 (1982): 69–80. Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. 116–29. Battestin, Martin C. The Providence of Wit. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989. Beasley, Jerry C. “Life’s Episodes: Story and its Form in the Eighteenth Century.” The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century. Ann Arbor: Colleagues P, 1998. 21–45. ——. Novels of the 1740s. Athens: U of Georgia Press, 1982. ——. “Smollett’s Novels: Ferdinand Count Fathom for the Defense.” Papers on Language and Literature 20.2 (1984): 165–84. Beck, Ulrich. “Risk Society Revisited: Theory, Politics and Research Programmes.” The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory. Ed. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, and Joost Van Loon. London: SAGE Publications, 2000. 211–29. Benedict, Barbara M. Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800. New York: AMS P, 1994. 183

184

Bibliography

Blewett, David. “Introduction.” Amelia. New York: Penguin, 1987. ix–xxi. Boucé, Paul-Gabriel. “Smollett’s Pseudo-picaresque: A Response to Rousseau’s ‘Smollet and the Picaresque.’” Studies in Burke and His Time: A Journal Devoted to British, American and Continental Culture, 1750–1800 14 (1973): 73–9. ——. The Novels of Tobias Smollett. New York: Longman, 1976. Boulukos, George E. “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23.1 (1999): 12–29. Bredvold, Louis I. The Natural History of Sensibility. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1962. Bree, Linda. Sarah Fielding. New York: Twayne, 1996. Brissenden, R. F. Virtue in Distress: Studies of the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974. Brooke, Frances. The Excursion. Ed. Paula D. Backscheider and Hope D. Cotton. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1997. Brooke, Henry. The Fool of Quality. London: A Millar, 1792. Brooks, David. “The Great Seduction.” New York Times. New York Times, 10 June 2008. Web. 20 Dec. 2010. Brown, Laura. Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Brown, Thomas. A Legacy for the Ladies, or Characters of the Women of the Age. London: H. Meere, 1705. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Burke, Thomas. English Night Life. London: Batsford, 1941. Burney, Frances. Camilla, or a Picture of Youth. Ed. Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom. New York: Oxford UP, 1972. ——. Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress. Ed. Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. ——. Evelina, or The History of A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Ed. Stewart J. Cooke. New York: Norton, 1998. Burton-Bradley, B. G. “The Amok Syndrome in Papua and New Guinea.” The Medical Journal of Australia 1 (1968): 252–6. Bush, Barbara. “White ‘Ladies’, Coloured ‘Favourites’ and Black ‘Wenches’: Some Considerations on Sex, Race and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean.” Slavery and Abolition 2.3 (1982): 245–62. Campbell, D. Grant. “Fashionable Suicide: Conspicuous Consumption and the Collapse of Credit in Frances Burney’s Cecilia.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 131–45. Campbell, Jill. Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. “Carding Censur’d.” The Lady’s Curiosity 1.15 (1752): 234–5. Carruthurs, Bruce G. City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986. Centlivre, Susannah. “The Basset Table.” Female Playwrights of the Restoration. Ed. Paddy Lyons and Fidelis Morgan. London: Everyman, 1991. 235–92. Challis, C. E. “Neale, Thomas (1641–1699).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Web. 3 Dec 2007.

Bibliography 185 Chalmers, A. The British Essayists; with Prefaces, Historical and Biographical. London: Nichols et. al., 1817. Chancellor, E. Beresford. Memorials of St. James’s Street, Together with the Annals of Almack’s. London: Grant Richards, 1922. Cibber, Colley. “The Lady’s Last Stake: or, The Wife’s Resentment.” Colley Cibber: Three Sentimental Comedies. Ed. Maureen Sullivan. New Haven: Yale UP, 1973. 175–276. Clark, Samuel. The Laws of Chance. London: T. Payne, 1758. Cohen, Jacob. “The Element of Lottery in British Government Bonds, 1694–1919.” Economica 20.79, 2nd ser. (1953): 237–46. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. 14: Table Talk. Ed. Carl Woodring. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Colman, George. The connoisseur. By Mr. Town, critic and censor-general ... Vol. 4. London: R. Baldwin, 1757. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Web. 4 Feb. 2011. Conger, Syndy McMillen, ed. Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics. Cranbery: Associated UP, 1990. Congreve, William. “Incognita.” An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction. Ed. Paul Salzman. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 471–526. Conway, Allison. Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1791. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Copeland, Edward. Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Cotton, Charles. The Compleat Gamester. London: Charles Browne, 1709. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Gale. Web. 4 Feb. 2011. The Covent-Garden magazine; or, Amorous repository: calculated solely for the entertainment of the polite world. London, 1774. Crane, R. S. “Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling.’” The Idea of the Humanities. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967. 188–213. Crump, Justine. “‘Il faut patier’: Pascal’s Wager and Fielding’s Amelia.” Modern Language Review 5.2 (2000): 311–23. ——. “The Perils of Play: Eighteenth-Century Ideas About Gambling.” Centre For History and Economics. Web. 2003. 20 Dec 2010. Darton, F. J. Harvey. Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966. Daston, Lorraine. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. David, F. N. Games, Gods and Gambling: A History of Probability and Statistical Ideas. Mineola: Dover, 1998. Day, Geoffrey. From Fiction to the Novel: New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Day, Thomas. The History of Sanford and Merton. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1857. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Ed. A. J. Rivero. New York: Norton, 2004. DeMoivre, Abraham. The Doctrine of Chances: or, a Method of Calculating the Probability of Events in Play. London: A. Millar, 1756. Dickson, P. G. M. The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit. London: Macmillan, 1967.

186

Bibliography

Disney, John. The Laws of Gaming, Wagers, Horse-Racing, and Gaming-Houses. London: J. Butterworth, 1806. Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996. Douglas, Aileen. Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Douthwaite, Julia. “Experimental Child-rearing After Rousseau: Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education, and Belinda.” Irish Journal of Feminist Studies 2.2 (1997): 35–56. Duncan, Ian. “Romance.” Encyclopedia of the Novel. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. 1113–17. Edgeworth, Maria. The Absentee. Ed. Heidi Thomson. New York: Penguin, 1999. ——. Belinda. Ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. ——. Castle Rackrent and Ennui. Ed. Marilyn Butler. New York: Penguin, 1992. ——. Moral Tales. London: J. Johnson, 1801. ——. “Murad the Unlucky.” Oriental Tales. Ed. Robert L. Mack. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 215–56. ——. Ormond, A Tale. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895. ——. The Parent’s Assistant. London, 1796. ——. Popular Tales. London: J. Johnson, 1804. Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Practical Education. New York: Woodstock Books, 1996. Einberg, Elizabeth. Manners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting 1700–1760. London: Tate Gallery, 1987. Ellis, Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Etherege, George. “Song of Basset.” The Works of Sir George Etherege, Containing his Plays and Poems. London: J. Tonson et. al., 1704. 287–8. Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn. Ed. E. S. De Beer. Oxford: Clarendon P, 2000. Ewen, C. L’Estrange. Lotteries and Sweepstakes: An Historical, Legal, and Ethical Survey of Their Introduction, Supression and Re-Establishment in the British Isles. London: Heath Cranton Limited, 1932. Fawcett, Trevor. Bath Entertain’d. Bath: Rutton, 1998. Fielding, Henry. Amelia. Ed. David Blewett. New York: Penguin, 1987. ——. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Signet, 1963. ——. The Lottery: A Farce. London: J. Watts, 1732. Fielding, Sarah. The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last. Ed. Peter Sabor. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1998. Finn, Margot. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture: 1740–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. ——. “Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760–1860.” The Historical Journal 39.3 (1996): 703–22. Floud, Roderick and Deirdre McCloskey, eds. The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Vol. 1: 1700–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Folkenflik, Robert. “Purpose and Narration in Fielding’s Amelia.” Novel 7.2 (1974): 168–74. Foreman, Amanda. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. London: HarperCollins, 1998.

Bibliography 187 Fredman, Alice Green. “The Picaresque in Decline: Smollett’s First Novel.” English Writers of the Eighteenth Century. Ed. John H. Mittendorf. New York: Columbia UP, 1971. 189–207. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Gallabher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Gautier, Gary. “Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility.” Novel 31.2 (1998): 195–214. Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. 412–54. Gigerenzer, Gerd et. al. The Empire of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Gladfelder, Hal. Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Goux, Jean-Joseph. “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism.” Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 206–24. Greene, Donald. “Latitudinarianism and Sensibility: The Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’ Reconsidered.” Modern Philology 75 (1977): 159–83. Greenfield, Susan C. “‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda. PMLA 112.2 (1997): 214–28. Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. ——. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Hargrave, Catherine Perry. A History of Playing Cards and a Bibliography of Cards and Gaming. New York: Dover, 1966. Haywood, Eliza The city Jilt; or, the Alderman Turn’d Beau. London: J. Roberts, 1726. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Web. 6 Feb. 2011. Henderson, Andrea. “Commerce and Masochistic Desire in the 1790s: Frances Burney’s Camilla.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.1 (1997): 69–86. Hopkins, Robert. “Moral Luck and Judgment in Austen’s Persuasion.” Persuasion. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. New York: Norton, 1995. Hoppit, Julian. “Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790.” The Historical Journal 33.2 (1990): 305–22. ——. “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England.” The Economic History Review ns 39.1 (1986): 39–58. ——. An essay towards making the doctrine of chances easy to those who understand vulgar arithmetick only. London: J. Jolliff, 1754. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Web. 3 Sept. 2008. Hoyle, Edmond. A Short Treatis on the Game of Whist. London: John Watts, 1724. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Gale. Web. 6 Feb. 2011. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. The Humours of Whist. London, J. Roberts, 1743. Ingamells, John. “A Hanoverian Party on a Terrace by Philip Mercier.” The Burlington Magazine 118.880 (1976): 511–15. Ingrassia, Catherine. Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

188

Bibliography

Jameson, Frederic. “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre.” New Literary History 7.1 (1975): 135–63. Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. ——. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. Ed. W. J. Bate & Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven: Yale U P, 1969. Kavanagh, Thomas M. Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. ——. Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Keohane, Catherine. “Too neat for a beggar’: Charity and Debt in Burney’s Cecilia.” Studies in the Novel 33.4 (2001): 379–401. Kibbie, Ann Louise. “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana.” PMLA 110.5 (1995): 1023–34. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn J. “Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject”: West Indian Suitors in Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5.4 (1993): 331–48. Knapp, Lewis M., ed. The Letters of Tobias Smollett. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1970. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Lancaster, Henry. “Evance, Sir Stephen (1654/5–1712).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Web. 4 Jan. 2008. Lang, Marjorie. “Maria Edgeworth’s The Parent’s Assistant (1796): A Document of Social Education.” History of Education 7.1 (1978): 21–33. Lascelles, E. C. P. The Life of Charles James Fox. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Lears, Jackson. Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Viking, 2003. Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote. Ed. Margaret Dalziel. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Linebaugh, Peter. The London Hanged: Crime and Society in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Penguin, 1991. Litz, A. Walton. “New Landscapes.” Persuasion. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. New York: Norton, 1995. 217–23. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island. Ed. George Metcalf. London: Frank Cass & Co, 1970. Lucas, Theophilus. Memoirs of the Lives, Intrigues, and Comical Adventures of the most Famous Gamesters and Celebrated Sharpers in the Reigns of Charles II, James II, William III, and Queen Anne. London: Jonas Brown, 1714. Lupton, Deborah. Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Markley, Robert. “Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue.” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature. Ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. New York: Metheun, 1987. 210–30.

Bibliography 189 Marshall, Julian. “Books on Gaming.” Notes and Queries 7th ser. VIII (1889): 42–3. McAllister, John. “Conversion, Seduction, and Medicine in Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 1.4 (1989): 319–33. McDowell, M. M. “A Cursory View of Cheating at Whist in the Eighteenth Century.” Harvard Library Bulletin 22.2 (1974): 162–75. McKeon, Michael. Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Miers, David. “A Social and Legal History of Gaming: From the Restoration to the Gaming Act of 1845.” Legal Record and Historical Reality. Ed. Thomas G. Watkin. London: Hambledon P, 1989. Montagu, Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Ed. Robert Halsband. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965. Moore, Charles. A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide. To which are added (as being closely connected with the subject) two treatises on dueling and gaming … London: J. F. & C. Rivington, 1790. Moore, John. Zeluco. London: Rivington et.al., 1820. More, Hannah. “Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune.” Selected Writings of Hannah More. Ed. Robert Hole. London: William Pickering, 1996. 121–236. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Morton, Charles. The Gaming-Humor Considered and Reproved. London: Thomas Cockerill, 1684. Motooka, Wendy. The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism, and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Routledge, 1998. Mowry, Melissa M. “Eliza Haywood’s Defense of London’s Body Politic.” SEL 43.3 (2003): 645–65. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998. Mullan, John. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998. Munting, Roger. An Economic and Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA. New York, Manchester UP, 1996. Murdoch, D. H. “Land Policy in the Eighteenth-Century Empire: The Sale of Crown Lands in the Ceded Islands, 1763–1783.” The Historical Journal 27.3 (1984): 549–74. Murphy, Anne L. “Lotteries in the 1690s: Investment or Gamble?” Financial History Review 12.02 (2005): 227–46. Neal, Larry. The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. New, Melvin. “‘The Grease of God’: The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction.” PMLA 91.2 (1976): 235–44. Nicholson, Colin. Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Nickel, Terry. “‘Ingenious Torment’: Incest, Family, and the Structure of Community in the Work of Sarah Fielding.” The Eighteenth Century 36.3 (1995): 234–47.

190

Bibliography

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. O’Brien, Patrick K. “Political structures and grand strategies for the growth of the British economy, 1688–1815.” Nation, State and the Economy in History. Ed. Alice Teichova & Herbert Matis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 11–33. Patey, Douglas Lane. Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Perera, Suvendrini. The Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Plumb, J. H. “The Commercialization of Leisure.” The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, & John H. Plumb. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. 265–285. Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. ——. “Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment.” Victorian Studies 45.1 (2002): 17–41. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonamy Dobrée and Terry Castle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Raven, James. “The Abolition of the English State Lotteries.” The Historical Journal 34.2 (1991): 371–89. ——. Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Rawson, Claude. Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. ——. Order From Confusion Sprung. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. Richardson, Samuel. The History of Sir Charles Grandison. Ed. Jocelyn Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 1972. Rivero A. J. “Representing Clementina: ‘Unnatural’ Romance and the Ending of Sir Charles Grandison.” New Essays on Samuel Richardson. Ed. A. J. Rivero. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1996. 209–25. Rosengarten, Richard A. Henry Fielding and the Narration of Providence: Divine Design and the Incursions of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Rousseau, G. S. “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility.” Studies in the Eighteenth Century, III: Papers Presented at the Third David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar. Ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Dade. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1976. ——. “Smollett and the Picaresque: Some Questions About a Label.” Studies in Burke and His Time 12 (1971): 1886–1904. Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1933. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review P, 1975. 157–210. Russell, Gillian. “‘Faro’s Daughter’s’: Female Gamesters, Politics, and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.4 (2000): 481–504.

Bibliography 191 Russell, H. K. “Unity in Eighteenth-Century Episodic Novels.” Quick Springs of Sense: Studies in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Larry S. Champion. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1974. 18–96. Scott, Sarah. The History of Sir George Ellison. Ed. Betty Rizzo. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1996. Seymour, Richard. The Court Gamester. London: J. Wilford, 1732. Sherman, Sandra. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Sitwell, Edith. Bath. London: Faber and Faber, 1932. Skinner, Gillian. Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800: The Price of a Tear. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1999. Skinner, John. Constructions of Smollett: A Study of Genre and Gender. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1996. Smith, Charlotte. The Old Manor House. Ed. Judith Phillips Stanton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. Ed. Jerry C. Beasley. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988. ——. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé. New York: Oxford UP, 1979. ——. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Ed. Angus Ross. New York: Penguin, 1967. Spores, J. C. Running Amok: An Historical Inquiry. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1988. Squire Randal’s Excursion Round London. London: Richardson and Urquhart, 1777. Stevick, Philip. “Smollett’s Picaresque Games.” Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp. Ed. G. S. Rousseau and Paul-Gabriel Boucé. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. 111–30. Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. New York: Grove P, 1967. Straub, Kristina. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1987. Swift, Jonathan. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Herbert John Davis and Irvin Ehrenpreis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1939. Sypher, Wylie. “The West-Indian as a ‘Character’ in the Eighteenth Century.” Studies in Philology 36 (1939): 503–20. Thompson, Edward. The Demi-Rep. London, C. Moran, 1756. Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Tilley, Roger. A History of Playing Cards. London: Studio Vista, 1973. Todd, Janet. “Sentimental Novel.” Encyclopedia of the Novel. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. 1206–8. Treadwell, T. O. “The Two Worlds of Ferdinand Count Fathom.” Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp. Ed. G. S. Rovsseau and PaulGabriel Boucé. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. 131–53. Utter, R. P. and G. B. Needham. Pamela’s Daughters. New York: Russell & Russell, 1936. Vanbrugh, John and Colley, Cibber. The Provoked Husband. Ed. Peter Dixon. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1973.

192

Bibliography

Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Viner, Charles. A General Abridgment of Law and Equity … London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, T. Payne, E. and R. Brooke, T. Whieldon and J. Butterworth, 1791. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Gale. Web. 1 Sept. 2008. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Ward, Edward. “Bad Luck to Him That Has Her: Or, The Gaming Lady.” The Modern World Disrobe’d: or, Both Sexes Stript of their Pretended Virtue. London: J. Woodward, 1714. Weissman, Cheryl Ann. “Doubleness and Refrain in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.” Persuasion. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. New York: Norton, 1995. 307–12. Williams, Ioan. Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: A Documentary Record. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970. Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. London: William Pickering, 1989. Wyett, Jodi. “Of Innocence and Experience: Fame, Fortune, and Women’s Intellectual Labor in Frances Brooke’s The Excursion.” The Eighteenth-Century Novel 3 (2003): 129–56. Zietlow, Paul N. “Luck and Fortuitous Circumstance in Persuasion: Two Interpretations.” ELH 32.2 (1956): 179–95.

Index Note: “n.” after a page reference number indicates a note on that page. Account of the Endeavors That have been used to Suppress Gaming-Houses, An 173 n. 18, 175–6 n. 3 Adventures of a Cork-Screw, The 100 Almack’s 10, 45, 50 Alter, Robert 65, 176 n. 13 amok 71, 177 n. 19 Arbuthnot, John 54, 177 n. 18 Ariès, Philipe 134 Arthur’s 55 Ashton , John 11, 172 n. 5 Ashton, T. S. 172 n. 7 Astell, A. W. 182 n. 4 Austen, Jane 7, 146–168 Emma 150, 155 Love and Freindship 148 Mansfield Park 144, 146, 150, 157, 182 n. 22 Northanger Abbey 150 Persuasion 15, 146–168 Pride and Prejudice 146, 149, 154, 155, 156 Sanditon 162 Sense and Sensibility 146, 149, 154, 155, 182 n. 2 Backscheider, Paula 175 n. 15 Bank of England 5, 25 Barker-Benfield, G. J. 99, 178 n. 2, 179 n. 7 Barrow, Rev. Isaac 78–9, 84 Bataille, Georges 4, 5, 19, 22–24, 30, 93, 104, 172 n. 6 Bath 147, 151, 155, 161–65 Battestin, Martin 178 n. 23 Beasley, Jerry 64–5, 176 n. 12, 177 n. 15, 178 n. 20 Beck, Ulrich 170–71 Benedict, Barbara 105, 178 n. 23, 178 n. 3, 179 n. 4 Bernoulli, Jakob 176 n. 8

Bernoulli, Nicholas 177 n. 18 bildungsroman 179 n. 7 Blewett, David 76 Boucé, Paul-Gabriel 175 n. 2, 176 n. 12, 176 n. 13 Bree, Linda 97–8, 107 Bredvold, Louis 178 n. 3 Brighton 162 Brissenden, R.F. 178 n. 3 Brooke, Frances Excursion, The 14, 32, 39–44, 112, 175 n. 15 Brooke, Henry Fool of Quality, The 102 Brooke’s 10 Brooks, David 169 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 181 n. 17 Brown, Laura 18 Brown, Thomas 114 Burke, Edmund 87 Burke, Thomas 163, 172 n. 5 Burney, Frances 7, 91, 92, 94, 113, 123, 126, 147, 179 n. 4 Cecilia 14, 88, 91–97, 111, 123, 177 n. 19 Camilla 86, 91, 94, 97, 111–113, 119–126, 156, 167, 168, 179 n. 4, 180 n. 7 Evelina 98–100, 102, 175 n. 15, 179 n. 7 Wanderer, The 179 n. 4 Burton-Bradley, B. G. 177 n. 19 Bush, Barbara 181 n. 17 Butler, Marilyn 151 Caillière, Maréchal de 133 calculation 6, 13, 14, 40, 45–50, 52, 55–71, 77, 80, 89, 95, 96, 123–5, 144, 147, 155, 156, 158, 161, 162, 165–7, 170, 171

193

194

Index

Campbell, D. Grant 94, 172 n. 5 Campbell, Jill 77–8, 81–82, 178 n. 23 capitalism 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 18–20, 22–24, 26, 28–34, 36–38, 40, 42–44, 63, 77, 82, 87, 97, 98, 100, 102, 108, 109, 110, 144, 169, 170, 172–3 n. 7, 175 n. 11 card tables 1, 4, 9, 15–16, 18, 20, 46, 51–52, 105, 108, 110, 116, 118–19, 120, 147 Castle, Terry 94, 178 n. 23 Centlivre, Susanna 7 Basset Table, The 117, 118, 121, 189 n. 5 Challis, C. E. 20 Chalmers, A. 112, 116, 179 n. 10 charity 37, 96, 99, 100, 101, 124 Charles II 18, 19, 20, 22, 35, 45, 50, 53, 174 n. 1 Cibber, Colley Lady’s Last Stake, or the Wife’s Resentment, The 117, 118, 121 Cibber, Colley and Sir John Vanbrugh Provoked Husband, The 115, 118, 179 n. 4 Clark, Samuel Laws of Chance, The 54 Cohen, J. 172–3 n. 7 Coleridge, Samuel T. 178 n. 23 Colman, George and Bonnell Thornton 55 colonies 19, 20, 25, 27, 71, 87, 127, 129, 139–44, 148, 169 Conger, Syndy M. 178 n. 3 Congreve, William 6, 7 Connoisseur, The 55, 177 n. 7 contingency 4, 6, 76, 81, 148 contracts 5, 11, 23, 26, 30, 32, 43, 52, 57, 59, 91, 95, 111, 122 conversation paintings 1, 3–4, 7, 11, 15, 16 Conway, Allison 178 n. 23 Copeland, Edward 27 Cotton, Charles 52–54, 56, 58, 65, 176 n. 5 Cotton, Hope D. 175 n. 15 Cottrell, Clement 20 Covent-Garden magazine, The 59, 62 coverture 111–12, 115, 123, 126

Crane, R. S. 178 n. 3 creole 128–130, 140–3, 181 n. 14 criminal biography 54, 176 n. 5, 176 n. 6, 177 n. 15, 178 n. 20 Crump, Justine 173 n. 13, n. 14, 178 n. 23 Cumberland, Richard West Indian, The 143 D’Arblay, Alexander 126 Darton, F. J. H. 133 Daston, Lorraine 13, 47, 55, 56, 173 n. 9, 173 n. 19, 176 n. 8 David, F. N. 72, 173 n. 9 Davies, Randall 174 n. 20 Day, Geoffrey 7 Day, Thomas “Dying Negro, The” 143–44, 181 n. 19 Sanford and Merton 142, 181 n. 16 De Beer, E. S. 174 n. 1 debt 10, 11, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 30, 34–37, 40, 41, 51, 84, 87–89, 91–96, 102, 108, 111–114, 116–118, 121–125, 142, 146, 172 n. 7 Defoe, Daniel 7, 33, 174 n. 12 Moll Flanders 32, 33, 175 n. 11 Roxana 175 n. 11 DeMoivre, Abraham 54, 55, 72, 176, n. 7, 177 n. 18 Derham, William 177 n. 18 Dickson, P. G. M. 21, 23–28, 172 n. 7, 174 n, 5 Dighton, Robert 175 n. 1 Disney, John Laws of Gaming, The 11, 51, 70, 172 n. 5 Doody, Margaret Anne 173 n. 12 Douglas, Aileen 176 n. 12 Douthwaite, Julia 139, 180 n. 3 Duncan, Ian 6, 173 n. 11 economy 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, 27–44, 46, 48, 63, 65, 66, 72, 77, 80, 82–100, 104, 105, 107, 109–114, 116, 119, 121–123, 125–127, 129, 130, 133, 139, 144–148, 157, 168, 169, 181 n. 16

Index 195 Edgeworth, Maria 7, 127–145, 148, 180 n. 2, 181 n. 10, 181 n. 12 Absentee, The 139–40, 181 n. 12 Belinda 127–132, 135–145, 148, 167, 180 n. 1, 180 n. 2, 180 n. 4, 181 n. 16, 182 n. 20 “Grateful Negro, The” 181 n. 12 “Murad the Unlucky” 131 Practical Education 130, 131, 135, 136, 138 Moral Tales 131 Ormond 134–136, 139 Castel Rackrent 139 Parent’s Assistant, The 181 n. 10 Popular Tales 181 n. 12 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 127, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 180 n. 3, 181 n. 11, 181 n. 15 education 14, 15, 115, 127–36, 138, 139, 141–4, 181 n. 3, 181 n. 16, 182 n. 4 Edward IV 50 Edwards, Ralph 174 n. 20 Einberg, Elizabeth 175 n. 1 Ellis, Markman 98, 102, 143, 178 n. 3, 179 n. 5, 181 n. 19, 182 n. 21 empire 14, 21, 28, 89, 128, 132, 139, 180 n. 4 England 2, 4, 5, 9, 14, 15, 17, 19–22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 47, 54, 64, 67–69, 72, 73, 93, 127, 129, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140, 141–144, 148, 149, 172 n. 2, 172 n. 5, 181 n. 16, 182 n. 21 estate management 34, 35–37, 42, 77, 84, 91, 95, 96, 110, 112, 139–142, 146, 148, 161, 167, 181 n. 11 Etherege, George 114 Evance, Sir Stephen 22, 24 Evans, Robert 172 n. 5 Eveyln, John 18, 20, 174 n. 1 Ewen, C. L’Estrange 19, 20, 21, 22, 24 Exchange Alley 18, 25, 26, 33, 34, 87, 100–103

expenditure 18, 21–24, 29, 30, 31, 35, 94, 95, 97–99, 102, 104–106, 113, 123, 125, 135, 170, 172 n. 6, 173 n. 10 Fawcett, T. 163 female gambler see gambling: female gambling Fermat, Pierre de 47 Fielding, Henry 7, 14, 54, 59, 63, 64, 74–77, 79, 80–84, 107, 109, 147, 150, 171 Amelia 14, 47, 63, 76–84, 110, 167, 171, 175 n. 15, 178 n. 23, 178 n. 24 Lottery, The 59 Tom Jones 72, 74, 76, 80, 81, 83, 176 n. 11, 178 n. 24 Fielding, Sarah 7, 98, 99, 100–102, 105, 107, 109, 110 Adventures of David Simple, The 14, 87, 98, 100–110, 179 n. 6, 179 n. 7, 179 n. 9, 179 n. 10, 179 n. 13, 179 n. 14 Volume the Last 107, 109 financial revolution 18, 19 Finn, Margot 30, 93, 111, 123, 172 n. 7, 174 n. 6, 174 n. 7 Floud, Roderick and Deirdre McCloskey 173 n.7 Foreman, Amanda 173 n. 16 Fortune 12, 55, 74, 76, 78–9, 83–4, 136, 156, 158, 161, 166 Fox, Charles James 45, 46, 47, 85 France 11, 21, 27, 28, 67, 133–135 Franklin, Benjamin 169 fraud 20, 26, 47, 50, 53, 60, 61, 63, 65–68, 77, 134, 137, 139, 177 n. 14 Fredman, A. G. 176 n. 13 friendship 42, 103, 105, 106, 121 Frye, Northrop 5, 6 Gallagher, Catherine 94, 181 n. 11 gambling basset 10, 114, 117, 118, 163, 180 n. 5 billiards 128, 137, 142

196

Index

gambling – continued cards 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15–18, 20, 22, 41, 42, 46–51, 53, 55–58, 60–62, 67–69, 77, 79, 82, 86, 90, 103, 106, 109–10, 112–119, 125, 128, 132–134, 139, 142, 144, 146, 147, 156, 160, 164, 172 n. 1 cheating 2, 4, 6, 10, 14, 15, 33, 35, 38, 40, 45, 46–56, 59–64, 66–72, 75–77, 79, 80, 82–85, 106, 117, 118, 121, 129, 130, 137–139, 163, 175 n. 2, 176 n. 11 children 127–135, 139, 144 at Christmas 9, 18, 20, 23, 50, 174 n. 1 clubs 10, 50, 112, 116, 160, see also Almack’s, Brooke’s, White’s at Court 9, 10, 20–22, 50, 134 debts of honor 10–11, 34, 35, 91, 93, 117, 121 definitions of 8–9 dice 5, 6, 9, 10–12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 45–47, 49–51, 53–56, 59, 67–69, 78, 86, 87, 90, 96, 97, 106, 110, 124, 132, 133, 147, 160, 163, 168, 171 E O 137, 143, 144, 163, 182 n. 20 faro 3, 10, 120, 163, 172 n. 5, 179 n. 1 female gambling 8, 14, 33, 111–126, 130 gaming houses 20, 108, 176 n. 4, 180 n. 5 horse racing 5, 34, 35, 46, 51, 142, 163, 172 n. 5 laws 10, 11, 13, 50–52, 54, 71, 112, 163, 173 n. 18 legal statutes 9–11, 50–2, 54 losses 1, 5, 10, 11, 22, 23, 29, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 45–48, 50, 70, 71, 84, 88–90, 104, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 134, 157 manuals 7, 47, 49, 52–4, 56–8, 60–2, 65, 82, 176 n. 5 Newmarket 45, 46 piquet 33, 34, 42, 43, 68, 89, 114 quadrille 67, 115 routs 40, 41, 102

sentimental gambling 14, 87–89, 97–99, 104, 106, 108–110 sublime gambling 14, 15, 87–92, 94–7, 100, 103, 106, 110, 111, 114, 115, 125, 129, 136, 138, 139, 147, 158–161, 170, 171 wagers 3–5, 8–12, 14, 15, 17, 22–25, 30, 32, 34–38, 40, 46, 50, 51, 54, 58, 62, 69–71, 80, 81, 87–90, 92, 94, 96, 98–100, 104, 108, 110, 113, 117, 119, 123–129, 131, 132, 137, 142, 146, 157, 158, 163–165, 168, 171, 172 n. 1, 177 n. 17, 178 n. 23, 182 n. 20, 182 n. 5 whist 48, 55–8, 60–2, 67, 68, 102, 134, 172 n. 5 gamestress see female gambler Garrick, David 76 Gautier, Gary 179 n. 7, 179 n. 14 Geertz, Clifford 5, 173 n. 10 gender 14, 16, 95, 111–12, 130 gentleman 4, 10–11, 37, 67, 73, 82, 90–1, 118, 134, 176 n. 11 George II 10, 174 n. 20 George III 10, 133 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire 9, 173 n. 16 Gigerenzer, Gerd 23, 59, 173 n. 19, 176 n. 8, 176 n. 10 Gladfelder, Hal 178 n. 23 goldsmiths 20, 23 gothic 98, 109, 110 Goux, Jean-Joseph 23, 173 n. 8 Greene, Donald 178 n. 3 Greenfield, Susan 140, 181 n. 19 Groom-Porter 10, 17, 18, 20–22 Grundy, Isabel 175 n. 10 Guildhall Museum, Corporation of London 175 n. 2 Hacking, Ian 12, 50, 173 n. 9, 177 n. 18, 182 n. 5 Hamilton, Gawen DuCane and Boehm Family Group 172 n. 3 Elegant Company Playing Cards, An 172 n. 3 Hargrave, C. P. 134, 172 n. 5

Index 197 Harvard University 169 Haywood, Eliza 7 City Jilt, The 32–34 History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, The 175 n. 15 Henderson, Andrea 125, 179 n. 2, 180 n. 6, 180 n. 7 Henry VIII 9, 20, 50 Hogarth, William 1, 3, 7, 15, 17, 175 n. 1 Assembly at Wanstead House 1–3, 7, 15, 156 Election III: The Polling 47 House of Cards, The 132 Lady’s Last Stake, The 113, 117 Rake’s Progress, A: The Gaming House 1–3 Hopkins, Robert 154, 166, 167 Hoppit, Julian 28–29, 91 House of Commons 26 Hoyle, Edmond 13, 47, 52, 55–62, 65, 67, 68, 71, 76, 115, 134, 176 n. 7, 176 n. 9, 176 n. 11 Huizinga, Johan 4, 172 n. 6 Humours of Whist, The 60–2, 67 imperialism 30, 42, 57, 141, see also empire individualism 30, 31, 35, 54, 101, 106 Ingamells, John 15, 16, 173–4 n. 20 Ingrassia, Catherine 18, 25, 26, 114, 174 n. 2, 175 n. 10, 175 n. 13 investment 12, 21, 23–27, 35, 38, 70, 89, 100, 102–104, 110, 172 n. 2 Iroquois 174 n. 3 Jamaica 130, 140–42, 181 n. 12 Jameson, Frederic 6, 173 n. 11 Johnson, Claudia L. 109, 157, 182 n. 2 Johnson, Samuel 8–9, 32 Kavanagh, Thomas 4, 12, 13, 14, 59, 173 n. 9, 179 n. 11 Keohane, Catherine 94, 178 n. 1 Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice 176 n. 4 Kibbie, A. L. 175 n.11

Kirkpatrick, K. J. 180 n. 1, 180 n. 2 Knapp, Lewis M. 76 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth 179 n. 2 Lady’s Curiosity, The 125 Lancaster, Henry 23 land 35–9, 42, 90, 97, 98, 104, 112, 140–2, 146, 148, 181 n. 12 Lang, Marjorie 180 n. 3 Lascelles, E. C. P. 45 Latour, Bruno 170 Lears, Jackson 169, 172 n.2 Lennox, Charlotte 32 Female Quixote, The 32, 41 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 182 n. 3 Linebaugh, Peter 57 Litz, A. Walton 153 Locke, John 8 Some Thoughts Concerning Education 132 London 10, 18–22, 27, 30, 39–43, 48, 57, 61, 63–64, 68, 75–84, 92, 94, 100, 103, 107, 109–10, 134, 140, 141, 151, 160, 163, 174 n. 1, 174 n. 20, 176 n. 3 London Gazette 20 Long, Edward History of Jamaica, The 141, 181 n. 18 lotteries 5, 14, 19–25, 27, 28, 33, 35, 44, 87, 113, 124, 169, 180 n. 7 lottery 3, 5, 9, 18, 19–24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 34, 59, 80, 123, 124, 125, 138, 156, 157, 161, 163, 169, 172 n. 1, 172 n. 7, 175 n. 12 Lucas, Theophilus 53, 54, 56, 58, 65, 156, 176 n. 5 luck 2, 5, 6, 14, 40, 42–4, 48, 56, 64, 68, 74, 77–9, 89, 90, 107, 115, 123, 125, 130, 131, 147, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 167, 171, 180 n. 7 luxury 33, 92–3, 96, 110, 179 n.8 Lyme 147, 151, 156 Malay 71 Mackenzie, Henry 7 Man of Feeling, The 143

198

Index

man of feeling 86–110, 121, 143, 179 n.7 manners 47, 97, 99–100, 104, 138, 154–56, 161 Mansfield, Lord 11, 70, 182 n. 21, 177 n. 17 “Mansfield Judgment” 144, 182 n. 21 Markely, Robert 178 n. 3 markets 7, 18, 23, 25–7, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 40, 42, 57, 172–3 n. 7, 174 n. 6 marriage 1, 15, 34, 35–38, 40, 41, 45, 65, 77, 92, 95, 96, 106, 111–113, 115, 116, 119–126, 130, 144, 149, 153, 156, 157, 161, 163, 165, 172 n. 3 marriage market 40, 112, 116, 119, 121–123, 147, 157, 172 n. 1 Marshall, J. 57, 61, 176 n. 7 Marx, Karl 30 masculinity 4, 10, 11, 34–7, 39, 82, 86, 90, 91, 97, 99, 105, 107, 108, 110, 134, 147 Mauss, Marcel 174 n. 3 McAllister, John 176 n. 12 McDowell, M. M. 57, 172 n. 5 McKeon, Michael 54, 173 n. 11, 176 n. 5, 176 n. 6 Méré, Chevalier de 133 mercantilism 38, 42 Mercier, Philip Schutz Family and Their Friends on a Terrace, The (1725) 15–17, 173–4 n. 20 Miers, David 172 n. 5 Million Lottery Act 21, 23, 24, 29 “Modest Defence of Gaming, A” 134 Molesworth, John 59, 80 moneylenders 23, 94–5 Monthly Review 176 n. 12 Moore, Rev. Charles 115–16 Moore, John Zeluco 94 More, Hannah 115 Moretti, Franco 6, 34, 175 n. 8 Morton, Charles 179 n. 10 Motooka, Wendy 179 n. 13 Mowry, Melissa 175 n. 13

Muldrew, Craig 29, 30, 172 n. 7 Mullan, John 178 n. 3 Munting, Roger 10, 50, 169, 172 n. 5, 173 n. 17 Murdoch, D. H. 141 Murphy, Anne 21, 23, 24 Nash, Beau 162–63 national debt 18, 19–21, 22, 27, 28, 30, 87, 91 Neal, Larry 21, 172–3 n. 7, 174 n. 5 Neale, Thomas 20–24, 33, 175 n. 12 New, Melvin 71–2 “New Game of Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished, The” 133 Newmarket 45, 46 newspapers 21, 134 Nicholson, Colin 35 Nickel, Terry 107 Nollekens, Francis Two Children of the Nollekens Family Playing with a Top and Playing Cards, The 132 Novak, Maximillian E. 175 n. 12 novel 6–7, 14, 17, 19, 31, 47, 63–7, 76, 84, 89, 146, 148, 150, 167, 171, 175 n. 8, 175 n. 9, 175 n. 14, 176 n. 6 bildungsroman 179 n. 7 didactic 74, 142, 176 n. 12 episodic 47, 52–4, 62, 63, 71, 72, 77, 81–3, 98, 176–7 n. 13, 177 n. 15 epistolary 98 gothic 98, 109, 110 picaresque 52–4, 64, 65, 71, 72, 74, 80, 83, 176 n. 12, 176 n. 13, 176–7 n. 13, 177 n. 15, 178 n. 20 realist 65, 148, 149, 155 sentimental 76, 97, 102, 105, 107, 108, 176 n. 12, 178 n. 3, 179 n. 4, 179 n. 6, 179 n. 7 obeah 141 O’Brien, Patrick K. 28, 30, 172–3 n. 7

Index 199 odds 4, 6, 14, 41, 44–46, 48, 52, 55–61, 80, 94, 102, 117, 148, 158, 161, 165, 171 Parliament 7, 10, 11, 18, 21, 24, 26, 27, 45, 51, 52, 93, 112, 169 Pascal, Blaise 47, 165, 176 n. 8, 178 n. 23, 182 n. 5 Patey, Douglas Lane 66, 69, 78–9, 173 n. 9 patronage 42, 80, 173–4 n. 20 Paulson, Ronald 113, 179 n. 3 Pepys, Samuel 10, 174 n. 1 Perera, Suvendrini 180 n. 1, 180 n. 4, 181 n. 19 Plumb, John H. 35 Pocock, J. G. A. 35, 97, 98, 100 Polite Gamester, The 60 Poovey, Mary 6, 31, 172 n. 2, 173 n. 8, 173 n.11 potlatch 22, 93, 174 n. 3 Prince Rupert 20 Princeton University 169 prison 73, 79, 84, 89–90, 97, 108–9, 170–71 private credit 28, 29–31, 34, 87–97, 108, 110, 111, 123 probability 5, 7, 12–4, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54–63, 65–9, 71–3, 76–79, 85, 89, 107, 131, 147, 150, 162, 167, 173 n. 8, 173 n. 19, 176 n. 8, 177 n. 18, 178 n. 21, 178 n. 22 expectation 58–9 prostitution 42, 116, 118, 120 providential narrative 47, 63, 64, 66, 71–9, 83, 150, 177 n. 14, 178 n. 20, 178 n. 21 public credit 4, 24, 27–31, 34, 87, 88, 90, 91, 97, 172 n. 7 Queen Anne 10, 53, 162 Queen Charlotte 10, 126, 133 Radcliffe, Ann 99, 110 Mysteries of Udolpho, The 14, 98, 108–110 Raven, James 22, 31 Rawson, Claude 178 n. 23 Reeve, Clara

Progress of Romance, The 175 n. 14 Restoration 18–20, 22, 172 n. 5 Richard I 50 Richard II 50 Richardson, Samuel 7, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39 Clarissa 34 Pamela 34, 36 Sir Charles Grandison 14, 32, 34–39, 44, 97, 99 risk 4, 9, 11, 13, 16, 22, 24, 27–30, 38, 40, 53, 55, 71, 91, 94, 97, 100, 109, 110, 114, 123–126, 135, 141, 143, 146, 147, 153–157, 159, 160–167, 169–171 Rivero, Albert J. 38, 39 romance 5–7, 14, 15, 19, 28, 31, 32, 34, 38–9, 40–5, 53, 55, 62–4, 66, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 79, 84, 85, 88–90, 96, 100, 107, 109–11, 115, 121, 125, 130, 135, 136, 144–59, 161, 164–7, 169, 171, 173 n. 11, 173 n. 12, 175 n. 9, 175 n. 14, 176 n. 12, 176 n. 13 of gambling 1, 4, 5, 6, 14, 17, 24, 25, 28, 31, 44, 46, 56, 84, 85, 87, 90, 98, 115, 119, 126, 135, 145, 146, 148, 170, 171 romances 7, 32, 135, 147 Rosengarten, Richard A. 76, 78–9 Rousseau, G. S. 176 n. 13, 178 n. 3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Émile 129, 135–36, 138 Rowlandson, Thomas 47, 175 n. 1 Royal Mint 20 Rubin, Gayle 182 n. 3 Russell, Gillian 172 n. 5, 176 n. 4, 179 n. 1 Russell, H. K. 62 Scott, Sarah History of Sir George Ellison, The 142–43, 181 n. 13 sensibility 89, 97–109, 136, 143, 148, 178 n. 2, 178 n. 3, 179 n. 6, 179 n. 7, 179 n. 12, 181 n. 19 Seven Dials 20 Seymour, Richard Court Gamester, The 134

200

Index

Shell, Marc 173 n. 8 Sherman, Sandra 26, 174 n. 2 shopping 105, 113, 122, 123, 180 n. 6, 180 n. 7 Shotover House 173–74 n. 20 Sitwell, E. 163 Skinner, Gillian 98, 101–02, 176 n. 13, 179 n. 5, 179 n. 9, 179 n. 12 Skinner, John 176 n. 13 slavery 25, 69, 127–30, 139–45, 148, 181 n. 12, 181 n. 16, 181 n. 19, 182 n. 21, 182 n. 22 Smith, Adam 30 Smith, Charlotte Old Manor House, The 89–91, 97, 110, 171 Smollett, Tobias 1, 7, 47, 54, 63–66, 68, 69, 71–77, 80, 84, 107, 109, 147, 150, 175 n. 2, 176 n. 12, 176 n. 13, 177 n. 14, 177 n. 15, 177 n. 17, 178 n. 20, 178 n. 21 Connoisseur, The 177 n. 7 Ferdinand Count Fathom 14, 47, 63–76, 77, 80, 81, 84, 166, 176 n. 12, 176–7 n. 13, 177 n. 15, 178 n. 20, 178 n. 21, 178 n. 23 Roderick Random 48, 49, 55, 65, 175 n. 2, 173 n. 10, 174 n. 3 South Sea Company 18, 19, 22, 24–29, 32, 129 Spain 25 Spectator 11 speculation 5, 18, 23–6, 28, 90, 91, 162, 169 Spores, J.C. 71 Squire Randal’s Excursion Round London 103 Steele 7, 112, 116 Sterne, Laurence Sentimental Journey, A 143 Stevick, Philip 176 n. 12, 176 n. 13 stock 5, 18, 22–7, 30, 32, 101, 102, 114, 174 n. 5 Stoppard, Tom 178 n. 22 Straub, Kristina 179 n. 4 suicide 92, 94, 97, 115 surplus 23, 177 n. 18

Swift, Jonathan 47 Sypher, Wylie 141–43, 181 n. 17 Tate Britain 15–17, 173–4 n. 20 theater 42, 115–21 Thomas, Dalby 175 n. 12 Thompson, Edward 115, 118 Thompson, James 94, 178 n. 23 Thornton, Bonnell and George Colman 55 Tilley, Roger 133, 180 n. 6, 180 n. 7 Todd, Janet 97, 178 n. 3 toys 118, 130–2 Treaty of Utrecht 25 Treadwell, T.O. 176 n. 12 Tricks of the Town Laid Open, The 175 n. 2 Turkey 133 Tyburn 176 n. 5 Utter, R.P. and G.B. Needham 179 n. 6 Vanbrugh, Sir John and Colley Cibber Provoked Husband, The 115, 118, 179 n. 4 Vauxhall 93–4 Vernon, Vice Admiral 141–43 vice 42, 47, 77, 106, 107, 108, 133, 140, 179 n. 8 Vickery, Amanda 156 Victoria and Albert Museum 175 n. 1, 180 n. 5, 180 n. 6, 180 n. 7, 181 n. 8 Viner, Charles 20, 51 Virginia colonies 19, 169 Virtue 32, 34, 35, 42, 83, 97, 98, 107, 108, 118, 121–22, 133, 135, 147, 154, 177 n. 14 Wahrman, Dror 4, 172 n. 4 Walpole, Horace 45, 46 Castle of Otranto, The 175 n. 9 Ward, Edward 115 Watts, Isaac Divine and Moral Songs for Children 132, 180 n. 5 Weissman, Cheryl Ann 150

Index 201 Wells, Helena Constantia Neville; or the West Indian 143 West Indies 129, 140–45, 160, 181 n. 16 Whitehall 20, 174 n. 20 White’s 10, 45, 50, 60, 62, 81 William and Mary 10, 20, 53 Williams, Ioan M. 78, 175 n. 9 Wollstonecraft, Mary

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters 133 Woodring, Carl 178 n. 23 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary 32, 41, 96, 175 n. 10 Wyett, Jodi 42 Yale University 169 Zietlow, Paul N. 182 n. 1