Playing High in the Eighteenth Century

Whenever I teach eighteenth-century literature, I find I have to explain certain aspects to my students about daily life in this time period. The cost and upkeep of a coach and horses, for example, is hard to conceive of in a time when most people in the US own a car—or know someone who does. Similarly, the discrepancies between how much a maid or vicar might earn a year versus the yearly income of a Mr. Bingley or a Mr. Darcy is also difficult to comprehend. How could some people live on a mere fifty pounds a year, or even just five pounds a year, in the case of a servant, when others had 5,000 or 10,000 pounds a year? Even more confounding can be the notion of “debts of honor” between friends and the widespread custom of playing cards for money among the social elite.

Fashionable men and women play "Pope Joan."

            Our class recently read Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and while Roxana lives in the Pall-Mall, she becomes the hostess of masquerade balls and fêtes that last all night. In the wee hours of the morning, the gentlemen “play’d high, and stay’d late.” A couple pages later, we learn that the gentlemen who join in the card games play high enough that their tips to Roxana’s maid, Amy, who attends them, amount to 62 pounds—anywhere from 2-5 years’ worth of wages for a maid. At the end of the novel, when Roxana’s daughter Susan tracks her down, she recounts various details that link Roxana to her exploits in the Pall-Mall. Of these is the memory of her gaming tables, which Roxana now admits gave the masquerade balls at her apartment a rather unsavory flavor: “her own Account brought her down to this, That, in short, her Lady kept a little less than a Gaming-Ordinary; or, as it wou’d be call’d in the Times since that, An Assembly for Gallantry and Play.” To the middle-aged Roxana, her former role as the mistress of a gambling establishment is nearly as detestable as her affairs with various men.

            Yet, gambling and playing high at cards was certainly not just the provenance of men. Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” recounts an intense game of ombre in which the heroine Belinda wins the game:

                                    The King unseen

Lurk’d in her Hand, and mourn’d his captive Queen.

He springs to Vengeance with an eager pace,

And falls like Thunder on the prostrate Ace.

The Nymph exulting fills with Shouts the Sky,

The Walls, the Woods, and long Canals reply.

Although the poem does not explicitly mention money being lost and won, card playing was almost always for money in this time period. Women did not usually gamble in public clubs (the “ordinaries” that Roxana mentions), but even in card games between friends, money was always at stake (think of all the games of whist in Jane Austen novels—always for money). In the later eighteenth century, many society women hosted games of “faro” on their faro tables, and some of them were even accused—and found guilty—of stealing from the bank! The case of Mrs. Albinia Hobart, later Countess of Buckinghamshire, who was found guilty of doing just that, and her friend Lady Elizabeth Luttrell, may have been the inspiration for Mrs. Harriet Freke and her friend Mrs. Luttridge in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. At the end of the novel, the two women are exposed for having cheated the men who come play at faro on their tables.

In reality, Mrs. Hobart was just fined 50 pounds--though the judge threatened her
with flogging. 

Georgiana Cavendish

            In Belinda, gambling itself is seen as the addictive vice that we understand it to be now. Throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, we see the representation and condemnation of gambling and playing high. While it is often the men, like Mr. Vincent in Belinda or Fred Vincy in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who get in trouble for gambling their money away, women could rack up debt as well. Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, was, at one point, in debt for in excess of 100,000 pounds (remember, Mr. Darcy, who is ridiculously wealthy in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, has a yearly income of 10,000!). As it turned out, the Duchess had been tricked by a notorious cheat, who had lent her money only to multiplied her debts in the span of just three months. The Duke, Georgiana’s husband, almost divorced her over the gambling and her debts…

            Gambling was certainly thought to be a vice and a waste of time—and immoral—by many in the eighteenth century. And yet, it was commonplace. While paying to play in a gambling establishment seems de rigour, what I often find difficult to understand is that friends “played high” against one another even in “friendly” games of cards. Those debts were considered “debts of honor,” i.e. debts that must be paid ahead of bills to the grocer, the tailor, or any other merchant who might actually be relying on that money to feed his own family. In Robert Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, Charles Surface gambles his money away to his friends; when he sells off the family portraits and library unsuspectingly to his own Uncle Oliver for a hundred pounds, he uses it to gamble with even as merchants await to be paid: Rowley the servant to Oliver: “I have left a hosier and two tailors in the hall, who, I’m sure won’t be paid, and this hundred would satisfy ’em!”

            The only way, perhaps, to understand the eighteenth-century penchant for playing for high stakes and paying one’s debts of honor is to think of the people who do so as we do now of celebrities. Who else would be so needlessly extravagant, so heedless of duty, so uninterested in integrity? It is no wonder that in the novels of Frances Burney, for example, the heroines, like Camilla, must be warned and forewarned several times by friends and family not to “fall in with the wrong crowd.” The “cool crowd” of the eighteenth century liked to spend money excessively and heedlessly, in a manner that most people, even those who achieved financial stability, could not keep up with for very long.