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