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.

Cropped Out of History: At the Margins of Culture

Currently the Yale Center for British Art is featuring an exhibit called, “Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain.” The idea for the exhibit started when curators at the gallery began examining William Hogarth’s 1735 painting, “A Family Portrait,” and they noticed a black hand creeping into the portrait of an otherwise lily-white family of middle-class eighteenth-century Brits.

 

Middle left: I've circled the servant's hand in red.

Upon further examination and x-rays of the painting, the researchers discovered that the black servant figure included in the original painting had been later cropped out of it—about 100 years after it was painted.

The metaphorical meaning of this act is impossible to ignore, as slavery, the slave trade, slave histories and narratives, and even the visual representations of slavery and non-whites have been routinely “cropped out” of dominant histories. It matters little whether we speak of history generally, or if we focus on literary history, art history, musical history, or any other discipline. These stories are often at the margins of where we are looking, not to mention that these discussions are still marginalized in the classroom.

What intrigues me, however, is how often the stories of slaves or Africans or persons of African descent, enslaved or not, appear in the background of other narratives or images. Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, originally published in 1801, contains a black character: Juba, the servant. In the original version of the novel, Juba marries the (white) daughter of an English farmer—but this element of the plot was cut out in subsequent editions. Again, the story, the character was “cropped out.”

In Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, racial masquerade begins the novel. The main character, the “Incognita,” escapes Revolutionary France in borrowed clothing with darkened features. She has darkened her skin to hide who she really is, and the characters she meets in England initially believe that she really is what she appears to be—a person of African descent.

In the novel, one of the characters asks the “stranger,” “What part of the world might you come from? The settlements of the West Indies? Or somewhere off the coast of Africa?...” Her arms and hands are described as “of so dark a colour, that they might rather be styled black than brown…”

Of course, quite soon we learn that the main character is not black at all—she is French, and the darkening of her skin was one of many ways she attempted to conceal her identity. While Burney may initially be asking us to sympathize with an “apparently black” heroine, she does not require this of her readers for very long.

The idea of “blackening” one’s skin or hiding behind a mask of darker skin color is apparent in John Raphael Smith’s pastel portrait “A Lady Holding a Negro Mask.” Historian Kathleen Wilson recently wrote about this image in the ASECS Fall 2014 newsletter. As she points out, there are many ways of interpreting the image. One thing that seems apparent to me in all of these examples is how integral blacks were to British life throughout the eighteenth century. While they may often only appear in the margins of literature or art, the consistent repetition of these images and references suggest that we are only at the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

 

Is she going to a masquerade? Is she happy about it?
Is the painting about race? gender? beauty? identity? all those things?

One interesting project that is working to change how we think of literary history in an American context is the “Just Teach One” project. Initially it began as a project that would aid instructors of Early American literature in teaching less-taught texts—texts that are out of print, difficult to find, or simply unknown. A parallel project has grown out of that first one, focusing on prints and literature of African Americans.

The name of the projects asks us to consider what happens when we make a concerted effort to teach at least one lesser-taught text, or at least one text by an African American who is, presumably, not Frederick Douglass (mostly because his canonicity has become [mostly] established). Their website caters specifically to instructors and aims to provide easily accessible versions of various lesser-known texts.

Many projects concerned with diversity and inclusivity have taken up the idea of moving things, people, and historical moments from the margins and putting them at the center of the conversation. We can only hope that this conversations keep happening and that more and more projects, exhibits, and syllabuses are put in the service of bringing hidden histories to light, of moving issues from the margins to the center. In the end, perhaps we may also find ways to move the conversation away from the binary of center and margin to other intertextual, multivocal, and less hierarchical modes of thinking and teaching.

Johann Zoffany's Family of Sir William Young, 1770.
The detail of this painting containing the African servant/slave is on my edition of Belinda, by Oxford World's Classics.
Interestingly, the redesign of the cover scrapped this image and chose one of a corset.

Cross-Dressing Ladies: Maria Edgeworth’s Harriet Freke

Frontispiece to a 19th century
edition of Belinda.

Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda is by far one of my favorite eighteenth-century novels—though, admittedly, it is technically not an eighteenth-century novel at all. The first publishing was in 1801, and subsequent edits and publication dates lead Belinda even further into the early decades of the nineteenth century. It is undeniable, however, that Belinda, in topic, approach and tone is very much an eighteenth-century novel.

 Belinda is a complex work that starts out, seemingly, quite conventionally. The novel purports to tell the story of Belinda, a young lady searching for a suitable suitor. Her aunt has attached her to the fashionable Lady Delacour in London, in the hopes that through this connection, Belinda will meet the perfect suitor. Very quickly, however, the reader cannot but admit that Lady Delacour is, in many ways, much more interesting than the eponymous heroine of the novel. Lady Delacour is magnetic, beautiful and witty—and she has a fascinating back story about how she received a mysterious wound on her breast. It happened, in fact, when she was out in men’s clothes, about to duel with another woman with pistols. For more on Lady Delacour’s breast and her bosom friendships, look here.

The brains behind this whole ordeal turns out to be none other than Lady Delacour’s former bosom friend Harriet Freke, who regularly cross-dresses and enjoys playing tricks on just about everyone. Mrs. Freke, whose own name pronounces her strange proclivities, has “bold masculine arms” with “no conscience, so she was always at ease; and never more so than in male attire, which she had been told became her particularly. She supported the character of a young rake with such spirit and truth, that … no common conjurer could have discovered anything feminine about her.”

At one point in Lady Delacour’s reminiscences, she recounts how a young man jumped into a  coach with her. After the initial shock, she recognizes the young man’s laughter and realizes that this “young man” is in fact her friend Mrs. Freke. Mrs. Freke then recounts merrily of the day’s adventures: “‘Where do you think I’ve been?’ said Harriet, ‘in the gallery of the House of Commons; almost squeezed to death these four hours; but I swore I’d hear Sheridan’s speech to night, and I did…Fun and Freke for ever, huzza!”’

Lady Delacour’s eventual betrayal at the hands of her “bosom friend” Mrs. Freke, as well as the latter’s joy in causing her—and nearly everyone else—pain, casts her as the main antagonist in the novel. She plays tricks on Juba, the black servant of Mr. Vincent (one of Belinda’s suitors), as well as on Lady Delacour, leading the latter to believe that she is haunted. Additionally, Mrs. Freke attempts to turn Belinda against her friend; when this fails, she turns her attention to another young lady, a Miss Moreton, whose reputation is spoiled simply by keeping company with Mrs. Freke.

Towards the end of the novel, Mrs. Freke, in attempting to spy on Lady Delacour, is caught in a bear trap while “frolicking” in men’s clothing: “Mrs. Freke’s leg was much cut and bruised; and now that she was no longer supported by the hopes of revenge, she began to lament loudly and incessantly the injury that she had sustained. She impatiently inquired how long it was probably, that she should be confined by this accident; and she grew quite outrageous when it was hinted, that the beauty of her legs would be spoiled, and that she would never more be able to appear to advantage in man’s apparel.”

Maria Edgeworth

Harriet Freke is conventionally read as the antagonist who gets what she deserves, while Lady Delacour eventually repents of her worldly ways, reunites with her daughter and husband, and even manages to find a good husband for Belinda. Meanwhile, Mrs. Freke must give up her cross-dressing ways and find new ways of playing tricks on people. I’ve always found this reading of Belinda a bit reductive, however. Though Mrs. Freke is certainly not a positive character by any means, even Lady Delacour manages to feel pity for her when she is injured. Further, it is only the doctor’s opinion that Harriet Freke will not “appear to advantage” in men’s clothes after her injury.

The doctor’s opinion also glosses over the fact that cross-dressing allows Mrs. Freke much more than simply the option of “looking good” and exposing her legs. (For more on sexy lady legs, see my previous post on the topic.) Cross-dressing gives Mrs. Freke freedom, especially freedom of movement. Like Hannah Snell and other female soldiers, female pirates, and female husbands, cross-dressing allows Mrs. Freke to go where women usually dared not.

By making Mrs. Freke a cross-dresser, Edgeworth has complicated rather than condemned her character. After all, Lady Delacour cross-dresses in the novel as well—and so does Belinda’s lover, Clarence Hervey. Additionally, the novel is full of masquerades and even some mistaken identities. The marriage between Juba and the English farmer’s daughter (a subplot that was cut in subsequent printings) further suggests that the world is not just “black and white”; there are many shades of gray in between, not all of which are wholly evil or wholly good.