Introduction: The Gambling Culture of Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

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 twenty-fifth 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.