Staking the castle |

You’ve all read them. The stories where the heroine is at risk because a father, uncle, brother, or husband has lost the family fortune, or where the hero cannot wed because he had inherited an impoverished estate from the gambling waistral who was the previous incumbent.

Gambling, especially the gambling of the upper classes, is a frequent plot device in our Georgian and Regency stories, as it should be since it was a frequent feature of Georgian and Regency lives.

Not just upper class lives, of course. People at every level of society, both men and women, loved nothing more than a bet, on anything from a horse race or boxing match to which cockroach would be first to run the length of the table.

For the most part, our stories look at the upper classes, though. We are compelled by what Arthur Pitt, in explaining the focus of his Masters dissertation, calls:

… the undeniably romantic allure of the richly decorated gaming clubs or the reckless gambling of dynastic fortunes [which] rather trump[s] the dingy and dull penny games played against street walls or in alehouses. (Arthur Pitt, MA dissertation, A Study Of Gamblers And Gaming Culture In London, c. 1780-1844)

Card and dice games

Card games – whether for no, low, or ruinous stakes – were everywhere. Evenings at home or out at dinner would often include card games. Hostesses holding a ball or party usually had a card room, where those fond of such games could spend the evening. Gentlemens’ clubs also set aside a room or two for their members to play cards, as did gaming ‘hells’, both low and high.

Some ladies supplemented their income by ‘holding the bank’ in private card parties held in their houses. As long as they retained the appearance of merely being a hostess, and not in business, such a venture would dent their reputation but might not ruin it.

Whist (the precursor of Bridge) was very popular. Four players, in two teams, chose a trump suit and played a strategic game to win each round (called a trick). Loo is also often mentioned. It is played in a similar way to Whist, except the dealer deals an extra hand, which a player can choose to pick up and play in preference to their own.

Piquet was a game for two players, with a complicated scoring system and the potential for huge wins or losses.

Vingt-et-un is today called Twenty-One (same name, but in English). Each player draws one card at a time, in an attempt to get cards that add as close to 21 as they can get, but without going over.

In Faro (or Pharoah – or Basset, the game Pharoah was derived from), the dealer takes cards from a special wooden box and lays them face up on the table. One suit of the cards is pasted to the table in numerical order, and players place their bets by putting what they want to stake on one or more cards. Various rules decide whether a card drawn from the box wins for a player with a stake on the same number, or loses.

Hazard is a dice game, rather than a card game. Players bet on the numbers to be rolled.

Of course, gaming tables were just the start. Next week, I’ll take a look at the Betting Books, and later at horse racing.