Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel: "A Leprosy Is O'er the Land" (review)

A billboard off of highway 37 in Bloomington, Indiana, loudly proclaims: "Casinos benefit Indiana: 16,500 Hoosier jobs." Can an ad campaign blot out an image of gambling as a vice that corrupts society and turn it into a virtue that benefits it? Not long ago, the media exposed the gambling excesses of a certain right-wing moralist, author of The Book of Virtues (1993), and his reputation has not quite recovered. Gambling is at once an economic asset, as the billboard tells us, and a shameful, name-ruining vice.

Such a disjunction is nothing new; the Victorians, it appears, invented it. In Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel: "A Leprosy Is O'er the Land," Michael Flavin calls attention to the emergence of this conflicting attitude in Victorian society. As the nineteenth century wore on, he explains, gambling became increasingly both a commercial success and the subject of moral condemnation. Yet, "the conflict between the desire to control working-class recreation and the desire to make a profit from it was won by the entrepreneurs over the moralists" (42). (No doubt this gives us a clue to the fate of Indiana casinos.)

Flavin traces this and other gambling-related issues in his study of gambling in the nineteenth-century English novel. He details the gambling that dots the historical landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. He unearths a sizable territory of nonfiction, melodrama, anti-gambling tracts, and parliamentary papers on the topic. He draws on this material to discuss representations of gambling in the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, and George Moore; and compares all of these representations to what we know of actual practices.

Careful and thorough, the work leaves nothing to chance. Flavin builds up a varied texture of trends and attitudes toward gambling in the culture. He describes the shift in attitude from the Regency period when gambling flourished to the Victorian period when gambling "increased as source of alarm" (39). The years from 1844 to 1845, when Parliament enacted new legislation to restrict some forms of gambling, become a kind of watershed for the shifts that occur.

Flavin meticulously describes each author's notions of and experience with gambling and compares them to those in the wider culture. He traces, for instance, Thackeray's conflict with gambling—that he was both morally opposed to it and unable to keep away from it. He also explores the extent to which each author uses gambling as both a narrative device and a tool for character development. The scope of the work is impressive and would benefit anyone wishing to enter into the topic and to situate the novels in their historical period.

In spite of this thoroughness, however—even at times on account of it— reading Flavin's study is like riding an old workhorse across a muddy, unpaved road, when you could be using a four-wheel drive. The critical machinery sometimes seems a throwback to older methods, and the absorption in details keeps him from presenting a broader picture that explains why those details matter. (The excessive use of the passive voice throughout also adds to the laborious reading.)

Flavin's close tracking of a literal relationship between texts and contexts leaves little room for other, less overt and perhaps more speculative ways in which a text might relate to its social context. His approach often aims at discerning whether a text "veers more towards fact than fiction" (15). Hence, George Eliot "was keen to represent gambling with some degree of accuracy" (144), visiting the horse races while she wrote Daniel Deronda (1876); and Hardy, by contrast, "knew practically nothing about gambling. . . . In The Return of the Native (1878), set in the 1840s at the time of the 1844 Select Committee on Gaming and the 1845 Gaming Act, such events do not...