Gambling on Gaming: Mary Robinson’s Literary Censures of the Fashionable Vice

Erratum

In her 1775 “Letter to a Friend on Leaving Town,”, Mary Robinson decries the origin of the fashionable female gamester:

Each idle coxcomb leaves the wretched fair,Alone to languish, and alone despair,To cards, and dice, the slighted maiden flies,And every fashionable vice apply’s,Scandal and coffee, pass the morn away,At night a rout, an opera, or a play;Thus glide their life, partly through inclination,Yet more, because it is the reigning fashion.

(Poems 81–2)

She relates the trajectory of female decline to the progress of a day, and by extension, to the progress of a life. Spurred by the absence of her husband—who is most likely engaged in similar amusements—the “wretched fair” follows the “reigning fashion” of the ton, leading her to “fashionable vice.” She “pass[es]” her day from morning “[s]candal and coffee” to an evening of dissipation. Robinson’s tying of the plight of the female gamester to the vagaries of her husband is especially poignant given that she often found herself in the same position. In fact, Robinson’s poem was published during her “tedious captivity” in debtor’s prison due, in part, to her husband Tom’s gaming (Memoirs 1:168, 2: 32).

Twenty-five years later, at the end of her career, Robinson launched her most striking attack on gaming in “Present State of the Manners, Society, &c. &c. of the Metropolis of England,”, a four-part series published from August to November 1800 in The Monthly Magazine. Writing this time from a “pretty cottage” on Englefield Green in Windsor, Robinson opens her critique by setting the responsibility for the tastes and mores of England’s metropolis firmly on the shoulders of the ton:

As the prevailing characteristics of polished life take their impression from example held forth by persons of exalted rank in society; so the customs, opinions, amusements, and propensities, of the community at large may be said to derive their leading features from the pursuits and pleasures which are practiced and tolerated in the metropolis of a kingdom.

(“Present” 35)

In this latter critique, then, Robinson extends the influence of the “reigning fashion” mentioned in her early poem to the “community at large.”

Given Robinson’s mention of “amusements” in the first installment of “The Present State”, her focus at the end of the second installment on the “vice of gaming” likely came as no surprise to her readers. Proclaiming that gaming “seems to have reached its climax at the fashionable end of the metropolis,”, she berates the magistrates for disparately enforcing the laws against it: “though the magistrates have endeavoured to check its progress among the subordinate ranks of society, it is still not only winked at, but tolerated, in the higher circles” (“Present” 140). While the “petty gambler” is punished “without mercy,”, Robinson complains, nobles “out-face the magistrates, and defy the laws, with boldness and impunity” (“Present” 140). However, those in the “higher circles” were not impervious to the consequences of gaming that the laws attempted to prevent. “[T]his fatal employment,”, Robinson contends, resulted in “the many domestic exposures which have taken place within the last twenty years” (“Present” 140). While men occupy their time with gaming and sport, she explains, women engage in “scenes of profligate debasement” accruing “debts of honour, which the sacrifice of honour too frequently discharges” and obliges them to use “even the family jewels and the family plate” to “supply the faro bank” (“Present” 140). Without qualms, she candidly censures this fashionable vice, exposing the extent of gaming’s harm to every rank of the metropolis.

Robinson’s observations likely resonated with the British public. In the latter eighteenth-century—particularly after George III issued his 1792 Proclamation Against Vice—Londoners were regularly exposed to stories of gaming’s widespread popularity as well as of its players’ significant losses (Russell 489). On 2 February 1790, The Times calculated the number of gaming establishments in “the County of Middlesex, including the City of London” to be “no less than one thousand three hundred and...