"We Had Carding": Hospitable Card Play and Polite Domestic Sociability Among the Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century England

England’s eighteenth century snapped and fizzed with novelty: new trade routes, new entertainments, and a newly wealthy merchant/professional class who suddenly had the means and the time to enjoy them all. A new leisure culture evolved, one of gentility and politeness, of ease and good company, and the rising middle classes were eager to sample its many delights. Of these lures, cards and their attendant wagers were among the most fashionable and the most daring: high-living aristocrats, playing to all hours and losing vast sums, had linked card games with irresponsibility and immorality. Both were death to trade and profession: how could the middling sort possibly circle this enticing flame and yet keep their wings unsinged?

This paper explores the many ways in which this varied but slowly coalescing group adapted card play, including gaming at cards, to suit their own patterns of home-based hospitality. In taming this particular beast, middling hosts and guests exploited its potential for forming and strengthening neighbourly and professional bonds. Throughout this process, the emerging priorities of these men and women, at once vulnerable to the eddies of oceans and markets, are consistent. For the middling sort, genteel sociability and restraint partnered one another.