The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  In the section on ‘Play-Games’ in Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke austerely advises that ‘A smooth pebble, a piece of paper, the mother’s bunch of keys, or any thing they cannot hurt themselves with, serves as much to divert little children, as those more chargeable and curious toys from the shops, which are presently out of order and broken.’ He recommends that children be encouraged to make or invent their own amusements, and continues:

  Play-things which are above their skill to make, as tops, gigs, battledores, and the like, which are to be used with labour, should indeed be procured them. These ’tis convenient they should have, not for variety, but exercise; but these too should be given them as bare as might be. If they had a top, the scourge-stick and leather-strap should be left to their own making and fitting. If they sit gaping to have such things dropped in their mouths, they should go without them.

  No mention yet of the kind of educational game that was to evolve in England half a century later, to the benefit of the publishing industry and the putative delight of children, but clearly the ideological grounds for such inventions were being prepared. ‘Good contrivances’ would soon be devised and would pour into the market place.

  XV

  Royal children have always presented a special case, and their playthings have been well documented. In 1644, Cardinal Mazarin commissioned sets of playing cards to instruct the infant King Louis XIV of France who had ascended the throne at the age of four years and five months. These are works of art and wit, and one may hope that the little king enjoyed them, despite their instructive purpose, as we at Bryn ignorantly enjoyed Belisha and Millionaire.

  Playing cards were not in themselves new; they probably date back to the twelfth century in China and Korea, and to the fourteenth century in Europe. We know that cards were played, perhaps too often and for excessively high stakes, at the court of Edward IV in England. But the idea of cards as an educational tool for the young was a seventeenth-century novelty. The four series commissioned by Mazarin were devised by Jean Desmarests (1596–1676) of the Académie Française, and designed by the Florentine artist and engraver Stefano Della Bella. They portrayed mythological stories, the kings and the queens of France, and images representing different parts of the world. The monarchs, as evocatively described by historian Catherine Perry Hargrave, were ‘separated into groups, with dreadful but amusing finality, by a single adjective in the upper right-hand corner – pious, clever, cruel, unfortunate, celebrated, saintly, good, wise, brave, happy and capricious’. That is how history is crystallized. Thus, Blanche of Castille is ‘saincte’, and Eleanor of Acquitaine is ‘capricieuse’. Le Jeu de Géographie is a set of cards that shows figures emblematic of their region or nation, in national dress, accompanied by a brief description. America, the Queen of Clubs, is represented by a bare-bosomed woman in a small chariot drawn by two unlikely creatures that look like a cross between an armadillo and a tiger.

  Desmarests, in an explanatory booklet addressed to the queen regent, specifically stated his educational purpose:

  Ce sont des Jeux en apparence que je présente à votre Majesté mais en effet c’est un livre, et une estude pour les Jeunes Princes, aussi sérieuse pour le moins que divertissante.

  [These may look like toys that I present to your Majesty, but in fact they are a book for the young princes to study, and they are as serious as they are amusing.]

  These French cards were not, I have discovered, the first history and geography cards. Henry Peacham, in his celebrated book on courtesy, The Complete Gentleman, written in 1622 for the ten-year-old William Howard, launches into a poetic hymn of praise to geography in his chapter ‘Of Cosmography’, which he describes as ‘an imitation of the face, by draught and picture, of the whole earth and all the principal and known parts thereof…a science at once feeding the eye and mind with such incredible variety and profitable pleasure that even the greatest kings and philosophers… have bestowed the best part of their time in the contemplation hereof.’

  This chapter concludes with an exhortation to the young scholar to exercise his pen in drawing and imitating cards and maps:

  I have seen French cards to play withal, the suits changed into maps of several countries in the four parts of the world, and exactly coloured for their numbers, the figures 1, 2, 3, 9, 10 and so forth set over their heads; for the kings, queens, and knaves, the portraits of their kings and queens in several country habits; for the knave, their peasants and slaves; which ingenious device cannot but be a great furtherance to a young capacity and some comfort to the unfortunate gamester when that he hath lost in money he shall have dealt him in land or wit.

  Thus are the minds of gamblers ingeniously tricked into improvement.

  (In The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Anthony Patch prefaces his desperate, alcohol-soaked career with a lonely, fourteen-year-old passion for stamp collecting, which his despised grandfather ‘fatuously’ considered was teaching him geography. Despite his grandfather’s endorsement, Anthony loved his ‘new stamp-books or packages of glittering approval sheets’ and would lie awake ‘musing untiringly on their variety and many-coloured splendour’. He never forgot his stamps; they returned to haunt him.)

  Peacham’s recommendations show that French playing cards were being imported in the 1620s, and England soon began to make her own. As it happened, there were fifty-two English and Welsh counties, a number that divided conveniently into four suits of thirteen cards, each card furnished with useful information about the county it represented – its principal towns, rivers and products. In one of these sets, Lincolnshire (the Eight of Clubs) clearly shows Grantham and Newark and the straight stretch of the Roman road of Ermine Street, where Bryn now stands.

  One early set of geography cards cast its net far wider than the counties of England. The eccentric engineer and engraver Henry Winstanley (1644–1703) designed and published in 1665 a pack that shows continents and their inhabitants, with colourful descriptions on each card. The British Museum has a full set, only recently completed, buried in its depths. I have discovered that ancient playing cards and early jigsaws have a tendency to sink to the dusty depths of institutions, or to make their way uncatalogued to distant warehouses.

  In Winstanley’s set, spades represent Africa, diamonds Asia, clubs America, and hearts Europe. Each card shows a male and female character in ethnic dress or undress, accompanied by weaponry or other indicators of nationality or culture; the text, with very inconsistent spelling, describes the products, habits and religion of each place. Plantations in Mexico are credited to Madrid and plantations in New England to London. The country of Morocco (the Queen of Spades) is ‘often ruined by the wild Arabians and their Civil Wars’; the natives of ‘Guinys’ (the Seven of Spades) are ‘Rude and Barbarous thieves and most idolators’; the Romans (the Knave of Hearts) are ‘all Romanists’, whereas in Amsterdam (the Four of Hearts) ‘Here is toleration of all sects in Religion’. The Swedes, we are told, are ‘clothed in Furr’ and, moreover, Lutheran. One of the finest cards is the Two of Diamonds, which represents Samarchand and the Zagathans:

  Zagathay, or Uzbeck, is one of the great parts of Tartary, and its people are warlike but cruel. Most rich in droves of Cattel and have little more knowledge than their Beasts. Pagan or Mahomitan. In Tartary desert are people living in houses built on wheels which they remove in great numbers to the terror of their neighbours.

  Colin Thubron, a writer who knows these regions well, tells me that Zagathay must be what we know as Jagathai, a name given to Central Asia between the death of Genghis Khan and the rise of Tamerlane. It is unlikely that Henry Winstanley, a Suffolk man, had much first-hand knowledge of the kingdoms he so colourfully describes, but Thubron says his information is surprisingly accurate. And Winstanley was not a parlour traveller. He took his love of topography to extremes. He is best remembered for having designed the first lighthouse on the Eddystone Rock off Plymouth, erected in 1700, which he saw through various designs and re
visions, and which has been credited with saving much shipping. But this invention cost him his life; he was on the lighthouse, seeing to repairs, when it was destroyed in a storm on 26 November 1703, and he perished with it.

  XVI

  The invention of geography cards for the young King Louis in 1644 connects the goose game of the Medici court with the invention of the jigsaw and the game of Belisha. The earliest ancestor of Belisha was a French game, derived from the goose game. Le Jeu du Monde of 1645, based on a mutation of Le Jeu de l’Oie, was designed by the infant king’s geographer, Pierre du Val. This was a game in which chance still ruled, but as you played you could learn the names (though not the relative locations) of the countries as you moved your counter round the track of the world; each numbered space was occupied by a small map. Du Val followed this ingenious invention with Le Jeu de France pour les Dames (1652), based on a traditional draughts board, in which the white squares were white, but the black squares were replaced by maps of the regions of France.

  The concept of learning geography through play can thus claim to have originated in France, and some historians have wondered why it took so long to reach England, which was already full of cartography. Beautifully coloured maps were treasured in cabinets and hung as furnishings and tapestries in halls, galleries, studies and libraries. Artists portrayed landowners and explorers standing before backgrounds of maps, or surveying maps importantly spread upon tables. It would seem a short step to the kind of geographical table game that had been devised in France in the 1640s, but in fact the earliest known English version dates from a century later, from 1759. This, however, when it at last arrived, was very different from its predecessors.

  The new game was called A Journey Through Europe, or the Play of Geography. It was designed by John Jefferys, teacher of geography, writing and arithmetic, and marketed by Carington Bowles, a well-known publisher of maps and prints based in St Paul’s Churchyard. It was a track game, but in the form of a map, not a spiral. It was mounted on canvas, and could be folded and stored in a case like a real travelling map. The player twirled a flat-sided top called a ‘teetotum’ to obtain a number, and then advanced or retreated his counter accordingly, as in the goose game. The spaces here were embellished not with rustic images but with useful nuggets of topical patriotic information, such as: ‘He who rests at 28 at Hanover shall by order of Ye King of Great Britain who is Elector, be conducted to No 54 at Gibraltar to visit his countrymen who keep garrison there,’ or ‘He who rests at No 48 at Rome for kissing ye Pope’s toe shall be banished for his folly to No 4 in the cold island of Iceland and there miss three turns.’ The winner was the first to reach London, ‘the first city in Europe’.

  The immense success of this new game was imitated over the next few decades in innumerable designs and variations, some combining the principles of the goose game with the format of the new tour of Europe, and introducing a variety of edifying elements to assuage the consciences of players.

  F. R. B.Whitehouse, for many years chairman and managing director of the Chad Valley company, published in 1951 an illustrated book titled The Table Games of Georgian and Victorian Days, which gives an excellent account of the development of board games, while somewhat arbitrarily subdividing them into ‘Instructional’ games, games of ‘Moral Improvement’, and ‘Games of Amusement’. Under the second heading, Whitehouse describes such items as The New Game of Human Life (1790), The Mirror of Truth (1811), and Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished (1818), all of which provide a strong element of exhortation, ranging from lessons in civic duty to warnings about what happens to naughty children.

  The pious moral content is in many cases offset, however, by the beauty of the design of the board, which must have added much to the pleasure of play. The New Game of Human Life, for example, published by John Wallis and Elizabeth Newbery in 1790, takes the player spirally through various imaginatively illustrated stages of life from infancy through manhood and the prime of life to sedate middle age, old age, decrepitude and dotage. The instructions for this game specifically advocated the use of a teetotum rather than dice. The New Game of Human Life was, of course, a game of chance, but the less this aspect was emphasized to its players the better. By this stage in history, we needed excuses for enjoying ourselves.

  Many examples of these games survive in county museums and toy museums, each mirroring the ethics, dress and sometimes the historical events of the period in which it was designed. A tale like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress lent itself readily to pictorial representation, and the staging posts of the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and Doubting Castle became as familiar to players as the counties and castles of England. Many children firmly believed that these were real places. Such family board games are re-created to this day by publishers and toy manufacturers, and new and topical variants are on the market every Christmas.

  The Chad Valley catalogue for 1954 advertises a board game called Dan Dare’s Race in Space, as well as Muffin the Mule jigsaws and drawing slates, and any catalogue for any year offers a similar snapshot of the new, the traditional and the adapted. The impressive display in Robert Opie’s Museum of Advertising and Packaging, now in Notting Hill, tracks the way in which trends in advertising and historical events are reflected through board games and jigsaws based on the days of Empire and two world wars, on movies and TV shows, on the launch of the sputnik and the space race. There is even a Twiggy Dress-the-doll Model Dress Book. Dress-the-doll books have a surprisingly long history.

  (Opie saves these ephemera with a purpose: ‘Whilst families tend to save mementoes from special occasions, it struck me that little was being done to keep the everyday material. When the thousands of pieces of this social history are assembled into some giant jig-saw, the result illustrates the remarkable journey we have all come through.’)

  The early board games designed for pure amusement betray their frivolity in their titles: Funnyshire Fox Chase, Royal Race Course, Comic Steeplechase, Waddling Frog. It was an old edition of the Funnyshire Fox Chase that first attracted Major Whitehouse to his pet subject. He advertised for information about similar games, and realized from the nature of the sparse replies he received that he had found a wider but less well-trodden field than he had thought. ‘Not knowing what may turn up next adds tremendously to the interest of collecting these old games,’ he sweetly and innocently wrote. I picture him as a pleasant, silver-haired, country gentleman, a kind father and an indulgent grandfather, who loved to show his grandchildren his valuable collection. I wrote to Chad Valley to find out what had happened to him, but no answer came, perhaps because Chad Valley, once toymaker to the queen, has been swallowed up by Woolworths, which itself is about to disappear. I did not pursue him further, for I did not wish to be disappointed. He might have been cast in the Alison Uttley mould.

  In his history, Major Whitehouse confined himself primarily to canvas or linen-mounted games published between 1750 and 1850, but in his tenth chapter he briefly mentioned jigsaw puzzles, which he said were ‘not games in the strict sense of the word’. In a foreword to the 1971 reprint we are told (by the then Vice-Chairman of Chad Valley, R. Swinburne-Johnson) that a book on the history of jigsaw puzzles by Linda Hannas would shortly appear as a companion volume to Whitehouse’s own work.

  And with the jigsaw puzzle, an entirely new form was born.

  XVII

  The first jigsaw puzzles took the form of ‘dissected maps’ and the earliest of these were credited to John Spilsbury (1739–1769). Spilsbury was an engraver, printmaker and cartographer, and as a young man he was apprenticed to cartographer Thomas Jefferys (c.1719–1771) of St Martin’s Lane, who, like his namesake John Jefferys, became involved in manufacturing a geographical race game. (The two Jefferys may or may not have been related, but they must have known one another; this was a small world.) Thomas Jefferys, despite an appointment as cartographer royal to George III in 1760 and a successful career as a publisher of maps of the Americas, was declared bankrupt in 1
766, the very year that his pupil Spilsbury is said to have hit upon the concept of the jigsaw.

  Spilsbury’s idea was dazzlingly simple. He mounted maps on thin mahogany board and cut them along country or county boundaries with a fine marquetry saw, then boxed them up for children to reassemble. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that nobody had hit on this concept before. (And perhaps somebody had.)

  These puzzles seem to have been specifically designed and sold as an amusing educational aid for children, and it is no coincidence that they arrived on the market during the extraordinary boom in child-oriented products that marked the second half of the eighteenth century. For those trying to follow the prescriptions of Locke and Rousseau, they fitted the bill exactly. They pleased parents and publishers alike, and children may well have enjoyed them as much as I did when young.

  I first read of John Spilsbury in the pioneering work of jigsaw-puzzle scholarship by Linda Hannas, The English Jigsaw-Puzzle 1760–1890, which, as we have seen, Major Whitehouse had announced as forthcoming in his book on board games. This book, published in 1972, was the starting point of my historical quest. Linda Hannas was the first writer to devote a whole book to the art and history of the jigsaw, and she dedicated many years to her subject, gathering together a fine private collection of puzzles, which was sold through Sotheby’s on 27 July 1984. She died in October 2004, not long before I read her book, though it took me a long time to discover this, and I kept hoping I might be able to meet her and talk to her about her obsession. I would have liked to have asked her more about what attracted her to the subject, how she became a collector, what collecting meant to her, what first attracted her to jigsaws, whether she continued to enjoy assembling them. But I came just too late, my letters went unanswered and, anyway, even had I written in time she might well not have wanted to see me. Experts may be possessive about their material and do not always welcome the interest of others, as I have found to my cost. They do not want newcomers peering at their treasures.