by John Mullan
When Elinor and Marianne attend Lady Middleton to a large, smart London party, she soon sits down to casino, freeing the sisters from the nothingness of her conversation, but also allowing Marianne to experience the shock of meeting Willoughby without having her as a spectator (II. vi). At parties and balls, card games are for those who will not dance. At the ball at the Crown in Emma, the heroine is disappointed to see Mr Knightley in the company of ‘the husbands, and fathers, and whist players’, removed from physical display. These men pretend to take an interest in the dancing just until ‘their rubbers were made up’ (III. ii). Whist is what men do when they are no longer young or attractive – when they are unsexed. Emma’s scorn of cards is rather different from Marianne’s. Marianne prides herself on transcending triviality; Emma, who elsewhere enjoys games, regards cards as the unimaginative time-filling of her fellow villagers. Visiting the Bateses for the first time in the novel, Emma intends to avoid the topic of Mr Elton as much as she can, and instead ‘to wander at large amongst all the Mistresses and Misses of Highbury and their card-parties’ (II. i). In her mind – which is where this sentence is placed – card parties are equally the empty distraction of Highbury women and the empty substance of Miss Bates’s usual chat. Highbury seems addicted to cards. At the Crown Inn, the former ballroom is now used only ‘to accommodate a whist club established among the gentlemen and half-gentlemen of the place’ (II. vi). Such a club existed in Austen’s early unfinished novel draft The Watsons, where the wealthy Mr Edwards belongs to ‘a quiet little Whist club that meets three times a week at the White Hart’.1 Here too it is clearly the respectable time-filling activity of dull men in a provincial town or village. Meanwhile the women in Emma visit each other’s homes for those card parties. ‘We were just going to cards,’ says Miss Bates of a typical Highbury afternoon, to mark the time when a triumphant Mrs Elton arrives to announce Jane Fairfax’s acceptance of the governess’s post (III. viii). Newly arrived in the village, Mrs Elton needs to signal her superiority at these gatherings, and does so not by refusing to join them but by being shocked by ‘there being no ice in the Highbury card parties’ (II. xvi).
In Persuasion, Anne Elliot’s lack of enthusiasm for card games is made to seem a symptom of her integrity and her inwardness. She makes a big show, for Captain Wentworth’s sake, of her lack of interest in the evening card party at Camden Place, where Mr Elliot will be a guest: ‘I am no card-player’ (II. x). But it is not merely show. Captain Wentworth recalls his intimate knowledge of her eight years earlier: ‘You did not use to like cards; but time makes many changes.’ Her attitude to card games weirdly becomes the test of her consistency as a character. ‘“I am not so much changed,” cried Anne’, as if a new-found liking for card games would indicate a falling into conventional role playing. Her avoidance of card games is a sign of her distance from the novel’s other characters: even her friend and admirer Lady Russell is a card player. Yet it is a matter of self-image rather than of Austen’s attribution. By the time of her sister Elizabeth’s ‘card-party’, Anne, engaged once again to Captain Wentworth, is too happy to worry that it is ‘a commonplace business, too numerous for intimacy, too small for variety’ (II. xi). Perhaps she is prepared to play cards after all.
Austen herself cannot have thought it all so pointless. In her letters she specifically mentions playing brag, casino, commerce, cribbage, quadrille, speculation, vingt-un and whist. When she writes to her sister she sometimes specifies her own successes at the card table (e.g. Letters, 45) or reports the triumphs of others (Letters, 56). Playing well is pleasurable, and playing badly is irritating. On one occasion she complains that her teenage nephew Edward ‘acquitted himself to admiration in every particular except selling his Deals at Vingt-un’ (Letters, 149). He is almost perfect, but smooth play at vingt-un is a real social skill that he has not quite acquired. So we should not assume that we need share Emma’s scorn. Mr Perry is naturally aggrieved when he finds that Mr Elton intends to skip the next gathering of the Highbury whist club at a moment’s notice (I. viii). He is off to London on his mission to get Emma’s portrait of Harriet framed. What will they do? He is ‘their best player’ (a fact that might itself suggest the vicar’s powers of calculation). Harriet and Emma are delighted to hear that he has given up his card game for his gallant undertaking, but they should instead see this selfishness as another sign that he is not a man to be trusted.
Whist is usually played for money in Austen’s novels. We are invited to notice which games involve gambling and which do not, whilst realising that playing for modest sums of money was normal for Austen and should not seem inherently bad. At the first ball in Mansfield Park, Mrs Norris tries to get Tom Bertram to join a rubber of whist where they are playing for half-crowns (2s 6d), but tempts him by suggesting that he and Dr Grant might like to play for half-guineas (10s 6d). Characteristically, she convicts herself of impropriety and him of a love of gambling. After the abortive outing to Bristol in Northanger Abbey, Isabella Thorpe finds solace in ‘a pool of commerce’ with James Morland and her brother (I. xi). This does not reveal her character because the game is played for money, but because it involves bartering and bargaining. The object is to ‘make your hand’ by exchanging some of your own cards with those on the table, or by ‘buying’ an extra card. Being all about trading what you have for what you think might be better, it is just the game for her – an imitation of the business of her life. It is a game that Austen herself played with her friends the Digweeds (Letters, 27) and with an unidentified admirer of her sister dubbed ‘Le Chevalier’, while on holiday in Lyme (Letters, 39). Commerce is mentioned again as being played in the Austen household – evidently for money (Letters, 56). Indeed, when Austen finds that a visit to Mrs Maitland in Southampton has become ‘a thorough party’, with ‘a quadrille & a Commerce Table’, she has to back out. ‘There were two pools at Commerce, but I would not play more than one, for the Stake was three shillings, & I cannot afford to lose that, twice in an evening’ (Letters, 57).
It is respectable enough to play cards for money it seems. When Mr Collins accompanies the Bennet sisters to their aunt’s house in Meryton, he declares himself inexpert but glad to play, as the game is appropriate for someone ‘in my situation of life’ (I. xvi). A few pages later he has lost every point (quite an achievement) and the total of five shillings, and is solemnly assuring Mrs Philips ‘that he considered the money as a mere trifle’. While he is playing whist there is a ‘nice comfortable noisy game of lottery tickets’ for the rest of the company (I. xv). This seems to be played for ‘fish’ – tokens of winnings rather than real money. ‘Mr. Wickham did not play at whist’, leaving him free to tell his lies about Darcy to Elizabeth, safely separated from the whist players and cocooned by the hubbub of the lottery game. Lydia is engrossed in the latter and has conveniently ceased to pay him any attention. Mr Wickham seems to be playing too, but has the ‘leisure’ to converse with Elizabeth. The reluctance to play whist is nicely contrived given what we later find out about his real appetites. When he takes Lydia with him to London he leaves Brighton with gambling debts of ‘more than a thousand pounds’ (III. vi). ‘A gamester!’ cries Jane. He must have glanced at the Meryton whist game with an expert’s cold eye. On the walk back to Longbourn, Lydia can talk of nothing but ‘the fish she had lost and the fish she had won’, marking her out as just the likeliest future partner for Wickham.
So even when everyone plays at something, cards can separate groups out from each other. Later in Pride and Prejudice, at Rosings there are cards after dinner and tea with Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Lady Catherine, Sir William Lucas and Mr and Mrs Collins play quadrille, so Elizabeth is condemned ‘to play at cassino’ at a separate table with Maria Lucas, Miss de Bourgh (who has chosen the game) and her companion Mrs Jenkinson (II. vi). After the preceding pages of gloriously antagonistic exchanges between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine, we are now condemned to novelistic silence. ‘Their table was superlatively stupid. Scarcely
a syllable was uttered that did not relate to the game.’ A great deal is said at the other table, but as Elizabeth is no longer part of the talk, it is not worth quoting. Cards at Rosings are a kind of tyranny: Lady Catherine and her daughter decide on the games, which go on ‘as long as they chose’. In Mansfield Park it is the self-indulging Dr Grant who dictates terms. After dinner and tea at the Parsonage, the whist table is ‘formed really for the amusement of Dr. Grant, by his attentive wife, though it was not supposed to be so’ (II. v). The presumption seems to be that Fanny will not play, while Mary Crawford is ‘too much vexed’ by discussion of Edmund’s future living to be involved and turns to her harp. The players must be the Grants, Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram; with Edmund separated from Mary Crawford the drama drains from the scene.
Some games are for clever people, and some are for the empty-headed.
A little later in Mansfield Park, the Parsonage is the setting for another after-dinner card game, the most carefully choreographed in all Austen’s fiction. Fanny and her recently arrived brother William accompany the Bertrams to dinner with the Grants. After dinner there is to be a whist table again, with enough people left over for ‘a round game’ (a game accommodating any number of players). Sir Thomas takes to whist with Mrs Norris and the Grants; the others play speculation (II. vii). As ever, the novelist’s purpose is to separate some players from others. Sir Thomas and Mrs Norris are evidently absorbed in their play: they win a game by the odd trick, ‘by Sir Thomas’s capital play and her own, against Dr. and Mrs. Grant’s great hands’. This is Mrs Norris’s triumphant self-vaunting, mingled with her sycophancy to her brother-in-law. Whist is the perfect chance to combine her aggression and her pretence of allegiance to her sister’s rich family, and it is the chance to win some money. Meanwhile, unnoticed by these players, the remaining characters play a game that elaborately enacts the different competitors’ undeclared wishes.
Speculation is a complicated game that is no longer familiar to us. It might have been a private joke to make Mary Crawford the self-thwarting conqueror of the speculation table in Mansfield Park, for it was a game that the author herself championed in her family. When Edward Austen’s bereaved sons Edward and George travelled from school in Winchester to stay with Aunt Jane and her mother in Southampton, after the death of their mother in October 1808, they had to be diverted from grief, as she told her sister Cassandra. ‘We do not want amusements; bilbocatch, at which George is indefatigable, spillikins. Paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the flow and ebb of the river, and now and then a stroll out, keep us well employed’ (Letters, 60). Speculation worked best. ‘I introduced speculation, and it was so much approved that we hardly knew how to leave off’ (Letters, 60). Two months later, when the boys had returned to their father in Kent and had Cassandra staying with them, Jane Austen was writing to her sister saying, ‘I hope Speculation is generally liked’ (Letters, 64). Evidently Cassandra wrote back saying that they preferred brag: ‘it mortifies me deeply, because Speculation was under my patronage’ (Letters, 64). ‘When one comes to reason upon it, it cannot stand its ground against Speculation.’ She even composed some doggerel verses in praise of speculation to be conveyed to her nephew Edward (Letters, 65).
It was a relatively new game, which Austen had to explain to her nephews just as the Crawfords had to explain it to Fanny and the entirely uncomprehending Lady Bertram. In The Watsons, composed in 1805, Mrs Watson testifies to its fashionable standing in her suburban world: ‘Speculation is the only round game at Croydon now’.2 Dickens mentions it in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), where it is made analogous with the financial risk-taking that ruins Nicholas’s father. ‘Speculation is a round game; the players see little or nothing of their cards at first starting; gains MAY be great—and so may losses.’3 The joke of the analogy suggests the author’s confidence that readers will know of the card game. Fanny has no previous experience of it, but quickly grasps its principles – well enough to try to play for her brother to win. In her playing of the game we see a paradox of her character distilled: she is an ingénue who quickly perceives the subtleties that more worldly characters miss. Every player emerges in character. In particular, the game is a carefully arranged vignette of the Crawfords’ schemes and efforts at manipulation. The comic summary of this is Lady Bertram’s: ‘I am never to see my cards; and Mr. Crawford does all the rest’ (II. vii). He is the arch-manipulator, while his sister is the restive gambler, staking more on victory than it can ever be worth. In speculation, players may bid to buy what they suppose might be a winning card in the possession of another player. So a player may ‘buy’ a card that does not win, or may pay more for a card than it gains.
It is not exactly a proper competition at all, as Mr Crawford intervenes to prevent Fanny selling her queen to her brother William for a low price and to try to ensure that she will win. ‘The game will be yours, turning to her again—it will certainly be yours’: this is more insistence than prediction. Henry Crawford is ingratiating himself with Fanny; Mary Crawford is testing herself against Edmund. The point of the game for the novelist is that it allows two simultaneous activities (for those with the wits): playing and talking. We keep noticing this because the dialogue calls attention to it via the instructions that Crawford gives in parentheses to Lady Bertram; he can keep two activities in his mind, where she can hardly manage one. He is playing the game and, for his sister’s benefit, asking Edmund about his future home at Thornton Lacey. Mary Crawford is playing – and listening. The card game and the topic of Edmund’s future are intimately connected, though the Bertrams cannot see this. Indeed, in little flashes of audacity the Crawfords glancingly declare themselves. ‘I never do wrong without gaining by it,’ says Henry (about losing his way); ‘No cold prudence for me,’ announces Mary (of her play). Everything really is a game for them, and all the better if they can flaunt their schemes in front of those whom they deceive.
Speculation is the electricity that courses through the company, and seems a good word too for the activity of the reader – for the engagement of not just our interest but our intelligence. Austen herself uses the word for what is going on the minds of her characters. Sir Thomas tells Henry Crawford of Edmund’s aspirations to dedicate himself to his duties as a parish priest, considerably irking the listening Mary Crawford. ‘All the agreeable of her speculation was over for that hour. It was time to have done with cards if sermons prevailed, and she was glad to find it necessary to come to a conclusion and be able to refresh her spirits by a change of place and neighbour.’ Her speculation, about the possibility of marriage to Edmund, has been rather thwarted than encouraged. ‘If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving for it,’ she announces, as if she really is saying something about herself rather than the game. Yet it is the treatment of all her social exchanges as subtle game-playing that robs her of any final triumph. ‘The game was hers, and only did not pay her for what she had given to secure it.’ Speculation, which she and her brother are using for their manipulative purposes, becomes a metaphor for what she loses by being so manipulative. She wins by paying more than she can gain.
Some games are for clever people, and some are for the empty-headed. In Emma, the clever and the empty-headed play together. Mr Woodhouse loves games – his piquet with Mrs Goddard (II. vii) and, especially, his backgammon. Backgammon is just right for him, relying enough on chance to offer him the occasional opportunity of victory, especially if the other player is guileful enough to help him win. No wonder it is also the game that Mr Bennet plays with Mr Collins (Pride and Prejudice, I. xv). We learn from Miss Bates that during the Highbury balls Mr Woodhouse passes the evening with ‘a vast deal of chat, and backgammon’ with Mrs Bates (III. ii). When, late in the novel, a chastened Emma looks back to the trip to Box Hill, considering it as a morning ‘totally bare of rational satisfaction’, she thinks that ‘a whole evening of backgammon with her father was felicity to it’ (III. viii). Here at least she is doing someth
ing unselfish, ‘giving up the sweetest hours of the twenty-four to his comfort’. The hours and hours of backgammon with Mr Woodhouse lie in wait for her if she really is committed to avoiding marriage, as she claims.
This image of an almost eternal backgammon game with Mr Woodhouse is all the more powerful because of Emma’s native love of intriguing play. Emma is a novel in which game playing is exciting enough to seem dangerous. ‘A most dangerous game’ is just the phrase that Mr Knightley chooses to describe Frank Churchill’s flirtation with Emma, designed to distract her from his attachment to Jane Fairfax. Game playing is an activity into which Mr Elton, ‘invited to contribute any really good enigmas, charades, or conundrums that he might recollect’, is disastrously recruited (I. ix). Perceiving the game-playing ethos of Highbury, he submits his notorious puzzle (a ‘charade’, in the vocabulary of the day). Harriet duly fails to understand it; more dangerously, Emma duly misinterprets it. In a letter of 1816 Austen describes friends ‘taking kindly to our Charades, & other Games’, and she and her family enjoyed just the word games to which Mr Elton takes with such alacrity (Letters, 145).4 Harriet has enjoyed ‘merry evening games’ with the Martins, but her games with Emma will be rather more hazardous. Emma likes to treat life as a game or puzzle. ‘She is a riddle, quite a riddle!’ she says to herself about Jane Fairfax, amazed that she should be willing to spend time with Mrs Elton (II. xv). Emma draws other characters into games; even her slow-witted father tries to join in the business of charades. On Box Hill Mr Weston foolishly tries to please Emma with his fatuous word game, the answer to which is a pun on her name, before Frank Churchill, ‘ordered by Miss Woodhouse’, proposes the game of clever utterances that end in such ill feeling (III. vii). At the novel’s heart is the anagram game played at Hartfield, in which messages are being sent by Frank Churchill to Jane Fairfax, and misdirecting signals being sent by him to Emma. The game is Frank Churchill’s idea – ‘We had great amusement with those letters one morning. I want to puzzle you again’ – but Emma is ‘pleased’ with the suggestion (III. v). In fact, Frank Churchill is playing a ‘deeper game’ than Emma knows. The judgement is Mr Knightley’s, for the whole game chapter is narrated from his point of view. He sees the players and watchers round that table – Emma, Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, Miss Bates, Harriet Smith, Mr and Mrs Weston, Mr Woodhouse – and sees how little most of them understand of what is going on in play. As ever, the game brings characters together precisely in order to divide them.