“”Faro’s Daughters”: Female Gamesters, Politics, and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain”
Russell, Gillian ""Faro’s Daughters": Female Gamesters, Politics, and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain"
Eighteenth-Century Studies - Volume 33, Number 4, Summer 2000, pp. 481-504
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Excerpt
One of the most enduring themes of eighteenth-century commentary on contemporary Britain was the nation’s passion for gambling. The rage for play obsessed all classes of society but was conducted to the most dramatic and conspicuous extent by the gambling "great," especially men and women of the Whig elite, such as Charles James Fox and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who could bet and lose the modern equivalent of millions at a night’s play. Such behavior was widely condemned as a sign of the moral degeneracy and irresponsibility of the fashionable classes. 1 High-stakes gambling represented a profligacy that constantly courted ruin and disaster: it was a form of luxury that was geared not toward the display of wealth but to the display of one’s insouciance in losing it. The anxieties surrounding gambling tended to become more acute during periods of social and political upheaval, particularly the 1790s when an influx of émigrés in the aftermath of the French Revolution led to a rapid increase in the number of gambling clubs in London. 2 There are a number of reasons why this by-product of the Revolution should have been controversial in the Britain of the 1790s. The impact of the events of 1789 led to an even more intense scrutiny of the behavior of the fashionable world, which became the target for, on the one hand, sustained radical critique, and, on the other, a concern on the part of loyalists that the irresponsibility of a privileged few was endangering the moral and political survival of the nation. At a time of food crises and other privations due to war, [End Page 481] some felt that the spectacle of upper-class gambling rendered the entire ruling order vulnerable. Charles James Fox’s gambling notoriety increasingly became a political liability, used by his enemies on all sides of politics to challenge his authority as "man of the people." Moreover, a problem…
