Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play

Michelle Beissel Heath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351392136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Drawing evidence from transatlantic literary texts of childhood as well as from nineteenth and early twentieth century children's and family card, board, and parlor games and games manuals, Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play aims to reveal what might be thought of as "playful literary citizenship, " or some of the motivations inherent in later nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American play pursuits as they relate to interest in shaping citizens through investment in "good" literature. Tracing play, as a societal and historical construct, as it surfaces time and again in children's literary texts as well as children's literary texts as they surface time and again in situations and environments of children's play, this book underscores how play and literature are consistently deployed in tandem in attempts to create ideal citizens – even as those ideals varied greatly and were dependent on factors such as gender, ethnicity, colonial status, and class.

1 Cultivating citizenship in the parlor

Transatlantic rivalries and respectability in nineteenth century board, card, and parlor games

Near the center of the R. Bliss Manufacturing Company’s Robinson Crusoe game board (1898) is a hill adorned with a flag. Given standard popular associations with islands and colonialism, at first glance the flag makes perfect sense—the Western explorer/colonizer, upon setting foot on the island has, as popular images and ideas go, stuck the flag in the hill to claim the territory as his, and more particularly, as part of his nation’s empire. This association is so common that Terry Pratchett critiques it (and imperialism, to a degree) in his Robinsonade, Nation (2008), by having an island inhabitant ask another, “How about if I take a canoe and sail it to the trouserman island [England] and stick my flag in the sand. … Will that make it our place?” (337). The answer, of course, is “No … They would laugh. Flags are like guns that flap. If you have a flag, you need a gun” (337). A second glance, however, renders the flag on the Robinson Crusoe game board a bit of a puzzle: in all of its wind-blown splendor, the flag is clearly a U.S. flag (Figure 1.1).

Despite its subtitle referencing the “un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America,” Robinson Crusoe is primarily the story of the English-born (though with German father) Robinson Crusoe who, if he were to plant a flag upon the island on which he finds himself stranded, would most likely choose either the flag of Great Britain or the English flag.¹ That Crusoe wouldn’t choose a U.S. flag is even more certain due to the fact that the U.S. flag—or even the U.S. itself—didn’t exist when the book was published (1719) and when Crusoe arrived at the island (30 September 1659, as Crusoe indicates in his journal and as a Parker Brothers 1895 Robinson Crusoe game card helpfully elucidates with a “Record Post” illustration). Potentially similarly strange appearances of U.S. flags occur with The R. Bliss Manufacturing Company’s Stanley Africa Game of 1891. The game, which portrays racial stereotypes, takes as its subject matter Henry Morton Stanley’s 1887–1889 “Emin Pasha Relief Expedition.” Though Stanley, more famous for his earlier expedition to find Dr. David Livingstone, spent time in New Orleans and gained his adopted name through that time, served in both sides during the U.S. Civil War, and worked for a New York paper, he ultimately was born, knighted, and died in Britain, and the expedition the game depicts was organized by British businessmen. A player of the game would be excused for believing Stanley’s now-infamous exploits to be decidedly U.S. accomplishments, however, given the prominence of (though unconventional) U.S. flags on the game board and the flag as one of its game pieces.

Figure 1.1 R. Bliss Manufacturing Company’s Robinson Crusoe Game (1898). Courtesy, The Strong, Rochester, New York.

The presence, at times anachronistic, of the U.S. flags indicates, I would argue, not only the games’ U.S. manufacture and creation by a U.S. company (Bliss Manufacturing was founded in Rhode Island) but attempts to align the U.S. with Britain’s imperial legacy—appropriating Britain’s literary legacy along the way. A year after the publication of the Bliss Robinson Crusoe game, following the Spanish-American war, Rudyard Kipling observed the U.S.’ imperial “maturity” (“have done with childish days” and “search your manhood”) through the poem “The White Man’s Burden,” which linked the U.S.’ acquisition of the Philippines with older, European imperialism (line 50; 53). Defoe’s novel has long been associated with British colonialism (from its references in Wilkie Collins’ imperialism-inflected The Moonstone [1868] to comments by James Joyce and postcolonial critical considerations today). It has, moreover, also long been associated with childhood, children’s education, and fostering imperial ideology for children. It is the one book Jean-Jacques Rousseau allows his fictional child Emile to read, it spawned an entire generally imperialism-oriented literary genre (the Robinsonade) which, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century, inspired many works of children’s literature including R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) if not Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), and it is sometimes even viewed as children’s literature itself.² As L.J. Swingle condescendingly suggests, comparing Defoe’s eighteenth century novel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), “people who have never actually read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe often think of it as a children’s book. It is a tale, so they suppose, that belongs on the shelf of the playroom” (xiii). In his view, “we adults” should “rescue Robinson Crusoe from the playroom and begin thinking about its significance for ourselves” as it “belong[s] in the library downstairs, where adults retreat to contemplate the shadowy mysteries of their own minds and experience” (xiv). Late nineteenth century game creators and parents seemingly disagreed: not only were multiple versions of the Robinson Crusoe game produced by leading manufacturers at the time—one each at least by Bliss, McLoughlin Brothers, and Parker Brothers, all circa 1890—those games were cast as decidedly for children. The Parker Brothers version (1893) indicates in its “Rules for Playing” that “the popular story of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ forms the basis of this little game for children” while the cover of the R. Bliss version suggests its being for children through the juxtaposition of its advertising, clustering around the title “The Favorite Games” not only the title of the Robinson Crusoe game but of other Bliss games based on child lore and childhood activities: The House that Jack Built, Visit to the Farm, Ride-A-Cock-Horse, Old Woman in a Shoe, and Babes in the Woods.

As such examples indicate, late nineteenth and early twentieth century board and card games mark revealing intersections between games and play, empire and nation building, and perceptions of children, literature, and “good” citizenship.³ As I aim to show in this chapter, U.S. and British board, card, and parlor games of the period—recognized by collectors and curators such as Margaret K. Hofer and Brian Love as a “golden age” of such games—promote games as respectable for children and families (freeing them from the, for example, moral blemishes of gambling and other addictions) by emphasizing didacticism and morality—or, really, what good citizenship should be—along with femininity and the home; they also drew upon literary foundations for inspiration and strove to bolster patriotic allegiance for a presumed audience of families and children considered primarily, in Sana Nakata’s terms, as “future-adult subjects” with regards to citizenship potential (129). Both literary foundations and patriotic allegiance were used to enhance respectability further and to promote citizenship ideals even more. A focus on respectability is especially notable in the U.S., where creators found themselves forced to acknowledge a literary heritage with Britain even as they strove to establish an independent literary and civic legacy. Time and again, political-literary motivations inherent in U.S. family and children’s board games and card and parlor play in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrate both attitudes of child citizens as primarily “citizens-in-training” and a fierce exchange over literary, cultural, and national respectability.

“Persons of literary taste and culture are always delighted” and “children are always entertained”: Redeeming games for child “citizens-in-training”

Games feature prominently in literature throughout the last few centuries and particularly in the nineteenth century. Jane Austen, who frequently played cards with family members, portrays similar playing in her novels while William Wordsworth hints at the commonplace presence of cards in childhood in the first book of The Prelude (1850). Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which I consider further in the next chapter, essentially revolve around games: races, croquet, and cards in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and children’s games (“I love my love with a …” alphabet game) and chess in Through the Looking Glass (1871). Yet many of these depictions of card and games-playing hint strongly at the darker sides of cards and gambling, as with the card play and gender battle in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1717) and the dice game (with the stakes being the Mariner and crew) between “Death” and “The Night-mare Life-in-Death” (lines 187–198) in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798, revised 1817). The association of cards with gambling is also apparent in William Makepeace Thackeray’s depiction of Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair (1848), a portrayal which seems to have inspired George Frederick Pardon, who adopted the pseudonym “Captain R. Crawley” for many of his game and card manuals published in the latter half of the nineteenth century (the manuals often also contain information on betting for the games he describes). Potential darker sides are also on display in the various children’s and adult games played in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861) by characters such as Estella and Magwitch (tellingly for Pip, his very name is the word which designates the markings on playing cards)⁴ while Dante Gabriel Rossetti even wrote a poem detailing the deleterious, seductive nature of cards entitled “The Card-Dealer” (1852). The U.S. writer Francis Bret Harte secured fame through his own poem describing disreputable card play (within the context of anti-Chinese immigration sentiment in the U.S.) in “Plain Language from Truthful James” (1870).

As these examples help illustrate, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cards and games playing was fraught with social and cultural contradictions. In 1876, C.LB.’s game of Tyche: The Fireside Oracle still observed in its “Publisher’s Announcement” that “many object to games of chance in which something is won or lost, as calculated to stimulate a taste for gambling” (2–3). Yet, while playing cards have long been negatively associated with gambling, the nineteenth century polite society custom of leaving a calling card while paying a visit actually stems, Roger Tilley suggests, from playing cards—the blank backs of original playing cards were recycled into spaces on which visitors left messages when the person to whom they were paying a visit was absent (130–131). Notably, too, as Janet E. Mullin discerns in her exploration of the nascent eighteenth-century beginnings of the rise of the middle classes in England, games were important in helping men and women of the “middling sort” “to construct and project their own self-image” and aided them in fostering social connections and in promoting business (990). Mullin argues that the middling sort “adapt[ed] card play to their own use” (992), an adaptation likely only continued and strengthened throughout the nineteenth century as the middle class came into its own. Simultaneously, then, games represented commonplace social practices of the sort that helped to create the middle classes and the development of middle class and national respectability and were indicators of dangerous characters, morals, habits, and risk. Children and youth, as Wordsworth’s and Carroll’s texts also indicate, were not exempt from the social, moral, and economic expectations and risks of such play. As Mullin notes, in the eighteenth century

simple games such as commerce helped to introduce young children to the rituals of both cards and company, often at a table of their own with parents or indulgent family friends. As the young ones grew and began to stretch their social wings, they joined more advanced adult players at more involved games, absorbing lessons in risk management as they dropped their pocket money into the pool.

(994)

Hofer observes that, by the 1880s, “materialism rather than morality became the focus of games, with players achieving success through competitive, capitalist behavior” (78), yet, as Mullin’s analysis of eighteenth century card play hints, “materialism” and “competitive, capitalist behavior” were long latent (or not so latent) aspects of such play, features also emphasized by the use of games for purposes of monetary gain in their contributions to tax income (playing cards were heavily taxed) and accumulation of profits (the goal of which likely in part explains the profusion of commemorative games celebrating such things as the centenary of the U.S.’ Revolutionary War that surfaced at the end of the nineteenth century). Still, as Mullin’s references to “rituals,” “social wings,” and “lessons” imply, attempts to soften or mitigate the negative, material associations of card and games play were also at work, and such attempts are on full display in later games, which emphasize didacticism and morality, femininity and the home, and literary and patriotic connections to broadcast their appeal to child and family players (and parental pocketbooks). Indeed, later games tend to reflect, sometimes even through competitive and capitalist impulses, perpetual didacticism and moralism when it comes to the young, attempts that can be understood as aligning with a purpose of helping to foster notions of good citizenship in youth. In other words, as part of an attempt to broaden the appeal of games by diminishing their unpleasant connotations, family and children’s card and board games contributed to views and ideals of middle class identities, which were adopted as notions of what constitutes “good” citizenship presented to child “citizens-in-training.”

McLoughlin Brothers’ The Game of City Life (1889), for example, offers an explicit defense that overtly highlights didactic moral intent and civic (connected with “civilizing” and “good citizenship”) purpose in the form of privileging “the virtues of life” over “wickedness or crime” (3) (Figure 1.2).

The game’s instructions explain that The Game of City Life

is not intended simply to present to the eye a series of pictures of city life, neither is it intended only as a pleasant pastime; but while it does accomplish both these objects, it goes still farther, and its highest value lies in the fact, that while it furnishes an unusually interesting game, it at the same time imparts a strongly pointed lesson in morality; showing the value of good qualities, kind actions, honesty and faithfulness, as against wickedness of every form. In short, whoever wins a game at “City Life,” does so because he or she strives for the cards representing the virtues of life, and to avoid those representing wickedness or crime.

(2–3)

Figure 1.2 McLoughlin Brothers’ The Game of City Life (1889). Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

The “good citizen” (and capitalist) underpinnings are especially apparent in the cards that make up the game. City Life is played by collecting tricks of cards that dictate the number of game counters gained from or placed back into a center pool of counters. The player with the most counters, which are representative of “virtues,” at the end of the game wins. The cards that cost a player counters depict figures associated with sloth, addiction, and fraud (the impoverished are generally viewed through such lenses in the game) or people or acts that, of perhaps of particular importance in a capitalist society, threaten or damage property or business rights (and occasionally life). These examples of “bad citizens” include “Corner Loafer,” “Drunkard,” “Beggar—Imposter,” “Gambler,” “Burglar,” “Sneak Thief,” “Rum Seller,” ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play
• Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Playful literary citizenship
• 1 Cultivating citizenship in the parlor: Transatlantic rivalries and respectability in nineteenth century board, card, and parlor games
• 2 Never and always a woman: Citizenship, croquet, and the nineteenth century growing girl
• 3 Citizenship on the world’s stage: Kipling’s novels of boyhood and the boy scouts
• 4 “‘Art for art’ is their motto”: Aesthetic citizenship, children’s play, and class politics in the eyes and hands of Burnett and Nesbit
• Conclusion—“playing houses”: Citizenship, play, and domestic adventure in Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series and the adventure playground movement
• Works cited
• Index