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List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction
‘The Most Prevalent Vice of the Age’
Chapter One
Gambling in Nineteenth-Century England
Gambling, Leisure and Crockford’s Club, 1828–1844
Chapter Two
‘A Dissipated Career’
Benjamin Disraeli and a Failing Aristocracy
Chapter Three
‘Tumult and Frenzy Reigned Supreme’
Charles Dickens’s Gambling Characters
Chapter Four
‘Gambler, Swindler, Murderer’
William Makepeace Thackeray’s Losses and Gains
Chapter Five
‘Lose Strikingly’
Gambling with Life in George Eliot
Chapter Six
‘Doctrines of Chance’
Gambling as the Universal Trope in Thomas Hardy
Chapter Seven
‘A Real Gentleman should never want the Money out of another
Man’s Pocket’
Anthony Trollope, Gambling and Class Contamination
Chapter Eight
‘One Law for the Rich and another for the Poor’
George Moore’s Working Gamblers
Conclusion
Appendix I, Glossary of Gambling Terms
Appendix II, ‘A Leprosy is o’er the Land’
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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“In this clear and informative study, social history meets Literary Criticism & Linguistics in a concise and useful form. Recommended.” Choice
“Dr Flavin’s meticulous study of gambling in its various forms in Victorian fiction ranges from the novel to literary biography, social history, politics and popular science. Opening new and intriguing perspectives on the subject, Flavin reveals gambling and chance as the dark alternatives to progressive evolution in the consciousness of the age.” Louis James, Emeritus Professor, University of Kent at Canterbury |
