London: The Biography полностью

So went a dialogue in a pamphlet entitled Manifest Detection, which outlined a score of other tricks used by the fraternity of the Shifters. Another pamphlet, Look on me, London, warned against the city’s tricks and devices to gull the innocent or the unwary; strangers and visitors were liable to be duped or defrauded by “the Picker-Up, the Kid, the Cap and the Flat,” nicknames which seem to span the generations. And, once more, the language used to describe London’s principal vices is one of corruption and contagion. Dice and cards “were the Green Pathway to hell, whereby followed a hundred gowtie, dropsy diseases.” In a city terrified of sickness and epidemic plague the metaphors for any type of excess, or pleasure, become insistent.

The fever ran unabated. When the floor of the Middle Temple Hall was taken up in 1764 “no less than a hundred pair” of dice were found to have slipped through its boards during the play of previous generations. In the mid-seventeenth century Pepys observed of the players in one gaming house, “how ceremonious they are as to call for new dice, to shift their places, to alter their manner of throwing” and he noticed “how some old gamesters that have no money now to spend as formerly do come and sit and look on as among others.” These places became known in London as “hells,” and in them Pepys heard the cries of the damned. So “one man being to throw a seven if he could, and failing to do it after a great many throws cried he would be damned if ever he flung seven more while he lived.” Another player, who had won, shouted out, “A pox on it, that it should come so early upon me, for this fortune two hours hence would be worth something to me but then, God damn me, I shall have no such luck.”

The London gaming houses were often characterised, too, as places where gentlemen and noblemen would sit down with the “meaner” sort, to use Pepys’s word. The same observation was made in the late twentieth century, in connection with casinos and gaming clubs where the aristocracy and the underworld consorted. The dissipations of London, like the city itself, act as great levellers. Lord Chesterfield, perhaps struck by the egalitarian mood of the city, once remarked that “he preferred playing with a sharper to playing with a gentleman, for though he might not often win of the former, he was sure when he did win to get paid.”

By the early eighteenth century there were approximately forty gaming houses in the city, known as subscription-houses and slaughter-houses as well as hells. There were “more of these infamous places of resort in London,” according to Timbs’s Curiosities of London, “than in any other city in the world.” They were recognisable by an ornate gas-lamp in front of the entrance and a green or red baize door at the end of the hallway. Gaming rose in frequency and excessiveness throughout the century, a century which by curious chance was the one most marked by financial uncertainty and sudden ruin. Thus in the age of the Bubble, and other panics, whist was perfected by gentlemen who met at the Crown Coffee House in Bedford Row.

Gaming was declared illegal but, despite nightly raids upon certain selected hells in the city, it continued to flourish. There was always “assembled a mixed crowd of gentlemen, merchants, tradesmen, clerks and sharpers of all degrees and conditions,” ready to play at Hazard, Faro, Basset, Roly-poly and a score of other games involving dice and cards. Into these hells came the puffs, the flashers, the squibs, the dunners, the flash captains with a regiment of spies, porters and runners to give notice of approaching constables. At Almacks, a famous gaming club in Pall Mall, the players “turned their coats inside out for luck”; they put on wristbands of leather to protect their lace ruffles and wore straw hats to guard their eyes from the light and to prevent their hair from tumbling. Sometimes, too, they put on “masks to conceal their emotions.” At Brooks’s, the twenty-first rule stated that there should be “No gaming in the eating room, except tossing up for reckonings, on penalty of paying the whole bill of the members present.” There were other less agreeable occasions for a wager, as recorded in London Souvenirs. A prospective player once dropped down dead at the door of White’s; “the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or only in a fit; and when they were going to bleed him the wagerers for his death interposed, saying it would affect the fairness of the bet.”