The Mansion of Happiness (3 page)

The New Game of Human Life showed up in the United States not long after George Washington was inaugurated, and it was still being played as late as the 1870s; although, by then, an essayist who wrote about it made it sound quaint, an antique game played “on a queer old parchment.”
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The fearsome hand of providence made the New Game of Human Life, by latter-day board game standards, unbearably dull. There’s no strategy, just dutiful to–ing and fro–ing, in abject obedience to the roll of the die and the rules of the game. Even worse, there’s a dispiriting absence of adversaries; you’re racing against other players, but you’re not competing with them,
not the way you are in, say,
Monopoly, when you get to charge them exorbitant rents. And, as for parents offering up “a few moral and judicious observations” at each square, I have tried this—giving my best impression of an eighteenth-century father—and all I can say is: no dice. When my six-year-old landed on the Docile Boy, I asked him, “Do you know what ‘docile’ means?”

“No.”

“It means you should do what I say, you little blister.”

“Oh yeah?” He narrowed his eyes. “Your roll.”

Two more games of life, the Mansion of Bliss and the Mansion of Happiness, were both produced in England beginning around 1800.
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They look a lot like the New Game of Human Life: spiral race games adapted to the pilgrimage of life. Both represent immortality, life’s final destination, as a heavenly mansion; this was then a popular Christian conceit, taken from John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” “O Lord! deliver us from sin,” prayed one American evangelical in 1814, “and when we shall have finished our earthly course, admit us to the mansion of bliss and happiness.”
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Or, as the rules to the Mansion of Bliss had it:

In the United States, the Mansion of Bliss never really made a mark, maybe because the phrase “the mansion of bliss” was also used by Americans to refer to an especially alluring woman’s breasts.
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But the Mansion of Happiness, the most popular board game in Britain, had an extraordinarily successful American career. It was sold in the United States at least as early as 1806. In 1843, an American edition, based on revisions to the English game made by
Anne Wales Abbott, the editor of a Boston-based juvenile magazine called the
Child’s Friend
, was offered by
W. and S. B. Ives, a printing company in Salem. In ten months, Ives sold nearly four thousand of what went on to become the century’s most enduring game. It became a staple of Victorian parlors; it made its way west on the Overland Trail.
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The Mansion of Happiness is abundantly pious. Its rules begin:

You can hear, in these lines, echoes of the earliest Puritan primers: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” And the last couplet alludes, quite particularly, to the beginning of
John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
(1667), in which Man waits for the son of God to “Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.”
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No game is more didactic: “At this amusement each will find / A moral fit t’improve the mind.” Whether it’s amusing is difficult to say. The Mansion of Happiness is hard to finish, mostly because the wages of sin are so harsh—“Whoever becomes a SABBATH BREAKER must be taken to the WHIPPING POST and whipt” (a retreat of six squares)—that you’re forever going backward and losing turns. However popular the Mansion of Happiness was with the parents who purchased it, the game boards that survive in archives are in such suspiciously good condition that at least one historian has wondered whether children—who must, invariably, have been given the game as a gift—could ever bear to play it. Its rules read like a sermon: “Whoever possesses AUDACITY, CRUELTY, IMMODESTY, or INGRATITUDE, must return to his former situation till his turn comes to spin again, and not even
think
of Happiness, much less partake of it.”
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Milton Bradley was born in Vienna, Maine, in 1836, two centuries after
Daniel Bradley crossed the Atlantic, by which time the Bradleys had not yet begun to think of happiness, much less partake of it. He was the great-great-grandson of
Jonathan Bradley, one of the many members of the
Bradley family killed by Indians. He was his parents’ only son. He was named after the Puritan author of
Paradise Lost.
As a boy, he read
Pilgrim’s Progress.
When he was ten, his family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, so
that his father, Lewis, an insolvent, itinerant craftsman, could work in the textile mills.
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The nineteenth century was an age of
machines: the steam engine, the cotton gin, the power loom. Inventors abounded; the patent office could barely keep up. “Men of
progress” they were called, and “conquerors of nature.” Their machines were better than poetry. The genius of
Eli Whitney was said to rival that of Shakespeare. The head of the
U.S. Patent Office declared the steamship “a mightier epic” than the
Iliad
, and any fool could see that James Watt had a thing or two over Cicero. Machines were thought to be the engines of progress, the “index of the degree in which the benefits of civilization are anywhere enjoyed,” as
James
Mill, John Stuart Mill’s father, put it, in his six-volume
History of British
India.
(Having never been to India proved no obstacle to Mills’s claiming that Indians were stalled on the march to progress, as measured by their “great want of ingenuity and completeness in instruments and machinery.”)
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But the age of machines had its critics.
Thomas Carlyle considered faith in machines a kind of spiritual bondage, something akin to a religious fallacy but worse, and every bit as much a delusion as seventeenth-century New Englanders’ belief in witchcraft. Faith in progress is faith in the future, but if we think that machines liberate us from the past, Carlyle argued, we are wrong; it is we who are their prisoners. “Practically considered,” he wrote, “our creed is Fatalism; and, free in hand and foot, we are shackled in heart and soul with far straighter than feudal chains.” We may be blind to those shackles, blinded by a fog as thick as London’s, as he put it, but we are just as surely “fettered by chains of our own forging.”
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What Carlyle was describing, and what the Bradleys, like everyone else, were caught up in, was a quite extraordinary transition, a shift in where people were seeking answers to questions about the meaning of life: from the ancients to the moderns, from the pulpit to the patent office, from books to machines, from the arts to the sciences. Not just the source but the nature of authority changed. Answers you used to find in the past you were now expected to find in the future. And you were supposed to find them yourself.

The secularization of progress and the rise of individualism had a great deal to do with another transformation: the shape of a life was changing. Life used to begin where it ended; it ended where it began. A lot of other things used to be circular, too. Everything went round and round: day and
night, the seasons, the crops in the field, fate. In an unraveling that had begun even before
Daniel Bradley sailed to Salem, all those circles were turning into lines. The sun still set at the end of every day, but now you could turn on the lights and day would never end. The very idea of history came to a kind of close. The world of tomorrow was infinitely more interesting than the world of yesterday. Novelty replaced redemption.
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While his father worked in the mills, Milton Bradley attended Lowell’s grammar and high schools. Then he went to the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, where he likely studied with Jacob Bigelow, Harvard’s Rumford Professor of Physical and Mathematical Science. In a widely read treatise called
Elements of Technology
, Bigelow used the word “technology” to describe “the application of the sciences to the useful arts.”
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(Before that, technology was something you made by hand. Bigelow’s usage soon found a place in the name of a new school: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) Technology, Bigelow said, was “promoting the progress and happiness of our race.”
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That’s neither what Bunyan meant by progress nor Milton by bliss. No machine can take you into the mansion of happiness or even to the gate of heaven.

Lewis Bradley did not find happiness shackled to a new and improved loom. He left Lowell for Hartford, in search of better work, which meant that his son had to drop out of school. Here, though, was yet another novelty: the Bradleys could travel from Lowell to Hartford by train. At the time, the locomotive was the symbol of progress, pictured, in prints and paintings, chugging across the continent, conquering nature, unstoppable. You could measure it: each mile of railroad track was another mile of progress. In the 1840s, train tracks reached across Massachusetts, much to the distress of
Henry David Thoreau, who had built on the banks of a pond in Concord a very different mansion of happiness: a cabin in the woods. While the train to Fitchburg rode by, its whistle screeching, its smokestack puffing, Thoreau wrote that all those
machines were merely “improved means to an unimproved end”: “We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation,” but that, he believed, was humbug. “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

Thoreau planted a hill of beans and spent his time hoeing, reading, writing, picking huckleberries, and listening to bullfrogs trumping, hawks screaming, and whip-poor-wills singing vespers.
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“Mr. Thoreau is thus at war with the political economy of the age,” one reviewer of
Walden
complained in 1854. But Thoreau wasn’t so much battling progress as dodging it. He had the idea “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.” No one can manage that. Ralph Waldo Emerson drafted a letter, never sent: “My dear Henry, A frog was made to live in a swamp, but a man was not made to live in a swamp. Yours ever, R.”
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Milton Bradley, no frog he, did not sit out the restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century. He kept striving. He left Hartford. By 1856, he had made his way to Springfield, Massachusetts, where, two years later, he opened his own business: “MILTON BRADLEY Mechanical Draftsman & Patent Solicitor.” In an age of machines, he would write not poems or prayers but patents. The next year, when Sa‘id Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, hired a Springfield firm to build a $300,000 railroad train on which he might travel the newly laid tracks between Cairo and Alexandria, it was Milton Bradley who designed and supervised the construction of a rosewood-and-mahogany observation car, from sketches supplied by an Egyptian artist.
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In 1860, Bradley started a lithography business and brought out an immensely popular election-year lithograph of a clean-shaven
Abraham Lincoln. But then, just when it seemed the young striver had finally crawled his way to Success, he nearly sank into Ruin: Lincoln grew a beard, making Bradley’s inventory worthless. One evening, a friend came over to cheer him up, bringing with him a board game; from descriptions, it sounds as though this must have been the Mansion of Bliss or a near knockoff. Bradley loved it. He decided to invent his own game, with materials he had near to hand: a
chessboard and wooden men.
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He always claimed to have invented the Checkered Game of Life from scratch, but that’s not strictly true. Most of its ideas were, by then, hackneyed. “Life is a kind of chess,”
Benjamin Franklin once wrote. By playing chess, you could learn foresight, circumspection, caution, and perseverance.
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An 1834 engraving called
The Chess Players; Or, The Game of Life
, by the German artist
Moritz Retzsch, depicted life as a game of chess between Man and Satan, held in the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Americans reenacted Retzsch’s engraving in
tableaux vivants.
It inspired short stories, novels, and plays. In 1848, one abolitionist complained about compromises with slaveholding states by arguing, “The North is as unequally matched with the South in this Game of Life as the youth in Retzsch’s chess-players, with his Satanic adversary.”
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In Bradley’s game, you don’t play against the devil; you play against other men. And you don’t play for your soul; you play for success. Bradley found more in Franklin than in Retzsch. Born in Boston in 1706 into a family much like
Hannah Bradley’s, Franklin grew up listening to
Cotton Mather’s sermons. But the story of his life, as he told it, wasn’t the story of dry bones quickening; it was the story of a voyage “from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a state of Affluence and some degree of Reputation in the World.” It was the story of “the way to wealth.”
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