What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (20 page)

Austen’s humorous picture of herself drifting from one conversational partner to another while half her fellow guests are fixed to their card tables is reminiscent of Elizabeth Bennet’s behaviour during an evening of cards at Netherfield. In
Pride and Prejudice
, the Austen novel that most frequently sits its characters down to cards, the first game is one in which all the characters present play, except for Elizabeth, who is thereby free to tease. She is staying with the Bingleys because Jane is ill, and is summoned from her sister’s sickroom for evening coffee. Entering the drawing room she finds ‘the whole party’ – Mr Darcy, Mr Bingley, his two sisters and his brother-in-law Mr Hurst – ‘at loo’ (I. viii). She is invited to join the game (loo must have at least five players, and can have more), ‘but suspecting them to be playing high she declined’. Loo, the wise reader would know, had acquired an ill repute as the ruin of keen players. There is a pool of money – or chips – to pay out the winners of tricks, but any player who chooses to stay in and does not win a trick is ‘looed’, and must pay a forfeit into the pool for the next round. In some versions of the game, the forfeit is limited; in Unlimited Loo, the forfeit is equivalent to the amount currently in the pool. This can lead to the size of the pool, and subsequent forfeits, multiplying hugely. Clearly Elizabeth senses that her hosts might be playing just this version of the game, suitable only for those without any money worries.

Elizabeth says that she will ‘amuse herself’ with a book, prompting some hostile responses.

Mr. Hurst looked at her with astonishment.

‘Do you prefer reading to cards?’ said he; ‘that is rather singular.’

‘Miss Eliza Bennet,’ said Miss Bingley, ‘despises cards. She is a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else.’

With characteristic ill manners, Miss Bingley accuses Elizabeth of bookish sniffiness about cards. In fact, our heroine plays cards on several occasions in the novel. Her hidden concern about the amounts of money being wagered leaves her the one mobile character in the scene. Everyone except Elizabeth is fixed around the card table. The conversational exchange that follows is shaped by this fact, and Elizabeth’s freedom to drift around the room, to move away from the ‘party’ or to join it, enables her to express her mischievous freedom in dialogue. The Bingleys talk while they play, and when the subject turns to Pemberley, Mr Darcy’s home, Elizabeth finds her attention tugged away from her book and she crosses to the players: ‘she drew near the card-table, and stationed herself between Mr. Bingley and his eldest sister, to observe the game’. Observing the game is her pretext. Soon conversation moves from Mr Darcy’s sister Georgiana to the common extent of female ‘accomplishments’, and Elizabeth joins in teasing dispute with Darcy about his lofty expectations of young women. It is a famous little exchange, in which the mutual attraction of the speakers is expressed by their ostensible opposition – and all the more brilliantly for Elizabeth’s apparent ignorance of her own motives. (Why does the mention of Pemberley drag her away from her reading?) Everyone but Elizabeth must talk with half a mind on their cards, while she darts her ripostes among them.

Mr Hurst call them to order, ‘with bitter complaints of their inattention to what was going forward’. Conversation is stopped, and Elizabeth soon leaves the room. For her, watching play is no entertainment to compare with playful dialogue. Not so Mrs Hurst, Bingley’s sister. The next day, when her brother and her husband are playing the two-handed game of piquet, she dutifully sits ‘observing their game’ (I. x). This game splits the two men off from Darcy and Miss Bingley, the former attempting to write a letter while the latter tries to insinuate her attentions. Without cards, Mr Hurst is without resources. In the evening, when his ‘petition’ to play again is rejected (‘Mr. Darcy did not wish for cards’), he has ‘nothing to do, but to stretch himself on one of the sophas and go to sleep’ (I. xi). Cards are the only refuge of the conversationally null. In
Sense and Sensibility
, Lady Middleton is always wanting to play cards, being incapable of conversation. When her husband goes off to his club in Exeter, Elinor, Marianne and Margaret are invited for dinner to preserve her ‘from the frightful solitude which had threatened her’ (II. i). After tea, the card table is brought in and Lady Middleton proposes ‘a rubber of Casino’. Marianne declines in uncivil fashion – ‘you know I detest cards’ – and goes off to play the piano. Elinor wants to speak in confidence to Lucy Steele, who has at their last meeting revealed her secret engagement to Edward Ferrars. Lucy is, ingratiatingly, completing the filigree basket she is making for Lady Middleton’s daughter, so Elinor proposes to ‘cut out’ of the card game to help Lucy with her basket. Casino allowing for a variable number of players, the reduction to four (Lady Middleton, Mrs Jennings, the elder Miss Steele and Margaret Dashwood) is easily accommodated, while the game separates the rest of the company from Elinor and Lucy (the piano music helping to cover their
sotto voce
exchange).

When Elinor and Marianne attend Lady Middleton to a large, smart London party, she soon sits down to casino, freeing the sisters from the nothingness of her conversation, but also allowing Marianne to experience the shock of meeting Willoughby without having her as a spectator (II. vi). At parties and balls, card games are for those who will not dance. At the ball at the Crown in
Emma
, the heroine is disappointed to see Mr Knightley in the company of ‘the husbands, and fathers, and whist players’, removed from physical display. These men pretend to take an interest in the dancing just until ‘their rubbers were made up’ (III. ii). Whist is what men do when they are no longer young or attractive – when they are unsexed. Emma’s scorn of cards is rather different from Marianne’s. Marianne prides herself on transcending triviality; Emma, who elsewhere enjoys games, regards cards as the unimaginative time-filling of her fellow villagers. Visiting the Bateses for the first time in the novel, Emma intends to avoid the topic of Mr Elton as much as she can, and instead ‘to wander at large amongst all the Mistresses and Misses of Highbury and their card-parties’ (II. i). In her mind – which is where this sentence is placed – card parties are equally the empty distraction of Highbury women and the empty substance of Miss Bates’s usual chat. Highbury seems addicted to cards. At the Crown Inn, the former ballroom is now used only ‘to accommodate a whist club established among the gentlemen and half-gentlemen of the place’ (II. vi). Such a club existed in Austen’s early unfinished novel draft
The Watsons
, where the wealthy Mr Edwards belongs to ‘a quiet little Whist club that meets three times a week at the White Hart’.
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Here too it is clearly the respectable time-filling activity of dull men in a provincial town or village. Meanwhile the women in
Emma
visit each other’s homes for those card parties. ‘We were just going to cards,’ says Miss Bates of a typical Highbury afternoon, to mark the time when a triumphant Mrs Elton arrives to announce Jane Fairfax’s acceptance of the governess’s post (III. viii). Newly arrived in the village, Mrs Elton needs to signal her superiority at these gatherings, and does so not by refusing to join them but by being shocked by ‘there being no ice in the Highbury card parties’ (II. xvi).

In
Persuasion
, Anne Elliot’s lack of enthusiasm for card games is made to seem a symptom of her integrity and her inwardness. She makes a big show, for Captain Wentworth’s sake, of her lack of interest in the evening card party at Camden Place, where Mr Elliot will be a guest: ‘I am no card-player’ (II. x). But it is not merely show. Captain Wentworth recalls his intimate knowledge of her eight years earlier: ‘You did not use to like cards; but time makes many changes.’ Her attitude to card games weirdly becomes the test of her consistency as a character. ‘“I am not so much changed,” cried Anne’, as if a new-found liking for card games would indicate a falling into conventional role playing. Her avoidance of card games is a sign of her distance from the novel’s other characters: even her friend and admirer Lady Russell is a card player. Yet it is a matter of self-image rather than of Austen’s attribution. By the time of her sister Elizabeth’s ‘card-party’, Anne, engaged once again to Captain Wentworth, is too happy to worry that it is ‘a commonplace business, too numerous for intimacy, too small for variety’ (II. xi). Perhaps she is prepared to play cards after all.

Austen herself cannot have thought it all so pointless. In her letters she specifically mentions playing brag, casino, commerce, cribbage, quadrille, speculation, vingt-un and whist. When she writes to her sister she sometimes specifies her own successes at the card table (e.g.
Letters
, 45) or reports the triumphs of others (
Letters
, 56). Playing well is pleasurable, and playing badly is irritating. On one occasion she complains that her teenage nephew Edward ‘acquitted himself to admiration in every particular except selling his Deals at Vingt-un’ (
Letters
, 149). He is almost perfect, but smooth play at vingt-un is a real social skill that he has not quite acquired. So we should not assume that we need share Emma’s scorn. Mr Perry is naturally aggrieved when he finds that Mr Elton intends to skip the next gathering of the Highbury whist club at a moment’s notice (I. viii). He is off to London on his mission to get Emma’s portrait of Harriet framed. What will they do? He is ‘their best player’ (a fact that might itself suggest the vicar’s powers of calculation). Harriet and Emma are delighted to hear that he has given up his card game for his gallant undertaking, but they should instead see this selfishness as another sign that he is not a man to be trusted.

Whist is usually played for money in Austen’s novels. We are invited to notice which games involve gambling and which do not, whilst realising that playing for modest sums of money was normal for Austen and should not seem inherently bad. At the first ball in
Mansfield Park
, Mrs Norris tries to get Tom Bertram to join a rubber of whist where they are playing for half-crowns (2s 6d), but tempts him by suggesting that he and Dr Grant might like to play for half-guineas (10s 6d). Characteristically, she convicts herself of impropriety and him of a love of gambling. After the abortive outing to Bristol in
Northanger Abbey
, Isabella Thorpe finds solace in ‘a pool of commerce’ with James Morland and her brother (I. xi). This does not reveal her character because the game is played for money, but because it involves bartering and bargaining. The object is to ‘make your hand’ by exchanging some of your own cards with those on the table, or by ‘buying’ an extra card. Being all about trading what you have for what you think might be better, it is just the game for her – an imitation of the business of her life. It is a game that Austen herself played with her friends the Digweeds (
Letters
, 27) and with an unidentified admirer of her sister dubbed ‘Le Chevalier’, while on holiday in Lyme (
Letters
, 39). Commerce is mentioned again as being played in the Austen household – evidently for money (
Letters
, 56). Indeed, when Austen finds that a visit to Mrs Maitland in Southampton has become ‘a thorough party’, with ‘a quadrille & a Commerce Table’, she has to back out. ‘There were two pools at Commerce, but I would not play more than one, for the Stake was three shillings, & I cannot afford to lose that, twice in an evening’ (
Letters
, 57).

It is respectable enough to play cards for money it seems. When Mr Collins accompanies the Bennet sisters to their aunt’s house in Meryton, he declares himself inexpert but glad to play, as the game is appropriate for someone ‘in my situation of life’ (I. xvi). A few pages later he has lost every point (quite an achievement) and the total of five shillings, and is solemnly assuring Mrs Philips ‘that he considered the money as a mere trifle’. While he is playing whist there is a ‘nice comfortable noisy game of lottery tickets’ for the rest of the company (I. xv). This seems to be played for ‘fish’ – tokens of winnings rather than real money. ‘Mr. Wickham did not play at whist’, leaving him free to tell his lies about Darcy to Elizabeth, safely separated from the whist players and cocooned by the hubbub of the lottery game. Lydia is engrossed in the latter and has conveniently ceased to pay him any attention. Mr Wickham seems to be playing too, but has the ‘leisure’ to converse with Elizabeth. The reluctance to play whist is nicely contrived given what we later find out about his real appetites. When he takes Lydia with him to London he leaves Brighton with gambling debts of ‘more than a thousand pounds’ (III. vi). ‘A gamester!’ cries Jane. He must have glanced at the Meryton whist game with an expert’s cold eye. On the walk back to Longbourn, Lydia can talk of nothing but ‘the fish she had lost and the fish she had won’, marking her out as just the likeliest future partner for Wickham.

So even when everyone plays at something, cards can separate groups out from each other. Later in
Pride and Prejudice
, at Rosings there are cards after dinner and tea with Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Lady Catherine, Sir William Lucas and Mr and Mrs Collins play quadrille, so Elizabeth is condemned ‘to play at cassino’ at a separate table with Maria Lucas, Miss de Bourgh (who has chosen the game) and her companion Mrs Jenkinson (II. vi). After the preceding pages of gloriously antagonistic exchanges between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine, we are now condemned to novelistic silence. ‘Their table was superlatively stupid. Scarcely a syllable was uttered that did not relate to the game.’ A great deal is said at the other table, but as Elizabeth is no longer part of the talk, it is not worth quoting. Cards at Rosings are a kind of tyranny: Lady Catherine and her daughter decide on the games, which go on ‘as long as they chose’. In
Mansfield Park
it is the self-indulging Dr Grant who dictates terms. After dinner and tea at the Parsonage, the whist table is ‘formed really for the amusement of Dr. Grant, by his attentive wife, though it was not supposed to be so’ (II. v). The presumption seems to be that Fanny will not play, while Mary Crawford is ‘too much vexed’ by discussion of Edmund’s future living to be involved and turns to her harp. The players must be the Grants, Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram; with Edmund separated from Mary Crawford the drama drains from the scene.