The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims

Andrew Steinmetz's The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims is a capacious Victorian anatomy of gambling, tracing games of chance from antiquity and continental salons to English clubs, racecourses, and domestic scandals. Combining antiquarian history, moral essay, anecdote, biography, and social reportage, Steinmetz writes in the energetic, admonitory prose of nineteenth-century reform literature. The book belongs to a culture fascinated by vice as both spectacle and warning, and its portraits of ruined nobles, professional sharpers, and fashionable gamblers reveal how play could expose the fragility of class, credit, and self-command. Steinmetz, a German-born Catholic writer and former soldier who settled in Britain, brought to the subject the eye of an outsider and the habits of a compiler steeped in European history. His varied career, broad linguistic knowledge, and interest in religious and moral questions help explain the book's wide geographical sweep and its persistent concern with the ethical consequences of pleasure pursued without restraint. This volume is recommended to readers interested in Victorian social history, the literature of vice, and the genealogy of modern gambling culture. Though moralizing in tone, it remains vivid, learned, and surprisingly entertaining.