FOR the middling sort of England's eighteenth century, life turned on the axis of the home. There were formed the values one expressed in the wider world; there, genteel manners became habit and were taught to children. Middling men and women crafted an image of self at home, and to one degree or another, that image shaped the face they showed to the world in public spaces. The ways in which they governed their home lives, and the choices they made for their families, reflect both their own upbringings and the circles in which they moved as adults, as members of a fashionably genteel and polite society.

If middling play began at home – and the surviving written record insists that it did – the decision to play cards, to wager stakes, was taken against the background of contemporary public discourse on home life in general, and on gaming in particular. Since the middling sort did not see themselves as the subject of such commentary, they felt free to indulge in their favourite games in their choice of settings. In bringing their children up to play within the limits they observed themselves, were they arming those children against reckless behaviour in their adult lives? This chapter will explore the ways in which the middling sort enjoyed informal, impromptu games, and the family life that those games reveal.

Home-makers: middling wives and the domestic space

The eighteenth century witnessed a seismic shift in what made and defined ‘home’, particularly for the middle classes. A range of scholars now agree that both the physical setting and the personal sense of middling home life had radically changed, influenced by their new wealth and the goods on which they spent it. New rooms – the dining-room and the (with)drawing room – were being created for entertaining friends and colleagues, and a new sense of domesticity, of home space, of privacy, was dawning. While the man of the house was the nominal head of this space, the running of the home was, overwhelmingly, a woman's job; the home had become the venue for wifely agency as good and virtuous homemaker.