FOR the Reverend James Woodforde and his housekeeper-niece Nancy, breakfast ended abruptly on that August morning. Scrambling to put together an afternoon meal that would do justice to the parsonage and to their soon-to-arrive guests, the two succeeded beyond expectations, and provided a spread that included veal, mutton, cold beef, steak pie, and pudding. Mr Woodforde's pleasure in the ‘very agreeable day’ he gave his unexpected company was not unmixed with triumph at their achievement, his three-shilling loss at cards notwithstanding. His household had been tested and had not been found wanting; his reputation for hospitality and sociability was, if anything, heightened. He could retire happily to bed and sleep the sleep of the successful middling host.

Over the eighteenth century, England's commercial and professional classes were caught up in a wave of prosperity, fed by the rapid rise of the import trade and, later, home-grown manufacturing. Their new wealth allowed them, in growing numbers, to sample the delights of genteel living and home-based hospitality, to venture into the fashionable world of assemblies and routs, and to spend on more than the bare essentials of living. Their sociability now acquired a gloss of fashionable consumption, so that guests might be seated at mahogany dining-room tables, might eat from delicately painted Chinese porcelain, might bask in the gleam of candlelight reflected from the finest silver-plated wall sconces.

Could other, riskier fashions infiltrate the lives of the middling sort? Were they, potentially, a vast pool of gamesters, a greater danger to the nation's prosperity even than their upper-class fellow players? The English passion for gaming – games or pastimes that included a money stake – began a sharp rise with the Restoration, and was well established and justly (in)famous by the turn of the eighteenth century.