The World in Play

Portraits of a Victorian Concept

Matthew Kaiser

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780804776080
• eBook ISBN: 9780804778947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future.

A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. The book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. Kaiser gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.

PART I

The World in Play

CHAPTER 1

Mapping the World in Play

But while every single player differed markedly from every other, there was a certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask—as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action.

—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda¹

In politics you are used as the counters of a game, each side plays with you: not for you, mind. You get nothing, whichever side is in: you are the pawns. . . . And if I might advise, it would be that we give that game over and play one by ourselves in which there really is something to be got.

—Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men²

At dinner she is hostess, I am host.

Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps

The Topic over intellectual deeps

In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.

With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:

HIDING THE SKELETON shall be its name.

Such play as this the devils might appal!

—George Meredith, Modern Love³

The Totality of Play

The list of nineteenth-century British writers and thinkers who take it upon themselves to voice official anxiety about play—frustration with idle children, roughhousing workers, playboy bachelors—is long. Let us not mistake anxiety about play, however, for hostility toward it. Because so many Victorians perceive modern life as structured by play, and because play is a perennial object of contemplation and worry, even the smallest or most quotidian play phenomenon becomes magnified, distorted and transformed into an opportunity for self-reflection. A mirror in which the Victorians admire themselves or shudder, play is not a problem to be eliminated or alleviated. Rather, the Victorians seek, in contradictory ways, sometimes inelegantly or heavy-handedly, to improve play. They set out to reform and manage it, mapping its varied terrain, getting to the bottom of it, coming to terms with its daunting range. They wrap metaphors of play around all aspects of their lives. Charles Darwin transforms biology into an endless act of competition, a life-and-death sport, and transforms sexual reproduction into a first-place trophy. John Ruskin conceives of Gothic architecture, and the life-affirming model of sociality it communicates, as a ludic enterprise. Flying buttresses become stony maypoles. Thomas Hughes and other reformers transform football into a vehicle for the political indoctrination of the working classes. The Victorians christen a new recreational institution “the weekend.” They build hundreds of parks and playgrounds in a democratizing (and normalizing) effort to cultivate play. Leisure becomes big business. At times they attack play, yes, rail against it, but they do so from within play, from a world perceived as in play.

What prevents us from seeing clearly the degree to which Victorian representations of modernity—indeed, Victorian senses of self—are interoperable with tropes of play? Why are we such spoilsports when it comes to the Victorians? The problem is only partially attributable to our mistaking Victorian anxiety about play for hostility, or our facile conflation of play with notions of fun. Fundamental flaws exist at the methodological, ideological, and historical levels in the ways we think about play. We think about play almost exclusively in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. How playful were the Victorians? This unanswerable question implies that play is quantifiable, that a historical epoch is either rich in play or impoverished. Rather than measure the Victorians against ourselves in a quixotic effort to determine who possesses the most play, or enough play (which is very Victorian of us, actually), we might ask the “how” question differently: In what ways were the Victorians “playful”? What logics of play shaped Victorian self-understanding? Why is it sometimes so difficult to detect play in the act of invading or absorbing various nonplay concepts? How do divergent logics of play vie for supremacy, clash, overlap, merge, and produce hybrid logics, only to subdivide once again, confronted by upstarts? Conversely, which logics of play harmonize with or hide behind one another, downplaying their presence? Answering these questions will give us a better sense of the double meaning of in play, of the play of play, the simultaneity of play as “ludic activity” and play as “constant flux.” On the one hand, the Victorians recognize and embrace the multiplicity of play, the taxonomic proliferation of various play logics (sport, recreation, mischief, and so on), which they project onto the world in order to give it structure; on the other hand, there is an accompanying sense of the inherent instability of these same logics, their reversibility, the tendency of play’s conceptual boundaries to blur and thereby to unsettle the very world to which play gives structure. At the same time that play makes the world cohere, it betrays the illusoriness of that coherence. The Victorian desire to control play is as anxious as it is confident. Even the most straightforward Victorian expressions of play are haunted by a potential for definitional fluctuation. Festivity, for instance, can in an instant metamorphose into mischief, and a leisurely pastime can metamorphose into a competitive sport. The state of being at play can never completely shake the sensation of being in play.

We insist, too, upon measuring play against its supposed antitheses: work, seriousness, suffering, truth. But what if nothing was intrinsically external to the concept of play, a concept that many Victorians describe, as we have seen, in startlingly totalizing terms? As Gerhard Joseph and Herbert Tucker have documented, the Victorians could view even death itself as a “prize,” a moral reward for a race well run, a life well lived.⁴ The point is not that those famously elegiac Victorians, with their crepe, black bunting, and funeral etiquette, experienced the passing of a loved one as fun, but merely that the concept of death has no conceptual immunity to the logic of play, which wears an appropriately somber (a theatrically somber) aspect for the occasion. Dickens in particular takes macabre delight, in Oliver Twist (1837) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), in exposing the ludic underpinnings of the Victorian funeral industry. Play does not die; it shifts shape. As philosopher Eugen Fink explains, when backed into a corner by its definitional opponents, “[p]lay, so to speak, confronts them all—it absorbs them by representing them.”⁵ As play theorist Edward Gross notes, “work can become play in a genuine sense . . . when forms bec[o]me ends in themselves,” when “hunting for food evolved into The Fox Hunt,” or more generally when “play becomes the life-work of the players.”⁶ The relentlessly porcine logic of play can absorb, without causing much of a stir, the most horrific and depressing Victorian phenomena: wars of imperial expansion, or the dehumanizing conditions of crime- and disease-infested slums. Readers barely bat their eyelashes. In Kim (1901), for example, Kipling metaphorizes the British conquest and occupation of India, including the impending Second Afghan War, as a game played by—literally facilitated by, at the level of plot—a mischievous boy spy, who is motivated, in the end, by “sheer excitement and the sense of power.”⁷ Here, the invocation of play, child play in particular, masks ideology while downplaying geopolitical violence and imperial espionage. An Indian matron marvels at how the British “dance and they play like children when they are grandfathers,” playing tricks on a disoriented India and running circles around it.⁸ But the wily and shamelessly transideological logic of play proves equally adept at exposing ideology and at inspiring radical change when necessary, for play wears the mercenary, reversible colors of relativistic modernity. Thus, Victorian social reformers alert the public to the deplorable conditions of urban slums by depicting the brutal sport to which the lives of the poor have been reduced. In How the Poor Live (1883), George R. Sims provides his middle-class readers with a sketch of a typical woman of the slum, a young mother with “the fist of a prize-fighter.”⁹ In The Nether World (1889), George Gissing repeatedly metaphorizes want—the slum dweller’s instinct to cheat and steal in the struggle for scarce resources—as a “game.”¹⁰

One of our worst intellectual habits, however, when it comes to theorizing play, is to divide ludic phenomena into games, on the one hand, which have “a certain formal logic,” Nancy Morrow suggests, rule-boundness, and structure, and so-called pure play, on the other hand, which is “not so much about reaching a particular goal,” as it is about “open-endedness,” imaginative freedom, and “infinite substitutions.”¹¹ Proponents of the games-are-bad-and-play-is-good school of thought, as well as of its less countrified cousin, games-have-structure-and-play-does-not, remind me of those employees in maternity wards who used to tape blue bows to the bald heads of male infants, pink bows to the bald heads of female infants, in order to create a heartwarming illusion of the inevitability of one of our most heavy-handed, culturally imposed binary oppositions. If “game” and “play” are as antithetical as many sophisticated people persist in believing, then the sentence “She’s playing a game” would sound, at least, in certain contexts, paradoxical. But it never does. “No, no, I don’t mean ‘play’ in that sense of the word,” a proponent will explain, smiling at my simplicity. But already, you see, the binary has collapsed. The baby has lost its bow. Do you really propose that we now use duct tape? For that is what it would take to preserve this tired opposition. The Victorians had no difficulty whatsoever (and neither do we) characterizing chaos as a game or believing that unstructured play has the capacity to induce a sense of psychic constriction in a player. Such radical abuses of language confused no one. The Victorians had no qualms about obliterating the distinction between “game” and “play” altogether, fusing these terms into one seamless megaconcept; nor did they have qualms about fracturing each half of this dubious binary into myriad irreconcilable concepts: a cacophonous litter of mewing mini-ideas. In the eyes of the language police, Victorian society no doubt made a mess of these concepts. While I recognize the necessity of pinning down our terms, mapping the topography of play, there is a more efficacious and nuanced way to go about it than by erecting an artificial semantic barrier between “game” and “play,” a barrier that has trouble withstanding even the most pedestrian expressions of quotidian speech.

When Victorian writers and thinkers praise or disparage play, they do so from within constellations of play logics; the praise or disparagement comes, implicitly or explicitly, at the expense of or on behalf of multiple logics of play, between which boundaries often prove quite porous. Consider the following statement by Dickens in Hard Times (1854): “I entertain a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked as any people upon whom the sun shines. . . . I acknowledge to this ridiculous idiosyncrasy,” he adds, “as a reason why I would give them a little more play.”¹² Yes, Dickens uses quantitative logic here to suggest that the working classes deserve an increase in play, reminding us obliquely that they deserve an increase in pay. But the real tension exists not between play and work but within the contending senses of the word. Dickens uses “play” as a relatively benign synonym of “freedom,” the power to maneuver—economically, politically, and socially. He also uses it as a synonym of “recreation.” In associating freedom with increased recreational opportunities for the working classes, and with rational, civic-minded amusements, of which he was a passionate advocate, Dickens attempts to sever the connection in the middle-class imagination between working-class political agency and another kind of play: mischief, tomfoolery, and ludic incivility. Rather than a blistering attack upon his own supposedly unplayful epoch or upon a society that distributes its ludic resources unequally, Dickens tacitly pits one play logic against another. He attempts to rescue play (freedom) from play (mischief) in the name of play (recreation).

No text has done more to reinforce the historically myopic view that Dickens waged a lonely battle on behalf of play than A Christmas Carol (1843). It is tempting to view Ebenezer Scrooge as the ultimate Victorian party pooper, the personification of an individualistic, middle-class hostility toward communitarian fun. It is tempting to view Tiny Tim as the embodiment of an increasingly obsolete ethic of festivity, indulged once a year at Christmas. Yet Dickens has a more nuanced, less evangelical understanding of the role of play in modern life. For Scrooge’s miserliness is just as pervasively marked by play as Tiny Tim’s mirth. Scrooge embodies competition: the agonistic impulse to win, to outplay one’s opponent. He greets people not as fellow revelers at a party but as potential competitors in a contest. “[E]dg[ing] his way,” Dickens writes, “along the crowded paths of life,” Scrooge even competes with the “wintry weather” itself for the title of most cold: “No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.” “Foul weather,” Dickens adds, invoking the image of a hapless wrestler, “didn’t know where to have him.”¹³

A Christmas Carol provides a vivid account of the civil war raging within the concept of play during the Victorian period. “Bah, Humbug!...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Modern Sensation
• PART I The World in Play
• PART II Portraits
• Notes
• Index