1. Scientific Whist in The Pickwick Papers

In 1846 Dickens rattled off a letter to his good friend William de Cerjat: “Have you cut down any more trees, played any more rubbers, propounded any more teasers to the players at the game of Yes and No? … Does Haldimand play Whist with any science yet? Ha, ha, ha! the idea of his saying I hadn't any!”Footnote ²⁰ Tucked into the middle of a list of newsy questions, Dickens's mention of scientific play would slip by if not for his self-conscious laughter and defensive tone. Dickens's blustering indignation reflects his awareness of scientific whist as an evolving intellectual standard that enjoyed widespread and long-lasting popularity.Footnote ²¹ Short Whist, by C. B. Coles, for example, went through eighteen editions from 1834 to 1865, a time frame roughly parallel to Dickens's own career: 1836–1870. I will focus, however, on Thomas Matthews's Advice to the Young Whist Player (1818), published repeatedly from 1804 until 1828, because Matthews introduced the dominant paradigm of social thinking that shaped nineteenth-century whist strategy.Footnote ²² Whether or not Dickens played whist with any science, he incorporates a technical understanding of its scientific intricacies into his representations of whist that underscores how strategic play fosters social thinking.

Edmond Hoyle published the first strategy manual for whist in English, A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742), and its popularity soon inspired a closet drama, The Humours of Whist (1743), that proclaimed Hoyle the founder of “a science.”Footnote ²³ Hoyle's treatise lists out tables of odds to be memorized for calculating the odds of winning each trick. Hoyle himself recognized the magnitude of this task, marking key probabilities so that readers “need only charge their memories” with those “upon which the whole Reasoning of this Treatise depends.”Footnote ²⁴ Hoyle published a sequel to his treatise, The Artificial Memory (1744), a method of arranging the cards in your hand assisting the memory to more strategic play.

Despite their respect for Hoyle—a “benefactor of his race,” according to one—nineteenth-century strategists considered his principles surpassed by those of their own day: “Hoyle, for more than half a century the only authority, has now become obsolete … and more likely to mislead than instruct.”Footnote ²⁵ Thomas Matthews felt “[i]t may not be unnecessary to inform the reader, that most of Hoyle's maxims were collected during what may be called the infancy of Whist; and that he himself, so far from being able to teach the game, was not fit to sit down even with the third-rate players of the present day.”Footnote ²⁶ Matthews objected to Hoyle's emphasis on calculations by the individual instead of coordinating play with one's partner. In whist, after all, two pairs of partners sit across from each other so that they play alternately and work together to collect the most tricks. Matthews, therefore, instructs his readers in how to “demonstrate your hand to your partner” and advises against “[deceiving]” him or her in any way (11). “Be as careful of what you throw away” as what you keep, he warns; “if [your partner] finds the deuce in your hand, and you frequently deceive him by throwing down superior cards, it will destroy his confidence” (12). Confusing your partner with illogical play undermines the trust necessary to partnership and will leave your partner feeling isolated, shut out from your mind. Matthews's handbook implies that the social mind can be known if it follows his prescriptions for scientific play. By “letting your partner into the state of your hand, who will play accordingly,” players virtually write out directives (12–13).Footnote ²⁷ True partners do not shield their minds but willingly turn out their thoughts with each correct play and may expect the same in return.

Whereas Hoyle encouraged players to take note of what was played and to calculate accordingly, Matthews focused on how the series proceeds. The logic underlining each play not only points to the cards but also reflects the mind of the thinker. Matthews explains strategic cases by minutely detailing the thought process behind each decision. For example, when holding both a king and queen, play the queen first because “his queen's passing demonstrates to his partner that the king cannot be in his left-hand adversary's hand, or the knave in his, … (whereas if he [the player] puts on the king, it leaves him [the partner] in ignorance as to the queen and knave)” (4; emphasis original). Essentially, once the round has been played out and the partner sees that neither adversary played the king to defeat the player's queen, and knowing he doesn't have the king either, the partner concludes the player must have the king as well. The adversaries, by contrast, know that they do not have the king; but they cannot know for sure whether the king belongs to player or partner. If readers of Matthews's handbook understand how he thinks, then, by extension, players following his system now know, to a limited degree, the minds of like-minded players. The cards make the cognitive activity of mind-reading visible to the initiated and divides the decision-making of the game into discrete, manageable inferences. Matthews's laborious articulation of his rationales depict thinking as a many-layered process of logical, linear deductions that can be socially shared.

The Pickwick Papers is full of games—Mark M. Hennelly Jr. lists at least twenty-one different forms of games and play in the novel.Footnote ²⁸ Critical accounts, however, have tended to analyze Pickwick with play theory and not the contemporary context of scientific games literature. Hennelly reads Pickwick as so saturated by the “theme of play” that “the tense cricket match is itself ultimately indistinct from the sacred Christmas game of kissing under the mistletoe” and from the games played by “society's institutions” (34, 29, 38). In an early interpretation of Pickwick, W. H. Auden used games as a moral category of innocent human interaction because a game is a “closed world” for “pleasure”: “Strictly speaking, a game in which the players are paid to play, or in which they play for money stakes, ceases to be a game.”Footnote ²⁹ Both of these critical approaches insightfully investigate strands of the Dickensian worldview but also treat games as generic theoretical or cultural constructs, not historically specific phenomenon. Paying attention to the games literature of the period, however, reveals that Dickens closely differentiates between games, not only in their details of play but also in their cognitive applications. Dickens uses whist to peer into the whirl of Mr. Pickwick's brain as well as to observe the social side of cognition. Though mocking their seriousness, Dickens draws on the scientific play of games manuals for their social and internal model of mind.

For Dickens, science and play were at odds; therefore, the frequently pompous manuals provided him with comic material. For an “old-fashioned card-party” at Dingley Dell, servant-boy Joe puts out two tables:

Mr. Miller's mistakes are not mathematical but procedural; at the end of the hand, the other players quickly review what he “ought” to have played, a word Dickens repeats four times in the short dialogue following the passage above (82). Dickens pays more attention to the play of the game than the calculation of probability, thereby cueing Matthews rather than Hoyle for this old-fashioned card-party. Unfortunately, Mr. Miller reveals his mind to his partner and to their adversaries. His distraction compounds his ignorance of the cards, whereas the others demonstrate their greater commitment to the game by their discussion of his mistakes. By contrast, the old lady proves especially adept at allocating her cognitive resources. In order to keep more of her mind on the game, she uses physical objects—some coins and a candlestick—to make a “memorandum” of the score (82–83).

Dickens's inflated rhetoric—“irreverently,” “ignominiously,” “high crimes”—mocks the ways games manuals seriously praised and penalized whist. Matthews explicitly incorporates legal forms into his handbook by urging players to adopt a unified “code” to be “hung up in various club-rooms, as a classical authority to be referred to on all occasions” (55). Taking on the role of “proper [judge],” Matthews sets out various “cases” with “their decisions” from his bench, taking as a guide the “following principle of all laws, viz. that penalties should be in exact proportion to the advantage possible to accrue from the transgression” (emphasis original):

Technically, Mr. Pickwick, the old lady, the fat gentleman, and Mr. Miller only discuss his play at the end of a deal, just as Matthews requires; but their restraint does not guarantee good feeling among all players. The scene twists Matthews's equation for justice: the good-humor of the old lady rises in “a proportionate degree” to the advantage possible from Mr. Miller's transgressions.

In contrast to scientific whist, “round games,” like Pope Joan, accommodate any number of players and depend more on chance than strategy; their participants can afford to be boisterously merry. Dickens mentions laughter eight times in his description of the round game: “though the merriment was rather boisterous, still it came from the heart and not the lips: and this is the right sort of merriment, after all” (84). The spinster aunt, her feelings hurt for being laughed at, quickly brightens up under the influence of Mr. Tupman's encouragement. Everyone behaves well because the merriment induces them to enjoy themselves, but the narrator most appreciates how the round game nurtures dialogue, especially jokes, and wit in narration. In contrast to the technicality of the dialogue on the whist game, all readers can appreciate the mood and content of the round game, which fosters social rather than intellectual partnerships. Mr. Miller pays a high price, in Dickens's view; he must “absorb” his own game, which is grave and sedate. Like Mr. Miller, the narrator feels distracted by the lively round game, which can be enjoyed without playing your cards well and, in Dickens's opinion, promotes the “right sort of merriment.”

The advances in theoretical play widened the gap between experts and amateurs. Although a winner at Dingley Dell, Mr. Pickwick finds himself outpaced when he joins a whist table in Bath, the birthplace of both Hoyle's and Matthews's systems:

The Bath scene magnifies the key scientific qualities of the parallel scene in Dingley Dell: more jargon, distraction, and greater censure for less serious errors. Dickens plays with the idea of what it means to be a “desperately sharp” card player by intensifying the mind-reading at the card table. Not only do Lady Snuphanuph and Mrs. Colonel Wugsby understand how to play together, but they easily interpret the states of mind visibly expressed by the face.Footnote ³⁰ Mr. Pickwick, meanwhile, can interpret their faces but not their style of play. In fact, Mr. Pickwick struggles to play well because he notices every look, smile, glance, shrug, cough, countenance, and sigh. Furthermore, the narration attaches particular narratives to each of these expressive signals, focalizing Mr. Pickwick's interpretations. In Dingley Dell, Mr. Miller discovers his mistakes after the fact, once they are explicitly recounted by the other players. Though the same happens here—as Miss Bolo puts Mr. Pickwick on trial with her jargon—he has already read his failure in the faces of his opponents. These three old ladies are a new brand of card-sharpers: they may not bend the rules, but their advanced knowledge turns any outsider, “finding escape impossible,” into a victim (480). Mr. Pickwick's social acuity comes at the expense of his intellectual concentration on the card game. These women have found a way to take advantage of Mr. Pickwick's attentive play: he is too busy reading their faces to read their cards.

In spite of the mirroring between these two scenes of whist, they differ dramatically in literary style. At Dingley Dell, the dialogue at the table bears the weight of representation, but in Bath, the narrator focalizes Mr. Pickwick's experience. Initially, it seems that the narration, like a minor character, overshadows Mr. Pickwick by minimizing his voice and spotlighting the behavior of the three ladies; but just as Matthews developed an alternative system for the problem of information in whist, so too does Dickens situate Mr. Pickwick's cognition elsewhere. The syntax of these sentences captures the cognitive action of Mr. Pickwick's mind. His having forgotten all about the game, indicates, ironically, just how hard his brain is working. At first glance, it seems the social partnership has overwhelmed the intellectual one, as Mr. Pickwick struggles to play the game because of the many social cues his brain processes; but the absence of the “right sort of merriment” reveals just the opposite. Internalized interpretation replaces the dialogue of Dingley Dell, underlining the dominance of intellectual energy that shifts the balance of social thinking heavily toward its mental register. Poor Mr. Pickwick, indeed: these new sharpers upend the balance required by scientific whist.

In his later novels, Dickens inverts the card table dynamics of the Pickwick whist games. In Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Great Expectations, one player dominates the other three, including his partner, and the games become increasingly dark. In Oliver Twist, the Artful Dodger practices to become a sharper by “taking dummy against Master Bates and Mr. Chitling. The countenance of the first-named gentleman, peculiarly intelligent at all times, acquired great additional interest from his close observation of the game, and his attentive perusal of Mr. Chitling's hand, upon which, from time to time, as occasion served, he bestowed a variety of earnest glances, wisely regulating his own play by the results of his observations upon his neighbor's cards … all highly unbecoming to a scientific rubber.”Footnote ³¹ Dickens maintains a sense of playfulness as Dodger literally over-looks his adversary's hand like a more practiced card sharp, but the fact that he plays alone, with a dummy hand for a partner, prepares him for a lonely, isolated future. In Bleak House, Inspector Bucket, like a “famous Whist player … with the game in his hand,” joins forces with Esther to find her mother but only succeeds in solving Tulkinghorn's murder.Footnote ³² In Great Expectations, the lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, plays whist with Pip, Estella, and Miss Havisham. Pip doesn't bother to record their seating arrangements, for Mr. Jaggers “took our trumps” as if “[we were] three very obvious and poor riddles that he had found out long ago.”Footnote ³³ Bucket, Jaggers, and Dodger forego partnership; they play competitively by themselves. Dickens warns that scientific play, whether from Hoyle or Matthews, will result in the dominance of the most educated player at the expense of true social partnership.

Readers don't need to know the historical context of games manuals in order to recognize that Dickens prefers games to be fun, not scientific. That being said, the historical context of games manuals helps us toward a richer understanding of the cognitive stakes in these highly detailed scenes of whist. The social mind necessary for whist must balance social and intellectual partnership, and the best players find ways to maximize this thinking capacity. A cognitive-historicist take on games reveals why we need to differentiate between the variety of games that Dickens provides, as whist exercises different cognitive mechanisms than does Pope Joan. Though Dickens prioritizes the merriment of round games as the right sort, these scenes contain less cognitive content. Only the scenes of whist turn out the minds of the players as they struggle with other minds. If we treat all games as varieties of play, we risk missing Dickens's highly attuned sense of the mind in play and partnership, the keystone of his game-based social metaphors.

2. Dickens's Gamers

Scenes of scientific whist in The Pickwick Papers reveal how Dickens incorporates models of social thinking from strategy literature into novelistic representations of gameplay. Dickens develops that basic foundation in two interrelated ways. First, he builds some of his characters from game-based thinking and, second, extends such thinking through those characters into extended metaphors for social systems. Dickens's “gamers,” as I call them, not only play games but also treat real-life interactions as games played on strategic, scientific principles. In Our Mutual Friend, for example, the scheming Lammles exchange “looks like partners at cards who played a game against All England”: Mr. Lammle “seemed to say to Mrs. Lammle, ‘Why don't you play?’ And so, looking about her, she saw Miss Podsnap, and seeming to say responsively, ‘That card?’ and to be answered, ‘Yes,’ went and sat beside Miss Podsnap.”Footnote ³⁴ As the metaphor develops, readers realize that the Lammles are not seated at a whist table but are, in fact, observing the social gathering, where the guests figure as possible cards to be played. Their unspoken conversation mimics the kind of intellectual-social partnership Matthews fostered among his readership. Mr. Lammle's question, “Why don't you play?” implies he knows his wife's hand and wonders why she doesn't play as expected. Mrs. Lammle's response follows by seeking confirmation and execution. Dickens moves deliberately from literal games, like whist, to social games, as whist, through the minds of particular characters. In other words, he does not suggest that social games intrinsically share qualities with literal games as such but that they do so because of the patterns of thinking that players transfer from one to another. Understanding social systems as game-systems begins, in Dickens, with understanding the gamer as a character type.

Games had been associated with a particular type of character—the gambling type—long before Hoyle, but scientific play extended the type as an intellectual figure. By 1850, Henry Bohn's Handbook of Games described a whist player as an analytical mastermind: “He is a good player who, upon a sound theory, analyses and proves the best written systems, making them into the machinery of his schemes; but he is a superior player, who, equally practical, and as well informed of existing rules, sees when they ought to be violated, and has no hesitation in departing from them.”Footnote ³⁵ The description concentrates on mental ability and activity, not of an addict, but of a highly respectable, scientific specialist. Though the meaning of the category changed, a gamester still remained a type of character, one known for their risky addictions in contrast to scientific players, known for their mental ability. Dickensian gamers make the “best written systems,” or scientific social thinking, into “the machinery of their schemes,” not only in game-based scenarios, to which Bohn alludes, but in real life. “Superior” Dickensian gamers, furthermore, “see when the rules ought to be violated and have no hesitation in departing from them.” Dickens trades on the metaphorical ambiguity of life as a game in order to probe what kinds of violations occur: when do players transgress the scientific maxims of social thinking—the “rules” of whist—and when do they break other kinds of rules that may be in play in real life, such as moral codes? The Lammles, for instance, successfully carry out the social thinking of scientific whist without disturbing any social forms. Playing Miss Podsnap, however, violates the moral code imposed by the novel.

Dickens places one such gamer, Mr. Carker, as the manager of the economic firm, Dombey and Son. Carker “plays all games … and plays them well,” including piquet, backgammon, and chess. With typical false humility, Carker downplays his study of chess: “I have sometimes played, and won a game [of chess]—it's a mere trick—without seeing the board. … To men like me, [such “little arts”] are sometimes useful.”Footnote ³⁶ Playing chess without the board for visual reference indicates a highly trained and practiced mind, one that studies chess strategy and theory. Aeron Hunt describes Carker as a highly trained reader, drawing parallels between the ways “business texts and Carker's practices” figure character reading “as a shuttling process in which one understands the different layers and motivations of another character by reference to the depths one discerns in one's self.”Footnote ³⁷ In this scene of chess, Hunt's formulation applies equally well to Dombey, Carker's employer. Dombey, who “plays nothing” and ignores the game, lying on the couch with “his eyes half shut, during the whole of the play,” also loses an opportunity to read Carker and understand his manager's approach to intellectual partnership.Footnote ³⁸ Appropriately, then, Dickens obscures Carker's chess game from the reader as well. In contrast to the whist scenes in Pickwick, we do not see how Carker plays. Dickens positions the reader on the couch with Dombey, eyes half shut, so that the scene formally takes on aspects of representation amenable to chess.

Carker's ability to win chess without the visual prompt of the board indicates the kind of mental vision traditionally associated with the mastermind in a Machiavellian narrative. Blakey Vermeule categorizes Machiavellian narratives as those that feature a mastermind and key tropes, including games, in order to probe “an especially intense kind of reasoning.” As figures “that point the way to deeper registers of reflection,” a “deeper game,” these common tropes—labyrinths, riddles, puzzles—are “eventually absorbed into the story.”Footnote ³⁹ As Vermeule suggests, Carker's scientific chess indicates his Machiavellian plot, but in Dickens's novels, games indicate kinds of minds, not one brand of narrative. Carker's chess underlines his adversarial relationship with Dombey but also cues the game-specific ways he structures his real-life interactions. In this way, Dickens reverses Vermeule's formulation: games are not present in his novels because his novels feature masterminds. Instead, his novels feature masterminds because those characters play games. Carker is not merely like a chess player (because he knows how to outplay others) but is a chess player in life because he actually plays chess. Carker expects that his cognitive training in games like chess, piquet, and backgammon will guarantee success in the games he plays in real life. He expects to outwit and outplay because he can outmaneuver and, in chess, outsee. Ultimately, Dickens builds his representations of game-based social systems from this principle: the character of the system does not arise from itself but from the minds of its players, its constitutive characters.

The models of thinking developed by strategic games literature provided dynamic templates of social minds for Dickens's gamers. Turning to early psychology, however, situates Dickens within the eighteenth-century concept of mind-as-entity, as Michael Kearns suggests. While most protopsychologists visualized the mind as an entity, primarily a passive substance capable of receiving inputs, “new metaphors used by some nineteenth-century novelists,” like George Eliot and Henry James, reimagined the mind as something biological, sentient, “something other than a relatively static, impressible entity.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Some of Dickens's characters, as Kearns explores, fall under the mind-as-entity metaphor dominant in the eighteenth century, but Dickens's gamers have a more dynamic model of mind generated by their association with game playing. Considering how Dickens draws on the types of minds made available by the popular literature of games manuals situates him as a unique transitional figure in Kearns's schema. Paying attention to the games in Dickens's fiction uncovers a wide range of mental activity, from an anonymous banquier to an established schemer like Carker. Dickens imports game-based thinking into his novels and maintains the sense of the individual gamer, but he does so in order to extend the figure of the game-table as small unit to the level of social domain, the system-as-game, populated by many gamers so that the system does not become mindless.

3. Individuals, Systems: Social Thinking, Social Minds

Dickens applies models of social thinking recommended for strategic, scientific play to his representations of social systems. For Raymond Williams, the Dickensian city functions as a kind of “determining system,” predicated on “miscellaneity and randomness,” a “system of indifference” and “differentiation” organized spatially by the layout of streets and houses.Footnote ⁴¹ Williams links the unique composition of the city, at once random and systematic, to immaterial, cultural frameworks: indifference, differentiation. Unlike city-systems, game-based systems prove more dynamic and their effects less certain, entirely dependent on the skill and method of their players. Dickens uses games to carefully preserve the minds generating institutional structures, the complex, social composites of many minds.

Dickens's approach compresses social systems into forms that look like they are run by a mastermind while multiplying the number of minds involved. In 1855 Dickens wrote to Austen Layard:

The players at the table believe themselves to be masterminds, the students of scientific play, blind to the compressed role they serve. The people, at least from Dickens's point of view, do not disappear; in fact, they remain capable of material interference. They may not understand the scientific play at the table, but they understand they are no longer involved in playing the game. Dickens has “no difficulty in understanding” the political state of his nation because he has compressed the nation to a gaming table without sitting down at the table himself. Like the banquier, Dickens remains involved without becoming compromised by the game.

Dickens's political metaphor reflects the same implications of minor characterization that Alex Woloch finds in his novels. Woloch's seminal monograph, The One vs. the Many (2010), considers the “character-space” of the novel as a limited resource divided among protagonists and minor characters that functions as a primary vector of roundness and flatness. Dickens reminds us, Woloch argues, that minor characters always “belong to a larger group,” mostly invisible to the wealthy and educated social classes.Footnote ⁴³ In terms of the metaphor of the political card table, above, the minor characters lay down their cards and merely look on, in most novels; Dickens, however, unlike the major players at the table, cannot ignore his minor characters—or the vast base of the social pyramid such minor characters represent.

Woloch's assessment of Dickensian minorness captures Dickens's concern with ratios of social inequality as well as his self-awareness of what other players at the table overlook. As Raymond Williams put it in The Country and the City (1954), Dickens's “power of dramatizing a social and moral world in physical terms” as the “unknown, perhaps unknowable, sum of so many lives” exposes the “centre” of the city's “social experience.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Woloch and Williams account for the “sum of so many lives;” but when Dickens figures social systems as particular games, he alters the formulation to the “sum of so many minds.” Reflecting on the delay of the Second Reform Act, Dickens suggested to his friend, Cerjat, that the “more intelligent part of the great masses” were only “awaiting the better intellectual cultivation of numbers of their fellows.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The templates of social thinking and social minds offered by strategic games literature extends the sensitivity to quantity identified by Woloch and Williams to more dynamic registers. In effect, Woloch and Williams point out that Dickens recognized that pip cards outnumber face cards—and pawns, power pieces—two to one, but the models of community present in strategic games literature and culture provide the templates of intellectual agency for changing the game: when “they and the table and the lights and the money are all overturned together.”

The publication of games literature created a culture of gameplay that emphasized whist as a figure of representational magnitude. Scientific play praised whist as “a game of such extensive combinations.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In The Handbook of Games, Henry Bohn marvels at the thought of “the entire population of the world … [dealing] packs of cards, Whist-fashion, never quitting their employment. … The possible combinations are almost beyond arithmetic, and absolutely out of the reach of words.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The relative infinity of whist does not intimidate Bohn. Instead, the endless variety and magnitude of the game inspire him with enthusiasm. Bohn knows he will never personally witness every variation at whist, but his awareness of whist's potential inspires him in every hand that does materialize. Recently, Elaine Auyoung has described how Bleak House repeatedly reveals the presence of “something more” only to reflexively consider its own constraints of limited representation.Footnote ⁴⁸ The difference between the potentially unlimited “something more” of literary fantasy and the “something more” articulated by games literature is that the constraints of the game provide knowable, or at least predictably imaginable, patterns of meaning, images, and configuration. The possible combinations of whist may be “out of the reach of words,” but whenever a queen appears, players know she fills one of four suits.

Strategy manuals attracted a widespread, national readership and made that readership aware of its participation in a gaming community. Players enjoying an evening at scientific whist could feel confident that there were others, many others, elsewhere in England passing the time in the same way. Whist bibliographer Rudolf Rheinhardt recalls being inspired by old scorecards to publish his own book: “We were delighted with [hearing anecdotes from old whist scorecards], and there came to me the idea that a little book prepared to receive just such items as these … would be a welcome thing in every Whist-circle, to every Whist-player.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The scorecards record a history of whist playing, a material memorial of other players, other hands, not fully known, but still present by their initials and scores. As a result, Rheinhardt can't help but think of “every Whist-circle, every Whist-player” in the present who might like to read his future publication. He knows an audience exists for his book; scientific whist fostered this imagined community, in Benedict Anderson's sense of the term: “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation [or whist party] will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion … a deep, horizontal comradeship.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Scientific whist created a sense of its gaming community as a world, shifting national borders to game-based ones through its literature, language, and strategic thinking.

Games literature not only reimagined whist as a figure of magnitude and sponsored a national audience for its publications but also represented itself as just such an imagined community. A good example comes from an article entitled “Whistology” that Dickens edited for All the Year Round. The anonymous author proposes whist as a fitting “measure of mind … so comprehensive as to include the whole nation” and imagines that nation as an empire: “I'd be pleased to think that even in our own colonies, scattered as they are over the universe, a rubber could always be found; and that when I write these lines—it is now nearing midnight—men were scoring the honours at Newfoundland, and marking the trick in Aukland.”Footnote ⁵¹ This global description recalls Mr. Pickwick's table in Bath with “the hum of many voices, and the sound of many feet … hovering around the card-tables” (477–78). This imagined community, a vast number “out of the reach of words,” at least in the constricted character-space of Dickens's novel, was minutely represented through game-related genres, such as initialed scorecards and matches recorded in newspapers or club journals. Games literature encouraged the kind of systemic model that we find in Dickens's fiction: many minds populate complex systems, to the point of lost individuality, while, at the same time, maintaining character individuality at the local level and as a kind of caveat to systemic analysis.

Dickens carries this principle into his journalistic portrayal of the New Detective Police, especially in terms of their intellectual activity. The detective force is “always sharpening and being improved by practice, and always adapting itself. … For ever on the watch, with their wits stretched to the utmost, these officers have … set themselves against every novelty of trickery and dexterity that the combined imaginations of all the lawless rascals in England can devise.” Having laid a foundation of great cognitive activity, Dickens compares the work of the detective police to “games of chess, played with live pieces.”Footnote ⁵² That these new detectives set themselves against the “imaginations” of their foes emphasizes the mental engagement between detective and criminal and evokes the intellectual standardization promoted by scientific handbooks. Dickens implies that the work done by these detectives will be mental work and, therefore, that the system of crime they police must be a mind-filled one.

The resonance between Dickens's journalistic detectives and his fictional detective, Mr. Bucket of Bleak House, helps dispel the impression that Bleak House separates its masterminds, like Bucket, from its systems, like the Court of Chancery. At first glance, Bleak House appears divided between Palmer's systemic mind and Vermeule's mastermind; whereas Palmer abstracts the mind of an individual so that a large social unit, such as a town, has a mind of its own, Vermeule concentrates intellectual capacity so that all other registers, such as games, serve as tropes of the focal mastermind. On one hand, Chancery has a life of its own. It is truly a social presence, what Palmer considers a mind, because of its influence in the world and on individuals. On the other hand, Inspector Bucket concentrates great cognitive activity in a single individual, the mastermind detective. Examining the games in the novel, however, reveals the many points of cognitive compromise between what at first glance appear to be the mindless and the Mind. After all, Mr. Bucket is a whist player, and Chancery is “a great gaming system” (265). At the same time, however, we must distinguish the two: Chancery's gaming lacks whist's science. The relationship between Mr. Bucket, the individual, and Chancery, the system, reflects Dickens's “poetics of misalignment,”Footnote ⁵³ not just in terms of character-space or ideology but in the sense that the game of Chancery—gambling—differs from that of detection—whist. Different kinds of minds and characters play each, expressing different mental habits.

Dickens prioritizes Bucket's individualism as game-trained cognition: “From the expression of his face, he might be a famous Whist-player for a large stake—say a hundred guineas certain—with the game in his hand, but with a high reputation involved in his playing his hand out to the last card, in a masterly way” (816–17). Like a whist player, Bucket begins with very little information but slowly accumulates more. A “first-rate player,” after all, knows how to make such plays “at Whist (which, considering that cards are unseen, and their positions only presumed, equals a masterly move at chess).”Footnote ⁵⁴ As Matthews predicts, “Where the sets are really good players, before half the cards are played out, they are as well acquainted with the material ones remaining in each other's hands as if they had seen them” (7–8). The famous whist player appears “superhuman” and “magical” to those outsiders who lack the scientific training of the player.Footnote ⁵⁵ Bucket's masterly review of the game exposes his scientific play rather than undermining his rationalism. After all, “there's not a move on the board that would surprise me,” he assures Sir Leicester (818).

And yet Bucket admits that before having evidence of any kind, “it flashed upon me, as I sat opposite to her at table and saw her with a knife in her hand, that she had done it!” (833). Unwittingly, Madame Hortense lets Bucket into the state of her hand; their positions at the table make them ironic partners. David Ben-Merre argues that Bucket's sudden recognition “forsakes the novel's epistemological system of verifiable inductive reasoning and ends up substituting desire for truth.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, Ben-Merre sees Bleak House as substituting its earlier commitment to rationalism with an ideological power play that puts readers on their guard rather than seducing them. Ben-Merre's positioning of Bucket's deduction as desire overlooks his characterization as a game-playing detective. Bucket's cognitive advantage arises from his connections with whist. Like Edgar Allan Poe's detective, Dupin, the “first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Bucket's intuition represents the habitual life of deduction, a sign that Bucket belongs to a set of really good players: before half of Madame Hortense's cards are played out, he is as well acquainted with those remaining in her hand as if he had seen them, to paraphrase Matthews. Bucket's dedication to scientific play gives him the advantage over Madame Hortense, who in turn defeats the traditional mastermind, the lawyer Tulkinghorn.

In the Dickensian world, the individual does not symbolically stand for the system as a whole; instead, the individual represents one of the system's many parts. D. A. Miller's brilliant reading of Bleak House reads the individualism of Mr. Bucket as a sign of the system, rather than the other way around: the “relatively friendly treatment that Bleak House accords to the Detective Police is qualified by a number of reservations about the nature and effects of its power. Most of these, like other aspects of the police, are carried in the characterization of Inspector Bucket.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Bucket functions symbolically as a repository of trace anxieties concerning the power of the Detective Police. In a way, Miller reads Bucket like Vermeule reads games as tropes for Machiavellian narratives. Both Miller and Vermeule read a concrete subject as pointing to something else, as a means for the author to underline something else as the primary target of inquiry. By contrast, Dickens sets his fiction against Miller's and Vermeule's inductive abstraction. Instead, supplementing Bucket with the detectives from Dickens's journalism—Inspector Field and Sergeant Witchem, among others—helpfully corrects Bucket's status in Bleak House as an isolated individual or symbol. Dickens unmasks the many minds, like Bucket's, that populate some larger system, like the Detective Police. Contrary to our expectation, Dickens does not see these large social games as mindless systems. Rather, Dickens works to uncover the game-type minds that work behind the system and make it appear to be a self-running entity.

Though Dickens certainly describes systems like Chancery as beyond the control of any individual, he nevertheless carefully provides insight into the individuals behind the scenes that help make it that way, like Mr. Vholes. A “vole” means winning every trick in a card game, such as quadrille, écarté, or ombre, usually at great risk. To “go the vole,” for instance, means to risk everything for great reward.Footnote ⁵⁹ As Richard Carstone's financial adviser in the Chancery suit, Vholes takes all the tricks for himself, leaving Richard with nothing. As we might expect, Vholes conducts his Chancery business in the language of the gaming table: “Sir, Mr. C is playing for a considerable stake, and cannot play without—need I say what? … [T]o be honest with you … money is the word. Now, sir, upon the chances of Mr. C's game I express to you no opinion, no opinion. … But, for the onward play, more funds must be provided” (779–80). Taken out of context, Vholes might as well be describing a game of hazard as a suit at law. The metaphors that Vholes uses to describe the system also contribute to that system's character. Though Vholes uses the kind of generic terminology that might lead people like Richard Carstone to think that Chancery is just a game, Dickens cleverly undermines the effort by naming Vholes with technical language that reveals Chancery to be a specific kind of game. Similarly, in The Pickwick Papers, when Mr. Pickwick goes to trial, the clerks at Dodson and Fogg's describe ongoing cases as a game (260). These characters with game-minds are the players who make the systems they populate into games. Dickens draws our attention to the minor characters who are indispensable for running large social games and who have provided a collective character for the system. Their metaphors of choice reveal how they think and how they perceive their work.

Alan Palmer does not discuss Chancery in his chapter on Little Dorrit in Social Minds, but he does briefly consider “large intermental units” like “the speculators, the Marshalsea [Prison], and ‘Society.’”Footnote ⁶⁰ Palmer finds the representations of “joint thought … relentlessly negative,” characteristic of a world where individuals “lose their identity.” When it comes to these groups, Palmer argues that individual actions “make more sense … when they are regarded as part of a joint action because people have become caught up in a group mind made up of wildness, reproach, and invective. They are behaving differently from the way in which they would behave as individuals because they have become part of this shared mind” (141). Palmer's repeated reference to the singular “mind” shared by the group reflects his commitment to reimagining the human mind as, at times, a collective entity but also exposes the extent to which his analysis obscures the many minds thinking in composite. When Dickens figures social systems as games, however, he suggests an opposite vision, one of many social minds thinking according to prescribed templates, the most visible of which were found in handbooks for strategic whist. Detective Bucket, after all, correlates his knowledge of the “moves on the board” to his knowledge of the many other players: “I know so much about so many characters” (Bleak House 818).

Games literature imagined its reading community in ways that Dickens translated into his representation of social systems, from Chancery to the detective police to investing and trade. As such, his systems are not mindless institutions supported by “discursive structures,” as we often tend to imagine them. Rather, he represents systems as far less abstract, populated by mindful individuals, social gamers, capable of playing and sustaining social games. For Dickens, the social mind plays whist, its intellectual partnership dependent in large part on social partnership, revealing the intricate ways that mind struggles with mind at both local and global scales.

4. Conclusion

The phrase “according to Hoyle,” still current today, “means by the book” or according to the standard rules. It might be more historically accurate to say “according to Matthews,” but the modern phrase “according to Hoyle” resonates more specifically with the ways I've been unpacking gaming in Dickens. By the early nineteenth century, the original “Hoyle” had become many “New Hoyles,” as other authors, like Charles Jones, borrowed his name for their games treatises. The man became a literature, a brand known for standardization. Whist culture, therefore, followed a figure of metonymy throughout the nineteenth century that repeatedly reinforced a sense of multiplication, as every hand at whist, though unlike any other, nevertheless could represent countless hands played elsewhere by players similarly devoted to scientific play. Dickens incorporates this sense of the individual, as both a significant player in a single game and as a meaningful piece of the larger collective, the playing community, into national social systems that typically challenge human comprehension. Dickens, according to Hoyle, exposes the role played by social minds in social systems through templates of social thinking from whist.

Games literature imagined its readers as a national community, everywhere compressed into representational units during gameplay. Representing one whist table, chessboard, or scorecard conjured many others—whole systems of gaming. Such figures, however, not only coordinate numerical quantities but also, thanks to the emphasis on social and intellectual partnership in games literature, represent many minds involved in social thinking. Thus, when Dickens uses game-based metaphors to describe social systems, he populates those systems with many minds, all thinking more or less socially. The individual, from this point of view, indicates other individuals without losing his or her own game-based character. In contemporary historical games literature and the models of mind it generated, Dickens found tools that enable intermental engagement. Dickens transposes his use of metaphor for mind into social metaphor because games capture both the cognition of the individual and the group. As a result, Dickens emphasizes systems as lived communities, not as abstract, ideological structures.

Cognitive literary historicism “[embeds] cognitive literary study” within the “historical imperative … [and] argues that cultural/historical criticism must acknowledge the history of the human body and its mind.”Footnote ⁶¹ In other words, cognitive historicism explores how the human brain and nervous body, habits of thought, neural architecture, and the mind that results enter history and, in literary applications, enter literature.Footnote ⁶² Although “cognitive” carries an array of meanings, in this case, as Alan Richardson reminds us, the “‘cognitive’ is historical, naming processes and capacities unfolding … in relation to specific physical and social environments, that are, of course, caught up in a ceaseless process of historical change.”Footnote ⁶³ Modern-day cognitive historicists often turn to contemporary works in philosophy of mind, medicine, protopsychology, or neurology to track the history of the brain and the brain in history. Cognitive applications of new historicism, therefore, expect to find an account of the historical mind deeply tied to specific contexts and cultural constructs as well as to find those cultural artifacts shaped by the constraints and aptitudes of the human brain. Nevertheless, scholars still recognize the “attempt to meld cognitive science with cultural and historical studies is still potentially problematic, both theoretically and in practice.”Footnote ⁶⁴ By turning to games literature, then, I propose expanding the conventional sources for contemporary writings on the mind, such as philosophy, medical writing, and early psychology or neurology. Strategy literature positioned itself as scientific and systematic, a method not only for describing the mind but for changing it. Historicizing the mind through strategic gaming, therefore, participates in one of the primary goals of cognitive literary historicism: that is, to see the mind as multiple and to understand the border between mind and culture as permeable.

As a popular genre, games literature formulated game-specific models for thinking that players also transposed across social and cultural domains. One advocate described whist as the “intelligent recreation” that most fully “repays in interest the trouble spent upon it; and there is certainly none in which the degree of perfection attained furnishes a better test of the mental powers. An eminent statesman once said that he would be content to choose a prime minister by his Whist-playing.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Dickens probes this contemporary formulation of the thinking mind: to what extent does cognitive training enter other social domains? The question offers exciting possibility in the case of uncovering anonymous reservoirs of cognitive power in an overlooked banquier at the gaming table, but it also presents frightening realities in systems like Chancery. What seems promising for individuals proves corrupted at global levels by the increase in scale and practice. Additionally, Dickens points up the highly contrived scenarios of social gaming. The mind can be known through systematic strategy, but only if all the players play the same game in the same ways. Competing systems of strategy made this difficult to achieve even within the selective populations of the clubs, much less a possibility for unimpeded social cognition.

Reading contemporary games literature alongside Dickens's fiction and letters ultimately reveals his interest in the interior workings of the mind and suggests that although he failed to offer many practical solutions for the social problems he observed, he nevertheless did use games to grapple with the comprehension of the scale of those problems while at the same time perfecting a model of games through his fiction that could transfer the sense of both the individual and the collective group of gamers from games culture to society. Scientific whist introduces social thinking into mental practices normally understood as antisocial, such as deduction and observation. The context of strategic games literature exposes the extent to which we have limited mind-science to institutionally recognized fields, like psychology, and encourages literary critics to historicize the mind in alternative ways.