Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America. By Douglas A. Guerra (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 264 pp. $69.95)

Abstract

Douglas Guerra positions his study of nineteenth-century American board games within a broader account of the history of the book. Like the “semantic vectors” arrayed across the printed page of modern novels, the sequences of rules governing leisure-time amusements functioned as a medium for the “circulation of ideas through the arteries of culture” (197), the most important idea of which was the sovereignty of the self. Any skepticism regarding this ambitious argument is convincingly offset by Guerra’s close reading of Milton Bradley’s Checkered Game of Life, which sold more than forty thousand copies soon after its invention in 1860. Play was organized around an opportunistic grid of “wealth,” “matrimony,” “school,” “fame,” “idleness,” “poverty,” “disgrace,” and “jail,” supplemented with behavioral norms that included “truth,” “honor,” and “ambition” and which together encompassed most of the human condition. Navigating this checkerboard of personal prospects required “a frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment,” as Bradley himself exclaimed upon applying for a patent (20). The game of life was accordingly designed as a trial run for life off the board, synopsized by Guerra with an epigraph from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855) that presents a similarly robust vision of the individual’s newly open field of play. As such, Milton Bradley and Walt Whitman each promoted “life” into the exclusive subject of those who lived it, a creed that inverted America’s traditional moral economy by re-constituting public order on the basis of private prerogative. The subsequent destruction of fixed hierarchies meant that “I” became the singular expression of my own talent and tenacity, a distinctly modern ethic which gave birth to a distinctly modern cultural hero in these same years, the self-made man. Or, as Guerra quotes Emerson’s pithy characterization of this self-centered gestalt: “You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances” (47).