Aristocrats Behaving Badly: Gambling and Dueling in the 1790s Novel of Reform

In the 1790s British reformist novelists became increasingly driven to expose the depravity of the English aristocracy by focusing repeatedly on upper‐class behaviors that they identified as markers of the ancien régime; particularly, gambling and dueling. To reformists, aristocrats gambled for high stakes to demonstrate their nonchalance about money publicly. Similarly, reformists saw dueling as a public display that aristocrats would continue to honor their age‐old codes of conduct above and beyond modern civil law, despite contemporary political changes. Gambling and dueling are linked by their foundation in the aristocracy’s devotion to the idea of chance, and by the tenacious peer pressure exacted in upper‐class circles to preserve these behaviors as signs of social distinction. This essay analyzes a range of novels published during the 1790s in which gambling and dueling are identified as the aristocracy’s attempts to perpetuate the worst extremes of an age whose time had passed.