Stranded Indoors and Bored? Beggar My Neighbor!

Oh, but it's cold and snowy in many parts of the country!  Here, we're back to our usual bleak, gray winter days, when it seems the sun is never going to shine again.  Winter in nineteenth century England could be as dreary, keeping ladies and gentlemen indoors for days at a time.  While some braved the cold to make calls, others languished at home with family members.  One of the ways to pass the time was playing cards and parlor games.  We've talked about whist and consequences. But there was another, rather all-or-nothing card game that could get, well, a bit tense, if you had the wrong frame of mind.

Beggar My Neighbor.

According to expert Barry Rigal, author of Card Games for Dummies, Second Edition, the game could also be called Beat Your Neighbor Out of Doors and Strip Jack Naked.  Sounds friendly, doesn't it?  This was a game played at a "round table" as opposed to the four-sided whist table for more serious players.  Up to six people could join the game.  One player dealt the cards as evenly as possible among the group.  The other players didn't take up a hand, but squared up his or her cards, face down, on the table.

The player at the left of the dealer turned over the top card on the individual pile.  If it was a numbered card, play would continue on to the next player.  If it was a face card or an ace, the next player had to turn over a certain number of cards--four for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen, and one for a jack.  If none of those cards was a face card or ace, the first player took away all the cards facing up.  If one of them was a face card, the play progressed to the next player, who had to do the same thing.  The player who ended up with all the cards won.

As you can imagine, play could get a little boisterous.  If you've ever played the modern game of Uno with cutthroat intensity, you will understand.  Me, I advocate Patience.

The game.  Patience was another name for solitaire in nineteenth century England.  When it comes to Beggar My Neighbor, I'm an all-or-nothing kind of gal.

And if you are looking for something interesting to do in the cold, allow me to draw your attention to the new gadget to the upper left on the blog.  I was under the impression that "followers" to the blog received our posts via e-mail.  I have lately been informed that such is not the case.  Therefore, Marissa and I have added an e-mail subscription option to the blog.  Put your e-mail address in the box, and Feedburner will send you all our posts from NineteenTeen.  I've signed up myself, just to see how it all works.  I do not believe we have access to your e-mail address or any other information about you, but I will let you know if I discover otherwise.  Given that it's taken me nearly seven years to figure out that we don't have an e-mail subscription, I can say with confidence that your e-mail addresses will be safe from me for some time to come.  :

Now where are those cards?

A Pleasing Silhouette

Has your summer started oddly?  Ours has.  Normally we are at a sunny 90 degrees F by now, but we’ve rarely topped 70 and it’s been raining!  Now I’m told we’ll jump to the triple digits by Monday.  That’s not really conducive to summer activities either.  So what would a young lady do in the early nineteenth century to pass the time?  She might have drawn a silhouette.

There's something elegant about a silhouette, as if the person’s character shines through when details are kept simple. Creating a proper silhouette, an outline of a person’s head and perhaps shoulders, was both a pleasant evening activity for friends and family and a lucrative business for some talented artists.  The very best silhouette makers could look at a person and cut directly on black paper to match features.  Some silhouettes were incredibly detailed, showing curls within hairstyles and even eyelashes. 

For those more inclined to do it themselves, whether from limited funds or a spirit of adventure, silhouettes could be created at home.  All that was needed was a piece of pale paper either tacked to the wall or affixed in a screen and a source of light such as a candle or fire.  The subject sits between the light and the paper, and an enterprising friend or family member traces around the lines made by the shadow cast on the paper.  Once the shape was cut from the paper, you could either put the white silhouette on black paper, or trace around it on black paper and put the transferred silhouette on white paper.

While silhouettes are becoming a lost art, you can still find artists at country fairs, popular shopping malls, and entertainment venues.  This silhouette is of me when I was a baby. 

This one is of my husband when he was a boy. 

This is one of our youngest son, who is obviously a silhouette, er chip off the old block.

If you decide to try silhouettes this summer, be sure to let us know!  And Marissa and I would like to let you know that we are going to take a little vacation for a couple weeks.  Look for a short post on July 12 before we head for our annual girls week out, er I mean the Romance Writers of America National Conference.  This year we’ll be Southern peaches in Atlanta, and we promise to bring you all the news. Until then, enjoy your silhouette, and your summer!

The Consequences of Using Nine Pins All the Time

All right, I admit it. I like the game of Nine Pins, what some of us call Table Skittles. My brother and I had a set when we were young, and we loved the sound of those wooden pins hitting the block. The game dates back to the 1700s, when what was an outdoor or pub game similar to lawn bowling was miniaturized for parlor play. So it’s no surprise that when I need someone to play a parlor game in the book I’m writing, Nine Pins is usually top of my mind. Vaughn and Samantha play a round or two in The Rake’s Redemption, and my widowed hero and his daughter will play a round in my August 2013 book, The Courting Campaign.

But in the book I’m currently writing, which won’t be out until December, I have a whole bunch of people ranging from 20 years of age up to 60 stuck at a country house party with rainy weather outside and feeling a bit at loose ends.  Nine Pins simply wasn’t going to work either logistically or from an interest factor.  So what should I have them do?

We’ve talked about using an electric shock as a party game, but I couldn’t see my fifty-year old marchioness unbending for such a display.  There were rhyming games, but one of my younger gentlemen was much too likely to get carried away, and then bluestocking in the group would have to take him to task. 

The game, however, that I thought would cause the most laughter, and the most havoc between the hero (the poor fellow who tumbled into the Blue John cavern) and heroine, was Consequences.

In Consequences, players take turns answering a series of questions, one question per player, and each player has no knowledge of what the others have written.  Questions involved the name and characteristic of a lady, the name and characteristic of a gentleman, how they met, what they wore, what they said, and what the consequences were.  You can imagine the results:

Wobbly Bill met skinny Alice at an ice cream parlor.  He was wearing a footman’s livery, and she was wearing an ostrich plumed hat.  He said “I have an itch under my right elbow,” and she said, “Does this outfit make me look fat?” The consequences were that they both called before the magistrate.

Ahem.

Now, I wasn’t sure how to keep previous words from you in a blog post, but I thought perhaps we might play, if you’re willing, and see how very silly we can get.  So, I’ll start:  “Pock-marked Charles met . . .”

Rainy (and Foggy) Day Games

I am fortunate to live in a fairly dry and sunny part of the United States. We get about 6 and a quarter inches of rain a year. However, over half that amount falls in just four months: November through February. So, I’ve been sitting looking at gloomy skies and feeling grumpy.

Jolly Olde England in the nineteenth century had her share of gloomy days as well, not just because of the abundant rain but because the coal fires brought about horrendous fogs, particularly when a large number of people (and fires) happened to live near water (like the Thames). Breathing the air literally burned the lungs, and carriage driving was downright dangerous. So, people tended to stay indoors on such days.

While the older folks caught up on correspondence, exclaimed over the latest newspaper reports from the various wars, and even snoozed in their libraries, the young folks were looking for entertainment. They played some of the games we know today, like charades and twenty questions. One of the more popular games was Crambo, where the leader called out a word, and everyone else had to come up with a rhyme for it or you were out. So if I as the leader said “peas,” you all could say “please,” “keys,” “cheese,” and so forth.

Another popular game was cap verses, and I personally think this one would be hard! The leader makes up a line to start a poem, let’s say “Today the trees weep loud with cold.” Whoever is next has to take the last letter of the last word in the line and start her line with a word that begins with that letter. So, since my line ended in a d, yours would have to start with a d. You might say “Down dusty lanes to town we go.” Yikes! Pity the next person — she has to come up with something that starts with an O and still makes sense. Variations of the game had you naming famous people in the same way: “Trollop,” “Pitt the Younger,” “Richard the Lion-Heart,” “Turner,” and so forth. You could also play the game with Bible verses. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” “Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” “Nothing is too hard for you.”

So, would you like to play? Let's make a poem. I’ll start: “Writers are a funny lot . . .”