by E. Leigh Bonds (Original)
In her 1775 “Letter to a Friend on Leaving Town,”, Mary Robinson decries the origin of the fashionable female gamester:
Each idle coxcomb leaves the wretched fair,Alone to languish, and alone despair,To cards, and dice, the slighted maiden flies,And every fashionable vice apply’s,Scandal and coffee, pass the morn away,At night a rout, an opera, or a play;Thus glide their life, partly through inclination,Yet more, because it is the reigning fashion.
(Poems 81–2)
She relates the trajectory of female decline to the progress of a day, and by extension, to the progress of a life. Spurred by the absence of her husband—who is most likely engaged in similar amusements—the “wretched fair” follows the “reigning fashion” of the ton, leading her to “fashionable vice.” She “pass[es]” her day from morning “[s]candal and coffee” to an evening of dissipation. Robinson’s tying of the plight of the female gamester to the vagaries of her husband is especially poignant given that she often found herself in the same position. In fact, Robinson’s poem was published during her “tedious captivity” in debtor’s prison due, in part, to her husband Tom’s gaming (Memoirs 1:168, 2: 32).
