Dear readers!
In our very first blog post, we are thrilled to introduce our research project entitled The Invention of the Lottery Fantasy. The project is funded by The Research Council of Norway and examines the cultural, political, and financial impact of what we call the lottery fantasy: the idea of sudden, life-changing wealth through the great prize in the lottery.
A group of international scholars will examine this fantasy as it circulated between countries, languages, and different medial forms in Europe, both in the eighteenth century and today. We will explore a large array of cultural and medial forms of expression, including newspapers, periodicals, almanacs, visual art, literature and theatre, to name a few.
From the birth of state-sanctioned lotteries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the institution has been riddled with controversy. At the heart of the conflict is the state’s attempt to balance financial reward with moral concerns over the wellbeing of its citizenry. Supporters of the state lottery would often point to the fact that the institution not only helped fill the national treasury, but also presented the modest classes with a glimmer of hope and the possibility for a better future. In addition, the need for a state-sanctioned lottery was often legitimized by references to fierce competition from foreign lottery schemes.
Opponents, however, pointed to the moral dubiousness of the state profiting from poor people’s desperate hopes for financial improvement. In their eyes, the institution nourished and profited from an illusory dream of financial improvement and social mobility, with dire social effects.
Thus, the state lottery was both a moral and a political problem, central to an eighteenth-century context in which this institution was established all throughout Europe. See About the project for more information about the project and its members.
Over the coming months, we will present some results of our work here on our project blog and on our embedded Instagram account. Moreover, we will share news of our various activities, including public lectures and media appearances. Recently, five of the project members returned from the Nordic 18th Century Conference in Copenhagen. This year’s theme was ‘Rights and Wrongs in the 18th Century’ – a perfect framework for discussions about the moral implications of state-sanctioned lotteries in eighteenth-century Europe.
Johanne Slettvoll Kristiansen is a postdoctoral scholar specializing in British and Scandinavian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural history. She is part of an international research project exploring the historical and cultural roots of European state-sanctioned lotteries (https://www.ntnu.no/blogger/lotteryfantasy/). The project is funded by The Research Council of Norway for the period of 2022–2024.