By Paul Goring
‘[S]uddenly acquired wealth is no light burden to bear!’.1 This is a recurrent warning in cultural representations of lotteries which, when they portray big winners, are typically more interested in depicting disastrous ways to splurge a fortune than in showing the actions of responsible spenders. Bad financial decisions and recklessness, it can be said, make for better stories than fiscal prudence.
This particular iteration of the warning appears in Edal Village; Or, The Fortunate Lottery Ticket, a novel published anonymously in London in 1781. This two-volume work is the most substantial British ‘lottery novel’ of the eighteenth century. Both light-hearted and serious, it offers a sceptical response to, in the narrator’s words, the ‘present rage of lottery-adventurers’ (I. 92). But it is not a fiercely anti-lottery work in the manner of, say, Hannah More’s condemnatory The Wonderful Advantages of Adventuring in the Lottery!!! (1797). The author’s principal conceit is the creation of a well-meaning, benevolent protagonist who, when in possession of a £10,000 lottery fortune, wants to act in charitable ways. Edal Village eschews, then, the much-trodden territory of rash gambling and greedy self-indulgence. It offers instead a fictional meditation upon how even an unselfish and well-intentioned lottery winner can get the business of spending money very wrong.
The lottery winner of the story is one Jerry Last – his surname being a sign of his trade as a shoemaker. He is a worthy and industrious inhabitant of the remote village of Edal (another suggestive name, bearing hints of ‘Eden’). Having saved £15 from his earnings, he ponders how to use the money and, after much agonizing over the propriety and wisdom of gambling, he buys a lottery ticket. Crucially, he does this not with a view to becoming ‘the greatest man, and lording it over every one in the village’ (I, 18), but rather because with a greater fortune he could improve his shoemaker’s shop and help the poor.
Seen in terms of common tropes or character types, then, Jerry Last is pointedly not a lower-class social climber; he has none of the fantasies of, say, Chloe in Henry Fielding’s well-known drama The Lottery (1732): ‘I will buy one of the best Houses in Town, and furnish it. – Then I intend to set up my Coach and Six, and have six fine tall Footmen’ and so on.2 He is rather a version of ‘the man of feeling’ – that emotionally susceptible and infinitely generous type which is found at the centre of numerous sentimental novels of the period, and indeed vaunted in the title of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771).
The author of Edal Village – whoever that may have been – was clearly well-versed in the tradition of sentimental writing. In fact, this novel is filled with literary references of many kinds. There are Latin tags from Virgil’s first Eclogue, quotations from Shakespeare, as well as pointers to more recent authors including Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Dyer, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Johnson. But it is the celebrated sentimental humourist Laurence Sterne, author of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), who seems to provide the most important literary model.
There are several mentions of Sterne in Edal Village and also scenes which are almost certainly inspired by his fiction. For example, A Sentimental Journey includes two maudlin chapters relating the travelling narrator’s roadside encounters with a dead ass and its grieving owner. Similarly in Edal Village, Jerry, travelling to London with a companion and an attorney to collect his winnings, finds his way blocked by an ‘ass loaded with earthen ware’, which has been run over and badly injured by a speeding cart (I, 158). The scene of the accident offers many tugs upon the heartstrings and, for Jerry, the purse strings. The distressed owner of the ass – present with his wife, his ‘little boy’ (I, 158) and a heap of broken crockery – is ‘an old soldier with a wooden leg’ (I. 159), a ‘withered arm’ (l. 163) and a tale of suffering to match his disabilities. There are distinct echoes of the sentimentalism of Sterne’s scene here, and Jerry steps readily into the ‘man of feeling’ role as he becomes deeply moved and insists, against the advice of the attorney, upon charitably compensating the family for their loss.
Edal Village deviates from the mode of the sentimental novel, though, in its examination of the larger-scale charitable projects that are facilitated by the £10,000 prize. Sterne’s protagonist has only slight wealth; his charitable giving is impulsive and limited and, as such, has no real social reach. Jerry’s lottery-derived wealth, on the other hand, allows for the design of a benevolent spending plan. And here the appropriateness of the novel’s title comes into focus, as the work explores how a sudden arrival of wealth is not only an issue for the individual beneficiary but can also affect a broader community – in this case, with disastrous results.
The work depicts two phases of the lottery win causing social disintegration in the village. The first is initiated by the villagers themselves as they insist upon celebrating the good fortune of the shoemaker, imposing hardcore revelry upon the naturally sober Jerry. Chaos ensues; there is widespread drunkenness, while the roasting of a whole ox goes badly wrong, with the villagers hacking at half-burnt, half-raw meat like ‘a hungry pack of hounds let loose upon a carcase after a hard day’s chase’ (I. 81). So easily, the simile suggests, can a disciplined community slip into savagery.
The second phase comes about through Jerry’s own actions as he starts to distribute his new-found wealth. One of his ambitions is to alleviate true poverty, and here he is partly successful but also has his charity abused:
Our hero begins to execute his long wished-for scheme; his benevolent and liberal intentions were soon discovered, and as quickly produced applications. Many and long were the dismal stories of age and sickness; large families, and high rents; scarcity of money, and dearness of provisions; frequent losses, and unfeeling landlords; and the more pathetic tale of the friendless, the fatherless, and widow; all of which Mr. Last heard, pitied, and relieved with an unsparing hand; giving out-right to some, and taking a note of hand for payment, when able, from others; not always with the utmost discretion, for the pathetic story wrought upon his benevolent heart; and the canting tale of the hypocrite was an overmatch to his simplicity and humanity. (II, 85-86)
Further projects are more quixotic – and more catastrophic. A scheme to turn his old shoemaking business into a non-profit enterprise so that ‘the poor people’ can have shoes ‘at an under-price’ fails because it enrages other shoemakers who are threatened by the competition (II. 88). More damaging is a broader vision he has of a new Edal relieved, thanks to his wealth, of the pains of work: ‘he hoped poverty would be no more heard of; that labour would cease; and the villagers of Edal would be the happiest people in the world’ (II. 90). Here sentimental charity seems to meet naïve pastoralism, and what happens is that, when freed of work, the villagers do little other than drink; the work operates with the bleak thesis that the first destination for a labourer with no labour is the pub. The harvest is neglected and the traditional patterns of rural life start to fall apart. The lottery win has become a serpent in the paradise of Edal/Eden.
The narrator is very ready to point out the dangerous whimsicality of Jerry’s thinking:
Such were the phantasms that our hero’s imagination had pictured; and so much does the eager pursuit of some favourite scheme blind mens’ reason for the present. How often has the castle-builder and visionary-schemer calculated upon as equally false premises; entirely forgetting the certainty of losses, misfortunes, accidents, &c. &c.! So he, in his present phrenzy, had quite forgot that labour was absolutely necessary, and that society could not subsist without gradation of ranks. (II, 90-91)
The novel also shows the correction of Jerry, with ‘the veil’ being ‘soon withdrawn from before his eyes’ (II, 91), and thereafter the restoration of village life. Jerry’s ‘cure’ comes in the form of a long lecture from the local rector concerning the necessity of labour and of social divisions. The rector, speaking from a patrician Christian position, acknowledges that Jerry’s project was ‘well intended’ and sprung from ‘a benevolent heart’ (II, 122). But he argues that it defied God in its challenge to the stratification of society:
The Great Author of all things, in his infinite wisdom, knew what was right; and […] has thus constituted the system of nature. And we find mankind in all civilized countries in a state of subordination; the one part laborious, and the other feasting upon the fruit of their labours; and since God knew things must be thus at the time of creation, why should we call him to account, and say this or that is wrong? (II, 132-33)
To reestablish order, the rector tells Jerry to talk with the villagers when they are sober; he becomes an envoy of the rector’s position, and the village starts to function once again (II, 147). Through this story, then, Edal Village evolves into a type of didactic tract on charity and economics in the guise of an entertaining fiction. It does not oppose charity, but it warns against large-scale charity disturbing the status quo. It is not forcefully opposed to the state lottery either, but it points clearly to the fact that the sudden possession of a fortune can be a problem rather than a blessing. To any readers who might fantasise about winning the lottery, the implied lesson is that they have already been correctly placed in society by God; given this, why should anyone want to buy a ticket?
- Anon, Edal Village: Or, The Fortunate Lottery Ticket, 2 vols. (London: printed for T. Lowndes, 1781), I, 94. Further page references are given in the text. ↩︎
- Henry Fielding, The Lottery (1732) in The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: Plays, Volume Two, 1731-1734, ed. Thomas Lockwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 160 ↩︎
Paul Goring
Paul Goring is Professor of British Literature and Culture at NTNU. He has specialist interests in theatre history, the actor and playwright Charles Macklin, the life and works of Laurence Sterne, and the mediation of news.