The Mansion of Happiness (37 page)

1.
Milton Bradley, The Checkered Game of Life (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Company, 1866), Liman Collection of American Board Games and Table Games, Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, New-York Historical Society.

2.
Milton Bradley Company, The Game of Life (East Longmeadow, MA: Milton Bradley Company, 1960), in the possession of the author. “Milton Bradley’s New ‘Family-Fun’ Game,”
New York Times
, November 6, 1960. For a comparison of the nature of play between the 1860 and 1960 games, see Thomas A. Burns, “
The Game of Life:
Idealism, Reality and Fantasy in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Versions of a Milton Bradley Game,”
Canadian Review of American Studies
9 (1978): 50–83.

3.
Game and Toy Catalogue
(Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Company, 1960), 5, Milton Bradley Archives,
Hasbro, East Longmeadow, MA.

4.
Milton Bradley, “Social Game,” U.S. Patent 53,561, issued April 3, 1866.

5.
Deepak Shimkhada, “A Preliminary Study of the Game of Karma in India, Nepal, and Tibet,”
Artibus Asiae
44 (1983): 308–22. Andrew Topsfield, “The Indian Game of Snakes and Ladders,”
Artibus Asiae
46 (1985): 203–26. Bruce Whitehill,
Games: American Boxed Games and Their Makers, 1822–1992
(Radnor, PA:
Chilton Books, 1992), 24–25. On the popularity of goods from the East in Victorian parlors, see Kristin L. Hoganson,
Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

6.
On the diary, see James J. Shea, as told to Charles Mercer,
It’s All in the Game
(New York: Putnam, 1960), 19. As recently as 1960, Milton Bradley’s papers were housed in the company’s archives. But beginning in the 1970s, researchers looking for the papers were turned away, and when I investigated, no one at Hasbro knew what had happened to
them. I couldn’t find them when I visited the company’s archives in November 2006, and my efforts to trace them through Bradley’s descendants didn’t turn up anything, either.

7.
David Parlett,
The Oxford History of Board Games
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 278–86.

8.
Thomas More,
Utopia
, trans. Ralph Robynson (London, 1551). Whitehill,
Games
, 45. George Herbert, “115. Upon John Crop, who dyed by taking a vomit,” in
Wits Recreations
(London, 1640).

9.
Bradley, Checkered Game of Life.

10.
Asa M. Bradley, “The Bradleys,” typescript, 1907, Milton Bradley Archives, Hasbro, East Longmeadow, MA. See also Shea,
It’s All in the Game
, chapter 1; and
Milton Bradley, a Successful Man: A Brief Sketch of His Career and the Growth of the Institution Which He Founded, Published by Milton Bradley Company in Commemoration of Their Fiftieth
Anniversary
(New York: J. F. Tapley, 1910), 4. Samuel Penhallow,
The History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians
(Boston, 1726), 10–11. Cotton Mather,
A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New-England
(London, 1707), 33–36. On captivity and redemption, see John Demos,
The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
(New York: Knopf, 1992), and Jill Lepore,
The Name of War: King Philip’s
War and the Origins of American Identity
(New York: Knopf, 1998).

11.
Mather,
Deplorable State of New-England
, 33. Cotton Mather,
The Spirit of Life Entering into the Spiritually Dead
(Boston, 1707), 6–22.

12.
The New Game of Human Life (London: John Wallis, 1790). An early work of Edmond Hoyle’s was his
A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist
(London, 1742). Robert Lewis, “The Mansion of Happiness: English and American Versions of a Nineteenth-Century Board Game,” typescript, Games Collection, Box 1, OS Box 2, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester,
MA. See also Jill Shefrin, “ ‘Make It a Pleasure and Not a Task’: Educational Games for Children in Georgian England,”
Princeton University Library Chronicle
60 (1999): 251–75.

13.
Plato,
The Republic
, trans. Benjamin Jowett (London: Clarendon Press, 1881), 3. On life as a journey, see Samuel Chew,
The Pilgrimage of Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962); Elizabeth Sears,
The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Thomas R. Cole,
The Journey
of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Demos,
Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Michael Kammen, “Changing Perceptions of the Life Cycle in American Thought and Culture,”
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society
91 (1979): 34–66; and Michael Kammen,
A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons
in American Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

14.
Francis Bacon,
A History of Life and Death
(London, 1638).

15.
When Noah Webster published a collection of aphorisms in 1786, he quoted Samuel Johnson’s “He that embarks in the voyage of life, will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind, than the strokes of the oar,” and, on the same page, offered this proverb: “The great art of life is to play for much, and stake little.” The two
ideas—that life is a game and that life is a voyage—fit together only awkwardly. Are you at the whim of the wind, or are you calculating your odds? Noah Webster,
A
Grammatical Institute
of the English Language
(Hartford, CT, 1786), 38. John Bunyan,
The Pilgrim’s Progress: From This World to That Which Is to Come
(London, 1678).

16.
Benjamin Franklin,
Poor Richard’s Almanack
(Philadelphia, 1740).

17.
R. C. Bell,
Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations
(London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 14.

18.
Nathaniel Cotton,
Visions for the Entertainment and Instruction of Young Minds
(Exeter, NH, 1794).

19.
On the game’s early use in the United States, see H.S.,
The History of the Davenport Family
(Boston, 1798), 30. On playing it as late as the 1870s, see Rose Terry Cooke, “Thanksgiving Then,”
Independent
, November 27, 1873, 1485–86.

20.
The first Mansion of Happiness was the New, Moral and Entertaining Game of the Mansion of Happiness, printed by Robert Laurie and James Whittle in October 1800.

21.
Frederick H. Quitman,
Evangelical Catechism
(Hudson, NY, 1814), 107.

22.
T. Newton, The New Game of the Mansion of Bliss: In Verse (London, 1810), 13.

23.
E.g., “On her arms she wore the bracelets of her friend, and suspended from her bosom the picture of Mr. Severs—that bosom the mansion of bliss, the fruition of peace which virtue alone can bestow.” Miss Hatfield,
She Lives in Hopes; Or, Caroline
(Wilmington, DE, 1802), 164.

24.
Catalogue of Books for Sale and Circulation by Charles Peirce at His Brick Book-store, in . . . Portsmouth, New Hampshire
(Portsmouth, NH, 1806), 91; “A New Game for Children,”
Boston Recorder
, December 7, 1843. For sales, see Lewis, “The Mansion of Happiness.” Whether the Mansion of Happiness is America’s first board game or its second is a matter of some debate. In any event, it was Ives’s
Mansion of Happiness that inaugurated what is generally known as the golden age of American board games. See also: Margaret K. Hofer,
The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003); David Wallace Adams and Victor Edmunds, “Making Your Move: The Educational Significance of the American Board Game, 1832 to 1904,”
History of Education Quarterly
17 (1977): 359–83.

25.
John Milton,
Paradise Lost
(London, 1674), books 1 and 3.

26.
The Mansion of Happiness (Salem, MA, 1843). In the possession of the author.

27.
Shea,
It’s All in the Game
, 27.

28.
Ruth Schwart Cowan,
A Social History of American Technology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 138, 210. Miller,
The Mind in America;
or see him cited in David E. Nye,
American Technological Sublime
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). James Mill,
History of British India
(1817; London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1820), 1:353.
Thomas J. Misa,
Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 101–18. On “men of progress,” see Jill Lepore,
A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States
(New York: Knopf, 2002), epilogue.

29.
Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,”
Edinburgh Review
, 1829.

30.
On the shape of life, see Demos,
Circles and Lines.
On modernity and historical consciousness, see Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,”
American Historical Review
89 (October 1984): 909–28.

31.
Jacob Bigelow,
Elements of Technology
(Boston, 1829). See also Leo Marx, “The Idea of ‘Technology’ and Postmodern Pessimism,” in
Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma
of Technological Determinism
, eds. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 237–58; Leo Marx and Bruce
Mazlish, eds.,
Progress: Fact or Illusion
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and Leo Marx,
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

32.
Jacob Bigelow,
An Address on the Limits of Education
(Boston, 1865), 4.

33.
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden and Resistance to Civil Government
, ed. William Rossi (New York: Norton, 1992), 35–73.

34.
Review of
Walden
in the New York
Churchman
, September 2, 1854, in
Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews
, ed. Joel Myerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 382. Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 15.

35.
Shea,
It’s All in the Game
, 35–38. See also “Said Pasha,”
Littell’s Living Age
, November 10, 1855.

36.
“The game Tapley brought to the lamp-lighted table was a very old one, apparently, and made in England,” a biographer of Bradley once wrote. “It was played on a board with oval discs, like several English and European games.” This is a good description of the Mansion of Bliss. “After a week of working steadily, Bradley believed he had
perfected his game. But what would he call it? Studying the checkered pattern of the game on his rolltop desk, he thought that it was like the design of his life and the life of nearly everyone he knew: checkered, hazardous, uncertain in its outcome. Life was like a game, and a game—a good game—must be like life itself. You subscribed to fixed rules, you recognized the element of chance, and you exercised all the skill and judgment you possessed to
win
it.
He would call it ‘The Checkered Game of Life.’ ” Shea,
It’s All in the Game
, 47–49.

37.
Benjamin Franklin, “The Morals of Chess,”
Columbian Magazine
1 (December 1786): 159–61.

38.
C. Borr. Von Miltitz,
The Game of Life; or, The Chess-Players
(Boston, 1837). Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, “The Coquette; Or, The Game of Life,”
Graham’s Magazine of Literature and Art
, January 1843, 24. “The Web Spun,”
Liberator
, July 28, 1848, 118. Lieutenant Murray, “The Duke’s Prize,”
chapter 4,
Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion
, July 15, 1854, 19. W.T., “The Game of Chess,”
New Mirror
, Septem-ber 30, 1843, 408. Near the end of the Civil War,
Harper’s
printed a version of Retszch’s engraving in which Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, plays against Uncle Sam, watched over by the “Goddess of Liberty” (“Check-Mate,”
Harper’s Weekly
,
June 3, 1865, 337). “What a perfect chequer-board is this same game of life,” wrote an essayist in 1854; “the various vicissitudes of life make up the chequered field, ourselves the wooden ‘men.’ ”

39.
Benjamin Franklin,
Autobiography
, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: Norton, 1986).

40.
Shea,
It’s All in the Game
, 50–52.

41.
Christian Union
, January 10, 1872, 62.

42.
Milton Bradley, “Social Game,” U.S. Patent 53,561.

43.
Thoreau,
Walden
, 221.

44.
Milton Bradley, The Checkered Game of Life (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Company, 1866), Games Collection, Box 1, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA.

45.
Mark Twain, “The Revised Catechism,”
New York Tribune
, September 27, 1871.

46.
Mel Taft, telephone interview with author, November 3, 2006. Reuben Klamer, who designed the 1960 game, told me he had never played the Mansion of Happiness, although when I visited
Hasbro, the Mansion of Happiness was hanging in a frame on a wall. Reuben Klamer, telephone interview with author, June 7, 2006. Reuben Klamer to the author, July 14, 2006.
On the development of the 1960 game, see also
The Milton Bradley Company 100th Anniversary
(East Longmeadow, MA: Milton Bradley Company, 1960), an advertising supplement, which also contains a good history of the company; this supplement was printed separately but was also inserted into the
Springfield Sunday Republican
, February 21, 1960.