Book Reviews

Playing Games in NineteenthCentury Britain and America
Ann R. Hawkins, Erin N. Bistline, Catherine S. Blackwell, and Maura Ives, eds.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021. List ofillustrations, editors’ introduction, andindex. 383 pp. $95.00 hardcover. ISBN:
978143848910
What makes a good anthology? At themost basic level, edited collections should
cohere around a clear theme. Within thattheme, the individual articles shouldpresent material of interest to specialists
and the articles both individually andcollectively engage key scholarship andtreat topics of interest to the discipline.
A new edited volume, Playing Games inNineteenth-Century Britain and America,delves expertly into narrow slices of Victorian play culture, but the assembled pieces
only unevenly engage broader issues andscholarship important to the history ofgames, play, and culture.
All the articles sit squarely within theAnglo-American world of the long nineteenth century. The editors take a capacious view of play, with essays on topics
ranging from pastimes of the parlor tosports of the open field. The contrast ingoing from chapters on fox hunting andboxing to pieces on charades and board
games seems sometimes staccato, but therange of topics also ensures a pleasantvariation.
Section 2 on “Communal Games”
proves the strongest of the book. Sean
Grass sensitively analyzes play in the writings of Charles Dickens, especially Great
Expectations. In the process, he explores
play’s role in confronting and dealing withtrauma, insights that many scholars ofplay—not just Dickens experts—will findthought provoking. Catherine Blackwellexpertly teases out the roiling sexual politics that sometimes simmered under thedecorous surface of croquet, where a wellturned ankle might distract and petticoats
and crinolines could provide cover forcheating. Heather Frey’s close reading ofa diary account of an evening of charadesin the household of Victorian fantasist
George McDonald plumbs the meaningof this play acting for insights into genderroles and expectations. Although, technically, it falls outside the strict bounds ofthe nineteenth century and the scope ofthe book, I would have loved to see her
explore Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel Houseof Mirth, in which Lily Bart’s star and starcrossed performance in a tableaux vivanteencapsulates just the sort of genderedjudgments that Frey discusses aroundplaying charades.
Specialists in particular subjects willfind other articles in the book useful.
Megan Norcia’s essay on games related tothe 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition deftly
probes how the art, text, and play of theseboard games reinforced dreams of empire
and ordered the world along coloniallines. Andrew Rhoda makes a case for theimportance of Louis Hoffman in the history of magic and puzzles. In other essays,I learned much about toy theaters and thecard game called Authors.
And yet the book missed opportunities to engage some of the most exciting
current work on the history of games andplay. Most contributors come from theworld of English criticism and read games
as essentially literary texts, often interpretively guided by theorists such as Benedict
Anderson and Michel Foucault. The essays

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P L AYtend to focus rather minutely on individual words and pictures in the games
themselves without offering wider insights
into their production, reception, or place
within the broader market economy of thetrans-Atlantic world. These close textual
analyses often left me wanting some ofthe structural investigations of publishing, business, and readership that have soenergized the history of the book for thelast three decades. How were these games
made? What sort of businesses purveyed
them? What did players think of them?
Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century
Britain and America also seems oddly disconnected from the boom in game studies
over the last twenty years. At times theselacunae seemed especially strange. The
book’s introduction, for example, offersa lengthy list of museums and libraries
who are collecting and exhibiting boardgames—citing the Grand Rapids Public
Museum’s 2020 LaughFest and the ability
to play historic games at Stuhr Museumof the Prairie Pioneer in Grand Island,Nebraska—but for some reason it does
not mention the Strong National Museumof Play’s collection of board games, likely
the most comprehensive in the world (andwhose holdings one contributor cited as
being vital for her research).
The articles also lacked engagementwith important game scholarship ofrecent years. An article on the history ofwar games, for example, didn’t mention
Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World or Pat
Harrigan and Matthew Kirschenbaum’sedited collection Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming. And there was little or
no reference to scholars exploring games
not just as texts but also as ludic objects.
Here the insights of authors such as Paul

Booth, Mia Consalvo, and Mary Flanagan
might have been helpful. A game, after all,while containing elements of literature andart, is fundamentally a play device, and it
needs to be read in ways that foregroundthe play.
In the end, scholars seeking information on particular nineteenth-century
games and play forms will find individual
articles quite valuable, but the book as
a whole could have entered into deeper
conversation with the latest scholarshipon play and games.
—Jon-Paul C. Dyson, The Strong, Rochester, NY

The Hidden Politics ofChildren’s Online Spaces,
Virtual Worlds, andConnected Games
Sara M. Grimes
Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto
Press, 2021. Acknowledgments, notes,bibliography, and index. 358 pp. $44.95
paper. ISBN: 9781442615564
In The Hidden Politics of Children’s Online
Spaces, Virtual Worlds, and Connected
Games, Sara M. Grimes explores virtualworlds, online spaces, and connected
games in a new light. In the author’s own
words, “The objective of this book is toprovide such a vantage point through an
in-depth critical exploration of the present and history of children’s connected(online, networked, or otherwise webenabled) games—what they look like,how they operate, who makes them, whoregulates them, and what they are used for