tell it slant—
Success in Circuit
lies
Too bright/bold for our
infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb
surprise.37
In a reading compatible with my invocation of “operational figures” above, the “Success” to be attained in the task of learning historical truths lies in understanding the “Circuit” or regular routes that direct their flow—hence algorithmic readings that narrate a sphere of potentials in an effort to trace the underlying biases or schemas that give shape to action. At the same time, Dickinson’s “Circuit lies” are iterative attempts to get at the truth with an imperfect instrument. The “lies” of customary metaphor and idiomatic rhetoric—the sorts of things one must tap into in order to be understood—require one to hang a lantern on the “slant” one is taking in the effort. Dickinson suggests that these efforts be multiplied, layered over and again upon each other, since no single slant can capture the “superb surprise” of an inexhaustible wonder in the world. This intuition of inexhaustibility reflects the fact that the “truth” of a thing has more to do with our perspective on how it should be used—what it fits with—than on what it is. Any “thing” can always be used a different way, as Dickinson demonstrates through her redeployment of scraps from receipts, old envelopes, and lists as platforms for new pieces of linguistic art. As I’ve gestured at in my transcription, the manuscript in which this “poem” appears makes such a layered redeployment even more obvious: “bright” and “bold” sit right on top of each other, neither struck out (I’ve clumsily rendered this in type with a slash). One is invited to read one, then the other, in a kind of assay of meaning that is materially prohibited from pushing either word out of the picture. The truth is bright, bold, and—strangely but meaningfully—a kind of flashbulb palimpsest or harmonic concatenation: “bright-bold.” Much of Dickinson’s writing demands a similar concatenation on the level of its material experimentation: a letter is a poem is a collage is a letter-poem-collage. The artifact insists that you read a poem as if it weren’t a poem in a manner comparable to the invocation in conversation cards of a dialogue that both is and is not a conversation in the traditional sense. Would it be useful to imagine Dickinson’s work as “conversation cards” of a sort? As objects of exchange and gestural irony instead of lyric? Given the friendship Dickinson enjoyed with Samuel Bowles—the editor of the Springfield Republican who collaborated with Milton Bradley on some of his first projects in the same period—it might be more productive to imagine her work within the sphere of game making rather than on the firm ground of the “literary” that has traditionally defined it.38
Since books and games occupied overlapping worlds, an attentive approach to games becomes an opportunity to rethink our expectations about what literature was doing in this moment as well. Such a shifted perspective allows us to ask what some of the texts and authors at the center of our literary-critical traditions—texts I have selected for their solid familiarity in contrast to the historical amnesia that surrounds their ludic counterparts—could have been figuring in the more motion-driven operational domain highlighted and placed at issue by gameplay. To put it another way, by including canonical literature alongside native models of potential social interaction (that is, specific historical games), I hope to show that a common conversation was happening within and across media that did not, in their moment, occupy dramatically different registers. Given that some nineteenth-century designers thought games could “be made to inspire an early taste for a profitable class of reading,” one might reasonably ask what specific sets of social behaviors and arrangement practices gave special contour to this idea.39 Such declarations prompt us to the insight that reading and game playing might have been seen in a continuum that has since been lost, naturalized, or simply ruled out by the slow historical reifications of genre and the late nineteenth-century invention of “childhood”—a major event in the sense of a division between (adult/serious) reading and (childish) gameplay.40 The more games and books are drawn together, the more possible it becomes to unsettle the assumed reception of both and to see them, in Thomas Augst’s phrase, as “artifacts from the messy business of living.”41
Materials in Play
If the curious contrivances analyzed in this book were always an experiment in pleasurable social modeling, they were also, like Dickinson’s work, nearly always the result of an expanded view of material usage, a wide and slippery territory of transmedia objects constructed out of the raw materials most readily at hand. A different approach to considering the vast genre experimentation in nineteenth-century games would be to think of them instead as experiments in the affordances of media. While games of the mid-nineteenth century were undoubtedly in conversation with innovations in reform pedagogy, they were just as often answers to the question of what could or might be done with the light industrial materials that were circulating the U.S. mediascape in high quantities: paper and ink, leather and wood, india rubber and pasteboard.42 The material world of paper amusements, documentary object production, and communicative labor was incredibly porous in the nineteenth century.43 Meredith McGill has compellingly argued that reprinting—from pirated European works to modular recirculations of newspaper content—was part of the “horizon of the ordinary … a principle of organization” in the antebellum period.44 Building on this, we might say that “reprinting” was a principle predicated on a general ethos of “repurposing” and “reinvention” that spanned the antebellum and postbellum periods. Like the Silicon Valley programmers of our own time—many of whom draw upon vast libraries of existing software like APIs, development frameworks, and middleware to build new end products without reinventing the wheel—successful agents of this system were as likely to be defined by their capacity to reconfigure, reappropriate, and reimagine what already existed as much as make something entirely new. Calling cards, as I mentioned above, could become playing cards. Maps could become board games with a few lines added.45 And cardstock for traditional playing cards could be used to print less morally problematic pictorial matching games, which Bradley wryly points out “are nearly all copied after some of the old games or are combinations and modifications of them.”46 Some of this circulation was undoubtedly the result of technological and geographic proximities, an alliance indebted to quasi-centralized locales of production and distribution.
Walk down the bustling printers’ row on Washington Street in Boston on a day in early 1858 and you would encounter a vital entanglement of printers, ink sellers, stationers, binders, and dealers of paper goods that ranged from blank books and fill-in-the-blanks puzzles to visiting cards, playing cards, maps, and board games, alongside the “literary” books that have formed criticism’s primary objects of study.47 Boundaries between different forms of media were persistently crossed and interleaved. Gould & Lincoln, which worked with the American Tract Society and primarily published religious pieces and year-end scientific anthologies, also published a stand-alone version of one of the first commercial Mad Libs–type games in the country. Anne Abbot’s breakout game of family grouping, Dr. Busby (1843), was ported into some of the earliest attempts at literary crossover publishing, as both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) were converted into similar card games that were sold around the corner from the shop of John Punchard Jewett, the original publisher of both best-selling novels.48 Jewett got his own start in Salem selling “new games” like Abbot’s alongside pictorial bibles, almanacs, and gift annuals before moving his business to Boston.49 And when he moved out of his location at 117 Washington Street in 1858, it was William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, publishers of the tangram-like “Geometrical Puzzle for the Young,” that moved from three doors down to take over his supplies.50
Anne Wales Abbot, arguably the United States’ first homegrown commercial game designer, would parlay her
