The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims. Volume 1 (of 2)

The great 19th-century obsession with gambling comes alive in this vivid social history, where Steinmetz documents the seduction of the gaming table across centuries and continents. With the moral fervor of a Victorian preacher and the eye for detail of a fine journalist, he catalogs the ruins: aristocrats beggared overnight, clergymen defrocked for pilfering the collection plate, merchants trading their inheritances for a turn of the card. The scope stretches from ancient Rome to Steinmetz's own England and France, tracing how the same desperate hope that "this time will be different" has ruined the same types of people for millennia. This is neither dry history nor sensationalist melodrama, but something more fascinating: a window into an era that saw gambling as a plague upon the soul of civilization, and wanted desperately to understand why otherwise rational people would destroy everything for a game.