A Jane Austen Themed Package

Lottery is a game of chance not skill. The rule of this game are included in Hoyles Games of 1817:

The cards being shuffled and cut by the left hand person, one dealer gives every person a card, face down, for the prize, on which is to be placed different values of counters from the pool, at the option of the person to whom each card has been given.

The second dealer then delivers to each player from the other pack, a card for the ticket. Next the cards are turned, by order of the manager, and whoever happens to have a corresponding card takes the prize upon the card dealt to him and those remaining undrawn, are returned to the hand…..

Just the sort of game to engross Lydia, a girl not known for her towering intellect.

For gaming counters at Mrs Phillips’s Meryton home, we understand that the company used “fish”:

Elizabeth went away with her head full of him. She could think of nothing but of Mr. Wickham, and of what he had told her, all the way home; but there was not time for her even to mention his name as they went, for neither Lydia nor Mr. Collins were once silent. Lydia talked incessantly of lottery tickets, of the fish she had lost and the fish she had won; Mr. Collins, in describing the civility of Mr. and Mrs. Philips, protesting that he did not in the least regard his losses at whist, enumerating all the dishes at supper, and repeatedly fearing that he crowded his cousins, had more to say than he could well manage before the carriage stopped at Longbourn House.

(Chapter 16)

A George III 1806 half penny, 3 antique mother of pearl gaming fish [also can be used as a thread winder] probably mid 19th C Chinese, a small early 20th C red leather purse all wrapped up in a reproduction of a 1940s cover of Pride & Prejudice.

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