At the Haymarket theatre, in 1791, a comedy, called the “School for Arrogance,” was produced with a prologue spoken in the character of a news-hawker, with the Lottery as one of the topics of intelligence.
After sounding, and calling “Great News!” without; he enters with a postman’s horn, newspapers, cap and livery.
Great news! here’s money lent on bond, rare news!
By honest, tender-hearted, christian jews!
Here are promotions, dividends, rewards,
A list of bankrupts, and of new made lords.
Here the debates at length are, for the week;
And here the deaf and dumb are taught to speak.
Here Hazard, Goodluck, Shergold, and a band
Of gen’rous gentlemen, whose hearts expand
With honour, rectitude, and public spirit,
Equal in high desert, with equal merit,
Divide their tickets into shares and quarters;
And here’s a servant-maid found hanging in her garters!
Here! here’s the fifty thousand, sold at ev’ry shop!
And here’s the “Newgate Calendar”—and drop.
Rare news! strange news! extraordinary news!
Who would not give three halfpence to peruse?
Shergolds seem to have persisted in a course of attempts to evade the law, by a peculiar mode of dividing and insuring tickets; but in Michaelmas term, 1791, the question was argued in the court of King’s-bench on a special verdict, whether the sellers of their receipts were liable to be apprehended and committed as vagrants under the Lottery act, and the court determined, that they were vagrants within the true intent of the act.
Insuring.
In February, 1793, the commissioners of the Lottery, in order to abate insuring, determined that no persons should be suffered to take down numbers, except the clerks of licensed offices known to the commissioners: no slips were to be sent out; but the numbers were to be taken down by one clerk in one book; Steel’s list of lottery numbers was to be abolished, and a recompence made for it; and the magistrates resolved to apprehend all suspicious persons who should be seen taking early numbers.[481]
Yet, in 1796, we find “a class of sharpers, who take Lottery Insurances,” and that this gambling, among the higher and middling ranks, was carried on to an extent exceeding all credibility, producing consequences to many private families, of great worth and respectability, of the most distressing nature.—Mr. Colquhoun represents them as “a class, in general, of very depraved or distressed characters, who keep unlicensed insurance offices, during the drawing of the English and Irish Lotteries;” many of whom, during the intervals of such lotteries, had recently invented and set up private lotteries, or wheels, called little goes, containing blanks and prizes, which were drawn for the purpose of establishing a ground for insurance, and producing incalculable mischiefs, inasmuch as the rage and mania were so rooted, from habit and a spirit of gaming, that no domestic pressure, and no consideration, connected either with the frauds that were practised, or the number of chances against them, would operate as a check upon the minds of the infatuated. The criminal agents felt no want of customers. The houses and offices were not only extremely numerous all over the metropolis, but in general high rented, exhibiting the appearance of considerable expense, and barricadoed in such a manner with iron doors and other contrivances as, in many instances, to defy the arm of the law. A considerable portion of their emoluments was traced to have been derived from menial servants in general; but particularly the male and female domestics in the houses of men of fashion and fortune, who were said, almost without a single exception, to be in the constant habit of insuring in the English and Irish Lotteries.
Such persons, with a spirit of gambling rendered more ardent than prevails in common life, from the example of their superiors, and from their idle and dissipated habits, entered keenly into the Lottery business; and when ill luck attended them were often led, step by step, to that point where they lost sight of moral principle, and were impelled, by desire of regaining what they had lost, to sell or pawn the property of their masters, whenever it could be pilfered so as to elude detection; and this species of peculation sometimes terminated in more atrocious crimes.