The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  13. Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (London: Clarendon Press, 1881), 3. On life as a journey, see Samuel Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962); Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Demos, Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Michael Kammen, “Changing Perceptions of the Life Cycle in American Thought and Culture,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 91 (1979): 34–66; and Michael Kammen, A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  14. Francis Bacon, A History of Life and Death (London, 1638).

  15. When Noah Webster published a collection of aphorisms in 1786, he quoted Samuel Johnson’s “He that embarks in the voyage of life, will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind, than the strokes of the oar,” and, on the same page, offered this proverb: “The great art of life is to play for much, and stake little.” The two ideas—that life is a game and that life is a voyage—fit together only awkwardly. Are you at the whim of the wind, or are you calculating your odds? Noah Webster, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (Hartford, CT, 1786), 38. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: From This World to That Which Is to Come (London, 1678).

  16. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (Philadelphia, 1740).

  17. R. C. Bell, Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 14.

  18. Nathaniel Cotton, Visions for the Entertainment and Instruction of Young Minds (Exeter, NH, 1794).

  19. On the game’s early use in the United States, see H.S., The History of the Davenport Family (Boston, 1798), 30. On playing it as late as the 1870s, see Rose Terry Cooke, “Thanksgiving Then,” Independent, November 27, 1873, 1485–86.

  20. The first Mansion of Happiness was the New, Moral and Entertaining Game of the Mansion of Happiness, printed by Robert Laurie and James Whittle in October 1800.

  21. Frederick H. Quitman, Evangelical Catechism (Hudson, NY, 1814), 107.

  22. T. Newton, The New Game of the Mansion of Bliss: In Verse (London, 1810), 13.

  23. E.g., “On her arms she wore the bracelets of her friend, and suspended from her bosom the picture of Mr. Severs—that bosom the mansion of bliss, the fruition of peace which virtue alone can bestow.” Miss Hatfield, She Lives in Hopes; Or, Caroline (Wilmington, DE, 1802), 164.

  24. Catalogue of Books for Sale and Circulation by Charles Peirce at His Brick Book-store, in . . . Portsmouth, New Hampshire (Portsmouth, NH, 1806), 91; “A New Game for Children,” Boston Recorder, December 7, 1843. For sales, see Lewis, “The Mansion of Happiness.” Whether the Mansion of Happiness is America’s first board game or its second is a matter of some debate. In any event, it was Ives’s Mansion of Happiness that inaugurated what is generally known as the golden age of American board games. See also: Margaret K. Hofer, The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003); David Wallace Adams and Victor Edmunds, “Making Your Move: The Educational Significance of the American Board Game, 1832 to 1904,” History of Education Quarterly 17 (1977): 359–83.

  25. John Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1674), books 1 and 3.

  26. The Mansion of Happiness (Salem, MA, 1843). In the possession of the author.

  27. Shea, It’s All in the Game, 27.

  28. Ruth Schwart Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 138, 210. Miller, The Mind in America; or see him cited in David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). James Mill, History of British India (1817; London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1820), 1:353. Thomas J. Misa, Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 101–18. On “men of progress,” see Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002), epilogue.

  29. Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” Edinburgh Review, 1829.

  30. On the shape of life, see Demos, Circles and Lines. On modernity and historical consciousness, see Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (October 1984): 909–28.

  31. Jacob Bigelow, Elements of Technology (Boston, 1829). See also Leo Marx, “The Idea of ‘Technology’ and Postmodern Pessimism,” in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, eds. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 237–58; Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

  32. Jacob Bigelow, An Address on the Limits of Education (Boston, 1865), 4.

  33. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William Rossi (New York: Norton, 1992), 35–73.

  34. Review of Walden in the New York Churchman, September 2, 1854, in Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Joel Myerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 382. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 15.

  35. Shea, It’s All in the Game, 35–38. See also “Said Pasha,” Littell’s Living Age, November 10, 1855.

  36. “The game Tapley brought to the lamp-lighted table was a very old one, apparently, and made in England,” a biographer of Bradley once wrote. “It was played on a board with oval discs, like several English and European games.” This is a good description of the Mansion of Bliss. “After a week of working steadily, Bradley believed he had perfected his game. But what would he call it? Studying the checkered pattern of the game on his rolltop desk, he thought that it was like the design of his life and the life of nearly everyone he knew: checkered, hazardous, uncertain in its outcome. Life was like a game, and a game—a good game—must be like life itself. You subscribed to fixed rules, you recognized the element of chance, and you exercised all the skill and judgment you possessed to win it. He would call it ‘The Checkered Game of Life.’ ” Shea, It’s All in the Game, 47–49.

  37. Benjamin Franklin, “The Morals of Chess,” Columbian Magazine 1 (December 1786): 159–61.

  38. C. Borr. Von Miltitz, The Game of Life; or, The Chess-Players (Boston, 1837). Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, “The Coquette; Or, The Game of Life,” Graham’s Magazine of Literature and Art, January 1843, 24. “The Web Spun,” Liberator, July 28, 1848, 118. Lieutenant Murray, “The Duke’s Prize,” chapter 4, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 15, 1854, 19. W.T., “The Game of Chess,” New Mirror, Septem-ber 30, 1843, 408. Near the end of the Civil War, Harper’s printed a version of Retszch’s engraving in which Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, plays against Uncle Sam, watched over by the “Goddess of Liberty” (“Check-Mate,” Harper’s Weekly, June 3, 1865, 337). “What a perfect chequer-board is this same game of life,” wrote an essayist in 1854; “the various vicissitudes of life make up the chequered field, ourselves the wooden ‘men.’ ”

  39. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: Norton, 1986).

  40. Shea, It’s All in the Game, 50–52.

  41. Christian Union, January 10, 1872, 62.

  42. Milton Bradley, “Social Game,” U.S. Patent 53,561.

  43. Thoreau, Walden, 221.

  44. Milton Bradley, The Checkered Game of Life (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Company, 1866), Games Collection, Box 1, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA.

  45. Mark Twain, “The Revised Catechism,” New York Tribune, September 27, 1871.

  46. Mel Taft, teleph
one interview with author, November 3, 2006. Reuben Klamer, who designed the 1960 game, told me he had never played the Mansion of Happiness, although when I visited Hasbro, the Mansion of Happiness was hanging in a frame on a wall. Reuben Klamer, telephone interview with author, June 7, 2006. Reuben Klamer to the author, July 14, 2006. On the development of the 1960 game, see also The Milton Bradley Company 100th Anniversary (East Longmeadow, MA: Milton Bradley Company, 1960), an advertising supplement, which also contains a good history of the company; this supplement was printed separately but was also inserted into the Springfield Sunday Republican, February 21, 1960.

  47. The Game of Life (East Longmeadow, MA: Hasbro, 1994). In the possession of the author. Hasbro Games Division, interviews with author, February 5, 2007.

  48. The Game of Life: Twists and Turns (Pawtucket, RI: Hasbro, 2007). In the possession of the author.

  49. Amy Johannes, “Child Advocates Call New Hasbro/Visa Deal ‘Sleazy,’ ” Promo, March 9, 2007, http://promomagazine.com/news/

  child_advocates_hasbro_visa_deal_030907/.

  50. George Burtch, interview with the author, February 5, 2007.

  51. Thoreau, Walden, 36.

  52. See www.secondlife.com.

  53. Before he left his games business to more ambitious men, Bradley had another big hit, just after the Civil War, with croquet, whose rules he patented and whose equipment manufacture he perfected while a fever for the game swept the nation, on the merits of the claim that croquet was just like life. E.g., “Croquet is the game of life, you see,” says a character in a Harriet Beecher Stowe novel in 1871 (“My Wife and I,” Christian Union, August 9, 1871; the reference is to chapter 32).

  54. On this subject, see Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

  55. Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth (San Francisco: 1879; London, 1884), 5. Edward Wiebé, The Paradise of Childhood (Springfield, MA: Bradley, 1887). See also Jennifer L. Snyder, “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s Contributions to Kindergarten and Art Education in the Context of His Time,” EdD diss., Florida State University, 2005.

  56. Shea, It’s All in the Game, especially chapter 9; quote from 180.

  Chapter 1. HATCHED

  1. “Drama of Life Before Birth,” Life, April 30, 1965. Readings of these photographs include Meredith W. Michaels, “Fetal Galaxies: Some Questions About What We See,” in Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions, ed. Lynn M. Morgan and Meredith W. Michaels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 113–32; Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn, trans. Lee Hoinacki (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), chapter 2; and Valerie Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), chapter 3. For a broader and influential analysis of related images, see Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989). Related readings include Susan Merrill Squier, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technologies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). Nilsson’s photographs were not actually unprecedented, as the editorial department at Life acknowledged, at least in internal memos, when readers wrote in to remark on this fact. See, e.g., Mabel Foust to Editorial Reference, memo, May 18, 1965, Lennart Nilsson file, Time Inc. Archives, New York.

  2. The editors at Life considered this feature the latest in a series of exposés about human reproduction, beginning with the publication of still shots from The Birth of a Baby in 1938, and which I discuss in chapter 3. J. McQuiston to Life index, “Human Reproduction,” memo, May 10, 1965, “Birth of a Baby” file, Time Inc. Archives. Lennart Nilsson, A Child Is Born: The Drama of Life Before Birth in Unprecedented Photographs (New York: Delacorte Press, 1965), with text by Axel Ingelman-Sunderg and Claes Wirsén. Display ad, New York Times, May 2, 1966.

  3. The fetus on the cover, the editors wrote, “was photographed just after it had to be surgically removed from its mother’s womb at the age of 4½ months. Though scientists hope some day to be able to keep such early babies alive, this one did not survive.” “Drama of Life Before Birth,” Life, April 30, 1965.

  4. “The Unborn Plaintiff,” Time, April 30, 1965.

  5. Nilsson himself kept his distance from the abortion debate, including in 1990, when another series of his photographs of embryos was published in Life. Asked when life begins, he said, “Look at the pictures. I am not the man who shall decide when human life started. I am a reporter. I am a photographer.” Ray Kerrison, “Backdrop to Bush’s Court Selection,” New York Post, July 25, 1990.

  6. The classic account is Joseph Needham, A History of Embryology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1975). But see also John Farley, Gametes & Spores: Ideas About Sexual Reproduction, 1750–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Matthew Cobb, Generation: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Clara Correia, The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); F. J. Cole, Early Theories of Sexual Generation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); Elizabeth Gasking, Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828 (London: Hutchinson, 1967); Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1984); and, especially, Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1–41.

  7. Page Smith and Charles Daniel, The Chicken Book (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 45, 169–70. For another take on philosophy and poultry, see Steven Shapin, “The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge,” in Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 237–58.

  8. Needham, History of Embryology, 22, 25; and Smith and Daniel, Chicken Book, chapter 1.

  9. A short history of efforts at measurement, along with the sand illustration, can be found in Carl G. Hartman, “How Large Is the Mammalian Egg?, ” Quarterly Review of Biology 4 (1929): 373–88.

  10. See Fabricius of Aquapendente, The Embryological Treatises of Hieronymus Fabricius of Aquapendente: The Formation of the Egg and of the Chick, The Formed Fetus, a facsimile edition edited and with an introduction, a translation, and a commentary by Howard B. Adelmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1942).

  11. Philip Barbour, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1:276, 128–29, xlv, 232–33. Captain John Smith, ed. James Horn (New York: Library of America, 2006), 1101. See also Jill Lepore, “Our Town,” New Yorker, April 2, 2007.

  12. The best biography of Harvey remains Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). But see also Emerson Thomas McMullen, William Harvey and the Use of Purpose in the Scientific Revolution (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), and Walter Pagel, William Harvey’s Biological Ideas (New York: S. Karger, 1967). Especially useful is John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1669–96), ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 1:297–301. For a gendered reading of the politics of Harvey’s theory of generation, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 155–63, and Eve Keller, “Making Up for Losses: The Workings of Gender in William Harvey’s De Generatione animalium,” in Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (Lexington
: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 34–56.

  13. William Harvey, The Generation of Living Creatures (London, 1653), especially “The Epistle Dedicatory”; Martin Lluelyn, “To the Incomparable Dr. Harvey,” prefatory poem to De Generatione animalium. On the language of wonder, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  14. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1:299. On his wife and the parrot, see Keynes, Life of Harvey, vii. Harvey thought the parrot was a cock, but when it died and he dissected it, he found an egg inside. McMullen, William Harvey and the Use of Purpose, 42.

  15. Thomas Reynalde, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, edited by Elaine Hobby (1550; repr., Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 186, 191. This form of diagnosis remained popular a century on; see Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (1671; repr., New York: Garland, 1985), 164.

  16. Harvey, Generation of Living Creatures, 2, 21, 25, 383, 390.

  17. Keynes, Life of Harvey, 387–89.

  18. Harvey, Generation of Living Creatures, 390, 391, 397, 430–31, 532. But see also Needham, History of Embryology, 133–34. On Harvey and James I and Charles I, see Christopher Hill, “William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy,” Past & Present 27 (1964): 54–72.

  19. Harvey, Generation of Living Creatures, 25, 390.

  20. For an invaluable account of what later came to be called the “scientific revolution,” see Steve Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  21. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1:300.

  22. Keller, “Making Up for Losses,” 43.

  23. Keynes, Life of Harvey, 344, 348, 368–70, 462.

  24. Lluelyn, “To the Incomparable Dr. Harvey.”