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CHAPTER THREE
    False as Dicers’ Oaths
    It is a curious feature in the career of a gambler at these “hells,” that he gets reconciled, apparently, to his degradation and downfall: though now and then a thought of happier days, and of what he might have been, flashes across his mind, and penetrates his heart with a desolate misery.
    â€” The London Literary Gazette (1827)
    I t was through such streets that Jack Thurtell made his way to his own abyss. More often than not, his destination was one or another of a class of houses in the vicinity of Piccadilly, the Haymarket, or the “Quadrant” at the south end of Regent Street. A handsome gas lamp illuminated the door. Going in, he would find himself in a passage that led to another door, thisone plated with iron and covered with green or red baize—the recognized hallmark of a gaming establishment. Such places were “appropriately denominated ‘hells,’” a contemporary writer said, and he believed that there were more of them in London than in any other city in the world.
    The “proprietors, or more properly speaking, the bankers of these houses of robbery,” according to an article in The Westminster Review , “are composed, for the most part, of a heterogeneous mass of worn-out gamblers, black legs, * pimps, horse-dealers, jockeys, valets, petty-fogging lawyers, low tradesmen, and have-been dealers at their own, or other houses.” They preyed upon rich and poor alike, but the rich were of course the most desirable victims. William Weare, in the prospectus for his Rouge et Noir establishment in Pall Mall, described the house as “a Select Club, to be composed of those gentlemen only whose habits and circumstances entitle them to an uncontrolled, but proper indulgence in the amusements of the day.” The grandees must indeed have laughed at the vulgarity of this; but the vulgarity was part of the fun. The larger gaming houses were gauchely fitted up “as a bait for the fortunes of the great.” Invitations to dinner were “sent to noblemen and gentlemen,” and those who accepted were “treated with every delicacy, and the most intoxicating wines.” After dinner, a “visit to the French hazard-table in the adjoining room” was “a matter of course.” A man “thus allured to the den, may determine not to lose more than the few pounds he has about him; but in the intoxication of the moment, and the delirium of play, it frequently happens that, notwithstanding the best resolves, he borrows money upon his checks, which being known to be good, are readily cashed to very considerable amounts. In thismanner, £10,000, £20,000, £30,000, or more, have often been swept away.” †
    It was in this Hogarthian atmosphere of luxury and dissipation, of great expectations and imminent ruin, that Thurtell attempted to retrieve his fallen fortunes. At the same time, he took the lease of a public house, the Black Boy in Long Acre between Drury Lane and Covent Garden, signing the document in the name of one of his brothers. (As an absconded bankrupt, he could hardly use his own name.) Thurtell’s motive in taking the Black Boy seems not to have been to make money, but rather to make a name for himself by creating a congenial resort for gaming men. He installed as barmaid one of his Norwich sweethearts, a girl with “a fine full figure” called Miss Dodson, and he was soon “hailed as a jolly good fellow” by those who came to sup with him or to drink of his “prime liquors.” The refreshment was “cheap and good,” one of his acquaintances remembered, and “a number of choice spirits in the town handled a knife and fork” at his table, or “took their glass in the evening” with him.
    Thurtell soon found himself in the clutches of the rankest gamesters of the metropolis, confederates of a mysterious Mr. Lemon, one of