Henry Hawley Smart’s The Great Tontine and the Art of Book-Making

Abstract

Although relatively neglected by the periodical press, Henry Hawley Smart’s fiction was reviewed in an unlikely forum, Chance and Luck (1887), in which Richard A. Proctor sought to demonstrate the immorality of gambling. This chapter will not only examine Smart’s fiction in the context of contemporary debates about gambling, but also with speculation in the literary marketplace at a time when Samuel Smiles suggested that a writer of popular literature could attain success essentially through making his own luck. This chapter argues that literary publishing, like the tontine, is a lottery played for an indefinite stake and that underpinning the narrative of The Great Tontine is a self-reflexive preoccupation on writing strategically for the literary marketplace of the mid-nineteenth century.