… Gaming Playing Playing games was a crucial aspect of daily sociability especially among the aristocracy and the middle classes in the long eighteenth century as we can see from the numerous treatises and publications on the subject such as … For an analysis on how card games gradually became a mark of hospitality favouring social interactions among the middle classes see Janet E. Mullin, ‘“We Had Carding”: Hospitable Card Play and Polite Domestic Sociability among the Middling … of Art , 41.77.1, 1791. 6 . On that subject see Janet E. Mullin, A Sixpence at Whist: Gaming and the English Middle Classes, 1680-1830 (New York: The Boydell Press, 2015), p. 3-5. 7 . John Hayes, ‘Rowlandson, Thomas (1757-1827), artist’, …