The Mansion of Happiness Read Free Page B

Mansion of Bliss and the Mansion of Happiness, were both produced in England beginning around 1800. 20 They look a lot like the New Game of Human Life: spiral race games adapted to the pilgrimage of life. Both represent immortality, life’s final destination, as a heavenly mansion; this was then a popular Christian conceit, taken from John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” “O Lord! deliver us from sin,” prayed one American evangelical in 1814, “and when we shall have finished our earthly course, admit us to the mansion of bliss and happiness.” 21 Or, as the rules to the Mansion of Bliss had it:
                   
Who enter the mansion of bliss
,
                   
Will have cause to rejoice at his claim;
                   
So well has he travell’d thro’ life
,
                   
He has happily ended the game.
22
    In the United States, the Mansion of Bliss never really made a mark, maybe because the phrase “the mansion of bliss” was also used by Americans to refer to an especially alluring woman’s breasts. 23 But the Mansion of Happiness, the most popular board game in Britain, had an extraordinarily successful American career. It was sold in the United States at least as early as 1806. In 1843, an American edition, based on revisions to the English game made byAnne Wales Abbott, the editor of a Boston-based juvenile magazine called the
Child’s Friend
, was offered byW. and S. B. Ives, a printing company in Salem. In ten months, Ives sold nearly four thousand of what went on to become the century’s most enduring game. It became a staple of Victorian parlors; it made its way west on the Overland Trail. 24
    The Mansion of Happiness is abundantly pious. Its rules begin:
                   
At this amusement each will find
                   
A moral fit t’improve the mind;
                   
It gives to those their proper due
,
                   
Who various paths of vice pursue
,
                   
And shows (while vice destruction brings)
                   
That good from every virtue springs.
                   
Be virtuous then and forward press
,
                   
To gain the seat of happiness.
    You can hear, in these lines, echoes of the earliest Puritan primers: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” And the last couplet alludes, quite particularly, to the beginning ofJohn Milton’s
Paradise Lost
(1667), in which Man waits for the son of God to “Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.” 25
    No game is more didactic: “At this amusement each will find / A moral fit t’improve the mind.” Whether it’s amusing is difficult to say. The Mansion of Happiness is hard to finish, mostly because the wages of sin are so harsh—“Whoever becomes a SABBATH BREAKER must be taken to the WHIPPING POST and whipt” (a retreat of six squares)—that you’re forever going backward and losing turns. However popular the Mansion of Happiness was with the parents who purchased it, the game boards that survive in archives are in such suspiciously good condition that at least one historian has wondered whether children—who must, invariably, have been given the game as a gift—could ever bear to play it. Its rules read like a sermon: “Whoever possesses AUDACITY, CRUELTY, IMMODESTY, or INGRATITUDE, must return to his former situation till his turn comes to spin again, and not even
think
of Happiness, much less partake of it.” 26
    Milton Bradley was born in Vienna, Maine, in 1836, two centuries afterDaniel Bradley crossed the Atlantic, by which time the Bradleys had not yet begun to think of happiness, much less partake of it. He was the great-great-grandson ofJonathan Bradley, one of the many members of theBradley family killed by Indians. He was his parents’ only son. He was named after the Puritan author of
Paradise Lost.
As a