ABSTRACT

Charles Dickens lamented the flourishing trade in lottery tickets in nineteenth-century Amsterdam. The Dutch upper class also expressed their concern about the gaming habits of ordinary citizens and advocated the discontinuance of the state lottery. Gaming in various forms had long before then found fertile soil in the prosperous Low Countries, which had been shaped by both mercantile capitalism and Calvinistic morality. The tension between a religious attitude to life and a capitalistic existence characterised the cultural climate and cultural politics of the time, dominated by affluent burghers.