Showing posts with label History of games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History of games. Show all posts

Free Printable Vintage Illustration for Mixed-Media Collage, Journaling, Papercrafts or Wall Art: Victorian Children Playing Blind Man's Buff, 1875

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
Mahatma Gandhi

A black and white engraving from an 1875 issue of Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine in my personal collection. This antique illustration shows a group of five Victorian children playing Blind Man's Buff.

Blind man's buff or blind man's bluff is a variant of tag in which the player who is "It" is blindfolded. The traditional name of the game is "blind man's buff," where the word buff is used in its older sense of a small push. A version of the game was played in ancient Greece where it was called "copper mosquito." The game was played in the Tudor period, as there are references to its recreation by Henry VIII's courtiers. It was also a popular parlor game in the Victorian era. The poet Robert Herrick mentions it, along with sundry related pastimes, in his 1624 poem "A New Yeares Gift Sent to Sir Simeon Steward":
That tells of Winters Tales and Mirth,
That Milk-Maids make about the hearth,
Of Christmas sports, the Wassell-boule,
That tost up, after Fox-i' th' hole:
Of Blind-man-buffe, and of the care
That young men have to shooe the Mare
Source: Wikimedia

The illustration is free to download for use in mixed-media collage, journaling, and various papercrafts projects or simply print and frame as wall art. You can find the high-res 11" x 8.5" @ 300 ppi JPEG without a watermark here.

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All digitized work by The Real Victorian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Please link back to RealVictorian.com as your source when sharing or publishing.

Victorian Childhood Games: Cat's Cradle

This illustration and the accompanying description of a popular Victorian childhood game of Cat's Cradle was taken from an 1875 issue of Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine.
I know this doesn't really have any relevance to the game but a phrase in the article (which I highlighted above) jumped out at me as I was reading it: "Shades of Verstegan - living soul of Richard Grant White, come to our rescue!" I find the sentence rather intriguing - I don't think I've ever read or heard anyone use that phrase before. Isn't it marvelously Victorian? I'm still hazy as to what it actually means! If anyone could shed some light on that turn of phrase? I would be delighted if you do.

Quick links to characters named:
[1] Verstegan
[2] Richard Grant White

For those who have not actually played Cat's Cradle before and would be interested in the steps, here is an easy-to-follow Youtube video from MomsMinivan:



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All digitized work by Victorian Trends.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Free for personal use only. Please link back to VictorianTrends.com as your source when sharing or publishing.