Victorian Pleasures: The Liman Collection of 19th-Century American Board and Table Top Games

Victorian Pleasures: American Board and Table Games of the 19th Century from the Liman Collection presents games that people played in 19th-century America, reflecting the moral and social values of the time, in an exhibition of items borrowed from one of the nation's premier collections.

About 200 games, blocks and puzzles will be shown in the first major public exhibition ever from the antique game collection of Ellen Liman, who made her first purchase 10 years ago—a map puzzle for $6 at a garage sale. "I respond to the visual beauty of the games," said Mrs. Liman, a painter, decorator and author whose collection today numbers hundreds of items. "They're delicate relics, small works of art."

Many of the games, beautifully engraved and hand-colored or chromolithographed, were produced by entrepreneurs who became industry giants -- George, Charles and Edward Parker, the Parker Brothers who created Monopoly, and Milton Bradley, who turned to games after producing hundreds of thousands of Abraham Lincoln lithographs, only to see them become useless paper when the candidate grew a beard.

Many have charming names like "The Mansion of Happiness," "The Checkered Game of Life," "The Sociable Telephone," "How Silas Popped the Question" and Mrs. Liman's favorite, "The Majestic Game of the Asiatic Ostrich." While the games show how 19th-century Americans spent their precious leisure hours, they also illustrate "the moral and intellectual values of a culture," write Ms. Kayyem and Mr. Sternberger in an exhibition catalogue. "Games also help to fix and define those values," they say.

Games in the exhibition correspond to many of the historical, cultural and educational upheavals of the era—the war of 1812, the civil War, Western expansion—and mirror the enormous commercial, educational and technological advances of the century. They also reflect changing morality and the progress from an agrarian to an industrial and urban economy. "The Mansion of Happiness," the first American board game to achieve wide popularity after its introduction in 1843, "boldly espouses the causes of Christian goodness," the writers note. Players move through spaces illustrated with virtues like piety and chastity and vices like passion or immodesty to attain the otherwordly mansion at the center of the board.

By the middle of the century, "The Checkered Game of Life" shifted the goal of life from one of moral success to the pursuit of wealth. "The idea of accumulation of points or wealth leading to success reflects a change in the 19th-century conception of achievement, exemplified by the dominant theme of the popular Horatio Alger novel," Ms. Kayyem and Mr. Sternberger write.

Games based on a thriving American business climate, like "Banking" and "The Game of District Messenger Boy or Merit Rewarded," were popular in the second half of the century, as were games about inventions, travel and expansion, like "Railroad" and "Peter Coddle's Trip to New York," which depicted modern buildings and new monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Conversation and fortune-telling games offered informal social contact in a society where codes of behavior were strict. A growing interest in the development of children, created by new child-rearing manuals, launched a market for word and spelling games, blocks and puzzles—the country's first mass market educational toys.

Barbara Novak, Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of Art History at Barnard College, who is advising the student-curators, calls the show "exquisite."

"It's really a double whammy," she said in a recent interview. "The games are visually stunning, like old Valentines. And they expand our understanding of the period enormously, both its enlightened views and its prejudices," she added, referring to games that portray women, African Americans, and Native Americans according to the racist and sexist stereotypes of society at the time. "Many of these values, and sometimes their biases, are still with us. The board games offer us at once our earlier social and cultural history and an awareness of their continuing evolution in our own time."

Mrs. Liman, who has written six books on interior design, has long been a supporter of the city's cultural institutions. A former vice president of the Jewish Museum and founding trustee of The International Center of Photography, she has been named chairwoman of the Mayor's Advisory Commission for Cultural Affairs. Her husband, Arthur Liman, is a trial lawyer who was chief Senate counsel during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings.

Art & Antiques Magazine this year placed Mrs. Liman on its annual list of the nation's 100 "most active, dedicated, passionate" private collectors.

Her interest was sparked while writing "The Collecting Book," (Viking Penquin, 1980), which focused on preserving and displaying collectibles and included a chapter on toys and games. She has paid from a few dollars for a game to over $1,000. She once turned down the opportunity to buy a game called "Man on the Moon' for $200; it now holds the $5,000 auction record.

Normally, her games fill walls and bookshelves in her Manhattan apartment, although she has previously lent to the Children's Museum of New York and to other museums. The first thing she does after buying a game is play it. "It's an education," she said, adding that she has found at least one, "New Game of Genius," to be "much harder than Trivial Pursuit."