Making an Ass
[GAME.]
English–French card game for children. [Britain, c. 1820.]
Game, comprising 29 (of 30?) pairs of bisected cards, each 75 × 50 mm with engraved image (hand-coloured) and caption, the latter in English and French, together with one half only of a further pair; a few of the cards a trifle discoloured or stained, else in very good condition; in the original sycamore box (92 × 62 × 30 mm), the sliding cover adorned with a second, undivided, and varnished copy of the card ‘an ass | un âne’, likewise hand-coloured; a few minor scuffs to the box; two of the cards with a child’s pencil sketches to verso, one depicting a man in a top hat on horseback, the other copying the card depicting an ass.
A delightful and apparently unrecorded early nineteenth-century card game for English-speaking children learning French.
Each of the cards here is printed with an engraved and hand-coloured image – an oak, a sailor, a dog, a flag (Royal Navy, with the royal cypher ‘GR’), etc. – under which are two descriptive captions, one in English, the other in French. The cards were then cut in half so that each of the two resulting pieces bears a caption in only one language. The player – clearly intended to be a young British student of French – would then match one half to the other to make the image whole and thereby learn the various French equivalents: ‘un chêne’ for ‘an oak’, ‘un matelot’ for ‘a sailor’, and so forth.
Our set was evidently used by such a child, with two of the pieces bearing juvenile sketches to the blank versos, one of a man in a top hat on horseback and the other copying the image of an ass present both on one of the playing cards and on the sliding cover of the original box, preserved here.