Poker & Pop Culture: The Thompson Street Poker Club

As poker clubs began to emerge in America toward the latter 19th century, stories about the games emanating from those clubs became a popular form of literary entertainment. Such stories also provide a glimpse into how poker was played, even in those cases when the stories are fictionalized or embellished.

Last week we looked at one collection of poker stories describing the adventures of an actual (though unnamed) uptown New York club of the late 1800s. Another interesting series of comic stories appeared a few years before that one, these telling of a fictional group of poker players called The Thompson Street Poker Club.

The Club’s “Minutes” (with Illustrations)

Shortly after Life magazine first debuted in 1883, the magazine’s associate editor Henry Guy Carleton began to produce a short poker tales focusing on the invented poker club.

The son of a famous Union general, Carleton was also a playwright who would later have a few of his plays performed on Broadway. He was additionally an inventor who is credited with early versions of smoke detectors and fire alarms.

“The Thompson Street Poker Club” by Henry Guy Carleton

Carleton’s stories about the club resemble colorful versions of the minutes of a committee’s meetings, and they proved popular among Life’s first readers. In the spring of 1884 a collection of 13 of Carleton’s stories were published in a slim volume, titled The Thompson Street Poker Club.

The book was dedicated to Robert C. Schenck, referred to as “that noble expounder of the game.” A former U.S. Congressman, Schenck earned that distinction thanks to his having written an early work of strategy about draw poker first published in England and reprinted in the United States in 1880 (a book we’ll be discussing here soon).

A sequel penned by Carleton appeared five years later, titled Lectures Before the Thompson Street Poker Club and containing six longer stories featuring the same cast of characters. This one even more closely mimics the committee-meeting conceit, with each story starting with references to a speaker and those in attendance and even pointing out how the “minutes” of the previous meeting were read at the start of each new one. These lectures in the sequel sometimes recall incidents from the first volume, with the club’s members revisiting earlier conflicts while debating the club’s various rules and procedures.

The Thompson Street stories are notable for a couple of reasons. One is the fact that they are illustrated with drawings by E.W. Kimble, best known for having been the illustrator for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In fact, it was after seeing Kimble’s work in Life that Twain got in touch with Kemble and eventually got him to agree to draw illustrations for Huck Finn. (That’s one of Kimble’s illustrations for the book up above.)

Also noteworthy is the fact that the players in the Thompson Street Poker Club are African-American, and thus the collections are often referred to as the first ever poker books to feature African-Americans. They are also occasionally considered along with other late 19th-century examples of “black humor” or “slice of life” representations of urban blacks (albeit written and illustrated by whites).

Swapping Pots and Stories with Professor Brick, Mr. Cyanide Whiffles, and the Rev. Thankful

Reading through the two collections, the …

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