Gambling was constantly on the political agenda during the 1840s and 1850s with a Gaming Act in 1845, the Betting Houses Act in 1853 and another in 1854. The 1845 Act was intended to unclog the legal system from the ever-growing number of cases involving gambling debts, but, 'as this meant that debts resulting from credit bets were no longer legally recoverably, the law inadvertently gave encouragement to cash betting offices' (R. Munting, An Economic and Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA [1996], p. 23). By 1852 there was an increasing groundswell of middle-class public opinion critical of this development as reflected in an article, 'Betting Offices', in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, 24 July 1852 (pp. 57–8) and Cruikshank's pamplet The Betting Shop (1852), as well as Dickens's article.
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