The state lottery in eighteenth-century Britain was mostly a striking success, bringing in ready money to the Treasury, supporting public borrowing, and rapidly attracting a wide spectrum of investors—or ‘adventurers’, as they were known. This article explores the reasons behind this success, but also seeks to understand the character and nature of lottery adventuring. To this end, it exploits various pieces of data about lottery ticket purchasers, focusing firstly on the Queen Anne lotteries of 1710–14, and then several lotteries from the early Hanoverian period. Lotteries were often portrayed simply as symptoms of a supposed contemporary ‘gambling mania’. This article presents a more complicated picture of a lottery marketplace that was driven by both rational calculation and fantasy.
