Snap-dragon (game) - Literary References

Literary References

The first printed references to snap-dragons or flap-dragons are in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (1594):

Thou art easier swallowed than a flapdragon.

and Henry IV, Part 2 (1598):

Because their legs are both of a bigness, and a'

plays at quoits well, and eats conger and fennel,

and drinks off candles' ends for flap-dragons

John Dryden refers to them in his play The Duke of Guise (1683):

I'll swear him guilty.

I swallow oaths as easy as snap-dragon,

Mock-fire that never burns.

Snap-dragons were also described in Isaac D'Israeli's The Curiosities of Literature (1791–1823). However, at this time it was not a parlour game but a drinking game, with the snap-dragons being "small combustible bodies fired at one end and floated in a glass of liquor, which an experienced toper swallowed unharmed, while yet blazing." Sandys cites a related variant of Snap-dragon where a lit candle end is placed in a cup of ale or cider; the aim is to quaff the liquor without singeing one's face.

The first reference to Snap-dragon explicitly as a parlour game is in Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811): "Christmas gambol: raisins and almonds being put into a bowl of brandy, and the candles extinguished, the spirit is set on fire, and the company scramble for the raisins."

By the mid-19th century Snap-dragon was firmly entrenched as a Christmas parlour game, and it is in this sense that it is referenced in 1836, in Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and in 1861, in Anthony Trollope's novel Orley Farm. Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) describes "A snap-dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum pudding, its wings of holly-leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy."

Agatha Christie's book Hallowe'en Party describes a children's party (during which a child's murder causes Hercule Poirot to be brought in to solve the case) at which Snap-dragon is played at the end of the evening.

In The Dark Flight Down by Marcus Sedgewick, Chapter 5 describes a game of Snapdragon being played during the wake of Director Korp. The rules are described as a drinking game, whereby should a player drop the raisin, they have to take a shot. Boy recalls Valerian playing (and winning) the game with absinthe as the alcohol which burns, including how he used to show off as the game wore on.