On page 59-60
She threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she despised them for having been won of me.
My guess for the phrase is "as if she despised them for having lost to me".
English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityOn page 59-60
She threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she despised them for having been won of me.
My guess for the phrase is "as if she despised them for having lost to me".
The usage was more popular over a hundred years ago than it is now.
Google Ngram shows the decline by a factor of ten from a peak in the early 1800s to the present day.
For example:
it shall be sufficient for the plaintiff to allege, that the defendant is indebted to the plaintiff, or has received for the plaintiff's use, the money so lost and paid, or converted the goods won of the plaintiff, to the defendant's use
Some justification may be found in contemporary English:
of: used in expressions showing loss:
They were robbed of all their savings.
I feel I've been deprived of your company.
Hence "the cards were won of me" implies that I lost the cards.
"Won of" in Dickens' day means "won from".
So "she" wins all the cards from the speaker (presumably this is a game in which you win by taking all the cards for yourself) and then throws them away, as if she "despised them" for where they had come from, i.e. that they had been won from the speaker.
It is the same form as "What would you have of me?"
"From" states direction and implies origin. "Of" states origin and implies direction. I suppose you could say that there has been an idiomatic transition from polar to cartesian framing.