George Walker and the ghost: the chess-player in urban and literary culture, 1840–51

ABSTRACT

This article aims to contextualise the nineteenth-century chess-player and writer George Walker’s involvement within urban and literary culture. Continuing research published in two recent Sport in History articles concerning Walker’s essays on the chess-player in Victorian Paris, this article considers another side to the chess-player’s cultural image in a different urban setting within Walker’s historical-fiction ‘A Night in York – A Chess Adventure of 1842’, in which the author imagines a night-time meeting with a ghostly medieval chess-player. George Walker’s life was marked by an involvement within the sites of nineteenth-century literary and urban chess-play. One notable feature of Walker’s writing was his constant return to the history of the game and its influence on the present day. Indeed, the interplay between chess past and chess present has been seen as a problematic aspect of his literary output. This article considers this theme and contends that Walker’s regard for the past should be seen within the context of modernity and an attempt to recover and pay sufficient attention to the historic game before its traces and fragments disappeared forever, while acknowledging the futility of the effort.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to all commenters and questioners at the 2017 BSSH Conference at Worcester.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

John Sharples http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0091-4059

Notes

1. Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (London: Reaktion, 2008), 14.

2. Many thanks to the reviewers and readers of this article. Their contributions helped in eliminating errors and pointing out where clarifications were needed.

3. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 5.

4. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon Press, 1995), 9.

5. See John Sharples, ‘“I am a Chess-player”: Respectability in Literary and Urban Space, 1840–1851’, Sport in History 35, no. 2 (2015): 296–321; and John Sharples, ‘“This Dark World”: The Blindfold Chess-Player in Victorian Literary and Urban Culture, 1840–1851’, Sport in History 37, no. 4 (2017): 483–504. See also: John Sharples, A Cultural History of Chess-Players: Minds, Machines, and Monsters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) for a consideration of a broader range of themes and time periods relating to the cultural chess-player.

6. Asa Briggs, quoted in Mike Huggins and J.A. Mangan, ‘Prologue: All Mere Complexities’, in Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play (London: Frank Cass, 2004), ix–xx: x.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., xi.

9. Ibid., xii.

10. George Walker, ‘A Night in York’, in Chess and Chess-Players: Comprising of Original Stories and Sketches (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1850), 62 (hereafter Walker, ‘A Night in York’).

11. Ibid., 76.

12. Ibid., 84.

13. Ibid., 86.

14. Ibid., 98–9.

15. Bjørn Thomassen, ‘Introduction: Into Liminality’, Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-between (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2014), 1.

16. Jeffrey Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination: Essays in History, Literature and Sport (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 13.

17. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 62.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 62–3. Caissa is, slightly ludicrously, the ‘patron saint’ of chess-players.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 63.

22. George Walker, ‘Preface’, Chess and Chess-Players, i.

23. George Walker, ‘Café de la Régence’, Fraser’s Magazine, 22 December 1840, 676.

24. ‘George Walker’, Huddersfield College Magazine 7 (1879), 239.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. H.J.R. Murray, ‘George Walker’, British Chess Magazine, May 1906, 189.

28. Ibid., 193.

29. Ibid., 189.

30. Walker continues to note that his writing career negatively affected his playing career, and that he ‘broke down [his] Chess-playing faculty through over study of “the books” and writing for the press. If practise on the board can be obtained books should be almost entirely left alone’ (George Walker, ‘Our Portrait Gallery No. 8 – Mr. George Walker’, Westminster Papers, December 1876, reproduced in American Chess Journal, May 1879, 331–2, on the occasion of Walker’s death).

31. Murray, ‘George Walker’, 192.

32. David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, ‘George Walker’, The Oxford Companion to Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 444; and T. Seccombe, T. and J. Lock (rev.), ‘Walker, George (1803–1879)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, available at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28483 (accessed October 2017).

33. ‘George Walker’, Huddersfield College Magazine, 241.

34. Murray, ‘George Walker’, 192.

35. Ibid., 194.

36. Ibid.

37. Curtis, Dark Places, 14.

38. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 7.

39. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 61.

40. See, for example, Herodotus, The Histories of Herodotus (Book 2, 148–9), trans. George Rawlinson (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1997), 202–4.

41. As one reader of this article has noted, Walker’s journey to York was completed by stagecoach. Such a mode of transport became rapidly outdated, emphasising how suddenly certain familiar aspects of everyday life could alter and disappear. Railway links between York and London were completed just one year prior to Walker’s trip. The York to Newcastle line was completed later, in 1847.

42. The association of ruins and progress has run throughout histories and theories of modernity. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 162; Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History: IX’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 257–8; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 473); and Marshall Berman, ‘1. Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy of Development’, in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 37–86.

43. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 7.

44. Ibid.

45. A fascinating parallel history concerns the development and standardisation of the written depiction of the scores of certain games and sports. Chess is not the only game, of course, which can be recorded in abbreviated fashion. In cricket, the earliest scorecards were ‘printed by a man called Pratt, scorer to the Sevenoaks Vine Club in Kent, but it took many years for his invention to catch on’ (Gavin Mortimer, A History of Cricket in 100 Objects (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), 76). Indeed, scorecards were only more fully adopted years later in 1846 when scorecards were printed and sold at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Influenced by the cricket scorecard, Henry Chadwick invented the baseball box score. The idea of such box scores is as follows: ‘the newspaper prints full box scores, enabling readers to re-create all games through imagination’ (Edward J. Rielly, Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 152). Regarding chess, Robert John McCrary gives examples of the same move in different notation systems: ‘1614: The white king commands his owne knight into the third house before his owne bishop. 1750: K. knight to His Bishop’s 3d. 1837: K.Kt. to B.third sq. 1848: K.Kt. to B’s 3rd. 1859: K. Kt. to B. 3d. 1874: K Kt to B3. 1889: KKt-B3. 1904: Kt-KB3. 1946: N-KB3. Modern: Nf3’. Successive developments relate the same information with less ambiguity and more brevity (Archived copy of Robert John McCrary, ‘Article 11’, The World Chess Hall of Fame and Sidney Samole Chess Museum, 2005, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20080704054703/http://www.chessmuseum.org/history_article11.htm (accessed July 2017)).

46. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 7.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Michel de Certeau, ‘Practices of Space’, in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky, trans. Richard Miller and Edward Schneider (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1985), 124, 129.

50. David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 172.

51. Ibid., 5.

52. Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague, ed. Michael Henry Heim, trans. David Newton Marinelli (London: Picador, 1995), ix.

53. Ibid.

54. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 61–2.

55. Ibid., 64–5.

56. Ibid., 65.

57. Walker, ‘Café de la Régence’, 669.

58. Ibid., 670.

59. Murray, ‘George Walker’, 189.

60. ‘About Us’. Yorkshire Chess Association, 2017, available at http://yorkshirechess.org/ (accessed October 2017).

61. ‘Chess Intelligence’, Chess Players’ Quarterly Chronicle 1, no. 1 (1868–9): 25.

62. See Tim Harding, Eminent Victorian Chess-Players: Ten Biographies (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012) for more information on the social history of the game in this time. Interested readers may also keep an eye out for Tim Harding, British Chess Literature to 1914: A Handbook for Historians (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018).

63. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 73.

64. Ibid., 74.

65. Mark Fisher. ‘Hauntology Now’, Abstract Dynamics, 17 January 2006, available at http://k-punk.org/hauntology-now/ (accessed July 2017).

66. Colin Davies, ‘Hauntology, spectres and phantoms’, French Studies 59, no. 3 (1 July 2005): 373–9, 373.

67. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 76.

68. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2nd edn (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000), 543.

69. ‘A.A.B.’ [George Walker], ‘Chess. By a Tenth-Rate Player’, Lippincott’s Magazine 7, no. 38 (February 1871): 209.

70. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 76.

71. Ibid., 76–7.

72. Curtis, Dark Places, 31.

73. Ibid., 32.

74. Ibis., 33.

75. Ibid., 34–5.

76. Ibid., 34.

77. Ibid., 32.

78. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 7.

79. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Johann Peter Eckermann (3 May 1827), quoted in Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 131.

80. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 7.

81. Kevin J. Hayes, ‘Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 56, no. 4 (March 2002): 445–65, 449.

82. Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfried Imhof and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 10.

83. Ibid.

84. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 82.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid., 87.

87. Ibid., 88.

88. See: ‘George Walker, ‘The Light and Lustre of Chess’, in Chess and Chess-Players, 330–63, for more on these two players. This article was published in a number of places including George Walker, ‘The Light and Lustre of Chess’, Chess-Player’s Chronicle 4 (1844), 215–22, 248–54, 279–86.

89. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 91.

90. Ibid., 92.

91. Ibid., 98–9.

92. Ibid., 100.

93. Ibid., 100–1.

94. Ibid., 104.

95. Julien Gracq, The Shape of a City, trans. Ingeborg M. Kohn (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2005), 2.

96. George Walker, ‘A Bibliographical Catalogue of Printed Books, and Writers, on Chess, up to the Present Time’, Philidorian 6, no. 6 (May 1838): 217–56.

97. See also D.W. Fiske, ‘American Chess Bibliography’, in The Book of the First American Chess Congress: Containing the Proceedings of that Celebrated Assemblage Held in New York in the Year 1857 Together with Sketches of the History of Chess in the Old and New Worlds (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1859), 485–503.

98. Walker, ‘A Bibliographical Catalogue of Printed Books’, 217.

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid.

101. Ian Crofton, Brewer’s Cabinet of Curiosities (London: Cassell, 2006), vii. See also: David Serlin. ‘A Brief History of Natural History Museums’, in Wonderstruck The Book (2011), available at http://www.wonderstruckthebook.com/essay_history_museums.htm (accessed September 2016)

102. Fredric Jameson, quoted in Colin Davies, ‘État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms’, French Studies 59, no. 1, 373.

103. Walker, ‘A Night in York’, 80.

104. Ibid., 104. Walker’s ‘A Night in York’ did, though, come at a time when interest in séance and belief in the doctrines of spiritualism was growing (1848 is generally understood to mark the beginning of the spiritualism movement). Regarding their disreputable status in the modern day, spiritualism and the occult are no longer ‘viewed as having been on the outskirts of society and culture, but rather as culturally central for many Victorians’ (Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Wilburn, ‘Introduction’, in Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (London: Routledge, 2012), 1.

105. Douglas Harper, ‘Ghost’, Online Etymology Dictionary, 2017, http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=ghost (accessed October 2017). Consider, for example, the practice of ‘ghost-writing’.

106. See also Richard Simpson, A Catalogue of Books on the Origin, History and Practice of the Game of Chess (London: Richard Simpson, 1863).

107. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 4.

108. Ibid., 4.

109. Ibid., 6.