Chess Journalism: Old and New

It is interesting to look at old documents pertaining to chess, and compare and contrast
them with current writing. Sometimes the writing can seem bizarre and incomprehensible,
while at other times one is surprised by the fact that some things we consider modern
inventions are actually quite old.

For example, we may think that modern tabloid reporting, with its nasty rumors and small-
minded criticism of celebrities, would be shocking to 19th-century readers. In truth, there
were plenty of publications that wallowed in scurrilous rumors, and sensational scandals
were on the front pages of the most respected newspapers.

In fact, one important figure on the fringes of the chess world worked for a publication
New Stories about with a particularly bad reputation, yet he is associated with that most heroic and honorable
chess player, Paul Morphy. A rather scathing review of Frederick Edge’s book Paul
Old Chess Players Morphy, the Chess Champion, published in Littell’s Living Age, comments that the book
was written by an Englishman who resided in New York, and was engaged on a paper that
the citizens there referred to as “The Satanic.” This seems to be a name used for the New
Jeremy P. Spinrad York Herald. My search in the New York Times for “The Satanic” interestingly first turned
up an article titled “Morphy and the Satanic Press,” which starts by stating “Of all the
foolish things which the veteran mischief-maker of the New York Herald has ever
attempted ...”. More conclusively, an article “Discord at Washington – The Herald on a
New Track” calls an attack on Lincoln by the Herald “This latest and most artful of the
Satanic dodges ...” Another hit, in the staid Times, shows how we must not believe that old
papers were extremely respectful: “imagine the record that those industrious knights of the
quill – the Metske Devantigers, who, by the way like him of the Satanic, have twisted
visual organs ....”
 Louis Paulsen

Along with visual organs, some of the physical descriptions given of chess players seem
odd to modern readers. There is often a great deal of attention given to the size and shape
of the player’s head. For example:

“The truth of Phrenology is strongly borne out by the conformation of

Deschapelles’ forehead; in which the organ of calculation is more considerably
developed than in that of any human being we ever saw. A high and sharp ridge
stands forth as the boundary of his fine, square forehead; attracting, at the first
glance, the earnest disciples of Combe and Spurzhim.” (George Walker in Chess
and Chess-Players)

Another example is this reprinted letter from the London Globe describing a simultaneous
blindfold exhibition by Paulsen in Düsseldorf:

New York Times, Oct 11, 1863: “Herr Paulsen, says the same letter, is a young man
of 29, tall and lank, as Westphalians generally are, and with a cranium which would
be the delight of phrenological science.”

The passage below comes from an article describing Morphy’s simultaneous (non-
blindfold) exhibition against Löwenthal, Boden, Rivière, Barnes, and Bird:

New York Times, May 14, 1859: “Mr. Morphy is a man of small stature and rather
juvenile appearance, but his head is exceedingly well formed, his eye bright, and
his countenance generally gives the evidence of a fine nervous organization and
quick intelligence.”

In fact, there are several phrenological reports of both Morphy and Paulsen in the
literature, which show conclusively that phrenologists can almost infallibly deduce traits
that their subjects are already known to possess.

Some old writers liked to sprinkle their columns liberally with references to classical
literature, often in Latin or French, assuming their readers would know what they were
talking about. For example, I was surprised while reading about the obscenely vicious
accusations between Harrwitz and Staunton over a proposed but unplayed match circa
1853-54, to run across a word printed in the Greek alphabet. Transliterated into English,
this read roughly as vatrachopolemos. Even with my advantage of having lived in Greece
for a year, and knowing that this meant “frog war,” I needed to ask my wife (who is
professor in the classics) to explain to me that this referred to a dispute in The Frogs, a
play by Aristophanes (450?-388? BCE). So a reader was expected not only to read Greek,
but to understand the correct classical allusion! I doubt one could assume that in many
current chess publications.
Sometimes even the “English” in the old articles is hard to understand. This happens
especially when the writer uses a dialect or terminology now forgotten. Scottish quotes
have me particularly baffled. For example, there is an interesting article in Littell’s Living
Age, Aug. 18, 1849 on the current state of chess. Although it is an English article, it does
not take the partisan view that Staunton is obviously the best player. Instead, it notes that
Staunton is probably the strongest living player, but has not been measured against other
strong players such as Szen, Jaenisch, Petroff, and various others. On Staunton’s current
strength, it says that for years he has not met his match, and is “in danger of becoming –
like the pugnacious little Irish tailor before he married – ‘blue-moulded for want of a
bating.’” Say again?

In another Scottish surprise, writer H.A. Kennedy enthuses about an upcoming great
tournament, which we know today as London 1851. He thinks it is wonderful that people
of different countries will sink their national differences and come over to the bloodless
fray, in the spirit of an old Scottish refrain. The repeated words (adapted from a Robert
Burns poem) map into a surprisingly obscene statement in colloquial American English:

“Then cock up your beaver, and cock it fu’ sprush; We’ll over the water and give
them a brush; There’s somebody there we’ll teach better behavior; Hey! Johnnie,
lad, cock up your beaver!”

One of my first language puzzles dealt with standard English, however. The book of the
Hastings 1895 tournament describes Georg Marco with the phrase “His general
appearance is very German, but with little of the bandbox about him.” Wiser readers than
myself on the newsgroup rec.games.chess.misc informed me that this implied that Marco’s
clothes might be a bit less spiffy than those of other German players.

Even when you can understand the words, the context can be strange. An example from
Littell’s Living Age, August 1849, from Quarterly Review, discussing some of the many
pleasures of Ries’ Divan: “A good cup of coffee – a good cigar (for those who have not
been nauseated with smoke in Germany).”

I can understand the following quote, but it is certainly not an analogy I would have
chosen to describe the event! New York Times, Jan 4, 1898, from Boston Journal:
“Harvard’s fourth consecutive victory in the intercollegiate chess tournament gives about
as much comfort to Cambridge undergraduates as a felled partridge to a moose hunter.”

The vatrachopolemos line comes up in the 1854 issue of the important journal The Chess
Player’s Chronicle, and it reads very strangely indeed, especially since this particular
magazine is generally very nicely written. A huge portion of the journal is devoted to the
negotiations (more precisely, the failure of the negotiations) for a match between Staunton
and Harrwitz. From beginning to the end, this is a rant against Harrwitz. I would be
interested in seeing the other side; Harrwitz’ rival journal was apparently full of the same
invective. The first part of the magazine is devoted to discussing the recent match between
Harrwitz and Löwenthal, which to Staunton’s dismay was won by Harrwitz. How did
Staunton congratulate the victor?

“We cannot resist recording our conviction that in no Chess match of importance
ever played, was the truth of the familiar proverb which tells us ‘the race is not
always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,’ so forcefully exemplified as in
this.”

The game annotations are also full of gratuitous derogatory comments towards Harrwitz,
both of his play and his personality.

I was surprised when a report on the London-Edinburgh correspondence chess match

(London Times, February 28, 1825) gave betting odds for the match. For the record,
bettors on the Scottish side collected big time, since the odds were 5-2 against them for the
game. Even after the loss of the first game and a drawn second game, with the third in
progress, the betting odds were 3-2 in favor of the English. It must have been a strange
sport for the bookies to give odds on, since proper handicapping in mid-game would
require quite a bit of chess knowledge.

One constant in any reporting in chess is that different commentators will disagree.
Generally, this may be no more than the difference between a “?” and a “!” awarded to a
move. Yet I ran across a fairly extreme case in which the writers disagreed quite strongly
on the quality of an entire, very important, game. The setting is London 1862, a very
important tournament, one which basically decided who was considered supreme in the
immediate post-Morphy chess world. The tournament was intended to be a round robin,
with draws being replayed, but there were a number of important forfeits as well. It was
won by Anderssen scoring 12-1, with Paulsen a close second at 11-2.
In some sense, it was the Italian player Serafino Dubois who decided the winner.
Excluding Dubois, Anderssen lost only to Owen, while Paulsen lost only to Anderssen. By
beating Paulsen and losing to Anderssen, Dubois made Anderssen the champion.
Excluding forfeits and the game below, Dubois lost only to Steinitz, and he was the last
major obstacle to Anderssen in the tournament. Thus, the Anderssen-Dubois game
assumed particular significance. According to the London Times (July 5, 1862), “the most
brilliant game was that between Anderssen and Dubois, which lasted little more than an
hour, was finished at the 25th move, and elicited all the skill of the two greatest players of
Germany and Italy.” On the other hand, Löwenthal’s book on the tournament takes quite a
different view, saying that Dubois’s play was “extremely bad, and could only be
accounted for as arising from indisposition.” I give the game score below, so you can
judge for yourself, though Fritz8-assisted analysis definitely supports Löwenthal’s view. I
cannot explain why the Times gives the game as ending in twenty-five moves.

Anderssen-Dubois, London 1862 (annotations by Taylor Kingston, assisted by Fritz8): 1.

e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Bc4 d5 4.exd5 Modern manuals scarcely mention this line at all. Nunn’s
Chess Openings (1999) prefers 4.Bxd5, and gives as an alternative only 4.exd5 Qh4+ 5.
Kf1 Bd6 6.Nf3 Qh6 7.Nc3 Ne7 8.Ne4 Nd7 9.Nxd6+ Qxd6, arriving by transposition at
Adams-Shirov, Tilburg 1997, with definite advantage to Black. 4…Qh4+ 5.Kf1 f3

6.Bb5+ The 1843 edition of Bilguer’s Handbuch

des Schachspiels, edited mainly by Von der Lasa,
mentions only 6.d3 fxg2+, when “Schwarz stände
dann wohl im Vortheil” (Black then stands to
good advantage). It appears that in the
intervening nineteen years Anderssen found an
improvement. 6…c6 7.Nxf3 Qf6 8.dxc6 bxc6 9.
Be2 Bd6 10.d4 Ne7 11.Bg5 Qg6 12.c4 f6 13.
Bd2 0-0 14.Nc3

14…Bf5?? A major tactical blunder, of which

Anderssen takes immediate advantage. Better
was 14…Be6, preventing any check on the a2-g8
diagonal. 15.c5! Bc7? From bad to worse.
Relatively best was 15…Be5, cutting material
loss to a minimum. 16.Qb3+ Kh8 17.Qb7 The
point – Black must lose at least a piece. 17...Bd3
18.Qxc7 Quite adequate to win, though 18.Qxa8
was probably even stronger. 17…Nd5 19.Qg3
Nxc3 20. bxc3 Qe4 21.Bxd3 Qxd3+ 22.Kf2 Nd7
23.Rhe1
 Black is down a piece and a pawn, with no
prospects of counterplay. A modern GM
unfortunate enough to fall into such a situation
would no doubt resign, but this being 1862,
Dubois makes one last vain try. 23…Ne5 Not as
bad as it looks, though it fails to have any real
effect. 24.dxe5 fxe5 25.Kg1 e4

26.Bh6! Better than 26.Ne5 Qxd2. 26…gxh6 27.

Qe5+ Kg8 28.Rxe4 Rf6 29.Qxf6 Qxe4 30.Re1
Qg6 31.Qxg6+ hxg6 32.Re6 1-0

Book reviews have been around much longer

than you might realize, and old reviews already
ran the full gamut from fulsome praise, through
thoughtful observations, to bitter criticism. An
example of a very old book getting ripped comes
from A Critical Dictionary of English Literature,
published in 1859-1871, in which Barbier’s 1672
work Famous Games of Chesse Play is called “a
treatise of no merit.” A review of Edge’s book in
The Atlantic, October 1859, shows considerable knowledge of Morphy, but the final
description of the book is amusing: “Its title is too pretentious; its style is braggart, and
tainted with the vulgarity of an English flash reporter; and yet this is tempered by a certain
constraint, as if the writer could not but occasionally think how ill such a style was suited
to its subject. The portrait is wretched, and a certain likeness to Mr. Morphy only adds to
its offensiveness.”

For a more nuanced review, I quote from the Southern Literary Messenger, September
1846. For space reasons, I quote only the beginning and end of the review, which is by
someone who does not understand chess but is moved strangely by the tales of its
passionate rivalries.

“There is something affecting in this advertisement of M. Alexandre, which

announces a new collection of the most famous games of Chess – affecting,
because, in seeing men of the keenest and most active intellect devote their lives to
such laborious trifling, we cannot avoid thinking how difficult it is to determine
what objects are in truth worthy of our search, and how frivolous after all are our
eager attempts to obtain honors or knowledge, which will bring us perhaps not so
much happiness as the triumphs of a chess-board.”

After describing briefly some of the great passions over the little board, the reviewer
concludes:

“It is with a melancholy interest that we see one of these giving his work to the
public as ‘the fruit of the labor of many years, and his tribute to the one great
passion of his life;’ yet it were perhaps well if every one could make his happiness
 depend so entirely on himself.”

I have saved my favorite bit of old-time chess reporting for last, which comes from, of all
places, an obituary column. Even here, we find a hint of scandal attached to a truly
blameless victim. The obituary in the New York Times, October 20, 1897 reads in full:

Berthold Englisch Dead

Vienna, Oct. 19. – Berthold Englisch, the well-known chess player, is dead. The cause of
death was brain affection.

Englisch withdrew from the recent tournament at Berlin, declaring that his head was not
clear. At the time rumor accused him of accepting a bribe from a weak opponent to
withdraw, but his death disproves that report.

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