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

What is it about?

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.

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Photo by sk on Unsplash

Photo by sk on Unsplash

Why is it important?

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.

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