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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Walker's March 1840 article forFraser's Magazineentitled ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’ outlined the history and method of blindfold chess (or chess-play without sight of the board and pieces). Arriving as chess was becoming increasingly visible within nineteenth-century literary and urban culture, Walker's essay covered familiar issues on the topic concerning spectacle, utility, and bodily and mental damage, as well as furthering his own concerns with the history of the game and the possibility of expanding participation. This assessment of ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, part of wider research concerning chess in urban and literary modernity, complements research published in the author's monograph on the cultural chess-player and previously withinSport in History. Prominent themes of Walker's article include the multiple identities of the blindfold chess-player and the game’s ever-changing relationship to standards of respectability. ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, offering a lengthy ‘how-to-play’ to the beginning player and outlining the national prestige and celebrity of historical blindfold chess-players, also presents a potentially disreputable reading of practice and player, denying any wider social utility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1840 and 1851, amateur and professional chess became an increasingly prominent part of the Victorian leisure world. A rapid rise in both literary output on the game and the number of places where it was played fortified the popular image of chess as rational and respectable. This paper challenges this image through close examination of the chess-player and writer George Walker's 1840 article The Café de la Régence. By considering Mike Huggins' challenge to the idea of a homogeneous Victorian middle-class respectability and taking up his implicit call to the historian of middle-class leisure to re-examine all leisure activities, particularly those that have, as the chess-player has until recently, evaded scholarly attention, this paper builds on revisionist challenges to the homogeneous respectability discourse. Providing an alternative reading of the chess-player as a potentially disreputable figure on display in the brightly-lit, notorious Parisian night, Walker depicts a loud, noisy, crowded, ill-mannered, sexist, and money-grabbing environment filled with passion and emotion, far removed from rational recreations that aimed at the individuals' improvement of health and physique, and personal, civic and national prestige. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]