Howard Staunton

◇Paris, 1843

Staunton came late to serious chess and rose fast. In late 1843 he travelled to Paris to meet Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant, the leading French player. He won eleven games, lost six and drew four, and the result established his standing as the leading player of the period.

In The Chess-Player's Companion (1849), he recorded how the final game stretched across 19 and 20 December. After eight hours the players stopped for an hour. They continued beyond midnight, then suspended play until the following morning at the request of Saint-Amant's seconds. Staunton gave the total duration as fourteen hours; Saint-Amant resigned the game and the match.

His account also admitted mistakes. Discussing two earlier Paris losses, he described the strain of maintaining concentration through long games in a crowded room. “The want of reflection in the present cases must be admitted to have been mortifying enough.” The admission appears in his note to the forty-third move of the eleventh game.

◇Writing for the learner

Staunton founded the Chess Player's Chronicle in 1841. His Chess-Player's Handbook (1847) brought earlier European analysis together for English readers. In its preface he said he had tested his predecessors' variations repeatedly rather than simply accepting their judgments. He also used larger type for the main lines, allowing a reader to follow those first and return to the subsidiary variations later.

The short Chess-Player's Text-Book took a different route. Its preface asked beginners to master the introductory chapters, then study simple mating positions one at a time before tackling openings with a full board. It was also a companion to the chessmen carrying his name: instruction and the practical equipment for following it appeared together.

◇The pieces bearing his name

In 1849 Jaques of London registered a new pattern of chessmen, and Staunton endorsed it and lent it his name. In the Text-Book he credited the designers with that association. He pointed out a practical detail of the registered set: small crowns on the king's rook and knight distinguished them from the corresponding pieces on the queen's side, making descriptive notation easier to follow.

The Staunton pattern became a standard for tournament chess, retaining its familiar name long after his playing career ended.

◇London 1851

Staunton helped bring leading European players to London during the Great Exhibition for the first international chess tournament. Adolf Anderssen won the event and defeated him along the way. Staunton's The Chess Tournament (1852) describes the committee's practical arrangements for foreign visitors: some entry fees were waived, some players were promised reimbursement of their expenses if they won no prize, and funds were reserved for further matches involving leading players eliminated from the main contest.

The tournament was meant to do more than produce a winner. A planned congress would discuss a common code of chess laws and notation. Staunton's book acknowledged that this part of the scheme was never carried out.

The German adaptation, Das Schach-Turnier zu London im Jahre 1851 (1852), preserves a letter Anderssen wrote from London on 30 June. He criticised Staunton's play but reported that repeated defeats had left his opponent calm, cheerful and courteous, without visible annoyance. It is a contemporary opponent's observation of his conduct during that contest.

◇Morphy, Shakespeare and later books

When Paul Morphy visited Europe in 1858, he sought a match with Staunton. Negotiations and postponements never produced the proposed individual contest. They did, however, face one another in consultation games. Chess Praxis (1860) prints games in which Morphy and Thomas Wilson Barnes consulted against Staunton and a partner.

Staunton made a substantial collection of Morphy's games part of that book, replacing an appendix originally intended for chess problems after requests from amateurs. His notes included praise as well as criticism. In the tenth game of Morphy's match with Anderssen, which Morphy lost, he called the American's long defence highly commendable.

His edition of The Works of Shakespeare, published by George Routledge in three volumes, was begun in November 1857 and issued month by month in parts until 1 May 1860, as a footnote to its preface records. His two interests met in a note to King John, where he read Elinor’s line “check the world” as an allusion to the queen of the chessboard and took it as proof that Shakespeare knew the game.

The edition also drew him into the dispute over John Payne Collier’s copy of the Second Folio of 1632, whose marginal corrections Collier had published in Notes and Emendations (1852). In his preface Staunton wrote that he had been sure from the first that they were “for the most part plagiarized from the chief Shakesperian editors and critics, and the rest of quite modern fabrication”. He urged Sir Frederic Madden of the British Museum in 1858, and again in the spring of 1859, to have the volume examined. Madden’s published account, which Staunton quotes, records that Staunton and Mansfield Ingleby had called on him more than once in 1858. When the folio reached the British Museum, Madden and other paleographers concluded that its annotations were of modern origin.

He continued to publish beyond chess: The Great Schools of England (1865) began as a planned reprint of newspaper articles, but its preface explains that the Public Schools Commission's evidence and report led him to rework and enlarge the book. He died in London on 22 June 1874. Chess: Theory and Practice appeared posthumously in 1876, edited by Robert B. Wormald, whose preface warned that the manuscript had not received Staunton's revision.