Dear chess friends,
In 2022, while searching about chess in the 19th century, I became aware that the famous player Paul Morphy, while travelling in Europe in 1858 – 1859, was accompanied by an English journalist, Frederick Edge, who, in 1859, published an account of this trip.
Reading this account, I became more and more interested in the life of Paul Morphy, in the history of chess in the 19th century and, more generally, in history during this interesting period, from the French Revolution to the Civil War, from New-Orleans to Paris.
At the end of 2022, I started working on a French translation of Frederick Edge’s book with the idea of commenting his text with historical facts about Paul Morphy and chess in the 19th century. This book was published in June 2023 (available here in French).
This book contains biographical information about a few hundreds of people, chess players, Morphy’s relatives and other people met during his journey. While writing these notes, I realized that it would be very interesting to have a reference book about all chess players and other people related to chess in the 19th century.
This blog is about my project to write such a reference book.