Edward Winter
As shown by numerous pictures, Morphy parted his hair on the left; see our comment on a mirror image in C.N. 5150. Another mistake occurred on page 53 of Chessworld, January-February 1964, in a lengthy, richly illustrated article on Morphy by David Lawson:
Left: published mirror image – Right: corrected
New in Chess has announced the forthcoming publication of The Real Paul Morphy by Charles Hertan:
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Addition on 28 August 2024:
As shown on the above-mentioned New in Chess webpage, the front cover has been changed:
From John Townsend (Wokingham, England):
‘Pages 268-273 of psychotherapist Charles Hertan’s recent book The Real Paul Morphy: His Life and Chess Games (Alkmaar, 2024) contain material about the Staunton-Morphy controversy. For those needing a reminder, the controversy can be seen as comprising the following phases in 1858:
1. Morphy arrives in England and challenges Staunton to a match. The latter, who has retired from match play, accepts, but points out that he is under contract to produce an edition of Shakespeare’s works, and he needs time to brush up on his game.
2. Relations between the two belligerents deteriorate through unfriendly exchanges in the press and elsewhere.
3. At length, Staunton withdraws from the negotiations. Relations continue to be bad and never really improve.
I did not notice new information about the controversy in this part of the book, or signs of fresh research on the topic. Much of the content in those pages is concerned with the quoting of contemporary reports and documents which have appeared in print before. For good measure, the author treats us to some colourful remarks of his own which reveal a one-sided stance in favour of Morphy.
Treatment of the Staunton-Morphy controversy in Chess Notes, going back to the 1980s, has included contributions from, among others, Louis Blair, G.H. Diggle, Frank Skoff and Kenneth Whyld, and the quartet of feature articles below includes many lively exchanges:
Edge, Morphy and Staunton
A Debate on Staunton, Morphy and Edge
Supplement to ‘A Debate on Staunton, Morphy and Edge’
Edge Letters to Fiske.The C.N. discussions have been conducted in an editorially impartial and even-handed manner, but it seems that even-handedness was not part of Mr Hertan’s objectives. He refers to Morphy sometimes as “Paul”, while the supposed villain of the piece has to make do with “Staunton”.
The following anti-Staunton language and sentiment is to be found:
Page 268:
“Paul understandably doubted Staunton’s intentions”
“... sucker punches received from Staunton in the press ...”
“... Morphy shared his concern that Staunton would try to evade the match, and pin the blame on Paul ...”
Page 270:
“... but Staunton being Staunton, he couldn’t resist taking more cheap shots at Morphy in his column ...”
“... his shoddy treatment of the American ...”
Page 271:
“These actions were certainly petty and ungracious on Staunton’s part”
“... the bitchy sniping of a humiliated champion ...”
“... potshots at Morphy ...”
“... rattled by Staunton’s antics ...”
“... his unseemly behavior ...”
Page 272:
“... Staunton’s catty, distasteful behavior ...”
“But Staunton’s defenders never threw in the towel.”
Page 273:
“Howard Staunton had a deeply flawed personality.”
This last remark is perhaps the most damning of these criticisms and is stated with the same certainty as if Mr Hertan had had Staunton on the psychiatrist’s (or psychotherapist’s) couch in his consulting-room. It almost reaches the level of conviction of Dale Brandreth, whom you quoted in Attacks on Howard Staunton:
“… the fact is that the British have always had their ‘thing’ about Morphy. They just can’t seem to accept that Staunton was an unmitigated bastard in his treatment of Morphy because he knew damned well he could never have made any decent showing against him in a match.”
Reference is made by Mr Hertan to the old criticism that Staunton unfairly accused Morphy of not having the stakes for the match. The latter was hurt by the comments. Staunton had had difficulties in the past with would-be match opponents who could not readily muster the stakes, an example being Daniel Harrwitz. He did not invent the problem of Morphy’s stakes. In his book Paul Morphy The Pride and Sorrow of Chess (New York, 1976) David Lawson devotes a chapter to the subject of Staunton and the stakes, which reveals that Morphy’s family, the intended source of the stakes, strongly disapproved of a match for money. It is only too clear from Charles Maurian’s letter of 27 July 1858 to D.W. Fiske that the family’s attitude most certainly was a problem which seriously threatened the match. Morphy had kept from Maurian the extent of this disapproval and the extraordinary lengths the family was prepared to go to, which Maurian now revealed:
“... they were ready to send some responsible agent to London whose duty it would be to let Mr Morphy know that he must either decline playing or continuing the match or that he will be brought home by force if necessary; that they were determined to prevent a money match by all means.” (Lawson, pages 120-121)
Hinc illae lacrimae. Clearly, this ruled out the family as the supplier of the stakes. It left poor Maurian close to his wits’ end. Fortunately, he acted promptly and, in a change of plan, secured the £500 from another source, the New Orleans Chess Club. He wrote again on 29 July 1858 with news that the amount had been raised. There had been real uncertainty until Maurian’s decisive action. Who can tell the exact time of arrival of the funds? Neither are we likely ever to know how much intelligence, if any, about Morphy’s family difficulties reached Staunton’s ears. At the times when he grumbled about Morphy’s lack of stakes, it is likely that the money was yet to appear or, at least, as far as he was aware. Staunton deserves the benefit of the doubt here. His remarks are likely to have been in response to a real difficulty over stakes rather than a smear which he had falsely concocted to discredit his young adversary. Morphy’s family’s disapproval strongly indicates that there was indeed a real problem over the stakes.
Edge wanted the chess world to believe that it was Staunton who asked for the stakes to be reduced from £1,000 to £500, but it is much more likely that any such request came from Morphy, in the light of the family circumstances alluded to above. Given a choice, Morphy would certainly have preferred no stakes at all (“... reputation is the only incentive I recognize”).
Another issue was Staunton’s contract with Routledge to produce an edition of Shakespeare, sometimes cited by his critics as an excuse for not playing a match. One might have hoped that the late Chris Ravilious had put this matter to bed for good by his article in CHESS (December 1998, pages 32-33), in which he showed not only that such a contract existed but also that it contained specific penalty clauses for failure to deliver parts of the work on time. Later, the contract appeared in print in Tim Harding’s book, Eminent Victorian Chess Players (Jefferson, 2012), on pages 338-339.
Our understanding of the character of the degenerate F.M. Edge, Morphy’s associate, has taken giant steps forwards in recent years, so it is disappointing that such material has not been drawn upon by Mr Hertan. Edge certainly contributed to the breakdown of negotiations for a match. Good relations between Morphy and Staunton were needed if the former wanted a match, but Edge pulled in the opposite direction.
As events turned out, if there was ever going to be a meeting of these two famous masters, it needed to be at the Birmingham tournament. Unfortunately, while Staunton played in this event, and did badly, Morphy went to some lengths to avoid such an encounter, even giving a phoney excuse for his non-attendance. (See my contribution in A Debate on Staunton, Morphy and Edge.) Staunton’s participation at Birmingham answers the frequent criticism, also raised by Mr Hertan, that he was afraid to meet Morphy: whether or not he was matched against Morphy in Birmingham, he must have known that it was likely he would lose there, and he was not afraid of that; in the event, he was beaten by Löwenthal.
The chief problem with Mr Hertan’s coverage of the Staunton-Morphy affair is that virtually all of it could have been written 50 years ago.
It may be a small slip on page 273 to give Frank Skoff the wrong USCF title (he had been President, not Director), but how could Mr Hertan offer, on the same page, such an obviously incorrect conclusion about the exchanges between Skoff and Whyld? As I have observed elsewhere, Whyld emerged from the debate severely battered.
Mr Hertan ends that paragraph by writing one thing which is true: that there are “hundreds of pages” of C.N. material on Staunton, Morphy and Edge. The problem is that he shows no signs of having read them.’
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Note: regarding David Lawson’s book, our correspondent’s page references are to the paperback edition (Lafayette, 2010).
Addition on 9 March 2026:
Below is the passage from page 273 of Hertan’s book which is referred to by John Townsend in his penultimate paragraph above:
What article and what rebuttal? We have no idea.
In the C.N. debate, which ran in the magazine from 1985 to 1989, the four main participants were Kenneth Whyld and G.H. Diggle (broadly speaking, pro-Staunton) and Frank Skoff and Louis Blair (broadly speaking, pro-Morphy). The above extract from page 273 is the only time any of their names appear in Hertan’s book.
Any worthwhile review of The Real Paul Morphy: His Life and Chess Games by Charles Hertan (Alkmaar, 2024) should surely estimate how much of its factual biographical narrative had already appeared in David Lawson’s Paul Morphy The Pride and Sorrow of Chess (New York, 1976). Have there been such reviews?
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‘I read biographies backwards, beginning with the death. If that takes my fancy I go through the rest. Childhood seldom interests me at all.’
Source: Diary entry, 3 June 1985, on page 143 of Writing Home by Alan Bennett (London, 1994).
Here, we shall adopt Alan Bennett’s approach as we look at a book published by New in Chess, The Real Paul Morphy: His Life and Chess Games by Charles Hertan. Its imprint page says ‘Second edition: October 2024’. The present item is also being incorporated into a new feature article (which includes C.N.s 12018, 12105 and 12217).
In working backwards, we shall say nothing about Hertan’s opinions, speculations, annotations or prose style, or about his coverage of the Staunton-Morphy affair. The first two words of the heading to the Preface (page 11) are ‘Morphy Scholarship’, and that will be our focus.
The book ends with a cursory ‘Index of Names’ (pages 378-384); there is no index of players or openings. Among the defects are the misspelling of Journoud’s name (multiple times throughout the book), numerous inconsistencies and Hertan’s unawareness of how accents work in French and Spanish. The index also reveals curious imbalances, such as fewer entries for Philip Sergeant, a Morphy scholar, than for Willy Hendriks.
Sergeant’s two Morphy books are in the unordered ‘Bibliography’ (pages 375-376), with his forename misspelt both times. Immediately before that, the two editions of F.M. Edge’s book on Morphy are listed, but regarding the UK edition there is a misprint in the title, and the wrong publisher is named. Overall, a hypothetical proof-reader would have made at least 20 or 30 amendments to the index and bibliography.
Most monographs on Morphy are ignored. Regarding David Lawson’s biography, only the out-of-print 1976 edition is there, with no mention of the still-available 2010 paperback (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press). Why might that be?
Chapter 10, the final one (pages 363-374), is entitled ‘Conclusion: Morphy’s Legacy’ and largely consists of 25 or so quotes about Morphy. Such dumping grounds are a copy-paster’s paradise; the abundance of unattributed quotations online enables any insouciant compiler to avoid the exertion of research and, even, typing. The first entry is 16 lines by Capablanca with no date or source given and naturally no mention of Capablanca on his Predecessors. Sometimes Hertan is more specific, as in the item headed ‘Max Euwe (‘64’ Shakmatny, June 24, 1937)’. That source and quote are copy-pasted from Lawson’s book, except that Lawson used the spelling Shakhmatny.
Chapter 9 (pages 349-362) is entitled ‘Mental Decline, Reanalyzed: The Final Years’ and has quotations, often long, from a letter from Woodbury in the Hartford Times, 15 March 1873; a letter from Maurian in the Watertown, NY Re-Union, December 1875; another Maurian letter, in the New York Sun, written on 28 April 1877; a letter from Meredith (name misspelt as ‘Merideth’ three times in Hertan’s book) in the Cincinnati Commercial, written on 16 April 1879; a report in Turf, Field and Farm, 22 April 1881; a letter from Morphy in L’Abeille on 1 August 1882; an article in the New York Tribune, 22 March 1883. Such scholarly-looking references may impress a superficial browser (a book-of-the-year judge, perhaps) but all those nineteenth-century texts used by Hertan were researched and presented in Lawson’s book 50 years ago.
Hertan’s entire coverage of Morphy’s death (page 362) comprises a chunk from Lawson and a chunk from Regina Morphy-Voitier.
In the same chapter, Hertan muddles the title and date of Reuben Fine’s book on chess psychology, and this is his description of Fine, also on page 355:
‘... an invitee to the exclusive AVRO tournament which decided the World Championship in 1948, following Alekhine’s death’.
There is no sign that anybody with a good knowledge of chess history had involvement in the publication of The Real Paul Morphy.
Chapter 8 is the last that we shall discuss here, by showing in full its final three pages (346-348). Passages written or quoted by Lawson are marked by us in red.
Furthermore, page 348 above provides a stark illustration of Hertan’s inaction. When reporting/repeating what ‘Sheriff W.C. Spens wrote in the Glasgow Weekly Herald of July 1884’ did he not wonder why a weekly publication was identified only by a month? Lawson’s 1976 book gave a complete date (19 July 1884) although, curiously, the unmentioned 2010 paperback edition had only ‘July 1884’, as did Hertan. Why might that be?
Here, though, the major point is that in blindly copy-pasting that text of Lawson’s Hertan did not realize that the quoted words had nothing to do with Sheriff Spens or the Glasgow Weekly Herald. They were by Leopold Hoffer on page 79 of The Field, 19 July 1884. When Lawson makes one of his rare errors (for another case, see C.N. 12204) Hertan simply repeats it, even though such publication references can easily be double-checked online nowadays.
In 1976 the Lawson book was an enormous advance in Morphy scholarship. With the Hertan volume the direction is backwards.
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See also five additions dated 10 March 2026 in Paul Morphy.
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Copyright Edward Winter. All rights reserved.