If you delve into chess played back in Victorian times -to use an English term- more work is involved than you may think: some would argue the further back in time you go the more cumulative this becomes. Not yet aghast? You may even discover that sometimes a spiffing Englishman come up against a chap from a former colony of ours and gets a tonking over the board -just imagine that!
In those heady days chess was bereft of ratings and titles only categories were used for classification; differing among nations in terms of criterion and meaning since they weren’t universal and subject to revision and misreportage also.
Today, some just go on the name of a player alone just to estimate their strength. But of course you can always compare ability by matching up these greats of the past. Look at the example below to see what I mean. Let’s look at a position and ponder a move first before playing through the game.
Here’s the game, containing a variation in an opening you don’t see in top flight chess these days. https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1027914.
Everything is open to interpretation, so make of it what you will. It looks to me like there is a serious gulf in class here. This appears to be substanitated by their results.
https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1039530
A blow for us English but not an unexpected one.
MJM, Colombia
McCreadyandChess 
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