I love Victorian literature, for the sheer sense of objectivism it projects. To the Victorian male, the world was a perfect heirarchy, with God at the top, scum at the bottom, and himself slowly working his way up. The wives were above the scum, but decisively below the breadwinning head-of-the-household husbands, because God said so, and God was above everyone, so no-one could argue with him. Yes, him. Through the powers of reductionism, all of creation could be sorted into neat boxes, to be hung on the Tree of Knowledge, as the Dewey Decimal system continues to attempt to do so.

This heirarchical model was a beautiful ideal - who wouldn’t like to know what fitted where in the Grand Scheme of Things? - but of course it turned out to be a pipe dream, and we’re left with a universe full of fractals, loops, quantum mechanics, fuzzy edges, incompleteness, uncertainty, and limits. Reading old books gives a glimpse of a golden age of understanding that everyone thought they had. The best known example is the perfectly regular world of Sherlock Holmes, where every minute detail of a crime had a simple explanation, if only you were intelligent enough to deduce it.

Written by Howard Staunton, published in 1847, and apparently “the standard textbook for chess-players for over half a century, The Chess-Player’s Handbook has some classic quotes from the age of certainty. The book contains an example game of chess which you are encouraged to play out, and follow the commentary:

… 5. Q. B’s Pawn takes Pawn. 5. K’s B. takes Pawn

Here you have played without due consideration.

Charming!

Although Chess was fairly high up the tree of intellectual achievement, mathematics was higher, so Staunton attempts to give “Mathematical Definitions of the Moves and Powers of the Chess-Men.” Cue inconclusive mumblings about squares, diagonals, parallelograms and lines of motion. Earlier, he had quoted the value of a Rook as 5.48, compared to a Pawn’s 1.00 and a Queen’s 9.94. No doubt adding a fourth significant figure would’ve enhanced his mastery of the game.

The book’s peak is during the description of the Knight:

The Knight is at once the most striking and most beautiful of all the Pieces. The singularity of its evolutions, by which it is enabled to overleap the other men and wind its way into the penetralia of the adverse ranks, and if attacked leap back again within the boundary of its own, has rendered it the favourite Piece of leading players in every country.

Beautiful. Puts The Weekly to shame.