His treatise The Chess-Player's Manual—A Complete Guide to Chess, a 900-page tome published in 1874 after several years of work, was harshly received by the critics, largely because he had included a number of informal skittles games that he had (atypically) won against stronger players.

[2] He was educated at Windermere College, Westmorland, and won a scholarship to Oxford University, but was unable to attend as his father, uncle, and aunts lost a lawsuit that ruined them financially.

[7][10][11] In May, the ship arrived in San Francisco, where, Gossip wrote, "I first set foot on my native soil after an absence of over forty years.

[16] The author explains in its preface:[16][17] My object in the present work is to paint the rich Jew in his true colors, as the enemy of society; to show that the Jew who steals millions, can, in Europe, at any rate, defy the laws with impunity, and that he almost invariably escapes punishment owing to improper occult influences, and the mighty power of Israelitish gold.The chess literature is silent about the last decade of Gossip's life.

[1][19][20] By 1864, Gossip was appearing in London chess circles, drawing a game against Joseph Henry Blackburne at a simultaneous exhibition in April.

[22] At London 1870, the Third British Chess Association Congress (won by John Wisker after a playoff against Amos Burn), Gossip scored two of six possible points, finishing in a tie for fifth–sixth out of seven players.

[28] However, playing first board for England in an 1879 correspondence chess match against the United States, he lost all four of his games to Ellen Gilbert of Hartford, Connecticut.

[34][35] He scored 17½ out of 25, tying for fifth–sixth place out of 26 players with Charles Ranken, who later co-authored the treatise Chess Openings Ancient and Modern (1889).

[10] While given his experience, Gossip was considered to be a heavy favourite, Esling won the first game, and the second was adjourned in a position favorable to him.

[43][44] The Congress, a double round robin that was one of the longest tournaments in history, was intended to select a challenger for the world championship title.

[50][51] A report in the BCM in 1889 observed that Gossip suffered from great nervousness that prevented him from fully displaying his abilities at chess tournaments, where he had to stop his ears "to keep out the low hum inseparable from a large concourse of people".

[53] The BCM commentator accordingly believed that Gossip "would make a good stand in a single encounter with men who are much higher in the tournament than he is".

[52] Following his move to Montreal, Gossip in a letter to a friend dated October 20, 1894, complained, "The French Canadian Chessplayers here are the poorest, meanest humbugs I ever met – all Jesuits.

[13] Later in 1895, Pollock finished 19th out of 22 players, scoring 8 out of 21 (including wins over Tarrasch and Steinitz), at Hastings 1895,[55][56] arguably at that time the strongest tournament in history.

[21] Steinitz later wrote:[85] Mr Gossip had practiced the unfair ruse of carefully preserving stray skittles games which he had happened to win or draw, generally after many defeats, against masters whose public records stood far above his own, ... thus leading the public to believe that the author stood on a par with them, or was even their superior.

William Wayte in the Chess Players Chronicle called the book "fairly in possession of the field among English elementary treatises".

[10] Unfortunately for Gossip, he "was the victim of an act of gross piracy, as many copies forming no part of the edition printed by his orders were circulated in America and the 'pirates' never brought to justice.

[87] Steinitz wrote that "Mr Gossip has produced a useful work, which in some respects must be regarded even superior to that of Staunton or any other previous writers on the chess openings. ...

[88] An anonymous reviewer in The New York Times called the new edition of The Chess-Player's Manual "probably the most convenient, trustworthy, and satisfactory chess book accessible in the English language".

The reviewer concluded that the games and problems in the volume would "afford great entertainment" to the casual enthusiast, "while for real students of chess ... it is very nearly indispensable".

[89] David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld write in The Oxford Companion to Chess that Lipschütz's appendix "helped to make this one of the standard opening books of the time".

[90] World Champion Bobby Fischer had a copy of The Chess-Player's Manual in his personal library,[91] and cited it in his famous 1961 article "A Bust to the King's Gambit".

"[5] Gossip in 1891 published a second revised edition of his Theory of the Chess Openings, which Diggle calls "a handsome volume with an appendix of sixty-one pages".

[31] The New York Times portrays him at the Sixth American Chess Congress (1889) as follows:[5][101] Gossip, with his long, flowing beard, looks like one of the old-time monks.

After condemning as "utterly worthless" the analysis of that opening published in two English periodicals, Gossip declaimed:[102] In order, therefore, to establish an important point of theory, and at the same time to prevent American chessplayers from being misled and deceived by the superficial analysis of incompetent British chess editors, whose object in condemning the Steinitz Gambit has obviously been mainly to depreciate the originality of its illustrious inventor, whom they invariably try to drag down to their own miserable level of shallow incompetency and self-conceit, I submit the following variations which at any rate possess the undeniable merit of exposing the hollow analytical twaddle continually published in the two London journals above named.Hooper and Whyld note Gossip's "unusual talent for making enemies" and attribute the critical reception of his books to this, since in their opinion "his books were not significantly worse than the general run of the time, and they were better than, for example, those by Bird, who was popular".

[5][104] Yakov Damsky in The Batsford Book of Chess Records (2005), addressing the question of which player "achieved the greatest negative distinction" on the international level, opines that Gossip "can probably feel safe from competition".

"[106] Like Hooper and Whyld, they overlook his result at New York 1889, a major tournament where he won 11 games and finished above the bottom.

[111] Chessmetrics also ranks Gossip number 17 in the world during four one-month periods between February and July 1873,[110] when opportunities for high-level competition were much rarer.

[113] Diggle writes that despite his faults, Gossip was "a man of dauntless courage and infinite capacity for hard work", which enabled him to become a recognized author despite the disastrous reception that the first edition of his Chess-Player's Manual received.

[13] The following game was played between future five-time U.S. Champion Jackson Showalter (White) and Gossip (Black) at the Sixth American Chess Congress, New York 1889.