Dr Will Houstoun

Then, as a natural follow up:

He lets any gentleman charge a blunderbuss with the same gunpowder and twenty leaden bullets, which blunderbuss the said artist discharges full in the face of the said company, without the least hurt, the bullets sticking in the wall behind them.

Perhaps in fear that the performance was aimed too firmly at the gun-loving portion of the audience, the closing effect for the first half was planned specifically to entertain the ladies:

He takes a pot of scalding oil, and throws it by great ladlefuls directly at the ladies, without spoiling their clothes or burning their skins.

Those who survived this theatrical onslaught, either in print or in person, might return for the second half, commencing with a piece I am surprised more modern conjurers do not include in their repertoires:

He gives any gentleman leave to drive forty twelve penny nails up to the head in a porter’s backside, and then places the said porter in a loadstone chair, which draws out every nail, and the porter feels no pain.

For any reader who is curious, I can confirm that magicians do use magnets in their tricks.

The grand finale of the show was a version of a routine that many performers use today. A number of audience members are invited to drop personal items into small opaque bags, which are then mixed up out of the performer’s sight. The magician then correctly identifies which object belongs to which person. Let us turn, once more, to our morbid source material:

He […] draws the teeth of half a dozen gentlemen, mixes them and jumbles them in a hat, gives any person leave to blindfold him, and returns each their own, and fixes them as well as ever.

Dental issues cured, one can only hope that even the most demanding audience would have had their money’s worth from the show. To be on the safe side, however, the programme also promises “many other programmes of art, too tedious here to mention.”

Perhaps you are questioning the authenticity of the performance this playbill describes? I am unwilling to confirm or deny anything, other than to comment that the copywriter is reputed to have been either Jonathan Swift (the satirist who wrote Gulliver's Travels) or Thomas Sheridan (Swift’s friend and principal collaborator). As to the impact of the work on the history of conjuring, it has, if nothing else, helped me decide upon a desirable audience for my work. Following the example of the playbill I chose, as my reader: “All Persons of Quality…”

Over the course of five years the project looks to investigate:

ways of knowing often described as embodied, tacit, implicit. The project explores the significance of embodiment in all processes of cognition and learning and champions its importance in all areas of practice, moving beyond the unhelpful divide between ‘mind’ and 'hand’ and between 'intellectual’ and 'manual’ knowledge and their disciplinary and institutional compartmentalisation.

Thus far, this has involved visits and workshops in locations such as Julian Stair’s pottery studio, Imperial College’s Faculty of Medicine, the Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science, The Royal College of Music and The Art Workers’ Guild as well as the V&A itself. In addition, a number of participants have just been awarded fellowships in order to create small independent research projects, aligned with the interests of the collective. I am involved with three of these offshoots… 

Working with Toby Athersuch (an Analytical Chemist) and Rachel Warr (a puppeteer) we are exploring ways in which the importance of embodied knowledge can be conveyed in a workshop setting. A separate project with Rachel will use our respective areas of expertise to explore the ways in which an object can be transformed into an experience, as well as how that experience can be conveyed in a museum setting. Finally, Fleur Oakes (a three dimensional embroiderer) and I will use our practices to investigate how extraordinary expertise can create seemingly impossible objects.

I also wrote a little about the book itself, including the somewhat personal response it engendered from the Dean of the Society of American Magicians:

I have always thought that it would have been well had he died in his Mothers [sic] womb. He started this awful avalaunch [sic] of BOOKS. I wish every one was taken and burned.

The good Dean’s comments seem a tad extreme, though the image of an avalanche of books is a pleasing one (bettered only, perhaps, by the image of an ‘avalaunch' of books)… so pleasing, in fact, that Caro kindly agreed to illustrate the potentially disastrous consequences of such an event.

In Reginald Scot’s 1584 publication, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, he described a trick titled “To cut off ones head, and to laie it in a platter, &c: which the jugglers call the decollation of John Baptist.” This may well be the most understated use of “&c” (etcetera) in the literature of conjuring.

The method is essentially a special table that allows one boy to conceal his head in a hole in the table whilst a second boy’s head appears to rest at his feet, on a plate. As with every magic trick, however, there are several details that can make it more convincing. After explaining the basic principle Scot suggests:

Then (to make the sight more dredfull) put a little brimstone into a chafing dish of coles, setting it before the head of the boie, who must gaspe two or three times, so as the smoke enter a little into his nostrils and mouth (which is not unholsome) and the head presentlie will appeare starke dead; if the boie set his countenance accordinglie: and if a little bloud be sprinkled on his face, the sight will be the stranger.

In a tantalising afterthought he adds:

There are other things which might be performed in this action, the more to astonish the beholders, which because they offer long descriptions, I omit: as to put about his necke a little dough kneded with bulIocks bloud, which being cold will appeare like dead flesh; & being pricked with a sharpe round hollow quill, will bleed, and seeme verie strange, &c

How has this biblically framed illusion been repurposed for the YouTube generation? At a palm reader’s stall in a shopping centre... with plenty of screaming reactions, of course. Enjoy!

In a recent post I described a trick performed for King Henry VIII by a brave conjurer who went by the name of Brandon. In performance, he:

painted on a wall the picture of a dove, and seeing a pigeon sitting on the top of a house, said to the king; Lo now your Grace shall see what a juggler can doo, if he be his craftes maister; and then pricked the picture with a knife so hard and so often, and with so effectuall words, as the pigeon fell downe from the top of the house stark dead.

In order to effect this miracle Brandon had previously done some research into how long a poison would take to act on the average pigeon, and would feed the local flock an appropriate length of time before his production began. (Perhaps there are three exceptions to my rule, rather than two.)

The more curious reader will be wondering what happens if the poisonous dose is misjudged, killing the pigeon too quickly or too slowly. If the poison is too strong then the unfortunate performer is left to their own devices. If it is too weak, however, then an ingenious back up plan is offered, for which the help of a friend is required.

This might be done by a confederate, who standing at some window in a church steeple, or other fit place, and holding the pig by the leg in a string, after a signe, given by his fellowe, pulleth downe the pigeon, and so the wonder is wrought.

The Discoverie of Witchcraft, written in 1584 by a man called Reginald Scot, describes a performance given by a magician called Brandon to the King of England. Scot described the performance:

What woondering and admiration was there at Brandon the juggler, who painted on a wall the picture of a dove, and seeing a pigeon sitting on the top of a house, said to the king; Lo now your Grace shall see what a juggler can doo, if he be his craftes maister; and then pricked the picture with a knife so hard and so often, and with so effectuall words, as the pigeon fell downe from the top of the house stark dead.

In other words, and with more modern spelling, when Brandon stabbed a drawing of a bird with his knife a real bird, sitting on a nearby rooftop, fell down dead. The king’s response, presumably after he uttered some regal expletives, was that Brandon:

… was prohibited to use that feat anie further, lest he should emploie it in anie other kind of murther; as though he, whose picture so ever he had pricked, must needs have died, and so the life of all men in the hands of a juggler.

Brandon was banned from ever performing the trick again, just in case he decided to use his powers on something (or someone) more important than a pigeon.

How did the trick work? Well, according to Scot, the performer would prepare by researching how long a particular poison takes to kill a pigeon. Then, armed with this knowledge, he simply had to feed the pigeons poisoned bread an appropriate length of time before the performance, allowing nature to take its course and, perhaps, drawing out the action of stabbing the picture until the bird expired.

Did Brandon follow the king’s decree and retire his performance piece? After a little research, trying to date his performances, I suspect he did. Brandon was first described as “the lord king’s juggler” sometime between 1520 and 1522, during the reign of Henry VIII. Given that information, Brandon would have done well to obey the royal command for, as history has taught us, Henry was not a forgiving man.

The article explains:

In 2008, according to “Dark Territory,” a history of cyberwar by Fred Kaplan, Russian hackers accomplished a feat that Pentagon officials considered almost impossible: breaching a classified network that wasn’t even connected to the public Internet. Apparently, Russian spies had supplied cheap thumb drives, stocked with viruses, to retail kiosks near nato headquarters in Kabul, betting, correctly, that a U.S. serviceman or woman would buy one and insert it into a secure computer.

The plan is a rather clever one, but its origins can be found long before the cyber age began, in a scam used by Parisian card cheats.

Imagine you were playing cards and had just made a large bet, say a month’s wages. I expect you would be feeling pretty nervous. Now imagine making the same bet but secretly knowing every card that your opponents hold and, indeed, every card anywhere in the game. That would be feel much more comfortable. Marked cards, which have secretly had their back designs changed to indicate their identity, make this possible. The problem, for a cheat who wants to use them, is to get them into play without arousing suspicion. In an ideal world, the cheat could arrive at a game, played with cards supplied by someone else, and still know that they would be marked without anybody else’s knowledge.

Cue Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and his 1891 book, Card-Sharpers Their Tricks Exposed; or The Art of Always Winning. He suggests, amongst other possibilities, that the card cheat would find out where the people who run the game he wants to rip off buy their cards. Then, after becoming a regular customer, “he says that his friend has asked him to purchase a dozen or more packs of cards.”

The next morning, under the pretext that the cards are not the right colour, he returns them.

The packs are still sealed; the tradesman, without suspicion, exchanges them for others.

But the Greek [cheat] has passed the night in unsealing the covers and resealing them, by a process known to jugglers [magicians]; the cards have been marked by him; the tradesman has them now in his shop; the trick is done; the Greek waits for them to appear.

Of course, if it were deemed that the effort were worthwhile, the cheat could carry out his plan at every shop near the venue for a game, knowing that then, regardless of where a fellow player buys their cards, they will be still marked.

If you wanted to get a malicious piece of software into a secure computer system, it turns out, you could follow a similar plan, using USB sticks rather than playing cards. “There's a sucker born every minute,” as the saying goes, and it seems that not much changes.

Addendum

Curiously, the term ‘Greek’ may not carry the same political implication as Maskelyne’s performances with his automata, or be designed to associate an entire nation’s population with the traits of the cheat. Robert-Houdin explains the origin of the term at the beginning of his book.

Towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV, a certain chevalier of Greek origin, named Apoulos, was admitted to the Court. He quickly made so much money at play, that his success awakened suspicion as to the cause of such great good fortune.

Notwithstanding his astonishing ability, the gentleman was caught in the act and condemned for twenty years to the galleys.

Both Zoë and another of Maskelyne’s creations, Psycho, were tied to the politics of the British Empire. Psycho, first exhibited in 1875, was a card-playing automaton, a mechanical man capable of engaging in games with a member of the audience and also of demonstrating card tricks. Zoë, who made her debut 1877, was a robotic girl capable of writing as well as drawing simple sketches. For his performances, Psycho rested on a glass support, sitting at a table with a number of playing cards arranged before him, dressed as a “Hindoo.” Zoë, who appeared to be a young girl, sat on a pedestal in front of an easel, dressed as a Greek and poised wth her pen, ready to perform. Maskelyne would join the automata on stage, and then guide the audience through an exhibition of their skills. As Kainoa Harbottle, an academic and coin magician, has commented, Psycho and Zoë represent a layered portrayal of Western control over the exotic:

Together the two devices made up an automaton empire: silent Oriental constructs whose purpose of existence was to serve, entertain, and ultimately perform a Western fantasy of the mysterious Other. The British conjurer is both their inventor and conqueror — the creator of impressive devices and a tamer of their unknown powers.

Zoë’s performances would sometimes take this subjugation one step further. For one of her demonstrations, a member of the audience would choose a well known person from a list of over 200 names. Zoë would then draw a recognisable portrait of the celebrity. As the list included political figures of the time, such as Disraeli and Gladstone (each Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on multiple occasions) Zoë was sometimes compelled to draw the very people who perpetuated the Empire that repressed the very people she and Psycho represented.

It is entirely possible that ants’ eggs are out of season but fortunately our resourceful writer has another solution for just such an occasion:

Observe when a Cock is treading the Hen, then nimbly snatch a feather out of his Tail, put this privately into the Broom, and when she goes to sweep the House, she cannot leave farting so long as the Broom is in her hand.

The precise mechanism by which the tail feather operates eludes me, but the moral of this practical joke (beyond the obvious ‘don’t lock the door to the cellar unless requested to do so’) is clear. Farting always has been, and always will be, funny…

We begin with a (comparatively!) subtle joke from a late seventeenth century book on sports and pastimes, “To Cause Worms or Maggots Seem on Meat:”

Take Cat-guts and cut them to a length small and great, then strew them upon Meat hot as it comes out of the Pot. Some will eat none; others will deride the Maid that drest it: But the Meat is not at all prejudiced by it.

Beckmann was a rather remarkable man who made contributions to many aspects of modern life. He is widely considered to be the first person to treat the practice of various trades as a science and coined the word ‘technology’ to signify this new area of interest. As the earliest person to reliably document the development of numerous inventions he is also viewed as the father of the study of the history of technology.

In A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins Beckmann catalogues many of the Eighteenth Century trades one might expect: glass etching, tin making, sewing, gun making and vegetable growing. In addition, he offers a chapter covering “Jugglers, Rope-Dancers, Automata etc.” (Jugglers, at the time, was an umbrella term that encompassed conjurers as well as other similar entertainers.) Here, at last, I could read an opinion on magic’s purpose from a man who dedicated his life to the study of purposeful things.

Beckmann begins by positioning entertainers in general sense:

All our trades and occupations are not only filled up with workmen, but overflow. Our farmers can employ no more labourers, and our manufacturers no more hands than they have at present; our regiments are full; and in every employment there are more candidates and more supernumeraries than is consistent with the good of the public. Must it not therefore give us pleasure, when necessity invents new means of acquiring a livelihood, although they could be dispensed with?

Whilst being inconsequentially “dispensed with” is not ideal, a role for conjuring as “a new means of acquiring a livelihood” does not sound altogether bad. His closing argument, however, convinces me of magic’s worth.

It is much better that those who have learned no useful art; who have lost their youth in the service of others; or who are destitute, through any other cause, should gain their bread by amusing their fellow-citizens, than that they should either beg or steal.

And so I find myself decided. In accordance with Mr Beckmann’s dictum I have resolved, in 2017, to demonstrate the conjurer’s value to society through my actions rather than my words (though I will continue to write regularly here). From the first day of January until the thirty-first day of December I will attempt to neither beg nor steal.

He […] draws the teeth of half a dozen gentlemen, mixes them and jumbles them in a hat, gives any person leave to blindfold him, and returns each their own, and fixes them as well as ever.

Continuing the comparison, let us not forget that in this rather brutal show “He’s behind you” would carry a very different connotation…

Maskelyne was a performing magician with a gift for invention. His start in show business came when he saw a performance by The Davenport Brothers, a pair of performers who claimed to demonstrate spiritualistic phenomena in their shows, making contact with the dead. According to Maskelyne’s own account, a chink in the curtains shone a light on the Brother’s performance, both literally and figuratively, revealing it to be the result of trickery rather than a manifestation of supernatural power. Armed with this knowledge Maskelyne teamed up with George Alfred Cooke, his friend and a cabinet maker, and put on a show which duplicated the Davenports effects but made no supernatural claims.

From this humble beginning, Maskelyne went on to build a magical empire, first with Cooke and later with England’s greatest magician David Devant. Between 1873 and 1905 Maskelyne performed a run of shows in Piccadilly’s Egyptian Hall, a record three-decade-residency that led to the venue becoming known as ‘England’s Home of Mystery’ and made the London the magic capital of the world.

A significant part of Maskelyne’s performance repertoire was based on his ability as an inventor and mechanic. A major feature of his show, for example, was a mechanical figure called Psycho, pictured with Maskelyne at the top of this piece. Psycho was an automaton capable of playing games of Whist with members of the audience, as well as answering simple questions, and made over 4,000 appearances in Maskelyne’s shows.

Maskelyne’s inventiveness extended well beyond his theatrical creations and he is credited with designing numerous other items. One such creation was a typewriter that allowed text to be produced with differential spacing, a format which creates a more balanced, legible work. (Today you would be hard pressed to find text set out with monospacing but it was not until the introduction of the electric typewriter that differential spacing became the norm.) Perhaps his most influential creation, however, was a simple and durable coin operated lock that was installed in public toilets throughout London. The cost of using the lock, and therefore the facilities it controlled access to, was one English penny: Hence the euphemism: ‘spend a penny.’

The books in question are two editions of the same work, Modern Magic by Professor Hoffmann. Their contents were first serialised in a Victorian magazine for boys before being collected in book form in 1876. In writing them Hoffmann changed the course of magic forever.

Before Modern Magic was published there were plenty of performing magicians, as well as a selection of literature that explained how magic tricks were done. What was not available was a work that would teach the reader how they could become a performing conjurer. As Hoffmann said in the foreword to Modern Magic:

There is a vast difference between telling how a trick is done and teaching how to do it. The existing treatises, with few exceptions, do the former only. The intention of the present work is to do the latter also; to teach sleight-of-hand generally, as well as particular tricks … to conduct the neophyte from the very A B C of the magic art gradually up to those marvels which are exhibited on the public stage.

Hoffmann did this not because he thought that everyone should become a magician, but because a practical knowledge of conjuring would teach all sorts of other skills — problem solving, presentation, the ability to deceive and the ability to spot deception — all of which could be useful in the furtherance of a professional career in the service of the British Empire.

At the time his work was published the response was mixed. The non-magicians (muggles!) who reviewed the work were positive. Tatler, for example, commented:

the perusal of a very few pages convinces the reader of two things. The first is that Professor Hoffmann possesses a vast knowledge of conjuring matters; and the second, that he has all the literary ability so necessary to describe the proper working of tricks.

Magicians were more circumspect in their responses, and in some cases downright vicious. Frederick Eugene Powell, a popular performer and the Dean of the Society of American Magicians, wrote:

I have always thought that it would have been well had he died in his Mothers [sic] womb. He started this awful avalaunch [sic] of BOOKS. I wish every one was taken and burned.

This vitriolic response was likely provoked by Powell’s fears that Hoffmann’s work made the once secretive business of conjuring far too easily accessible, and that this would lead to the eventual death of magic. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. Certainly Modern Magic sold in unprecedented quantities to a swathe of the public for whom conjuring would otherwise have been less accessible, but this actually re-invented the art of magic.

Modern Magic, and Hoffmann’s subsequent works, created an audience of amateur magicians who, in turn, created a new community to feed their interests. They created and popularised the idea of trade magic magazines, of magical societies (including England’s Magic Circle and America’s Society of American Magicians, of which Powell was the Dean), of conferences for conjurers, and of the vast privately produced literature that is dedicated to magic.

My own interest in conjuring was forged through Modern Magic, both as the first book that developed my mentor’s interest in conjuring and one of the first books he gave me to arouse my curiosity. At one step removed it was also important through my formative association with The Magic Circle and the magic conventions that flow from Hoffmann’s work.

So those two little books, seen by the best part of four million viewers but, I suspect, noticed by almost none, are responsible for me being a magician. More significantly, as the catalyst that led to a huge change in how magic was, and is, practiced, they are responsible for the programme itself, and, in fact, for shaping every aspect of the magic that we experience today.

Dickens was, of course, a writer. What is less widely known is that he was also a keen amateur conjurer. For friends and family he performed under the name of “The Unparalleled Necromancer, Rhia Rhama Rhoos,” as part of a tradition in which people at social gatherings would all contribute some form of talent to an evening’s entertainment. Jayne Carlyle, a friend of Dickens and one half of the querulous literary couple about whom Samuel Butler wrote: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four,” saw one such Dickens performance and described it in a letter to her cousin:

Only think of that excellent Dickens playing the conjuror for one whole hour — the best conjuror I ever saw — (and I have paid money to see several) — and Forster acting as his servant! This part of the entertainment concluded with a plum pudding made out of raw flour, raw eggs — all the raw usual ingredients — boiled in a gentleman’s hat — and tumbled out reeking — all in one minute before the eyes of the astonished children, and astonished grown people! That trick — and his other of changing ladies’ pocket handkerchiefs into comfits — and a box full of bran into a box full of — a live-guinea-pig! would enable him to make a handsome subsistence lest the book-seller trade go as it please!

In addition to practical performance, Dickens also seems to have taken direct inspiration from conjuring for his books. A Christmas Carol, for example, features a scene in which Scrooge snuffs out the Spirit of Christmas Past with an “extinguisher cap.” This alludes to a famous, and then popular, illusion: The magician would cover his assistant, in the middle of the stage, with a giant candle snuffer. Upon lifting the snuffer, the assistant would have completely vanished.

I’d now like to lift the snuffer on the question of what made me think of Dickens on this particular stormy night. My performance for the programme was recorded at Knebworth House, a Tudor stately home just outside London. And the room in which I conjured was the library, formed by The High Honourable Lord Lytton (‘Litto’ to his friends).

Lytton, who was a friend of Dickens and a writer himself, has notably contributed to English literature, devising a number of memorable phrases that have endured to the present day. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” “pursuit of the almighty dollar” and “the great unwashed” all emanated from his pen (which, bizarrely, was mightier…).

And indeed he left a decisive mark on one of Dicken’s most-loved works, to be precise the ending of Great Expectations. When the novel was serialised, Dickens sent a proof to his friend and Lytton suggested a change to the story. At the end of Dickens’ original draft, Pip and Estella remained apart, with Estella having remarried and therefore being unavailable to Pip. Lytton suggested that this was too sad and Dickens, in a move that proved popular with the public but which is still questioned today, revised his text to allow for the possibility of the two characters’ future union.

So, to summarise the logical steps that flow through this post with a sense of perfect inevitability: I did magic tricks in a room containing books bought by an English Lord who was friends with a novelist who occasionally enjoyed conjuring himself. And the night after doing all this I thought about it during a storm.

There is one final thing to mention. Lord Lytton is perhaps best known today as the man who wrote the infamously convoluted, opening lines to the 1830 novel, Paul Clifford:

It was a dark and stormy night…