HIDING THE ELEPHANT: How Magicians Invented the Impossible
by Jim SteinmeyerHeinemann £14.99 pp362
One sometimes suspects that the thing lying at the heart of Victorian attitudes to life was the idea of illusion. Nothing was better calculated to raise the middle-aged W M Thackeray’s spirits than early December and the promise of the pantomime season. Dickens liked appearing in amateur theatricals built on the idea of mistaken identity. Royalty was not immune, and after-dinner entertainments at Windsor Castle were regularly enlivened by the presence of the latest fashionable conjuror. The Victorian era may have ended up as a monument to rationalism, but, as Jim Steinmeyer shows in this highly entertaining study of magic’s “golden age”, all manner of cheerfully suspended disbelief lay gathered up in its foundations.
Real “magic”, of course, was long dead by this time, blown out of the respectable world by three centuries of crusading Protestantism. In its place came a more or less artificial phenomenon in which several features of the mid-19th century landscape — mass entertainment, popular science and sub-religious sensibility — all played their part. This led to some odd juxtapositions: curiously enough, the origins of the Victorian magical renaissance can be found not on the stage of some East End penny gaff, with a frock-coated showman pulling livestock from an up-ended top hat, but in the comparatively august setting of the Royal Polytechnic Institute near Langham Place, W1.
Founded in 1838, the institute had been intended as a kind of permanent scientific fair offering lectures on navigation aimed at naval officers. Come the early 1860s, however, these had given way to the more lucrative performances of Signor Buono Core, the fire-walking Italian Salamander. Conscious of the need to bolster receipts, its canny director, John Henry Pepper (who, lecturing to Queen Victoria, once advised her that “the oxygen and the hydrogen will now have the honour of combining before your majesty”), was delighted to welcome to the premises a Liverpudlian engineer named Henry Dircks together with an invention that he christened “the Dircksian phantasmagoria”. Known immediately as “Pepper’s Ghost”, this cunning arrangement of mirrors and lighting (the angles producing an illusion of flickering spirits) ran for 15 months and attracted more than a quarter of a million visitors.
The middle-class crowds who came flocking up Regent Street wanted to be entertained. Yet, as Pepper realised from the outset, there were other factors at work. Dircks was a bona fide inventor: the original summary of his scheme had appeared in the journal of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the modern equivalent would be David Blaine reading a paper to the Royal Society). At the same time his “ghosts” were calculated to appeal to followers of the burgeoning spiritualist craze. As Steinmeyer points out, Pepper accumulated a trunk-full of letters from people who imagined that they had witnessed a performance by real spirits. Meanwhile, London theatres were crammed with mirror-wielding imitators, a patent war broke out and the Thames Plate Glass Company ran out of materials.
If Pepper and Dircks, both genuine men of science, managed to preserve something of the decorum of the lecture hall, the next great magical phenomenon — William and Ira Davenport — was a much more doubtful proposition. Taciturn brothers from New York who may have witnessed a demonstration by Margaret and Kate Fox, the godmothers of spiritualism, their act involved a whole range of supposedly otherworldly sensations: ghostly hands emerging from the cabinet in which they sat secured with ropes; the sound of musical instruments from within. Not everyone was fooled (“Is it not passing strange that in the year of 1865, when the whole of the human race is pressing with rapid strides in the direction of progress, an attempt should be made to renew these superstitious tomfooleries?” wondered a French newspaper) and engagements in the north of England were broken up by sceptical stage-invaders, but the Davenports’ reputation endured sufficiently for Harry Houdini to visit the surviving brother half a century later and attend a recitation of his professional secrets.
Thereafter the path lay ever upward: to Pepper and Thomas Tobin’s “Proteus Cabinet” (this concealed the person placed in it while contriving an optical illusion of empty space), John Maskelyne’s Enchanted Gorilla Den, and Psycho, an automaton who picked up playing cards from a rack and was worked by air pressure and a hidden bellows. Steinmeyer turns out to be a magic designer by trade, and some of the most intriguing parts of his book cover the psychological backdrop to audience manipulation. A good magician, he explains, anticipates the way in which the audience thinks, never overplays his hand and works intelligently with the belief system of the people in front of him. To declare that “here is an ordinary brown paper bag” is to invite instant suspicion.
Among the myths exposed along the way is the idea that Houdini, great escapologist though he was, could do magic. He was, in fact, altogether dreadful, Steinmeyer pronounces, having picked over accounts of his performances in this line and sniffed over the elephant of this book’s title, which vanished at the New York Hippodrome in 1918, inside a cabinet whose interior was “suspiciously black” with only the first few rows able to see what was going on. All at once something elementary stirs amid the confusion of angled mirrors and levitating devices. Self-presentation, as Anthony Powell remarked, requires a basis in art.
GET OUT OF THAT
Harry Houdini may have been a poor magician (Orson Welles called his tricks “awful stuff”), but he was a genius at escapology. One of his finest moments came in London in 1904, when a newspaper challenged him to escape from a pair of handcuffs that had taken five years to make. After 70 minutes behind a curtain, Houdini emerged, perspiring heavily and asking for the handcuffs to be unlocked so he could remove his coat. When this request was refused, he placed a pen-knife in his mouth, shredded his jacket, returned behind the curtain, and emerged 30 minutes later miraculously free of the cuffs. The audience, reportedly, nearly rioted.
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websites:
www.bbc.co.uk/london/insideldn/dannybaker/archive1_clipoftheday_2004.shtml
Interview with Steinmeyer
