At this time of year, exactly 70 years ago, I was taken to my first exhibition of professional conjuring. The magus called himself Dante — he was Danish-American and his real name was Harry Jansen. He had an amazing moustache and beard, wore dazzling evening dress and a red satin-lined cloak, and performed his tricks at lightning speed: his slogan was ‘15 sur- prises in 15 seconds’. However, the performance I would like to have seen most was staged by Charles Dickens on Boxing Day 1843 at a children’s party given by the actor Macready. Dickens had bought at Hamley’s a proper ‘apparatus’ which had belonged to the conjuror Doëbler. Being the man he was he had learned his business thoroughly. Jane Welsh Carlyle, who was present, wrote to her niece Jeannie:
Dickens also changed the pocket-handkerchiefs of the ladies present into bags of sweets, and produced a live guinea-pig from a box of bran. He kept up these seasonal conjuring shows so long as his own children were small.
He was not the only famous author to go in for magic tricks. Kipling sought successfully to become a member of the Magic Circle, where his letter of application is preserved, and J.B. Priestley enjoyed conjuring too. So did Edmund Wilson, though he did not see the business as merely a game: ‘There may be more to these feats and to our pleasure in them than we are likely to be conscious of… And the magician who escapes from the box: what is he but Adonis and Attis and all the rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise?’
The truth is, people who dabble in magic rarely know exactly where to draw the line between entertainment and mystification.
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