Liz Hyder is enchanted by the magicians and film-makers of the 1890s, whose extraordinary inventions inspired her new novel, The Illusions, set at a time of great technological and social change.
A few years ago, I went to the Wellcome Collection’s Smoke and Mirrors exhibition, which explored the psychology of magic. It was a feast for the senses, the entire exhibition space crammed full of the most deliciously entertaining — and peculiar – things: fake wooden hands used in séances; ear trumpets to better hear the ‘spirits’; huge playbills of famous magicians; and endless, irresistible stories about disguises, impossible tricks, vanishings and deceptions.
I wandered around it, spellbound, and I knew then that I’d found the spark for my next book.
The year in which The Illusions is set – 1896 — was a time of great technological and social change. From electric trams and the craze for bicycles to early moving images, it must have felt like change was in the very air itself as the world headed towards the cusp of a new century.
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Add into that the growing rise of the suffrage movement and women taking an increasingly prominent role in society, and you have yourself a heady mix. Not to mention — abracadabra! – a golden age of British magic. How could I resist?
I had known, of course, that magicians and film-makers overlapped, not least with the likes of Georges Méliès, but the more I delved into the Venn diagram overlap between the two, the stranger the truth seemed to be – that not only did magicians play a crucial role in developing the language of film as we know it, they also played an important role in presenting and popularising film too. And on it went.
Time and time again, I came across anecdotes and facts, snippets of the past that felt too far-fetched to be made up, from mind-boggling disappearances – and reappearances! – to impossible-sounding tricks, and woven through it all were contradictory acts of staggering jealousy and extreme kindness, huge egos and selfless generosity.
I fell in love with them, the magicians and film-makers, how could I not? And, like a jackdaw, I stole the shiniest nuggets of tall tales and dastardly deeds, of triumphs and tragedies, and repurposed them for my own story.
I borrowed from the best, from the likes of renowned British magician David Devant who ushered in a new era of informal magic and co-founded the Magic Circle — only to be thrown out not just once but twice for revealing how he did his tricks.
Many of Devant’s innovative and show-stopping illusions still feel as impossible today as they must have done in his heyday, and his motto ‘all done by kindness’ resonated deeply with me. I borrowed it for my own fictional young magician, George Perris, in The Illusions, hoping Devant would not object…
I borrowed, too, from the great magician and performer Adele Scarsez, better known as Adelaide Hermann. Born in London, the daughter of Belgian immigrants, Adelaide fell in love with theatre and dance at a young age before marrying the renowned magician Alexander Hermann. Wilful, determined and talented, Adelaide regularly performed in drag as Mr Alexander in the early days of being her husband’s on-stage assistant.
The duo were brilliantly inventive and hugely successful, and one of the Hermanns’ acts, Ten Minutes with the Modern Spirits, duplicated the techniques that spiritualists used, exposing their methods to the public. In 1896, after her husband died, Adelaide continued the act, taking the lead to become the star attraction for decades still to come.
And there are many more that inspired and fed into my tale: Charles Morritt, John Nevil Maskelyne, Howard Thurston, the list goes on.
The innovation, experimentation, ingenuity and invention of all of these magicians – and the mechanicians who worked with them — was utterly extraordinary. I filled my mind with their impossible tricks.
I read too of earlier magicians, like Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (who Houdini named himself after), a watchmaker and inventor turned magician whose own biography reads like a glorious work of fiction (and arguably is). One of my favourite tricks of his was extinguishing a whole stage filled with candles in the click of a finger!
I learned too about how magicians made the impossible possible, how Devant might work for years on one of his grand spectacles, and the engineering, timing, presentation, and performance that went into them.
And oh, what glorious spectacles they were! There was The Artist’s Dream, in which a painting became real right in front of your eyes, and Devant’s most famous illusion and my personal favourite, The Mascot Moth, in which a winged woman disappears in mid-air.
There are so many more: magic cloaks that transform the wearer underneath, cabinets in which a woman instantly changes into a man, and a glass box suspended in the air in which Devant vanishes himself in front of the small audience he has invited on-stage only to reveal that he himself is, somehow, a member of that very same audience.
And on it went, trick after trick, that amazed and delighted. I gathered them all up, collecting them from not just Devant but a wide variety of magicians, everything from card tricks and vanishings to the decapitation tricks that were strangely popular at the time.
The most extraordinary version of which leads to — and I’m genuinely not making this up — the magician decapitating himself before then taking the curtain call, bowing to applause, with his own head tucked underneath his arm!
And still there was more! Off-stage there are tales of double agents, of locks allegedly being picked to steal secrets from rivals (yes, Houdini, I’m looking at you!), and of magicians attending séances in disguise before revealing their true identity as they expose the medium in the very act of deception. Last but not least, there are bizarre and heart-breaking real-life disappearances.
British magician Charles Morritt, a man with a reputation for being somewhat difficult, had disappeared from the scene and was widely thought to be dead. That is until Devant came across him in Northumberland experimenting with how to vanish a donkey in a garage just outside of Hexham.
Bizarrely, this wasn’t even the first time a British magician had been assumed deceased only to be found alive and well. In 1783, the famous conjurer Philip Breslaw was pronounced dead and a book was produced and promoted as his last legacy. Except Breslaw was not dead at all. He was simply on tour in Newcastle…
The most baffling — and undoubtedly tragic — disappearance though is of Louis le Prince, the French-born, Leeds-based early film pioneer who is believed to have recorded the very first true moving pictures before vanishing without a trace. Known to be in debt at the time, and with a brother who owed him a huge sum of money, rumours still abound as to what might have really happened to him.
All of this and more fed into what became The Illusions, a story about power and talent, of friendship and love, of magicians and film-makers, a rollicking tale with a seam of darkness running through its heart; a love letter to theatre and live performance.
Finally, a story to show that things really do come full circle. In my first year at Bristol University back in the late 1990s, a talented young magician came and performed at my halls of residence. He was magnificent — handsome, charming, and utterly delightful with a penchant for purple velvet.
He ran a free workshop afterwards for a small group of us, and showed us how to hypnotise ourselves. It was a glorious, strange, and fascinating night that has lingered long in my memory. Believe it or not, that magician’s name was none other than Derren Brown…
The Illusions by Liz Hyder is published on 22 June, 2023.
See more about this book.
Liz has also written about the background to her previous novel, the magical The Gifts, in The gift of writing historical fiction.
If you enjoyed this feature, you may also like The Victorian theatrical world of mystery and illusion by Essie Fox, who is fascinated by early film.
Images:
- Frame from the only surviving hand-coloured print of Georges Méliès’s 1902 film Le voyage dans la lune, 1902: Cinespect via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Le Château Hanté by Georges Méliès (Star Film 96, 1897): Wikimedia (public domain)
- David Devant, portrait from The Strand Magazine, 1900: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Adelaide Herrmann as Sleeping Beauty, c1903: Theatrical Portrait Photographs (TCS 28). Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University via Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Artist’s Dream presented at the Egyptian Hall by David Devant in 1893, poster (detail): Copyright © The British Library Board (CC BY 4.0)
- Louis Le Prince, c1885: Courtesy of Armley Mills Industrial Museum, Leeds, via Wikimedia (public domain)
