LAUSR

In his 1906 book The Old and the New Magic, magic historian Henry Ridgely Evans (1861–1949) wrote, ‘Alas, the golden age of wizardry has passed’ (1906, 315). For him, as for other magicians at the turn of the twentieth century (and indeed a number of French magicians even now), ‘the good old days – the golden days’ were the ‘days – of Robert-Houdin’ (1902, 78). Every culture and every era looks back fondly on some point in its past as a golden age and each âge d’or is, of course, a historical fiction that probably reveals more about the culture and the time period that looks back than it tells us about the ‘golden age’ so optimistically recalled (or constructed). At the turn of the twentieth century, Evans and many others would have, without hesitation, designated the golden age of theatrical conjuring as belonging more or less completely to Jean-Eug ène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871), the so-called father of modern magic. Many French magicians in particular would maintain this claim even today. From our vantage point in 2018, however, Evans was himself living through a golden age at the turn of the twentieth century that was every bit as transformational as the changes spearheaded by Robert-Houdin. We appear to have at long last arrived at a moment when the study of conjuring has reached something like a critical mass, though scholarly work on the topic is still scattered across various disciplines. With a few notable exceptions, studies of magic history continue to cluster in the established domains of practitioners, collectors and interested enthusiasts rather than being found in peer-reviewed journals or academic programs of study. Two noteworthy mavericks we know of are the journal Gibecière, published biannually by the Conjuring Arts Research Center since 2005, which at some point adopted a double-blind, peer-reviewed publication process, and Carleton University in Ottawa, which is expected to soon announce the appointment of its inaugural Allan Slaight Chair for the Conjuring Arts. These developments would seem to fill a significant and relatively long-standing void, although they remain mostly recent exceptions to the general rule of academia’s more or less systematic avoidance of magic history notwithstanding occasional doctoral dissertations, journal articles and scholarly books over the years. The earliest doctoral dissertation in English devoted to conjuring appears to have been Norman Triplett’s ‘The Psychology of Conjuring Deceptions,’ completed in 1900 at Clark University (where Sigmund Freud would later give his American lectures) and