Charles Dickens Magician: Conjuring in Life, Letters and Literature

Ian Keable. Charles Dickens Magician; Conjuring in Life, Letters and Literature. Ian Keable: iankeable.co.uk, 2014. Pp. xviii + 268. $25.

Charles Dickens was well known as a novelist, journalist and public reader. But he had many other lesser accomplishments as well: poet, playwright, editor, actor, mesmerist, athlete, musician and so on. He was also an amateur magician - or, in nineteenth-century parlance, a conjuror: Jane Carlyle wrote enthusiastically of "that excellent Dickens playing the conjuror for one whole hour - the best conjuror I ever saw" (56). In this book, author Ian Keable, a practicing British magician who has recreated Dickens's own illusions in a performance called The Secret World of Charles Dickens, closely considers Dickens's experiences as a spectator and as a performer of magic, and the influence magic may have had on Dickens's writing.

Though Keable is not a literary scholar, he has done careful and thorough research for this book and makes no important errors in his treatment of Dickens's life and writing career, though he omits Little Dorrit from his chronological timeline.

Keable traces Dickens's depictions of thimble-rigging in Sketches by Boz and Nicholas Nickleby, and considers Dickens's only depiction of a conjuror in fiction, Sweet William in The Old Curiosity Shop. He also identifies several conjurors Dickens saw perform, including Ludwig Döbler, Robert-Houdin, Alfred de Gaston, Henri Robin, and Colonel Stodare.

Dickens's career as a practicing conjuror was limited to a single decade: the 1840s. Dickens bought the stock in trade of a conjuror in 1842, and gave his first proper show in January 1843. Dickens's best-documented performance,...