In 1918, an audience at the Wood Green Empire in north London was eagerly watching that night’s entertainment – the famous magician Chung Ling Soo was performing. He was an experienced performer, first hired as a Chinese magician at the Folies Bergère in Paris back in 1900. He was an exotic creature to Westerners, clad in traditional Chinese robes, with his hair in a Chinese ‘queue’. He claimed to be half-American, half-Chinese, never speaking on stage, and only able to speak in broken English off-stage, when he wasn’t using a Chinese interpreter. He was so popular in Europe that he quickly became one of vaudeville’s highest-paid performers.

Yet his identity itself was an illusion. Chung Ling Soo was really an American of Scottish descent – one William Ellsworth Robinson, 39 years old when he had performed in Paris. In fact, Soo had been exposed by a rival magician, Ching Ling Foo, a genuine Chinese man, whose name he had adapted for himself. The men had a long-standing rivalry, and Ching Ling Foo made a point of finding out Soo’s real identity. While performing himself in London in 1905, Foo revealed Soo as an impostor – but was horrified to learn that the press didn’t care who Soo really was, as long as he could perform tricks.

Soo’s most famous illusion involved his attendants, armed, firing a gun at him. He would then appear to catch the bullets while they were in the air, and drop them onto a plate. In reality, the guns were rigged so that bullets never left them, and Soo had previously palmed bullets, hiding them in his hands until appearing to catch them. On 23 March 1918, Soo performed his final illusion. As his assistant fired the gun at Soo, it accidentally fired, triggered by gunpowder exploding in its chamber – Soo never unloaded his guns properly after performing. The bullet hit Soo in his lung and he collapsed, dying in hospital the next morning.

Chung Ling Soo was a celebrity magician: the public loved to hear stories about him, and watch him perform, his apparent ‘exotic’ qualities as a performer from the East proving very attractive. Those he worked for and with kept up the image of mystique themselves; the manager of the Wood Green Empire, for example, insisted that Soo ‘always jealously guarded the secret of his trick guns’, yet it later emerged that his wife, who was also his assistant, knew exactly how he did the trick. In real life, he had a series of relationships, with children by various women including assistants, and after his death the public was shocked to find out how different he was in reality compared to the image he projected on stage. The Stage, the theatrical newspaper, summed up the reality 40 years after his death: ‘He was really an American called William Ellsworth Robinson, he lived in Lonsdale Road, Barnes, where he had his workshop. His wife, Olive, was also living a double life, of Suee Seen [sic], his assistant.’

Although Soo gained immortality by the nature of his untimely death, he was by no means unique. The 19th and early 20th centuries have become regarded as the Golden Age of magic, for our ancestors loved theatrical acts of all kinds, and were keen audiences for magicians, whether Chinese, pretending to be Chinese, or homegrown. These magicians usually performed as part of a wider variety or vaudeville performance; for example, the Alexandra Music Hall in Wigan hosted a varied show in 1884 that included Lilian Haydn and Don Esparto performing a series of magic tricks; Haydn and Esparto featured alongside burlesques, songs and comedy sketches by others. A review of one of their performances in 1888 noted that Esparto had mesmerised an army private and ‘could do anything with him, actually making him eat a candle under the impression he was eating linked sausage’. However, Esparto also performed Chinese tricks, with one involving linked iron rings which he could disconnect with nobody being able to work out how he had taken them apart. This trick was still being performed on television in the late 20th century.

Esparto was not a Spanish or Portuguese performer as his name might suggest, for, like Soo, he had adopted a more exotic persona. In reality, he was Lincolnshire man William Smith, who used conjuring and mesmerism in his act. Lilian Haydn was a serio-comic in her own right, and known as ‘the celebrated London beauty’, but who performed with Esparto as his glamorous assistant – a type of duo still familiar a century later with the likes of Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee. Esparto and Hayden were sometimes known as the Mystagogue and the Enchantress (see blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/newsroom). The 1901 census records William Smith, illusionist, and his family, visiting his brother-in-law in Wolverhampton; this brother-in-law was Tom Beaumont, himself an exhibiting acrobat. After his career as an illusionist ended not long after this, Smith became a packer in the electrical engineering industry, settling in Wolverhampton. Another illusionist of the late 19th century was Lieutenant Albini, who could make a woman disappear, and was skilled at sleight of hand: despite his Italian stage name, he was a Norfolk man, whose real name was Frederick Baxter Ewing. Albini admitted that putting on his shows was expensive work; he would often spend £75 a time on a single trick, and once spent £100 on a new illusion that he could not get to work. He calculated that it could take two to three years to get an illusion to work perfectly.

As the identities taken on by the two Williams – Robinson and Smith – and Lieutenant Albini suggest, there was a special fascination with the exotic in Victorian Britain, and magicians who visited from overseas were particularly attractive. The likes of Italian Bartolmeo Bosco, an illusionist in the earlier part of the 19th century, and the Frenchman Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, helped associate magic with ‘foreignness’, and the British were keen to be seen to be appreciative of European or Asian ingenuity and creativity. However, as the cases above show, if an individual was not from abroad, they could easily pretend they were. Therefore, Edwin Joseph Sewell made himself sound French by adopting a French version of his name, becoming Jean Seul. Seul – who was performing professionally by his early 20s, and continued until his premature death from heart failure in 1929, aged 55 – made items appear and disappear from a black screen, and even made himself vanish from the stage before ‘magically’ reappearing at the back of the auditorium.

Cavaliere Antonio Poletti, like Bosco a genuinely Italian illusionist performing in Britain, was admired for his manual dexterity; he used the still-famous ‘magic hat’ to produce a range of items, in addition a mirror trick and the ‘box of Catullus’ which contained an unfeasible amount of items – too many for the box itself, and too many to have been previously concealed on the magician’s person, according to press reviews. These noted that the British public contained a sizeable percentage of ‘mystery-loving’ people, for whom the appearance of an illusionist at their local variety hall or theatre was much anticipated. Signor Poletti’s tricks flabbergasted Victorian children in particular, and ensured him a warm response in the mid-19th century.

Magic crossed all boundaries, both in terms of the audience, and the background of those performing. Magic had traditionally been an activity popularly watched by the working classes, but during the Victorian era, it became popular with the higher rungs of the social ladder, including the aristocracy and royalty. Edwardians of all classes were intrigued by Harry Houdini, the Hungarian–American illusionist, and he was even commissioned by the Daily Mirror to perform in London in 1904. They also witnessed the continuation of John Nevil Maskelyne’s illusions and his exposing of fraudulent acts, after the death of his magic partner George Alfred Cooke in 1905.

John Henry Anderson, who became famous as The Great Wizard of the North (a name said to have been given to him by Sir Walter Scott), made the most of advertising to ensure his name became known. Anderson was a stern critic of himself: he was not happy just to do a trick well – he wanted his audience to enjoy it. If he performed an illusion and it was not received as enthusiastically as he hoped, he would drop it from his programme. He also popularised the famous trick of pulling a white rabbit from a top hat, and also performed a version of the bullet catch illusion that later killed Soo. However, he also performed tricks that had been invented by others, such as Robert-Houdin, whose inventions were stolen by his mechanic, with duplicates being copied and sold to his competitors.

The Great Wizard of the North was so successful that he toured the world, and performed for both the Russian Imperial family and the British Royal family. The perceived success of such magicians led some to try and become magicians themselves, although their careers might be more shortlived, part-time, or more of a hobby. For every successful performer, there was an unsuccessful one. Magic was a tough act to do right, or do well enough to make a living from. For example, William Baldrey, from Luton but living in south London for much of his life, claimed to be a full-time magician in 1891, but all other censuses show him working in other industries: he was a baker, a jeweller, and a watch repairer, suggesting that working in magic was more of an interest than a successful career. You needed both showmanship and skill to make it as a magician in an often crowded industry, as well as lots of publicity and a fair bit of imagination and creativity. But you also needed determination and a shrewd sense of business, to keep an eye on what your competitors were doing and do it better. The real trick with these magicians was to make their acts look effortless – even if, like Soo, you died in the process.