The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic. And the second thing he learns is that a perfectly respectable example of the former may be had for two or three guineas at a good bookseller, and that the value of the latter is above rubies. (Susanna Clarke's Johnathon Strange and Mr. Norrell)
I'm reading one of my holiday gifts from my beloved, a historical novel about magicians, magic, and practical vs. theoretical magic, set in England (and eventually other parts of Europe, according to the dust jacket) in the early 1800s.
The answer already seems to be
yes to the inevitable question: Is the author writing about the 19th century or the 20th?
In the early pages of the book, the reader is given to believe that by the 1800s there have been no practicing magicians in England for several centuries. The "gentleman-magicians" meeting to discuss magic in the opening pages of this promising book are men who have never "cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree." Historians of magic, yes, theoretical magicians, some of them, but practicing magicians? No, the belief
du jour is that practical magic is dead in England.
Indeed, from the footnote accompanying the above quote:
Magicians only applied themselves to writing books when magic was already in decline. Darkness was already approaching to quench the glory of English magic. Those men we call the Silver Age or Argentine magicians (Thomas Lanchester, 1518-1590; Jacques Belasis, 1526-1604; Nicholas Goubert, 1535-78; Gregory Absalom, 1507-99) were flickering candles in the twilight; they were scholars first and magicians second. Certainly they claimed to do magic; some even had a fairy-servant or two, but they seem to have accomplished very little in this way and some modern scholars have doubted whether they could do magic at all. (ibid.)
We've had a very rare four-day weekend here with no meetings or classes or social events big or small. Just the two of us, family phone calls, a brief Christmas Day visit, and some hearth magic of our own, very practical with very little ceremony and no awareness of the involvement of fairy-servants.
Haloscan:
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Blogger:
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