One of New England’s earliest professional magicians, Jonathan Harrington (1809-1881) began his on-the-road career as a ventriloquist “superior to anything we have ever before seen,” New England Farmer gushed in 1833, seven years after the Boston native made his debut. By 1856, he had become the “Professor of Legerdemain” and made annual trips through the Berkshires.
Harrington at the age of 11 had seen a performance by Charles the Ventriloquist and began throwing his own voice to fool his parents, according to a 1919 profile in Society of American Magicians Monthly. His first public appearance was at Castle Street Hall in Boston in 1826, and three years later signed on with promoters Tufts, Austin & Macomber. Adding magic, he performed a “Burning of Moscow” trick.
Conjurer Harrington became so popular, he booked regular July 4th performances at Boston Public Garden and purchased the New England Museum in that city in 1838. He sold the museum after six years and returned to the road, touring largely in New England.
Horatio Alger Jr. included him as a character in the “Professor Harrington’s Entertainment” chapter of his dime novel “The Store Boy; or, The Fortunes of Ben Barkley” (1887).
Harrington, “ventriloquist and wizard,” as The Pittsfield Sun called him, performed for a North Adams audience in 1866.
In 1874 in Pittsfield, according to The Berkshire County Eagle, he brought “a special attraction the celebrated Indian box trick, which has puzzled investigating committees in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and how it is done has never yet been discovered. A plain box is wrapped in canvas, tied with ropes, and the knots sealed with wax in the presence of the audience. Then an assistant stretches himself upon the box and in a twinkling he is found inside the little chest, and yet neither the ropes have been cut or disturbed and the canvas covering is intact. It is one of the greatest magical feats ever performed and columns have been written in the New York papers describing it.”
The Indian box trick, as the name implies, originated in India. Several European and American magicians adopted and adapted it, some claiming to have invented it. It evolved into the Substitution Trick. P.T. Barnum bought a version (then called the Locked and Corded Box Mystery) from Dr. Lynn in London in 1873 for $2,500 and presented it at his museum.
Harrington planned to perform his version at Pittsfield’s Academy of Music in March 1874, but, as The Eagle reported, “The professor was so discouraged by the multitude of empty seats that he didn’t think it worth while to give the Indian box trick. He concluded that Pittsfield doesn’t appreciate conjurers.”
Pittsfielders may have still been wound up from the rip-roaring show a month before featuring Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack and Wild Bill.
Harrington’s last performance was in York, Maine, after which he caught a severe cold and died of pneumonia at his home in Revere.
Learning all this, I was of course curious about the Indian box trick. I scoured books by my friend the late Walter B. Gibson, of Eddyville, N.Y. — a sleight-of-hand artist, ghostwriter for magicians and author of the pulp tales featuring The Shadow — but to no avail. Another friend, the late Bill Severn, of Great Barrington, mostly wrote about close-up magic, not stage illusions.
There were variations on the illusion, sometimes involving an assistant being wrapped in a burlap bag. One magician in Texas made a double switch, disappearing from the box, and out the back door with the theater’s receipts.
I finally found a very complete revelation in a Wilmington, Del., newspaper, Every Evening (News Journal), in a January 1874 issue. The writer begins, “It may seem an ungracious task do dissect the thrilling illusions of necromancy, and there is certainly nothing more disagreeable in attending an exhibition of the marvels of magic, than to have a conceited neighbor who airs his theory of every performance as it is exhibited, and is as generally as ignorant of magic as of manners. The world is so painfully real that one likes to enjoy the clever tricks of the conjurors, and does not dare to be disillusionized as he witnesses them, but there is, nevertheless, no small amount of curiosity to know the modus operandi of some of the more famous tricks, and this curiosity in regard to the Indian box trick is the purpose of this article to gratify.”
The writer watched an unnamed performer from backstage; the timing suggests it could have been Harrington.
I’m no magician, but I appreciate the magicians’ code of keeping secrets. And I’ve used up my allotment of space here. I’ll just say it involved a second, unseen burlap bag and a trap door in the box. But you’ve already probably guessed that much.
Article From & Read More ( Bernard A. Drew: Magician Harrington's Indian box trick drew crowds everywhere — except Pittsfield, apparently - Berkshire Eagle )https://ift.tt/j0m8UcW
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