Gibecière Vol. 4 No. 1

Con ten ts Pocket Notes—Stephen Minch 7 The Thought-Reader Craze—Barry H. Wiley 9 An Investigation into Magic in Japan After the Opening of the Country, Part V—Mitsunobu Matsuyama 135 Contributors 195

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Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University

•• • • • •• • • • THE THOUGHT-RE ADER CR A ZE

•• • • • •• • • •

O

Barry H. Wiley

I h Mr. Cumberland and Irving Bishop too With the pins you try to find I’d like to run you through For you have marr’d my happiness and it is very plain That all the family now have got, thought reading on the brain.

Chorus, Thought Reading on the Brain, 1884

In 1884, anyone in England had only to go to the nearest music hall and listen to the jokes of the comedians to identify the “the rage of the hour,” the latest craze, the focus of public attention. In 1884, it was a raucous sensation called “Thought Reading.”

No explanations by the comics were necessary, as everyone in the audience easily understood what the rapid-fire jokes were about.

The song quoted above has three verses and a chorus, along with spoken patter, between the verses—in all, a six- to eight-minute turn.

The lyrics describe a married man with nine children, mostly girls, who have been infected by every disease or fever that comes down their street, and now they all have succumbed to “Thought Reading on the Brain.” The beleaguered father is particularly disturbed that his girls, even the youngest, practice their thought reading in the dark with their boyfriends.

In another British locale, however, thought reading wasn’t a joke.

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At the time, Stuart Cumberland called himself a “Thought Reader.”

He could apparently detect in some subtle manner, the private, unspoken thoughts and intentions of strangers, whether low born or royal. Since June 1880, Cumberland had been demonstrating several ­bewildering

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Courtesy of the William V. Rauscher collection

Th e Th o u g h t - R e a d e r C r a z e

J. Randall Brown at work

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Ba rry H. Wiley a copper telegraph-wire running between Philadelphia and New York?

There was a Dunningeresque element about this challenge.

Brown and his manager met Frazer and others at the Philadelphia Western Union Office. It was agreed that two “experienced operators” were to cut ten slips of paper with the numbers from thirty to forty written on them. They then sent a message that requested the New York operator to get ready to hold the wire in his fingers and to think intensely of the number that represented his age. Everyone in the room intently watched Brown in silence.

Finally a tap-tap was received, indicating all was ready. J. Randall Brown, blindfolded and tightly holding the wire with both his hands, bowed his head over the table on which the slips with the numbers were laid. He commenced to move slowly to and fro, at times lowering his forehead to touch the slips directly. Finally he pulled off the blindfold and handed a slip to one of the operators. The number was thirty-seven.

A quick request was sent to New York for confirmation. The answer, when it finally came, rendered the experiment a farce. It was: “Battery put on the wire by mistake. Sorry.”

Smiling, one of the operators commented that he didn’t think they had any thirty-seven-year-old batteries.

Three other attempts were made, this time between Philadelphia and Wilmington. All were failures.

Frazer concluded his paper: “from the facts known in connection with this new form of mind reading [...] there is nothing to justify the inference that the results are obtained by the agency of any unknown or occult force.” This conclusion refuted the Yale conclusions.

Scientists were agreed that J. Randall Brown was genuine, but they still could not agree on just what that meant.

Though the telegraph stunt was an embarrassing failure, years later

Gibecière • Winter 2009

Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, University of Texas

Th e Th o u g h t - R e a d e r C r a z e

Poster, c. 1875

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Ba rry H. Wiley

Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center

W. Irving Bishop at twenty-one, 1876

Gibecière • Winter 2009

Th e Th o u g h t - R e a d e r C r a z e

Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University

appropriated as “personal expenses” all but $80 of the proceeds for himself and his unnamed male assistant, an amount equivalent to $140,000 in 2007. When the great men realized they had been cleverly gulled by Bishop, they were too humiliated to challenge him publically. Consequently, the Boston papers were filled with glowing reviews of Bishop’s presentation and accolades for his generous support for the cause.

It was also in Boston that Bishop was photographed dressed as a

Miss W. I. Bishop, November 1876, photographed by Warren’s Portraits, Boston

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might even have used so brazen a method as to run ahead of Bishop to lead him to the right place.

PMG editor, W. T. Stead, observed that the envelope containing the secret had disappeared and, while he did not explicitly accuse W. I. Bishop of fraud, he noted that Bishop could not reach into the minds of people standing close to him at the hotel in the various banknote tests, failing every time but the last; yet he succeeded in an elaborate experiment that had too many loopholes, too many opportunities for collusion and trickery. As for potential applications of Bishop’s powers to criminal investigation, nothing further was said.

Within two months, and long before Maskelyne’s libel trial opened, Bishop and his assistant had left for France, heading east. W. I. Bishop

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Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria, Australia

Th e Th o u g h t - R e a d e r C r a z e

Cumberland and Houdini at the stage door of the London Palladium, 1920

Stuart Cumberland, 1905

of Europe as her subjects.

With W. Irving Bishop leaving Great Britain in 1884, never to return, followed by Bishop’s bizarre death in 1889, Stuart Cumberland became the premier thought-reader in Great ­Britain and Europe for the remainder of his career.

Unlike Bishop, who squandered his money faster than he earned it, Stuart Cumberland had preserved and invested his capital. After making an estimated £50,000 from thought reading, plus income from his books and novels, Cumberland retired from professional performing about 1910.

He later appeared only for charity events or at the request of a prominent member of society or royalty. His last book, on Spiritualism, appeared in 1919.

That 1880 comment made in passing by the reporter of the Whitehall

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From Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, (Tenpo 12: 1841)

Choji Shio-no’s vision of swallowing a horse

••••• • ••••• • AN INVESTIG ATION INTO M AGIC IN JAPAN AFTER THE OPENIN G OF THE CO UNTRY

••••• • ••••• • Part V: Various Western Magicians Visiting Japan in the Late 1800s

A

MITSUNOBU MATSUYAMA

fter the appearances of Vanek and Vertelli at the Gaiety Theatre in the Yokohama concession (see part IV), many western magicians performed on the Gaiety stage. The majority of their audiences were composed of westerners, with few Chinese and Japanese attending. Of these early visiting conjurers, all known records indicate that only Vertelli (aka John Marcom) made the leap from the Yokohama concession theater onto the Tokyo vaudeville stage, where in Meiji 9 (1876) he performed for Japanese theatergoers. It would be Meiji 21 (1888) before another western conjurer would entertain Tokyo audiences with the novelty of genuine western magic. Meanwhile, Shoichi ­Kitensai and other Japanese magicians worried over and wondered how they should perform and adapt the new effects and ideas coming from the west, in order to update their programs and create new sensations to attract the public.

As one reads various biographies and articles on the magicians of this period—both western conjurers coming to the Far East, and Japanese conjurers traveling to the west—one finds numerous records of great struggles and terrible hardship suffered by all.

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M a g i c i n J a pa n A f t e r t h e O p e n i n g o f t h e C o u n t r y

Poster for the Wash Norton Greatest Wonder of Magic show

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