Conjuring science: Performance magicians, natural philosophy, and the audience in eighteenth-century England, 1763-1800

Following the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, travelers were again free to move across borders. Among those travelers were performance magicians, or conjurers. England already had a long tradition that celebrated magic and conjuring—a canon of conjuring texts can be dated to the sixteenth century—and London audiences welcomed these new performers. Some of them gave spectacular shows that were ostensibly demonstrations of natural philosophy, where they capitalized on public interest in it and created a new fashion for these hybrid events. While their London audience were not convinced of their standing as natural philosophers, these magicians and their "natural philosophical" acts can serve for us as a way to examine how information on natural philosophy was presented and how Londoners accessed it. It has been thought that offerings in public lecturing on natural philosophy, and books that were geared as entertaining education, steadily increased throughout the eighteenth century. This dissertation argues that the reality was more complex. In fact, public lectures in London seem to have declined during the middle of the century and then rebounded in the late 1760s and 1770s. Likewise, recreational texts on mathematics and physics were nearly non-existent until the mid-1770s. After 1763, performance magicians were part of an increase in entertaining literature and performance that communicated complicated ideas in natural philosophy for a broad audience.;This dissertation thus examines spectacular demonstrations of natural philosophy, the history of conjuring and conjuring texts in England, the development of textual and performance credibility, and the replication of information in printing and publishing during these transitional years. It traces how credible information began to take priority over the credible persona in the late eighteenth century.