Naturally, Strange’s friends were very glad that he had found some agreeable company, but what intrigued them most were several references in Strange’s letters to the daughter of the family, who was young and unmarried and in whose society Strange seemed to take a particular pleasure. The same interesting idea occurred to several of his friends at once: what if he were to marry again? A pretty young wife would cure his gloomy spirits better than any thing else could, and best of all she would distract him from that dark, unsettling magic he seemed so set upon.

There were more thorns in Mr Norrell’s side than Strange. A gentleman called Knight had begun a school for magicians in Henrietta-street in Covent-garden. Mr Knight was not a practical magician, nor did he pretend to be. His advertisement offered young gentlemen: “a thorough Education in Theoretical Magic and English Magical History upon the same principles which guided our Foremost Magician, Mr Norrell, in teaching his Illustrious Pupil, Jonathan Strange.” Mr Lascelles had written Mr Knight an angry letter in which he declared that Mr Knight’s school could not possibly be based upon the principles mentioned since these were known only to Mr Norrell and Mr Strange. Lascelles threatened Mr Knight with exposure as a fraud if he did not immediately dismantle his school.

Mr Knight had written a polite letter back in which he begged to differ. He said that, upon the contrary, Mr Norrell’s system of education was well known. He directed Mr Lascelles’s attention to page 47 of The Friends of English Magic from the Autumn of 1810 in which Lord Portishead had declared that the only basis for training up more magicians approved by Mr Norrell was that devised by Francis Sutton-Grove. Mr Knight (who declared himself a sincere admirer of Mr Norrell’s) had bought a copy of Sutton-Grove’s De Generibus Artium Magicarum Anglorum and studied it. He took the opportunity to wonder whether Mr Norrell would do him the honour of becoming the school’s Visiting Tutor and giving lectures and so forth. He had intended to tutor four young men, but he had been so overpowered by applications that he had been obliged to rent another house to accommodate them and hire more teachers to teach them. Other schools were being proposed in Bath, Chester and Newcastle.

Almost worse than the schools were the shops. Several establishments in London had begun to sell magical philtres, magic mirrors and silver basins which, the manufacturers claimed, had been specially constructed for seeing visions in. Mr Norrell had done what he could to halt the trade, with diatribes against them in The Friends of English Magic. He had persuaded the editors of all the other magical publications over which he had any influence to publish articles explaining that there never ever had been any such thing as magical mirrors, and that the magic performed by magicians using mirrors (which were in any case only a few sorts and hardly any that Mr Norrell approved) were performed using ordinary mirrors. Nevertheless the magical articles continued to sell out as fast as the shopkeepers could put them on the shelves and some shopkeepers were considering whether they ought not to give up their other business and devote their whole shop to magical accoutrements.