10 The difficulty of finding employment for a magician

1 Burlington House in Piccadilly was the London residence of the Duke of Portland, the First Minister of the Treasury (whom many people nowadays like to call the Prime Minister in the French style). It had been erected in an Age when English noblemen were not afraid to rival their Monarch in displays of power and wealth and it had no equal for beauty anywhere in the capital. As for the Duke himself, he was a most respectable old person, but, poor man, he did not accord with any body’s idea of what a Prime Minister ought to be. He was very old and sick. Just at present he lay in a curtained room somewhere in a remote part of the house, stupefied by laudanum and dying by degrees. He was of no utility whatsoever to his country and not much to his fellow Ministers. The only advantage of his leadership as far as they could see was that it allowed them to use his magnificent house as their meeting-place and to employ his magnificent servants to fetch them any little thing they might fancy out of his cellar. (They generally found that governing Great Britain was a thirsty business.)

2 William Pitt the Younger (1759—1806). It is very doubtful that we will ever see his like again, for he became Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four and led the country from that day forth, with just one brief interval of three years, until his death.

12 The Spirit of English Magic urges Mr Norrell to the Aid of Britannia

1 Four years later during the Peninsular War Mr Norrell’s pupil, Jonathan Strange, had similar criticisms to make about this form of magic.

2 In this speech Mr Lascelles has managed to combine all Lord Portishead’s books into one. By the time Lord Portishead gave up the study of magic in early 1808 he had published three books: The Life of Jacques Belasis, pub. Longman, London, 1801, The Life of Nicholas Goubert, pub. Longman, London, 1805, and A Child’s History of the Raven King, pub. Longman, London, 1807, engravings by Thomas Bewick. The first two were scholarly discussions of two sixteenth-century magicians. Mr Norrell had no great opinion of them, but he had a particular dislike of A Child’s History. Jonathan Strange, on the other hand, thought this an excellent little book.

3 “It was odd that so wealthy a man – for Lord Portishead counted large portions of England among his possessions – should have been so very self-effacing, but such was the case. He was besides a devoted husband and the father of ten children. Mr Strange told me that to see Lord Portishead play with his children was the most delightful thing in the world. And indeed he was a little like a child himself. For all his great learning he could no more recognize evil than he could spontaneously understand Chinese. He was the gentlest lord in all of the British aristocracy.”