The spell that Ormskirk eventually produced became very popular and was widely used in his own century and the two following ones; but, until Jonathan Strange made his own alterations to the spell and brought forth Maria Absalom into his own dream and Mr Segundus’s, I never heard of any one who had the least success with it – perhaps for the reasons that Jonathan Strange gives.

4 Mr Segundus’s good sense seems to have deserted him at this point. Charles Hether-Gray (1712–89) was another historio-magician who published a famous spell of summoning. His spell and Ormskirk’s are equally bad; there is not a pin to chuse between them.

5 In mediaeval times conjuring the dead was a well-known sort of magic and there seems to have been a consensus that a dead magician was both the easiest spirit to raise and the most worth talking to.

6 There have been very few magicians who did not learn magic from another practitioner. The Raven King was not the first British magician. There had been others before him – notably the seventh-century half-man, half-demon, Merlin – but at the time the Raven King came into England there were none. Little enough is known about the Raven King’s early years, but it is reasonable to suppose that he learnt both magic and kingship at the court of a King of Faerie. Early magicians in mediaeval England learnt their art at the court of the Raven King and these magicians trained others.

One exception may be the Nottinghamshire magician, Thomas Godbless (1105?–82). Most of his life is entirely obscure to us. He certainly spent some time with the Raven King, but this seems to have been late in his life when he had already been a magician for years. He is perhaps one example that a magician may be self-created – as of course were both Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange.

24 Another magician

1 The Modern Magician was one of several magical periodicals set up following the first appearance of The Friends of English Magic in 1808. Though not appointed by Mr Norrell, the editors of these periodicals never dreamt of deviating from orthodox magical opinion as laid down by Mr Norrell.

2 Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps the week after that.

25 The education of a magician

1 Naturally, Mr Norrell based his syllabus upon the classifications contained in De Generibus Artium Magicarum Anglorum by Francis Sutton-Grove.

2 Richard Chaston (1620–95). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

3 The Blue Book: being an attempt to expose the most prevalent lies and common deceptions practised by English magicians upon the King’s subjects and upon each other, by Valentine Munday, pub. 1698.