The History and Practice of English Magic

Norrell’s great talent is not magic. It is librarianship as a form of hoarding. Hurtfew Abbey holds the books; York’s theoretical gentlemen hold the ones he has rejected; the public holds a periodical that tells them which opinions are legal. Strange, who has been his pupil, does the one thing a monopolist cannot forgive. He writes the textbook.

The History and Practice of English Magic is a practitioner’s book, which in Clarke’s invented history is the rare kind. The Golden Age magicians did not write. The later ones wrote because they could no longer do. Strange is trying to be both, and the prologue is already a declaration of war: if you remove John Uskglass from English magic you are not purifying the subject. You are holding empty air.

Clarke surrounds the novel with 185 footnotes that are themselves a shadow catalogue — lives of half-legendary magicians, disputed editions, the difference between a book of magic and a book on it. This entry is the one volume that the plot turns on, because publication is the plot. A magician who prints is a magician who has decided that the art does not belong to one house in Yorkshire.

File it beside Bathilda Bagshot, with the difference that Bagshot is the approved account and Strange is the unauthorised one, and that Strange can, inconveniently, do the things he describes.

On the readability rating. The prologue is given in full enough to hear him. The rest of the book remains inside the novel’s footnotes and reports. John Murray did not, in our 1816, take it.