One hundred twenty-five years ago, a recurring trope in juvenile fiction was the boy performer: A young lad, usually an orphan, would find a home in a circus or traveling show and often performed as a conjurer.
Herman, the Boy Magician, and Zig-Zag, the Boy Conjurer, were eventually succeeded by Vance Barnum’s Joe Strong, the Boy Wizard; or, The Mysteries of Magic Exposed. There were several Joe Strong books involving circus life, but the first and last of the series concentrated on the boy as a magician in a traveling show. The books were popular enough to last through many printings and editions; the most recent was published in 2015.
An early example of this kind of literature was Professor Hoffmann’s Conjurer Dick, which first appeared in 1885. Angelo Lewis, a straight-laced English barrister writing under the nom de plume Professor Hoffmann, employed his protagonist Dick Hazard in a morality tale, warning his young readers of the life of a showman. In his novel, Conjurer Dick eventually becomes Barrister Dick, forsaking the footlights for a more respectable career as a lawyer. Dick’s American counterparts, on the other hand, are more than happy to pursue a career on the stage, without a thought of the propriety or security of such an endeavor.