It’s amazing what once passed for a time machine. This was at the close of the Victorian age, when each evening, the streets of the City were thick with traveling mountebanks, each a Doctor or Professor of dubious credentials, each en route to the drawing room of a fashionable home to beguile the assembled with a mystical look into the ancient past (vague) or the distant future (unverifiable.)

Each carried a leather case, containing a grosgrain-lined coromandel box, containing a mystifying apparatus said to be made from a form of blue sodalite found only at the very pinnacle of the Andes. Guests would be encouraged to examine these contraptions’ fascinating clockwork viscera, the brass gears and ivory weights cheek-and-jowl among unrecognizable components of unknowable function. As the curtains were drawn and the gaslight turned down, these whirring, chiming curios would come to life, trembling amid an otherworldly cloud of vapor, which was almost certainly peyote. Magnetism and mirrors helped sell the illusion, as did the testament of the one dinner guest who always recounted an extraordinary visit to Mercia or Golgotha or Xanadu, his assistance earning the standard one-third of the evening’s take of £3/6– plus gratuity.

Published December 15–December 16 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.