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Summary
Summary
A rope rises up into the air. A boy climbs up the rope and when the boy gets to the top he vanishes into thin air, explains Peter Lamont, winner of the Jeremy Dalziel prize in British History, and author of The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, about a tall tale that found its way into legend. The rope trick is one of the most successful hoaxes of all time, created by an amateur magician and printed in the Chicago Tribune in 1890. Despite a later admission that the story was false, it continued to spread in newspapers and journals throughout the world. Some claimed to have seen the trick performed on trips to India. Others added their own spin to the tale. Using the original legend as a starting point, Lamont, who has performed as a magician and psychic, explores how easily people will believe stories that are fed to them as truth despite all logical senses and their outright impossibility.
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-A performer pulls out a long rope and, with arcane words and gestures, coaxes it to climb high into the sky without any sign of support. The magician then calls on his young assistant, who climbs the rope until he vanishes from view. When the boy doesn't return, the magician angrily follows after him and carries him down to resounding audience applause. Impossible? Yes. Lamont's fun, informative book details the history of this myth and why so many people wanted to believe in it so deeply. The first "hard" reference came from an eyewitness report in the Chicago Tribune in 1890. Although the journalist printed a retraction a few months later, the fabrication had already captured the attention of U.S. and British readers to the extent that others claimed to have witnessed the trick themselves. Strange and frightening stories developed around the swamis and magi who supposedly performed it and the dangers experienced by those who attempted to discover its secrets. Amid the campy facts, Lamont develops interesting conclusions. The late 1800s brought a rise in science and a growing disbelief in the spiritual side of life, and the tale fulfilled a need within educated Westerners to believe in something that couldn't be explained. The faraway land of India as its origin added a level of mystique. In the end, the author shows that the stories we create about other cultures reveal volumes about ourselves.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
The truth here is more bizarre than even the most outlandish fiction. There never was an Indian rope trick - the one where a "juggler" tosses a length of rope into the air, sees it suddenly stiffen and watches a small monkey of a boy climb it until, with a click of the fingers, he vanishes. The story was old rope from beginning to end, and nothing to do with India. On the contrary, it was the impurest invention of John Elbert Wilkie, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, penning an 1890 cod piece as Fred S Ellmore. (S Ellmore . . . copies than the Chicago Times, eh. Geddit?) Nor do the wonders and resonances quite stop there. Lord Conrad Black of Hollinger currently leads the Chicago Sun-Times in its ancestral battle with the Trib. More old rope; more amazing tales. And Wilkie himself - when City editor of the Tribune a few years later - got a call from the Secretary of the Treasury. "I should like you to come to Washington and make you chief of the Secret Service." He went, put his propaganda skills learned as a journalist to brilliant use, and "exploited the press far more than his predecessors had ever done, controlling their access to information and ensuring his agents' activities were hailed as a public victory". The first spin doctor. Today, no doubt, he'd have been busy shuttling between Baghdad and the Hutton inquiry. So, the basic story was tabloid tosh, as in "Freddy Starr ate my hamster". Wilkie himself admitted as much in print four months on. Yet the world chose not to notice his straightforward correction and apology. It was too busy playing hunt the fakir and inventing a legend. Most of Peter Lamont's divertingly diligent research is devoted to explaining why on earth this should be so. The Indian magicians he found when he went there a few years ago dealt in silk hankies and silver tubes and magic wands, the familiar tat of western trade, about as mysterious as a takeaway chicken masala. Yet 19th-century Britain, high on the majesty of empire, swallowed super-swami stuff open mouthed. Wasn't it Marco Polo who first reported wonders in the east? Didn't the Moghul emperor Jahangir keep amazing conjurers at his court? Just like the Beatles 70 years on, Joe Public wanted to believe. And one credulous thing, inevitably, went with another. There was a great Victorian market for "Oriental" wizards who came from Essex and "French" masters of magic who came from England and worked in Scotland. You could never be an ordinary lad from round the corner if you wanted to amaze - and the farther away you and your feats seemed to come from, the better. Then there were travellers - mostly retired colonels with notebooks - touring the Raj in search of tales and little about hard evidence; not to mention the big-time illusionists, the Blackstones and Goldins back home, who'd hang a sensation on any passing peg for the benefit of box office takings and headlines alike. Mix together, stew lightly through the decades, spice up at every opportunity and you had an exotic dish with a life of its own and an alleged history reaching into the mists of time. All bunk, all rubbish. We talk sometimes about a purer, kinder world BC (Before Campbell). More bunk. The rope trick, from start to finish, was a textbook study in cynicism, cupidity and calculated confusion. Did that matter? Of course not. Nobody got hurt; most people, puffed with self-delusion, were thoroughly entertained. Yet add just a pinch of caution. Are we 21st-century types too modern, too sophisticated to be taken in now? Read about the fakir at the court of Ranjit Singh buried alive for a month without food, water or air and think of David Blaine. Human nature doesn't change, nor human credulity, eternally available for exploitation. Full marks for entertainment to Dr Lamont, somewhat mysteriously billed in these straitened times as "research fellow in the history, theory and performance of magic at the University of Edinburgh". With nothing up his sleeve but a top-up fee? Peter Preston, a former editor of this paper, is also a former member of the Leicester Magic Circle and a writer on magical matters. To order The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick for pounds 12.99 call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-ropetrick.1 On the contrary, it was the impurest invention of John Elbert Wilkie, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, penning an 1890 cod piece as Fred S Ellmore. (S Ellmore . . . copies than the Chicago Times, eh. Geddit?) Nor do the wonders and resonances quite stop there. Lord Conrad Black of Hollinger currently leads the Chicago Sun-Times in its ancestral battle with the Trib. More old rope; more amazing tales. And Wilkie himself - when City editor of the Tribune a few years later - got a call from the Secretary of the Treasury. "I should like you to come to Washington and make you chief of the Secret Service." He went, put his propaganda skills learned as a journalist to brilliant use, and "exploited the press far more than his predecessors had ever done, controlling their access to information and ensuring his agents' activities were hailed as a public victory". The first spin doctor. - Peter Preston.
Booklist Review
British historian and magician Lamont relays the strange history of the so-called Indian rope trick. According to legend, a boy clambers up a rope and disappears, followed by a knife-armed fakir, who also vanishes. Severed limbs then tumble from the heavens and reassemble into the living boy. Sound plausible? A group in 1930s Britain was skeptical, and Lamont has a lot of fun describing their inconclusive debunking campaign. Such entertaining insouciance permeates his writing, but Lamont structures his tale seriously and treats the trick as an example of the West's flawed perceptions of the East. Delving into Victorian history, Lamont discusses popular fascination with the East's mysteries and presents a gallery of eccentric performers who met the public's demand to be gulled by supernatural feats. Feeding this social appetite was an 1890 Chicago newspaper revelation of the rope trick, which, despite its editor's admission that the article was fabricated, only succeeded in perpetuating the myth. The various tangents related to the Indian rope trick are cleverly united in Lamont's amusing read. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2005 Booklist
