Magic as a performance genre can be traced back many hundreds of years but it was within the entertainment environment of the nineteenth century that it developed and flourished. This special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture includes articles taken from the third Visual Delights Conference, Visual Delights and Magic, which range from the history of 19th century performance, stagecrafts and special effects, the magic scene in 1905 and the importance of female magiciennes in the Edwardian performance environment.
