Mr. Lane | His Majesty's Conjurer

Mr. Lane

Grand Exhibition, by Mr. Lane first Performer to the King. [London, ca. 1786]

Letterpress broadside playbill (225 x 152 mm). Woodcut vignette depicting Mr. Lane in the midst of his act; not examined out of frame, mounted on paper. Framed and glazed with Plexiglas. 

Mr. Lane is seen in the present broadside, produced for his appearance at the Bartholomew Fair, surrounded by the tools of his trade: playing cards, coins, a pocket watch, two boxes containing numbered blocks for an experiment he called "Unparalleled Sympathetic Figures," and a live bird, presumably hatched from an egg in an experiment called "Palingenesie, or Regeneration." Lane was a popular entertainer at British fairs in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. He billed himself as "His Majesty's Conjurer" or "First Conjurer to the King." 

Not recorded in ESTC

REFERENCE:

Exemplars, p. 20; EE, pp. 46-47