[VENTRILOQUISM] SMITH, George. MEMOIRS AND ANECDOTES OF MR. LOVE THE POLYPHONIST; TO WHICH IS ADDED AN EXPLANATION OF POLYPHONY. London: W. Kenneth, ca. 1865. “Principally selected and abridged from the octavo volume.” Publisher’s aqua wraps printed in black. [1 – 3], 4 – 15, [16]. Dog-eared corners, chipped and soiled wraps. SCARCE.
Stephen Connor, writing in his cultural history of ventriloquism, Dumbstruck, states, “In the year following Alexandre Vattemare’s departure from England, a young journalist called William Edward Love began touring around England and Ireland with a solo performance on the model of Charles Mathews’s and Vattemare’s entertainments, which featured the mimicry of sounds as well as the throwing of voices. If Vattemare’s performances show the move from a display of pure sound to a more visible array of recognizable and sustained character, along with a more marked narrative line, then Love’s performances appeared, at least at the beginning of his career, to return to an earlier form of ventriloquial spectacle, one in which the illusions are both purer and also more fragmented, transitory, and unsupported by visible appearance: spurning, even scorning, the use of figures and properties he specialized in what the Dublin Morning Register called ‘phenomena…in the philosophy of sound’ rather than the arts of mimicry and caricature.”