Re: OT Who said it first ? "Its all done with mirrors"

Nick Odell <gurzhfvp.jbexfubc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:28:54 +0000, Nick
<3-nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Dave xxx" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

"Its all done with mirrors"

Who said its first ? earliest saying I can find is in the 1943 film We Dive
at Dawn

Partridge (readable on Google books) gives us:
"Death's very laughable, such a cunning little mystery. All done with
mirrors"

From deaar, dear Noel's "Private Lives" of 1933.

That reads to me as though it was a well known expression then.

I thought that it was put into the mouth of Sherlock Holmes by Sir
Arthur Conan the Barbarian. But it might have been Bert Coules. Or
somebody else entirely - my dictionary of quotations is being
unhelpful over this question.

Some imaginative googling shows that if you change it to "done by
mirrors" you can push it back quite a lot further. Certainly to that
vintage, but I'm pretty sure not to Sir ACD - and google seems to
confirm that.

"All done by mirrors" appears in "Voces Populi" by F Anstey, published
in 1892 and that was a reprint from Punch.

It's not entirely clear how metaphorical that use is: it's the actual
words of a showman "some people think this is all done by mirrors but
it is not so; it is managed by a simple arrangement of light and shade.
She will now turn slowly round to convince you she is inside the urn and
not behind it".

Similarly in Frank Leslie's "Pleasant Hours" of 1885 we find "Perhaps we
saw a shadow of some one,' I ventured. "Sampson thought it very
probable, and further stated his conviction that it was all done by
mirrors."

So it looks like we have it in literal use about magic tricks or similar
in the late 19th century, and by the 1930s it has become metaphorical
for anything that is not all that it seems.

Just for interest, why do you want to know?
--
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