Spell of Dissolution

A Spell of Dissolution, as its name suggests, causes a material substance to loosen and as it were dissolve, so that another substance may easily pass through it, without apparent harm to either. Jonathan Strange creates his own version of such a spell so that he can step through the reflective surface of a mirror in the Bedford coffee-house and enter upon the King's Roads [35]. As he later explains to John Childermass, "there are no end of dissolution spells in the books I have seen, but ... they are all perfectly useless so I was obliged to make my own." [48]