Brown was apparently skilled at it. The newspaper accounts of his performances from the 1850s onward describe audiences impressed by the demonstrations he staged. He also added magic to his repertoire — stage illusions and conjuring tricks that were, again, popular entertainment of the period. He performed under variations of the name ‘Professor H. Box Brown,’ keeping the Box as a marker of his identity even as the content of the shows moved further from the original escape story.
He showed a panorama of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 — one of the major British news events of the decade, in which Indian soldiers in the British army rose against colonial rule, leading to a brutal suppression that was extensively covered in the British press. The choice to create a panorama of this event shows Brown’s understanding of the market: audiences wanted visual recreations of events they had read about, and he was willing and able to provide them.
By 1859, he was showing panoramas of the Indian Mutiny, doing mesmeric demonstrations, and performing magic. The abolitionist Mirror of Slavery was still in his inventory — he showed it as late as 1864, according to advertising records — but it was no longer the centerpiece of what he did.
What to make of this evolution depends on what framework you bring to it. From one angle, it looks like dilution — a man with an extraordinary and morally significant story choosing to trade on novelty and entertainment rather than bearing witness. From another angle, it looks like freedom — a man who had spent years as a symbol choosing to be, on his own terms, many things at once. He did not owe the world a perpetual performance of his own suffering. He had survived and he was going to live, on his own terms, and those terms included the pleasures of a successful entertainment career.