In 1849, Anderson returned to London to perform for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The following year, Anderson toured America, Canada, Australia, and Hawaii. Upon returning to Britain, Anderson found that he had a rival in fellow magician Robert Houdin. Robert-Houdin's inventions were pirated by his trusted mechanic Le Grand who was arrested for making and selling duplicate illusions. Many of those illusions fell into the hands of his competitors like The Great Wizard of the North, Robin, and Compars Herrmann. It is not known whether Anderson or the others bought the illusions directly from LeGrand or from another source. But, they willingly performed the illusions after knowing that those were invented by Robert-Houdin. Herrmann too was performing in London with Robert-Houdin's pirated tricks. Anderson took Houdin's tricks and returned to America in 1853 and performed in Boston. An illusion involving Anderson's dispensing of various alcoholic beverages to the audience caused a legal controversy regarding temperance in that city. In 1859, after a brief period as an actor, Anderson began another world tour. In 1862, at the age of eighteen, John Henry Jr. left his father's troupe and began his own independent career as a conjuror. This started a bitter feud between father and son and the two never spoke again. Greatly in debt, Anderson returned to England in 1864. He would tour once more in 1866. Anderson died in 1874 at the Fleece hotel in Darlington, County Durham. He was buried next to his mother in Aberdeen. Magician Harry Houdini, who was born in the same year as Anderson's death, revered Anderson as one of his inspirations and in 1909 arranged for the upkeep of the gravesite, which had fallen into disrepair. In 1854, Anderson held a farewell performance in Aberdeen. The success of this show was enough to inspire Anderson not to retire. Rather, he began to concentrate his efforts on exposing the tricks of mediums and spiritualist fraud. In his shows, he used his daughters to duplicate spiritualist effects. Anderson was one of the magicians of his day who exposed the frauds of the Davenport brothers. The show played at the Lyceum in London and then moved to Covent Garden in 1855. The following year, after a gala performance, the theatre caught fire, destroying all of Anderson's properties and bankrupting him for the second time in his professional career. Anderson stated that spiritualism was a "delusion that has driven ten thousand persons mad in the United States."