Silversmith

The Silversmith was a magician from 19th century Scotland. In an effort to develop a new trick for his magic show, he unwittingly created the Silversmith's Mirrors, which connected Edinburgh to a Pocket of unreality from which Mirror Folk soon began to emerge.

Creating the Mirrors
Decades prior to the Eighth Doctor and Josie Day's tangles with the Mirror Folk, the Silversmith was a successful magician who, unaware of quite what he was creating, built the Silvesmith's Mirrors, a set of "enchanted" mirrors which connected to a pocket of unreality thanks to the presence of Spherion crystals in said bubble dimension. The Silversmith stepped through the portal and was immediately confronted by his mirror self, later known to the Doctor as the Mirror Silversmith. He trapped his creator inside the pocket of unreality, allowing the Mirror Silversmith to wander out of the mirror and into the real world, where he stole the Silversmith's identity and began to scheme to create more of his kind. (COMIC: The Silvering)

Imprisonment
For years, the Silversmith remained trapped in the pocket dimension, which the Mirror Silversmith had fashioned into a Mirror Edinburgh, using the psychic energy of the many other human prisoners he had since captured and “liberated” the reflections of. Unlike his eternally youthful Mirror self, the Silversmith aged into a disheveled old man with a gray beard. (COMIC: The Silvering)

Freed by the Doctor
Much later, the Eighth Doctor and Josie Day began to investigate the wrongdoings of the so-called Silversmith on Earth, and eventually discovered his secret. The two successfully freed all of the Mirror Silversmith's prisoners, including the true Silversmith, by then nearly dying, who, as the Eighth Doctor carried him out of the mirror in his arms, could think of nothing else to say than “I'm sorry” — to which the Eighth Doctor replied by absolving him of guilt in the matter, stating that he had not created “Mirror Edinburgh”, only accidentally opened the portal that let the true culprits out. As the Silversmith returned to the waking world, his Mirror self was sucked back into the collapsing pocket dimension, where he was apparently destroyed by the Doctor's using the sonic to shatter the Silversmith's Mirrors. (COMIC: The Silvering)