Proving Grounds

This from a conversation with the editor of a famous (in its way) spiritualist-oriented newsletter...

Emma Harding(e) the actress -- what sort of career did she have? And how would the career of an Emma Harding(e), actress, be irrefutably connected to the career of an Emma Harding(e) [Britten], spiritualist and propagandist?

It isn't necessarily pretty for a spiritualist to contemplate the idea that EHB was an actress, particularly since her metier was the so-called trance address.  This is particularly true if, as seems the case, EHB usually played secondary parts in farce, burlesque and burletta (oh, yes, and a short stint in Macbeth at Sadler's Wells, as one of the (singing) witches. EHB could, by all accounts, sing like an....angel.)

EHB does tell us, in a number of places, that she pursued a career on the stage, but she gives us little or no detail.

As it happens, the archives of some of the London theatres in which she worked are now available electronically, and we can now chart, in detail, every play she acted in and every part she played (in London and in New York, but not yet in Paris) from 1844 until 1856 (the last year for which we have records). She was a working actress, appearing thousands of times in nearly a hundred different roles in ephemeral plays in the course of a decade's career.

But that actress is a woman named Emma Harding (Miss Emma Harding, to be precise) -- how are we to know that the actress and the spiritualist are the same person?

As it turns out -- and this is the find of the week, as far as I'm concerned -- Miss Emma Harding the actress was of sufficient repute on the London stage that likenesses (portraits, I expect to find) were made of her contemporaneous with her career. (She was also of sufficient repute to warrant a mention in a long poem on the London stage in Ainsworth's Magazine for 1848, the year of upheaval...)

And one of those portraits captured the eye of one Sacheverell Sitwell, who included it in his Romantic Ballet In Lithographs of the Time... a copy of which is kiting its way to me in the USPS as I write.

EHB was described, even by those journalists who disliked her, as beautiful -- and so she was in a mid-nineteenth-century sort of way. But her teeth -- a dead give-away. I'm hopeful we'll know her by those.