The Magical Marriage

Reading E. J. Dingwall's preface to his edition of Modern American Spiritualism, and encounter this:

Through connections not yet fully established, it is said that Emma was for a time employed by [the Orphic Circle principals] as one of their magnetic subjects. During one of their meetings, she was "married" at some sort of mystic ceremony to a member of the society belonging to the Hardinge family.

Reading Dingwall is a bit like reading scripture, if you're a believer, inasmuch as he was perhaps the most active researcher during the Spiritualist renaissance in the 1920s and after. He speaks with some significant authority.

But I really have the strong desire to rule this bit of apocrypha -- the mystical marriage -- out. As near as I can determine from assembling a fairly detailed chronology of her appearance in the public record in England and the US, she was referred to as (and presumably used the name) Miss Emma Harding -- unmarried, no e -- for some time after her arrival in the United States. Whether she changed 'Harding' to 'Hardinge' for a reason, or adopted what became a common misspelling of her name in the US press, remains to be pinned down. She did allege from time to time that she had been married in England and left a young widow, but (a) those stories were told out of school, as it were, and (b) no mention of an early marriage makes it into either the Autobiography (where she does allege a fiance), or into Robertson's Noble Pioneer. And, although Dr. Dingwall apparently had access to primary materials from EHB's life that we no longer have, during his preparation of the 1970 edition of MAS, that material did not include any clarifying details on Emma's early life -- or one presumes Dingwall would have included those in his preface.

The adoption of a stage name by a young woman who felt the social stigma of a female, acting in public (which, in a slightly different context, Emma asserts she felt in the Autobiography) was as common as dirt in mid-Victorian England - it was almost a requirement if that woman felt she had the opportunity to return, at some point, to "good society." And we know -- or think we know -- that her time as an actress was viewed by her Spiritualist confreres with some disapprobation -- see for example C. D. Maurice's remembrance of being taken to see Emma at the Beethoven Rooms in 1865, and Benjamin Coleman's emphatic request that Maurice not mention Emma's time on stage in London as Miss Emma Harding. Whether the middle-class English Spiritualist of the 1860s shared his class' prejudice against actresses, or whether Spiritualists thought Emma's career as an actress could be used as corrosive evidence against the legitimacy of her trance lectures, is an open question.

And, of course, there's the whole Ernest Reinhold thing -- if Emma was writing music and criticism in the period 1835-1842 under the name Ernest Reinhold (and there is, finally, evidence that an Ernest Reinhold did publish music during that period of time), she was an experienced user of pseudonyms.

I'm hypothesizing, on not much direct evidence (but on substantially more evidence that the Hardinge myth-makers), that Emma used the pseudonym Ernest Reinhold because she was indentured to Thomas Welsh, and did not want to share her earnings with him.

I'm further hypothesizing that Emma chose the stage name Emma Harding out of the air -- Harding was a common surname in England at the time -- and not because she had been (a) married, (b) affianced, (c) controlled psychically or (d) ravaged by a member of the Hardinge family, viscount or otherwise.

Emma adopted the stage name Harding at the time she joined the company of the Princess's Theatre in 1842 -- else what would have been the point of the Sadler's Wells advertisements of "Miss Emma Harding, late of the Princess's Theatre" in 1844? No one would have been able to identify her.

And she kept the surname Harding for a time after arriving in the US (traveling under it, answering the census taker's questions, etc.). Harding, not Hardinge. And Miss not Mrs.

Like the myth that Emma received the essential tenets of Spiritualism from (a dead) Robert Owen, I suspect the myth of the mystical marriage is going to die hard. Frankly, it shouldn't. It isn't essential to establishing the facts of the matter-that-matters: whether or not Emma was the lucide for a secretive group of English (and Continental?) occultists in the late 1830s and early 1840s. There's no evidence of occult leanings in the Hardinge family, as far as I know, and no need for Emma to have been mystically married for other aspects of her life's narrative to make sense.