Vito-Magnetic Appliances

One thread that connects three of the four lives of Emma Harding(e) Britten -- the dark life of the desperate young lucide with that of the engaged spiritualist propagandist, and with that of the cantankerous occultist -- is: magnetism. The clairvoyante, the electric physician, the editor of Ghost Land and Sirius, too, I think, all believed in magnetism, not as a metaphor or a misnomer, but as an actual natural force.

This, tonight, from the introduction to Fryar's edition of Thomas Welton's Mental Magic (1884):

And, just to tie things off, or perhaps to trace the thread backwards from the 1880s to the time of Emma the young piano demonstrator, playing in Pierre Erard's workshops in Paris in 1838 while elsewhere in the metropolis, magnetism and automata were all the rage, there is this bit, from the back matter of the same text: