From The Deveney File: Emma, Amanuensis

Pat Deveney's extensive notes from his careful reading of Spiritualist periodicals are yielding pure gold.

As I have had occasion to mention once or twice, Emma was always testing her messaging, and the Autobiography was the culmination of those tests: the narrative, finalized, at twilight.

In July of 1858, Emma was covered in a series in The Banner of Light entitled "History Of Mediums". She was #5. In Pat's notes, I find an early and very interesting version of her "conversion in New York" narrative: one that is different from the Six Lectures version, the Spiritualist Magazine version of 1865, and the version in the Autobiography.

Perhaps most important for the thread of inquiry that -- Nietzsche rope-maker fashion -- I am tracing, in this article, the author A.B. Child, claims that Emma served as amanuensis for a member of Parliament, and was not infrequently (I am thinking that's a direct quote, as Emma adored double negatives) the repository of state secrets.

As she is by this time "Miss Emma Hardinge", this may be one of the earliest attempts to implicitly link herself to Henry Hardinge, who was MP for Durham and Secretary at War in the Wellington cabinet from 1828-30, chief secretary for Ireland in 1830, and from 1834-5, and Secretary at War in the Peel cabinet from 1841-4. Hardinge was married in 1821 to Emily, widow of John James (British minister to the Netherlands), daughter of the Marquess of Londonderry and sister of Lord Castlereagh.

I mention the latter largely because Emma claims, in this version of her life, to be connected (she apparently does not say how) with noble families -- clearly not connections she got from her parents.

This amanuensis revelation -- and it is that -- may equally well be an attempt to link herself to either Bulwer Lytton or to Disraeli, although it's difficult to see how, during his time in Parliament, EBL would have been party to much that would actually qualify as "state secrets."

And of course there is no time during Emma's life where she attempts -- as EJ Dingwall explicitly does in 1970 -- to connect the (completely concocted) marriage that gave Emma the name Hardinge with the Orphic Circle events. Hardinge was a Conservative church-and-state man, a ruthless authoritarian (his claim to liberal thinking was that he forbade troops to fire into unarmed crowds during civil disturbances), and apparently intellectually incurious -- neither mesmerism nor the occult would have appealed to him. And his circle was in no material way connected with our Orphic Circle network -- Hardinge's intimates were of an earlier generation, and tied to the rural and not the urban elements of English culture.

What's clear is that A.B. Childs could not have gotten this information from anyone other than Emma herself.