Sir John Franklin, Wella Anderson, Social Network Speed, and the Economics of Modern Spiritualism

I am not sure how often Emma refers to Sir John Franklin, but...it's often.

Preparing some of the materials for the web site tonight, I had occasion to skiffle through Google, looking for information about Emma's neighbors in Vassal Terrace, Chelsea, in 1860. The Ann Sophia menage, including William and Margaret's husband, Gilbert Wilkinson, are recorded in the 1871 UK census as living at 6 Vassal Terrace. Next door -- at number 5, I presume -- was a boarding house, with various and sundry persons of interest in residence. Isabella Burt, the author of several obscure books on the geography and urban institutions of Kensington and environs, was one of the boarding house lodgers, and another was William Duguid, listed in the census as a veterinary surgeon.

I confess Duguid attracted me initially because he shares a surname with David Duguid, the famous painting medium, and the employee of Emma's biographer, James Robertson. As I sense Emma had a substantial Scottish network that as yet I can't map -- and as her possible connections with the HBofL may be through this Scottish social network -- I dug into our man William a bit.

It turns out that William Duguid was a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Science (entitling him to M.R.C.V.S after his name), and professor of Veterinary Physiology at the Albert Veterinary College in Bayswater: an institute above-board enough to have attracted his Grace the Duke of Newcastle to its Presidency.

It also appeared -- and here's a shred of dessicated carrion caught in my teeth this evening -- that William Duguid was an ordinary seaman who served on the Price Albert, the ship sent in 1845 to look for Sir John Franklin's expedition. Ahah, I said to myself, but ten minutes later I realized my William Duguid was six years old or so in 1845, and not likely to have been on that expedition....

Off to the genealogical databases....squirrel, squirrel....two William Duguids of my William's age in the Scots censuses, one of whom is living with a David....nope, nothing. Just a surgeon. Just a neighbor.

Context-switch to David Duguid, and do what I should have done a few months back: read the introduction Hay Nisbet wrote to Duguid's trance-delivered Hafed, Price of Persia. And there I find the payoff.

Nisbet, writing about the difficulties of disproving fraud early on in Duguid's career as a painting medium (a fairly rare manifestation of mediumship at the time), says:

Orooso is probably Owosso, a town which was then and is now somewhat off the beaten track.

You'd need to add two zeroes, I would think, at least to the figure paid for the Wella Anderson painting to get 2009 purchasing power equivalence.

But what's noteworthy about this little gem -- and Hay Nisbet's introduction to Hafed is full of little gems -- is the sheer speed and distance with which practices, tests, tips (and quite possibly, in other contexts, tricks) traveled within the social network that was Modern Spiritualism. A letter from a Spiritualist in a backwater Michigan town, and an entire practice is transported and deployed in Scotland. Innovation travels fast, even in the mid-Victorian period.

And I'd imagine we can look on Wella Anderson in a somewhat clearer light now. Tens of thousands of dollars for a spirit painting -- that'd pay your rent in Manhattan in 1870 for a good while.

By comparison, Emma at this time, in Boston, was charging between 10 cents and a quarter a head to attend her lectures on galvanic medicine, and she was failing to fill venues of a hundred seats or so. William was selling his Home Batteries for a few dollars each. It would have taken her, by my estimate, 400 lectures or so to gross $3000.