Making Ends Meet

This, from the back pages of the Dcember 1872 issue of Emma's Western Star

We have seen Emma in this position before, as for example with her endorsement of Elizabeth French's galvanic medicine. In this case, Emma is endorsing -- by means of a letter, putatively published in a newspaper, a cure for opium addiction promoted by Dr. S. B. Collins of Laporte, Indiana. Collins' cure, as far as I can tell, was a patent medicine made primarily from opoids, and Collins was a masterful self-promoter, publishing a book and an house rag called Theriaki that he circulated widely to promote his cure

That Emma was periodically obliged to endorse products, either for favors or for money (in this instance, for Collins' advertisement) is not surprising, but it is also clearly something she does not do as a matter of course -- something she does as a last resort. This raises, again, the question of how Emma got her living as a spiritualist propagandist, and the question of the role of money in Emma's life - how she got it, how she spent it, why it was always, from her perspective, in short supply, and why it was that she never figured out how to make her commercial business model scale. Pat Deveney's comments to me have got me thinking a lot about this -- why it was that the second, rather than the first, generation of Spiritualists (I am thinking particularly of Emma's friend Ida Ellis) would be the ones to take on the questions of the business of spiritualism head-on, and figure out how to make money, how to do well while doing good.