Audience Response, 1864

Isabelle Saxon, on Emma's performance of her Reverend Thomas Starr King eulogy, delivered (at least) during her first trip to California, in 1864.:

I attended several spiritualist lectures in San Francisco (in 1864). Some, as the results plainly proved, were catch-penny affairs, -- the efforts of undoubted charlatans. I remember deriving pleasure from a lecture delivered by a lady, since deceased, a woman of considerable repute in America, and deservedly so, -- Mrs. Eliza Farnham, authoress of "Woman and her Era." She was handsome, dark-haired and dark-eyed, modestly attired in a dress of black watered silk, and read her lectures in a quiet, ladylike and unobtrusive manner. More striking, if not more solid, was the impression produced by a course of lectures delivered there by an English lady, Miss Emma Hardinge, a woman of genius, apparently between thirty and forty years of age, with clear intellectual grey eyes, pleasing expression of countenance and elegant manners. She is said to be the only rival of the noted Anna Dickenson in the art of feminine oratory. Well educated, with a good command of language, she drew crowded audiences to her Lectures on Spiritualism. Not the least of her attractions was her easy and graceful gesticulation. I was told she had been on the stage eight years, which would account for the elegance of her attitudes. Her style was logical, her language flowery. The funeral oration of the Rev. Starr King, pronounced by her, affected me much more than the eloquence of any speaker I ever heard. I was sorry to learn that Miss Hardinge, capable of the sternest efforts of reason as she undoubtedly would be thought, was contented to sink her own gifts of intellect and genius from nature at the feet of a power to whose influence alone she is contented to ascribe them. Her language was too palpable to be thus filmsily veiled, however, in the eyes of any but the ignorant or credulous. The strongest argument against spiritualism I have ever known was, to me, this merging of almost peerless and positive talent in a mystical ideal.

in her Five Years Within The Golden Gate (1868), where this description of Emma occurs, Saxon was hostile to spiritualism -- she writes that "it entered many families, not to bring peace, but a sword" (echoing the attacks of the spiritualism-is-free-love camp) and claiming that "spiritualism in America present(s) a frightful aggregate of ignorance, domestic unhappiness and discord".

And she was an Englishwoman -- Ida Emma Redding, actually -- who went to California with her husband Frederick Sutherland, an attorney, and who wrote Five Years... at the request of English friends, apparently originally as a series of letters home: a quite common method of rough-drafting a book in those days. She had relatives who had converted to Mormonism during the first wave of evangelical Mormonism in England in the 1840s, and was no stranger to outlandish (at the time) cosmogonies. She also apparently published a book -- perhaps on the US Civil War -- called An Englishwoman's View Of The War.

The names -- Eliza Farnham, Thomas Starr King, Anna Dickenson -- are meaningless to the non-specialist reader these days, but were names to conjure with in the 1860s: you can read a review of one of Dickenson's lectures here -- like Emma, Dickenson was pro-Lincoln, feminist and anti-slavery. Eliza Farnham and Thomas Starr King have marginally useful Wikipedia entries for the curious. I have not yet recovered a copy of Emma's eulogy on Starr King's death.

Isabelle Saxon, an Englishwoman watching an Englishwoman perform in 1864, encapsulates the central dilemma of Emma's public life -- trance speaker or self-possessed occultist -- as neatly as anyone could, I think. As a platform-standing advertisement for Modern Spiritualism, parsing Hebrew under the control of the spirits, Emma was potent evidence of the faith: in the eyes of some folk, anyway. But, in the eyes of a smart, well-traveled Englishwoman, herself proto-feminist if FIve Years... is anything to go by, she was a palpable disappointment: the intellect and the rhetorical force attributed to a sham.

It was a problem for Emma, as well, and one she never satisfactorily resolved, in public or I think in private.

(I note in passing that this might be our best dating for the transition from Miss Emma Harding to Miss Emma Hardinge -- early 1864, in California. Again - to be a pendantic bore -- I note: Miss Hardinge.)

And I had not bothered, until I read this, to wonder about the color of Emma's eyes. Shame on me, after all the anguish about her hair color...