A Fragment Of Modern Scripture

Another recovered EHB piece, this one entitled A Fragment of Modern Scripture and dating from the same period as her Six Lectures, is from Frances Brown's Christmas Annual of 1860, courtesy of Google Books and the sharp eyes of a reader (thanks, Pat).

As Pat points out, what's interesting about this piece is that it appears in a periodical edited by Frances Brown -- aka Mrs. HFM Brown -- a noted midwestern Spiritualist who was also decidedly in the "free love" camp -- from the middle 1860s onward, anyway.

In the text of this short piece, Emma recounts a lecture she gave in February of 1862, in Cleveland, on Mary Magdalene (boy, what I wouldn't give for a transcript of that), to benefit "the funds of an Institutional Farm, endeavoring to found (sic) for the reclamation, refuge and instruction of fallen women," at which Mrs. H. F. M Brown apparently held the chair -- Emma refers to her as "my kind 'High Priestess'".

The nexus -- Emma, free love, her home of outcast women -- is an important one. Emma's issues with sex and sexuality, her desire to found a philanthrophic organization to rehabilitate outcast women, her strident anti-free love rhetoric -- we have to see in this confluence the ugly scab covering Emma's core psychic wound.

I can't say much about it now -- I hardly understand it myself, particularly given Emma's oblique admissions, at various points in her career, that she herself had 'fallen' in her youth, and her posthumous confession to having been a kept woman -- but there is something relevant in the fact that she first claims (with reason, as we know from other sources) a relationship with Charles Dickens in The Two Worlds only in the late 1880s, thirty years after the time during which she worked with, and corresponded with, Dickens.

Dickens spent much time in the late 1840s and 1850s working on just such a philanthropic project: Urania Cottage. And he ceased his involvement with Urania Cottage only after his own highly irregular marriage arrangements fell apart, publicly, in 1862.