Hypotheses on A Theatre Career, Redux

Luck and cunning, said Butler, who knew a thing or two about living out-of-doors, and who might be another patron saint of chasing-after-historical-figures, though I doubt whether he and Michel Foucault would have found much to talk about.

Revision: The London residence that Emma speaks of with horror during one of her lectures in Australia is 12 Tufton Street, and I now have to chase down 1850s London guide books to find out what life was like there. There was a cock-fighting pit in Tufton Street, which in the mid-1700s hosted the major fighting-cock training yards (Cockpit Yards), so we begin to get a flavor of the locale: a heterotopic space where the hoi polloi and the gentry mixed it up, cockfighting being, like speakeasies and smoking lounges, something that cuts across socioeconomic lines.

Elaboration:The Theatre des Italiens in Paris: much to dig into there. The original comic (Italian) opera house in Paris, and presently called the Opera-Comique situated on the Boulevard des Italiens (named for the theatre).

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People dressed for performances there, and attended in droves, amidst what by all accounts was bustling middle-class social behavior in the shadows of carefully-designed buildings.

Nearby, the Theatre Robert-Houdin and the French Academy Of Music, giving me a plausible ground for Emma's first period of "study" in Paris. If I can find showrooms and workshops of Erard (where a young Emma Floyd demonstrated Erard's pianos daily, we're told) in the vicinity, I'll declare victory. We know that Erard supplied the theatre's pianos.

In the end, though, it's what one finds on the margins of these threads of investigation that truly gratify. Like this street scene from the Boulevard des Italiens, at the end of the nineteenth century, from H. Sunderland Edward's Old And New Paris (1893).

Worth seeing large.

Hypotheses on A Theatre Career

1. 1835: Ebenezer dies, and the family (exact constitution unknown) moves from Bristol to London
2. 1836: Emma goes out to work, as a pupil-teacher for Thomas Welsh
3. 1840-2: Emma perhaps does some work at Covent Garden
4. 1842: Emma is placed in the Princess's Theatre, perhaps by Welsh, and participates in the then-current fare of operatic works, comedy, farce and burlesque
5. 1844: Emma 'moves up' from the Princess's Theatre, to the Theatre Royal at Sadler's Wells (episodic), the Haymarket (episodic) and the Adelphi (regular work)
6. 1848 or after: Emma does some work at Covent Garden, meeting Michael Costa
7. c 1850: Emma's earnings are sufficient to move from wherever she has been living (which she describes as an area of hideous squalour in other works) to 12 Tufton Street, Westminster, where she can afford a housekeeper
8. c. January 1855: Emma is blackballed out of the theatres by the "baffled sensualist" and "millionaire" who keeps her for some unknown period of time before she is "rescued" by the opportunity to go to Paris with the Walleck company for the (as it turns out) disastrous performances of Macbeth
9. 1855: Down and out in Paris, Emma is rescued by the manager of the Broadway Theatre with a nine-month contract to appear in New York. The manager has evidently done some serious head-hunting while in Paris, as there are other actresses, from Paris, aboard the Pacific when it brings "Mrs. Harding" and "Miss Harding" to New York in August of 1855

Many holes and suppositions, yet.

Plus those two stays in Paris, and one in Milan, via Monte Carlo, yet to fit in.

Emma, In London and Paris, Doing Shakespeare

In the Autobiography, EHB has this to say about her move to the United States in 1855:

The last night of the English Wallack Company's performances (in Paris) had arrived; on that occasion I played in a little character piece of my own writing, and at its close, our most intimate friend in Paris, being, as was his custom, behind the scenes, introduced me to a gentleman whom I found talking with this friend and my mother, and endeavouring to convince her that the best and most attractive spot on earth for the display of my peculiar talents, etc., etc., was the B— Theatre, of New York, of which he himself was the manager. He had watched me playing various parts many nights, he alleged, and had determined to engage me, and go to New York I must, and that immediately.

Compare that, with this, from The Principal Dramatic Works of Thomas William Robertson (1889):

Coming to the year 1855, [Robertson] was engaged by his father and J. W. Wallack, then partners in the management of the Marylebone Theatre, for juvenile lead...Robertson, together with the entire company, accepted an offer to go to Paris for the purposes of producing Macbeth at the Theatre des Italiens....The whole affair was a terrible failure and did not last three weeks, the company receiving but one week's salary." (pp. xxx-xxxi)

Other summaries of this company's Macbeth are even more harsh, and suggest plainly that the cast was effectively stranded in Paris.

For example, Maynard Savin's Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft (1950) includes this description

Robertson's first substantial acting engagement since he had struck out on his own in London was ironically due to family connections. William Robertson and J. W. Wallack in 1855 were managing the Marylebone Theatre. Robertson's brother
Craven and his sister Madge were playing juveniles. Tom rejoined the family. They played a season. Then, whether it was because the touring instinct was overpowering or the Marylebone vein had been exhausted, the Robertsons were off on another fantastic gamble a visit to Paris to produce Macbeth at the Theatre des Italiens. The company was impressive, including the Wallacks, the William Robertsons, Mrs. Arthur Stirling, and George Honey, but the name of the angel was prophetic: Monsieur Ruin de Fee. The foreign tour lasted less than three weeks; the company received one week's salary, and the actors straggled back to London as best they could.

Though the details differ (the theatre names, for example), this does tend to confirm EHB's story about this particular period of her life. She speaks, earlier in the biography, of going to Paris with a company to do Shakespeare, and she mentions a G.H., whom she knew and who effectively recruited her into the company. That would be either George Honey, or George Bennett Hoskins (or Bennett-Hoskins), who are noted as among the company in The Principal Dramatic Works..., and, as Bennett Hoskins was from the Sadler's Wells company, where "Miss Emma Harding" had done Macbeth and Othello in 1844 , I'm inclined to bet on Bennett Hoskins as the G.H. of the Autobiography, although "Miss Emma Harding" did perform with George Honey at the Adelphi in August of 1853 in (kid you not) What, No Cab?.

Increasingly difficult not to draw the equation "Miss Emma Harding" = "Emma Hardinge Britten"

The Superb Manikin

While practicing as an electric physician, EHB continued to lecture -- but on very different topics than before her marriage.

Below, an advertisement from the front page of the Boston Daily Globe, for Saturday 6 December 1873.

The superb manikin is mentioned several times in The Electric Physician. Parker Memorial Entertainments took place in the Parker Memorial Hall, home of the 28th Congregational Society, and named for Theodore Parker. It had at the time a seating capacity of 850. Ditson & Co. was a well-known music publisher and dealer, in operation under some variant of that name until the 1880s.

The Electric Physician

The great lost work of EHB. Boston: Dr. William Britten, 1875. Green cloth boards, blank spine, 4.5 inches wide by 6 inches tall. (3) + 59pp. + 4 advertisements. Unobtainable by the general public, and scarce in its first edition.

It isn't a medical treatise. It's something between a piece of marketing collateral, and an instruction manual for a very specific piece of apparatus, which clearly shipped with a schematic diagram with alphabetized piece-parts.

Worth the price -- every penny -- for this:

Written by any old nobody, operating out of a three-story brownstone on West Brookline Street, it'd quickly be filed under quackery (as my copy obviously was by someone, doubled-over and used as a wedge of some kind) or just thrown out. But, with her by-line, we should see it for what it is: an artifact of the breathtakingly bold re-invention of herself that EHB attempted after the Boston fire of 1872 and the failure of The Western Star.

To be made available on the Archive in facsimile and machine-readable forms almost immediately. Contact me directly if you can't wait to get your hands on it.

The Family Floyd

begins to piece itself together, but only just. All information in this post subject to revision -- consider this notes from the field.

Father definitely Ebenezer, son of Ebenezer, born circa 1795, and noted as the christening of several of his children.

Mother Ann Sophia, possibly Bromfield or Bromville, born circa 1798, possibly daughter of a clergyman. Also present at the christening of children. Known at times as Amy Sophia, and A. S. Floyd, and A. S. Harding, interestingly enough, when she traveled first to the US with "Miss Emma Harding".

Marriage of Ebenezer and Ann Sophia takes place on 9 December in Minehead, not Misterton, as often reported, and by license rather than by banns, which may say something about Ann Sophia's socioeconomic status, and may say something about the hurried-ness of the marriage.

News flash:Elder sister, Frances Ann, born probably in Minehead, christened at Minehead on 20 August 1820. She disappears from the records almost immediately thereafter, and is not part of the post-Ebenezer household in London. Current hypothesis: early death.

News flash:Brother Tom, who "died young" and acted as one of EHB's controls early on in her career, has been found in the records. He was born 17 March 1826, and christened in Calne, Wiltshire, on 26 April 1826. He also disappears from the records almost immediately, and is not part of the post-Ebenezer London household, which would be consistent with the tale that Tom died young, and at sea, or overseas.

Add younger sister Margaret's christening to the geographical mix, and we get a very interesting pattern.

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At A, Margaret's christening. At B, Thomas' christening. At C, the parents' marriage and Frances Ann's christening. And then, way over on the right, D: Emma's christening in Bethnal Green.

We know, from EHB's Autobiography that the family was living in the vicinity of Bristol up until Ebenezer's death (in 1834?) -- perhaps within walking distance of the Avon, into which Emma contemplated throwing herself before being called back by the voice of her father. So, the Bristol-centric cluster of the marriage and the other childrens' christenings makes sense.

Emma's an outlier, and the question is: why? Ann Sophia's relatives in the vicinity? Father in the coasting trade by this time - if there was a coasting trade between Bristol and the Thames at the time?

First Publication Of Spirit Circles

EHB's bibliography is coming together, slowly and not well. Some of her smaller tracts -- in particular Rules For The Formation And Conduct Of Spirit Circles -- appear in many different forms at roughly the same time, making lineage of these texts difficult to establish.

I believe, however, that I've found the first-state publication of the Rules, as described below.

The name-less medium described in the snippet is almost certainly David Duguid, with whom EHB had a long relationship.

Oh, for a bookseller, sitting on a copy of this pamphlet...

Art Magic And Its Author(s)

A vexed question: who wrote Art Magic and under what circumstances? AE Waite and Olcott, among others, were willing to say in more or less public forums that (a) significant borrowing, verging on plagiarism, was to be found in Art Magic, and (b) EHB almost certainly was the author. But then each of them had an axe or two of their own to grind.

In that context, then, this interesting snippet, from The Manufacturer and Builder, a building trades magazine, of November, 1876 (pp. 260-21).

Smacks of Olcott's diary entries, to me. Note to self: who edited this magazine in 1876?

Emma, the Master of Lindsay and Elongation

Getting Emma in a room with the Master of Lindsay and Viscount Adare (who, remember, famously saw D. D. Home levitate himself out a window in Buckingham Gate) goes some way toward helping flesh out the plausibility of various theories about just who made up that 'Orphic Circle' that used Emma Floyd as their clairvoyante.

Here we have Emma and her mother, in that room with Adair and the Master of Lindsay, watching D. D. Home elongate himself.

This from The Spiritual Magazine of September 1868, in which one may also find the second in a series of heretofore uncollected "Questions and Impromptu Answers" by "Miss Hardinge", who at that point in 1868 needed no first name qualifier for readers of that magazine.

Emma herself does refer indirectly to this incident, in Modern American Spiritualism on page 146. Emma knew Home in the US.

Dr. Britten's Home Battery

Speaks for itself.

The snippet is from the Countess of Caithness' book, Old Truths In A New Light (1876). EHB and the Countess had a long association -- the Countess shows up as a 'friend' of the Two Worlds Publishing Company, established by EHB and William in Manchester in the 1880s, in a vanity book the press did in the 1890s (below).

Emma, Fibbing and Revealing (?)

Today's mud-encrusted sapphire comes from Elizabeth J. French's A New Path In Electrical Therapeutics, published in Philadelphia in 1873 by French herself, and subsequently republished by Lippincott.

French, as I mentioned in an earlier post, provided a home for EHB and her mother in New York City shortly after EHB's arrival from Europe, and probably introduced EHB to trance-speaking: a skill French advertised herself as possessing. It also seems clear, from the excerpt of EHB's writing published here, (and here, in flat text form) that whatever falling-out occurred between French and EHB occurred subsequent to March of 1873, for no miffed party would have written a puff piece for an adversary like the one below.

The archives of the Philadelphia Press aren't readily available to check the date and the accuracy of the text (I cannot at this point even verify the existence of such a paper), but assuming it to be an accurate transcription of an actual letter published in March of 1973 by EHB, the text is revealing in a number of ways, indicating that

• it places EHB in residence, at least temporarily, in the Philadelphia area in 1873, thus possibly putting a specific time-frame around the "Rose Cross"/Delanco "blue ink" stalker incident in her Autobiography, on which more another day


• EHB spent time in Milan, Italy, as well as in London and Paris, performing in opera companies


• EHB underwent some number of medical procedures at the hands of eminent London physicians just prior to her first trip to the US -- some time in the early 1850s, after she first became associated with the Haymarket Theatre (which places this any time after May of 1848, when EHB (as Emma Harding) made her debut at the Haymarket as Zepherine in a retitled version of Lola Montes)


• the proximate reason for her trip to the US was not a contract to appear on the stage at the Old Broadway theatre, but rather a doctor's directive that she take a "long sea voyage" or risk "pulmonary consumption."


• EHB was under the care of A. D. Wilson, a prominent and controversial homeopath connected with the French circle, while living in New York


• EHB was at least passingly familiar with the major works of homeopathy, including Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of Medicine (1810), and assumed her readers would be as well

Some of these statements are almost certainly false.

But perhaps most interestingly, though, the letter studiously avoids drawing the very close connection that undoubedly existed for several decades between French and EHB. The text of the letter is written in such a way as to suggest, very clearly, that EHB sought treatment from Mrs. French, and then did not see her again for a significant period of time.

Her Autobiography tells a significantly different story:

One of the most fortunate acquaintances that I was. privileged to make, as I then deemed, was with the family of Mrs. E. J. French, a very fine clairvoyant, physician, electrician, and one who from the first days of the modern movement had been gifted with extraordinary powers as a trance, writing, rapping, and physical medium. I had been introduced to this remarkable medium with a view of consulting her professionally as to the possibility of recovering my powers as an opera singer. Whilst giving me absolutely no hope in that direction, Mrs. French's spirits, the chief of whom professed to be the great electrical discoverer, Benjamin Franklin, strongly advised that my mother and I should make our home with Mrs. French and her family of three sweet young girls. Following this advice, we took rooms with Mrs. French, in a new house to which she was, removing, and for many years we boarded with her, forming an intimate part of her family, and constantly connected with her life and professional experiences.

Selective memory? Creative embellishment (Milan? Really?) Just good storyelling/marketing sense?

Recovering The Texts: EHB's Rules To Be Observed...

The chief qualifications for every one who investigates Spiritualism, either in a private circle of their own or in a public one, are : patience, perseverance, and a disposition to recognize a truth and freely admit it to be one when convinced that it is. The latter is of special importance and value, and does more to aid the spirit than we of earth can possibly realize; whereas, on the other hand, a stupid silence, or what might be termed a willful offishness in this respect, dampens their ardor and retards their work.

Rules To Be Observed When Forming Spiritual Circles

There, in a nutshell, we have the argument-from-evidence-of-the-senses, upon which EHB and other spiritualists insisted so forcefully, and on which so many converts -- I think of Conan Doyle and Alfred Russel Wallace as examples -- based their rationale for conversion.

Maskelyne might have, did, say: that's not evidence -- not at all.

Emma (Harding) And Charles (Dickens)

This would be one of those places at which we burn a bit of incense in honor of our patron saint, Michel Foucault, again.

Stare at it a moment -- the great big hole in this corner of the historical record that will never, ever be filled, with anything other than supposition.

What did Emma's letter say?

What papers did Emma send Charles? Were they returned? Do we have them, in some published form or other, now?

Why early 1854? How did Emma know Charles?

Supposition: the papers in question were, in some form or other, the work we now know as The Wildfire Club (1861), or at least some version of one or more stories in that collection. After all, what does an actress -- by her own account blackballed off the London stage by a "baffled sensualist" in 1854 -- do next? Write, of course.

And how did she know Charles, well enough to write him, and well enough for Dickens to be after Wills to return her papers? Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Social network analysis enthusiasts, take note. Here, in the black holes of history, we suppose on the basis of connection: Emma to Edward, Edward to Charles, Emma to Charles. Drama, the theatre, the Adelphi, spiritualism -- the links among the three are complex, pregnant.

The Electric Physician

Go ahead: Google it.

Early on in her transition from actress to propagandist - while she was still serving as a test medium -- EHB and her mother lived, in New York, with Mrs. E. J. French, a Spiritualist who counted among her skills both trance-speaking and electro-medicine -- the use of electricity as a therapeutic mechanism.

(One doesn't need to know much about mesmerism to recognize the intellectual lineage here...)

I haven't looked yet to see how often EHB discussed electro-medicine in her published work, but she and William did, from 1872 until some time in late 1874 or early 1875, practice electro-medicine professionally in Boston.

(I believe, for what it's worth, that this is where the Dr. in Dr. William Britten comes from. When asked by officials about his occupation, in census-taking and elsewhere, Britten had a wide variety of answers, including "bricklayer", "accountant" and "gunsmith" (?!?), but never claimed a medical certification.)

In any case, the great lost (digital) work of EHB is her booklet on electro-medicine, The Electric Physician.

Hunted high and low (abebooks and alibris both failing to produce same), for some months....and I've found a copy. What a treat it will be to submit that book to the tender care of CanoScan and OmniPage, and release its digital (dare I say aetheric) double into the wild...

Proving Grounds

This from a conversation with the editor of a famous (in its way) spiritualist-oriented newsletter...

Emma Harding(e) the actress -- what sort of career did she have? And how would the career of an Emma Harding(e), actress, be irrefutably connected to the career of an Emma Harding(e) [Britten], spiritualist and propagandist?

It isn't necessarily pretty for a spiritualist to contemplate the idea that EHB was an actress, particularly since her metier was the so-called trance address.  This is particularly true if, as seems the case, EHB usually played secondary parts in farce, burlesque and burletta (oh, yes, and a short stint in Macbeth at Sadler's Wells, as one of the (singing) witches. EHB could, by all accounts, sing like an....angel.)

EHB does tell us, in a number of places, that she pursued a career on the stage, but she gives us little or no detail.

As it happens, the archives of some of the London theatres in which she worked are now available electronically, and we can now chart, in detail, every play she acted in and every part she played (in London and in New York, but not yet in Paris) from 1844 until 1856 (the last year for which we have records). She was a working actress, appearing thousands of times in nearly a hundred different roles in ephemeral plays in the course of a decade's career.

But that actress is a woman named Emma Harding (Miss Emma Harding, to be precise) -- how are we to know that the actress and the spiritualist are the same person?

As it turns out -- and this is the find of the week, as far as I'm concerned -- Miss Emma Harding the actress was of sufficient repute on the London stage that likenesses (portraits, I expect to find) were made of her contemporaneous with her career. (She was also of sufficient repute to warrant a mention in a long poem on the London stage in Ainsworth's Magazine for 1848, the year of upheaval...)

And one of those portraits captured the eye of one Sacheverell Sitwell, who included it in his Romantic Ballet In Lithographs of the Time... a copy of which is kiting its way to me in the USPS as I write.

EHB was described, even by those journalists who disliked her, as beautiful -- and so she was in a mid-nineteenth-century sort of way. But her teeth -- a dead give-away. I'm hopeful we'll know her by those.

Backfill

About a year ago, while researching Harry Houdini's early career on the dime museum circuit, I took a sharp left turn into the life of Mina Crandon: Margery, the (in)famous Boston medium. What that woman could do with ectoplasm...

That left turn led me to spend a few months reading in the history of the Spiritualist movement, on all sides of the question: Houdini, Conan Doyle, Hereward Carrington, Frank Podmore, the SPR and ASPR.

One day I found myself staring at a short description of a trance lecture given by Emma Hardinge, and wondering why it was that the description of Hardinge's life the writer provided differed so markedly from one I had read only a few weeks before.

A bit of spade-work (interesting metaphor that -- archeology, or necrophilia?) and I had a half-dozen different versions of Emma Harding(e) [Britten] to rationalize: different parents, birth dates and places, life paths, career choices.

What seemed clear to me was that EHB (hereinafter, etc.) was the victim both of sloppy scholarship, in the printed world, and Wikipedia disease in the online world. The repetition of falsehood, Winston Smith either said or should have said, begets over time the canonical.

So, then and there, in the fall of 2008, I started chasing down Emma, vaguely with the view to writing a biography of her, if the material warranted, but decidely with a desire to know: to pin it all down, insofar as such things can be pinned down (fixed and wriggling, as it were).

Michel Foucault does, definitely, say somewhere that working-in-history fools one into thinking that history provides a kind of direct access to the physicality of the past, when it at best provides us with access to words-about-the-past, some of which have origins close in time to that unknowable past, and hence (possibly) greater relevance. True, of course, but then there is, after all, a difference between an un-footnoted reference to EHB's husband Henry Hardinge (not true - no such marriage) and a real ship's passenger manifest with Mr. and Mrs. William Britten among those passengers.

This, then, is a series of snapshots, taken on the road, chasing down Emma.