The Spiritualist Encyclopedia

One would have thought that the trials of publication-by-subscription would have worn Emma out by the 1890s. Apparently not. Or else she found it was the only way to get her product to market.

As reported in the January 2007 issue of Psypioneer, Emma had plans for another omnibus, The Spiritualist Encyclopedia, which she abandoned -- possibly handing it off to a co-worker -- when she was unable to collect the required number of subscriptions.

As the extract below, from James Coates' Photographing The Invisible (1911) hints, the manuscript for The Spiritualist Encyclopedia may have been in sister Margaret's possession as late as 1910 or so.

I wonder -- and perhaps I'm the only one who does -- whether the odd document called The Two Worlds Album, which was issued in 1897, clearly under the aegis of EHB, is some kind of stripped-down, or hacked-up version of The Spiritualist Encyclopedia -- whether in fact, when we look at the marvelous faces and profiles in that album (as well as the adverts at the back) if we aren't in fact looking at the 90-odd folks who did pony up for a copy of The Spiritualist Encyclopedia. If so, it must have been crushing for her.

Festus and Ghost Land

The quote from Bailey's Festus in Ghost Land is, alas, no help in dating the text.

1847 text

LUCIFER The original
Of all things is one thing. Creation is
One whole. The differences a mortal sees
Are diverse only to the finite mind.

1848 US text

LUCIFER The original
Of all things is one thing. Creation is
One whole. The differences a mortal sees
Are diverse only to the finite mind.

1853 text

LUCIFER The original
Of all things is one thing, Creation is
One whole. The differences a mortal sees
Are diverse only to the finite mind.

1889 text

LUCIFER: The original
Of all things, all existence being one
Derivative whole, is one. The differences
Seen, show diverse but to the finite mind.

Charles Maurice Davies records, in his The Great Secret and Its Unfoldment in Occultism (1895) that Bailey was a Spiritualist, and to be found lurking on the fringes of Spiritualist gatherings at Mrs. Gregory's house in Mayfair during the 1880s.

Ghost Land: A Further Bibliographical Note

Have been off in other realms, digging into the as-it-turns-out muck of the New York Spiritualist community of the 1850s, but today the first edition of Ghost Land arrived on my doorstep, as did a note from Paul Gaunt (on my electronic doorstep, anyway), who pointed something out to me.

Here's a view of the front cover of Paul's first edition of Ghost Land:

And here's a view of the front cover of my first edition of Ghost Land:

On its face, we have two printings of the first edition (and possibly two states), since it is highly unlikely that in a small run (of only 500? 1500?) copies the printer would have run two different covers. I've send Paul some notes on some of the idiosyncracies of my text, and we'll see if they reproduce themselves in his, but it seems clear the type for Ghost Land was stereotyped (the verso of the title page reads in part "Stereotyped and Printed by | ALFRED MURGE & SON, PRINTERS, BOSTON"), and that the edition Emma spoke of in her note to Mr. Coleman may in fact have been prepared.

Barring further data, it seems that the "blue" Ghost Land is the first printing, and the "red" Ghost Land the second printing.

And for anyone who's been wondering just how many states of the text of Ghost Land we have, the answer is: at least three. To enumerate:

1. the partial versions of the Louis de B---- text and the John Cavendish Dudley text, each serialized in The Western Star in 1872
2. the first edition of 1876 (which may have two states -- to be determined)
3. the "Premium" edition issued by the Progressive Thinker in 1897

I have done a quick collation of the first seven chapters of my first edition text against the first seven chapters of the 1897 "Premium" edition text, and here's a quick summary of the differences, material and otherwise.

• All italics and FULL CAPS in the 1876 edition are dropped in the 1897 edition -- the original emphasis thus entirely lost.
• Chapter content summaries are substantially different between the two editions (and the chapter summaries in the table of contents for the first edition do not match the actual chapter headings in many cases)
• Many of the editor's footnotes in the first edition are silently deleted from the 1897 edition
• An extended quotation from Philip James Bailey's Festus (the signal work of the so-called Spasmodic movement in poetry) which heads Chapter Two in the first edition, is silently deleted from the 1879 edition.
• Several sentences, most of them at the end of paragraphs, present in the first edition, are struck from the text of the 1879 edition

(The reference to Philip James Bailey's poem is interesting in two regards: (1) as Bailey revised Festus extensively from its first -- anonymous -- publication in 1839 until its Jubilee edition in 1889, there's a chance we can date the creation of at least part of the Ghost Land text based on the quotation; (2) it had never struck me until tonight just how close the doctrine of Modern Spiritualism, particularly its claim to be a religion based on reason rather than superstition, aligns with the religion described in Festus -- which of course pre-dates the Rochester events by some years.)

A partial table of contents from the first edition:

And a partial table of contents from the 1897 edition:

Update: A comparison between the texts of the "Blue" and "Red" editions indicates that, for the most part, both seem to exhibit the same stereotyping defects. It seems probable that we're looking at an American first (possibly, the blue) and an English first (the red) produced from sheets printed in the US, and shipped to the UK. I find it impossible to believe that Emma carted around the stereotypes for a 400+ page book... and then declined to make those plates available to the Progressive Thinker for the 1897 edition.

Pierre Erard <--> Thomas Welsh

Mayhaps Emma learned marketing from Pierre Erard.

The dark years of Emma's life -- roughly from early 1834 to early 1842, after which the light of documentary evidence shines increasingly clearly on an increasingly public woman -- are yielding, like a rock face, to persistent sallies with sharp tools.

Readers of the Autobiography will recall that Emma spends less than a page of text covering the time between her father's death and the start of her career as an actress -- in part, I think, because she has been playing fast and loose her entire life with her actual age, and in part because there was a profound trauma -- or series of traumas -- in that period of her life that she either would not or could not acknowledge.

But she does mention Pierre Erard, and I have been struggling for some weeks now to connect her to Erard in a way that would validate her assertion that she (and her mother, readers will recall) spent time in Paris while Emma studied voice and piano, discovered her talents as a clairvoyante, and demo-dollied pianos for Erard in his workshop in return for a loaner on which to practice.

As it turns out, the inventive genius of the Erard family petered out in Pierre -- although he filed more English patents that his predecessor (his uncle), his contributions to the modern instrument were somewhat less impressive, and his real genius was: promotion. In the service of promoting two of the Erard innovations -- a seven octave keyboard and a double-repetition action -- Erard brought to London, in 1824, a young Franz Liszt, lodging Liszt in the Erard London offices on Great Marlborough Street, and kicking off a series of performances by the boy genius (on Erard equipment, at the time the only piano capable of playing some of the pieces in question) with a private recital on 5 June 1824, and a public concert on 21 June.

The venue for both the recital and the concert: the Argyll Rooms, owned by Thomas Welsh, who will become Emma's "singing-master" (as she liked to phrase it) a decade later.

Erard, as it turns out, was in London in 1835 and in 1838, at just the time we'd like him to be, in order to bring Emma over to Paris for a spell during one of those periods -- in 1835 he was driving the filing/granting of two British patents (one for the pianoforte and one for the harp) and in 1838 he was finagling an extension of another of his English patents out of the House of Lords.

A period in Paris, circa 1835, for a year or so in duration, would bring Emma and Ann Sophia back to London (to Lambeth, as far as we know) none the richer, but much the wiser from Emma's clairvoyante experiences while in Paris -- under the hands of a Dupotet or a Cahagnet perhaps? -- in good time to be drawn into the esoteric shenanigans of the Gore House circle...say, circa 1838? Just after Dupotet himself converts Elliotson to the cause, and just at the time that Elliotson teaches his friend, Charles Dickens, how to mesmerize his own wife? The year Disraeli marries his rich widow? The year Bulwer Lytton publishes Alice, or the Mysteries?

Vito-Magnetic Appliances

One thread that connects three of the four lives of Emma Harding(e) Britten -- the dark life of the desperate young lucide with that of the engaged spiritualist propagandist, and with that of the cantankerous occultist -- is: magnetism. The clairvoyante, the electric physician, the editor of Ghost Land and Sirius, too, I think, all believed in magnetism, not as a metaphor or a misnomer, but as an actual natural force.

This, tonight, from the introduction to Fryar's edition of Thomas Welton's Mental Magic (1884):

And, just to tie things off, or perhaps to trace the thread backwards from the 1880s to the time of Emma the young piano demonstrator, playing in Pierre Erard's workshops in Paris in 1838 while elsewhere in the metropolis, magnetism and automata were all the rage, there is this bit, from the back matter of the same text:

Picking Through Godwin

For nearly twenty years, Hargrave Jennings (whom Olcott and others will accuse Emma of plagiarizing) served in administrative roles in various London theatres, in particular Covent Garden, about which he left a very interesting (and sinister) description in his The Childishness and Brutality of the Times.

The manuscript of History and Mystery of the Magic Crystal by Robert Fryar (he of HBofL fame) was incinerated, along with the rest of Emma's papers, in the Boston Fire of 1872. Godwin surmises that EHB solicited the manuscript for inclusion in an issue of The Western Star.

Two small, significant snippets from Josceyln Godwin's The Theosophical Enlightenment.

EHB and Victoria Woodhull

Readers familiar with the controversies surrounding Art Magic will remember this passage from Olcott's Old Diary Leaves:

The book-reviewer of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, a New York journal of the day, in noticing the appearance of Art Magic uses very severe language in regard to the reputed Author, whom he indentifies, whether justly or unjustly, I cannot say, with Mrs. Britten. The book, he says, “is simply a rehash of books accessible to any student of even limited means, and (which) can be readily found in almost any book-store, or on the shelves of any public library. Ennemoser’s History of Magic, Howitt’s Supernatural, Salverte’s Philosophy of Magic, Hargrave Jenning’s Rosicrucians, Barrett’s Magus, Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, and a few others are the real sources of this wretched compilation, which is full of bad grammar and worse assumptions. We unhesitatingly assert that there is not a single important statement in the book which cannot be discovered in already-printed books.” This is exaggerated censure, for the book does contain passages worthy of Bulwer-Lytton; in fact, one would say they were written by him...

Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly was, I believe, almost wholly the production of Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, who were fascinating figures in their own right (Woodhull was one of, if not the first, female stock trader, a candidate for US President, and a very early leader of the US branch of the Marxist First International). But, at the start, the sisters had been traveling spirit mediums, and had found themselves on the opposite side of the rhetorical picket lines from EHB on the "free love" issue in the 1860s. Payback's a bitch, as they say.

Sticking Note

HPB, writing to the editor of Light (which would have been Stainton Moses at the time) in July of 1889:

[W]hy should Spiritualists feel so interested in my travels, studies, and their supposed dates? Why should they be so eager to unravel imagined mysteries, denounce alleged (or even possible) mistakes, in order to pick holes in everything Theosophical? To even my best friends I have never given but very fragmentary and superficial accounts of the said travels, nor do I propose to gratify anyone’s curiosity, least of all that of my enemies. The latter are quite welcome to believe in and spread as many cock-and-bull stories about me as they choose, and to invent new ones as time rolls on and the old stories wear out. Why, again, should they not, since they disbelieve in Theosophical adepts, turn their attention to Spiritual adepts, who perform far more curious and astonishing feats than were ever claimed by the Theosophists? Witness the Adept of Mrs. E. Hardinge Britten, “Louis,” in Art Magic, and Ghost Land. Which of the Tibetan Mahatmas has ever looked through Lord Rosse’s telescope, at Greenwich (England), when the said telescope was built and has never been moved from Parsonstown, Ireland? And if Mrs. Hardinge Britten’s “Louis” could see the mysterious “Spirit-heads” in the sky (presumably with his legs at Greenwich and his face and eyes in Ireland), and that such superhuman feat, though often talked about, was never questioned in print by the Theosophists, more polite and discreet in this than the Spiritualists, why should the latter go out of the way to cast mud at us?

The Baffled Sensualist

The key to something.

By one cruel and remorseless persecutor, in the person of a baffled sensualist, several of the theatrical entrepreneurs by whom I was engaged or in treaty wuth, were induced by specially prepared golden arguments to cancel any engagements with me, so that I might be driven to the last necessity of placing myself under my millionaire enemy's kind protection.

Baffled in this context means, I think, thwarted or in some way deflected, rather than the more modern meaning of clueless or bewildered, particularly when we see the verb form, baffle used by EHB a sentence or two later, to mean just that: to thwart, or undo.

Within the scope of Google's gaze, which is vast but certainly not perfect, I can find only two occurrences of the phrase baffled sensualist within EHB's linguistic culture, both of which are oddly enough evocative. The first -- hidden from inspection by the oddities of Google Books' agreements with publishers -- occurs in an 1838 novel, entitled Cagliostro, or the Charlatan by one T. A. James. And the other, from William Leonard Courtney's The Development of Maurice Maeterlinck and Other Sketches of Foreign Writers (1904), reads thus:

And so the storm-driven artist (JK Huysmans) depicts a hero called Durtal, who, in the first state of his progress, revels in blank magic, and tries to connect medieval superstition in its basest forms with that curious product of nineteenth century magic called, in Paris, Satanism or Diabolism. "La Bas" is one of the most hideous books that has ever been composed on a repulsive theme, for in it is drawn for us the deliberate attempt which a baffled sensualist makes to provide himself with new and exquisite sensations, not only by an apparatus of scents and sights, pictoral art and music, but by recourse to hidden and obscene rites of magic. In a simpler and less terrible way one can see much the same characteristics in modern society. Fashionably people, with some profession of scepticism and much devotion to the materialistic idea of wealth, seek to satisfy the imaginative and romantic side of their nature by going to seances, consulting spiritualistic mediums, or lending an attentive ear to Esoteric Buddhism or the glowing pages of Mr. Myer's "Human Personality. (pp. 79-80).

What are the odds, really, that, in the 1890s (since that is apparently when Courtney's texts first appeared, as articles in the Daily Telegraph), Courney and EHB would use the identical phrase, in contexts so blatantly similar?

The mind boggles. Or is baffled.

And I could pile it one further, citing the parallels between other essays of Courtney -- on, for example, the similarities between Buddha and Jesus -- and EHB's thinking and writing.

Did she read Courtney? And leave us -- in her autodidactic way -- a clue to her meaning?

Dropping Names

Reading Godwin's The Theosophical Enlightenment (a masterful work, by any standard), and trying to fight off the seductive idea that Modern Spiritualism was a programmatic propaganda campaign designed, instigated and promoted by an occult group of some shape or other, rather than a (spontaneous) Great Awakening -- something the peculiarities of US culture produces from time to time.

Leaving aside the question of whether powers and abilities exist that could create such an awakening for propaganda purposes, and adopting -- for the sake of entertaining the idea -- the position that the Rochester events were spontaneous, and exploitable, and were exploited for propaganda purposes, that idea leads me -- with my parochial concerns -- to ask the question: what role did EHB play? Was she exploited, or exploiter? Or bystander?

To my way of thinking, the answer to that question is bound up with a decided peculiarity in EHB's body of work -- namely, her egregious habit of diarrhetic name-dropping in print, coupled with her -- deliberate? -- opacity about entire areas of her life.

The density of proper names in Modern American Spiritualism and Nineteenth Century Miracles is off the charts, and not due merely to Modern Spiritualism's habit of "proof-by-association" (how could one possibly question the moral and intellectual integrity of Professor Hare or Charles Richet, or the probity of Governor Tallmadge?). Nor it is solely bone-throwing: Emma is doing something more, I think, than handing out recognition chits to the thousands of people whose paths she crossed in her journeys. The same holds true with many of her non-trance essays -- they are identity networks, names strung together on a thread of polemic.

That said, what to make of her extreme reticence to say anything at all -- let alone to drop names -- about her career as a lucide, or her involvement with the members of the Orphic Circle? Oh, yes -- we have the Sirius explanation: the pledge of secrecy. But the explanation is somewhat specious. First of all, the proclivities of a Bulwer Lytton or a Stanhope or a Morrison with respect to the occult were by no means secrets in the broader culture -- let alone the subculture EHB usually addressed. And secondly -- unless we are to treat the material in Ghost Land as (name-free) factual revelation of real English occult practices -- no substance had been divulged. The secret is hollow: EHB reveals the names (of the dead) and associates them with a discourse and a set of practices she declines to specify, or specifies only in a context that almost begs the reader to dismiss fact as fiction.

The imbalances in EHB's various texts -- the swings from exhaustive detail to nearly-complete opacity, the heavy thuds of names, dropping, interspersed with the provocative finger-pointing in the direction of the truly occult, the hidden -- mean something. The question is: what?

It's hard for me, at least, to see EHB as the advance team for a global occultist program to bring light to the masses through cabinet tricks and slate-writing. But it's an idea that has to be entertained, sat with as it were, if only because such a hypothesis goes a long way to explaining the complexities of Emma's texts.

The Coming Man

EHB had a few great passions: galvanic medicine, modern spiritualism, the occult, outcast women, and Abraham Lincoln.

Whether her passion for Lincoln was for the man, or for the reforms the Lincoln Administration represented, I can't at this point decide. Few newspaper accounts of her time in California in the 1860s survive, but those that do link her directly to Union propagandizing: to emancipation, to the Boston abolitionists, to John Brown and to Lincoln. Several contemporaries credit her with "delivering California for Lincoln" in 1864 (whatever that means, practically) and she certainly collected for auxiliary soldiers' hospitals at her lectures during the war. Her lecture "The Coming Man; or the Next President of the United States" was, E.J. Dingwall tells us, phenomenally popular, and her funeral oration, after Lincoln's assassination, was as close as EHB came to broad, popular, fame during her lifetime.

For Presidents' Day 2009, EHB's Great Funeral Oration (1865) in photofacsimile and flat text.

(Hardinge mystical marriage theorists, please note the "Miss" on the title page)

Ebenezer - Curiouser and Curiouser

From one of my researchers, in the Bristol area:

I spent some while at the Bristol and Somerset Record Offices trying to get some purchase on Ebenezer.... It seems plain enough that your Ebenezer was the son of John and Ann, baptised in 1790.

His marriage in 1819 was by licence, and I was hopeful I could glean some info from that document, but unfortunately it's one of those that hasn't made it down to the present day. The same applies to the wedding of his own father John Floyd, who married Ann Leigh of Carhampton on 29 Oct 1768 - again the licence is missing.

Ebenezer was described as a mariner when Frances Ann was christened - and because of his later Bristol connections I think it's likely that he was involved in trading or such-like up and down the Bristol Channel, as were many at the time. The 40-mile sea passage to Bristol was no doubt far preferable to the 50 mile struggle across the hills and dales of North Somerset.

You will have noticed the baptisms at Minehead of children of John and Mary Floyd (1821 and 1824), John being described as a labourer of Langton Place Minehead and Lower Woodcombe respectively. Another baptism is to a John and Ann Floyd in 1833, which though taking place at Minehead gives the residence of the family as "Redcliff, Bristol".

Margaret's baptism at Bristol took place on 28 Apr 1830 (she was born on the 20th) at St Michael on the Mount, and Ebenezer is at that time described as an apothecary. Being a chemist myself, I doubt he had studied this at University.

So Ebenezer is entirely enigmatic - once a trader operating in the Bristol Channel, then turning up in London as a teacher, then back in Bristol in 1830 parading as an Apothecary. Very strange.

I thought it worth while having a look at the Land Tax Assessments for Minehead which were drawn up annually from the 1760s to 1832, listing anyone who was liable - i.e. owning or renting some kind of property. But there was no sign of a Floyd in the two years I searched (1819 and 1822) which bracket a date when he might have been around

A man qualified as an apothecary or schoolmaster would perhaps show up in certain Bristol records, such as Electoral Rolls following the 1832 reform Act. But despite thorough searching of these documents and the earlier Poll Books, his head did not show above the parapet.

His burial occurred on 13 Apr 1834 at St Michael on the Mount, but gives away nothing beyond his age of 44.

The places we glean from this: Floyds living in Redcliff (A), Margaret's christening at St.Michael's on the Mount Without (B) where Ebenezer is also interred. Note the proximity of the Redclif(fe) area to the river, into which Emma, in her despair, considered throwing herself after her father's death.

View Larger Map

Overland, about half a mile between A and B. Are we looking at Miss Emma's neighborhood?

A few things to hang on to, and run down. Emma's childhood cannot, despite her mythologizing, have been a stable one: mariner, schoolmaster, apothecary.

Many thanks, Tony.

The Magical Marriage

Reading E. J. Dingwall's preface to his edition of Modern American Spiritualism, and encounter this:

Through connections not yet fully established, it is said that Emma was for a time employed by [the Orphic Circle principals] as one of their magnetic subjects. During one of their meetings, she was "married" at some sort of mystic ceremony to a member of the society belonging to the Hardinge family.

Reading Dingwall is a bit like reading scripture, if you're a believer, inasmuch as he was perhaps the most active researcher during the Spiritualist renaissance in the 1920s and after. He speaks with some significant authority.

But I really have the strong desire to rule this bit of apocrypha -- the mystical marriage -- out. As near as I can determine from assembling a fairly detailed chronology of her appearance in the public record in England and the US, she was referred to as (and presumably used the name) Miss Emma Harding -- unmarried, no e -- for some time after her arrival in the United States. Whether she changed 'Harding' to 'Hardinge' for a reason, or adopted what became a common misspelling of her name in the US press, remains to be pinned down. She did allege from time to time that she had been married in England and left a young widow, but (a) those stories were told out of school, as it were, and (b) no mention of an early marriage makes it into either the Autobiography (where she does allege a fiance), or into Robertson's Noble Pioneer. And, although Dr. Dingwall apparently had access to primary materials from EHB's life that we no longer have, during his preparation of the 1970 edition of MAS, that material did not include any clarifying details on Emma's early life -- or one presumes Dingwall would have included those in his preface.

The adoption of a stage name by a young woman who felt the social stigma of a female, acting in public (which, in a slightly different context, Emma asserts she felt in the Autobiography) was as common as dirt in mid-Victorian England - it was almost a requirement if that woman felt she had the opportunity to return, at some point, to "good society." And we know -- or think we know -- that her time as an actress was viewed by her Spiritualist confreres with some disapprobation -- see for example C. D. Maurice's remembrance of being taken to see Emma at the Beethoven Rooms in 1865, and Benjamin Coleman's emphatic request that Maurice not mention Emma's time on stage in London as Miss Emma Harding. Whether the middle-class English Spiritualist of the 1860s shared his class' prejudice against actresses, or whether Spiritualists thought Emma's career as an actress could be used as corrosive evidence against the legitimacy of her trance lectures, is an open question.

And, of course, there's the whole Ernest Reinhold thing -- if Emma was writing music and criticism in the period 1835-1842 under the name Ernest Reinhold (and there is, finally, evidence that an Ernest Reinhold did publish music during that period of time), she was an experienced user of pseudonyms.

I'm hypothesizing, on not much direct evidence (but on substantially more evidence that the Hardinge myth-makers), that Emma used the pseudonym Ernest Reinhold because she was indentured to Thomas Welsh, and did not want to share her earnings with him.

I'm further hypothesizing that Emma chose the stage name Emma Harding out of the air -- Harding was a common surname in England at the time -- and not because she had been (a) married, (b) affianced, (c) controlled psychically or (d) ravaged by a member of the Hardinge family, viscount or otherwise.

Emma adopted the stage name Harding at the time she joined the company of the Princess's Theatre in 1842 -- else what would have been the point of the Sadler's Wells advertisements of "Miss Emma Harding, late of the Princess's Theatre" in 1844? No one would have been able to identify her.

And she kept the surname Harding for a time after arriving in the US (traveling under it, answering the census taker's questions, etc.). Harding, not Hardinge. And Miss not Mrs.

Like the myth that Emma received the essential tenets of Spiritualism from (a dead) Robert Owen, I suspect the myth of the mystical marriage is going to die hard. Frankly, it shouldn't. It isn't essential to establishing the facts of the matter-that-matters: whether or not Emma was the lucide for a secretive group of English (and Continental?) occultists in the late 1830s and early 1840s. There's no evidence of occult leanings in the Hardinge family, as far as I know, and no need for Emma to have been mystically married for other aspects of her life's narrative to make sense.

Poor Joey

Emma has little to say about the pleasures of being married to William in her Autobiography, but she devotes pages of text to Joe, her parrot:

As I am now closing up all my records of foreign travel, and have but little to say of the far more limited scenes of effort which home Spiritualism supplies, I may with propriety devote a few words of introduction to another character in my busy life's drama, who for many months from the time I am writing of had played his constant part in all the scenes we had passed through. This, our invariable attendant everywhere, and on all occasions, was no other than an Australian bird, a splendid specimen of the Corilla, a bird of the parrot species, but white as milk, with a beautiful collar of crimson feathers round his neck, and a large circle of azure round his beautiful black eyes. We bought this bird at a Melbourne Town Hall show of all the wonderful varieties of the Australian feathered tribes, and we were principally moved to do so to please our aged mother, who had always expressed an earnest desire to have the companionship of a fine talking bird. Besides the remarkable conversational powers of my new friend Joe—or, as he chose to call himself, "poor Joey" —we both became warmly attached to him from his remarkable intelligence and his passionate attachment to us. True, we had with him all the discomforts of continual changes, far and wide travel, stormy ocean voyages, and the perils of stage coach bush travelling, but our darling accompanied us joyously. He became acquainted with all the sailors, coachmen, guards, and waiters we encountered, and often called them by name. He was a universal favourite, an excellent dancer, fond of music, to which he moved and danced in capital time: in short, if that creature had not a soul capable of growth and aspiration, an intellect susceptible of cultivation, and a heart full of tender emotions, even to worship of his protectors, neither do any of these glorious attributes, as exhibited in man, constitute claims to immortality. My husband had bought Joe to please me, I had desired to have him to please the dear old mother at home, but both of us soon learned to love and cherish him for his own bright self.

From the front matter of the 1897 edition of Ghost Land, a photograph of Emma and poor Joey:

EHB <--> HBofL

This from the back matter of the 1897 Progressive Thinker edition of Ghost Land:

Ghost Land: Bibliographical Note

For those of you who've wondered (as I have) whether the 1897 edition of Ghost Land was run from the same plates as the 1876 edition, the answer is: no.

With the generous help of Patrick Elliott of Madoc Books, I've been able to determine that the text of the 1876 "Premium" edition of Ghost Land does not contain two signal flaws that are found in the 1897 edition.

• On page 301 in the 1897 edition, in Chapter XXII, in the paragraph beginning "Such was the substance..." the word "letter" spelled "leter". In the 1867 edition, that paragraph is on page 408, and "letter" is spelled properly.
• On page 337 in the 1897 edition, in Chapter XXV, in the paragraph beginning "Eight months had passed..." -- the word "position" in the phrase "worming himself into a good official position" is repeated: "worming himself into a good official position position." In the 1876 edition, that paragraph is on Page 457, and the flaw does not occur.

While that doesn't constitute a full bibliographical review, I think the pagination change alone -- not to mention the introduction of new typeset (that is, non-plate-related) flaws -- puts to bed any notion that the 1897 edition might have been produced from extra sheets, or from plates, done at the time of the 1876 edition. So, if Olcott is correct that Emma ran 1500 copies of Art Magic for the 1876 edition, rather than the 500 copies she advertised under the terms of the subscription, she either did NOT do that with Ghost Land or the extra copies were disposed of at that time. Given the number of illustrations, and the plate preparation expense, in Art Magic, running extras while the press was set up seems commercially prudent, rather than sinister. Everything fits, it seems to me, given the palimpsest we got to look at earlier this week -- which claims a need to produce a new edition immediately (which wan't done, of course).

Cover of first edition of Ghost Land

Title page of first edition of Ghost Land

Prospectus from 1897 edition of Ghost Land

Many thanks to Patrick Elliott for his assistance. He's holding the last first edition of Ghost Land in the open market, as far as I can tell. Race you for it...

Update: I've acquired Patrick's first edition copy of Ghost Land for the Archive, and the Archive's photofacsimile edition of GL will be based on that text, rather than the 1897 text. Full textual collation will be done to determine if we have multiple states of the text -- wouldn't it be fascinating to discover that EHB revised Ghost Land between 1876 and 1897?

Louis de B----- as Defensive Routine

A note from an advisor this morning puts me in a different frame of mind. Source-hunting, as Harold Bloom says somewhere, is a carrion-eater's discipline, and I have been picking over a lot of dead carcasses of late. There are other facets to the jewel that is Emma.

In 1856, EHB claims in her Autobiography, she had her conversion experience, at the hands of Mrs. Foye. She is still acting at this time -- appearing, as far as one can tell, on the stage for the final time at the Olde Broadway in 1856 as Azurine in the play King Charming -- but she is also developing her skills as a medium, holding test sessions, and editing the Society for Diffusion of Spiritualist Knowledge/Christian Spiritualism's house rag, the Christian Spiritualist.

By the end of 1857, she has ended her association with the SDSK/CS, gone out on her own, as it were, as a both a "normal speaker" (which I take to mean "plain old propagandist") and a trace speaker (her first such public experience was in Troy, NY) and -- pointedly, for one of the central riddles of her career -- (re)met her old friend Louis de B______, putative author of Art Magic and sections of Ghost Land, in NY (passenger list carrion-eaters take note).

She had become acquainted with Louis de B_____, we are invited to accept, during her clairvoyante-Orphic Circle period (1835?-1842?).

In light of all this, what are we to make of her statements in the Autobiography that she experiences "intense disgust" and affront at the slighting of the Bible by the early spiritualists she speaks with, and that she forms an intention to expose the whole scam in a series of articles for the "musical and dramatic papers" to which she has promised American material. Surely -- as she in effect did claim later in her life -- EHB has by 1856-7 already seen a more obscured and profound wisdom tradition in action: one in which apparent blasphemy, dissociating strangeness and fetishistic secrecy are essential elements. Is Emma's positioning in the Autobiography just that -- rhetorical construction? Or are the various versions of the Orphic Circle narrative a mask -- a formation -- designed to shield from inspection a very different set of (almost certainly traumatic) events experienced by a young (12-19 year old) Emma Floyd?

We have to assume, I think, that there is something substantial to the Orphic Circle narratives, and we have to further assume that the narratives do point to a real circle of occult practitioners (until we exhaust the plausibility of the suspect list), since Emma named some of that circle -- Bulwer-Lytton, Philip Henry Earl of Stanhope and Richard Morrison -- albeit in a medium not likely to attract much attention from non-specialist audiences.

But we also have to keep in view a plain fact: Emma was psychologically complex, and deeply wounded by something, in her past -- something that was reflected (as in a skrying mirror) in her concern for outcast women.

The Left-Hand Path

In the silence of her own contemplation, the answer to the question "What is out of bounds?" was, for Emma, the answer of the modernist: it depends.

It is true that, in public, she was very much about defining boundaries, lines of demarcation, regions within and without the pale, that which was legitimate, and that which was not. As a propagandist, she was all about moral discrimination. But, alone with her thoughts, she could have formulated the Law of Thelema, and perhaps did.

Advertising Art Magic

Emma understood how to create demand for what it was she had to sell: that was, after all, her role as a propagandist, and it was a role she accepted explicitly (count the occurrences of the words propaganda and propagandist in her work), and in some senses enthusiastically (look up the phrase 'reaction formation'). Some times, as when she writes 'home' to the Banner of Light to complain about her treatment by the authorities in Melbourne, Australia, her intellectual posture slouches a bit, and she acknowledges the way in which selling pervaded her life.

Anyone who's ever done demand creation professionally knows that artificial conditions of scarcity can work very effectively to stimulate demand, if (and only if) the marketeer can engineer need for the (artificially scarce) product into the minds of the consumers.That sort of engineering is something we're all exposed to, as consumers, every day -- and which all of us respond to. The trick isn't creating the condition of scarcity -- it's creating the imperative need from which the response to scarcity springs.

Here, from the American Bibliopolist - A Literary Register and Repository Of Notes and Queries, Shakespeariana, etc. (a kind of periodical that makes one reflect on the absolutely desert-like conditions of the modern magazine business), is our Emma, creating conditions of scarcity:

Whether the text was actually scarce -- Oscott alleged it was not -- we shall soon determine, I hope (as the text has a number of technical flaws that will allow us to determine whether subsequent editions were printed from plates of the first edition).

Whether Emma succeeded in engineering need is a more subtle question. Did Olcott, Waite and others denigrate Art Magic because it was so derivative, because the story of its inception was so implausible, or because they were, when all was said and done, envious of Emma's skills as a sales person?

Rank Speculation: The Unknown Fiance

From Emma's Autobiography:

I had a certain and somewhat solemn engagement in "the Old Country," as I had learned to call England, and one day, in answer to a letter from the party in question, urging my return, I sat down to write, purposing to inform my correspondent of my intention to be with him again in a month's time. In place of making this announcement, however, I deliberately wrote, and that whilst in the full possession of my senses, a description of a very rich lady who had herself made my correspondent an offer of marriage. I told him of some heavy financial difficulties he was then in, and bid him at once marry the lady who had offered herself to him, and think no more of me, for "I should never return to England for many long years to come." Although deeming myself infatuated, if not insane, to write such a letter, write it I did, and sent it.

Despite the faux coyness, it's clear that EHB is alleging a fiance in England in this passage. The question is -- as with the question of her keeper when she was an actress -- who?

I'm posting this to remind myself as much as anything else, and it's a rank (as in stinking) speculation, but...

It may be Howard Staunton, the famous mid-Victorian chess master. Why? (1) If Emma Harding = Ernest Reinhold, then they were both writers for the Court Gazette at the same period; (2) Staunton was a Shakespeare editor, and a good one, and claimed to have been a Shakespearean actor in his youth; (3) Staunton married a rich widow (of an attorney) with a large brood of children at a time in his life when he was in financial difficulties.

Problem: he married the widow in 1849.

The theory works only if this passage from the Autobiography is another example of Emma's loose handling of time. An engagement made and broken in the 1840s, followed by a period as the kept woman of a "baffled sensualist" and "millionaire" with significant pull among theatre company owners, and who may also have been a practicing occultist (if "sensualist" should be read "sex magician", for example), isn't out of line.

Rank.

Ernest Reinhold = Emma Hardinge?

I think I've found the origin of Mathiesen's claims about Emma's work as a "music critic" under the pseudonym Ernest Reinhold. It's to be found in Lewis Spence's Encyclopedia of Occulism and Parapsychology:

Interestingly enough, there does appear to be evidence (yet to be tracked down) that this claim is valid. Richard Kitson's vast The Musical World: 1836-1865 contains at least two references to music written by an Ernest Reinhold in that period: one, a popular song called "Pray for me, Gabrielle" (published by T. Boosey and Company, a London-based publisher operating continuously from the 1820s until the late 1850s) and another represented by the cryptic string "64:440r REINHOLD Professor Longfellow, the music composed by Ernest Reinhold (C. Jefferys)"

This second reference I find particularly intriguing because the Library of Congress holds the earliest published (musical) work known by EHB, The footsteps of angels: recitative and air (New York: H Waters, 1856), which appears in this advertisement from the Auburn (New York) American for some as-yet-undetermined date in 1858:

As the ad clearly indicates (which the LOC catalog entry does not), the words of the song are almost certainly those of this poem of Longfellow's.

If the same words and music can be identified published under both Emma Hardinge and Ernest Reinhold, then we have a link that I think justifies trolling through the volumes of the Court Gazette for the years 1835-1842 looking for Reinhold's critical pieces.

Dig, dig, dig....and find this....now purchased for the Archive.

The Court Gazette and Fashionable Guide (one of two places Mathiesen locates Ernest Reinhold's musical criticism, was (published in Catherine Street, and ran from April 7, 1838 until January 4, 1840, when it changed its name to New Court Gazette: A Fashionable Guide for January 1840 through December 26, 1840, when it became Court Gazette: The Only Fashionable Family Newspaper (January 1841 - August 1841), before folding.

The Delanco, New Jersey Nexus: Emma Stalked

Fans of the Autobiography will remember that it is while staying at the house, Rose Cross, in Delanco, New Jersey, that Emma is forced to go to the law to get relief from the Boston Spiritualist who, convinced that Emma is his spiritual double, is stalking her, by letter and then, in New Jersey, physically.

A propos of that, this snipped from the Decatur (Ohio) Republican, of November 25, 1875:

Tracking down that Banner of Light article is rising to the top of my list.

Impenetrable

This from the (Madison) Wisconsin State Journal for some time in August of 1865:

How to even begin to track down the origin of that rumor?

Notice Of Removal

This marvelous palimpsest, from Paul Gaunt of Psypioneer, proving, I think, how powerful and evocative emphemera really is, and giving us a rare glimpse of Emma's handwriting.

Text One: Moving House

NOTICE OF REMOVAL
208 West 38th Street, New York
On and after April 21st (1876), DRS WM & EMMA HARDINGE BRITTAN (sic) will remove to their own residence, 118 West Chester Park, Boston, Mass., where they will resume practice as ELECTRIC PHYSICIANS, and continue to manufacture the HOME BATTERY. No other address will reach them.

This move, from the house in which some of the early organizing meetings of the Theosophical Society were held, and the announced intention to re-enter the galvanic medicine business. If, as the second text suggests, the Drs. Brittan (fascinating that EHB would allow the spelling, but perhaps the use of the removal card as notepaper indicates some enforced parsimony in the Britten household) were in residence in Boston in November of 1876. they were certainly back on the lecture circuit by mid-1877, Emma appearing (at least) in Salt Lake City and San Francisco before embarking for Sydney in January of 1878.

Text Two: I This Day

118 West Chester Park, Boston [Mas?] America
Nov 16 / 76
Dear W Coleman
I this day send you by mail a copy of Ghost Land of which I beg your acceptance from me, its Editor. The demand for it is so great that the first edition is exhausted and I have to prepare another immediately. Receive one to [...] to write a letter yet -- Let me know if this copy comes safely. In great haste yours ever sincerely
Emma H. Britten

(Will puzzle the rest out, I think, with some help from Paul)

W. Coleman may be William Coleman, a somewhat truculent spiritualist and member of the American Oriental Society, who wrote periodically for the Religio Philosophical Journal in Chicago, and who famously accused EPB of plagiarizing large sections of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, but the inclusion of "America" in the header of the text tends to suggest it was written to someone outside the country. A puzzlement.

The ways in which Emma created demand for Art Magic and Ghost Land, the size of the print runs, the number of editions and states of the text are, in my view, all questions that remain open. The texts of Art Magic and Ghost Land commonly in circulation today are those of the Progressive Thinker "premium" editions of 1897 and after, not those of the first (limited) editions. The mechanics of publication for Art Magic, with its illustrations, tend to suggest that the Progressive Thinker edition was printed from the first edition plates or forms of Art Magic, and there are several significant, glaring flaws in the 1897 Progressive Thinker text of Ghost Land that, if present in the first edition text, would establish clearly that it too is based on the original plates or forms.

The Family Floyd: Latest Working Model

Briefing a potential research partner today. In so doing, summarized what I think I know since the last time I speculated on the Family Floyd.

1. Emma Floyd: born Bethnal Green 2 May 1823, christened St Matthews, Bethnal Green 28 May in the presence of both parents (1 and 2 below). Father's occupation listed as schoolmaster. I have a pretty clear skeletal chronology of her life as Emma Harding the actress (1842-1856), Emma Hardinge and Emma Harding Britten the spiritualist (1856-1899). I know NOTHING about her life other than what she herself has told us, prior to 1842.
2. Her father, Ebenezer Floyd. Near as I can tell, he is Ebenezer, son of Ebenezer (?) and grandson of Ebenezer. His father/grandfather was of sufficient stature in Minehead to get referenced in books of the period (we're talking the 1750s here). I guestimate that Ebenezer was born circa 1795 in Minehead. I see his marriage record in the GENUKI data (the marriage is conventionally recorded as taking place in Misterton, but according to GENUKI, took place in Minehead). (See #3 below). Who was he? Who were his people? What was his situation when he married Ann Sophia? The marriage was by license and not by banns, which could mean "they were middle class" and could mean "the marriage was hurried". He is listed as a "mariner" (GENUKI) and as a "schoolmaster" (Emma's christening record) -- was he? Both? What was the tie to London? Was he in the coasting trade? Did he have family/friends there? Did his wife? How, when (1834 or 1835, in Bristol, I think) and where did he die?
3. Her mother, Ann(e) Sophia Bro(o)mf(i)eld. She also shows up in the GENUKI data: marriage, christening of children. In the 1871 British census (where she appears to be Anne F Floyd?) she listed her birthplace as Liverpool. I can find (in ancestry.com and genealogy.com data sets) only one Bromfield family having children in Liverpool at that time (again, circa 1795, I'm thinking) and *no* Ann(e). Who was she? Who were her people? How well educated was she? What was her situation when she married Ebenezer? How did the two come to meet? Is this a classic "merchant's daughter meets local freighting sailor during a delivery" kind of story? Emma supported her mother her entire life (in fairness, in the 1870s, she bought her mother an annuity and had her mother live with her sister Margaret and her husband). Was Ann delicate in some way? Ill-suited for the rough-and-tumble life of a young-ish widow?
4. The oldest daughter, Frances Ann, christened August 20, 1820 in Minehead. Emma never mentions her. Yet there she is, in the GENUKI data, 9 months after the marriage (give or take). What became of her? This is important because I *surmise* she married youngish -- around the time of her father's death -- and that Margaret and perhaps Thomas lived with her rather than with Emma and Ann Sophia after Ebenezer's death. But Margaret was only 5 years old when her father died... There's some suggestion in the UK census data that she may have married a John Jackson, becoming Frances Jackson, with whom a "Margaret Floyd" age 10 is living in the 1841 census. Is that our Frances, and our Margaret? If so, then I think I have Ann Sophia and Emma (middle initial D) Floyd, living in Lambeth in 1841 -- sans Margaret (who's with her sister Frances Floyd Jackson) and sans Thomas (who's....where?)
5. Thomas Floyd. Christened in Calne 26 April 1826. Dead 25 October 1842, aboard the HMS Minden in the China Sea, after an illness. Took ship aboard the HMS Vixen 10 September 1841. Where is he between his father's death in 1834/35 and 1841? With Ebenezer's relatives? He's not with Frances (if I am right on #3) and he doesn't appear with my AS Floyd and Emma D Floyd in Lambeth -- but he DOES list "Westminster" as his normal residence when takes ship, suggesting he's been living with Emma and Ann Sophia.
6. The family's life -- where did they live in Minehead? Where in Bristol? For what dates? What were their surroundings? What was Ebenezer doing? Emma, her whole life, had both an attraction to, and a dread of, dense urban areas. She was scarred by her time in London, and she idealized her time in Minehead/Bristol, writing in her Autobiography that she was known even as a child for her musical and psychic abilities and that she loved to roam the field and abandoned abbeys and ruins. Poetic license? Based in fact?

Sausage-making. Not pretty.

The Delanco, New Jersey Nexus

Nothing but supposition, hear-say and rumor.

EHB makes mention in the Autobiography of living, for an as-yet-undated period of time, with her mother, but not her husband (and that helps us a bit) in a house named Rose Cross in Delanco, New Jersey. Avid fans of the Autobiography will recall that this is the location for the climax and resolution of Emma's blue-ink-stalker episode.

Mathiesen felt that the Delanco episode was significant -- presumably because of the name of the house -- and listed it as one of the unplumbed pools in EHB's life.

Fools being inclined, among other things, to rush in, I asked a colleague to post an inquiry on New Jersey local-history lists she haunts, and got back several bits of information that tend to suggest another strange attractor in Emma's life, in Delanco.

None of this has been verified.

1. There was a large house, with elaborate formal gardens, in Delanco, until very recently. It had been abandoned for some time, and had a local reputation for hauntings and "black spirits." Locals tell me that it was reached by boat, from a boat house named The Red Dragon (have to dig out my alchemical stuff) rather than by road.
2. The house sat nearby (a three-iron drive, I am told) from what were the Neshaminy Falls Camp Meeting ground, where the Philadelphia Spiritualists gathered each year. EHB attended most of those gatherings, making a special trip (as far as I can tell) in 1884 from the UK to do so
3. The house may have been owned by Seth Pancoast, or a member of his family. This is, if true, important, as Pancoast was (a) a radical gynecologist (one of the local historians referred to a medical work of his as 'pornography' presumably a comment on of its frank language and graphic illustrations), (b) a founding member of the Theosophical Society (he may well have been instrumental in bringing EHB and EPB together) and (c) more than a dabbler in occult sciences.
4. (Incredibly), one local historian reports that Paschal Beverly Randolph may have been operating in the Delanco area at one time. I am just now wading into Deveney's book, but it seems clear to me that EHB and PBR knew each other, must have known each other.

Thoughts of a dry brain. A set of testable assertions. Nothing more. If true, it opens up a new avenue, a broad one at that.

St. Thomas of War Debts is today's patron saint.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear.

(Read it all.)

Into weak hands, indeed.

The Load-Out

Have to listen to the song while I transcribe this grueling schedule for 59-year-old Emma Hardinge Britten (or Hardinge-Britten, as the typographers at Light preferred to set her).

1. October 16, 1881: Manchester
2. October 17: Littleborough
3. October 18,19: Ulverston
4. October 23: Blackburn
5. October 30: Macclesfield
6. November 6: Sowerby Bridge
7. November 13, 14: Keighley
8. November 20: Liverpool
9. November 27, December 4: Nottingham
10. December 11: Oldham
11. December 18, 19: Halifax
12. December 24, 25, 26: Batley Carr
13. January 8, 1882: Manchester
14. January 15: Bingley
15. January 22, 23, 24: Bradford
16. January 29: Macclesfield
17. February 5: Blackburn
18. February 12, 13, 14: Newcastle
19. February 19: Liverpool
20. February 26: Sowerby Bridge

Assuming Newcastle is Newcastle-under-Lyme and not Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, here it is, Emma's circuit, on a map:

View Larger Map

Make sure you've got it all packed to go, before you come for my piano. Rock stars, and working musicians. EHB was working.

Update: Many objections to selecting Newcastle-under-Lyme rather than Newcastle-upon-Tyne as the likely Newcastle of EHB's schedule. I am sure people are right in their objections.

The Tele-Gastrograph

Annotation of other people's texts is, I find, one of the most enjoyable things one can do.

Working on EHB's Spiritualism -- Is It A Savage Superstition? this evening, I find, in the columns of the Melbourne Age (as reprinted by the Brisbane Courier for 10 July 1878 and several other papers in Australia and New Zealand) a marvelous discussion of EHB's doings, as an experimenter testing a new invention: the electro-gastrograph, “a machine by which, through the aid of electric currents, the flavour of any food or liquor can be transmitted by wire to any distance, and the sensation of eating and drinking conveyed by merely placing the end of the wire between the teeth.” EHB was at one of the five points in a network set up to test the machine, in the offices of the Mebourne Age newspaper, with (among other people) the unjustly-not-famous Australian novelist Marcus Clarke (For The Term Of His Natural Life). The correspondent for the Age, who was clearly not a believer in the efficacy of the machine, intimates the EHB had too much sherry-and-bitters, and concludes that “the business of the ‘restauranteur’ promises to be severely injured if not abolished” by the tele-gastrograph.

Recalling the Vitapathy foray of a few days back, and looking up on the shelf above my monitor at my much-prized copy of The Electric Physician, I am suddenly reminded of the human battery scene in Ghost Land:

Let no sneering skeptic doubt the possibility...

Update: Must learn to be less opaque. This article is, of course, satirical. No such machine was ever made.

Articled Singers, and The Great Sea Snake

A couple of possibly minor points, from a day spent trolling through the still amazingly disorganized history of London theatre in the first half of the 1800s:

1. Thomas Welsh articled many of his students who were unable to pay for his tutelage. As an articled -- what? -- apprentice?, the student was in Welsh's hands with respect to placement and work, and a portion of the student's wages during the period covered by the articles (three years, in the specific cases I have been able to find), went to Welsh. Seems, in retrospect, obvious.
2. Thomas Floyd's favorite song has been found, and a popular favorite it was. Now that I'm comfortable with the veracity of EHB's account of Thomas, I went looking for a "great sea snake" EHB mentions in her description of her contact with Thomas in the Autobiography and found it, in the form of a popular ballad.

Don't late the date on this exemplar fool you -- the song dates back to at least the 1810s, from what I can gather.

Digging Up The Princess' Theatre: Hamlet Goes Bankrupt

As it turns out, the transfer of control from Thomas Hamlet, goldsmith and theatre owner, to J.M. Maddox, the man who'll bring opera to the Princess's Theatre, happened not (as the conventional histories of the Princess's Theatre suggest) as the result of a business deal, as a normal commercial transaction, but because Thomas Hamlet had bankrupted himself -- perhaps on the Princess's Theatre, in part, but (as George Augustus Sala, whose mother played at the Princess's, wrote) "the famous Hamlet -- Thackeray's Mr. Polonius -- the silversmith of Cranbourne Alley... amassed an immense fortune,but muddled it away on disastrous speculations, among which was a large investment in Royal Bonds which were never paid" (LIfe and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, p. 123).

Messrs. Foster & Son, assigned to dispose of bankrupt Hamlet's property, have inadvertently left us, for posterity, an excellent description of the theatre in late 1841.

From the London Times for 26 August 1841.

Perhaps this, rather than anything else, was the event that signaled the end of Emma Floyd's career as a musician, and the beginning of her career as an actress.

But Sala tantalizes us: "How Maddox scraped together sufficient money to open the Princess's was a mystery. He had led a kind of roving life as stage-manager, acting-manager and agent-in-advance; and in the last-named capacity had traveled with an English singer who, at one time, enjoyed considerable celebrity. This lady was known as Madame Feron -- who had been formerly prima donna assoluta at La Scala in Milan...." (p. 124).

No way. Couldn't be. All the pieces fit, though...

Sala continues: "I note a kindly allusion to her talent as Mrs. Feron Glossop in the recently published "Correspondence of Mr. Jekyll." She married, indeed, early in life a Mr. Glossop, the lessee of the disestablished Victoria Theatre, at the corner of the New Cut and Waterloo Road." (p. 124).

I suppose I'll have to go look, just to be diligent, but the idea that Mr. Glossop was the mysterious first husband EHB mentions at one point in her life, and that she was Mrs. Glossop before she was "Miss Emma Harding", fills me with a quiet dismay...

Update:Madame Feron Glossop <> our Emma, by any stretch of the imagination. Feron was born in London, of French refugee parents, in 1797. She debuted at Vauxhall Gardens as a child (prodigy) and went on the stage at Covent Garden in 1811, at 14 years of age, in Rosetta. She apparently married Glossop on the Continent, but "the union was an unhappy one," and she went back on the stage under her maiden name in 1827. See Ireland's very useful Records Of The New York Stage and William Thomas Parke's Musical Memoirs for more.

Promenade Concerts: Princess's Theatre, 1840

From the Literary Gazette and Journal for 1840.

J. T. Willy was one of the inventors of the (indoor) promenade concert subgenre -- all the rage in 1840 -- in which the orchestra was elevated from the pit to the stage, and a set program of music -- initially at least 4 overtures, 4 quadrilles and 4 waltzes, with a closing piece -- was played. The orchestra was large-ish: 60 players or so in the early examples. After floating the subgenre at the Lyceum starting in 1838, Willy split from his fellow organizers in early 1840, and hired the Princess's Theatre to pursue the indoor promenade concert model on his own.

Digging Up The Princess' Theatre

So much of this work is fraught, riddled, knotted up with desire: what one wants to be the case, versus what is in fact the case. The shades of dead deconstructionists and post-structuralists flit about my office...

Consider this, from Henry Barton Baker's History of the London Stage and its Famous Players (1904):

During the early years of the nineteenth century there stood upon the north side of Oxford Street not far from the Circus, a building called the Queen's Bazaar, used for the sale of fancy and miscellaneous goods. Burned down in 1829, it was rebuilt for exhibition purposes. Soon afterwards Hamlet, the noted silversmith, whose shop, at the corner of Sidney's Alley, Leicester Square, was a fashionable lounge for the jeunness doree, conceived the idea of transforming the place into a theatre, which was opened on October 5th, 1840. That its construction occupied some tim is evident from a line in the announce-bill stating that permission to call it the Princess's had been obtained from the Queen previous to her accession to the throne; the public was also informed that "this new and elegant theatre was fitted up with a style and splendour never before equalled in this country." The first entertainments given within its walls were Promenade Concerts, the price being one and two shillings. These were continued for some months with indifferent success; and it was not until December 26, 1842, after undergoing considerable alterations, that the building was opened for opera, varied by light dramatic pieces. The bill (for December 26, 1842) was La Somnabula, sung by Madame Garcia, Weiss, Templeton and Madame Sala, the mother of the famous journalist (George Augustus Sala); the extravanganza ofThe Yellow Dwarf being the after-piece. English versions of the most popular Italian operas continued to be performed with such singers as Garcia, Ann Thillon, Miss Paton, while the dramatic company included Henry Wallack, Walter Lacy, Oxberry and the Keeleys....The great hit of 1844, however, was Don Cesar de Bazan, which had been so recently revived by Lewis Waller, with James Wallack as the hero. Scribe's piece, suggested by the episode in Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas, took the town immensely, and rival versions cropped up east and west....James Wallack afterwards went to America and established in New York the famous theatre that still bears his name. (pp. 475-6)

So, what we needed, to make the 1860 accounting of Emma's early theatre career make sense, was a period of concert- or recital-playing, followed by a period of opera, followed by a period of drama. We wanted Italian influences, and we wanted a way to get her, naturally, into the Adelphi in August of 1844.

This looks to my (perhaps desiring) eyes tailor made as a summary of Emma's early theatre career, given (a) the advertisement of Emma in May of 1844 as "of the Princess's Theatre", (b) the presence at that time of a couple of Wallacks (who takes Emma to Paris in another decade, to do Shakespeare) and (c) the fact that the first performance Miss Emma Harding gave at the Adelphi, in August of 1844, was: various unnamed singing roles in Dion Boucicault's version of...you guessed it...Caesar de Bazan. Throw in exposure to Victor Hugo, French and Italian (and German -- occult historians take note) opera singers, at a theatre financed by a luminary of the jewelry trade and attended by the fashionable set, and I think we have a plausible hypothesis that explains much.

Time to find some reviews of those promenade concerts...

Update: Let's really pile it on. We have anedotal evidence that Emma wrote (under a pseudonym) musical criticism for a couple of magazines, including one called The Court Gazette. Would it surprise us to learn then, that from 1836 until licensing in September of 1840, the Princess's Theatre was known, locally, as The Court Theatre? (James Redwood, Themes In Drama p. 104).

Autobiography, Again

From the preface to Six Lectures on Theology and Nature (1860), one of EHB's earliest works:

In brief, then, I was born in London, England, and up to the age of twelve years, was educated in the quiet seclusion of "sweet home." The death of a noble father, and the entire disruption of family ties, sent me out into the world at this early period of my life, first as a teacher of music in a school, and subsequently as a concert player and vocalist. I beg, distinctly, once and for all, to claim, that I never went to school in my life as as student; that the common branches of English education were received only in the family circle of accomplished English ladies, and the life page of good society; and that in no science but the theory of music, and the all-absorbing page of harmony and composition, did I ever receive any instruction, or pursue any study. From the age of twelve, my public life commenced [editorial emphasis]; and any one who has become acquainted with the severe studies which musical artistes are called upon to pursue in Europe, (especially when in addition I had to provide a home for myself and my mother by my teaching, etc. [editorial emphasis]) will scoff at the idea that any leisure could have been afforded me for those metaphysical and scientific studies in which certain of my American friends confidently affirm "my youth was absorbed" [sic]. With the exception of a little dabbling in astrology, pursued under the auspices of merry gipsying parties, I never heard of, much less studied, any "ology" in my life. From six to eight hours' practice of vocal and instrumental music each day, and the gay soirees in which musical artistes form the chief feature in European aristocratic curcles, -- this passed my early life, until the complete loss of my singing voice, and chronic difficulties with my throat, compelled me to adopt speaking instead of singing for a profession, and the drama instead of the opera [editorial emphasis]. From this period, I remained in one London theatre for seven years, and except on rare occasions, never during that period passed more than a week at a time exempt from the arduous and all-engrossing duties of a London actress' life. (pp. 7-8)

Reading this text, we can see the genetic material of subsequent versions of this period told by EHB, culminating in the dark hints of the Autobiography, but I'm struck by several things in this passage that -- unless we accord EHB the foresight of knowing where she would be, psychologically and commercially, 30 years in the future -- we'll have to credit as fundamental statements of fact.

1. Living in London: I have a record of a Mrs. A. Floyd, and an Emma D. Floyd, living in St. Mary's, Lambeth, alone, in 1841. Mrs. A. S. Floyd, is listed as age 30 (inconsistent with her marriage in 1819) and Emma D. Floyd's age is listed as 8: also inconsistent. Tantalizing, nonetheless. More on this in a moment.
2. Studying music, as a pupil and a teacher: entirely consistent with (a) other autobiographical assertions made at various times in her life, and with what we have been able to determine about life as a student of Thomas Welsh, the man who was likely her music teacher and (what word to use?) promoter.
3. Public life starting at age twelve: Emma's father was a sometimes schoolmaster, and her occupation as teacher would not qualify, for Emma, as a "public" life. This statement strongly suggests, to me at least, that we should find Emma (as Miss Floyd, I suspect) in recitals promoted and organized by Welsh in 1835/6 and after. Evidence of those recitals and performances has yet to be found -- but I feel can be found -- in the public record.
4. Emma as primary breadwinner. I believe Emma's older sister, Frances Ann, was married before or at the time of Ebenezer Floyd's death, to a man named Jackson, and I believe Margaret was sent to live with Frances at the time of her father's death. I believe Tom was sent out, at about the same time, to Floyd relatives in the maritime trade (ending, as we known, by taking ship in 1841 and sailing off to China, and his death), leaving Emma to take care of her mother, in London. Given that neither Ann nor Emma ever, to my knowledge, accurately stated their ages on a public document, I'm inclined to treat the record of an Ann and Emma Floyd in Lambeth in 1841 as a trace of our Ann and our Emma, post-Thomas.
5. astrology, and gipsies: I am reminded of the section of Ghost Land during which Marx and the Chevalier stay in a Romany encampment. This is a far cry from the piano demo-dolly/French mesmeric subject and "Orphic Circle" revelations of the Autobiography.
6. the transition from opera to drama: now that I've accepted the Miss Emma Harding = Emma Hardinge Britten equivalency, and laid out a record of Emma's performances in the 'dramatic theatre', as I understand it at present, her claims to have been fully occupied for a long period of time as a dramatic actress are in my view fully justified. The significance of Sadler's Wells advertising Miss Emma Harding (in an extra-textual singing role in Macbeth) as late of the Princess's Theatre is also, now, underscored, as it's highly likely that it was at the Princess's Theatre, from its (re)opening in 1842 until her move to the Adelphi in 1844, that Emma did opera, and experienced problems with her voice (if indeed those problems were real). What is more interesting, however, is the first of a series of repetitions, on EHB's part, of seven years as the duration of her time on the dramatic stage. That time corresponds, roughly, to the last period she spent at the Adelphi (August 1848 to July 1854) -- after working at the Princess's Theatre (1842?-1844?), moving briefly to Sadler's Wells (May 1844), then the Adelphi for a good period (August 1844-August 1847), then the Haymarket briefly (August 1847-September 1848). Possibly it becomes necessary for her to shorten this period -- actually, some 12 to 13 years -- to seven in order to deal with the nearly-a-decade age discrepancy between her real and her advertised age.
7. London. No Paris. No Milan. I become more and more convinced that her reference to time in Milan in the Philadelphia Press letter of 1873 is a fabrication, suitable for the context -- a throw-away line. And the trauma of the failed Walleck Company production in Paris -- nothing to call attention to a scant half-decade later.

A picture is emerging for me, of struggle and of trauma, for Emma between the time Ebenezer dies in 1835 and the time she lands in New York with her mother in 1855. I am convinced that the throat injury -- oft-cited but nearly always with varying details -- is some kind of psychic stand-in, an emblem of a trauma deeper, and harder to heal. Newspaper reporters in Boston and New York in the 1860s heard Emma sing, and -- though none too kind in their coverage of her lectures' substance -- remarked on her singing abilities.

Vitapathy

In Volume 4, Number 9, The Psypioneer, in publishing a text of William Britten's in one of its issues, remarks that (according to his obituary) Britten was a graduate of the Vitapathic College in the US.

There was only one such Vitapathic institution, run under various names, including the American Health College, by John Bunyan Campbell, in Cincinnati.

To get us started down this interesting path, Dr. Otto Juettner's remarks, in his Historical and Biographical Sketches (1909), on Campbell are instructive:

There is only one individual whose memory ought to be preserved because he exemplifies the possibilities of schemes executed under the cloak of medicine. He is the type of an entire class and as such is necessarily of value to the medical historian. This man was the Cagliostro of Medical Cincinnati,
John Bunyan Campbell, who at one time did more to amuse the educated and mystify the ignorant than all the other charlatans put together.
Campbell was born in 1820 on Little Pine Creek, Lycoming Co., Pa. The sketch of his earnest efforts to find the truth in medicine, given by himself in the preface to his "Encyclopedia of Vitapathic Practice," reminds one of Faust's "Monologue." This preface and the book should be read by every physician who has the blues. The fact that this man ever found even one human being who took him seriously, is an unfathomable mystery. There were thousands in all parts of the country who were his devout followers, some of whom, when the spell was broken, entered medical colleges and graduated in medicine. Campbell called his system "vitapathy," a mongrel mixture of half-digested science, brazen assurance and medical and religious quackery. His graduates were "vitapathic physicians and ministers" who were empowered to heal the sick, to give the vitapathic breathing prayer, to administer the milk-sacrament, to receive and give forth higher spiritualization, etc., etc. Campbell wrote a book on practice and another on vitapathic materia medica, in which he included all the quack-nostrums and house-remedies of all ages and centuries. The principal therapeutic agent is "vita," the vital spirit which is everywhere and is introduced into the body, if handled by a properly qualified vitapathic physician. Campbell says : "The higher wisdom and spiritual power comes in at the top of the head and the hair must be parted there to let the spirit in, as hair is a non-conductor." Campbell did not sell any of his books, nor did he allow his students to divulge the contents. He made his students pronounce a terrible oath that they would not speak of the contents of his books or show the books to anyone.... Campbell charged a good fee for his "course of instruction" and drew large classes of males and females.... His citadel of infamy still stands in Fairmount, a mute witness of iniquity unspeakable. After following up this man's career, the only question remains whether he should have properly been confined in a State prison or in an insane asylum. His "graduates" some years ago could be found in every State in the Union.

Graduates of Campbell's school were, as noted, minister-doctors, denoted (unfortunately), V. D. (presumably Vitapathic Doctor) and were certified by the school both to practice medicine and to "perform the functions of a minister of the Gospel," as one practitioner explained to her state licensing board when haled up before it.

Campbell clearly understood the medical game -- indeed, the modern medical game -- and not only asserted his intellectual property rights aggressively, as the image above indicates, but took out patents on aspects of his practice.

No doubt one particular patent (US Patent # 606887, for the electric extraction of poisons) reflects a vitapathic practice that both William and Emma were subsequently to use to advantage.

The similarities between the machinery drawn in this patent illustration, and the machinery described in the Electric Physician are many, and close.

A History of the Schools of Cincinnati (1906), provides this summary of Campbell's American Health College:

"The American Health College and Vitapathic Sanitarium was organized in Cincinnati in 1876, and chartered in 1883. The society owns its own college building and sanitarium in Fairmount. To date, 400 doctors have been licensed. John Bunyan Campbell, president and founder. This college objects to much medicine, and uses few drugs. Electricity plays a prominent part." (p. 297)

The state of Illinois, in 1892, was less charitable:

Record held by the American Medical Association note, however, the existence of the American Health College in 1871, which seems more in keeping with our timelines, if we presume that William Britten studied galvanic medicine before practicing it, rather than, say, getting a degree as an afterthought.

Given the dating of Campbell's college (1871-1876, reorganized 1876, chartered [by what organization?] 1883) , Britten must have been an early student of Campbell's, after his marriage to EHB. That bit of their trajectory remains as yet unplotted.

Cincinnati, by the way, seems at the time to have been a positive gold mine of quackery and degree mills.

But I think we find the linkage we're looking for -- as no doubt the editor who selected the story to run did -- from this snippet from the New York Times of April 16, 1905:

Manifestations Of A Cross Girl, Redux

I'm saying a few prayers today for the kindness of one particular stranger, Stuart Elliott, whose site on military medals I was led to by Google the other day. I'll just reproduce a chunk of Stuart's note to me here, and let him speak for himself:

The part of the site where you found reference to Thomas Floyd concerns those members of the Royal Navy, British Army Regiments & Honourable East India Company forces that served during what became known as the First China Opium War 1839 - 1842.

I found the information Thomas Floyd was a brother to Emma Hardinge Britten most interesting and in turn can offer the following that I'm hoping will be of value to you.

Thomas Floyd born Calne (entered as Clane in ship's description book) 17/03/1826.

He chose a career at sea entering HMS Vixen on 10th September 1841 as a Boy 2nd Class aged 15 years 7 months. His Muster entry number was '1' indicating he was the first boy rate to sign on the ship.

Thomas's normal residence was shown as Westminster - he was described as 5 ft 2 inches tall, fair complexion, grey eyes and with light brown hair. He had no distinguishing marks and was vaccinated (normal practice for RN) for smallpox. This was his first entry into the service.

HMS Vixen was a new vessel and as a steam paddle ship one of the most advanced ships of her type at the time. The paddle ships were invaluable in operating in the Chinese rivers and towed the larger RN vessels during most actions. Thomas would have been present during the major action at Chin kiang foo on 21/07/1842 but appears to have fallen ill shortly afterwards being discharged sick on 18th October 1842 to HMS Minden, the hospital hulk (ex 3rd rate ship) at Hong Kong.

Thomas Floyd was 'Discharged Dead' on 25th October 1842. Sickness by this time was rife in the fleet and especially on shore due to the unhealthy climate, poor drinking water and other bad practices. HMS Minden must have been 'hell' to all those who entered her and perhaps one should not dwell too much on the suffering poor Thomas must have experienced.

The China 1842 Medal muster shows Thomas as entitled to the medal but no indication as to whom the medal was forwarded on to (next of kin?) The whereabouts of his medal is also not known to me at this time. I retain a database of known medals.

A check at the National Archives, London also confirms his service papers have not survived.

The kindness of strangers... Thank you, Stuart.

Manifestation Of A Cross Girl

In her Autobiography, EHB records the details of a sitting in which she communicates, by raps and automatic writing, with her departed brother, Tom, a sailor:

"If that is you, Tom, tell me the name of the ship you went away in." No knock responded, but the Medium holding out a slip of paper on which she had been rapidly writing, we read this message, written before my very question was spoken.

" Sailed away in H.M.S. the 'manifestation of a cross girl'. "

"What on earth does that mean?" cried my companions.

"Sailed away in Her Majesty's Ship Vixen," I replied ; "but oh, Tom, why do you speak in such enigmas?"

Again the Medium wrote—" I gave those words only to signify the meaning of my ship's name, Vixen, because in after years no one should say that my answers were mind reading."

Robert Mathiesen, in his chronology of EHB's life, notes Tom's death as occurring in 1846, when Emma was 23, and acting in London, and Tom was 16. (The Unseen Worlds of Emma Hardinge Britten, p. 72). He does not cite the source of his information.

So, what of the HMS Vixen, and brother Tom?

The HMS Vixen was a steam-paddle driven, lightly armed (6 gun) first class sloop, built at the Pembroke royal dockyards, beginning in May of 1840, fitted for sea at Woolwich in the fall and winter of 1841, and manned and provisioned in Plymouth in the early part of 1842. Presumably, then, it looked much like the Peterel, below, a steam sloop operating at the same time.

The maiden voyage of the Vixen was out to the China Sea, and up the Yangtse river, to participate in the battle that resulted in the Treaty of Nanking, ending the First Opium War (1849-42). Vixen apparently operates in the China Sea until late 1845, when it is dispatched along with other vessels of the Royal Navy to the coastal waters around Borneo, for anti-piratical duty. The Port Philip Herald, from 11 December 1845, carries this story:

Destruction Of Pirates. -By a letter from H.M.S. Agincourt, dated Manila, 3rd September, we learn that the squadron, consisting of the Agincourt, Vestal, Daedalus, Cruizer (?) Wolverine, Vixen, Pluto, and Nemesis, had attacked, at Malloodoo (also Maladu) Bay, the pirate chief Seriff Housman (Sharif Hasman?). The boats of the squadron succeeded in taking his forts, being three in number, and mounting altogether fifteen guns; they destroyed his town, and all the goods they came across. The boats were under the fire of the batteries, while forcing the boom, upwards of fifty minutes, at little more than two hundred yards. distance. Our loss was six killed and fifteen wounded-two of the latter since dead. Mr. Pym, of the Vestal, was wounded in the back part of the thigh by a grape shot, but not dangerously. Gibbard, a mate of the Wolverine, was killed. The loss on the Agincourt alone was four killed and six wounded. The loss of the enemy could not be ascertained, as they carried the bodies immediately into the jungle, but it must have been immense. Two Arab chiefs are known to have been killed, and Seriff Housman himself (is said) to have been carried off the field, severely wounded in the neck.

Later, in 1848, Vixen is involved in slave trade disruption at the mouth of the Congo, and dispatched to Nicaragua to deal with some truculent local ruler; it remains apparently in Atlantic waters until 1856, when it returns to Portsmouth for refitting. Vixen then returns to duty in the Pacific until some time (as yet undetermined) in the 1860s, when it is either destroyed or decommissioned. The new HMS Vixen is ordered in 1864 and commissioned in 1866, bracketing the end-date of the first Vixen's life in that time frame.

Tom clearly served aboard the HMS Vixen, and is listed in the ship's company under "Boys". Presumably he signed aboard -- or was transferred aboard -- at Plymouth, in 1842 - at the age of 16.

And subject to verification and subsequent updates to this posting, it appears that Tom died, aboard the Vixen, in the China Sea, on 25 October 1842 -- whether from wounds sustained in the attack on Nanking, or of other natural or unnatural causes, we do not yet know.

Update: Confirmed, with detail, by someone who (as Emma liked to say) ought to know.

18 Shawmut Avenue, Again

In her room, in one of the many boarding houses the Boston directories tell us lined Shawmut Avenue, Emma railed at the system that dragged women down, and cast them out -- perhaps exercising personal demons.

Nearby, young college students were singing a song about Emma's neighborhood, which ran in part like this:

.

(William Allen Hayes, Selected Songs Sung At Harvard College, 1866).

Tends to shed rather a more complex, nuanced light on Emma's neighborhood -- emotional and geographical -- in the early 1860s.

18 Shawmut Avenue, Boston

This, from the Liberator of June 21, 1861, speaks (volumes) for itself:

THE HOME FOR OUTCAST FEMALES

To the Editor of the Boston Journal:

I should not feel justified in asking for space in your columns, at a time when they are imperatively required for a more momentous matter, did I know of any other model by which I could acquit myself of a debt I owe to many citizens of Boston, to whom I tendered pledges of service some three months since on behalf of the outcast and homeless women of their city. In view of the wide interest with which my efforts were then met, and the solemn earnestness with which I pledged myself to that work, I deem it but justice to both parties to render some account of my subsequent action. It will be no matter of surprise to any who participate in the all-engrossing interest of the present national crisis to learn that committee of ladies and gentlemen who at first rallied around me, felt the necessity of suspending further action from the middle of April until next fall, or such time as the public mind should be free to sympathize in such a movement.

For myself, whilst fully acquiescing in the propriety of such an adjournment, I yet felt that the calamities that feel heavily enough on those most qualified by wealth and position to sustain them, would visit yet more heavily on those Pariahs who have so few to care for or sympathize with them, gaining their miserable livelihood, moreover, from that luxury which would now be drained, and leave them yet more helpless than ever, I determine to use what little means I had collected myself, for the purpose of commencing a small experimental home, on the same industrial principle announced in my public addresses, and approved by my committee. Having named this purpose to many of my personal friends in Boston, I experienced a warm renewal of that sympathy which, from the first, determined me to inaugurate a movement which I hope will radiate into a world-wide reform in this city. Such little sums as could be wrung from national demands, and even articles of furniture, were kindly brought me, and several stanch (sic) friends joined me in efforts to find a suitable location for my undertaking. With a sum not exceeding $1500, but yet sufficient, in addition to my own labors, to support a poor family (unhappily too ready to myhands) for one year, at least, I anticipated the world's gracious permission to undertake my terrible charge, unopposed at least, if not sustained; and it is because the new obstacles arise in my path speak more loudly the tone of public opinion toward these "abandoned" ones, than aught I could say, that I ask leave to state why I cannot carry out my design. For the last six weeks, I have been incessantly toiling round the suburbs of Boston, in company with two faithful friends, in the vain attempt to find any place, with the specialities requisite for my purpose, which I could hire -- not but what such places are to be found in abundance. In the neighborhood of the chamber where I write are three noble estates that have for years remained tenantless; the doors are falling from their hinges; decay and time writing their mossy epitaphs on threshold and roof; but even the very worms that run riot in these solitary places are deemed more acceptable inmates than the "woman of the town" who seeks the shelter of decent surroundings as a chance of reform -- in a word, landlords and proprietors seem to have entered into a league against the admission of the outcast into their dwellings. Her stamp on their threshold would too indelibly stain it, and a roof where a fallen woman had learned the lessons of virtue would never again be deemed worthy to shelter those who, in nine cases out of ten, have helped her on her ruin. In one or two rare instances, the kinds hearts of the proprietors have been deaf to the call of interest, and one hold estate owner, weak enough to believe his property would insure him better interest if laid up in the funds of heaven than those of earth, actually pressed a place upon me, where the sweet flowers, balmy air and quiet groves seemed to breath of the moral and physical health which I feel confident is absolutely essential to the restoration of the victims whom I seek to heal; nay, this dreamer had the hardihood to express his believe that to convert his lawn into a school of reform, would plant it in blossoms from the skies; and that the feet of repentant sinners made whole, and fitted for eternity, treading his thresholds, would leave angel-footprints all over the house. Deluded proprietor! The virtuous indignation of his neighbors soon recalled him to a sense of his earthly duties; and lest his heavenly ones, carried out in the admission of my homeless ones to his estate, should involve him in a threatened dispute with neighbor, who determined not to share the atmosphere poisoned with these polluted ones, I had to come to the conclusion that I must withdraw, or involve my benefactor in a war of ill-will and antagonism. This has been my reception in nearly every instance where I could find all the specialties I sought, two only excepted -- the one where a noble gentlemen of Roxbury proposed, in sympathy with my movement, to make pecuniary sacrifices of an estate, the extreme publicity of which renders it wholly unsuitable for my purpose; and another, where a house so terribly ruinous as to render it a sheer disgrace to offer it for human habitation, was generously tendered at a rent little higher than the undertaker would charge for equally convenient graves.

Having exhausted my strength, time and means in this depressing search, I am compelled, by the pressure of my own engagements, to abandon further efforts till my return to Boston next fall; but I think it is due to the friends who, in countless letters of encouragement and variety of little gifts, have manifested their warm sympathy in my work, to tell them why it is ssspended -- to assure them, moreover, that it is only suspended -- that having come to the conclusion that a self-sustaining industrial home would open up to these unfortunates a means of retreat which a heartless society else denies them. That a country residence and horticultural exercises are and must be main features in the work, bitter experience of a far more detailed character than I have hinted at, convinces me that I cannot hire, but that a company must own the land necessary for the experiment.

That to create a revulsion in favor of these women, and to place them where they should be, in juxtaposition with the criminals who destroy them, countenanced in society as they are, or they in the gutters with their victims, requires a stronger force than the one woman who thus dares to stand forth as their friend. As finally, in apology for thus and at this time intruding this subject on the public, and this journal, I would add, from the horrible revelations which I CAN AND YET WILL MAKE, iN DUE SEASON, of the underground world of sin, shame, pollution and hideous indifferent neglect, of which these women are the chief features, dearly as I love this noble country, whose hospitable arms have enfolded me with a love almost material, I would rather see the entire array of her strength, chivalry and beauty left sleeping on the battle-field, in the pale arms of a glorious and honorable death, than return to perish themselves in the stream of living death that this lower world sends up, luring her victims to her foul arms, or enticing them to make a shameful war on the frail children of want and ignorance. It matters not whether man be the seducer or the seduced; to see the results in the awful pictures that every city presents, if known to the world as it is to her who traces these lines, as it should be to every creature who wishes well for their kind, would be a sufficient apology for this cry for home warfare, and a sufficient inducement for everyone who is compelled to be absent from the glorious strife for honor and patriotism to join me in the equally glorious war upon a system that enslaves women in the chains of corruption, and arrays man in the most relentless species of dishonor and cruelty against her, and his own temporal and eternal interests.

I am, sir, faithfull yours,

EMMA HARDINGE
18 Shawmut Avenue, Boston, June 1, 1861

Going To California

Despite my discovery of the Belle Boyd Hardinge Principle, I continue to troll through old newspapers - fortunately, with the aid of technology.

The Portland (Maine) Daily Advertiser for October 2, 1863 ran this column-filler:

Emma did indeed have friends in Portland, Maine, where her plan for a Self-Sustaining Institution For Homeless And Outcast Females apparently got some traction with local philanthropists. (the plan, or one version of it anyway, is here and her Portland trustees are listed at the end of the text.)

Emma arrived some time in late 1863, or early 1864 (into a local economy, readers of the Autobiography will recall, that did not accept Union currency), and (after receiving some $20 in gold from supportive local Spiritualists), began running advertisements in the San Francisco papers, like this one from the San Francisco Bulletin of January 2, 1864:

Note the lecture titles: Magic and Witchcraft. I don't know EHB's work well enough to know if those have been found and collected, but I sure want to read them.

Miss Emma Hardinge = Mrs. Belle Boyd Hardinge

In the New York Times for April 6, 1866, in a letter dated March 24, 1866, the London correspondent for the New York Times concludes his letter from London with these remarks:

While I am near this subject (he has been speaking of D. D. Home converting "to spiritualism half the magnates of the English literary world") I may as well say that the Davenports, after going over Ireland and Scotland without being detected or arrested, have returned to London and reopen at the Hanover-square rooms on Easter Monday. Miss Emma Hardinge speaks "inspirationally" every Monday evening in Harley-street, and WIlliam Howitt says, in the Spiritual Times: "So far as I know anything of modern orators, there is not one who is fit to carry Miss Hardinge's shoes after her." This is rather a forcible way of putting it, but he goes on at some length [and] challenges any orator in England to hold a candle to her, and declares that if she spoke on any other subject, "she would be the enthusiasm of the day." As I have quoted a somewhat different opinion from the Saturday Review, it is but fair that the oratress should have the benefit of the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Howitt.

But the English papers will have it that Miss Hardinge and Belle Boyd, the Confederate spy -- whose blandishments are supposed to have, at times, deranged Federal operations -- are the same person; and some are scolding her for covering the table at St. James Hall with the American flag, and generally sailing under false colors. "We understand now, " says the English Leader, "all about the spirit-world with which she was said to be in communication. The "Banner of Light" she represents is a banner of darkness, of tyranny and slavery. No woman ever served a more hateful cause." Is this not delicious blundering? Belle Boyd became Mrs. Hardinge one day in St. james Church, Piccadilly, and Miss Hardinge, who stumped California for Lincoln, myst be saddled with all her sins and treasons by these blundering newspapers with short memories.

Not all the London journals got it wrong; the British Controversialist and Literary Magazine, noted that:

Miss Emma Hardinge is here said to be identical with Belle Boyd. This is a mistake. The two ladies are very different. Miss Hardinge is a warm Unionist. whilst Belle Boyd was an enthusiastic Confederate, for instance. T.S.B

Belle Boyd did marry Samuel Hardinge, a Union officer, in London in August of 1864 -- well before Emma's arrival there in December of 1865.

Many things strike me, reading this passage -- the reliance one places on newspapers for evidentiary information, in an unwarranted (and worse, unconscious) way, for example. Or the way in which the New York Times London correspondent takes for granted -- and well he might have -- that his readers would know Emma well, including her service on behalf of Lincoln during her tour of the West. Or the snarkiness of TSB in the Controversialist (for instance). Or the way in which this sort of toxic information survives -- for quite a long time, given the number of modern scholars who have linked Emma with Samuel Hardinge.

But mostly, what I see, staring at me on the screen, repeatedly is: Miss Emma Hardinge. Not Mrs.. Miss

In other news tonight: the recovery of two of Emma's texts, both lectures: her Spiritualism: Is It A Savage Superstition? (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1878), a transcription of a lecture given by EHB at the Opera House , Melbourne, on Sunday, June 9, 1878, and The Scientific Investigation of Spiritualism, a transcription of an address given at the Beethoven Rooms, London, on December 12, 1870, and published in The Spiritual Magazine for 1871.

As a wonderfully irrelevant aside, EHB's desire to lecture on Sundays in Melbourne was perhaps a clever piece of show-woman-ship on her part. The local press reports that her Sunday lectures were clearing "50 pounds a performance," and apparently her decision to charge little or no admission fees to parts of the theatre ran afoul of performance-on-Sunday laws in Melbourne, creating a legal stink, and excellent advertising.

What's In A Face?

Miss Emma Harding, in 1847, in London:

Emma Hardinge, some time in the early 1860s, in New York:

Artistic licensing, hand coloring and digital distortions aside...do these two faces belong to the same woman?

Miss Emma Harding = Emma Hardinge Britten?

The career of a Miss Emma Harding, on the London stage from the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s, is well documented.

We don't know, however, whether that Emma Harding is Emma Hardinge Britten, and it's a matter of some consequence, since, if the two are the same person, we (a) have a decent view into Emma's early life and (b) put to bed the speculation that Emma took the name Hardinge from a (licit or otherwise) first marriage (possibly to a Dr. Hardinge).

Here is the actress, Miss Emma Harding, in her role as Queen of the Wilis, from the romantic ballet The Phantom Dancers.

The image (a lithograph by J. Branard from a drawing by J.W Child, dating from March of 1847), neither rules in, nor rules out, to my eyes, the notion that Miss Emma Harding = Emma Hardinge Britten. Certainly the features are generally consistent. But the teeth -- from which I had been hoping for definite positive identification -- are insufficiently clear to make a determination.

Given that romantic ballet was of almost strictly French and Italian origin, we have to wonder about EHB's assertion that she studied in both Paris and Milan in the late 1830s or early 1840s...

Update: Now that I know what to look for, I've found the original of this image, in the V&A's collection:

Update:The Phantom Dancers was performed at the Adelphi in the 1846-47 season, with 102 performances, and was considered a "great success".

Update:With the help of a wonderfully responsive curator at the New York Public Library, I have been pursuing what I hoped was a second, different, image of EH dating from before 1860.

Alas, the NYPL holds another copy of this lithograph. That makes this image (having been inspected by several EHB folks, and uniformly pronounced "looks like a young EHB") the only surviving image of which the community is aware of Emma Harding the actress-dancer-singer, and the only surviving image of Emma Hardinge Britten, the Spiritualist leader, that pre-dates 1860-something. The NYPL's catalog entry does suggest some further lines of inquiry.

Miss Emma's Neighborhood: Resurrection Men and Disreali Heroines

A troll through directories and other primary material suggests that, indeed, the word to describe Emma's neighborhood in Tufton Street was: squalor.

In 1794, concerns about the depradations of resurrection men -- body-snatchers, working for surgical college lecturers -- led to a search of the graveyard adjoining St. John the Evangelist, and revealed 200 empty graves. Cocks were being trained and fought nearby. The local pub -- the Coach and Horses on North Street, named for the nearby Horse and Groom yard -- was uproarious. On the Square itself, in the 1860s, were three cattle pens, one of which was also an abattoir. Not surprisingly, the entire district was decimated in by a scarlet fever epidemic in 1864. Blower's Directory for the 1850s reveals tradespeople scattered around the Square and into Tufton Street: gas-fitters, boiler works (one proprietor, Henry John Olding, enterprising enough to be awarded a patent in 1861), cab drivers (several up on charges), corn-merchants, stone-masons, carpenters and cabinet makers. These last two preferred the relative quiet of Tufton Street itself (the higher numbers, down toward Vine Street) to what must have been the stench and cacophony of Smith Square itself.

Still, the neighborhood is in transition, beginning in the 1850s. Richard Belt, the sculptor, is born there in 1851, and Emma is not the only actress living in the neighborhood. By the end of the 1870s, the professional class is moving in: doctors, dentists, lawyers. At the turn of the century, W.T. Stead makes his home in the Square itself (1904-1912), and of course more recently the Square has served as the base of operations for the Conservative Party.

But for this investigation, perhaps the most interesting fact is this: I can find only two literary references, thusfar, to Smith Square (though Thackeray knew Tufton Street, and mocks it in one of his snippets in the Cornhill): one by Dickens and the other, famously, by Disreali.

Dickens' use of the Square, in Our Mutual Friend suggests he hadn't spent much time on the ground there:

In this region are a certain little street called Church Street, and a certain little blind Square called Smith Square, in the center of which last retreat is a very hideous church, with four towers at the four corners, generally resembling some petrified monster, frightful and gigantic, on its back with its legs in the air.

(The square was never blind, and Chesterfield's comment about the church predates OMF by some years.)

Disreali, on the other hand, knew the square well --so well in fact that contemporary critics wondered if Disreali wasn't in the habit of taking refuge there from his government duties. He has Sybil live there, and catches what must have been the feel of the place in several places in the novel of the same name (1845):

Agitated and overcome by these unexpected and passionate appeals, and these outrageous ebullitions acting on her at a time when she herself was labouring under no ordinary excitement, and was distracted with disturbing thoughts, the mind of Sybil seemed for a moment to desert her ; neither by sound nor gesture did she signify her sense of Morley's last words and departure ; and it was not until the loud closing of the street door echoing through the long passage recalled her to herself, that she was aware how much was at stake in that incident. She darted out of the room to recall him; to make one more effort for her father; but in vain. By the side of their house was an intricate passage leading into a labyrinth of small streets. Through this Morley had disappeared; and his name, more than once sounded in a voice of anguish in that silent and most obsolete Smith's Square, received no echo.


Darkness and terror came over the spirit of Sybil; a sense of confounding and confusing woe, with which it was in vain to cope. The conviction of her helplessness prostrated her. She sate her down upon the steps before the door of that dreary house, within the railings of that gloomy court, and buried her face in her hands: a wild vision of the past and the future, without thought or feeling, coherence or consequence: sunset gleams of vanished bliss, and stormy gusts of impending doom.

So, Disreali knew the place. As did, at some level, Dickens. Hmmm. Not so far away, toward the Park, is Gore House: Lady Blessington's circle of somewhat edgy poets, dandies and (yes) mesmerists, frequented in the 1830s and 1840s by three pillars of Victorian popular culture: Disreali, Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton.

Miss Emma's Neighborhood: Smith Square and Environs

Drawn, from the river, in 1816, here is what Emma's neighborhood looked like:

The feature that might have attracted tourists and wanderers is the Church of Saint John the Evangelist, which was pretty uniformly dismissed by contemporaries from an architectural perspective. John Timbs' Curiosities of London (1858) is gentler than most, saying:

St. John the Evangelist, Smith-square, Westminster, was the second built of Fifty New Churchs (10 Anne), finished in 1728, after the designs of Archer, pupil of Vanbrugh; before which it began to settle, and a tower and lantern-turret were added at each corner to strengthen the main building; "And these would have been beautiful accompaniments to the central tower and spire intended by the architect" (Elmes). These towers reminded Lord Chesterfield of an elephant thrown on its back, with its four feet erect in the air; and Charles Mathews, of a dining-table upside-dpwn, with its four legs and castors. Meanwhile, justice has not been done to the originality and powers of the architect: the whole composition is impressive, and its boldness loses nothing by the graceful playfulness of the outline...

The Lambeth Suspension Bridge, built in 1862, led to some major renovations in the area, and there were other wholesale renovations in 1903-4 coincident with the demolition of Millbank Prison .

Of the turn-of-the-century changes, the Pictorial And Descriptive Guide To London (1904) says:

Under the Westminster Improvement Scheme a new embankment, with gardens, to be constructed between Lambeth Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, making the riverside more worthy of the noble buildings close at hand....A great transformation, including the widening of roads and the building of blocks of flats and offices, is also taking place in the hitherto squalid area around St. John's Church and Smith Square.(pp. 136-7)

There's that word again: squalor. Was it, really, squalor? The chaos and crime EHB so vehemently asserts in her Chinese labor lecture?

Miss Emma's Neighborhood

It finally dawned on me that I was pursuing the Tufton Street problem in entirely the wrong way, in any number of dimensions. Of course there is no substantial information on the Tufton Street area in London tourist guides of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s -- and for two very good reasons. First, the guide book as genre is just being born at that time, and, secondly, no tourist went far south of Westminster Abbey at the time under consideration, because of (the word used uniformly by contemporaries) the squalor of the district, on which more later.

And then there's the question of maps, which lie. The London of 2008 is not the London of 1850, or anywhere near. I tracked down some contemporary maps of the area, and things began to clear up.

Here's Miss Emma's neighborhood, from James Reynolds' London map of 1859:

And here's the neighborhood in 1879, from Stanford's School Board Map:

The strange attractor in this map snippet is, of course, Smith Square, of which more later. But the dark, heavy mass -- the squalor magnet, if you will -- is something one can't see in either of these snippets, but which is just 1500 feet due south of Emma's address at 12 Tufton Street (at the corner of Tufton and Wood, I believe) and clearly visible in Thomas Hodgson's 1859 map (from his London At A Glance gazetter and guide.

(larger version)

Millbank Penitentiary. The Panopticon. Jeremy Betham. Duh.

I knew Michel Foucault was the patron saint of this project, but didn't fully understand why.

12 Tufton Street: Reception Aesthetics

In her address On The Chinese Labor Question; Or the Problem of Capital Versus Labor, the scarcity of which has, I think, kept people from looking at it, EHB has this to say, at one point:

I am myself a native of London, and as a girl resided in the Collegiate district of Westminster Abbey. Close to the sacred precincts where Bishops, Priests and Deacons lived in holy seclusion, was a large and thickly populated quarter which once belonged to the Monastic Fraternity of the Abbey, and formed its sanctuary and almonary. In my girlhood, this district was the resort of thieves, murderers and outcasts of both sexes, and no person of decent habits and appearance could tread its lanes, streets, and alleys without the protection of armed police, even in the glare of sunlight. At night, the vicinity was made hideous by the shrieks of altercation, and the yells of inebriety, and when finally those dreadful haunts of vice and uncleanness were broken up, characteristics and modes of life where revealed, which would make the worst records of Asiatic immorality appear civilized. (p. 7)

Dramatic effect? Spontaneous recall (as the address was, apparently, extemporaneous)? It's astounding to me how little I have been able to find, to date, on the area around Tufton Street. Henry Mayhew (whom EHB remembers, in her next paragraph, as John Mayhem -- a slip worth looking into) has nothing specific to say that I can find, but I haven't as yet checked the surrounding streets. Aside from a long tradition of breeding and fighting cocks (noted in an earlier post), Tufton Street remains a mystery.

For sure, EHB lived in Tufton Street long enough to get vice hot, hear the police done in different voices (armed police? not likely), and see some sort of urban reclamation or criminal-rousting campaign enacted.

That, or it's myth-making.

Time will tell. Somewhere, someone's left us a memoir of Tufton Street or the vicinity in the 1840s...A fine Amarone to the reader who digs it up...

On The Road (Recovered)

EHB's On The Road, or the Spiritual Investigator: A Complete Compendium Of the Science, Religion, Ethics and Various Methods of Investigating Spiritualism (Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide; George Robertson, 1878) has been found, digitized and will be available shortly in the Archive. Roughly, an 8-inch by 5-inch pamphlet of (iv) + 62 pages.

The title page is instructive:

A quick check of the text reveals some not-obviously scissored-and-pasted text, and references to Modern American Spiritualism as The History of Modern American Spiritualism throughout. Most obviously interesting, after 10 minutes reading, are EHB's recommendations for further reading for the spiritual newbie.

And, as per usual, adverts in the back:

One wonders if George Robertson was the publisher of Art Magic and Ghost Land in Australia, and if so whether those were set up from copies of the US editions, or from manuscript or printers' proofs of the US edition.

Hagiography

Some time between William Britten's death in 1994 and EHB's death in 1899, the Two Worlds Publishing Company produced a very expensive Album (Manchester: The Two Worlds, etc., [n.d.]) that is clearly a vanity house production designed to flatter the friends of the firm. I have a digital copy and will publish it in due order, but the lack of photos of William Britten lead me to post his now.

Handsome man. Given that the photograph of EHB dates from her Australian tour, I'm inclined to date the William Britten photograph, on nothing more than a hunch, to the Electric Physician period in Boston, possibly from a carte-de-visite.

37 Somerset Street, Portman Square

In the London Times for 11 April 1853 appeared this advertisement:

Students of EHB's life will recognize it as the advertisement Robert Mathiesen and other suggest may have been placed by Emma's (morganatic? extra-legal?) husband, Dr. E. Hardinge, from whom Emma Floyd took the name Hardinge.

There is, as Duncan Gascoyne has noted, an Edward Alfred Hardinge, medical botanist, listed in the 1851 English census as living in Buckingham Place, in Westminster, but he is at that time (1851, two years prior to the date of this advertisement) married, with three children, and cohabiting with all.

That there was a medium, and her publicist, practicing and perhaps living at 37 Somerset Steet, in 1853, is pretty much beyond dispute, since someone at Chamber's Edinburgh Magazine (perhaps Robert Chambers himself) visited the medium and her handler there in 1853, and left an account of his experience there, which was noteworthy in his view for apparently independent table movement (rather that table-tipping).

Somerset Street, Portman Square, no longer exists, or at least Google Maps cannot locate it.

View Larger Map

In 1801, however, 37 Somerset Street was the home address of one E. Hardie (tantalizing, that), who was a listed subscriber to Fredrick Accum's A System Of Theoretical and Practical Chemistry (it being common practice at that time, prior to the rise of publishing houses, for texts to be published using subscriptions to raise funds for publication).

In the 1820s, William Collen, an Cape Colony pioneer, lived at that address.

By the 1830s, Somerset Street and the environs had become the business address for several members of the Royal College of Physicians (as well as dentists, medical botanists, and dispensers of one sort or another). Dr. Henry Hardinge, who bears some looking-into given EBH's disclosures in her later life that she sought the advice of several prominent physicians for her voice troubles, was not nearby, as his surgery was (as far as I can determine) in Grafton Street at the time.

By the 1870s, the neighborhood had changed complexion, featuring boarding houses of the better sort, associated with the arts -- lady painters, a few Royal Academicians (including Alexander Melville who at one time lived at 37 Somerset Street), and a Mrs. Adams:

Some hint of its earlier life as a medical area remains in the 1880s:

The Chambers Edinburgh Journal article is worth reading; there is nothing about it, to my way of thinking, that suggests EHB in particular, although, if Mathiesen and others are right, and this is a record of Emma's work under the protection and promotion of a man who gave her his name (however extra-legally) and died shortly thereafter, this is an important document for our understanding of EHB's early life.