The (Manifold) Mystery Of No. 9 Stanhope Street

In a prior post, I made reference to a serialized novel, The Mystery of No.9 Stanhope Street, in EHB's final periodical effort, The Unseen Universe. Properly a novella, the work is badly flawed in any number of ways -- not least because it was clearly planned to run beyond the 12 issues that comprise the entire life of UU, and when the magazine was abruptly terminated, the story line had to be, rather abruptly and crudely, closed off.

The prevalence of the word Stanhope, in both the name of the street of the title, and in the surname of the protagonist, Richard Stanhope, is as I mentioned evocative -- of Philip Henry Stanhope (whom EHB claims was a member of the Orphic Circle), and because Bulwer-Lytton's first significant home in London had, as its cross street, Little Stanhope Street.

However, the novella's roman a clef elements have opened up a whole new thread of inquiry for me -- one that turns on a painting, a painter, and artists' models.

Emma, as readers will recall, modeled -- or stood as the then-current phrase was -- at least once for an artist: for the 1847 drawing of Emma as Queen of the Wilis in The Phanton Dancers, the image that has allowed us to identify "Miss Emma Hardinge" the spiritualist as "Miss Emma Harding" the English stage actress.

In The Mystery of No. 9..., Richard Stanhope, an artist of recently-acquired reknown, has a young woman -- whom he has met by chance in a grocer's -- stand for him, with the woman's domineering, merchantile (and as it turns out vicious) mother as chaperone, so that he can paint her as Eve in a painting he entitles "Eve and the Serpent."

Here's a portion of EHB's description of that painting, from The Mystery of No. 9...:

One of the grandest triumphs of this wonderful picture was that this reptilian form conveyed to every beholder the impression of human intelligence in the very act of speaking, whilst an equally irresistible sentiment of conviction seemed to pervade the veiled yet nude and unexceptionably modest angel of the flowery bushes—gleaming in her eager, large, azure eyes, and revealing eloquently in her bending form—that she was listening. The picture was at once a marvel of history, revelation, and artistic perfection. After a long and almost breathless pause of admiration the visitor murmured —"Matchless! Perfect! Supermundane!

Of course, being the carrion-eater I am, I went looking for paintings treating of Even and the serpent as their subject, and painted -- roughly anyway -- during Emma's career as a musician and actress in London.

James Smetham, a minor painter, did one,but the one that caught my attention, because it seems to match so well the part of the description I've quoted above (but not other details of EHB's fictional painting), is this one:

And...wait for it...the artist? (John) Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908), Pre-Raphaelite, friend of Rossetti and Swinburne (bringing him immediately into our Orphic circle extended network). Another Stanhope.

Now, let's play pile-on...

• Roddam Spencer Stanhope's mother was the daughter of William Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, providing yet another plausible underpinning for Emma's claims of association with nobility
• Evelyn de Morgan, the famous painter, was Roddam Spencer Stanhope's niece. She wintered with RSS, and was effectively, in part, trained by him. Now, Evelyn de Morgan was married to William De Morgan, the famous Arts & Crafts Movement potter, who was himself the son of Sophia De Morgan, the Spiritualist and author of From Matter to Spirit (1863). Evelyn De Morgan was a professed Spiritualist, whose gift was that of automatic writing.
• Roddam Spencer Stanhope married a rich (how rich?) widow of a military officer in early 1859 -- a coincidence of timing nearly perfect for our Emma's claim, in the Autobiography that she had a betrothed at home whom she kissed off from New York City, encouraging him to marry the widow who had offered him her hand.
• Roddam Spencer Stanhope spent most of his later life in Bellosguardo, near Florence. The uncle of the protagonist Richard Stanhope, in The Mystery of No. 9..., lives....dum-de-dum-dum... in Bellosguardo.

In his startling demand for Stanhope's immediate presence at Florence no address was given, neither had he the slightest idea whether or no he should enquire for him at his uncle's residence at Bellosguardo. Considering the latter proposition the most probable, and reflecting that sooner or later the unknown artist of Sir Lester's prize picture must be presented to him in person, he determined to avail himself of the present occasion to make his own introduction.

There is little written about Roddam Spencer Stanhope, although Simon Poe -- a well-known UK art critic -- is apparently writing a biography of him.

it seems clear to me that Emma is deliberately referring to Spencer Stanhope in The Mystery of No. 9..., as the details are far beyond the boundary of the coincidental.

The cross-over, for young female actresses, from the stage to the artist's studio was quite common; it had never occurred to me to look for traces of Emma's presence in the fine arts scene of the 1840s and 1850s.

It is not at all clear that there is any real connection between Emma and Roddam Spencer Stanhope, and Emma certainly wasn't the model for this particular painting -- that's Fanny Cornforth, it seems to me.

What is clear is that Emma, writing at the end of her life, wanted her readers to form a connection between EHB and Roddam Spencer Stanhope -- for what reason, it remains to be seen.

---

I am going to republish The Mystery of No. 9... because it's part of EHB's canon. And I'll write something more substantial about it in the introduction to the republished text. But I have to mention, because it bugs me no end, that EHB is less-than-usually-unkempt in her story-telling in this text. Nominally set in the early decades of the 19th century (she does like to distance difficult subjects in time, as she did in some of the stories in The Wildfire Club), EHB has one of her characters (as I show above) make use of the term "supermundane", refer to the 1860s work of Max Muller on the origins of languages, while simultaneously introducing, as peripheral characters, both D'Eslon the French mesmerist (1739-1786), and Adelaide Lenormand (1772-1843), the famous card-reader (and possibly an original of Eliot's Madame Sosostris), both of whom our protagonist Richard Stanhope meets in the course of a day or two in an otherwise narratologically-irrevelant stop-over in Paris on his way to the plot's climax outside Florence.

The Lenormand episode leads EHB to get out the glue and scissors, and paste in -- honestly -- a three-page excerpt from a minor magazine edited by Bret Harte, the American writer, exactly as she did so often in NCM. Really, the work is painful to read, and it's hard to know whether the jarring juxtapositions, the stew of references, the changes of tense and voice, and narrative drifting is the result of over-work on Emma's part, or due to the fact that she was handling what was, for her, a psychically-charged subject (albeit disguised and distorted).

---

Really, though, the text is finally worth reading for the descriptions of the mother of the artist's model. The mother is grasping, manipulative, exploitative and vicious -- and ultimately (in cahoots with the artist's model) a murderess. Note to self: careful not to treat this text too seriously. As a viewport on Emma's life after Ebenezer's death, it certainly does not paint Anne Sophia in a positive light.

And Margaret, With Apologies

I've said little or nothing about Margaret Floyd Wilkinson, Emma's younger sister and the editor of the Autobiography. We know little about Margaret. As I've suggested in earlier posts, it appears that Margaret was sent to live with her elder sister Frances and Frances' husband on Ebenezer's death, and that she did not rejoin Ann Sophia and Emma in London, even when Emma managed to pull herself up into the lower echelons of respectability in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Margaret did live briefly with Emma in the 1870s, in both London (on Vassal Terrace) and in Boston, after her marriage to Gilbert Wilkinson, a private secretary.

In the issues of the Unseen Universe, however, we get a glimpse or two of Margaret; she is a contributor to UU on a number of occasions, and her byline includes the cryptic phrase, "Foreign Librarian, Manchester".

It appears that Margaret, from the 1880s onward until 1903, was the (head?) librarian for the Manchester Foreign Library (1830-1903), which specialized in French, German, Italian and other Continental texts.

At its dissolution in 1903, the Library held 16,000 volumes -- no mean size for a privately endowed library. The MFL was of interest to both the Martineaus (James in particular) and the Gaskells, and was generally considered to have the finest collection of German literature in Great Britain. Members paid 3 guineas to join, and an annual subscription each year thereafter to support the library's operation. Its most famous subscriber -- depending on your perspective -- was either Elizabeth Gaskell or (be still my beating heart) a certain F. Engels, son of a local manufacturer.

Margaret is not listed as a librarian in the 1881 UK census, is listed as such in the 1891 census, and in 1893, she is bylined as such.

The library closed in 1903, unable to sustain its operations. Margaret died in 1912. One wonders if she stayed on until the end of that institution, and what the last 9 years of her life were like.

Emma, On Her Marriage

I have complained a number of times about the lack of information, from Emma's pen or mouth, on her marriage.

A reader (thanks, Michael) draws my attention to this interesting snippet, from Ebenezer Wilson's The Truths Of Spiritualism (1876), which is extracted from his diary for January 11, 1872.

Swirling thoughts: the menage in Boston, which included Margaret, did not last much beyond this date (early 1872). The annuity comment is a bit disingenuous, as both Ann Sophia and William are listed as "annuitants" in the 1871 UK census, when the whole extended menage (just what kind of hold did Ann Sophia have on her children?) was living at 6 Vassal Terrace in Kensington. The issue of William Britten's class -- "although a gentleman born" -- seems to have been very important to someone: William or Emma.

At the moment, I am intrigued by the "I have known him long" comment. Just how long?

From The Deveney File: Emma, Amanuensis

Pat Deveney's extensive notes from his careful reading of Spiritualist periodicals are yielding pure gold.

As I have had occasion to mention once or twice, Emma was always testing her messaging, and the Autobiography was the culmination of those tests: the narrative, finalized, at twilight.

In July of 1858, Emma was covered in a series in The Banner of Light entitled "History Of Mediums". She was #5. In Pat's notes, I find an early and very interesting version of her "conversion in New York" narrative: one that is different from the Six Lectures version, the Spiritualist Magazine version of 1865, and the version in the Autobiography.

Perhaps most important for the thread of inquiry that -- Nietzsche rope-maker fashion -- I am tracing, in this article, the author A.B. Child, claims that Emma served as amanuensis for a member of Parliament, and was not infrequently (I am thinking that's a direct quote, as Emma adored double negatives) the repository of state secrets.

As she is by this time "Miss Emma Hardinge", this may be one of the earliest attempts to implicitly link herself to Henry Hardinge, who was MP for Durham and Secretary at War in the Wellington cabinet from 1828-30, chief secretary for Ireland in 1830, and from 1834-5, and Secretary at War in the Peel cabinet from 1841-4. Hardinge was married in 1821 to Emily, widow of John James (British minister to the Netherlands), daughter of the Marquess of Londonderry and sister of Lord Castlereagh.

I mention the latter largely because Emma claims, in this version of her life, to be connected (she apparently does not say how) with noble families -- clearly not connections she got from her parents.

This amanuensis revelation -- and it is that -- may equally well be an attempt to link herself to either Bulwer Lytton or to Disraeli, although it's difficult to see how, during his time in Parliament, EBL would have been party to much that would actually qualify as "state secrets."

And of course there is no time during Emma's life where she attempts -- as EJ Dingwall explicitly does in 1970 -- to connect the (completely concocted) marriage that gave Emma the name Hardinge with the Orphic Circle events. Hardinge was a Conservative church-and-state man, a ruthless authoritarian (his claim to liberal thinking was that he forbade troops to fire into unarmed crowds during civil disturbances), and apparently intellectually incurious -- neither mesmerism nor the occult would have appealed to him. And his circle was in no material way connected with our Orphic Circle network -- Hardinge's intimates were of an earlier generation, and tied to the rural and not the urban elements of English culture.

What's clear is that A.B. Childs could not have gotten this information from anyone other than Emma herself.

The Orphic Circle Meets At Craven Cottage...

Dark deeds, as someone once said, require a dark place.

It's clear, to me, that if the Orphic Circle as I am coming to see it existed, and conducted ceremonial or practical rituals involving the use of clairvoyants (thereby making our Emma's story of being one of those clairvoyant subjects plausible),those meetings must have taken place in a private home, and in London or the immediate vicinity.

Of my major and minor Orphic Circle suspects, we know that Dickens, Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, and Wilkie Collins (yes, he's been elevated to the status of minor suspect) all had London residences in the period under question. Dickens may in fact have had several, which he used for assignations and escape.

But I keep in my thinking, coming back to Bulwer Lytton as the likely orchestrator and space-provider, for no reason that can stand up to scrutiny.

One of those reasons is to be found in EHB's serialized novel, The Mystery Of No. 9 Stanhope Street, which was issued in 12 parts during the one-year run of EHB's Unseen Universe in 1892. The choice of the street name (particularly when one of the characters is also Stanhope) struck me as odd, and evocative (given her suggestion about Philip Henry Stanhope) when I first found the novel, and I was not much surprised, therefore, to discover that Bulwer Lytton's house at 36 Hertford Street had as its cross street (at the time but no longer) Little Stanhope Street.

Emma, leaving clues like crumbs....

Not being willing to go with that as proof of anything, I dug around looking for Bulwer Lytton's various domiciles in London (noting that I need at some point to do the same with Dickens, Morrison and Stanhope), and found that, in either 1840 (according to his son) or 1843 (according to other biographers), Bulwer Lytton bought or leased Craven Cottage in Fulham, which he kept until 1846.

Laurence Hutton describes Craven Cottage, in his Literary Landmarks of London as follows:

...on the banks of the Thames, just beyond the Bishop of London's Meadows. It stood in 1885, a picturesque ruin, and must have been, in its day, a very remarkable specimen of fantastic architecture, embracing the Persian, Gothic, Moorish and Egyptian styles.

I'm liking that.

Thomas Crofton Croker, in his A Walk From London to Fulham also left us a nice potted history of the cottage:

Craven Cottage [was] originally built by the Margravine of Anspach, when Countess of Craven, and since altered and improved by Walsh Porter, who occasionally resided in it till his death in 1809. Craven Cottage was considered the prettiest specimen of cottage architecture then existing. The three principal reception-rooms were equally remarkable for their structure, as well as their furniture. The centre, or principal saloon, supported by palm trees [columns] of considerable size, exceedingly well executed, with their dropping foliage at the top, supporting the cornice and architrave of the room. The other decorations were in corresponding taste. The furniture comprised a lion's skin for a hearth-rug, for a sofa the back of a tiger, the supports of the tables in most instances were four twisted serpents or hydras: in fact the whole of the decorations of the room were of a character perfectly unique and uniform in their style. This room led to a large Gothic dining room of very considerable dimensions, and on the front of the former apartment was a very large oval rustic balcony, opposed to which was a large, half-circular library, that became more celebrated afterwards as the room in which the highly-gifted and talented author of 'Pelham' wrote some of his most celebrated works.[From Bulwer Lytton, Craven Cottage] passed to Mr. [Thomas] Baylis, now of Thames Bank, who parted with it to Sir Ralph Howard, its present (1860) occupant....

Craven Cottage also contained a room referred to as "the Robbers' Cave", with a doorway in the ceiling of the room.

The door into the library looked, apparently, like this:

And by cottage, we are to understand "large, rural residence", as the following photograph shows;

Now, Bulwer Lytton knew this area well before his sojourn at Craven Cottage -- according to his son, he had lived in the immediate neighborhood, in Vine Cottage, from September to December of 1829, while looking for "a suitable London residence". Vine Cottage had also been done up by Walsh Porter, and was a favorite trysting and revelry spot for George IV, while Prince of Wales.

We need to keep in mind that Lytton was, at the time (1840-46), also continuously maintaining (according to his son) a residence in the West End.

Lytton had parties at Craven Cottage -- that's for certain. Louis Napoleon spent significant time there in 1840 while in exile in St. John's Wood, and when he escaped from confinement at Ham in 1846, and arrived in London, his first night's dinner was at Gore House (with Lady Blessington, the Count D'Orsay, and John Forster, Charles Dickens' man-of-business for some years), and his second night, he dined with EBL at Craven Cottage.

And Lytton had assignations at Craven Cottage as well -- including perhaps with Laura Deacon, with whom EBL was involved for 20 years, who was a neighbor at Craven, and by whom Lytton may have had as many as three children, all of whom were remembered in EBL's will.

Disraeli spent pleasant times at Craven Cottage (including time with Louis Napoleon, getting stuck in a boat on a mudbank in the Thames), and wove it -- as he did Smith Square -- into one of his novels, Tancred:

He rather liked [Craven Cottage]. The scene, lawns and groves, and a glancing river, the music, our beautiful country-women, who with their brilliant complexions do not shrink from daylight, make a morning festival there very agreeable, even if one be dreaming of Jerusalem.

E. L. Blanchard, part of our Orphic Circle connective tissue, and witness before the Dialectical Society, spent time at Craven Cottage with EBL, who invited him to come down river to Craven Cottage in order to participate, as a member of a party with John Forster and one of the Macaulay brothers, in afternoon leapfrog games (according to letters published in the memoir of Blanchard prepended to his poetical works).

Robert Browning recuperated there after an illness, writing to Blanchard from the cottage.

But, closest to home for our purposes, the venerable Spiritualist Samuel Carter Hall left, in his Retrospect Of A Long Life (1883), this reminiscence of Craven Cottage:

That Bulwer was a Spiritualist there is no question. He may have done, as so many others do -- shrunk from public avowal of a belief the foundation of which is knowledge; but that he accepted Spiritualism as an infallible truth there can be no doubt. I dined with him when he was living at Craven Cottage, on the banks of the Thames, near Fulham. Some persons, of whom I had the honor to be one, were invited to meet Alexis, then a lad who had obtained renown as a clairvoyant. Lord Brougham was of the party. Dinner was delayed waiting for the "marvelous boy." When the bell rang, Bulwer, accompanied by two or three of his friends, left the room to receive him. In the hall was the card-tray: Bulwer took from it a dozen or so of cards, and placed them in his coat pocket. After dinner Alexis went into "a trance." Bulwer placed his hand in his pocket, and before withdrawing it, asked whose card he held; the answer, after a brief pause, was given correctly. The experiment was repeated at least a dozen times -- always correctly. Alexis was a French boy, who had been but a few days in England. The cards were all those of Englishmen. I need no say how great was our astonishment. "Clairvoyance" was a term that probable most of the guests heard there for the first time."

"Alexis was a French boy" -- Alexis was Alexis Didier, the clairvoyant controlled by J.B. Marcillet, whom Dickens first encountered at John Elliotson's (or was it at Craven Cottage?) and subsequently raved of in his correspondence as "the Magnetic Boy". We are clearly seeing here a glimpse of Didier as a child, during his first stint in London in 1844.

Hall's direct equation of an interest or belief in mesmerism with a belief in Spiritualism is interesting, common, and wrong -- like his friend Harriet Martineau, EBL was involved in mesmerism without making any commitment (public or private) to the belief system of Modern Spiritualism, as I think his statement to the Dialectical Society indicates pretty clearly.

Nonetheless, EBL's ability to pull in the Magnetic Boy within days of his arrival in London, and well before Elliotson and others, indicates something -- connections, if nothing else.

Today, the grounds of Craven Cottage are the Fulham Football Club's playing field, I believe.

If EBL's son's chronology of residences for his father is correct, and EBL owned or held the lease on Craven Cottage from 1840 to 1846, it seems more than plausible that this was the place where an Orphic Circle would have held its meetings, particularly when we look on this cartoon for the Egyptian Hall at the cottage, done by Thomas Hopper, who was Walsh Porter's architect.

I suppose I could insert choice snippets from Ghost Land at this point, describing the scene of the Orphic Circle's rites, but that feels like piling-on (which is one of my favorite intellectual games)...

EHB and Her Children

No, not that sort of children...

I had occasion today to say what I've been thinking for some time, which is that it's impossible to imagine someone like Dion Fortune without also imagining a strong precursor like Emma. What Fortune found so easy -- that is to say, profiting from the commercialization of all things Spiritual and Occult -- Emma found damned hard: so hard she had to get out on the road and engineer the market she wished to serve, and experience all the setbacks, mistakes and disappointments of a market maker.

It isn't going to far to say that Emma would have written Psychic Self-Defense, if she could have done so. Her job was different, and, it seems to me, an order of magnitude or more harder, that Dion Fortune's. Both the popularizers of the occult -- Fortune, and others -- and the second-generation mediums (I always think of Mina Crandon here) -- owed much of their success to the blockade-busting and concept-sowing that Emma (not exclusively, mind you) did.

And the same can be said for Emma's other children -- occult and New Age practitioners from 1900 onwards.

With that idea in mind, a tangent this evening: the death of Nora Fornario, as told by Dion Fortune:

Fornario's death was covered by the UP wire, the London Times and other major newspapers -- not, as one might imagine, with sympathy, or because Fornario was well-known (she was not), but also not with the ridicule with which EHB and her contemporaries regularly experienced. Fornario's death was a matter of...curiosity, of the same secular sort that motivates our interest in a mysterious death today. The people who rented her a room on Iona didn't think she was a witch, or a sex fiend, or a Satanist come to corrupt their local morals and institutions -- they thought she was odd.

And the people who read the UP press report or the Times article knew how to categorize Fornario, as they knew how to categorize Fortune: mystic, occultist.

Fortune's book, and Fornario's death, have been in the back of my mind throughout the chase thusfar -- both women are Emma's children, and we cannot understand the currents of thought that held them up, and let them down, without understanding our Emma and her work.

(For anyone with the bandwidth and the inclination, Fornario's life and death deserve some serious work.)

The New York Musical Academy

From John Patrick Deveney's copious notes on American Spiritualist journals, the first independent evidence found of Emma's establishment of a musical academy in the offices of the SDSK (from the June 4, 1856 issue of the SDSK's periodical, The Christian Spiritualist, which Emma claims in the Autobiography she was editing at the time.) Note the "Miss".

Miss Hardinge's Musical Academy.
It will be perceived from the subjoined proposals and accompanying statement that Miss Emma Hardinge is about to establish, at 553 Broadway, in this City, a Musical Academy, where those who are intending to pursue the study and practice of Music, may be provided with all the facilities necessary to a scientific and artistic education. We have not hitherto enjoyed the pleasure of a familiar personal acquaintance with Miss Hardinge, but after two or three brief private interviews, and a perusal of several of her contributions to the public Press, we feel assured that she is a lady of superior intelligence, and endowed with many noble and generous attributes and qualities of mind and heart.
Miss Hardinge acquired her musical education in Europe, where, as we learn, she held a professorship in a highly respectable institution. The lady has our earnest wishes for her success in the enterprise she has chosen; and we hope that those of our readers who may desire to avail themselves of such advantages as are offered by Miss Hardinge, will call at her Academy, and make themselves acquainted with her claims and qualifications, before applying for admission and instruction elsewhere.—Ed.
This Academy will open June 30, 1856, under the direction of Miss Emma Hardinge.
The object of the Institution is the promotion and cultivation of Spiritual and Classical Music of the highest order.
Instruction will be given in solo singing, concerted singing, piano forte playing, harmony composition, and elocution.
In order to render the benefits of the Academy attainable to all classes, the Principal has decided upon the following scale of Terms:
First Class—Harmony and composition . . . .$18 per Term.
Second Class—Solo Singing in the best Italian Method . . . .20 “ “
Third Class—Classical Piano Forte playing . . . . 20 “ “
Fourth Class—Elementary Instruction in Singing or Music . . . .15 “ “
Fifth Class—Concerted Music, Glees, Choruses, Part Singing, etc . . . . 15 “ “
For two Students subscribing to the fifth class together . . . . 15 “ “
The Principal earnestly desires to direct attention to the latter class, which will meet two evenings each week for the study of every kind of concerted music, from simple Glees to Oratorios. The design in forming this class is to establish an harmonious and accomplished musical association where the highest purposes of the art may be developed. Every possible assistance will be rendered to its members—instruction in sight singing given, and vocalists of all capacities admitted.
A semi-public exhibition of the Students will be given every fourth Saturday.
Each term will consist of eleven weeks, to commence from the day of entry. All payments to be made in advance.
Elocution taught in class at . . . .$20 per Term.
Private lessons at . . . . 15 per course of twelve lessons.
The Principal will be ready to receive applications at the Academy every day from 11 A.M. till 1 P.M.

From Pat's notes, it is clear that Emma is trying hard to make her career as a musician and music teacher go during this period, digging deep for material, including (as advertised in February of 1857) rehashing her part in the 1844 Sadler's Wells production of Macbeth by staging the witches' scenes and music from Macbeth.

Emma and the Sinking Of The Pacific

Readers may remember (a) that EHB comes to the US with her mother on the steamship Pacific, and that (b) her first significant event, during her development as a medium, is a communication, via the alphabet board, from Philip Smith, someone she knew among the crew of the Pacific, indicating (correctly as it turned out) that the Pacific had been lost at sea with all hands. This communication is subsequently corroborated by a separate communication via another medium -- an impactful evidentiary event in Emma's conversion.

I will have something to say, in a later post, about just how many mediums weighed in on the loss of the Pacific, and who in fact predicted its loss first, but a reader's comment (thanks, Michael) today is worth including:

This is from "Transatlantic" by Stephen Fox, published by Collins in 2003 (p. 135) --In 1991, divers in the Irish Sea, about twelve miles northwest of the welsh island of Anglesey, found the bow section of the "Pacific". Contrary to most informed surmises in 1856, she had made only about sixty miles from Liverpool when something went wrong, suddenly and completely. A boiler explosion or a fire, perhaps; the new chief engineer, in his first hours at sea with the pacific, might have made a fatal mistake in the unfamiliar engine room. Or maybe a collision with another ship that sank both vessels so quickly that it left no time for lifeboats, or even floating bits of wrekage, to tell the story. It was only a dozen miles from land, but too cold in January for anybody to swim to safety. Yet why did nothing identifiable--not even a life preserver--wash ashore?

Emma's discussion of her relationship with Philip Smith and the Pacific suggests pretty clearly that Smith was a crew member, and yet the rosters of the Pacific -- passengers and crew -- that we have available to us today do not show any Philip Smith among the crew of the Pacific at any time between Emma's landing in 1855 and its sinking in 1856. The name "Philip Smith" occurs only once among the crew and passenger lists for the Pacific -- in November of 1855, where a person of that name is listed as a "contractor", is among the passengers, and arrives safely in New York. It's possible that -- given Emma's opacity when writing -- that we are not supposed to equate Philip Smith with the officer of the Pacific from whom Emma expected to get a package, and that, if Smith was traveling frequently between Liverpool and New York, he could have been on the final 1856 voyage of the Pacific. But an alternative, earlier version of this incident in her life (from The Spiritual Magazine for September of 1865) blows a hole, as it were, in that explanation:

E. L. Blanchard -- Connective Tissue?

In one of yesterday's posts, I included a snippet from The Astrologer and Oracle of Destiny, owned by a shadowy man named Haddock, and written, almost completely, by the literary jobber Edward Leman Blanchard.

Blanchard may be important connective tissue for our investigation, as he was clearly involved in occult circles in London, wrote extensively for and about the London theatre -- plays, sketches, criticism -- and knew and reviewed Emma as Miss Emma Harding. Perhaps more to the point, Blanchard knew John Varley, and claimed a friendship with Edward Bulwer Lytton that dated back to 1841, precisely the time period in which we'd like to locate the Orphic Circle incident. And finally, there appears to be evidence (to be verified) that Blanchard wrote for the Court Gazette, which was the publication we believe Emma, as Ernest Reinhold, wrote for.

Reading Blanchard's work for The Astrologer is instructive, in that things "Rosicrucian" (in name if not in substance) were sufficiently well-recognized to be fit subjects for a penny magazine -- targeted at lower middle-class literate audiences.

A Trout In The Milk: Plotting The Orphic Circle

Emma's claim to have been a clairvoyante for a collection of occult practitioners -- including, according to Emma, Richard Morrison (Zadkiel), Philip Henry Stanhope and Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- is the most vexed question in a biographical trajectory that is full of vexed questions.

This "Orphic Circle" left no records that anyone is aware of -- we cannot know with certainty or high probability whether Emma is telling the truth about this period in her life. But, for her assertions to be plausible, we would need to be able to establish as a matter of historical fact at least the following:

1. that Morrison, Stanhope and Bulwer-Lytton (as well as other 'occult figures' possibly implicated in Emma's life, including Dickens, Disraeli and Richard Francis Burton) all knew one another at more that a reputational level -- that a real social network existed among these figures
2. that some or all of these figures were actually involved in a 'circle' -- that is to say, an organized set of activities -- somehow implicating or involving occult subjects
3. that clairvoyante subjects were used in these organized activities

The first prerequiste -- the existence of a real social network that was more than reputational -- has I believe been met. In a social network with John Varley the painter and occultist and Lady Blessington of Gore House circle fame, we can link all the relevant figures to one another, in intimate social discourse involving (among other things) the casting of horoscopes and the earnest discussion of occult topics. In some cases -- as with Bulwer Lytton and Burton, for example -- Varley actually tutored possible Orphic Circle members.

I also believe that the second prerequisite -- the documented existence of an organized occult investigative group -- has been met, at least prima facie: Varley, Morrison, and Robert Cross Smith (Raphael) were members of a practicing geomancy circle called the Mercurii (Bulwer-Lytton's geomantic casting for Disraeli exists to this day) that operated at least up to Smith's death in 1832.

And I believe now -- thanks once again to Google's relentless drive to restore the obscure -- we have evidence that young female clairvoyantes were used by Orphic Circle members.

This snippet, from The Astrologer and Oracle of Destiny for February 15, 1845, is squarely in the period of our investigation, and links Morrison to clairvoyante usage unequivocally.

All circumstantial, to be sure, and none of it directly pointing to our Emma.

But as Thoreau said, some circumstantial evidence is very strong, and this collection is beginning to bear a resemblance to a trout in the milk.

And in any case the snippet is noteworthy for exposing the interaction between the occult control (Zadkiel, in this case) and the clairvoyante -- and the "astronomy" revealed bears to my mind at least some interesting similarities to the "astronomy" in Ghost Land.

One interesting note: several folks, myself included, are inclined to link Richard Francis Burton to the Orphic Circle. Emma named (dead) Orphic names in the late 1880s -- Burton died in 1890. If Burton was a member of the circle during the period of Emma's involvement, we can date that involvement very precisely to the fall of 1840 through mid-1842, simply because that was the only period during which Burton could have been involved: during his brief stint at Trinity College, Oxford, before his expulsion, the purchase of his commission, and his voyage to India to join his regiment.

The Unseen Universe

The 12 issues of EHB's Unseen Universe, the last of three periodicals she edited, have been recovered and digitized, and will be included, in short order, in the Archive.

Clearly a wrapper for EHB's stash of manuscript material, The Unseen Universe contains extracts from the much hinted-at sequel to Ghost Land (referred to as Ghostland Volume II), a heretofore unknown (I believe) EHB novel The Mystery at No. 6 Stanhope Street (which seems, on internal evidence, to date from the 1850s), a serialized tract called Historical Spiritualism, and much classic EHB scissors-and-mucilage work, including a few potshots at Theosophy.

One of the more interesting bits of the periodical is EHB's league table of important spiritualist publications, on the back cover of each issue. Also of interest is the strong influence of French material in the content of the issues.

Emma's Brief Career As A Trance Medium

Another of those spaces, the lacunae of history.

Emma was a test medium for less than two years, and apparently experienced some sort of illness that left her unable to operate under control in test seances. What happened?

In the November 21, 1858 issue of the New York Sunday Times, EHB (then Miss Emma Hardinge) published one of her classic letters: long, rambling, emotionally charged, conflicted, even frightened. The letter was about the charges, swirling in New York at the time, that Spiritualism engendered moral decline generally, and "free love" (understood mostly as open adultery, sex outside the marriage bond, and attacks on the institution of marriage, rather than the more salacious definition of "free love" we think of today). Emma was taking the charges personally, and responding from a sense of personal affront -- one that doesn't quite make sense, unless we look at some other pieces of the story, earlier, and later.

The proximate cause for the hubbub was the increasingly public, violent and unseemly breakdown of the marriage of Cora L.V. Hatch, arguably at that time the most famous trance medium in the US, and her husband, mesmerist-turned-promoter Dr. Benjamin Franklin Hatch.

Hatch was arguing, in public, that Spiritualism was destructive of marriage as an institution, using his "wayward wife" (as he painted her) as one example of this endemic problem.

As the Hatch scandal blossomed -- it would become a matter of law, and therefore of public record, in late 1858, and drag on until 1864 -- Benjamin Franklin Hatch (yet another wise propagandist) took his case to print, issuing in May of 1859 a pahphlet entitled Spiritualists Iniquities Unmasked, and The Hatch Divorce Case. Whether he did himself a service or not, in issuing the pamphlet, is uncertain, but he did implicate any number of famous New York Circle spiritualists (and others) in extra-marital infidelities, violations of the marriage bond, and general licentiousness:

The best and most critical minds in the Spiritualist ranks, are beginning to fully realize that this converse with spirits would, if left to its free course and work out its designs, result in the destruction of all bonds of society; stir up the vilest animosities; destroy all human confidence; ignore all religion, and totally destroy the institutions of marriage, and open every flood-gate of iniquity.

At one point in the document, he quotes from an extensive letter, written by John F. Whitney, who was associated with the founding and operation of the Society for Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge -- which, it will be remembered, is where Emma began her career in Spiritualism, as one of two test mediums sponsored by the SDSK, and later as the editor of the SDSK journal, the Christian Spiritualist. Whitney, who apparently remained a Spiritualist for many years after this time, was shocked at what he saw as the general licentiousness of American Spiritualism, and in the letter Hatch reproduces in his pamphlet, Whitney rails against various forms of that licentiousness which he himself has witnessed, including this:

We have a seen a medium who was employed, during the day, in giving communications to persons from the other world, on retiring with her widowed mother, use language and expressions that would well befit the Five Points. We have seen spirits giving communications through this medium to a gentleman stating it was his departed wife, desiring that he should marry this medium.

Is that medium of whom Whitney speaks our Emma, whom he certainly knew and worked with?

It's impossible to know, of course, with certainty, but the presence of such a passage would certainly go a long way to explaining why Emma was so dismayed to discover, when she landed in Australia in 1878, that the Christian anti-spiritualist propaganda machine was using Hatch's pamphlet -- nearly 20 years after its publication -- as a cudgel to beat the local Spiritualist champion, Thomas Walker (see NCM, pp. 236-237).

EHB's description of the rescue of Thomas Walker -- by herself and her husband -- from the tender mercies of Rev. M. W Green, is dealt out in tortured opacity in NCM, and jives neither with the facts of the Hatch case, nor with the historical facts-on-the-ground at the time, if modern Australian historians are to be believed.

If you read the passages in NCM in detail, you'll see that EHB (inadvertently?) moves from discussing a "tract" (second paragraph, p. 237) to a "letter" (third paragraph), a slip that is, it seems to me, pretty important, and the trace of a real fear of exposure via a letter-within-a-tract that made it necessary, in this section of NCM, for Emma to be more than usually indirect and oblique about her objects: "two Americans" rather than "me and my husband", with no mention whatsoever of the surname of the "eminent New York physician" Dr. Benjamin Franklin Hatch by name.

And the fact that Green apparently shadowed Emma on her Australian and New Zealand tour, eventually forcing her, in July of 1879, to deliver and then publish the non-trace address Spiritualism Vindicated And Clerical Slanders Refuted in Dunedin, NZ, (available here) must have done her nerves little good.

It seems to me that in this bit of all-too-human nasty ad hominem (Hatch's, and Green's and Emma's too) we have a discourse that explains, or at least points toward the explanation for, Emma's decision to trade test mediumship for trance mediumship, her separation from the SDSK, her vocal anti-free love stance in late 1858 and after, her "illness" in 1857 that was attributed to spiritual exhaustion, and her first published trance addresses, which were focused on the social role of women, in the home and in the marriage.

(And I also think I understand better why Emma was, as she grew older, increasingly critical of the apparatus of the test seance, as, for example, in her Dark Circles and Cabinets essay, available here.)

In the silence of my own contemplation, the Emma I am coming to know -- the Emma of Lambeth and Smith Square and the Adelphi -- could swear like a sailor. And I love her the more for it.

As a concluding note, Hatch's tract is pure poison, in my view, whether historically accurate or not, and as it's still being used, as recently as the mid-1990s, by the Xian right to attack non-Christian spiritualism, I don't intend to publish it here or in the Archive. If you want a copy, ask me for one.

Market Engineering

One of the things that I find most fascinating about EHB, and those she mixed with, is the ways in which they discovered, pioneered and/or regularized the techniques of propaganda -- the marketing of a body of ideas designed to influence behavior. Propaganda as a discipline is, as I've said somewhere before, is not going to get its first systematic treatments qua propaganda until after the first World War, but it's a term EHB applies to herself and her work regularly -- it's what she saw herself as, her work as. Propagandist. Propaganda.

And propagandists war with other propagandists for, as one recent marketing guru was fond of saying, position in the mind of the prospect.

A propos of that latter idea, a tid-bit, related to my earlier note about the marketing of Art Magic. Turns out that the editor of the American Bibliopolist, which held EHB up to gentle ridicule for her circular soliciting subscribers for Art Magic,was none other than Charles Sotheran, nephew of the famous English publisher Henry Sotheran, biographer of Cagliostro, freemason, and founder...excuse me, former....alongside EHB and WB, of the Theosophical Society.

William, From The Shadows

Now that we have some reason to believe that William Britten's father's name was Daniel, we can find traces of young William in the historical records. A Daniel Britten, in the 1841 UK census, is living in Shoreditch (a slum of some fame) with his wife Elizabeth (perhaps Elizabeth Jane?) and his 15-year-old son W(illia)m. Daniel's occupation is listed as labourer and W(illia)m is, at 15 (birth year 1826/7), the oldest of three children: he has a sister Mary, age 10, and a sister Sarah, also 10. Daniel and his wife are both, at this time, 50 years of age -- making their children demographic oddities.

A decade later, in the 1851 census, Daniel and Elizabeth have upgraded both residence and occupation -- they have moved from a tenement to a numbered house in Goldsmiths Terrace, and (a) Daniel is a journeyman carver and gilder (suggesting sufficient affluence to have served a paid or articled apprenticeship in the 1840s); (b) William and sister Sarah have disappeared from the household; and (c) sister Mary, 20, has a daughter, also Mary (and almost certainly out of wedlock), aged 7 (not such a demographic oddity for the time).

William wasn't kidding when he listed London as his birthplace on his marriage day -- his family was smack-dab-center-working-class-London.

What's most interesting, though, to me, at this point in the investigation, is that William was apparently born and raised less than half a mile from where our Emma was christened -- literally around the corner if we understand "Bethnal Green Road" in Emma's christening record to mean "Old Bethnal Green Road" of the present day.

Oh, and where did William get to, between the 1841 and 1851 census? Impossible to know. But before the 1861 census, he was gone from the UK, having taken ship for America -- the City of Washington from Liverpool, which arrived in New York on 28 September 1858.

This does not, it's important to note, make it likely that he was, as Cora Hatch's biographer suggested, in the lobby of a New Haven, Connecticut hotel in time to save a distraught Cora Hatch from the depredations of her husband.

Update: Not so fast! The preliminary injunction (restraining order) against Benjamin Franklin Hatch, "restraining Mr. Hatch from entering any house where Mrs. Hatch may reside, and from directly or indirectly interfering with her in any manner" was issued in New York state court by Judge Sutherland in late November or early December of 1858, making it possible for William to have been in a hotel lobby in New Haven some time in October or November of that year, and to have witnessed Cora Hatch's distress at being pursued/hounded by Benjamin Franklin Hatch.

Another Trench: Emma The Widow Marries William The Gentleman

A large, high-definition image of the marriage record of Emma Hardinge, widow and William Godwin Britten, gentleman is now available.

What do we learn from this?

First of all, the documentary evidence supports EHB's assertions about the marriage: date, place, minister, etc.

Secondly, EHB was not above asserting her status as a widow, despite the fact that there was no marriage to a Mister Hardinge and indeed, as far as we know, no prior marriage at all. And she notes her occupation as lecturer although less than a year later in the 1871 UK census, she will note her occupation as actress.

William Britten here gives us his middle name -- Godwin as I read it -- making him a namesake of a rather famous turn-of-the-century radical philosophe, and telling us, I believe, something about his parents' educational background and political persuasion. Britten's residence is London as I read it, which is an odd choice for a man who, as far as I can tell, was more or less permanently resident in the US from the late 1850s onward. His parent (pure gold): Daniel and Jane (or perhaps Laura -- I'm not very good with orthography issues), so it's off to the genealogical sources again to see if I can pin those two down somewhere.

His occupation: gentleman, which suggests that he'd yet to receive his V.D. from John Bunyan Campbell (consistent with what we know about Campbell's operations). In 1871, in the UK census, he will give his occupation as "annuitant" as will EHB's mother.

Stratigraphy

Trying to piece together the life of any ordinary person born before political economy, statisticians and notions of the value of social surveillance drove documentation into the center of statist culture (after, say, the revolutions of 1848) is a tricky business. The evidentiary record is, at best: spotty, widely dispersed and difficult to obtain (despite the so-called Internet revolution).

Layer upon layer of secondary commentary that mostly repeats, references and otherwise becomes entangled with yet other secondary commentary -- makes the problem a kind of archeology. Think of the number of places on the 'Net, for example, where Emma's father is named as Floyd Hardinge, or the number of places where someone marries her off to Samuel Brittan.

One needs to practice stratigraphy -- to cut a trench through the layers back to the earliest evidence of all-too-human habitation.

Down at the bottom of the trench, finally, we find Emma's christening record from St. Matthew Church in Bethnal Green, London.

A larger version of the entire page of the record is also available.

There's Ebenezer, and Ann (no-e) Sophia, and Emma (no D middle name, alas), and the dates check out.

On the to-do list: the state of play in Bethnal Green Road in 1823, and the names of also-ran private schools in the area.

Spirits On The Glass

A reader (thanks, Michael) points out to me that John Lobb's Talks With The Dead: Luminous Rays From The Unseen World contains a photograph that purports to be the spirit of EHB, taken in 1902, some three years after her death.

This isn't the only spirit photograph of Emma in circulation: there is an instrumental trance communication (ITC) image available as well.

The open boundary between spirit communication and available technologies is something I'm sure someone way more clever than me has already explored in detail. Spiritualism's generalized obsession with offering proofs (one of EHB's favorite words) of its claims required that Spiritualism co-opt the nomenclature of science (something we see for example in the creation of parasciences like galvanic medicine) while trying not to become subject to the apparatus the nomenclature drags with it (I think here for example of EHB 's periodic claim that non-proofs were a function of the mental predisposition of the observer/experimenter, something that quantum mechanics might give some thought to, but nineteenth-century scientific epistemes rejected out-of-hand). It was a dance with the devil for Spiritualists, and they lost -- even if sometimes (as with the Houdini/Margery/folding ruler incident, for example), there was chicanery on the side of science.

I see spirit photography then -- and ITC now -- as another example of traffic across that open boundary -- spiritualism trying to adopt the mechanics of technology without taking on the epistemic framework of the science behind the technology. That gesture -- co-opting the machine without submitting to the discipline of the mechanic -- is an essential gesture of the propagandist, in any situation, at any historical juncture. It is the gesture of the creation scientists, the holocaust-denial historian or cleric, the ufo-logist. It is what parascience is, essentially.

The epistemological promise of the photograph, in the nineteenth century, was fidelity -- truth to life. As people who have lived through the era that began with 18 minutes of silence on Nixon's tapes (the gap that could not erase itself) and that ended, in some material way, with the photoshop'd head of the US Republican vice-presidential candidate on a bikini'd gun-toting body, we know better. A photograph is proof of nothing: it is an ambiguous image, requiring interpretation to mean anything at all. Masking glass negatives was a well-understood technical feat within the means of every competent photographer in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and in cases such as the one above, when the artifacts of the masking are present in even poor-quality reproductions of the image, what is created as proof of life-after-death is, at the very moment it is released, a bifurcation in the dialog: yet-more-uncontrovertible-evidence for those in need of no additional evidence, and proof only of yet another instance of chicanery in the ongoing dialog about proofs, for those unwilling or unable to suspend disbelief.

Both parties can build their impermeable wall of the same stone.

As with photographs 100 or so years ago, so with electromagnetic radiation today. A new medium, an old gesture, a continued failure to enter into dialog. But then -- does the propagandist want dialog? I have been re-reading George Sylvester Viereck's Spreading Germs Of Hate (which along with Rogerson's Propaganda In The Next War remains the best systematic treatment of propaganda as a discipline) and I blush to recall, yet again, that the question of dialog aboutwhat may be true is not in fact relevant to the propagandist.

In this particular case, an historical eye finds something interesting too -- I cannot match the masked face of EHB, in the photograph above, to any image of her in my personal collection, except perhaps for her Joey picture from the front matter to Ghost Land. Since masking permits re-placement but not distortion or reshaping (as one can do, today, with any decent image manipulation program), the source of the masked-in face for this spirit photograph indicates to me that there maybe at least one more broadly-available photographic image of EHB to be recovered for the historical record. If anyone has it, let me know.