Resurrectionists: Digging Up The Western Star

The six issues of The Western Star, edited by Emma, and arguably the first periodical to anneal occult themes to the chassis of the Spiritualism movement, has been recovered, digitized and will be available shortly in the Archive.

Emma, In Transition

This tiny, but significant, advertisement from the Chicago Tribune for 4 January 1859.

HARMONIAL SOCIETY | The Celebrated Trance-Medium, | MISS EMMA HARDINGE | Will speak in METROPOLITAN HALL on Thursday Evening, January 6, 1859. Miss HARDINGE speaks under the influence of a Superior Power, and generally permits the audience to choose a Committee to select the subject on which she shall speak during the evening, thus giving those present a chance to test the matter publicly. It is expected that on this occasion the custom will be observed and it is confidentally hoped that all persons who have doubts of her entrancement will be present to witness the test. The price of admission is only 10 cents. Doors open at 6 1/2 o'clock.

Still a test medium, though being tested differently. Already aware that it needs be a Superior Power and not a name, not an historical figure. Still Miss, but now Hardinge. 1200-odd seats, I believe, at 10 cents a head, with some portion of the proceeds paying for the hall, and some to the Harmonial Society no doubt.

And Emma, as we know, wrote her own copy.

The Spiritualist and the Physicist

Something to ponder:

Herein may be found a key to the fact that, with the exception of the late Dr. A. R. Wallace, who, as a young man, believed that 'electro-biology' was a supernormal phenomenon, it is mostly from physicists (and mathematicians) that Spiritualism derives its support. To cull only three examples, take Sir William Crookes, with his reiteration of his belief in Florence Cook, as a medium of the manifestation of spirits, after her detection in fraud; Sir Oliver Lodge, in his belief, after witnessing them, in the genuineness of the performances of Eusapia Palladino, and the admission afterwards that he had been befooled; and Sir W. F. Barrett asserting his conviction that the dowser discovers the presence of water by "the faculty of clairvoyance" and possession of a "supersensuous perceptive power."

This from Edward Clodd's under-rated book The Question -- If A Man Die Shall He Live Again? (1917).

Is it true, I wonder, that the scientific support Spiritualists craved and trumpeted (and Clodd does a marvelous job deconstructing the rhetoric of scientific support in the book) came mostly or even predominantly from physicists? Or was it rather that physics and mathematics, as the favored sciences of the nineteenth century, carried more cultural weight? received more attention? were more carefully cultivated?

One thing is certainly the case -- the passing of the control of science from amateurs to professionals in the course of the nineteenth century is a well-understood phenomenon. To call Sir William Crooks a physicist is fine, but one could have equally well called him a chemist, and been well within bounds. As we have already seen with our Varleys, possession of significant scientific or technological credentials and capabilities was well within the bounds of the average well-educated middle-class person in the early part of the century -- and highly unlikely to be the case with any but the professionally-degree'd by the century's end. Freud fought, and lost, the last battle in this war when he waved the white flag on the question of lay analysis. Although I take Clodd's point, and take it seriously, what strikes me in his -- and others -- examples (de Morgan being a notable outlier) is the extent to which Spiritualism captured the imagination of the amateur, the polymath and the technologist (again, I think of the Varleys, and particularly of Cromwell Varley), and failed the sniff test of the professional scientist.

There is an open boundary, for sure, between science and spiritualism in the nineteenth century: both for example are discovering the marvelous and polymorphous perversity of electromagnetism (real and animal). I think we tend to forget that electromagnetism-the-science spent a good bit of its time in the 19th century chasing the phantom of the luminiferous aether at the same time electromagnetic scientists were denying spiritualists any such convenience for propagating their particular set of phenomena. This is the classic exclusionary gesture of science; to deny to other disciplines the intellectual make-shifts on which its own theories depend.

(Here I can't help thinking of the hysteria of Dawkins in The God Delusion, and wondering whether Dawkins might have a picture of, say, E. Ray Lankester on the wall of his office. Wait...Lankester was an invertebrate zoologist, wasn't he? Well, that explains it...)

Or was it the case, as Clodd might have suggested, that physicists were particularly susceptible to the epistemological claims of spiritualism precisely because they, too, needed the aether, for their purposes?

And something else, while we're poking at the old scar of spiritualism upon science...why is it, does one suppose, that so many scientists who would, after 1880 or so, make their way in the new 'human science' of psychology, see so clearly that, at the heart of spiritualism, was something that was undeniably worthy of study?

The Call, Part Six: The Skrying Call

Here is the meaning -- Emma's meaning -- of the word call, taken from Northcote Thomas' Crystal Gazing: Its History and Practice, with a Discussion of the Evidence for Telepathic Scrying (1905):

Lest there be any doubt, among her occult-literate readers, about the reason for Emma's involvement with the members of the 'Orphic Circle', she makes it plain enough in her Autobiography -- she was a skryer, and knew the ceremonial drill.

I'm sure I'll keep returning to this topic, as it is so central to Emma's life and work, but it seems plain enough to me at this point that Emma's major claims, about people and practices, during the 1830s and 1840s are substantiated by the available evidence. Every person she names -- in her Sirius article -- as a member of the 'Orphic Circle' can be demonstrated to be involved in one or both of the two strange attractors for these sorts of practices at the time: the circle around the Mercurii, or the Gore House circle. The specific practices Emma suggests or identifies are indeed in vogue, and Emma is familiar with procedures, equipment and locales consistent with what we know about the historical figures she wants to implicate.

This is, I think, as close as we will come to proving the matter. Perhaps Morrison, like John Dee before him, left detailed notes of his skrying sessions that have not come to light, and perhaps those name Emma. But I doubt it.

The most likely ways in which Emma became involved in the 'Orphic Circle' are therefore:

1. Through Richard Morrison, whether as a skryer for his astronomical investigations, or his public performances, or
2. through a meeting with Varley, Dickens or Chauncey Hare Townshend at Gore House, where Emma would have been placed, by Thomas Welsh, as a musician.

So, no QED, unfortunately, but (in my opinion) Emma's account of matters once again proves to be substantially accurate.

The Call, Part Five: Setting The Scene for Emma

The Varleys -- John and Cornelius -- possessed the trade secrets (mechanical and occultic) and the apparatus to make skyring crystals from the late 1820s (Samuel Varley died in 1828) onward. Cornelius Varley may have made -- I think did make -- a skrying crystal for Lady Blessington, which was delivered to her by John Varley, her astrologer, and which subsequently became conflated with a crystal owned by Richard Morrison, and another, more widely viewed, crystal owned by Philip Henry Stanhope.

(Stanhope and John Varley had a complicated relationship. John Varley's father was probably one of Philip Henry's tutors, and the two men grew up together, but Philip Henry blamed Samuel Varley for encouraging his father's mechanical and scientific excesses, and depleting the Stanhope estate. It does not surprise me, based on Philip Henry's comments, at the time of his father's death, that he chose to have his crystal made by an optician other than Cornelius Varley.)

John Varley and Richard Morrison, along with Thomas Oxley, Richard Cross Smith and other practicing astrologers, were members of a loose-knit occupational-mutual-aid society, called the Mercurii, during this same period. Prosecutions of astrologers under the Vagrancy Act were still going on as late as 1844, according to the scholar Owen Davies, leading Morrison to form the British Association for the Advancement of Astral Science &c and the Protection of Astrologers. Morrison understood the value of association -- formal and otherwise -- for protection as well as advancement of what he saw as his science: occult science. And he knew members of Parliament, convincing William Ewart for example to introduce a private member's bill to have the Vagrancy Act modified to permit private (in-home) practice of astrology without legal penalty.

Morrison was using skyring and adolescent skryers, from at least 1842 onward (judging by accounts in print) to aid him in his astrological investigations, using young female skryers to obtain 'local' view of astronomical bodies.

John Varley brought both Edward Bulwer Lytton -- by 1840 an accomplished geomancer hard at work on the most famous occult novel in English history, Zanoni -- and a young Richard Francis Burton (just expelled from college) into the Mercurii circle.

These things we can rely on, as matters of historical fact.

How conveniently this maps to the darkest part of Emma Floyd's young life: the period when Thomas Welsh's school was winding down (1842 or so), and the period before the documentary record has her on stage as an actress (at Sadler's Wells, in 1844).

Unfortunately, the thread by which I tie Emma to the circle around Morrison and Varley is, I confess, thin: it is in fact a single word, here in its context, from Emma's Autobiography:

Never understood by those around me, it was only in after years and when I became called and associated with a secret society of Occultists and attended their sessions in London as one of their clairvoyant and magnetic subjects, that I myself began to comprehend why a young girl fairly educated, and blessed with many advantages, should be branded with such peculiarities of disposition as must inevitably shut her of from all companionship with children of her own age and standing.

The society of Occultists to whom I can now only allude, and who are named in " Ghost-Land " as the " Orphic Circle," obtained knowledge (by means I am not at liberty to mention) of those persons whose associations they desired.

None of the members were known as such outside their circles, the existence of the society was undreamed of, and those whom they chose to affiliate with they knew of and called. I having been thus favoured obtained a clue to my own exceptional early experiences, which the subsequent developments of Spiritualism stamped as natural Seership.

The repetition of the verbal call is deliberate -- to the point of being awkward -- in this passage. Given Emma's penchant for dropping opaque hints, what can this mean?

The Call, Part Four: The Countess of Blessington's Magician

The Countess had a skrying crystal. Subsequently, either Richard Morrison, Philip Henry Stanhope, or both men, possessed said crystal. It was made for the Countess by her magician.

Who was that?

Although procured might be a better word than made, as we shall see, the answer first: it was John Varley, the Gore House Circle's resident astrologer.

To begin, a letter from the master of skrying, Frederick Hockley, to F. G. Irwin, a military officer and practicing skryer:

I will answer (your) last note first. Mr. Chevallier's Crystal is one of Burns' egg shaped 'Glass Receptables' as they were accurately termed in contradistinction to 'Crystals' which are made of natural rock crystal and beryl. All the so-called 'Crystals' I have seen at Burns being made of common glass are sheared and are very fatiguing to the eyes and indeed if much used would seriously affect them -- even with good 'seers' I would not advise you to buy it (of course this is confidential). My two factitious Crystals are made of powered Rock Crystal with Brass, the late Earl Stanhope gave Mr. Slater the Optician 4 (grains) of brass each for them. They were made expressly for me, but tho' great lenses they are by no means comparable to the real article -- my others are Rock Crystals.

I read this passage as suggesting both that there is a distinction to be made between skrying crystals and glass receptables (for ink? water? semen?), and between species of skrying crystal: there are both man-made skyring crystals (requiring powered rock crystal, brass and the skill of a glass-making optician) and natural skyring crystals, made of pure as-found rock crystal.

Judging by the NYT's coverage of the Morrison defamation suit, Morrison's crystal was of the latter variety. We have no description I'm aware of, of Philip Henry Stanhope's skrying crystal itself, but Hockley is clear, in his letter, that Philip Henry was involved in the production of man-made crystal using opticians (who were at the time both glass-makers and lens-grinders).

It seems to me -- and it's only a hunch, informed by stray bits of evidence -- that neither Morrison nor Stanhope were in the possession of the Countess of Blessington's skrying crystal.

John Varley, as I've mentioned in prior postings, is connected with both the Countess of Blessington and with the Stanhope family, and this connection has been noted before, by researchers and scholars working on the occult network operating in England in the first half of the nineteenth century.

What has not been noted -- at least not to my knowledge -- are three salient facts, that bear on the issue at hand. To wit:

1. Samuel Varley, John Varley's uncle, was an intimate friend and co-worker of Charles Stanhope, Philip Henry Stanhope's father. Samuel Varley actually lived and worked on the Stanhope estate at Chevening, and was the recipient of one thousand pounds when Charles Stanhope's will was proved: as much as Charles Stanhope left his mother in his will. Stanhope also left Samuel Varley "all my tools, machines and instruments, mathematical and astronomical, chymical and mechanical". And, further, Charles Stanhope was intent, in his will, that the money and the apparatus stay in the Varley family, indicating that should Samuel Varley predecease him, the money and instruments were to go to Samuel Varley's children.
2. Around 1800, Charles Stanhope and Samuel Varley laid out plans -- never realized -- to construct what would have been the largest optical telescope in the world at the time: 384 feet in length, with mirrored reflecting lens six feet in diameter, requiring all the engineering ingenuity those two men had to produce. And they had world-class skills: Stanhope is credited as the inventor of the iron-bed press, named for him, that revolutionized the production of books, and changed the economics of mass publishing beginning in the middle 1810s.
3. Cornelius Varley, Samuel Varley's nephew and John Varley's brother, was frequently in the workshops at Chevening, and was trained by his uncle in optics, becoming a skilled optician (in addition to a significant painter) with one optical invention (the so-called graphic telescope) and numerous improvements to the camera lucida, microscope and camera obscura to his credit. And Cornelius Varley was the recipient of all his uncle Samuel's trade secrets, which he bled into the pubic domain in the course of his life -- there are numerous reports of Cornelius' donations of "techniques" and "recipes" to the various scientific societies of which he was a member. And some of those -- not coincidentally -- had to do with the manufacture and use of brass.
4. Cornelius' son Cromwell Varley was both a world-famous telegraphy engineer and, not coincidentally, a Spiritualist of the first water, testifying -- as did our Emma -- before the Dialectical Society committee.

Cornelius Varley was in possession of Samuel Varley's trade secrets, and of the apparatus Samuel Varley and Charles Stanhope had constructed to build, among other things, their projected giant telescope, and he was a practicing optics engineer during his own lifetime.

It's almost a certainty, to my way of thinking, that Cornelius Varley made skrying crystals for his elder brother John, and that one of those crystals was the one given to the Countess of Blessington by her court magician, John Varley.

(As a side note, I refer interested readers to the telescope-viewing scene in Emma's Ghost Land, and ask them to re-read that scene with what we know about Stanhope and Varley's designs in mind...)

The Call, Part Three: Richard Morrison Predicts...

In 1861, Richard Morrison, known in astrological circles as Zadkiel, published a prediction in Zadkiel's Almanac, suggesting that "[t]he stationary position of Saturn will be very evil for persons born on or near the 26th August."

The aforementioned persons included the much-beloved Prince Consort, Albert, who obligingly died on 23 December 1861.

The Daily Telegraph for 21 January, 1862 made much of the connection between Morrison's pronouncement and the Albert's death, concluding by asking a question designed to produce response from its readers: who is this Zadkiel?

Rear Admiral Sir Edward Belcher (who, one imagines, was a bit tired of all this occult nonsense, as he had been responsible, in 1852-1854, for the search for the remains of the Sir John Franklin Arctic expedition, that touchstone of spirit mediumship), responded, writing (in part):

Is it your impression of this day that you say Who is this Zadkiel, and are there no means of ferreting him out and handing him up to Bow street (Magistrates Court) as a rogue and a vagabond? I will aid you on the scent by informing you that he stands as a Lieutenant on the Navy list; next that he has admirers at Greenwich Hospital (for wounded and disabled seamen and their families) who fancy him a prophet A1, and that his mischievous propensities are not solely involved with that foolish publication, Zadkiel's Almanac....His name is C. J. Morrison (sic)...he is the crystal globe seer who gulled many of our nobility about the year 1852....Making use of a boy under fourteen, or a girl under twelve, he pretended, by their looking into the crystal, to hold converse with the spirits of the Apostles, and to tell what was going on in any part of the world...

(We have already seen that Morrison used adolescent skryers for other purposes.)

Morrison sued for defamation, not surprisingly, and he won his case: he was awarded 20 shillings, indicating that while the court found him within his rights, all justice's sympathies were with Belcher and the Telegraph.

During the trial (the transcript of which I am in the process of obtaining), much evidence was adduced by the plaintiff, but the case revolved around: Zadkiel's skrying crystal. The New York Times coverage of the trial reports, as follows:

(Morrison) stated that the had heard of the wonderful (crystal) ball as in the possession of Lady Blessington and sold among her effects (when she died, bankrupt, in Paris in 1849). He himself bought it in 1849 from a London dealer in curiosities. Here the ball itself was produced and put in evidence. It was a rock crystal, three or four inches in diameter, with several flaws, handled by means of a ribbon, and carefully kept in a cushioned box....The plaintiff then went on to say that his son, a lad of thirteen years of age, was the first who professed to see visions in it; the scenes described to him were laid chiefly in the Arctic seas and appeared to relate to the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew. He had sent an account of these visions to the Athenaeum which had published it...(Plaintiff testified that) several persons of distinction had at different times desired to see the crystal, and it seems from the evidence to have been quite the rage at one time to engage Zadkiel and his crystal as an additional entertainment, at evening parties. The plaintiff ran over a long list of persons to whom, at their own request, he had exhibited the crystal. Among these figured Baron (Christian) Bunsen, (father of Ernest and Henry George de Bunsen), several countesses, a bishop, an archedeacon and a member of Parliament....

Morrison's attorney called the Earl of Wilton to the stand, who testified that he had consulted the crystal on several matters, and also called his friend Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton to the stand, where EBL copped his standard line about his occult investigations: that he was investigating these practices "to find the natural causes bu which strange and wondrous effects might be produced." Just the science, ma'am.

Zadkiel's crystal, Stanhope's crystal -- apparently not the same, and only one of them (but which one?) the possession originally of Lady Blessington, made for her by "her magician"...

The Call, Part Two: Virginia Woolf, Being Catty

The Bloomsbury folks, it seems to me, loved stories that made their Victorian forbears seem thick.

To book-end our investigation, here is an excerpt from Virginia Woolf's 1933 novel, Flush:

Woolf is of course getting her information, directly or indirectly, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's letters -- or is she?

Here is at least once source of Woolf's information, another letter of EBB's, this one to Mary Russell Mitford:

London is emptying itself, and the relief will be great in a certain way; for one gets exhausted sometimes. Let me remember whom I have seen.
Mrs. Newton Crosland, who spoke of you very warmly; Miss Mulock, who wrote 'The Ogilvies' (that series of novels), and is interesting, gentle, and young, and seems to have worked half her life in spite of youth; Mr. Field we have not seen, only heard of; Miss ----, no--but I am to see her, I understand, and that she is an American Corinna in yellow silk, but pretty. We drove out to Kensington with Monckton Milnes and his wife, and I like her; she is quiet and kind, and seems to have accomplishments, and we are to meet Fanny Kemble at the Procters some day next week. Many good faces, but the best wanting. Ah, I wish Lord Stanhope, who shows the spirits of the sun in a crystal ball, could show us that! Have you heard of the crystal ball? We went to meet it and the seer the other morning, with sundry of the believers and unbelievers--among the latter, chief among the latter, Mr. Chorley, who was highly indignant and greatly scandalised, particularly on account of the combination sought to be established by the lady of the house between lobster salad and Oremus, spirit of the sun. For my part, I endured both luncheon and spiritual phenomena with great equanimity. It was very curious altogether to my mind, as a sign of the times, if in no other respect of philosophy. But I love the marvellous. Write a word to me, I beseech you, and love me and think of me, as I love and think of you. God bless you. Robert's love.

The Call, Part One: Lord Stanhope's Crystal Ball

Tying together the threads Emma lays out for us -- Richard Morrison, Philip Henry Lord Stanhope, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Emma's calling to the Orphic Circle -- requires an act of imagination: no one left us the Circle's minute books.

There are many places we could begin to tie the threads together, but here is one place: a portion of a letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Fanny Haworth, written by EBB from Florence in June of 1853:

We did not go to Rome last winter, in spite of the spirits of the sun who declared from Lord Stanhope's crystal ball, you remember, that we should. And we don't go to England till next summer, because we must see Rome next winter, and must lie _perdus_ in Italy meantime. I have had a happy winter in Florence, recovered my lost advantages in point of health, been busy and tranquil, had plenty of books and talk, and seen my child grow rosier and prettier (said aside) every day. Robert and I are talking of going up to the monasteries beyond Vallombrosa for a day or two, on mule-back through forests and mountains. We have had an excursion to Prato (less difficult) already, and we keep various dreams in our heads to be acted out on occasion. Our favorite friend here is (Frederick) a brother of Alfred Tennyson's, himself a poet, but most admirable to me for his simplicity and truth. Robert is very fond of him. Then we like (American artist Hiram) Powers--of the 'Greek Slave'--Swedenborgian and spiritualist; and Mr. Lytton, Sir Edward's son, who is with us often, and always a welcome visitor. All these confederate friends are ranged with me on the believing side with regard to the phenomena, and Robert has to keep us at bay as he best can. Oh, do tell me what you can. Your account deeply interested me. We have heard many more intimate personal relations from Americans who brush us with their garments as they pass through Florence, and I should like to talk these things over with you. Paid mediums, as paid clairvoyants in general, excite a prejudice; yet, perhaps, not reasonably. The curious fact in this movement is, however, the degree in which it works within private families in America. Has anything of the kind appeared in England? And has the motion of the tables ever taken the form of alphabetical expression, which has been
the case in America? I had a letter from Athens the other day, mentioning that 'nothing was talked of there except moving tables and spiritual manifestations.' (The writer was not a believer.) Even here, from the priest to the Mazzinian, they are making circles. An engraving of a spinning table at a shop window bears this motto: '_E pur si muove!_' That's adroit for Galileo's land, isn't it? Now mind you tell me whatever you hear and see. How does Mrs. Crowe decide? By the way, I
was glad to observe by the papers that she has had a dramatic success.

D. D. Home (Mr. Sludge) has yet to arrive on the domestic scene, of course -- but what is of most interest here (aside from confirmation that Tennyson's interest in spiritualism (oh, how Hallam's death traumatized him), and EBL's in occultism, were transmitted within the family) is this crystal ball of Lord Stanhope's.

That, and the fact that EBB -- like so many of her contemporaries -- apparently does not associate the kid of divination she speaks of with the new phenomena of Modern Spiritualism. They are, clearly, of different categories.

The Orphic Circle, Out In Public

They didn't call themselves the Orphic Circle -- that's what Emma called them.

In public, they referred to themselves, if at all and only early on, as the Mercurii.

And when they appeared together, it was usually in this form.

This is Richard Morrison, a member of the Mercurii, puffing the Celestial Planispheres (1830) of another member of the Mercurii, Thomas Oxley.

Both Oxley (d. 1851) and Morrison (d. 1874) lived to see -- in part as a result of Morrison's decision to inject clairvoyants into their astrological investigations -- the transformation of what was a social-welfare society for working astrologers into a network of mesmerically-inclined, spirit-mad occult practitioners.

An Offering Of Sweet Savour

The Cannibal Club, which has a pivotal role to play -- as many marginal social networks do -- in bringing together Victorians from different classes and sociocultural backgrounds, apparently plays a role (or rather certain of its members do) in the life of our Emma.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Emma left behind, in the pages of the Unseen Universe, a fragmented, poorly-written and abruptly-terminated novella, The Mystery of No. 9 Stanhope Street, that I believe Emma wrote deliberately to connect her life with that of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, the minor Pre-Raphaelite painter.

It is of course possible or even probable that no such connection actually exists: that Emma knew of Roddam Spencer Stanhope, but he knew naught of her. But Emma's dark hints -- and she is a dark hinter -- almost always contain a kernel of truth; she prevaricates and embellishes and accentuates, but she doesn't seem to fabricate things.

Internal details from the novel suggest that, some time during the period of her life about which we know little -- roughly, from 1835 to 1855 -- Emma served as an artist's model in addition to working as an actress (the details of which are amply documented), for Pre-Raphaelite painters or their associates, with the knowledge and indeed the commercial connivance of her mother, Ann Sophia.

It was fairly common for the painters in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) to use actresses as models; GF Watts (who was Roddam Spencer Stanhope's mentor and companion) married the actress Ellen Terry to save her from the iniquities of theatre life, and despite the disparities in their ages.

And the timing -- we'd expect a member of the PRB to notice Emma at the theatre some time after 1844 -- is roughly right. Hunt, Millais and Rossetti are all doing significant work, involving artists' models, at this time, and we know -- from the scant biographical information Stirling (his first biographer, and the only reasonably available non-specialist treatment of him) provides us on Roddam Spencer Stanhope that RSS was studying with GF Watts beginning in 1850: leaving us a four-year window in which RSS could have met our Emma in one of the studios of Watts' cronies, which Stirling tells us he and Watts were in the habit of visiting, as they were in the habit of going to the theatre and sitting in the cheap seats.

RSS has, by 1855 when Emma vanishes to the Continent and then to New York, done no work of significance -- I believe his first public exhibition was in 1858, and his heyday, such as it is, begins with his participation in the painting of the Oxford Debating Union hall in 1857, and culminates in his work of the 1870s and 1880s. RSS was wealthy, asthmatic, and at loose ends in the early 1850s. And decidely single.

To talk about the PRB is to evoke -- in my mind anyway -- Algernon Charles Swinburne, who stood under the members of the PRB, painting the frescoes at the Oxford Debating Union hall, cracking jokes, reading poems, and occasionally playing tricks on people.

Swinburne is an old love of mine -- dating back to graduate school -- but he's more important in this context because he was the intimate friend of the man who casts a large shadow over the social networks Emma may have been connected with in the period 1835-1855: Richard Francis Burton.

I and others want to link Burton into the Orphic Circle, for a variety of reasons, and although Emma did not name him -- she could not, in her Sirius pieces, as (if Burton was a member of the Circle) he was still alive -- I believe we'll find evidence that Burton was a member of the Orphic Circle before long.

But, to talk of Burton -- in the 1860s, not the 1840s or 1850s,mind -- is to talk of Swinburne, and their expeditions together: mostly, into the dark places of drink (Swinburne's alcoholism became so damaging that he was taken in hand by Theodore Watts-Dunton and confined, for the last decades of his life, in Watts-Dunton's house in Putney), and alternative sexual practices.

Swinburne, like many of his generation, had been educated at Eton, where the rigorous corporate punishment program inculcated in him a life-long passion for birching: he liked being beaten, by women and by men.

And he liked writing about people being beaten -- flagellant pornography -- which he routinely shared with Burton (who most scholars believe was aggressively bisexual) and another close associate, Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, who at the time had the largest private collection of pornography in England, and who was instrumental in rehabilitating Burton in the 1860s, and getting Burton his foreign service appointments. Monckton Milnes as also an intimate of Dickens and Disraeli, and a student of mesmerism, which interested him largely for sexual reasons - the control of a pliant female or male subject for sexual purposes (which Emma will run into, in New York, in the late 1850s, during the first "free love" controversy.).

Burton, in 1863, was the instigator behind the founding of what he referred to as "a new religion" and "a refuge for Destitute Truth", the Anthropological Society of London. The ASL was a collection of anti-evolutionists (at least in so far as the human species were concerned), eugenicists, anthropologists, and what would have been called, a couple of decades or so later, sexologists -- people interested in the ethnology of sexual practices. Monckton Milnes and Swinburne were both members of the ASL.

The ALS was in the habit of holding board and committee meetings in the early afternoon, and convening general sessions for paper-reading after 9 PM that same evening, leaving a gap in the schedule that was filled with a dinner society that quickly coalesced around pornography and sexual ethnology, and referred to itself as The Cannibal Club.

The Cannibal Club is famous among students of pornography: a quick Google will give you more background that you want on the predilections of the Club's members.

What's interesting from our perspective is that there were significant open boundaries between the Cannibal Club and both the Theosophy Society and the Rosicrucian/occult circles in England.

Charles Carter Blake, the craniometrist/zoologist who was the ASL's curator and a member of the pornography-writing circle in the Cannibal Club subsequently became a prominent member of the TS and may in fact have known PB Randolph.

And Kenneth Mackenzie, intimate of Frederick Hockley, influencer of the Golden Dawn founders and author of the Royal Masonic Cyclopedia, was both a self-professed Cannibal Club member (see his entry below on the CC in the Cyclopedia) and (because Mackenzie was apparently a liar of some scale) recognized as a member by none other than Swinburne himself, with whom Mackenzie corresponded.

So what, right? Interesting chain of relationships, but what does it prove?

In the British Museum, there are pornographic works of Swinburne (I'm told) so graphic in their sadomasochistic detail that they may never see the light of day. The ones that have are graphic enough -- cruel, even vicious. Yet these men -- the Cannibal Club -- not only found these kinds of stories titillating, but also practiced flagellation and other alternative sexual practices on one another.

Some of the members of the Cannibal Club -- Milnes, James Plaisted Wilde -- were made peers; others, like John Studholme Hodgson, were made generals; others like Burton were made consuls; others like Swinburne came within a hair of being Poet Laureate of England.

And yet they had a secret, and a shared, passion for sadomasochism, catered to one another's needs, made the rounds of the London flagellant brothels together, subscribed to elaborate, expensive privately-printed pornography - and met for dinner regularly at Bartolini's Hotel in Leicester Square, where order was hammered on the collective dinner table (literally) with human bones, and where the catchecism of the Cannibal Club (written by Swinburne, but not published until after his death, by the noted literary forger TJ Wise, who did not forge this particular Swinburne poem) was recited, reading in part:

Preserve us from our enemies,
Thou who are Lord of suns & skies,
Whose meat & drink is flesh in pies
And blood in bowls!
Of thy sweet mercy, damn their eyes,
And damn their souls!

The cannibal of just behavior
Acknowledges the Lord his saviour,
With gifts of whose especial favour
He hath been crammed,
To whom an offering of sweet savour
Are all the damned.

If this sort of circle could flourish -- for years, from 1863 until 1869 -- in the heart of London, attracting wealthy and powerful men, none of whom (with the possible exceptions of Burton and Swinburne) were ever materially touched by the scandal of being associated with outre sexual practices, does Emma's story of being a clairvoyante for a similarly shadowy group of occult practitioners -- some of who may later become Cannibals -- seem far-fetched?

Not to me, it doesn't.

Emma -- as John Patrick Deveney points out -- loses her right to be considered in the vanguard of the modern occult movement for one reason: she has nothing to do with the link between sexuality and magic. She cannot treat with sex effectively, and certainly can't embrace the idea of a procreative, powerful sex-magic. But sex, in fact, is something that overshadows Emma's entire life. That something terrible happened to Emma, sexually, early in her life seems beyond dispute. That she saw herself as fallen, equally so.

That she felt herself fallen, degraded, by 1854 or so, she tells us herself. What happened? We will never know -- the hints in The Wildfire Club are as close as we will ever get to knowledge.

In the hands of men with the views, needs and predilections of the sort we know permeated the Cannibal Club, is it plausible than a young girl from Lambeth, who could play a mean piano, had no pedigree, no father (and possibly a mercenary mother known to pimp out her daughter to artists), and who was a fantastic mesmeric subject, would find herself -- say it -- raped after a clairvoyante session by a group of men?

It certainly is.

And that she kept silent while these men were alive, afraid --as she says in the Autobiography in reference to one of them (Dickens, I'd bet money on it, but that supposition is for another night, another post) -- of their wealth and power -- does that make sense?

Does to me.

And that she felt compelled, throughout her life, to drop hints about these events, her connections to the powerful, the darkness of the psychic wound she carried with her, to confess by inches, and opaquely -- does that make sense?

It will to any one who has ever been, truly, a victim.

Emma And Her Stalkers: Some Delanco Data

I believe that Emma claimed to have been stalked, twice, in her life: once by the etheric double of John Gallagher, and once by the mysterious Boston spiritualist she mentions in the Delanco incident in the Autobiography.

I at once recognised the blue-inked missive, and having perused the rhapsody it contained, I found " the Messsiah " was still hovering about in the neighbourhood for the answer he implored me to write and leave in a certain indicated spot. Without a moment's delay I hastened off to a neighbouring estate close by, occupied by a worthy magistrate, and an excellent friend of my own and my mother's. I had already acquainted Mr. Fletcher (our magisterial friend) of my persecution, and he was therefore not surprised when I laid my morning's complaint before him.

Acting under the authority of the New Jersey law, in which our home, at Delanco was situated, Mr. Fletcher bid me hold up my hand, and swear that I considered my life in danger from this fanatic. This I attested with equal truth and candour, whereupon the " Son of Man " was at once sought out, arrested, and brought before the magistrate (Mr. Fletcher), charged with having trespassed on my grounds for illegal purposes.

To the first part of this charge he pleaded guilty ; the second part he denied, meekly urging that he had brought his own provisions with him, whereupon he produced some dry bread and a pot of honey, which he affirmed was the only sustenance he allowed himself, in order to follow the example of his great prototype " John the Baptist," all except in the matter of the locusts.

Being fined, warned severely, and forbidden to reappear in that district again for a specified time, he was discharged, and before the expiration of his time of taboo I had embarked in the " North Star," bound for California, and my dear mother was safe under the protection of good friends at Concord, Massachusetts.

I admit at this point to being somewhat confused as to whether this is a description of yet another John Gallagher incident, or of the culmination of a separate stalking.

However, I have been able to gather two pieces of useful information about this event:

• The index to the official record of indictments in Burlington County, Burlington County Indictments, 1732 - 1897 contains no reference to any legal action involving EHB under any of her names, either as plaintiff or as respondent/defendant
• Thomas S. Fletcher, whose family owned an estate in Delanco, was a justice of the peace in Burlington County from 1860-1865

That dates the incident in any case to the proper period -- the period consistent with (a) Ann Sophia's presence in EHB's household and (b) her trip by boat to Calfornia. Since she left for California on the North Star some time in late October or early November of 1863 (15 days minimum via the North Star to Panama, overland to the Pacific Coast, and another 15 to 20 days to San Francisco via a different ship, possibly the Yankee Blade), we can even further refine the timeframe for this incident - between January 1, 1860 and November 30, 1863.

The state of New Jersey's archives do not contain the Justice of the Peace record books for Burlington County, so unless we find those, we're not likely to get much more detail on this particular episode in EHB's life.

Update (thanks, Jeannie!): In the prison log books for the Burlington County, NJ jail, one finds the following entries:

John Gallagher-July 6th, 1863(arresting officer Philip Slacks) malicious mishief-1 day in jail
John Gallagher-Aug 24th, 1863(arresting officer C.R. Schyler) malicious mischief-4 days

No way to know if it's our John Gallagher, at this point. Once again, circumstantially, Emma's account checks out.

Margaret, Again

It now appears that the Frances Jackson, age 50, with whom Margaret Floyd (age 10) is living (in the Manchester area, in Brook Street in Salford to be specific) in the 1841 UK census is not Margaret's eldest sister Frances Ann Floyd, but instead Margaret's aunt, Ann Sophia's sister, Frances Broomfield Jackson, b. Rochester, Kent, in August of 1796.

Additionally, the GENUKI data suggests pretty clearly that Ann Sophia must have been pregnant with her first child, Frances Ann (presumably named for her sister), when she and Ebenezer married in December of 1819. Given a 20-day average gap between birth and christening in that period, Frances Ann was born circa 30 July 1819.

It's a mystery to me why Ann Sophia listed Liverpool as her birthplace in the 1871 census, when Frances Broomfield's sister Ann was, like Frances, born to Richard and Ann Broomfield, in Rochester.

The sea, the sea is what ties it all together.