Sir John Franklin, Wella Anderson, Social Network Speed, and the Economics of Modern Spiritualism

I am not sure how often Emma refers to Sir John Franklin, but...it's often.

Preparing some of the materials for the web site tonight, I had occasion to skiffle through Google, looking for information about Emma's neighbors in Vassal Terrace, Chelsea, in 1860. The Ann Sophia menage, including William and Margaret's husband, Gilbert Wilkinson, are recorded in the 1871 UK census as living at 6 Vassal Terrace. Next door -- at number 5, I presume -- was a boarding house, with various and sundry persons of interest in residence. Isabella Burt, the author of several obscure books on the geography and urban institutions of Kensington and environs, was one of the boarding house lodgers, and another was William Duguid, listed in the census as a veterinary surgeon.

I confess Duguid attracted me initially because he shares a surname with David Duguid, the famous painting medium, and the employee of Emma's biographer, James Robertson. As I sense Emma had a substantial Scottish network that as yet I can't map -- and as her possible connections with the HBofL may be through this Scottish social network -- I dug into our man William a bit.

It turns out that William Duguid was a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Science (entitling him to M.R.C.V.S after his name), and professor of Veterinary Physiology at the Albert Veterinary College in Bayswater: an institute above-board enough to have attracted his Grace the Duke of Newcastle to its Presidency.

It also appeared -- and here's a shred of dessicated carrion caught in my teeth this evening -- that William Duguid was an ordinary seaman who served on the Price Albert, the ship sent in 1845 to look for Sir John Franklin's expedition. Ahah, I said to myself, but ten minutes later I realized my William Duguid was six years old or so in 1845, and not likely to have been on that expedition....

Off to the genealogical databases....squirrel, squirrel....two William Duguids of my William's age in the Scots censuses, one of whom is living with a David....nope, nothing. Just a surgeon. Just a neighbor.

Context-switch to David Duguid, and do what I should have done a few months back: read the introduction Hay Nisbet wrote to Duguid's trance-delivered Hafed, Price of Persia. And there I find the payoff.

Nisbet, writing about the difficulties of disproving fraud early on in Duguid's career as a painting medium (a fairly rare manifestation of mediumship at the time), says:

Orooso is probably Owosso, a town which was then and is now somewhat off the beaten track.

You'd need to add two zeroes, I would think, at least to the figure paid for the Wella Anderson painting to get 2009 purchasing power equivalence.

But what's noteworthy about this little gem -- and Hay Nisbet's introduction to Hafed is full of little gems -- is the sheer speed and distance with which practices, tests, tips (and quite possibly, in other contexts, tricks) traveled within the social network that was Modern Spiritualism. A letter from a Spiritualist in a backwater Michigan town, and an entire practice is transported and deployed in Scotland. Innovation travels fast, even in the mid-Victorian period.

And I'd imagine we can look on Wella Anderson in a somewhat clearer light now. Tens of thousands of dollars for a spirit painting -- that'd pay your rent in Manhattan in 1870 for a good while.

By comparison, Emma at this time, in Boston, was charging between 10 cents and a quarter a head to attend her lectures on galvanic medicine, and she was failing to fill venues of a hundred seats or so. William was selling his Home Batteries for a few dollars each. It would have taken her, by my estimate, 400 lectures or so to gross $3000.

Hypotheses On The Orphic Circle

I'm posting less frequently at the moment because I'm trying to get the web site into some kind of decent shape.

Meantime, there are new documents: Hypotheses On The Orphic Circle, the narrow Orphic Circle social network diagram and its wide version.

I have also begun writing the code to perform the linguistic analysis of Emma's texts, so we can begin to get at those nagging questions of authorship. One of the by-products of this work will be a searchable database of all Emma's texts, as well as an automatic concordance generator. We'll also be able (assuming I can find the referenced sources) to confirm or reject the charges of plagiarism leveled at Emma at various times.

Keep those cards and letters coming.

The Suspension Of The Western Star

There have been enough references in the secondary press to the termination of The Western Star as a result of the Boston Fires of 1872 that I thought it would be worth publishing Emma's own notice.

While I'm curious to know whether Emma actually had shareholders, in the technical sense of that term, in The Western Star, the rhewtoric of the final paragraph is critical: resources exhausted, encomiums received but no financial recompense, suspended but not totally foreclosed. This is a stance Emma has recourse to, time and again -- not because it's convenient, but because, almost certainly, it is true. Try what she might, as she might, she led a tenuous financial existence, supporting her mother, and then her husband -- the first purely parasitic (and perhaps abusive?), the second somewhat symbiotic, the both in need of, and eventually supplied with, annuities. I wonder if any of us can imagine what Emma must have struggled with, every day, at the maslovian ground level, as she executed her mission?

Making Ends Meet

This, from the back pages of the Dcember 1872 issue of Emma's Western Star

We have seen Emma in this position before, as for example with her endorsement of Elizabeth French's galvanic medicine. In this case, Emma is endorsing -- by means of a letter, putatively published in a newspaper, a cure for opium addiction promoted by Dr. S. B. Collins of Laporte, Indiana. Collins' cure, as far as I can tell, was a patent medicine made primarily from opoids, and Collins was a masterful self-promoter, publishing a book and an house rag called Theriaki that he circulated widely to promote his cure

That Emma was periodically obliged to endorse products, either for favors or for money (in this instance, for Collins' advertisement) is not surprising, but it is also clearly something she does not do as a matter of course -- something she does as a last resort. This raises, again, the question of how Emma got her living as a spiritualist propagandist, and the question of the role of money in Emma's life - how she got it, how she spent it, why it was always, from her perspective, in short supply, and why it was that she never figured out how to make her commercial business model scale. Pat Deveney's comments to me have got me thinking a lot about this -- why it was that the second, rather than the first, generation of Spiritualists (I am thinking particularly of Emma's friend Ida Ellis) would be the ones to take on the questions of the business of spiritualism head-on, and figure out how to make money, how to do well while doing good.