Henry Hardinge's Letters To His Wife

Just finished a run through Henry Hardinge's letters to his wife, Emily Jane, written between 1844 and 1847, while Hardinge was in India, and edited into a fine edition by Bawa Satinder Singh.

They are, decidedly, the cure for any Henry Hardinge-the-occultist-and-mistress-keeper illness.

The upright, right-thinking, principled, wife-children-and-rural-pile-loving nature of Sir Henry Hardinge comes through in every letter.

Since Singh spells out pretty clearly in his crisp introduction where Hardinge's papers can be found, people committed to drawing this link can go source hunting, but I'm convinced after this read of Hardinge's letters that there is no connection whatever between Henry Hardinge and Emma Hardinge Britten, and that Henry Hardinge is none of the four men whose identities Emma obscured in her own writing.

Next stop: Charles Hardinge's letters, also edited by Singh. Bless the man.

Infidel Spiritualism: Emma's Fatal Mistake

A note from a colleague (thanks, Leslie) about Timothy Larsen's Crisis of Doubt spurs me to post this interesting letter, received by J. M. Peebles while in England in 1870, and included in J. O. Barrett's biography of Peebles, Spiritual Pilgrim.

In this observation -- that Emma's strident anti-Christian rhetoric (as early as the late 1860s) was marginalizing her among those who believed Christianity and Spiritualism were reconcilable discourses -- there is something important, I think: something that may go some way to explaining why Emma failed, ultimately, to get a seat at the table when Spiritualism was institutionalized, on both sides of the Atlantic, beginning in the 1890s.

I have been thinking of Emma's biography as having the title "The Propagandist", but perhaps "Infidel Spiritualist" is more a propos.

Stanhope's Tutor

Several occult scholars (and yours truly as well) have claimed (I expect by repeating one another) that Philip Henry Stanhope was tutored by John Varley's father, Richard Varley (a man about whom we know nothing, by the way).

Ten minutes' reading in Lady Hester Stanhope's biography tonight reveals that Philip Henry was educated entirely at home, and by Charles Stanhope's secretary, Jeremiah Joyce, who was one of the men indicted for "encompassing the death of the King" in the famous treason trials of 1794, when Philip Henry was 13.

What Philip Henry did for education after Joyce went to the Tower (not for long, but he didn't return to Stanhope's menage, as far as I can determine), I don't know.

Maybe that's when Richard Varley stepped in...

Emma's Four Men

There are four men in Emma's life about whom we'd like to know a great deal more:

1. the man waiting at home, to whom Emma suggests in her Autobiography she is engaged, and with whom she breaks in 1856, encouraging him to marry a woman who has made him a proposal of marriage (which Emma has learned from her spirit guides, from remote viewing, or from astral travel - she does not say).
2. the "baffled sensualist" who ends Emma's career on the London stage, and who keeps Emma from the time of her last performance in London in mid-1854 until she bolts for Paris with the Wallack Company in 1855.
3. the "statesman" for whom Emma acts as amanuensis (as she claims in the Banner of Light in 1858)
4. her first husband (since Emma alleges an early marriage at several points in her career, and claims to be a widow at the time of her marriage to William Britten in 1870)

I've suggested elsewhere that:

1. the leading candidate for #1, based on the internal evidence of Emma's novel, The Mystery of No. 9 Stanhope Street, is Roddam Stanhope Spencer, the pre-Raphaelite painter.
2. the best guess for #2 is, at present, Charles Dickens.
3. #3 is a distortion of her relationship with Edward Bulwer Lytton.

That leaves us with #4.

I've said before that I think Emma lied about a marriage before her marriage with William. She may even have lied to William about it; certainly, she was in print, before the time of her marriage, with claims to a prior marriage; and she had herself listed herself as a widow in the registry on the day she married William in 1870.

People have wanted -- still want, I think -- to have Emma marrying a Hardinge, despite the fact that we can find her, in the historical record, as Miss Emma Harding and Miss Emma Hardinge, before she adopts the titular Missus. The prosaic, and likely explanation -- that she adopted the Mrs. because it made it easier for her to travel in American (as she did) unchaperoned -- doesn't seem....something... enough for people, I guess. E. J. Dingwall made it a fraudulent "mystical marriage" to get around the fact that no records of any real marriage could be found, and because he needed a deep psychic wound to explain Emma's obsession with "outcast women" and her apparent distaste for sex, but that's special pleading, at best.

Granted, Emma went out of her way, in my opinion, to permit people to assume associations between herself with the family of Viscount Hardinge. When she added the 'e' to Harding, she did so not merely because it made her more English, but because it suggested an association with the family of the man who'd been Governor-General of India (1844-48), Commander-in-Chief of the British armed forces (1853-56) and British Field Marshall (1855), and who was well know internationally.

But she never made the connection explicitly.

An interesting example of a story by Emma, in print, suggesting but declining to make explicit a connection between herself and English nobility, comes from a volume (thanks, Michael) entitled The Encyclopedia of Death and Life In The Spirit-World (1895), edited by J. R. Francis, the manager of the Progressive Thinker publishing operation in Chicago. The story by Emma, entitled "A Vision by Emma Hardinge Britten" is available here, but I'll quote the relevant section verbatim:

He was a man whom no description can fully represent to the inhabitants of the western continent, for he was of a class unknown in American experiences -- a peer of the British realm; the elder brother of a wealthy, noble and far-descended house, and marked actor in that peculiar drama which is only played amongst the members of the British aristocracy.

You could not follow me, my American friends, were I to attempt for you a description of the stately earl and his peculiar sphere of action; happy for you you cannot; for the sum of all is told when I translate his life in this: His birth, position, the law of primogeniture, and other specialities, had manufactured a rich nobleman and a capacious mind into a bad man, notorious for his enormous gallantries in public life, and his equally enormous tyrannies in private life. This man had lived for self, and used time, talents, wealth and station, for no other purpose than the gratification of self and selfish passions....

In my youth I had known this man. I had often read Shakespeare to him, sang and played for him; and, despite some awe with which his singularly stately presence inspired me, I returned his regard for me with perhaps more of interest than the young and innocent generally yielded to him. My full understanding of his character was a revelation of after years. Since I have been in America, the journals of home have brought the intelligence of the great man's transit into "the land of rest".

I had become a believer in Spiritualism about a year; and then, as often since, had wondered why that spirit never sought communion with the girl who remembered him kindly, and with whom dark shadows of wrong had never been associated.

Assuming Emma is dating the event accurately (in 1857 or 1858, after she had been "a believer in Spiritualism for about a year"), there are some interesting clues in this narrative:

• a wealthy, noble and far-descended house would rule out the Hardinges immediately; Viscount (not Earl) Hardinge was enobled; his father was a clergyman, and although Henry Hardinge's son Charles Stewart did inherit his father's title, it's more than a stretch to view Charles Stewart as "the elder brother" (which he was) of such a house. And Charles Stewart's younger brother, Arthur Edward, spent his entire career in the military, and was Equerry to Queen Victoria -- again, hardly a picture of licentiousness and self-indulgence.
• lived for self, and used time, talents, wealth and station, for no other purpose than the gratification of self and selfish passions would also rule out Henry Hardinge, who spent all but about four years of his life in strenuous government service. It would rule out Charles Stewart Hardinge, who was his father's secretary, an MP, under-secretary for war, and an accomplished amateur artist. It would rule out Bulwer-Lytton (who was not an eldest brother, but who otherwise fits the description fairly well), as Lytton, too, performed singularly strenuous government service, while leaving a literary legacy that, if it doesn't put him in the first rank of Victorian writers, certainly puts him in the second rank. It would rule out John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, the painter, who -- while he had done no work of consequence by the mid-1850s, was studying seriously.
• since I have been in America, the journals of home have brought the intelligence of the great man's transit into "the land of rest" could rule in Henry Hardinge, who died in 1856, but certainly rules out his son Charles Stewart (d. 1894), Bulwer Lytton (d. 1873), and Roddam Spencer Stanhope (d.1908).

On balance, there is however one figure in Emma's life -- a figure she names in other materials of roughly contemporary date -- that her vague description does fit, and that is Philip Henry Stanhope.

• a wealthy, noble and far-descended house: Philip Henry was the 4th Earl Stanhope, and was indeed an earl, jiving with Emma's description. The Stanhope family is indeed a "wealth, noble and far-descended house", stemming from the line of the Earls of Chesterfield in the late 1600s. Philip Henry was 4th Viscount Stanhope of Mahon, and 4th Baron Stanhope of Elvaston, before succeeded to his ultimate peerage on his father's death. But he was an only son, from Charles Stanhope's second marriage.
• lived for self, and used time, talents, wealth and station, for no other purpose than the gratification of self and selfish passions fits Philip Henry Stanhope, as far as we have biographical information on him, to a tee, in my estimation. Stanhope spent his life wandering, experimenting, and enjoying himself, leaving as a legacy his ambiguous role in the Caspar Hauser affair, his love of skrying, and a son, Philip Henry, who as the fifth Earl Stanhope would do some work towards redeeming his father by becoming a decent historian.
• since I have been in America, the journals of home have brought the intelligence of the great man's transit into "the land of rest". Stanhope died in March of 1855. The timing is not quite right, is it? But it's close.

Of course, this is just Emma, telling a story, late in her life, when she was telling other stories, and when she was -- as far as I can see -- marginalized within in the Spiritualism movement in England because of her position on various issues associated with institutionalization, marginalized within the Spiritualism movement in the US because she was in England, and (with very good reason) bitter about where she found herself. It proves nothing, this story -- nothing about Stanhope, and certainly nothing about Henry Hardinge, though the timing, on reflection, may help to explain a few things about that critical period from mid-1854 until mid-1855 (which I'll come back to in another post).

What's most troubling, when all is said and done, about what Emma does hint about her relationships with famous men, in this and other printed accounts, is this: there's nothing she tells us about these figures that she could not have learned from reading the Times, or having a good gossip with any well-connected figure in mid-Victorian London.

Flaxen Ringlets

Returning to an older thread...

I've had in my possession for a while a poem by Charles Hervey, about the London theatre of the 1840s, called "L'Embarras Du Choix". It includes a stanza worth quoting:

I love the Adelphi (Ned loquitur still,
There's no theatre like it - none - go where you will,
Not one house where so hearty a laugh you'll enjoy;
To which Echo replies, "I believe you, my boy."
Then the ladies, enchanting, agreeable creatures,
Most wickedly tempting in figures andf features,
Celest, who though she does assume roles celestial,
Is, notwithstanding, a beauty terrestrial,
Woolgar, from whom, when she does as a man dress,
Wright learns how to settle accounts with his laundress,
And whose pretty eyes and luxuriant hair
Have made more than one feel what Pat terms 'mighty quare.'
Emma Hardinge - a blonde - with blue eyes and small feet,
Ellen Chaplin - a brunette - and then, to complete
My selection, in Harvest Home you may discern her,
A nice little actress the play-bills call Turner.

The poem appears in Ainsworth's Magazine for 1848, amidst the materials surrounding the first publication (in serial form) of William Harrison Ainsworth's occult-influenced novel Crichton.

How Charles Hervey, a self-described "habitue" of the theatre, writer and raconteur, knew Emma has yet to be determined, but I do note in passing that Hervey was intimately familiar with Parisian theatre, having written several books on the subject (none of which, unfortunately, contain any reference to Emma), and that Hervey and Bulwer Lytton worked together at the New Monthly Magazine. No one's bothered to scribble up even a summary of Hervey's life, so that thread will have -- for the time being at least -- to remain unexplored.

I have sat on this poem, because I was unable to explain that phrase: "a blonde."

When we recovered the only known image of Emma as an actress -- from her performance as Queen of the Wilys in the Phantom Dancers in 1847 -- it did not appear, from the impressions we have, anyway -- that she was a blonde at that time.

Then, tonight, looking for something completely different, I stumble across this, in W. J. Colville's Universal Spiritualism (1906):

Another interesting experience of mine dates back to the autumn of 1899, shortly before my first visit to Australia. I had long known Mrs. Emma Harding Britten, but my first interview with her was in 1877, at a lecture delivered in Manchester, when she was a middle-aged woman, dressed in much the same style as she continued to adopt till she finally withdrew from the public platform. Since her passing to spirit life, this earnest worker has occasionally made herself distinctly known to me, both on and off the platform, and in November, 1899, I distinctly saw, in connection with a most forceful realization of her close proximity, the likeness of a radiant maiden with light golden curls, somewhat resembling the earliest pictures of Mrs. Richmond when she was Cora Hatch, but in no way suggesting Mrs. Britten to me by appearance. I cold never have understood the vision had I not visited Mrs. Wilkinson (Mrs. Britten's sister), about a month later, and, while her guest in Manchester, been show a picture taken many years ago, representing Emma Hardinge in youthful costume as "Queen of the Fairies". This picture represents the young lady who afterwards became Mrs. Britten in flaxen ringlets, and in every way precisely as she showed herself to me on the occasion of my vision.

I think this does nicely for us in two respects: it demonstrates, as far as I am concerned, that Margaret Floyd Wilkinson was in possession, prior to her death and the dispersal of her papers and Emma's papers, of a lithograph (not a photograph) of Emma as Queen of the Wilys, and that Emma was -- at the time of that performance, anyway -- sporting blonde...excuse me, flaxen....locks.

Emma, Losing Control

Emma and William founded The Two Worlds Publishing Co. Ltd. in Manchester in 1886 (I believe) and less than a year later began publishing The Two Worlds, a weekly Spiritualist paper, edited by Emma, that quickly became one of the top 5 Spiritualist papers by circulation and influence. By early 1892, Emma was out -- apparently, forced out -- of the editor's chair, under acrimonious circumstances, replaced by E. W. Wallis, a tea merchant and medium, who edits the paper until 1899, when he moves to the editorship ofLight.

Emma, being Emma, put herself immediately back in the editor's chair elsewhere, launching and conducting The Unseen Universe for a year -- herself and sister Margaret as the sole contributors -- until pressure of work, and financial distress, forced that paper's closure.

Emma offered typically self-oriented reasons for her departure from The Two Worlds: that her viewpoint was too internationalist, and specifically that she gave too much space and attention to American Spiritualist material.

But Logie Barrow, in his excellent Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians 1850-1910 gives us another, frankly more convincing, reason: the melding of Spiritualism, in the midlands and north of England, with ILP-style socialism. That would explain much -- Emma was not a political ideologue, and saw her revolution as spiritual and institutional in the religious sense, rather than a secular political fight. If she had a political credo, it was one deeply informed by American-style individualist democracy and the great-man theory of history.

Barrow's explanation would also go a long way to explaining how a demure Two Worlds advertisement of 1894...

could become, in 1895, this:

It leads the van (unfurl flag, begin chant). People's Popular....huh? The phrase "infantile disorder" springs to mind.

Emma, Performing (Again)

Heavy sigh. In my last post, I neglected to mention the famous spirit-designed window blind fastener delivered by the spirits via Emma to one Frank Chase, and described in Modern American Spiritualism and somewhat less glowingly in the Athenaeum magazine for August 13, 1870.

Frank Chase held three window-related patents: #13300 for a window shutter, issued in July of 1855, #34739 for an improvement in blind and shutter fastening, issued in 1862 and #671756 for a window shutter, issued in 1901. Clearly, Emma delivered him the design for the improvement and blind and shutter fastening.

Alas, there is no trace to be found in any depository library of the pamphlet he wrote about this invention, The Spiritual Invention, although other references besides Emma's can be found to that document, indicating pretty clearly that it was, at one time, known and available.

What troubles me, as I dig through this sort of material, is the hidden self-promoting edge of the thing. The patent in question issued on March 25, 1862, a Tuesday. Emma's letter, as reproduced in MAS, is dated April 5, 1862, a Saturday 11 calendar days and 8 business days later - about enough time for her to receive a letter from Chase, and post a letter to the Banner of Light. Yet she is entirely disingenuous about timing in her note (as it is reproduced in MAS), writing "A few weeks later, my correspondent informed me that the money (to produce the invention) was readily obtained, and the patent granted; that the spiritual machine is now in successful operation and great demand, and can be had of Mr. Frank Chase...." In this case, "[a] few weeks later" should actually be read as "just the other day..." This is Emma-in-miniature: accurate in the main, distorting the details to suit her purposes of the moment.

This is Emma the propagandist.

Emma, Performing

A question from a friend, a propos of the review of one of her 1860s UK trance lectures that I posted earlier this week: what did Emma do, as a medium? What did it look like?

Leaving aside Emma's own claims about the breadth of her mediumistic abilities, and focusing on the independent historical record, a brief precis of her career as a medium per se would run as follows. From her conversion in 1856 until the end of her life, Emma practiced - publicly at least -- only two sorts of mediumship: (1) a brief period, in New York, from mid-1856 to perhaps as late as the end of 1857, as a classic test medium, under the auspices of Horace Day's Society for Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge (which folded in 1857) followed by (2) a longer period from her as-yet-not-precisely-dated Troy, NY trance lecture of 1857 until the early 1880s, as a trance lecturer. While she claimed at various times to have a wide range of mediumistic gifts -- including automatic writing and psychometry -- she practiced publicly in more limited ways, as far as I can determine. Her brief stint as a test medium was in the period prior to the rage for direct voice mediumship: as far as we know, her test medium sessions employed alphabet cards and planchettes. Contemporary reports of the test sessions held at the SDSK tend to confirm this. As I have noted in prior postings, it seems clear to me that she ceased to practice as a test medium after becoming embroiled in a local (NY) scandal that was given wider airing during the public drama surrounding the Hatch divorce case, during which Emma was accused of exerting her power over her sitter, during a session, to in effect extort an offer of marriage form the sitter. Whether this in fact happened is beyond our ability to determine. That this accusation dogged her until the late 1870s is undeniable.

Her transition to trance lecturer seems, to me, to be quite natural when we consider that her closest influence at the time was Elizabeth J. French, who was herself a practicing trance medium. While she frequently lectured, from the early 1860s onward, on pre-prepared topics that were entirely conventional addresses (in various catalogs of the day, Emma is listed as often as a "regular speaker" as she is as a trance speaker), when she gave trance lectures, these were of two sorts: (a) lectures on topics of her choosing or the choosing of her sponsors, and (b) lectures in response to questions or positions prepared by a committee formed, ad hoc, of audience members. Emma's lectures were often described as such in surviving newspaper advertisements, as in this one from the New York Herald for April of 1858 (note the "Miss").

This latter sort of trance lecture was, in effect, a kind of test mediumship, as Emma describes in her Autobiography

As this committee were stationed in a small room only separated from the antechamber I occupied by a slight partition, and they were over half-an-hour engaged in discussion, I had, what may be deemed either the pain or pleasure, as the case might be, of hearing their arguments pro and con. All I can now remember is, that a certain Mr. Hunt, whom I was subsequently informed was the "Queen's chemist," was appointed as chairman of that committee, and the last words I heard him utter prior to the committee's return to the audience were, "We'll break her down anyway, and that's all we have to do." The subject selected, I find by the newspaper reports I sent afterwards to my mother, was "The Geological Formation of the Earth and its Ultimate Destiny."

Again the lecture was listened to attentively, and loud applause, in which the committee, as I was afterwards informed, joined, greeted me at its close, but the end was not yet.

Sitting opposite the platform, in the front row, was one whom I subsequently learned was a Jewish Rabbi. On either side of him sat some twelve of his scholars, and it was he it seemed, who was expected by the oppdsition, to "break me down anyway." This gentleman, rising from his seat, asked permission of the audience to put a few consecutive questions to the speaker, and that without any interruption. A loud burst of applause being taken as acquiescence, the rabbi proceeded sternly to ask me a number of purely biblical questions.

After about seven or eight minutes' interlocution of this kind, the gentleman, turning to the audience with a profoundly sarcastic air, remarked, that "These Spirits of the lady's did not know much, as, if they did, instead of answering in orthodox biblical fashion, they would have known that such and such passages, which he repeated, were false translations. In the original Hebrew," he added, "they were so-and-so, and the translations were rendered otherwise, either to suit the opinions of the time, or on account of the translators' ignorance of the ancient Hebrew language."

I cannot now recall the passages to which my opponent referred, nor do I believe that they were indicated in the newspaper reports, but I do remember the nature of the answer which the Spirit power that held me—like a vice— impelled me to give, and it was to this effect : That the sentences quoted were inscribed after the ancient mode of of Hebrew writing, in which the vowels were omitted, and that the methods of pointing employed would render them susceptible of being translated in six different ways ; consequently it was the learned scholar who was endeavouring to impose upon an unlearned audience, and not the young woman who stood before them as the mouthpiece and messenger of those who "did know Hebrew, both ancient and modern."

The rhetoric in this passage -- suggesting as it does that Emma could only recall the subject and material of her trance lectures if newspaper accounts of them existed, since she herself had no memory of what she spoke while under control -- is common throughout her career, and a common position for trance lecturers to adopt.

In terms of the stagecraft of her lectures, reviewers were struck by Emma's physical presence throughout her career (as for example in this review from 1870) often to the exclusion of any discussion whatsoever of her actual address. She seems to have been -- particularly when silent, at the start of a lecture -- commanding.

By 1863, when she went for the first time to California, Emma was mixing her repertoire: giving traditional audience-driven trance lectures on occasion, and speaking on pre-publicized topics as well. These fixed-topic addresses may also have been cast, at the time, as inspired -- the historical record is silent on this. But it seems to me, from sampling her advertisements from the 1860s to 1880s, that it became increasingly rare, as her notoriety grew, for her to give audience-driven trance lectures -- the last of these (outside the UK, at any rate) may have been during her 1878-9 Australia and New Zealand tour.

What seems to me to be unique about Emma's mediumship (and I am no expert in this area) is that, so far as I am aware, Emma never named, during her lectures, her controls (though she did credit various spirits, including her father and Sir John Franklin, in written forums, later in her life). Critics found this maddening, as it prevented Emma from being attacked, as it were, from behind -- by impuning her inspirational sources. As late as her Sydney lectures in 1878, according to this extensive review, she was fending off demands from her audience for attribution.

Although I believe Emma continued to perform trance lectures in the UK after 1881, her public career as a trance medium ended, I think, in August of 1880, when during a lecture she opined on the role mesmeric energy played in the then-all-the-buzz 40-day fast of Dr. Henry Tanner in Clarendon Hall in New York City. Unfortunately, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, Tanner was in the audience during the lecture, and at the close of Emma's remarks, he stood and refuted her remarks in no uncertain terms. This was, for Emma, tantamount to exposure, and -- for no reason other than intuition -- I have always linked this public humiliation to her decision to leave the US almost immediately thereafter.

I think of Emma as a very circumspect medium. She chose, after her brush with exposure in 1857, to practice a type of mediumship that was both consistent with her skills as an actress, and unlikely to attract much in the way of organized debunking (relative to cabinet sessions, elongation, psychokinetics, slate-writing, etc.) and she minimized her exposure within that subgenre by participating in audience-driven trance speaking less and less as she became more and more famous (and hence, more and more of a target). This was, after all, not just her calling -- it was her livelihood, and she was carrying her mother's and her husband's economic weight, as well as her own.

Sir Charles Lennox Wyke

People who've taken a look at my notes on the Orphic Circle know that I favor Sir Charles Lennox Wyke for participation in the Orphic Circle (in no small part because he was given to bragging about his occult associations with Bulwer Lytton), and for playing a role -- how central it's impossible to determine -- in introducing Emma into the Circle.

Here's the only image of Wyke I've been able to obtain:

But, as always, what you get in the margins (in this case, his micro-bio from the issue of Vanity Fair in which the portrait was originally published), proves as interesting as the main attraction.

Turns out Wyke was the childhood schoolmate of George, Prince of Cumberland, the first cousin of Queen Victoria and eventually George V of Hanover. Thomas Gibson Bowles ("Jehu Junior") is a bit catty about Wyke in his write-up of the (by that time) elder statesman, but he does note that Wyke's German connections and Germanophilism were so pronounced in his early adult life (as a soldier) that he was commonly known as the Baron.

Yet another angle on Louis de B________....

Ernest Reinhold = Emma Hardinge, Redux

Much depends, I think, on whether or not the cryptic hint offered us in Mattheisen's article on EHB -- that she had written for periodicals in London, on music, as Ernest Reinhold -- can be verified or not.

As I have said elsewhere, attempts to communicate with Dr. Mattheisen have failed, but I believe I know where he obtained this information: from Lewis Spence's note on EHB in his Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology.

Physical artifacts of Ernest Reinhold's brief transit on this planet are exceedingly difficult to obtain, but we can triangulate Spence (and therefore Mattheisen) via a brief note I'v already mentioned, in Kitson's vast The Musical World: 1836-1865, which I now know reads:

"Voices of the Night," recitative and air; the poetry by Professor Longfellow, the music composed by Ernest Reinhold (C Jeffreys)

Again, as I've said before, this would be entirely consistent with what we know about Emma Hardinge's brief career (one piece) as a publisher of original scores: her single publication "Footsteps of Angels" was also a recitative and air, and its words were based on a poem drawn from Longfellow's first collection: Voices of the Night.

Here's what may be another trace of our Ernest Reinhold -- an artifactual one this time.

(And a full view of the title sheet here...)

The timing for all this...what to call it?....tracery is decent. Caldwells' Musical Journalwas in print perhaps as early as 1840, and edited by Robert Guylott -- a working composer with strong ties to the musical theatre generally and the Adelphi in particular in London from the 1830s onward, and a publishing operation in Blenheim Street -- for most of its life.

Jenny Lind was storming London and the provinces from 1847-1849, and that would date this piece to that period, given the role of "musical gazettes" as the means by which middle-class pianos were furnished with "the latest songs from the centers of culture." But the lack of a given name for Herr Reinhold is troubling to me, particularly because there was apparently a Martin Von Reinhold about at this time, publishing music in various places, including Caldwells' Musical Journal. The lack of closure is maddening, to say the least.

And, because I can't resist red herrings, false clues and other tantalizing cultural byways, I'll close this bit of emphemera-coloring with this snippet.

"Oh, it cannot be over!" exclaimed Edward and St. Edmunds together. "Will you not play it once more?"
"Certainly, if you wish it; or perhaps you would like to hear another by the same author?"
"More than I can say," replied St. Edmunds, "What is his name?"
"His name is Ernest Reinhold, and, if I mistake not, it will soon be well known to fame, for he feels what he composes."

This snippet can be found in a piece of (then thinly and now completely) disguised gossip-mongering called A Transport Voyage To The Mauritius and Back; Touching At the Cape Of Good Hope and St. Helena, published in Paris (as so much scandal-gin material was) in 1852. Were it not for the fact that the author is identified as "the Author of Paddiana", we might be stumped, but that identification allows us to point to the actual author: Sir William Henry Gregory, gambler, travel raconteur (writing frequently as "Adam Blenkinsop"), intimate of Trollope, MP for Dublin, Governor-General for Ceylon, and husband of the famous Lady Augusta Gregory of Irish Renaissance fame.

I'll let interested readers have a look at his Wikipedia entry, note the places (Egypt, Ceylon), and the dates (the middle east in the middle 1850s, and the US in 1859, in particular), think about his wife's predilections, and let their imaginative dogs off the lead. Did Gregory know Emma? Have we got another Louis de B______ candidate on our hands?

---

Alas, not so. A mis-attribution on my part. The text naming Ernest Reinhold as a composer is to be found in a novel called Cecile, or the Pervert by a pseudonymous Sir Charles Rockingham. Whether it refers to Emma (qua Reinhold) or Emma borrowed her pseudonym from the novel (as I think she did with Emma Harding) remains to be determined.

Emma, Reviewed

From a reader (thanks, Michael), something we don't see every day: a multi-page review of a trance lecture by Miss Emma Hardinge, from the London Saturday Review via New York Saturday Press of 17 February 1866 . Undoubtedly a review of one of Emma's London soiree lectures of early 1866, the fact that the Saturday Press felt it worthy of front page placement tells us something about Emma's notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic in the middle 1860s.

Henry Clapp, Jr., the editor of the Saturday Review, was a lapsed temperance reformer and abolitionist often called 'the King of Bohemia', who is best known today for his early promotion of Poe and Whitman. His book The Pioneer, or Leaves From An Editor's Portfolio (1846) is available from reprint houses.

Web Site Updated

The artifacts section of the EH Britten Archive is now live, as is part one of the biographical summary.