Audience Response, 1864

Isabelle Saxon, on Emma's performance of her Reverend Thomas Starr King eulogy, delivered (at least) during her first trip to California, in 1864.:

I attended several spiritualist lectures in San Francisco (in 1864). Some, as the results plainly proved, were catch-penny affairs, -- the efforts of undoubted charlatans. I remember deriving pleasure from a lecture delivered by a lady, since deceased, a woman of considerable repute in America, and deservedly so, -- Mrs. Eliza Farnham, authoress of "Woman and her Era." She was handsome, dark-haired and dark-eyed, modestly attired in a dress of black watered silk, and read her lectures in a quiet, ladylike and unobtrusive manner. More striking, if not more solid, was the impression produced by a course of lectures delivered there by an English lady, Miss Emma Hardinge, a woman of genius, apparently between thirty and forty years of age, with clear intellectual grey eyes, pleasing expression of countenance and elegant manners. She is said to be the only rival of the noted Anna Dickenson in the art of feminine oratory. Well educated, with a good command of language, she drew crowded audiences to her Lectures on Spiritualism. Not the least of her attractions was her easy and graceful gesticulation. I was told she had been on the stage eight years, which would account for the elegance of her attitudes. Her style was logical, her language flowery. The funeral oration of the Rev. Starr King, pronounced by her, affected me much more than the eloquence of any speaker I ever heard. I was sorry to learn that Miss Hardinge, capable of the sternest efforts of reason as she undoubtedly would be thought, was contented to sink her own gifts of intellect and genius from nature at the feet of a power to whose influence alone she is contented to ascribe them. Her language was too palpable to be thus filmsily veiled, however, in the eyes of any but the ignorant or credulous. The strongest argument against spiritualism I have ever known was, to me, this merging of almost peerless and positive talent in a mystical ideal.

in her Five Years Within The Golden Gate (1868), where this description of Emma occurs, Saxon was hostile to spiritualism -- she writes that "it entered many families, not to bring peace, but a sword" (echoing the attacks of the spiritualism-is-free-love camp) and claiming that "spiritualism in America present(s) a frightful aggregate of ignorance, domestic unhappiness and discord".

And she was an Englishwoman -- Ida Emma Redding, actually -- who went to California with her husband Frederick Sutherland, an attorney, and who wrote Five Years... at the request of English friends, apparently originally as a series of letters home: a quite common method of rough-drafting a book in those days. She had relatives who had converted to Mormonism during the first wave of evangelical Mormonism in England in the 1840s, and was no stranger to outlandish (at the time) cosmogonies. She also apparently published a book -- perhaps on the US Civil War -- called An Englishwoman's View Of The War.

The names -- Eliza Farnham, Thomas Starr King, Anna Dickenson -- are meaningless to the non-specialist reader these days, but were names to conjure with in the 1860s: you can read a review of one of Dickenson's lectures here -- like Emma, Dickenson was pro-Lincoln, feminist and anti-slavery. Eliza Farnham and Thomas Starr King have marginally useful Wikipedia entries for the curious. I have not yet recovered a copy of Emma's eulogy on Starr King's death.

Isabelle Saxon, an Englishwoman watching an Englishwoman perform in 1864, encapsulates the central dilemma of Emma's public life -- trance speaker or self-possessed occultist -- as neatly as anyone could, I think. As a platform-standing advertisement for Modern Spiritualism, parsing Hebrew under the control of the spirits, Emma was potent evidence of the faith: in the eyes of some folk, anyway. But, in the eyes of a smart, well-traveled Englishwoman, herself proto-feminist if FIve Years... is anything to go by, she was a palpable disappointment: the intellect and the rhetorical force attributed to a sham.

It was a problem for Emma, as well, and one she never satisfactorily resolved, in public or I think in private.

(I note in passing that this might be our best dating for the transition from Miss Emma Harding to Miss Emma Hardinge -- early 1864, in California. Again - to be a pendantic bore -- I note: Miss Hardinge.)

And I had not bothered, until I read this, to wonder about the color of Emma's eyes. Shame on me, after all the anguish about her hair color...

E. W. Wallis, Quoting Emma

Perhaps when The Two Worlds is digitally recovered, we'll find the origin of this extended quote from Emma, by E. W. Wallis, in A Guide to Mediumship and Psychic Enfoldment (1903?) (available in a hermetically-sealed online version here:

By a party of eminent occultists who held strictly private -- or, I might say, secret -- circles for investigation, I was frequently invited, with other young persons, to become a subject for the magnetic operations of inquirers. In my own case, I was never rendered wholly unconscious by the will of the magnetisers, though nearly all the rest of the subjects they experimented with were made so. I believe now that the difference between the partial and total unconsciousness of the various subjects of these occult sciences corresponded to the different degrees of entrancement which we who are platform speakers experience. I realize that on the spiritual rostrum I am two distinct persons. I can go on speaking aloud, yet thinking of quite other matters, and when I can fix my mind on what I utter I have listened with a sense of strangeness, which brings conviction, to my mind, at least, that I am not the individual who originates the thoughts expressed, although they are undoubtedly shaped by the organism and linqual capabilities through which they are transmitted. From this state of what I may call waking trace, up to the somnambulic sleep in which the spirit's ideas are expressed automatically, I have observed many gradations, ranging, as above observed, from semi-consciousness to the deep somnabulic sleep. There is one striking difference, however, between the entrancement induced by human and spiritual magnetism. The former is much stronger, more direct, and, in general, may be considered as being a much coarser, or more material, element than the latter. Human magnetic control anniliates individuality, and even identity, for the time being, and substitutes the sensuous perception of the magnetizer in place of those of the subject. "A good magnetic subject" is helplessly in the power of the magnetizer, unless that subject passes away from the human to a spiritual control, when that of the human operator is at once lost. This was constantly my own case, and thus I, and others similarly influenced, have come to the conclusion that spiritual control is more subtle, finer and -- except in the case of obsession by evil spirits -- far purer. Mediums, when once they have become such, are scarcely ever susceptible again to human magnetism. To avoid such a possibility, I have always been strictly charged by spirit friends never to submit to be magnetized by human operators, and when preparing for the spiritual rostrum to wear silk, and avoid as much as possible conversation or contract with those around me.

There is a lot in this passage -- repetition, gesturing in the direction of the Orphic Circle, and quite a few finely-drawn distinctions: the sort that are demanded when one is conjuring with the elements of an entire cosmogony. That Emma remained partly conscious during the times she acted as a clairvoyante for the Orphic Circle is new information, as far as I am concerned, as is her observation that she was nearly unique in this regard among Orphic Circle subjects. That assertion -- if actually Emma's -- would tend to undercut several other public statements of Emma's, not least of which her assertion, in the Autobiography that she had, in effect, no understanding of the spirit world before her conversion in New York in 1856. Here, toward the end of her life, she is claiming -- pretty clearly, it seems to me -- that she in fact had spirit controls (in the late 1830s or early 1840s) who kept her from becoming, as a clairvoyante for the Orphic Circle, helpless and unconscious under the control of "the sensuous perceptions of the (human) magnetiser." Hmmmmm.....

I really need to get the bottom of Emma's beliefs about silk: did she think silk was a conductor, or an insulator?

The de Bunsens And Mesmerism

This choice bit, from Caroline Fox's journal for 1851:

The Bunsens have been deep in Mesmerism. The Chevalier's theory of the mesmeric power is, that it silences the sensuous and awakens the super-sensuous part of our nature ; a sort of faint shadow of Death, which does the same work thoroughly and for ever. George de Bunsen afterwards gave me some of his own mesmeric experiences ; he is a rigid reasoner and extorter of facts. I forget the three absolute laws which he has satisfactorily established, but here is an experience of his own: When he went to college and studied Greek history, he learnt that a book of Aristotle's on the politics of his own time was lost. He mused on this fact, and pined after the missing book, which would have shed such light on his studies. It became a perpetual haunting thought, and soon his air castle was the finding of this book. He would be for ever romancing on the subject, getting into a monastery, finding it amidst immense masses of dusty books and parchments, then making plans for circumventing the monks, rescuing the treasure, &c., &c. Just after this excitement had been at its maximum, he received a letter from a friend, telling that he had been consulting a clairvoyante about him, who had seen him groping amongst dusty parchments in the dark. It seems to have established a firm faith in his mind in the communication of spirit with spirit as the real one in mesmerism. His opposite class of facts was thus illustrated : When his father was with his King and our Queen at Stolzenfels, he wanted to know something about him, and accordingly mesmerised a clairvoyante, and sent her in spirit to the castle. "Do you see my father?" "No, he is not there." "Then go and look for him." At length she announced having found him sitting with an elderly lady. George de Bunsen could not conceive him anywhere but at Stolzenfels, till the thought struck him, he may have gone to Karlsruhe to see his sister ; so he asked, " It is a very neat, regular-looking town, is it not, and the houses new ? " and asked particulars of the room in which he thought his aunt likely to be found. "No, nothing of the sort; an old town, an old house, and an old lady." She gave many details which he could make nothing of, and gave up the geographical problem in despair. In a few days a letter from his father arrived, saying that the King had taken a fancy to go somewhere in a steamer, and had asked Bunsen to accompany him. This brought him within a moderate distance of another sister, whom he had previously had no idea of visiting, and so he was actually with her at the time of the clairvoyance.

In the passage, I believe the title Chevalier refers to Christian von Bunsen, not to Ernest, who was present at the event Fox is documenting, and who sang "like a nightingale" with his brother at that event.

Recovering From Miss Wood

Judging from the contents of Light, The Medium and Daybreak, and The Psychological Review, Emma returned to England in 1881 to a community fraught with concern about various scandals and impostures associated with public test mediums -- particularly those engaged in physical manifestation work -- who had been exposed, by one means or another, and one party or another.

By September of 1882, when Miss Wood was exposed, in situ and subsequently in the pages of Light, for fraudulent practices in her 'materialization' of her guide Pocha (read Frank Podmore's version of events here, and Alex Owen's version here), the British spiritualist leadership cadre was ready to promulgate some standards and practices, to, as Stainton Moses put it, fend off the "reiterated exposures of fraud [that[ are dealing a death-blow to Spiritualism as a public and popular movement. Many who are recent investigators are coming to believe that fraud is mixed up so inextricably with all the manifestations, that it is at least questionable whether there are any free from it."

In mid-September 1882, E. Dawson Rogers (the editor of Light, and John Farmer (the editor of the Psychological Review), circularized the leadership cadre of British Spiritualism, proposing essentially that cabinet manifestations, and dark seances -- in many respects, one of the mainstays of test mediumship up to that time -- be done away, since "in view of the continued obloquy and contempt brought upon Spiritualism by "Exposures," is it wise to continue methods tending in every case, sooner or later, to such disastrous results?"

The targets of the circular were a lions' list: Stainton Moses, T. P. Barkas, W. F. Barrett, William Crookes, J. Enmore Jones, Gerald Massey and CC Massey, F. W. H. Meyers, JJ Morse, Hay Nisbet, William Oxley, Frank Podmore, James Robertson, Thomas Shorter, Miss Wood herself, and George Wyld, among others...and of course our Emma.

Emma's essay, Dark Circles And Cabinets was a direct response to this circular, calling for methods and practices standardization, but she also responded directly to the circular (available in situ here), in a somewhat more emphatic manner:

I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your circular of the 16th inst., to which I hasten to reply as fully as the present moment will permit.

You may judge how deeply I am personally interested in the subject-matter of your circular when I remind you that I have given the last twenty-three years of my life, with all I am and all I have, to the promulgation of what I Know to be the truths of Spiritualism. In thus helping to build up a noble cause I have deemed myself amply rewarded by witnessing its triumphant acceptance in many parts of the world by tens of thousands of capable thinkers. I now see this work- to me so holy and sacred—degraded by imposture, and repudiated by the most respectable portion of the community, chiefly on account of the notorious frauds practised upon it in the name of Mediumship. If I have of late forborne to take any public part in a movement justly and necessarily tabooed by the classes whose influence is most neeiled to sustain it, it is because I have felt that my single voice was insufficient to stem the tide of fanaticism and credulity which ever seemed ready to shield the imposture, but exercised no charity for the victims imposed upon; neither could I any longer, with respect to myself, subject my remonstrances to the virulent denunciations which are visited upon those who dare to ask for test conditions in the investigation of so unprecedented a subject as spirit communion. It is not that I fear these ever ready denouncers, but like many other of my most esteemed associates, however willing I have been, and still am, to debate the proven facts of Spiritualism with the enemies of the cause, I shrink with aversion from contest -with the foes of " our own- household," especially those who descend to abuse instead of argument, and mistake vituperation for logic. When I find any well-conducted movement bent on redeeming our noble cause from the vultures that seek only to devour it, I am ready with heart and effort to take my part therein; and in the anticipation that such a desirable result may grow out of your endeavour, gentlemen, I offer you the following suggestions as the fruits of my own personal observation and experience. First, however, I would kindly take exception to those passages in your circular which seem to lay the burden of the imposition practised in " form-materialisation," solely upon " Professional Mediums."

I am in possession of abundant evidence to show that in this country, as in Holland and other places, some of the grossest impositions have been practised in the simulation of the above-named phenomena by non- professional mediums, and without attempting to analyse the motives of either class, I am in a position to show that both have availed themselves of the equivocal conditions furnished by cabinets, darkness, and the credulity of those around them, for practising cruel and heartless deception.

In reference also to your fourth paragraph, wherein you plead for the exclusion of the public " in dark circles," I would ask, whom you would propose to admit but the public ? To me it has always seemed as if the chief value in holding circles was to convince the public of the truth of spirit communion. When Modern Spiritualism was first known, it found the whole world sceptical, and the millions now convinced of its truth have become converted from their scepticism chiefly by circles. I have often read with astonishment the plea put forth by spiritualists for the exclusion from the circle of all but " sympathisers," " true spiritualists." etc.; in other words, of all who would not accept whatever was presented -without question, or who might be likely to expose palpable fraud.

Now, if spirit circles are only to be held for the delectation or amusement of "true spiritualists," any attempt to redeem Spiritualism from its ill odour in public opinion is superogatory, and the movement itself must end with the " sympathising " few of this generation. If, on the contrary, the aim of those spiritualists who have realised the worth of their belief be, to convince others of the same salvatory truth, there is one of the best methods to be found in circles, and those circles which are not fit for the public may well be deemed equally unfit for private gatherings. I know the outcry that will be raised against this position, and the assertion that " sensitives" require " special conditions and special influences" around them, etc., etc. In answer to well-worn platitudes of this character, permit me to cite some of the experiences of the early mediums, with nearly all of whom I have been intimately acquainted, and associated in circles. The Misses Fox of Hydesville, Messrs. George Redman, J. B. Conklin, Henry Slade, Charles Foster, and numerous other powerful physical mediums, have sat heterogeneously for all comers in public, as well as private, circles for years. Their best tests have generally been given to sceptics, strangers, and very often to bitter opposers. J. C. Mansfield, Lizzie Keizer, E. C. Wilson, and many of the best American Seers have given their best tests in large public audiences. Mrs. Ada Foye for eight months gave public tests at the end of my lectures in San Francisco, two years ago, to over a thousand people, by rapping, writing, seeing, and clairaudience, the hall being brilliantly lighted, and multitudes of sceptics present. All through America and Australia this same lady has given the same class of tests in public and private without mistake, failure, or the shadow of suspicion during a period of twenty-five years. Miss Laura Edmonds, Mrs. Sweet, several other ladies, and I myself have sat as non-professional mediums, giving tests to all comers. I sat in this way, in the commencement of my public mediumship, for eighteen months in New York City, and, being very enthusiastic in mv work, admitted strangers of all classes ; and neither my co - workers nor myself have found that sceptical or " heterogeneous influences " marred our work, or prevented the spirits from giving tests. On the contrary; the spirits were equal to all demands; and though, now and then, some rarely exceptional person might bring with him a peculiar influence, wholly antagonistic to spirit power, and impossible to overcome or explain, the general rule with us all was, the stronger the sceptic the more striking were the evidences of spirit power and presence. Miss Kate Fox, now Mrs. Jencken, held public circles, made free to the public by the generosity of Mr. Horace Day, under the room in which my seances were held, and I have frequently seen the apartment crowded by scoffing sceptics, as well as by the strangers that sat around her, but I never heard her make one mistake, or failure, in giving correct tests, through rapping and writing. But, it may be argued, the conditions requisite for " form materialisation" differ essentially-from all other phases of phenomena, and imperatively demand cabinets, darkness, or the isolation of the medium. Once more I call experience into court, as my witness, to see if this position is irrefutably proved.

I have known Mr. D. D. Home for many years, and witnessed all his most marvellous and striking phases of mediumship. In my own house, and that of Mr. Howitt, Mr. S. C. Hall, and numerous other friends, I have seen, felt, and been caressed by hands of many sizes, and conditions of warmth, and density. I have also seen arms attached to them, and some faces, visible to all present, and apparently, to sight and touch, as human as my own; and yet I have never sat with Mr. Home on his own premises, in darkness, nor when he was isolated, in any way from every one in the room. I have sat with Mrs. Underhill (Leah Fox), and in her presence, and that of Robert Dale Owen, and William Lloyd Garrison, luminous forms, one of whom we all recognised as Mr. Underbill's father, came through the door and halted in our sight, the lights burning, by which I had been reading aloud, and the medium, Mrs. Underbill, clinging to me in terror, but neither isolated nor in a cabinet. In the presence of Messrs. Slade, Foster, Eedman, and Conklin, 1, and scores of other still living witnesses, have seen hands and feet, from the size of infants to those of giants, formed and dissolved before our eyes, and that in brilliantly lighted rooms.

I could re-duplicate examples by hundreds, if necessary, to prove that hands and portions of forms have been exhibited and made palpable to sight and touch in broad light without cabinets, and in circles of heterogeneous and sceptical sitters. Of course, we are in no position to ask why the same conditions could not suffice for the materialisation of the entire form as well as a part; but we, at least, have a right to say. when so much has been manifested, and such illimitable possibilities are predicated for future unfoldment, under conditions which admitted of no shadow of chance for deception, that neither spirit nor mortal has the right to ask investigators to accord belief to investigations differing only in degree, but not in quality, which are produceable only under the most equivocal conditions, and which place the inquirer at the mercy of those who are constantly being proved to be remorseless and unscrupulous tricksters.

Spiritualism does not depend for its proofs on form materialisation only; and however wonderful and interesting such a phenomenon might be, if it can only be given under the most equivocal and doubtful conditions, better to dispense with it altogether than throw a priceless pearl to the dogs, and that simply to gratify a few persons, who are contented to endure the pernicious and often disreputable conditions of the dark circle, and that at the risk of catering to the behoof of unprincipled impostors. I have read with sufficient attention all the attempts to excuse the base frauds that have been perpetrated, and the plea of "evil spirits," " unconscious trances," or the malign influences of heterogeneous sitters. etc., etc. To all this I have but to ask whether the medium was "unconscious," or under the influence of the wicked exposers, when they brought, made and carefully prepared, the paraphernalia by which they proposed to delude their victims ?

I have myself endured the martyrdom and borne the cross which every unpopular cause puts upon the shoulders of its propagandists. Both in public and in private I have enduredpersecution, desertion, ingratitude, and scorn, and none have ever felt or manifested more kindly than I have, all the sympathy which my fellow-labourers deserve; nay, it is in my resolve to stand by them and protest against the pharasaical raid made upon them, under the pretence that they alone of all mankind should give life, time, and service for nothing, that I have determined never to lecture even. without the fair compensation that honest labour should ensure in every department of usefulness. I would demand besides justice to mediums, kindness, courtesy, and special sympathy for special conditions of sensitiveness; but that which I demand for them, I surely have a right to demand also for the investigator. and if I feel just indignation towards those who fail to treat mediums with the utmost impartiality and justice, am I to have no pity on those who conie to the circle with bleeding hearts, and in the agonising hope to be restored to their banished dead, only to be mocked with rags, tinsel, shams, and puppets ? There is yet another and a very solemn plea to be made for pure, honest, unadulterated spirit intercourse. There are wild, monstrous, and wholly unsupported theories growing up, on the new soil of Spiritualism, like fungi, ready to eat the life out of the movement, quench its most momentous revealments, and substitute hideous ghosts and phantoms for the immortal existences with whom Spiritualism has brought us face to face. And what is the corrective to these fantastic and groundless fantasies ? Nothing under the high heavens but the Facts of spirit communion. Let a set of remorseless swindlers take our facts away, and we are at the mercy of as many wild theories as there are sects in theology.

There is much more to be said, gentlemen, in behalf of your attempted movement, and in relation to its best methods of practicalisation ; but although I can hardly feel that I have written one word too much on so important a subject, I dare not press my individual opinion further on your attention. I can only bid you God-speed, and assure you that in your attempts to purify and elevate our noble cause from the degradation which human folly and wickedness have put upon it, you may command to the fullest extent of my power.

Recovering from the Wood impostures by means of standardized methods and practices marks, I think, an important milestone in the institutionalization of modern spiritualism, and Emma's response -- fearful, it seems, of the turn inward of the Spiritualist community, and enthusiastic for strong engagement with the unbeliever -- marks, I think, one of the points of contention between her and other Spiritualists that would, eventually, lead to Emma's marginalization.

Gleaning...err...Gleanings

Another recovered text of Emma's: Gleanings In The Fields Of Spiritualism, No. II. A relatively rare informal piece: chatty, letter-to-the-editor-ish. From The Medium and Daybreak of September 18, 1885. One of a pair, this piece is a report-from-the-field on the progress of institutionalization of the movement in Emma's circuit.

William, Substitute Lecturer

Having entire years' worth of The Medium and Daybreak to troll through is a nerd's delight, let me tell you...

This bit, from November 13, 1885, can't go unremarked upon, as it both illustrates yet another aspect of Emma's on-the-ground practice, and gives us a glimpse of that most elusive of figures, William:

I have not as yet found a review of any of William's lectures, but I'm hopeful.

Emma's Stereopticon

Little by little, bits of Emma's practice as a test medium, and as a speaker -- trance and normal -- emerge.

For students of the business of spiritualism in the 1880s and after, this letter of W. J. Colville's, in the Medium and Daybreak of June 12, 1885 (a month or so after Emma's return from her last visit to the US, for the 1884-1885 camp meeting circuit), speaks of an aspect of Emma's practice -- and the tradecraft of spiritualist speakers -- that we don't often see:

What I wouldn't give to see some of those stereopticon slides now.

The equipment Emma used no doubt looked much like this 1887 model: a table-top projector that burned carbide or a mixture of gases to produce enough lumens to project a stereopticon slide that would otherwise be viewed through a hand-held viewer.

That Emma let the stereopticon go makes sense, as she was coming home, to her home circuit between Manchester and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and to a different kind of lecturing than she'd been engaged in, in the US, in 1880 and after: more Spiritualist content, the resurrection of on-demand trance lectures on topics selected by the audience, and more polemics, including public challenges to non-Spiritualists.

Not something she'd be likely to need the nineteenth-century equivalent of Powerpoint for...

The Three "Two Worlds"

Come to discover that Emma's The Two Worlds was the third of three spiritualist publications to bear that name.

The first, a US publication edited in the later 1850s by Jacob Dixon LRCP -- a London homeopathist, author of Clairvoyance, Hygienic and Medical (excerpt here) and a member of the Ashburner circle -- was apparently fairly long-lived.

The second, edited and funded by Eugene Crowell and A.E. Newton, had a short run from the fall of 1881 until the spring of 1882 before being folded: apparently the loser in a commercial war with The Banner of Light.

And Emma's makes three -- and the longest-lived thereof, seeing as how it is, nominally at least, still being published.

Whether Emma cribbed from earlier efforts -- third time's the charm -- or picked up the "two worlds" metaphor from its copious recurrence in the liteature of the period, or borrowed from Thomas Shorter's book of the same name (TS, we note, wrote for Dixon at the first Two Worlds), we may never know. But I like to think she took her title from a passage in John Brown's The Darvishes -- an early work on eastern "spiritualism" in English that has not received, I think, the attention it deserves as a source of Modern Spiritualism's ideas about the East.

Recovering The Two Worlds

I am pleased to report that the process of digitizing the entire run of The Two Worlds during the period of Emma's editorship is under way, and before Halloween (an appropriate marker) we should all be able to read the first six years' worth of The Two Worlds online.

The Key To The Occult Sciences

Forging the chain, forging the chain....another small and somewhat fragile link...

From William Gregory (MD, FRSE, Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh), this choice morsel (to mix metaphors, and break a few teeth) about the figure who cast his cliched shadow over Emma's life, Philip Henry Stanhope:

The text itself is:

Thanks to Michael, who's always digging up something interesting and relevant.

Like Gregory, Emma certainly saw mesmerism -- and her early experiences as a clairvoyante, as the key to the occult sciences she promoted as an adult.