May 1859: Newport, Rhode Island

An anonymous correspondent for the Newport, Rhode Island Daily News leaves us this (skeptic's) view of Emma's lecture there, circa May 20, 1859:

Miss Emma Hardinge, the popular lecturess on Spiritualism, who commands the attention and admiration of cultivated minds of all classes, whether believers or not in the peculiar doctrines she advances, recently delivered three lectures in this village. This lady, though she lectures with her eyes open und apparently in a normal state, professes to speak under the control of spirits; and in order to convince the people that her discourses are spontaneous, and result from some other intelligence than her own mind, she ahvays requests audiences to appoint a committee Io select a subject for elucidation, subsequent to her coming on the platlorm. The subjects chosen for her here are the following : "The Origin and Destiny of Man" "The Origin of Physical and Moral Evil;" and "Religion and Spiritualism." All who listened to her in this village, whatever they think of her opinions, admit that her discourses were rare productions of ability, beauty, and eloquence. She treated the subjects given her in the most consecutive manner, each of her positions being stated with remarkable cleainess and logical precision. Her discourses were characterized by profound scientific knowledge and deep historical research, and abounded wilh the most beautiful analogies, similitudes and illustrations that I ever heard. Questions put to her by individuals in the audience in relation to various subjects, were answered without the least hesitation, and with a beauty and definiteness of expression that charmed all who heard her. While I could see no indication that the lady was but an oracle enunuciating tho words of another intelligence, I must confess that for extent and variety of knowledge, amplitude of thought, force and fitness of illustration, enchantment of eloquence and perfection of elocution, the lectures of Miss Hardinge surpass any that I ever listened to.

Abisha S. Hudson

One of the likely sources for the material on sex magic in Art Magic is a small booklet -- 70 pages in duodecimo -- by one Sha Rocco, called The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship, published in 1874 (that is, a year or more prior to the time during which AM was being assembled), in New York, by Asa K. Butts and Company, at that time operating out of their offices on Dey Street in Manhattan.

The text was available in mid-1874, and was being advertised nationwide in periodicals associated with Spiritualist, occultist and freethinker communities, as evidenced by this advertisement from June of 1874 in Common Sense, the California weekly.

The text became a staple of occult reprint libraries, more or less continuously in print through the 1920s, and a 1904 edition can be found in Google Books' digestive tract.

An anonymous librarian, in the version in Google Books -- as well as other folks -- associates "Sha Rocco" with one Abisha S. Hudson.

But here the story takes a bizarre twist -- one that could only happen in an age where amateur scholars equipped with powerful publishing technology treat the Internet like a peer-reviewed encyclopedia, rather than the rumor, speculation and disinformation mill it so often is.

In several places on the Internet, we're told that "Abisha S. Hudson" is actually a pseudonym for Hargrave Jennings.

Imagine my disappointment, on reading this, that TAOAM had -- once again -- relied on Hargrave Jennings without attribution. But when I began reading the 1909 edition of The Masculine Cross it became immediately apparent, on stylistic grounds alone, that the work could not have been written by Hargrave Jennings unless our man Hargrave got a significant linguistic deep-structure brain transplant. Hudson's prose is straightforward: his sentences are clean, simple and constructed of common English words with little or no use of tortured dependent clauses. In short, Hudson's writing is nothing like Jennings' writing (which is highly idiosyncratic, complex, and either beautiful or crapulent, depending on one's aesthetic).

Dig, dig, dig a bit, and I uncover the (nicely stated and bibliographically precise) root of the "Hudson is Jennings" myth. Because the page-maker did not see fit to give me anchors to the relevant section, I'll quote it here:

Advertisements and text in [the Nature Worship and Mystical Series] make it clear that the entire series is the work of one person. Most bibliographers attribute all nine volumes to Hargrave Jennings (q.v.), and i concur with this. The one bibliographer who believed othewrwise is Gershon Legman. He stated that "Ophiolatreia," the second volume in the set, was written by Abisha S. Hudson. Legman did not publish this theory, merely noting it on a piece of paper he slipped into his personal copy of the book in question. However, Legman's stature being what it is, his little note has entered several bibliographical databases and been published in numerous bookdealers' catalogues.

To understand why Legman reached this conclusion, it is necessary to know that the name Sha Rocco (q.v.) appears as the author of two books similar to those listed above, namely "The Masculine Cross" and "Sexual Mythology," and that Sha Rocco -- an obvious pseudonym -- is said by some bibliographers to have been the pen-name of one Abisha S. Hudson. However, no biographical data on Abisha S. Hudson has ever come to light, and it is highly likely that this was yet another pseudonym for the author of "The Masculine Cross."

Legman probably drew the conclusion that "Ophiolatreia" was written by Rocco/Hudson because (1) the writing style is the same, (2) in one edition of "Phallism" there is an advertisement for a "cream vellum binding" edition of Sha Rocco's "The Masculine Cross" which places it before "Phallism," indicating its earlier publication date, and (3) circa 1890 edition of "The Masculine Cross" is a reprint of the 1874 Sha Rocco book bound to match the "Nature Worship and Mystical Series" titles [making it #0 in the series].

No biographical data in Abisha S. Hudson?

Not the case.

First, to set the bibliographical record straight, this is not the only work published by Sha Rocco -- there are others, dealing with obscure topics, listed by Worldcat, including Abisha S. Hudson's doctoral thesis from his days at the Albany Medical College. Some of the Worldcat titles appeared after his death, and from non-US publishers, indicating (perhaps) two Sha Roccos, or (perhaps) a reprinting of Hudson's periodical work. The common;y-referenced titles published by Kessinger we have to ignore, bibliographically, as it's pretty clear those shameless creeps are doing what they often do: parting out one text and giving it different (fake) titles, to drive up their unit sales.

Now, as to Abisha S. Hudson the real historical figure and author of The Masculine Cross, here's what we know about him:

• he was born 1 May of 1819 in New York state, or Massachusetts, to Amos Hudson and Mary Fisk Hudson, the sixth of nine children
• he attended the Medical College of Albany -- his preceptor was Dr. H. Murdoch of Pulaski, NY, he was given 28 months credit for time served (presumably with Pulaski), and he was graduated with an MD after 8 months of attendance, in 1846, having written a dissertation on vision
• he participated in the founding of the Keokuk (Iowa) Medical College in 1853 (it granted degrees until 1899)
• in 1855, he married one Rose Elliott (b. 1826), and they had several children, including Harry (b. c. 1859) and May (b. c. 1861)
• he served briefly as a surgeon in the US Army's 34th Infantry division, from October 29 of 1861, until he resigned in March of 1862
• by the 1880s he was apparently maintaining a residence in the Midwest and in the San Francisco Bay area, where he and his family (including his niece Mary Parks who was the co-executor of his will) were caught in the 1880 census
• he died, either in San Francisco (his will was probated in California, and the ensuing court case was a landmark in community property law) or at Mt. Vernon, Ohio, on October 8, 1904, at the age of 86, after choking on a fig.

So, once again, just for the search engines: Sha Rocco is Abisha S. Hudson; Abisha S. Hudson is not, in any way shape or form, a pseudonym for Hargrave Jennings.

Now, why do I give a crap? Well, there's that whole setting-the-record-straight thing, but, more to my parochial concerns, Hudson is the source of the otherwise weirdly a-scholarly discussion of the Nileometer in Art Magic, and in particular the (incorrect) linking of nilometers with the Christian cross.

The Soul's Question

Another recovered EHB lecture: "The Soul's Question - Whither Am I Bound?" from The Spiritual Magazine for December of 1870, where it appears between an essay on Greatrakes by Thomas Shorter (writing as Thomas Brevoir) and a long extract from a "Baron de Bunsen" work with which I am not familiar.

I am working on the annotated version of Art Magic at present, and this essay - published five years prior to AM and delivered earlier than that - indicates pretty clearly that EHB was already familiar with, and promoting, the cosmogony that TAOAM promotes in Section II of Art Magic. Of particular note is EHB's emphasis on the condition of the group of souls she refers to in this essay as "the dwellers on the threshold" -- those that TAOAM refers to as "the souls of evil or unprogressed men". This notion of a purgatory -- for that is surely what it is -- will come to be problematic for Spiritualists, once its opponents point out the possibility -- or probability -- that spirit communication is confined to communication with these dwellers on the threshold, progressed souls having moved on to a higher sphere, as it were.

A Fragment Of Modern Scripture

Another recovered EHB piece, this one entitled A Fragment of Modern Scripture and dating from the same period as her Six Lectures, is from Frances Brown's Christmas Annual of 1860, courtesy of Google Books and the sharp eyes of a reader (thanks, Pat).

As Pat points out, what's interesting about this piece is that it appears in a periodical edited by Frances Brown -- aka Mrs. HFM Brown -- a noted midwestern Spiritualist who was also decidedly in the "free love" camp -- from the middle 1860s onward, anyway.

In the text of this short piece, Emma recounts a lecture she gave in February of 1862, in Cleveland, on Mary Magdalene (boy, what I wouldn't give for a transcript of that), to benefit "the funds of an Institutional Farm, endeavoring to found (sic) for the reclamation, refuge and instruction of fallen women," at which Mrs. H. F. M Brown apparently held the chair -- Emma refers to her as "my kind 'High Priestess'".

The nexus -- Emma, free love, her home of outcast women -- is an important one. Emma's issues with sex and sexuality, her desire to found a philanthrophic organization to rehabilitate outcast women, her strident anti-free love rhetoric -- we have to see in this confluence the ugly scab covering Emma's core psychic wound.

I can't say much about it now -- I hardly understand it myself, particularly given Emma's oblique admissions, at various points in her career, that she herself had 'fallen' in her youth, and her posthumous confession to having been a kept woman -- but there is something relevant in the fact that she first claims (with reason, as we know from other sources) a relationship with Charles Dickens in The Two Worlds only in the late 1880s, thirty years after the time during which she worked with, and corresponded with, Dickens.

Dickens spent much time in the late 1840s and 1850s working on just such a philanthropic project: Urania Cottage. And he ceased his involvement with Urania Cottage only after his own highly irregular marriage arrangements fell apart, publicly, in 1862.

The Boston Fire of 1872

The roots of Art Magic are to be found in Emma's life, in Boston, in the early 1870s, in The Western Star, her short-lived periodical of that period, and in her time there as a galvanic doctor.

As such, the Boston Fire of 1872 looms large, particularly as we have claims from both Emma (indirect, opaque) and Robert Fryar that Emma and William suffered significant property loss in the Boston Fire -- the lost material including, tantalizingly, Fryar's material on skrying, which he had apparently loaned Emma for inclusion in The Western Star.

At the time of the fire, Emma and William were living at 251 Washington Street (B), and the offices of The Western Star were a block or so away, around a corner, at 25 Bromfield Street (A) ( and how she must have loved that -- her mother's maiden name, nearly).

View Larger Map

The fire was extensive, and devastating.

Fortunately, a contemporary map-maker left us a rendition of downtown Boston at the time, showing the extent of the fire -- and more importantly, its boundaries -- and some enterprising souls have put that famous "Burnt District" map online, allowing us to see that, while Emma's home at 251 Washington (and the Banner of Light offices a bit away at 158 Washington, were at the edge of the fire, the offices of teh Western Star were a further block-and-a-half beyond the perimeter of the fire's damage.

A contemporary account of the fire-fighting in Emma's district -- from Conwell's History of the Great Fire in Boston -- is instructive (though it will tax the reader who's not also looking at a map):

As the conflagration swept onward, crossing street after street in its march, it was decided to blow up all the buildings on Milk Street on the south side from Devonshire Street, to and through Morton Place, as many of the buildings in this locality were of a very combustible nature, and would endanger the entire northern section of the city. This was between twelve and one o'clock on Sunday morning : but a sufficient quantity of powder could not be obtained in this city at that time ; and Alderman Jenks despatched a police-officer to the Navy Yard with a request to Commodore Parrott to furnish a quantity of that article. With commendable promptness, the commodore ordered five one-hundred-pound kegs of powder to be placed in a hack ; and the officer soon reported back, when the blowing-up of buildings on Washington, Devonshire, and Water Streets, was commenced. To make the corner of Milk and Washington Streets the objective point in the ravages of the fire northward, every effort was made, and fortunately proved successful. Then, to stop its crossing State Street, and sweeping the section of the city Iying beyond that point, a number of buildings were mined on the south side of that street and on Devonshire Street, between Water and State Streets ; but, before these extreme measures were required, the dreaded element was under control, and all further danger avoided.

The corner of Milk and Washington was a block from Emma's house, and two blocks from the offices of The Western Star but both were outside the perimeter, according to this account. The damage that The Banner of Light sustained - reported in numerous venues -- may well have been to its printing operation, rather than to its editorial offices, which were yet farther up Washington Street, on the fire's boundary line.

(larger version)

Lightning, Making Rain

One thing Emma -- the speaker of the Six Lectures in 1860 -- and TAOAM had in common was their (completely mistaken) belief that rain was produced by lightning.

I am not sure how I am going to determine whether that idea was prevalent or not, but it's interesting.

More interesting is the feeling of rehearsal one gets reading Six Lectures and Art Magic back-to-back or in parallel -- particularly the first lecture in Six Lectures.

The Economics of Recovering Spiritualist Journals

Now that the costs are all in, the recovery and translation of The Two Worlds for 5.3 years of its run-life is as follows:

• per-year microfilm copy costs: $125 (microfilm creation, for one year, $300)
• per-year film-to-single-page PDF conversion: $95.
• per-year PDF aggregation, cropping and indexing costs: $50
• per-year hosting costs: $5

So, recovering a single year of a 16-page weekly newspaper costs, roughly, $270 for 830-odd pages (perhaps 900 when you include special numbers, inserts and yearly indices), or (using the 900 page number) $.30 USD per page of the run.

Your mileage may vary, as the source of the film I used is notoriously expensive.

I would strongly recommend that anyone who decides they want to do this for their favorite Spiritualist publications:

• Check with me -- I am going to do others, and there's no sense in duplicating cost and effort.
• Give your film-to-PDF work to Spectrum Information Services, which (a) has equipment you'll want used (like skew correction on film images), (b) understands curatorial requirements and (c) bends over backwards to get it right for you. I can't say enough about what a great job SIS did on the film conversion.

If you have the financial wherewithal, you can do this entire process with a phone and a keyboard, and a couple trips to the post office. And, given the rate at which Spiritualist materials are being de-accessioned by libraries, it's critical in my opinion that people who know-and-care start taking these conversions into their own hands.

I am toying with the idea of building a Spiritualist Periodical Archive, so people don't have to manage their own web sites, so we get some leverage with Google in terms of search engine optimization, and so we can start maintaining central indices of people, events, places, etc. -- if that interests you, let me know.

The Karens Believe The Spirits Of The Dead (Sad Day, Part 1)

Around page 157 (in the later editions) of Art Magic, the author of Art Magic (TAOAM) suddenly decides to start providing citations for his quotations. The texts are a bit obscure, and not in English, but TAOAM gets around that by quoting instead from -- wonder of wonders -- Modern Spiritualist publications, and, for the most part, from The Spiritual Magazine. (Interestingly enough, from those issues of that magazine in which a young Miss Emma Hardinge figures prominently, both as subject and as author). This despite the fact that each text quoted was available in multiple English translations well prior to the publication of Art Magic.

Hmmmm...broadly traveled, deeply-versed occultist declining to cite either Hargrave Jennings or Ennemoser explicitly, quoting Eastern scriptures without attribution, but fine with explicitly citing small-circulation Modern Spiritualist publications. Odd...

Then, there's this truly signal bit:

The letters of European missionaries from India, China and other eastern lands, popular accounts of snake charmers, Indian magicians, etc., especially the writings of Messers. Salt, Lane, Wolff, Laborde, Mesdames Poole, Martineau and others...

A sudden storm of indirect references. The rhetorical gesture we recognize: I have read these; surely you have as well; say no more, and if you haven't, well, then, take my word for it...

Imagine my surprise to discover that this set of writers is dealt with, in an article by Thomas Shorter in The Spiritual Magazine for March 1, 1861, entitled "Glimpses of Spiritualism In The East".

And imagine the surprise turning to a stomach-churning disappointment, as I realize that most of the section of Art Magic on "Magic Among The Mongolians" is cribbed, more or less directly, from Shorter's article.

At some point, I'll do a parallel-column rendering of the two texts, but in the meantime the dubious reader can check my assertion by comparing Shorter's article with this section of Art Magic. That the two pieces would cite the same authorities, and the same material from the same authorities, is damning in itself, I think.

I don't know when Thomas Shorter died, and I need to figure that out.

But I think any dispassionate reader of these two texts is going to conclude that TAOAM borrowed extensively without explicit attribution from Thomas Shorter's article, and allowed the reader of Art Magic to assume that she was reading material stamped with the authenticity of "the author's residence in Tartary".

At least, I hope this is the case, since Emma -- under her own by-line -- recapitulates some of this material, attributing it explicitly to TAOAM, in her Nineteenth-Century Miracles.

In the undesirable position of making Emma a dupe, or something much worse, I'm opting for dupe at the moment.

Sad day.

Emma's Science

Part of the difficulty one has reading Modern Spiritualist texts these days is: the bad science.

Art Magic is hard for a modern reader to follow, I think, in part for this reason -- that the science is, these days, so patently wrong. Since the history of science is not something one usually gets taught, except in the "Eureka" sense, it's hard for the lay reader to know what Emma knew, did not know, and knew incorrectly about the literally dozens of sciences on which her texts touched.

Her discussion of carbonic acid and the "weight" of it in Six Lectures gets much easier to digest once we understand that the noble gases were 30 or so years from discovery at the time she spoke, and the truly wacky science of Art Magic becomes similarly more palatable -- and the text itself less strange -- once we've had a look at something like Zachariah Allen's Philosophy of the Mechanics of Nature, And The Source and Modes of Action of Natural Motive-Power (1851). This is just the sort of text I'd imagine Emma kept around -- if not before her days as a galvanic doctor, certainly during and after.

John Abraham Heraud

Section VIII of Art Magic, the "Man the Microcosm of the Universe" section, is a particularly interesting part of that text, in my view. It is rife with traces of Emma -- long cribbed quotations (from Hargrave Jennings) strung together scissors-and-paste fashion, barely concealed borrowings from Eliphas Levi (the "attraction is not a force" theme, among other bits), scientific terminology borrowed and redeployed somewhat awkwardly, polemic addresses directly to the reader. And, intermingled, some not-so-Emma features, including: comma splices.

I was struck -- I don't know why -- by the phrase "ancient Theosophists," used just after the longish Hargrave Jennings borrowing, and decided to look to see how frequently that phrase occurred in the document base for the first half of the nineteenth century, in English.

Prior to 1870, the phrase "ancient Theosophists" isn't used much in printed material, if the Google Books sample is at all representative.

The texts in which the phrase is used are instructive, and include (among a half-dozen texts):

• "Alchemy, by an Alchemist", in Fraser's Magazine for 1839
• "Sketches of Theosophy and Freemasonry" in The Monthly Magazine for 1840.
• J. C. Colquhoun's An History of Magic, Witchcraft and Animal Magnetism, and Robert Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews, both from 1851

What's curiously suggestive about the periodical pieces, in addition to their thematic affinities for the material in Art Magic is that they are likely both the product of John Abraham Heraud, a literary jobber connected with Emma in a number of diaphanous ways. Heraud was the editor of The Monthly Magazine at the time the article on Freemasonry and Theosophy was published, having been the editor of Fraser's from 1831-33, and a contributor (signed and unsigned) thereafter -- including a longish piece on Paracelsus in 1835.

Heraud was an auto-didact; a mystical poet ("a worshipper of the vast, the remote and the terrible") who wrote among other things a verse drama linking (as texts associated with Emma would do) meso-american culture with Thebes; a drama critic associated with the Haymarket and Adelphi in any number of ways; a playwright involved in the breaking of the theatre patents.

Heraud wrote on Swedenborg, Boehme, Agrippa -- the range of reference of the author of Art Magic, really.

He was an intimate of Phelps, Wallack, Webster, Blanchard and others who touched Emma's life as an actress directly -- Heraud may well have been in the audience when Emma debuted at Sadler's Wells.

And Heraud was an accomplished mesmerist and friend of Martineau, Braid, Elliotson and Dupotet, who conducted his own mesmeric experiments, including the control of young female lucides.

I could play pile-on at this point, with gusto. Can you say "friend (and neighbor) of James Pierrepont Greaves", "friend of Francis Foster Barham, progenitor of the Al religion"? Really, deeply enmeshed in the whole Aesthetic Institution milieu -- that peculiar mix of reformism and occultism characteristic of....oh, I don't know... Emma Hardinge Britten.

A short biographical sketch, by his daughter, exists, but it is more her life than his.

Hargrave Jennings

He is the single most-often quoted source in Art Magic. But he is not named, and nearly every quotation from his The Rosicrucians is mis-quoted in some fashion...and in many instances the sense of the passages are changed, slightly or otherwise. The misquotations could imply intent. Or they could suggest the transcription of material, from notes, by an editor who did not have the text to hand -- or perhaps could not even recognize the source.

Ernest Reinhold in the Court Gazette

Report from our London researcher: the Court Gazette for the period of interest (1838-1842) did not publish indices, most of the articles are not by-lined, and there is no evidence of any work by "Ernest Reinhold" in its pages.

More as it happens....

W. E. Coleman, J. J. Morse, and EHB

One of the interesting things about chasing Emma has been the development, on my part, of a certain protective attitude about Emma. I can call her veracity or motives into question if I like, but others cannot....and I see slights against her where perhaps there are none.

With that said, I've taken a detour into the life and work of James Johnson Morse, a younger contemporary and colleague of EHB's, who will take over the editorship of The Two Worlds in the early part of the twentieth century. J. J. Morse is perhaps more neglected than EHB -- it's difficult to find most of his primary works in print or online, his addresses have not been collected, and no one's bothered, as of yet, to put together even a basic chronology of his life. Two of his works -- Leaves from My Life and Practical Occultism -- have made it into the ever-loving maw of Google Books (thankfully), and this snippet, from William Emmette Coleman's introduction to Practical Occultism, seems to me aimed directly at EHB:

One of the more conspicuous of these perversions -- especially during the last decade (the 1880s) -- has been the growing tendency, on the part of a portion of the adherents of the Spiritual Philosophy, to introduce into that philosophy sundry elements pertaining to the mysticism of ancient and modern times. Certain of the inspirational speakers, and others among the public workers for Spiritualism, together with many of its followers in the private walks of life, have been misled, to a greater or less degree, by the current idealisms, transcendentalisms, and fanciful conceits, born of crude speculations and nurtured by spurious philosophies and pseudo-science. Sound philosophy and genuine science, while in accord with the demonstrated truths of Modern Spiritualism, have neither lot nor part in any of the mutually-antagonistic and ever-conflicting forms of mysticism with which the world has been and still is cursed; including all those phases thereof with which many have sought to encumber Spiritualism. A rational, natural, healthy, progressive, scientific Spiritualism, at one with the spirit of the age, with the trend of the most advanced modern thought, must be wholly free from the degrading and soul-stultifying theses and dogmas of the mysticisms of the day; and until everything of the latter character be eliminated from the spiritual movement, it can never hope to obtain that respect and confidence of the intelligent, thoughtful men and women of our planet to which it will be justly entitled when its complete dissociation from its present perverting encumbrances becomes an accomplished fact.

As I have said before, the 1870s and 1880s are not only the boundary marker for the Occult Renaissance, but are also the decades in which Modern Spiritualism begins its (inevitable) institutitionalization, and the beginning of the "commercialization of the occult" that produced, ultimately, the New Age movement and the supermarket-of-the-spiritual that we find on the shelves of Barnes and Noble today.

Coleman's critique ought to be seen in that context,as of that moment; indeed, he demands it.

More as a note to one's self than anything else -- in the multi-party pitched battle between the scientific establishment, the guardians of cultural norms, the representatives of orthodox religion, Modern Spiritualist, and Theosophy -- who chose the wiser transformational strategy: EHB or HPB? Blavatsky's decision to break from the trappings, methods and difficulties (practical and otherwise) of Modern Spiritualism, EHB's decision to underpin the modern Awakening with (idiosyncratically selected) elements of the western Occult tradition - which strategy was more productive? The answer is, unfortunately, plain. Emma's choices forced her, increasingly, into a narrow tributary of the modern occult, and her work lives on today -- and palely, at that -- only in partial form: in her founder's status among contemporary Spiritualists, in her "historical" works (I am always amused by the uncritical way in which her work is used by orthodox historians as, itself, history rather than propaganda) and in the Church of Light. She escaped, for sure, the sort of silence in which J. J. Morse is enveloped today. But that is not much of a victory.

January 5, 1866

Miss Emma Hardinge, (secular) extemporaneous speaker. From The Times of London for January 5, 1866.

Miss Harding In Booth's Ugolino

An 1856 publication of Junius Brutus Booth's play Ugolino in French's Standard Drama series notes the cast of the play at the time it was performed at the Old Briadway Theatre in NY. Playing Diana de Lascours, one Miss Harding.

Cannot at this point verify that it's our Miss Harding we're talking about.

E. Reinhold, 1850

The search of Ernest Reinhold continues.

From The Musical World of 2 February 1850, this clue:

EHB and Adah Isaacs Menken

Adah Isaacs Menken was larger than life during hers, which was brief. She is almost certainly the original for Irene Adler in the Sherlock Holmes story -- Holmes referring to her, throughout the Canon, as "The Woman".

Menken was also -- depending on who one believes -- Swinburne's only female lover, or merely his close friend and versifying competitor.

Among spiritualists -- or historians of spiritualism anyway -- Menken is known as one of Daniel Dunglas Home's controls: a fairly risky one for him to channel, I'd have thought, even in the company of the Adare and Lindsay.

Menken and EHB met in California in late 1863 or 1864; Emma conducted a test seance for Menken, which apparently had a profound effect on Menken, who the next day sent Emma a hand-written inscribed copy of one of the poems that would later grace Menken's Swinburnian collection Infelicia: "Dreams of Beauty".

The autograph poem was in the collection of Frederick J. French for some years, apparently, and was auctioned around the turn of the century -- it now seems to have disappeared.

Menken was aggressively bi-sexual; like Emma, an actress of some experience; already through two or three husbands by the time she met Emma. I am really intrigued by their meeting.

And herewith, the Menken poem "Dreams of Beauty", which may well have be inspired by Emma herself -- either as a medium, or as a woman. The poem itself is, I think, ambivalent on that score.

Miss Emma Harding In The Puppet-Show

The Puppet-Show was an irreverent weekly commentator on politics and the theatre, published by the Vizitelly Brothers, which had a relatively short run in the late 1840s.

How nice to come across, therein, this snippet, in a review of an extravaganza called The Devil's Violin, which was paired with (or a had segment called) The Revolt of the Flowers at the Adelphi in August of 1849.

In the scene where the flowers, with Miss Emma Harding at their head, as the rose, revolt against the gardener, who comes to cut them for a bouquet, Mr. Wright, who plays the horticultural individual in question, was irresistably comic. A propos de bottes (that is, "as an aside"), if the nursery gardens around the metropolis produced such lovely plants as those which Miss Emma Harding heads, we think we may venture to give it as our opinion that young men would become remarkably fond of gardening.

The Marble Heart

Having the good fortune to have found someone willing to spend hours in the British Library on my behalf, reading through old periodicals (thanks, Rosalie), I am going over some old ground -- Miss Emma Harding, 1834-1856.

More than twenty years spent, from the death of her father, until her conversion to Spiritualism, in the theatre -- that's a quarter of her life.

As readers will know, EHB explains the year's hiatus between her last role at the Adelphi (in Waiting for an Omnibus..., a farce) in July of 1854, and her decision to join the Wallack Company's Shakespeare-in-Paris boondoggle in the summer of 1855 as a year during which she was the kept mistress of the "baffled sensualist".

In looking at her final work at the Adelphi, I realize something significant happened at the Adelphi in mid-1854: Benjamin Webster assumes management of the theatre, in April of 1854. And less than a month after he assumes management, he's putting on a new Charles Selby adaptation, The Marble Heart (Emma had acted in several Selby pieces already), casting Emma in the piece (as Mariette), and acting in it himself (as Volage).

Change in management....hmmm. Webster....hmmm. Friend of Charles Dickens....hmmm.