Emma and Her Shadows: Lotti Wilmot, 1878

Emma and William arrived in Sydney in February of 1878, having had a rather rough crossing of the Pacific in the steamer City of Sydney, if the Reuters wire service reports are to be credited.

In the Autobiography and elsewhere, Emma speaks of landing to controversy -- almost certainly the Rev. M. W. Green, waving a copy of Benjamin Franklin Hatch's Spiritualist Iniquities Revealed and spouting the "spiritualism = free love" lines that Emma, throughout her career up to the early 1880s, was obliged to counter.

But M. W. Green wasn't the only person shadowing Emma during her time down under (1878-1879); plenty of folks saw the opportunity to, in one way or another, make money from Emma's brand, as this advertisement from the April 5, 1878 Sydney Morning Herald indicates:

Thomas Walker, Madame von Halle, and Professor Hamilton I will come on to in posts sooner or later; they all deserve highlighting. Tonight, it's Madame Lottie Wilmot who intrigues me: a shadow of Emma in more than one way.

Like Emma, Lotti was an actress at the Adelphi (in Lotti's case from 1871-3). And her particular metier was, like Emma's distinctive: she traveled with her daugher and a large greyhound, and specialized, apparently, in channeling dead children for their mothers.

Like Emma, Lotti had little good to say about The Bible, and had a deep (but somewhat differently motivated) interest in prostitutes and outcast women.

But, entirely unlike Emma, Lotti Wilmot made of herself a sexualized scandal-magnet, from her poses in photographs to the titles of her books and pamphlets (the most notorious being, apparently, a series of pamphlets entitled Beds I Have Slept In.

There's some slight indications that Lotti may have turned against the Spiritualist cause when that became opportune for her, but, for the entire time Emma and William were down under, Lotti was no more than a town, or a hall, away, offering people a sexualized, confrontational, and none-too-proper counterpoint to Emma.