Getting At The Meat of Emma's Lectures

As I assemble the month-by-month (and in some cases day-by-day) chronology of Emma's life, it becomes clear that she had a set of stock lectures (as opposed to her trance lectures, which were audience-driven, and her ad hoc lectures, often on behalf of some specific organization that was sponsoring her) that she used throughout her career as a propagandist. Her lecture on "Ancient and Modern Freemasonry" for example, served her from the mid-1860s until the late 1880s (at least), although we have to be careful not to make too many assumptions based on similarity/identicality of title.

The trouble with these lectures is: since none of Emma's manuscripts survive (as far as we know), and few were stenographically recorded explicitly for publication, we have only newspaper reports of lectures as sources on which to base our knowledge of the lectures' contents.

The US press was, all too often, more interested in Emma-the-person and/or dismissive of the subject matter to give us much of a view into the matter of the lectures; not so the New Zealand press, which covered her closely for her entire time there in 1879, and which leaves us with far and away our best records of the content of her New Zealand lectures, many of which came from her stock lecture pool (by title, anyway).

Thanks to the wonderful "Papers Past" project of the National Library of New Zealand, not only do we get a day-by-day view of Emma in the ground in the land of the long white cloud, but we get pretty good precis of the lecture material, as with this coverage of Emma's stock "The Wonders of the Age We Live In" lecture.