A New Monetization Strategy

A group of us are puzzling over a piece Emma wrote in The Two Worlds for 1891, concerning a group or class Emma put together, probably in January of 1880 in San Francisco, to study practical occultism -- that is, to attempt practical magic.

The suggestion that such a class had been formed, and that Arthur van der Naillen was a member, seemed odd, evocative...different, and pregnant with meaning, inasmuch as Emma insinuates that the class failed to achieve any measurable results.

I've just found an advert in the Sydney Morning Herald for December 10, 1878 that suggests maybe Emma was trying out a new monetization strategy:

She wouldn't be the innovator here - I recall J.J. Morse doing the same in Boston (but I could be mistaken) several years before this.

Nice to know where they were living at the time, though...

Middle-Aged Rosicrucians?

Given that we know Emma wrote her own copy -- or William did for her -- things like this given me heartburn.

Granted that we have no evidence that Emma was any more familiar with Rosicrucian thinking than Hargrave Jennings' work could make her (now that we know she and Jennings were at Covent Garden together, that link feels secure), in what sense would a body of thought that dates from the Fama Fraternitatis in 1607, supposedly detailing the life of a man born no earlier than the year of the Great Schism be considered a document of the Middle Ages?

Emma the Infidel: 1878

After arriving in Australia in 1878, Emma did a stint in Sydney before traveling south for a long (and apparently very successful) winter season in Melbourne in the Harbinger of Light circle. She made her way back from Melbourne to Sydney in September, with stops in Bendigo, Albury and elsewhere -- all of which are reported by the meticulous Australian press and their system of distributed corrrespondents. Arriving back in Sydney in late September, Emma did a few lectures on the auspices of the Progressive Lyceum Society before launching into her now-tried-and-true "popular science" series of lectures: magic, witchcraft, sorcery, etc.

Her local competitors are around. Thomas Walker has swapped cities with her, and gone to Melbourne; Lotti Wilmot is in the neighborhood, as are her shadows/debunkers Hamilton and company, and an ex-Catholic priest named Chiniquy, charging the ramparts of Rome and giving lectures "for ladies only" on obscure Roman Catholic ritual, who I have to look into but who is tied in some way or other to Madame Wilmot. But what's interesting about this second round of lectures in Sydney, in the spring of 1878, is the wrath Emma brings down on herself from a clergyman named Wazir Beg.

Not the first time Emma's heterodoxy has been called out, but certainly one of the most frank attacks on her beliefs. Definitely something we're going to have to dig out of the dustbin of history.

---

Hoped this was a pamphlet, but alas -- it appears to be a lecture, targeting Emma as well as influential Australian spiritualists, that Beg delivered on (at least) Sunday 27 October 1878 at Chalmer's Church in Alfred Park, while Emma was across town at the Theatre Royale in Castlereagh Street, given an audience-driven trance lecture.

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.

Emma as Reformer

It's conventional to remark on Emma as an espouser of reformist causes -- her institution for outcast women being the most conspicuous -- but it's pretty clear that Emma was no radical. Not only was she unable to carve out a space in the landscape of her thought for "free love", but she was equally unable to envision any solution to the stand-off brewing in the 1860s and 1870s between capital and labor that involved taking a hard position on one side or another of the exploitation/economic efficiency argument at the heart of that conflict. I have yet to dig into her lectures on the origins of the races, but I'm a bit scared about what I might find there, and as Leslie Price has pointed out to me, the fact that Ann Sophia came from a family that made their money in the West Indies trade virtually guarantees that Emma carried some residual guilt about her more-or-less direct participation in the slave trade.

Emma's 1878 extemporaneous lecture on The Chinese Labor Question is indicative of her discomfort with political questions, but more indicative, if sketchy, is the canned lecture on capital and labor she was giving in Australia and New Zealand later in 1878 and in 1879.

That she was billed as a Freethought lecturer in New Zealand is somewhat humourous, in the political sense, as her thought is hardly free from the completely ineffectual small-c christian small-s socialist mentality emphasizing 'voluntary cooperation for mutual betterment' between the employer and the employed (the nineteenth century equivalent, in many ways, of "why can't we all just get along?", poignant and relevant but ultimately unworkable), but it's interesting to speculate, in light of her relatively under-developed opinions on this issue circa 1879, how much she had developed her ideas a decade or so on, when she found herself, in the offices of The Two Worlds amidst truly left-wing socialists with, in some cases, a to-the-barricades mentality.

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.

Ernest Reinhold (Again)

Readers will remember Lewis Spence's assertion (undocumented), that Emma wrote music, music criticism, or both, under the name of Ernest Reinhold in the period between her father's death in 1834 and her move to the US in 1855.

I've now found five more traces of Ernest Reinhold, or E. Reinhold, publishing music in the period 1849 to 1852.

First item of interest: every one of these snippets is from the Bristol Mercury, and notices of Ernest Reinhold, or E. Reinhold, appear nowhere else but the Mercury in the British Library's newspaper database.

Second item of interest: the link to Francis Henry F. Berkeley, Liberal member of Parliament for Bristol, to whom one of the pieces is dedicated, and who is obviously promoting Reinhold's work.

Third item of interest: the dedication "with permission" of another piece to the Duke of Beaufort.

So let's assume that Lewis Spence knew something we do not -- even if he did garble what he knew -- and that Emma = Ernest Reinhold.

The first item of interest -- mentioned only in Bristol -- makes sense. Emma's ties to the Bristol musical performance scene I've already touched on; it's where her career was launched.

The link between Emma and Francis Henry F. Berkeley is a bit difficult to dig out, but we can find it in this passage on Berkeley's initial election in Bristol, in 1837, from John Latimer's Annals of Bristol (1887):

At the general election in July, caused by the demise of the king, the two Conservative members of the previous Parliament retired into private life....The Liberal Party selected the Hon. Francis Henry F. Berkeley. After an exciting contest, the poll was declared on the 25th July, as follows: Mr. Miles, 2828; Mr. Berkeley, 3312; Mr. Fripp, 3156. In lieu of the old ceremony of chairing, the Liberals celebrated their victory by a procession of the trades of the city, in which some thousands of artisans took part. A petition against the return of Mr. Berkeley was presented on behalf of (Mr. Fripp). It alleged extensive bribery and treating, and further affirmed that certain agents of Mr. Berkeley, being also Charity Trustees, had been openly guilty of corruption and undue influence, bu giving or promising charity gifts in order to secure votes against Mr. Fripp.

Readers may recall that the Charity Trustees employ Ann Sophia Floyd at about this time.

And if that connection's not strong enough, there's this: Francis Henry F. Berkeley was intimately connected with the London theatre, and with the Royal General Theatrical Fund, as were (dum-de-dum-dum) Edward Bulwer (Lytton) and Charles Dickens.

I cannot find, as yet, a connection between Emma and Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort, one-time Lord of the Admiralty, and High Steward of Bristol (horse racing and theatre enthusiast), to whom E. Reinhold dedicated "with permission" the ballad "Oh bid me live". But Somerset was more than a bit of a rake, and it appears that Somerset served in the lower house of Parliament, as member for Gloucestershire West, with the Honorable George Berkeley, who I believe was the elder brother of FHF Berkeley.

The Album and the Encyclopedia

Seems to be a period of climb-downs, step-backs and re-states, for me...

My conclusion that the Two Worlds Album was all that remained of a more ambitious encyclopedia project may be incorrect. As this advert from The Two Worlds of October 1896 makes clear, the Album is indeed the Album, as such, published under the aegis of The Two Worlds, with Emma and WIlliam (who died in November of 1894, implying this text was a long time in preparation) as editors.

While this doesn't prove that the Encyclopedia didn't become the less ambitious Album (and what would prove that, or disprove it, short of a manuscript copy of the Encyclopedia, or something similar), it makes it less likely, for sure, that the two documents are part and parcel of one of Emma's projects, and more likely that, when Emma died, she left behind some portion of what would have been a truly interesting work.

Art Magic: A Bibliographical Note

In an earlier post, I noted that there are two cover variants of the first edition of Ghost Land: an edition with blue boards, and an edition with red boards.

It now appears the same is true with the first edition of Art Magic.

Here is a shot of my first edition of Art Magic, in red boards, and deliberately designed to be visually consistent with the first (red) edition of Ghost Land:

And here is a first edition (currently for sale by owner -- contact me if you're interested in owning it) of a first edition text (same title page, for sure, same cover stamping, and presumably same text) in green boards:

I had speculated that the difference, with Ghost Land, was the country of origin: blue for US, red for England. Maybe that's dead wrong, and maybe I got it backwards.

A green boarded Ghost Land or an Art Magic in blue boards would open up yet another vista.

A bibliographical puzzle, for sure.

Emma's Theatre Career: A New Chronology

Thanks to the British Library's stellar newspaper archive, we have a new and much more accurate view of the 18-year career of EHB, on the public stage.

In broad strokes, it looks like this:

• In November of 1838, in Bristol, Emma debuts, as "Miss Floyd", as a vocalist. Presumably she is also studying piano, which went hand-in-hand, pedagogically speaking, with vocal training at the time. She is taken in hand by T. Machlin, a Bristol impresario, and operates under his tutelage and promotion until mid-1839.
• Some time in 1839 or 1840, T. Machlin hands Emma to T. Welsh, in London, where Emma moves with Ann Sophia and Tom (but not Margaret), and begins a (now we can call it) three-year articling to the famous English music master, with articles due to terminate in 1842. During this period (according to Emma), she is loaned to Pierre Erard as a piano demo dolly (whether in Erard's Paris workshop, as Emma claims, or in his London workshop, is to be determined).
• (In 1841, with Emma's articles coming to a close, Thomas goes to sea, where he will die that same year.)
• On or before April of 1843, Emma joins the Covent Garden company, where she will appear (as Miss Floyd) -- in London, and in the provinces, when the company tours -- in operas and burlettas, in named minor roles.
• On or before August of 1843, Emma moves from Covent Garden to the Princess's Theatre, where (as Miss Floyd), she will appear in several productions, in named minor roles, and receive notices, primarily for her looks and her voice.
• In early 1844, Emma moves from The Princess's to Sadlers Wells, to do Shakespeare (singing roles) briefly, and adopting the stage name of "Emma Harding", before moving to the Adelphi at the end of 1844, and from there to the Royal Surrey in 1854.

(To measure change, consider my hypotheses a year ago)

This confines Emma's asserted period in Paris to the period she is articled to Thomas Welsh (which should make tracking down some trace of that a bit easier), and it makes Emma's Philadelphia 1877 claim to have studied in Paris and Milan a very tight squeeze indeed, since both would have to be encompassed by the period of articling. And, finally, it calls into question her claim to have known Sir Michael Costa, at least in the Covent Garden context, since Emma was long gone from Covent Garden by the time Costa takes over there in 1847. But since Costa was conducting, in London, from 1830 on, there's no reason to believe she didn't run into him when she was part of the T. Welsh brigade.

On the whole, with documentation all the way along now, the evidentiary record validates -- or at least does not contradict -- any claims made by Emma about her early performative life. She left gaps, but, then, that's what Emma often did: elide what she chose, at any given time, not to foreground. Always the propagandist.

Emma and The Bristol Charity Trustees

Established by Parliamentary act during the reign of William IV, the Bristol Charity Trustees were 21 men (yes, male) of good social standing, who administered, as time went on, a wide variety of gifts (of money and property), operations (schools, hospitals, almshouses) and funds in broad charitable areas, within Bristol.

Within their portfolio, in the 1830s and after, was a grammar school -- that is, what we would call in the US a public school -- for poor children.

On March 16, 1838, the Bristol Charity Trustees met to consider various topics, and the Bristol Mercury reported, the next day, on their deliberations.

This is some four years after Ebenezer's death: Ann Sophia has three children(15, 12 and 8 years of age respectively), and Emma has yet (see my earlier post) to make her debut as a performer (and contribute wages to the family). That Tom was at work -- in the Floating Harbour, I expect -- seems likely, but the family would not have been able to support itself on the boy's wages. Emma was almost certainly expected to take care of Margaret, and I suspect that the conflict between that (a necessity if Ann Sophia worked), and Emma's earning power as a performer is what led to Margaret's banishment to Ann Sophia's sister's family.

That Ann Sophia was compelled to apply for a cleaner's position in the gift of the central charitable institution of Bristol tells us a great deal: about her employability after Ebenezer's death (nil), about the life she (and therefore her children) led prior to Ebenezer's death (middle class), about how Ann Sophia's family could be relied upon (not for money), and about how a young Emma -- at 15, already a woman in the eyes of British law -- saw her mother, as a (perhaps already imagined) life-long companion.

1838: The Start Of A Career

No one on the planet will enjoy this as much as I do, I'm sure, but here it is: Emma's first public performance, in Bristol, in 1838:

The Bristol Mercury reviewed the concert, remarking that "A young lady, named Miss Floyd, made a very promising debut; she possesses a voice of more than ordinary sweetness and flexibility, and of great compass, and, judging from the manner in which, under all the disadvantages of of a first appearance, she executed some very difficult passages in the music assigned to her, we should say she will prove a valuable acquisition to the musical profession."

Emma, lead vocalist, at age 15, in Bristol.

Within a year, she will be under the tutelage of one T. Machlin, the musical impresario of Bristol, who will -- by 1840, I think -- have handed her off to Thomas Welsh, in London.

Curatorial Heart Attack #2 (Almost)

Mining the pages of the Bristol papers from 1820 until 1840, for traces of the family Floyd, and what riches there were...and what potential sorrows.

Keeping in mind that Margaret Floyd, Emma's younger sister, was banished from the family by 1841, and sent to Ann Sophia's sister's menage, imagine my train of thought when I discovered, in the 1830s, in Bristol, one Margaret Floyd, arrested for theft, creating a public disturbance and prostitution, and ultimately sentenced at the general quarter sessions in 1838 to seven years' transportation.

Oh, well (modulo Margaret's putative birth in 1830), that all makes sense, and shines quite a different light on Emma's obsession with homeless and outcast women, not to mention the separation...

But that's not our Margaret.

Margaret-the-transported was born in Gloucester, in 1812. Thank heavens for the anal retentiveness of the clerks-pronounced-with-an-a in the British penal system, and the Church of Latter Day Saints for providing all that yummy data so we can help them identify folks for their baptisms-for-the-dead rituals.

Margaret, my apologies...

The Attraction of Cheetham Hill

I suppose this is well-understood amongst Spiritualist scholars, but I've not understood until just now what precisely it was that drew Emma and William to Cheetham Hill, Manchester -- given they were both Londoners by birth, and big city folk by inclination.

Turns out Margaret's husband, Gilbert Wilkinson, was tied to that part of Manchester, as indicated in the marriage announcement for Margaret and Gilbert from the July 25, 1857 issue of The Manchester Times:

I have turned over a few other rocks and found a Margaret Floyd underneath, but in conditions that require me to check quite a few facts yet...

January 1844: Emma at the Princess's Theatre

Covered in metaphorical dirt, but nuggets remain...

From the London Examiner, in the "Theatrical Examiner" section for Saturday, January 6, 1844:

...The Magic Mirror, which is founded on the Arabian tale of the 'Ninth Statue,' continues to be very attractive: and most deservedly so. As a specimen of stage decoration it is entitled to unqualified praise, and the various Chinese costumes successively brought before the audience, show a most lavish spirit of liberality on the part of the manager. A 'bit' at Hullah's singing for the million is not only comical, but the musical effect produced by the chorus of Chinese pupils and their preceptor, Mr. Paul Bedford, is exceedingly pleasing. The air is the French 'Ah vous dirai je', which is cleverly harmonized. And when the price of China, Mrs. (sic) Grattan, obtains the hand of the 'Ninth Statue' -- and he is a lucky man, for that statue is none other than the very pretty and fascinating Miss Floyd -- the curtain descends amid the loud plaudits of an audience evidently untired: an amazing thing to say of a Christmas piece.

I have little hesitation in saying that this is our Emma, using her surname, for two reasons: a non-speaking role for the pretty, "fascinating" singer and musician who's yet to earn her acting stripes, but who'll have her likeness as Queen of the Wilis (a form of polite pornography) engraved in a couple of years, and the presence of the man whose career Emma's shadows, partners or trails behind for the best part of a decade from this point forward: Paul Bedford.

1854: Emma Goes Transpontine

As I scrabble and scrape amidst the debris of Emma's life, it gets harder and harder to fill in blanks. After a while, one just doesn't expect to learn anything substantially new. Yes, there's some pleasure in filling in the details of her movements for the spring of 1873, or in learning precisely what lecture she gave in Liverpool (and where) on that day (cold, raining) in February 1882, but the big gaps -- all, for the most part, before 1855 -- remain: gaps. Curator becomes indeed a much more apt word than, say, historian.

But there's always the hope of something fundamentally new, and yesterday brought such newness.

We need to begin by recapitulating, in summary fashion, Emma's story of her life as an actress, adding in the dates that she declined to provide but we have since recovered. That story is, roughly: Emma was a working actress for seven (no, eleven) years in London, until "a baffled sensualist" ended her career by making it impossible for her to work in London theatre, so Emma would be forced to fall back upon the baffled sensualist's protection (that is, become his mistress). This condition persisted for a year, more or less (from late spring of 1854 until early summer of 1855), when Ann Sophia demanded that Emma end the liaison. Emma, at her wits' end, wandering in St. John's Wood, looking for Sir Michael Costa's house, runs instead into Mr. G. H. (George Honey, a member of her company at Sadler's Wells and after), who gets her engaged as a member of the Wallack Company, which is headed to Paris for the summer season to do Shakespeare.

I was, until yesterday, running with that story, so much so that I had published it in the Archive (where it still sits at this moment), and drafted it into the chapters of the biography on Emma's time on the London stage.

Wrong. Dead wrong. Or rather, woefully incomplete.

This failure on my part might serve as an object lesson for that oft-repeated grad school phrase: in important matters, do not depend on secondary sources. Well, I did. And I did so in a notoriously unreliable area of Victorian social history - the history of the London stage. I accepted the (complete and accurate) reconstructed records of the Adelphi Theatre as the sum total of the documentary evidence on Emma's theatre career, spot-checked them against the Times advertisements of the period, and called it good.

Shame, shame, shame...

After wading through every theatre advertisement in the British Library's newspaper database that mentions "Emma Harding," "Miss Emma Harding" or "Miss Harding", a different picture emerges -- one that's more interesting, plausible, and consistent.

As reported, Emma's career at the Adelphi ended in June of 1854.

In September of 1854, Emma is at the Strand Theatre, performing in Hard Times, "for the benefit of Mr. Sidney", who I believe was the owner of the Strand at that time.

Beginning in October of 1854, and running consistently (that is, multiple press mentions per month) until mid-May of 1855, Emma is a member of the company of the Royal Surrey Theatre, performing in a wide variety of work, including farce and panto, until (at least) her last recorded performance, which begins on May 17, 1855.

The Wallack Company was forming in June of 1855, so it's reasonable to assume Emma ended her stint with the Surrey in late May of 1855, and was in Paris doing Shakespeare a month later. Continuous employment as a working actress from 1844 until 1856.

There's a lot to say about this move, from the Adelphi to the Surrey via the Strand (including the discovery that Emma was in competition, in the eyes of the press, with her beautiful and talented Adelphi company-mate Miss Sarah Woolgar, whose career is central to Victorian theatre), but the salient facts to note now are:

• The Surrey at the time was run by Shepherd and Creswick, working actors (as were many theatres) who were known for taking risks of all sorts -- debuting edge-y dramas, running original light operas in the summer season, etc. Surrey's economics were unwashed: two shows at half-past six and half-past nine, two shillings for a box, one shilling for the pit, and six pence for a place in the gallery.
• The benefit performance of Hard Times had, I believe, the assistance and involvement of Charles Dickens.
• The Strand is south of the Thames -- Emma had to go "transpontine" as the then-current saying had it, to find work.

Going across the river for work must have made Emma sick at heart -- crossing the Thames, as an actress, was equivalent to crossing a class line, going down-market. Ann Sophia's not working, Emma's 32-passing-for-21 (we have to keep reminding ourselves of that fact), and her career is decidedly on the decline. Whether there was a "baffled sensualist" in the mix, effectively pushing Emma across the river for work by poisoning the first-tier theatre owners against her, or whether that -- as in other cases in Emma's later life -- is just a (paranoid) convenience, is something we'll probably never know with certainty. But the chance, in the summer of 1855, to go to Paris, and do Shakespeare (where she had begun her career, in 1844), must have seemed to Emma at the time to be the workings of providence.

Curatorial Heart Attack (Almost)

Yesterday evening brought with it an important discovery (wait for it), and at the tail end of documenting that, I discovered, in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post for October 4, 1855, this heart-stopper:

Now, when this happened, I did bother to track down Ashburton, and found it, there at the edge of Dartmoor, but I didn't stop to think for a moment about the date -- October of 1855 -- or the fact that Emma and her mother were already in the United States, having spent the summer theatre season of 1855 doing Shakespeare in Paris. I just -- went immediately into reconstruction model: de-emphasizing those bits and pieces of Emma's early life that were inconsistent with this new fact, raising up the bits that made more sense (the story of the man she left behind), etc. And making up thematics -- very important. Young (well, young-ish) actress, with an eye on the main chance, seen by young man from the provinces at the theatre, decides to chuck it all for the security of wife-li-ness, but almost immediately reconsiders....my my how the melodramatic tropes of our common lives infiltrate everything.

All of that happened in, oh, thirty seconds or so, before I processed the date of the entry, and realized this was not our Emma.

A quick trip to the census database, and, indeed, Charles and Emma Stentiford (what a killer name) are easily trackable in the census data until near the end of the century, and wind up in Canada, with a big family and what looks, from the census records, to be a good life.

Definitely time to listen to Robert Francis read his poem on history again....

Ebenezer's Death

Although we've known it with some certainty for a while, it's nice to see it in the journalistic record, and to know that the Floyds' life was sufficiently respectable (that Victorian word for appropriately-classed) that Ebenezer's death warranted an obit in the local paper.

From The Bristol Mercury for May 5, 1834:

One line, but confirmation of the two bits of data on which so much of the story (in the Robert Francis sense) of Emma's early life is based.

June 1886: The First Spiritualist Marriage In England?

Seems the Spiritualists felt the need to contest the religious marriage ceremony as well. The Birmingham Daily Post for Wednesday, July 28, 1886 reports, in its "Gleanings" column, that the first Spiritualist marriage performed in England took place the prior Monday -- the 26th -- in Blackburn, in the Public Hall, where Roderick Round Sanger (19) and Jane Anne Farmery (25) were married by Richard Wolstenholme (photographer). The ceremony included music, and an address by...you guessed it... our Emma (married in an Episcopal church).

May 12, 1871: Brand Issues

Although she wouldn't have used the words, Emma had some personal brand management issues in late 1870, and early 1871, after marrying William in Jersey City, and returning to the UK. For example, consider this advert, from the Liverpool Mercury of May 12, 1871:

Mrs. for real now (but usually still referred to in the British press as "Miss Emma Hardinge"), she has yet to add "Britten" to her name. She'll save that for the next tour of England.

April 1871: Emma as Metonym

This letter to the editor of The Preston Guardian on April 15, 1871, goes some way to showing how Emma was, by the early 1870s, a stand-in for "Spiritualism" as a whole.

Given how short was Emma's period as a test medium, and how -- as far as we know -- she repeatedly refused to identify her spirit guides (mentioning them only in private conversation, and claiming relatively few famous ones -- it's clear this correspondent is less worked up about Emma, than he is about the behavior of test mediums in general.

April 1, 1865: Emma, Defensive

The Liverpool Mercury for Saturday, April 1, 1865:

Among the late reinforcements to the army of female speech-makers is an Englishwoman, calling herself "Miss Emma Hardinge", about whom there has been some interesting discussion in the (US?) newspapers. The World, editorially alluding to Miss Hardinge some few days since, stated that common rumour affirmed that she first made her appearance in public as a ballet-dancer in a London theatre, which provoked a sharp reply from the offended Emma, denying the assertion, so far as it related to dancing in public, but admitting that she "was educated as an opera-singer, and in process of training for her professional duties became an actress at the Royal Adelphi Theatre, London.

What's truly interesting about Emma's press coverage in England in 1865-6 is that she garnors virtually no mention from her arrival until her debut as a secular lecturer in January of 1866, after which time she is roundly panned, "outed" as a Spiritualist under the thrall of The Spiritual Magazine, and then largely ignored.

Reception Aesthetics: Modern American Spiritualism

Three reviews of Modern American Spiritualism (1870), all without by-line: from The New York Times, (January 1870) , The Athenaeum (August 1870), and The Month (October 1871).

The Athenaeum piece may well have been written by Moncure Conway, with whom Emma will tussle later in her career.

Modern American Spiritualism, despite reviews of this sort, has to be seen as Emma's most successful publication venture. Advertisements (placed no doubt by Emma herself) in the New York Herald Tribune during the first quarter of 1870 suggest that between 2,000 and 8,000 copies of the book (depending on how we understand the word "edition" as a unit of measurement) sold in the first year of its publication alone, and it's still -- judging from contemporary citation in scholarly work -- viewed as a standard historical reference work.

January 1866: Not Safe For Long

One wonders what Emma thought, as she and her mother left New York in August of 1865 to return to England, about the tenor of her reception there.

Assuming that her departure was occasioned, as the US papers suggest, by the receipt of a legacy on her part, or on Ann Sophia's part, rather than by an explicit desire to take her theretofore-US-only show on the road, it's astounding how soon after her arrival in England she's taken under Benjaminc Coleman's wing, and introduced to London spiritual circles at the Winter Soirees.

And it's equally surprising how soon her past career as an actress is thrown in her face, publicly, by the English press. The earliest example I have found so far is this snippet, from the January 13, 1866 issue of The Anglo-American Times of London:

(In passing: I am excited about the "considerable powers of authorship" comment. It suggests to me that, indeed, Emma was trying to transition from actress to author in the early 1850s, before her trip to Paris and thence to New York.)

The Anglo-American Times was, in January of 1866, still in its first year of publication, targeting American expatriates and visitors to London.

As I have suggested in earlier posts, I believe Emma hoped to remake herself on her return to England, and establish herself as a public speaker on secular topics. Clearly this attempt was both transparent and offensive to others, who felt no compunction about blowing Emma's cover in public.

And this failure may explain why Emma is intent on returning to the United States in mid-1866 (she arranges for an announcement to that effect to appear in the Banner of Light in July of 1866), and why - desperate, I believe, to get off the rostrum -- she hatched the plan that produced her most enduring work, Modern American Spiritualism, which is discussed as a project-in-progress in the pages of the The Banner of Light in March of 1867, after Emma has returned: to the US, and to the trance lecture rostrum.

October 1862: Emma Goes On The Stump

Turns out there is quite a lot of coverage in the California papers of Emma's call to the political rostrum, to stump for Lincoln. Florence Fane (Frances Fuller Victor), in The Golden Era for October 2, 1864, for example, writes in her column that:

Now, if instead of an odd fabcy about Odd-Fellowship, I have been thinking about the "Coming Man," the whole reverie would have been less odd -- indeed would have been in some danger of being even. I am glad Emma Hardinge regards my venerable friend Abraham Lincoln as the Coming Man; it shows good taste as well as a clear insight into the National sympathies....The next time there is a great mass meeting where front seats are reserved for the ladies, I am going. If Miss Hardinge stumps the state I shall offer myself as aid-de-camp. One thing will then be certain, I shall have an opportunity to witness the coming of a great many men to hear her address. Long live Abraham Lincoln! As long live Emma Hardinge!

This is a puff piece, to some extent. Emma was, almost as soon as she arrived in California, taken into the circle around the Golden Era, so much so that, when the Era expanded its format in early 1864, Emma (along with Adah Isaacs Menken and her husband, Robert Henry Newell, who wrote under the pseudonym Orpeus C. Kerr -- that is, "Office Seeker") was listed as a major contributor.

March 1862: Outcast Women

Although we have various versions of Emma's plan for her institution for homeless and outcast women, we have little in the way of recordings or precis of her addresses on this topic.

The New York Herald-Tribune for March 15, 1862, furnishes us with one such precis, at the time when Emma -- having failed to rally support in Boston, Portland (Maine), and Philadelphia, turned her attention to New York philanthropic circles.

A Distinguished Marriage

From The (Jersey City) Evening Journal for October 13, 1870:

What a lot of knots. "Miss" Emma Hardinge (when she listed herself as a widow on in the marriage registration) and "Mr. Britton" (which could get us quickly to the notion some scholars have had that she married Samuel Brittan).

1867: Where Was Emma?

It's nice that I am still getting thrown as I wade through newspapers, looking for bits of Emma.

The conventional chronology (including mine own) has Emma in England continuously from the fall of 1865 to the fall of 1869, when she supposedly returns to the US to arrange for publication of Modern American Spiritualism (in 1870). On this trip, she is alleged to have met William Britten, making sense of the marriage in 1870. (I am fairly certain she knew William much earlier than that).

What to do then, with this announcement on the front page of the New York Herald for January 26, 1867?

Mrs. now. She left the US, in 1865, as Miss.

Or how about this one, from the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer for May 22 1867?

If these lectures actually took place, that places in Emma in the US for at least the first half of 1867.

1865: Leaving For London, and a Legacy?

Finally, a date on Emma's departure from the US for England in 1865, courtesy of the New Your Herald for August 7, 1865.

Also, this contextualizes the oft-reported "legacy" associated with this departure, in a more sensical way -- it was Ann Sophia who'd been left a legacy, rather than Emma. That means, almost certainly, that a member of Ann Sophia's family had died (note to self: look it up).

Emma's Politics: The Day of Reconstruction

Emma's staple lectures, in the period between her return from California and her departure for England in late 1864, were non-trance political lectures, specifically one called "Politics versus Principles" (which may be the same as another called "Politics in the Pulpit") and "The Day of Reconstruction." To date, no stenographic transcripts of these lectures has been found, but the Philadelphia Inquirer for April 14 1865 does give us a precis of "The Day of Reconstruction":

They Went Where Their Interests Called Them: Emma in A Free Love Colony - 1856?

There's a good bit at stake, in terms of understand Emma's mature positions regarding both sexual freedom and socialism, in uncovering precisely how Emma was spending her time between February of 1856, the period of Emma's acceptance of her mediumship, and the end of 1858.

This is the time of the Cora/Benjamin Hatch divorce scandal -- in which both Emma and William were apparently involved, albeit in different ways -- and the time of the first "free love" insurgence within the Spiritualism movement.

Although he is quick to place Emma in the anti-socialist, anti-free-love camp (the Christian camp, he calls it), Warren Chase (known for his "Lone One" autobiography), in his Forty Years on the Spiritual Rostrum makes the extraordinary claim that he first met Emma, and Ann Sophia, in the aggressively-pro free love colony of Modern Times, Long Island.

Elsewhere in the text, Chase writes that "In those years of '61-2 I often, in my visits to new York, went down to Modern Times, L. I., where T.L. Nichols and Mary Gove Nichols had started with others a settlement, and effort at social reforms, as I had friends there, and there I first became acquainted with Emma Hardinge, now Emma Hardinge Britten, one of our most active and efficient workers in England, and well known in our country. She and her mother were quietly living there then, or about that time, and she was developing into mediumship and soon after went upon the rostrum." That would date this sojourn among the free love anarchists to some time between early 1856 and the end of 1857.

Modern Times was founded in 1851, as an "anarchist" community by a group of people gathered around Stephen Pearl Andrews, Josiah Warren, and TL and Mary Gove Nichols - spiritualists, practitioners of alternative medicine, free-love advocates, and communitarians whose economic model was based on the idea that the cost basis of a commodity set the upper limit of its price (thereby of course shifting complexity from margin, to the determination of the cost basis).

Thomas Low Nichols (biographer of the Davenport Brothers, and writer of that great lost novel Raffle For A Wife (1845) -- left a description of life in Modern Times in his Forty Years of American Life and it's worth reading, if only to imagine Emma in such surroundings:

(A small grocery store experiment) did not satisfy Mr. Warren. Modern Times was founded to carry out the (cost-as-the-limit-of-price) as far as it could be done in one village. Disciplines came from New York and even from Boston. They bought lots of one to four acres at cost; they build houses of lime and gravel at cost; they exchanged labour and goods, grubbed up the scrub-oaks, and made the desert bloom with an abundance of roses. The air was pure; an abundance of soft water was at a depth of thirty feet in the gravel. There were no churches, no magistrates. Every one did what was right in their eyes. The women wore "bloomers" or donned the entire male costume, as they found most convenient. As the sovereignty of the individual was opposed to all artificial, social or legal constraints, families arranged themselves according to the law of attraction. Those lived together who chose to do so, and parted without giving any trouble to the courts of law. The right of the State either to unite or separate was denied, and free love was placed in the same category with all other freedom. A man might have one wife, or ten, or more if he could take upon himself the proper cost or burthen; and the same freedom was asserted for women as for men. It seemed very odd to find one's self, two hours from New York, among people who had deliberately discarded the common restraints and regulations of society, and where the leading spirits -- the persons most admired and respected -- were those who had most completely acted on their theories. But it was evident that Modern Times was a failure. It was wanting in the basis of wealth; the land was poor; there were no facilities for manufactures. The mere enjoyment of freedom, or the utmost realization of the sovereignty of the individual, was not enough to bring or hold people together. They went where their interests called them. One most enthusiastic advocate of the principles of Warren and (Stephen Pearl) Andrews got an appointment in the New York police force, and became a humble instrument of the power he had long denounced. Others were attracted away by the chance of profit, or the hope of wealth. It was very well to teach that profit was plunder, and that to be rich only gave the power to rob others with impugnity; that marriage was legalized adultery, and families petty despotisms. There were few who could resist the temptation to live upon the labour of others, and to preside over a despotism that society had stamped with respectability.

Modern Times, Long Island survived apparently from 1851 until the mid-1860s, but Emma and Ann Sophia -- if they lived there at all -- could not have been residents for more than a year or so in 1856 and early 1857.

It strikes me that Emma got, from somewhere, her faith in the sovereignty of the individual, and that individual's epistemic warrant to judge for herself what were and were not facts-of-the-matter without the pesky interference of institutions. Why not from Josiah Warren?

Australia 1878: Spiritualism and Drunkenness

From the Sydney Once A Week (editor, C. H. Barlee) for 9 March, 1878:

I need to find independent confirmation that such a challenge -- to an open-air test seance -- was in fact issued, but charges that EHB's rhetorical force were due at least in part to demon alcohol were common while she was in Australia. Apparently, part of the Australian anti-spiritualist meme linked spiritualism and drunkenness in the same way that the US anti-spiritualist meme linked spiritualism to insanity.

A Side Note On EHB and The Two Worlds

EHB's by-line returns to The Two Worlds, I have discovered, in 1896, when apparently she appears at least twice: once on "the use of the Bible in schools" and once on "Spiritualists versus Conjurers".

H. Bielfeld, Esq. Redux

Some time ago, I posted a note about one H. Bielfeld, Esq., Emma-related mystery.

Mystery resolved, courtesy of an obit/letter in The Two Worlds from 1892.

"If You Like This Paper Please Hand It To A Friend"

The Two Worlds for 1892 is now available from the Archive.

I wish I could say that Emma's departure as editor diminished the paper, but the opposite is in fact true: The Two Worlds is in every way a better paper -- for its readers, and for us, now -- after Wallis assumes editorial control than it was in the prior five years. From an idiosyncratic miscellany -- a personal platform -- the newspaper morphs almost overnight into a focused Spiritualist propaganda organ, with a robust stable of contributors, little filler, and a vibrant community of readers engaged with the material.

James Robertson and J. J. Morse (including a revised novella) lead the contributor ranks for the year; Peter Lee, A. F. Tindall and J B Tetlow are much in evidence; James Swindlehurst and other rising members of the cadre also appear. E. W. Wallis attempts a melodramatic novella. Controversies over astrology. Lots of propagandizing for Federation. Much more space devoted to letters, and local doings. A truly fascinating "How I Became A Spiritualist and Why" series, from famous and not-famous contributors. Less re-published filler (though Giles Stebbins appears in its pages that way), and more bespoke content.

Really, there must have been a pent-up pipeline of local content, frustrated by Emma's editorial policies. Little that appears after her departure looks rushed, forced or obtained to fill space.

Emma's last contribution to the newspaper is in the February 5 issue: "A Plea for Spirit Mediums and Speakers." It is, for all intents and purposes, a letter she writes to her board and detractors, rather than to her readers -- an inadvertently appropriate self-referential swansong, in many respects. For the duration of the year -- other than a perfunctory mention of the appearance of The Unseen Universe and the odd reference or two by letter-writers -- Emma appears in the pages of the magazine she founded not at all.

The Seance In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Whats-his-name....Walter Benjamin... would have had something to say about this. What, indeed, changes in the spiritualist situ when the act of production can be recorded? For most of Spiritualism's early life, "recorded phonographically" actually meant "recorded stenographically", but here, in 1892, we have the introduction, into the seance, of verbatim recording equipment.

1892: Transition At The Two Worlds

Here's the constitution of the board and operating management of The Two Worlds Publishing Co Ltd in January 1892.

And here's the constitution of the board and operating management of The Two Worlds Publishing Co Ltd in February of 1892.

In: G. Boys, SS Chiswell and J. Pemberton. Out: William Britten, RT Ashworth and Emma's sister and brother-in-law, the Wilkinsons. Emma remains as editor.

In mid-February 1892, E. W. Wallis assumes the editorship on a pro tem basis.

And in April, Wallis is confirmed as editor and general manager of the operation, while George Colbeck joins the board, and Chiswell and Lee are elevated to board control, while the position of President -- previously occupied by William Britten -- is apparently done away with.

In an issue of The Unseen Universe, Emma attributes the change of control at The Two Worlds to elements of her editorial policy, including her use of non-English material, and her disinclination to publish local matters and ordinary first-person testimonial material.

That may well have been true, but the change of control was triggered, according to The Two Worlds Publishing Co Ltd's official account, by stock manipulation and vote-rigging on the part of William Britten.

The relevant material from the 12 February 1892 and 26 February 1892 (p. 102 and after) issues of The Two Worlds detail, respectively, the board discussion and the board's subsequent report to the shareholders on the stock and voting irregularities (this would be the board's version of the story), as well as (in the 26 February issue) providing a precis of the Chancery suit filed by William Britten in response to the board's decision to restrict all shareholders regardless of share ownership to a single vote.

Pay special attention, in the 12 February issue, to Emma's valediction, on page 78.

My candidate for Nemo was H. Junor Browne, but Nemo is listed as a resident of London in his proxy statement, which makes Browne unlikely to be Nemo, although the board claims the proxy statement is false in this regard.

It's important to point out that the publication of this detail in a circulating newspaper was an open invitation, on the part of the board, for William Britten to file a suit for libel, which he did not do.

---

The Jabez Sherratt who witnessed Nemo's proxy...there is only one in the census records for the UK in the 19th century. Variously a watchmaker and silk worker, with a large family, Jabez Sherratt is living in Macclesfield in the 1881 census, absent from the 1891 census (through a transcription error I'd guess), and dead, in Manchester, in 1900. Precisely how Britten knew him we will probably never know.

The Mrs. J. J. Morse Hotel

Completely off-topic, but delightful nonetheless, I think.

J. J. Morse's publishing and distribution operation is operating at the same address.

View Larger Map

Emma, Slandered

The early months of The Two Worlds for 1892 are a revelation. This suit is the second in which Emma is involved before the end of March 1892. The first, while lasting only an hour or so, was of far more consequence to her life, and will be taken up in a post tomorrow, once I've absorbed what I've read this afternoon, and -- to be frank -- reconstructed my view of both Emma and William.

---

A search of the British Library's online newspaper database for the period 1891-1893 fails to reveal any trace of the suit, or the published apology, in any periodical in that database.

The Two Worlds for 1891

is now available from the E. H. Britten Archive.

Definitely the year of Anti-Theosophy, Federation, Ant-Churchianity, and Magnetic Girls.

18 December 1891

As far as I am aware, this is the first in-print indication that Emma is working on her Autobiography.

Present At The Incident

As mentioned in an earlier posting, one of the tactical blunders committed by the editorial staff of The Two Worlds in 1891 was an over-eager promotion of the magnetic girl craze. I suspect - as I think I've said -- that the magnetic girls on the variety circuit at the time were, for the first generation of spiritualists, a way to recapture the essential doctrines of mesmerism from science, which had transmuted mesmerism into hypnotism, lodged it firmly in the mind of the subject (discounting or discarding the mesmerizing control) and turned it from a fundament of the universe's metaphysics into a tidy clinical instrument.

In late November of 1891, an unsigned essay (almost certainly by EHB) on Ann Abbott, the "Georgia Magnet", appears in The Two Worlds, working in precisely this vein, and concluding with this:

...true, candid, all round thinkers will agree with us that this is THE DAY OF UNVEILING (sic), and that at the point when we begin to realize (sic) that there is an inner man and woman as diverse, but far more powerful than the outer form of matter, we may assure ourselves we have but just entered upon the threshold of the divine temple of the Creator's image MAN (sic), and that when we can (sic) advance father and farther yet into that mystery of mysteries, and know man as he is, and understand his whence and whitherward, we shall have discovered the Alpha and Omega of all being below the supreme existence of GOD (sic) himself.

Vintage Emma.

How unfortunate to find, just north of this stirring coda, the following:

Some six or seven years ago, a young girl, also from Georgia, traveled with her mother and her manager, a plain, quiet, gentlemanlike, young man, through the United States under a name which soon became famous, to wit, "Lulu Hearst." Arriving in New York, and giving exhibitions of the same astounding powers as those of Mrs. Annie Abbott, she performed nightly on the stage of Wallack's Theatre, and on a certain evening the vast crowds assembled to witness her marvelous feats were joined by Dr. and Mrs. Hardinge Britten. After several athletes and sundry big masculines had been drifted about like leaves in the wind by little Lulu, Dr. Britten, then practising in New York and well known to many present, was loudly called for in the audience and invited to go on the stage. As the young girl herself smiling beckoned to the six-foot-two gentleman, he at once mounted the stage, and with a touch of the girl's finger the tall, portly doctor was driven round and round the stage in baffled helplessness. He was, seated in a chair, raised a foot from the ground by one of the girl's hands resting on the side of the chair back.

Present at the incident. Also vintage Emma.

Also distorted, in subtle and disturbing ways.

Lulu Hearst did indeed open in New York, at Walleck's, on 7 July 1884 (according to T. A. Brown's indispensible History of the New York Stage, and got noticed by theNew York Times almost immediately:

But she didn't remain there for long -- she's doing her act in San Francisco at the end of September of that year .However, to make William Britten a practicing physician in New York in 1884 is beyond a stretch - William and Emma were by then resident in Manchester and had returned to the US (on their final trip there) for the 1884 camp meeting season. William had not "practiced" as a physician, as far as I can tell, since the duo's "galvanic medicine" period in Boston, in the mid 1870s, and they were certainly not "resident" in New York in any but the mailing address sense from 1878 until their departure for England in 1880, except for a very brief period -- measured in months -- between their overland return from San Francisco and that departure.

I doubt very much whether in this case the Brittens were in fact present at the incident -- I'll have to check my dates at some point, but I believe at precisely this time, Emma is south, outside Philly, at a camp meeting.

I don't know which is more quietly tragic, in this piece -- the compulsive "present at the incident" gesture that inevitably requires distortion or fabrication -- or the desperate embrace, by Spiritualism, of one of the things that will poison it: the submersion of the legitimate occult in the dime museum variety entertainment.

The Society of the Dew and Light

In the 20 November 1891 issue of The Two Worlds, the lead article space is given over to a letter written to the editor of "The Keighley News", by someone named David Lund, who, as he closes, takes a swipe at Emma's less than charitable post-mortem comments on HPB, and says that "I do not belong to that body or section of Theosophists, and therefore I will leave them to defend themselves. The line of Theosophical thought which I follow is that of the Neo-Platonists, known as the Alexandrian School."

Hmmmm.

Turns out Mr. David Lund is having controversies elsewhere -- including in the Theosophical journals -- with the Theosophists and Mathers, and is the "secretary" of something called The Society of the Dew and Light, an explicitly Rosicrucian order also known as the Ros. Crux Fraters, and the publishers of a magazine we'll have to get out mitts on called The Lamp of Thoth. Turns out he's done time in jail for casting horoscopes, and has been personally slagged-off by HPB herself. And -- wow! -- someone's done a short documentary on David Lund.

Yet another under-examined corner of our supposedly well-tilled field.

Conjuring with Science

You have to reflect on this a minute to see in it, possibly, the essential rhetoric of Spiritualism circa 1890.

It's all very well to talk -- as so many did -- about removing the profit motive from Spiritualism, but to the extent that Spiritualism was a movement of and by the plain people -- the working and earning classes -- people had to, and did, get their livings from Spiritualism, as Morse did. That fact put him what must have been the discomfiting position of creating demand for what he supplied: what every proprietor and small-scale entrepreneur must do. He took the rostrum, delivered value in the form of an address, and monetized that value through his distribution operation. Emma, Wallis, Kersey -- they did the same. The lecture is free; CDs are available in the foyer at intermission.

But keeping the balance -- the careful see-and-saw between belief and merchantilism -- was a difficult proposition. Emma never did very well at it; she was perceived, by her peers, as a bit too much about self-promotion, as the phrase has it.

Here, Morse, in my view, loses control, almost completely. As a rising star in a discourse that is very much about the claims of spiritualism to the status of science (not only to establish parity with science, but also to avoid the charges of obfuscation and hermeneutic elitism leveled at conventional religions), he ought to be watching his own positioning, defending the tenets of that which gives him both social currency and sustenance. But he doesn't -- he couples together the most astonishingly heretical phrase, in the service of demand creation for a board game: Its metaphysics are scientific, occult, inexplicable.

Talk about delivering yourself into the adversary's hands.

That's an oxymoronic miscalculation of staggering proportions.

Perhaps that needs to become my new working definition of parascience: that which is simultaneously scientific and occult and inexplicable.

Out Of Print, Out of Stock

Almost missed this one.

Did Emma have no extra copies for her sub-editor?

Contradictory Trash at the Vegetarian Restaurant

While fighting over institutionalization of the movement, and running a weekly newspaper, Emma (and E.W. Wallis as well) found time to keep the troops in the neighborhood properly indoctrinated as well.

The Two Worlds for 1891 really should be seen as the "Anti-Theosophy" volume...

Joiners and Splitters

Suddenly, in late 1891, the "Platform Guide" at the front of each issue of The Two Worlds contains a new legend.

In late October of 1891, The Two Worlds records 135 distinct societies, operating in 85 English cities - a significant presence, to be sure. Of those, only 28 cities (33%) and 43 societies (32%) are marked as affiliated with the National Federation, and the correlation between "small towns with a single society" and "affiliated with the National Federation" is very high --more than 75% of single-society towns are marked as members of the National Federation.

Even at this early date -- the third annual National Conference has yet to take place -- the (statistical) chances of a single unified National Spiritualist institution seem fairly low. When we see that only 1 of the 18 societies in London is affiliated, we really have to wonder why Emma canceled her lectures there.

Tindall, Damned

In the continuing sniping between Emma in Manchester and Tindall in London:

Completely unfair, really, since after Emma cancelled her appearances before the London Spiritualist Federation, Tindall and three other speakers stepped into the breach, unleashing a salvo of addresses all of which (according to their own report) tended to refute the position that the doctrine of shells explained the phenomenon of modern spiritualism.

Hecklers

There's a wonderful master's thesis or PhD dissertation waiting for the person with the sticktoitiveness to put all of the local society notes from The Two Worlds into a proper database, analyze the movement of speakers among societies, look at the topical and thematic shifts, etc.

This one, from the local Manchester society, appeared in The Two Worlds in late October of 1891, and is surprisingly (post) modern, in many ways.

Persistent Presence, Redux

How natural, and indeed progressive, it now seems to embrace the eruption -- pardon me, percolation -- of the occult in the most unlikely places.

Shades of the Egyptian Canon of Proportion.

Persistent Presence

Emma as art.

Emma Backs Out...Down...Down and Out

In several earlier posts, I noted A. F. Tindall's kow-towing and goading as he attempts to get Emma down to London for a series of lectures sponsored by the London Spiritualist Federation. Tindall promises -- but there was no indication he could deliver -- our Emma, in London, answering the previous lecturer, Annie Besant, and thereby occupying the position Tindall was in effect carving out for her: the grand dame of English Spiritualism. A figurehead position perhaps, but not without influence, particularly when the battle was to be with AB.

Turns out (and you'd have to be reading closely to discover it) that Emma did in fact commit to the two lectures Tindall advertised, at more or less the times he advertised them -- in the two weeks following Besant's address to the LSF -- and then canceled her appearances, apparently within a week or so of her expected appearance.

There's way more here than meets the eye: both in terms of what led to the cancellation, and its repercussions, for Emma and for the promise of a unified Spiritualist movement in Britain.

The Spiritual Songster

The issue of The Two Worlds for 2 October 1891 may have contained within its pages an insert advertisement. Certainly one found its way into my microfilm copy, and here it is, in all its interesting and enlightening glory.

(Download larger-resolution copy from here.)

The Kerseys' management of the Lyceum system in Britain may or may not be covered by the work of historians and researchers; certainly it's worthy of such coverage, and -- based on no more than the Lyceum records regularly published in The Two Worlds -- should be intrinsically fascinating for anyone who looks into it at ground level.

The "Tonic Sol Fa" system of notation described in the Kerseys' advetisement -- something I'd never heard of -- is summarized quite well here, and represented visually here, and apparently at one time contended to replace conventional staff notation as the basis for musical transcription, vocal and instrumental.

One copy of this (first edition) text survives, in the market, according to AbeBooks: in Spain, of all places. Probably hitched a ride in som ex-pat's library.

A culture is its ephemera, really. Or all culture is emphemera. Or emphemeral. Something like that. This bit is wonderful.

An Elderly Gentleman of Superb Aplomb

A signal phrase, for sure.

It appears in a paragraph from the essay (story?) "An Unsolved Mystery" in the collection of HPB's occasional writings and fragments, A Modern Panarion (London: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1895). The paragraph in which it is situated reads as follows:

A diplomatist of distinction, representative at Paris of a neighbouring state, an elderly gentleman of superb aplomb and most commanding appearance, was summoned to the oracle by the bowing footman. After being absent above five minutes he returned, and immediately made his way through the press to M. de Lasa, who was standing not far from the fireplace, with his hands in his pockets and a look of utmost indifference upon his face. Delessert standing near, watch the interview with eager interest.

You can read the entire piece here.

In The Two Worlds for 2 October, 1891, we find a piece on De Lasa, in the same series mentioned in an earlier post, subtitled "A Curious Episode in the History of the Celebrated French Conjurer, Medium or Charlatan, De Lasa" and beginning with this:

The following narrative was communicated to the Editor some years ago by M. De Baillot, a journalist, who had been thoroughly acquainted with the facts, as well as the hero of the story, one that has lately been revived in several of the French and Spanish spiritual papers in a very garbled form.

The piece, some four paragraphs later, contains this (quotations in original):

"A diplomatist of distinction, representative at Paris of a neighbouring state, an elderly gentleman of superb aplomb and most commanding appearance, was summoned to the oracle by the bowing footman. After being absent about five minutes he returned, and immediately made his way through the press to M. de Lasa, who was standing not far from the fireplace, with his hands in his pockets, and a look of the utmost indifference on his face. Delessert, standing by, watched the interview with eager interest....

In EHB's version, the paragraph continues; in HPB's, it ends as I have it above. But the two texts are, for all practical purposes, identical.

I can find no trace of a French journalist, de Baillot, working between 1820 and 1880, although the violinist de Baillot, whom Emma could have conceivably met during one of her untraceable teenage trips to Paris, is in evidence, abundantly, in the literature of the period.

There are, it seems to me, a finite set of explanations for the textual identicality here. Inasmuch as A Modern Panarion collects previously uncollected EHB texts (in 1895), it's possible that Emma had, in her apparently voluminous clippings files, unpublished HPB material she was mining (even at the very moment when she was savaging HPB in print). It's equally possible, I suppose, that HPB had theretofore unpublished or obscurely published EHB material in her files -- in her own hand, even, given the methods of copying available -- that was mistaken by the editor(s) of the Panarion as original HPB material. And it's possible -- even likely -- that both women chose to repurpose a common ancestral text, which would have been in keeping with what we know about both of their scholarly methods -- though HPB was wont to cite her borrowings, generally.

The version of the text in A Modern Panarion ends with the suggestion that the ancestral text of the de Lasa story is to be found (with a by-line?) in an issue of The Spiritual Scientist, which (when I get done with the 1891 and 1892 Two Worlds editing), I'm going to turn to soon. How painful, and illustrative, it will be if we discover that EHB was mining The Spiritual Scientist for material for The Two Worlds, and inventing provenance for what she mined...

Emma, Repurposing?

Note to self: do a side-by-side comparison of Emma's article "The Romance of History - An Episode of the Bastille" in the 25 September issue of The Two Worlds (which she casts as something given to her for translation, possibly by Victor Hugo, and claims was published in Frank Leslie's Monthly), with the piece entitled "The Bastille" in Number XLII of The Chatterbox from 1868 (some 25 years earlier) by one "J F C".

Either EHB = JFC (and that's possible), or we have Emma doing a verbatim mix-up and repurposing.

Tindall, Goading

A. F. Tindall of the London Occult Society is clearing playing a complicated game, in print, with our Emma. In the 18 September 1891 issue of The Two Worlds, Tindall provides a summary of the London Spiritualist Federation's plan to host a series of addresses, in the Atheneum Hall, by Thomas Shorter (of The Spiritual Magazine, aka Thomas Brevoir), followed by an address by Mrs. Besant on "What is Theosophy?", followed (Tindall hopes) by "one or more lectures" by our Emma, in which "Mrs. Britten herself will shortly answer the theories of Theosophy from our point of view." Tindall makes slight apology for his eclecticism, saying "There are those who think we ought not to have introduced subjects as (sic) Theosophy and Astrology, but we desire to hear all sides, and to unite all parties of psychic students. We do not wish for a credal uniformity. Our motto is 'Union with Liberty.'"

Can't have been welcome by EHB, who was all about credal uniformity at this point in her career.

The Ouija Board

From the 4 September 1891 issue of The Two Worlds.

James Burns, the editor of The Medium and Daybreak and purveyor of spiritual materials galore, probably needs no further gloss.

The original patent filing is interesting.

The Officers and Directors of The Two Worlds Publishing Co. Limited

as of August of 1891, are suddenly listed on the paper's editorial page, as follows:

Some of these folk are well-known to us: EHB's husband at the helm, his sister (Mrs. Wilkinson) and her husband (G. R. Wilkinson) on the board, along with Mrs. M. H. Wallis (E. W. Wallis' wife) and E. W. himself as (probably non-voting, recording) secretary.

As for the others:

• R. T. Ashworth, J Boys, J. S. Gibson, W Johnson, T Simkin, F Tomlinson and T Brown escape me for the moment -- clues appreciated.
• W T Braham was an officer of the Salford (Trinity Hall) Society of Spiritualists
• R. Fitton was, I believe, a Manchester spiritualist of some standing who was also a chess enthusiast.
• P. Lee is Peter Lee, the influential and widely quoted Rochdale Spiritualist; I believe he will become either under-editor or acting editor when E. W. Wallis replaces EHB as editor in 1892.
• J. B. Tetlow, one of the founders of the National Conference, a (former?) rostrum speaker and psychometrist.

Assuming EHB's dismissal from The Two Worlds was done by vote, these are substantially the people who will dismiss her, and replace her with E. W. Wallis, in about six months.

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Note: the paper's circulation must be doubled at this time, in order for it to break even -- one wonders whether that, as much as anything else, underlies the dismissal of EHB (and WGB, too).

Light Shines on Delanco

A reader (thanks, Michael) found references in the diary of Miss Martha Fletcher (daughter of JP Thomas Fletcher), in the library at Winterthur in Delaware, that shine some light on the Delanco/Rose Cross mystery.

I'll just list the entries, for now.

30 March 1864: Raining hard all day, very blustering. William went to the city. A Gentleman came from the City to buy Mrs Hardinge’s House, his name is Mellizet. Wrote a letter to Mr Everett, sent him some flowers in it.

4 April 1864: Clear. A woman came to wash, by the name of Josephine; Mrs Newton, sent two women here, in the afternoon. Mr Melizet, and Family, moved from the city today in Mrs Hardinge’s House. Melanie came home. It is quite late, and I am very tired.

12 January 1865: Clear; went out in the morning; took Cynthia. Edward called at Eliza’s; Miss Hardinge arrived from California; left Philada for Delanco, in the half past 3 o’clock, train, with Miss Hardinge; got home safe, and found Ma sick; Miss H. gave me a silver napkin ring which she brought from California.

13 January 1865: Clear; Miss Hardinge went to New York this morning; got a note from Lou Lathrop; Mrs Parsons called to see Ma; Mr Louder came to see Pa.

21 March 1865: Clear very warm; Mrs Sully came to wash. Ma, Pa, and William went up to Beverly to see Dr Smith, he was not at home. Tom and Pa went to the City in the afternoon to hear Miss Hardinge lecture; went down to Mrs Yerkes, she told me Mary A. Dennis died last night. William Meyers came to see Pa.

24 November 1866: Clear, cold; Mrs Hardinge and Mrs Dyott and Marian took dinner with us; Carrie Dennis and Josy called to see me in the evening.

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"Mr. Melizet" is almost without doubt F. W. Melizet, head of a firm of "commission merchants" with offices at 312 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. He is the only Melizet in the Pennsylvania tax assessment for 1862 in Philadelphia. His offices are visible in this picture.

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And, according to an 1876 map of Delanco, the Melizet/Millizett property was bounded by Rancocas Avenue, Burlington Avenue and Franklin Avenue, on Rancocas Creek.

So taking the leap of faith that the "Mrs. Hardinge" in Miss Fletcher's diary is A. S. Floyd (and we know she went by Mrs. Hardinge on occasion), this is the probable location of the house "Rose Cross" mentioned in EHB's Autobiography. Many kudos to Michael, who dug and dug and dug on this one....

Why Google Books Sucks

Off topic, but relevant, I think.

The publishing industry and the content creators they front (and exploit) are frightened and angry about Google Books and Google's aspirations for its digital library platform.

For the record, Google Books has changed my life, and entirely for the better. Whatever progress I have been able to make on EHB is down, for the most part, to Google Books and its voracious appetite for texts.

Having said that, I think people's fears about Google Books are overblown and in some cases hysterical, because Google Books contains the seeds of its own destruction -- and those seeds are themselves part of Google's genetic material. They are there because they must be there, because Google, when all is said and done, knows nothing and cares to know nothing about the content it indexes. Google Books is a giant omnivorous maw, eating everything it finds, indiscriminately, and with little or no understanding of what it eats. That virtually ensures that, once we're all done being thrilled to have the largest repository library on the planet at our fingertips (and once Google is done fighting our legal battles for us, and breaking the publishers' and libraries' monopolies on content), we'll discover that the devil we disintermediated may have been preferable to the book-engorged demon into whose arms we've thrown ourselves.

Because, for any serious researcher (as distinguished from the casual reader), Google Books sucks.

Here are some of the ways Google Books sucks:

• Everything is a book: bound periodical runs are treated as a book, and indexed and posted without inspection. About 25% of the periodical runs I have parted out, thusfar, from Google, contain either damaged sections, missing issues, or both.
• Every book is without artifactual value: a 1966 paperback of a Hawthorne novel is epistemologically identical to a first edition of that Hawthorne novel, and both are shorn of their physicality - binding, size, etc. Google Books captures no physical bibliographical information about what it consumes.
• Poor indexing: Google Books routinely, for me, fails to return books in its search results that (a) I know it has indexed and (b) I know should be returned because they contain the strings for which I am searching. I suspect this is because Google's generally unsophisticated brute-force index-and-search mechanisms, while perfectly suitable for low-value, semantically-sparse web pages, are unsuitable for dense objects like books.
• Miscategorization galore: Google Books' "bibliographical" information on many, many, many texts is just wrong: wrong authors, wrong dates, wrong volume and issue numbers, wrong publishers. Just wrong. The programmers seem more interested in making stupid (and often wrong) fake covers for books (operating on the assumption that the first image in the text must somehow be central to the book's focus) than they are in getting their basic metadata right.
• No reliable mechanisms for identifying different editions: because the book metadata is so badly polluted, Google Books is unable in most cases to effectively identify the other editions of a given text it already has.
• No curatorial mechanisms: when I find that Google Books has royally screwed up some metadata element or other, there's no obvious way for me to (a) correct the metadata or (b) point out to Google Books that someone needs to correct the metadata.

I could go on. But why? Google doesn't care about researchers. Or about the texts they're absorbing for Google Books. It's all just content, all part of the grand vision to have everything indexed. No matter how haphazardly.

It's a damned shame that no one at Google Books thinks library science has anything to add to its endeavor. But then, that's how technology advances itself -- by assuming that what has gone before has no value.