Notice Of Removal

This marvelous palimpsest, from Paul Gaunt of Psypioneer, proving, I think, how powerful and evocative emphemera really is, and giving us a rare glimpse of Emma's handwriting.

Text One: Moving House

NOTICE OF REMOVAL
208 West 38th Street, New York
On and after April 21st (1876), DRS WM & EMMA HARDINGE BRITTAN (sic) will remove to their own residence, 118 West Chester Park, Boston, Mass., where they will resume practice as ELECTRIC PHYSICIANS, and continue to manufacture the HOME BATTERY. No other address will reach them.

This move, from the house in which some of the early organizing meetings of the Theosophical Society were held, and the announced intention to re-enter the galvanic medicine business. If, as the second text suggests, the Drs. Brittan (fascinating that EHB would allow the spelling, but perhaps the use of the removal card as notepaper indicates some enforced parsimony in the Britten household) were in residence in Boston in November of 1876. they were certainly back on the lecture circuit by mid-1877, Emma appearing (at least) in Salt Lake City and San Francisco before embarking for Sydney in January of 1878.

Text Two: I This Day

118 West Chester Park, Boston [Mas?] America
Nov 16 / 76
Dear W Coleman
I this day send you by mail a copy of Ghost Land of which I beg your acceptance from me, its Editor. The demand for it is so great that the first edition is exhausted and I have to prepare another immediately. Receive one to [...] to write a letter yet -- Let me know if this copy comes safely. In great haste yours ever sincerely
Emma H. Britten

(Will puzzle the rest out, I think, with some help from Paul)

W. Coleman may be William Coleman, a somewhat truculent spiritualist and member of the American Oriental Society, who wrote periodically for the Religio Philosophical Journal in Chicago, and who famously accused EPB of plagiarizing large sections of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, but the inclusion of "America" in the header of the text tends to suggest it was written to someone outside the country. A puzzlement.

The ways in which Emma created demand for Art Magic and Ghost Land, the size of the print runs, the number of editions and states of the text are, in my view, all questions that remain open. The texts of Art Magic and Ghost Land commonly in circulation today are those of the Progressive Thinker "premium" editions of 1897 and after, not those of the first (limited) editions. The mechanics of publication for Art Magic, with its illustrations, tend to suggest that the Progressive Thinker edition was printed from the first edition plates or forms of Art Magic, and there are several significant, glaring flaws in the 1897 Progressive Thinker text of Ghost Land that, if present in the first edition text, would establish clearly that it too is based on the original plates or forms.

The Electric Physician

The great lost work of EHB. Boston: Dr. William Britten, 1875. Green cloth boards, blank spine, 4.5 inches wide by 6 inches tall. (3) + 59pp. + 4 advertisements. Unobtainable by the general public, and scarce in its first edition.

It isn't a medical treatise. It's something between a piece of marketing collateral, and an instruction manual for a very specific piece of apparatus, which clearly shipped with a schematic diagram with alphabetized piece-parts.

Worth the price -- every penny -- for this:

Written by any old nobody, operating out of a three-story brownstone on West Brookline Street, it'd quickly be filed under quackery (as my copy obviously was by someone, doubled-over and used as a wedge of some kind) or just thrown out. But, with her by-line, we should see it for what it is: an artifact of the breathtakingly bold re-invention of herself that EHB attempted after the Boston fire of 1872 and the failure of The Western Star.

To be made available on the Archive in facsimile and machine-readable forms almost immediately. Contact me directly if you can't wait to get your hands on it.

Dr. Britten's Home Battery

Speaks for itself.

The snippet is from the Countess of Caithness' book, Old Truths In A New Light (1876). EHB and the Countess had a long association -- the Countess shows up as a 'friend' of the Two Worlds Publishing Company, established by EHB and William in Manchester in the 1880s, in a vanity book the press did in the 1890s (below).

Emma, Fibbing and Revealing (?)

Today's mud-encrusted sapphire comes from Elizabeth J. French's A New Path In Electrical Therapeutics, published in Philadelphia in 1873 by French herself, and subsequently republished by Lippincott.

French, as I mentioned in an earlier post, provided a home for EHB and her mother in New York City shortly after EHB's arrival from Europe, and probably introduced EHB to trance-speaking: a skill French advertised herself as possessing. It also seems clear, from the excerpt of EHB's writing published here, (and here, in flat text form) that whatever falling-out occurred between French and EHB occurred subsequent to March of 1873, for no miffed party would have written a puff piece for an adversary like the one below.

The archives of the Philadelphia Press aren't readily available to check the date and the accuracy of the text (I cannot at this point even verify the existence of such a paper), but assuming it to be an accurate transcription of an actual letter published in March of 1973 by EHB, the text is revealing in a number of ways, indicating that

• it places EHB in residence, at least temporarily, in the Philadelphia area in 1873, thus possibly putting a specific time-frame around the "Rose Cross"/Delanco "blue ink" stalker incident in her Autobiography, on which more another day


• EHB spent time in Milan, Italy, as well as in London and Paris, performing in opera companies


• EHB underwent some number of medical procedures at the hands of eminent London physicians just prior to her first trip to the US -- some time in the early 1850s, after she first became associated with the Haymarket Theatre (which places this any time after May of 1848, when EHB (as Emma Harding) made her debut at the Haymarket as Zepherine in a retitled version of Lola Montes)


• the proximate reason for her trip to the US was not a contract to appear on the stage at the Old Broadway theatre, but rather a doctor's directive that she take a "long sea voyage" or risk "pulmonary consumption."


• EHB was under the care of A. D. Wilson, a prominent and controversial homeopath connected with the French circle, while living in New York


• EHB was at least passingly familiar with the major works of homeopathy, including Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of Medicine (1810), and assumed her readers would be as well

Some of these statements are almost certainly false.

But perhaps most interestingly, though, the letter studiously avoids drawing the very close connection that undoubedly existed for several decades between French and EHB. The text of the letter is written in such a way as to suggest, very clearly, that EHB sought treatment from Mrs. French, and then did not see her again for a significant period of time.

Her Autobiography tells a significantly different story:

One of the most fortunate acquaintances that I was. privileged to make, as I then deemed, was with the family of Mrs. E. J. French, a very fine clairvoyant, physician, electrician, and one who from the first days of the modern movement had been gifted with extraordinary powers as a trance, writing, rapping, and physical medium. I had been introduced to this remarkable medium with a view of consulting her professionally as to the possibility of recovering my powers as an opera singer. Whilst giving me absolutely no hope in that direction, Mrs. French's spirits, the chief of whom professed to be the great electrical discoverer, Benjamin Franklin, strongly advised that my mother and I should make our home with Mrs. French and her family of three sweet young girls. Following this advice, we took rooms with Mrs. French, in a new house to which she was, removing, and for many years we boarded with her, forming an intimate part of her family, and constantly connected with her life and professional experiences.

Selective memory? Creative embellishment (Milan? Really?) Just good storyelling/marketing sense?

The Electric Physician

Go ahead: Google it.

Early on in her transition from actress to propagandist - while she was still serving as a test medium -- EHB and her mother lived, in New York, with Mrs. E. J. French, a Spiritualist who counted among her skills both trance-speaking and electro-medicine -- the use of electricity as a therapeutic mechanism.

(One doesn't need to know much about mesmerism to recognize the intellectual lineage here...)

I haven't looked yet to see how often EHB discussed electro-medicine in her published work, but she and William did, from 1872 until some time in late 1874 or early 1875, practice electro-medicine professionally in Boston.

(I believe, for what it's worth, that this is where the Dr. in Dr. William Britten comes from. When asked by officials about his occupation, in census-taking and elsewhere, Britten had a wide variety of answers, including "bricklayer", "accountant" and "gunsmith" (?!?), but never claimed a medical certification.)

In any case, the great lost (digital) work of EHB is her booklet on electro-medicine, The Electric Physician.

Hunted high and low (abebooks and alibris both failing to produce same), for some months....and I've found a copy. What a treat it will be to submit that book to the tender care of CanoScan and OmniPage, and release its digital (dare I say aetheric) double into the wild...