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.

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.

The Two Worlds for 1890

A weak year, but not without its moments of interest. Now available from the Archive.

• January: More On Colonel Olcott and Theosophy; what might be another piece of fiction from EHB, "The Mystery of the Postern Gate"; hypnotised shopkeepers; J. J. Morse gets the Rostrum for his "Notes form a Worker's Diary" and for his "Theosophy and Re-Incarnation Not Proven"; a lecture from Dr. Carl du Prel; a note from William Mumler; a criticism of "The Key To Theosophy"; the psychic effects of hashish; spiritualism is communism; theological war in the United States; "Astounding Revelations Concerning The Dens Where The Poor of Manchester Herd Together" (can you say odi profanum?
• February: Stanley and Spiritualism; raging against Hell; report of the annual meeting of the board of directors of The Two Worlds including an extended address delivered by EHB (a must-read); the cremation of Baron de Palm; "the public rostrum is designed to teach the religion, philosophy and ethics of spiritualism, and is not only lowered but absolutely disgraced by making it the scene of half-developed or wholly inefficient, mediumistic experiments"; Egyptian and Persian cartomancy
• March: modern fire worshippers; suffrage for all; Alfred Kitson gets the Rostrum; the Golden Verses of Pythagoras; Proposal For A National Organization Of British Spiritualists; EHB on "The Great Pyramid of Egypt - The First Lodge of Ancient Masonry"; Captain Pfoundes on Japanese Spiritualism; Sirius on Black and White Magic referring to "the Author of Art Magic" as though TAOAM was someone else
• April: Witchcraft; "Commonwealth as a Victory to Be Won"; vicarious atonement is a "horrible teaching"; Hudson Tuttle on thought transference
• May: Spurgeon and Talmadge take a beating at the editor's hands (again); William Britten goes after Annie Besant during a lecture; the editor, contra capital punishment; Carl du Prel gets the Rostrum to discuss "the state after death"; The Missionary Number "specially designed to deal with some of those questions propounded by persons unacquainted with the subject of spiritualism"; Sirius on Spiritualism In Relation To Science And Religion; a poem by EHB from 1869; JJ Morse on "Woman: The Problem Of The Future"; vivisection is "the shame of our modern civilization"; Richard Hodgson on ghosts
• June: Emma excerpts Lydia M Childs (as did TAOAM); the agenda for the meeting of the National Conference of Spiritualists, from the leadership cadre (Morse, EHB, Tetlow, and Wallis; publication of the Roman sentence of death passed on Jesus of Nazareth;
• July: EHB defends spirit photography; EHB on her "residence at Macon, Georgia"; EHB extracts an extended section of Judge Robert Hewitt Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy; report from the National Conference of British Spiritualists
• August: "Things a Boy Should Learn"; Faiths, Facts & Frauds is offered "for the cost of the binding" due to the generosity of an unnamed spiritualist; "Theosophical Definitions By An Avowed Theosophist"; EHB contra Theosophy (again); mental telegraphy; EHB on "bible infallibility"; the beginning of a series by Dr. Charles W. Hidden marks the beginning of EHB's association with The Progressive Thinker; more battering of the Salvation Army
• September: JM Peebles on "Spiritualism in All Ages"; a testimonial gift to Alfred Kitson; claiming William Blake for spiritualism; EHB rejects utterly the idea of a united front between Spiritualists and Theosophists and invokes the Coulomb scandal and the New York Sun "revelations"
• October: Wallis and Morse join forces as publishers; "Is Platform Clairvoyance Beneficial Or Hurtful To The Cause Of Spiritualism?"; the son of D. D. Home on "Some Russian Superstitions"; The Second Missionary Number; >B>Summary Of Spirit Communications Concerning Creation. Received During Thirty Years Of Direct Communication From And With Spirits, By Emma Hardinge Britten"; Peary Chand Mitra; Arthur Morrison makes his first appearances - is this the Martin Hewitt Arthur Morrison?
• November: J. B. Tetlow on "Variations In Mediumship"; William James excerpted; "private correspondence" (about EHB's published works) "is totally out of the question"; "William Tell's Arrow A Solar Weapon"; all the guns trained on the Salvation Army -- "Phonographic Dolls To Convert The Universe"
• December: J. J. Morse on "Do the Facts Of Spiritualism Support The Theories Of Theosophy"; the Christmas double number, with an EHB novelette; EHB's song of Charles Dickens, to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic; J. N. Maskelyne made to confess his belief in ghosts; EHB excerpts Mark Twain and implies acquaintance (she had it); Flammarion describes the Martian seas; mesmerizing insects; Sirius on Witchcraft In Ireland

Signal Phrases: Art Magic, its Progenitors and its....Children

As readers of Art Magic will no doubt remember, the sources of Art Magic are obscure. Or perhaps "obscured" would be a better word.

In any case, we have to rely largely on internal textual evidence to validate the complex set of claims about this text: that its author was not EHB, that the original material was written in languages other than English, that the original material consistent largely of scattered material, which was assembled according to "a hasty and fragmentary sketch of the work" provided by the author of Art Magic (who I will refer to as TAOAM).

There are few established methods for dealing with this kind of investigation, but one technique known to work is the identification and tracing of signal phrases: sentence fragments sufficiently uncommon that their recurrence in texts other than Art Magic are at least prima facie evidence of textual affiliation: the other text is either a progenitor, or a descendent, text.

Google Books is a fantastic textual base from which to work for this kind of endeavor, not least because its collections are biased in favor of texts that are out of copyright, and in favor of texts from the large depository libraries with which Google collaborates, making the density of "spiritualist" and "occultist" texts in the Google Books database very rich.

I've started that process, and having gotten through roughly 100 pages of the text, Ithought readers might like to see some of the results thusfar.

To be clear, I am not interested in questions of "plagiarism" - the academic police forces of the world can look into that, if they like. I am interested in questions of influence -- whose work influenced TAOAM, and who was influenced by Art Magic? And since exact repurposing is the sincerest expression of "the agony of influence", I look closely at exact repurposing.

For what its worth, at this point, I believe TAOAM relied heavily on the ideas of at least two works while Art Magic was being written: G. C. Stewart's The Hierophant (1859), and Robert Taylor's The Diegesis (1834).

Stewart TAOAM quotes; Taylor is not quoted.

I also believe that TAOAM may have had access to the manuscript of a "curious and rare book", Judge Robert Hewitt Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy, which itself saw the light of day in 1882, less than two years before Brown's untimely death at the age of 53.

All hypotheses, but worth noting at this point, if only so I can contradict myself later...

Lao-Kiun

One of the more misfitted sections of Art Magic reads as follows:

Lao-Kiun, a cotemporary (sic) of the great Chinese Sage Confucius, founded a school, which, for the spirituality of its doctrines, far transcended the teachings of Confucius. His text of religious faith was: "Tao (meaning God) produced one; one produced two, two produced three, and three produced all things." During the lifetime of this philosopher, a book containing the names and offices of innumerable companies of spirits was found, as it was asserted, suspended on the royal gate of Pekin, placed there by no mortal hand, and supposed to be full of direct revelations from heaven. This miraculous volume is said have contained magical formulae for the evocation and control of spirits; directions how to cast out devils and heal diseases; also the profoundest secrets of alchemy, namely the composition of the philosopher's stone and the elixir vitae. To satisfy the bigotry and superstitious fears of succeeding generations, this book, together with all other magical writings, was destroyed. Still, it was asserted, that private copies had been
made and circulated of its contents. From a curious and very ancient roll of MSS., in the royal library of Pekin, the author has had the privilege of copying a fine astrological chart, and a magical evocation of elementary spirits, assumed to have been first written in the aforesaid book.

Leaving aside the annoying fact that we must now add China to the list of places visited by Louis de B_________, it shouldn't be too hard to track down the source of this interestingly specific anecdote.

L(ydia) Maria (Francis) Child tells it, substantially, in her The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages (1855).

And, in all the books indexed by Google Books, that is the only location in which the anecdote appears.

That Emma ran into Maria Child in the anti-abolitionist, women's-rights circles of New York in the late 1850s is, really, quite plausible.

That a Prussian occultist and religious scholar would crib an anecdote -- involving a text he claims to have seen, directly, in China -- from a radical American proto-feminist is really beyond belief.

Emma and Charles

Piecing together The Two Worlds for 1890, it seems that Emma was in a name-dropping mood. The business offices of the newspaper having been moved to E. W. Wallis' address, I fancy Emma was feeling a bit...reckless as she read the writing on the wall.

I'll have more to say -- or summarize, rather -- when 1890 gets released (tonight or tomorrow), but for now, I'd like to recall readers' attention to a speculation I made at the beginning of the year, based on admittedly scant evidence, and then have you read this snippet, from the 30 May 1890 issue of The Two Worlds.

(larger version)

This is, as far as I know (and Spotlight tells me) the only direct reference Emma makes to Dickens in her own work.

Charles Dickens: mesmeric doctor; a man with a possessive sexual appetite so large it's believed he kept multiple flats in London for multiple, simultaneously-kept women; a writer for the theatre, whose Christmas play The Chimes marked Emma's debut (if my memory serves) at the Adelphi. Working hypothesis: Emma was, for some period of time, Dickens' mistress and he is our best candidate for the "baffled sensualist" who ended Emma's career on the London stage.

Sirius, de Bunsen and Louis de B_____

Having watched "Sirius" morph in his language and subject matter and rhetorical stances through several years of The Two Worlds now, I have little confidence in Emma's claim that "Sirius" was "the author of Art Magic," if by that second term we mean "Louis de B____" and (as lead contender for that role) Ernest de Bunsen.

(If of course Emma is the author of Art Magic, then the equivalency Sirius = "the author of Art Magic" is one I'm very comfortable with.)

In order to link Ernest de Bunsen to Louis de B______ in some material way, we have to find Ernest de Bunsen in the United States in the 1856-60 time frame, and again in the 1872-75 time frame, says Robert Mathiesen, and I agree with that litmus test.

No records of anyone named Bunsen with the approximate demographics of Ernest (age, etc.) is to be found in the shipping line records available to me.

Good news is that the diaries of Elizabeth Gurney de Bunsen, Ernest's wife, apparently survive amongst the papers of her son Maurice, in the Bodleian Library.

Forensic Accounting

Much is made, toward the latter half of 1889, of a 1000 pound share purchase made by one Nemo, which effectively keeps The Two Worlds afloat. It is not the first such capital infusion The Two Worlds has required by the end of 1889: there are at least another 110 pounds explicitly mentioned as "anonymous gifts".

I'm having some trouble, given Nemo's injection of 1000 pounds in mid 1889, making sense of this:

(larger image)

The 1000 pounds for share purchase appears not to be accounted for; but that's probably my lack of familiarity with late Victorian accounting methods.

What is clear is that, at a net cash burn rate of 250-odd pounds a year (call that 25,000 of today's pounds and we wouldn't be far off), Nemo's gift was essentially four years of life for The Two Worlds, all else remaining status quo.

Interesting to note, as well, the possible reason for the change of printers mid-year in 1889 -- out of cash, and max'd out with John Heywood, the editors had no choice but to print elsewhere...and hurriedly.

Cards: January 1890

I've been looking for ads for skrying crystals since I started processing The Two Worlds.

The range of services advertised, the linkages between the old, the new, and the alternative -- all fascinating.

---

Later on in 1980, the vendor changes name, and location.

This was a pretty upscale, medico-scientific, address, as this advertisement (by our crystal-maker's brother? father? husband?) from the 1891 British Homeopathic Review indicates:

What strikes me as interesting is this: the text of the ad, modulo the address to which one applies, changes not one jot.

---

And in the meaningless trivia department, 83 Grosevnor Street had in the 1840s been the home of J. B. Jarman the antiquarian, and, by the time Ian Fleming was old enough to smoke expensive cigarettes, he bought them -- Morlands, the same brand Bond smoked -- at Morland & Company, 83 Grosvenor Street.

The Two Worlds for 1889

The 1889 issues of The Two Worlds are now available on the Archive.

Call this year the year of amorphous opposition, or, to borrow from Emma herself, the year of "impassable lines of demarcation"...

The attack on Theosophy -- direct and otherwise -- intensifies, the occult linkages are further underscored (note a good few months worth of front-wrapper advertising of the works of one P. B. Randolph, and some mention of The Light of Egypt), and the red(dish) flag of small-s socialism is unfurled and waved about.

Among the highlights:

• January: Emma recycles another of the stories in The Wildfire Club (yes, in a different textual state); a letter from abroad from J.J. Morse; the return of the Sabeans; a whack at Thomas Henry Huxley; the claiming of Tennyson and Rider Haggard for the cause; TP Barkas starts a multipart series on "The History and Mystery of Mesmerism"
• February: Swinburne as control; the report of the first annual meeting of the shareholders of The Two Worlds Publishing Company Limited; Lena Loeb, the Electric Girl
• March: Hugh Junor Browne starts a multipart series called "The Grand Reality"; Emma decides against publishing letters when she does not (privately, at least) know the identity of the sender; Gerald Massey lectures on "The Origin of Christian Dogmas"; "the herb of prophecy" (!); a tribute to Amy Post; "Legal Murderers, Beware"!; J. R. Buchanan; an obituary for S. C. Hall; "On Elementals"
• April: "Tyrannical and Highhanded Legislation In America!"; a thitherto-unpublished EHB novella, called "The Light In The Tower"; the Two Worlds changes its printer (with some not-so-desirable results, but a marked increase in the number of font faces used in heads); the death of S. Govinda Sattay, "Hindoo Buddhist" Theosophist; a whack at the Seybert Commission from General Francis Lippitt; EHB and Wallis begin dividing up the turf of the newspaper in public;
• May: "A Practical View of a Hindu Fakir"; Sir John Franklin's fate and the spirits; shots fired at the Salvation Army; Victorien Sardou reprinted; Emma re-states her theory of "obsession"; Marie Gifford (who's she?); Captain Pfoundes on Buddhism; M.A. Oxon noticed; Summary report of the Spiritual Lyceum Annual Conference
• June: the return of Sirius, summarizing J. A. Froude, writing about Origen refuting Celsus; magic in Egypt; the sacred cemetery of Bombay; opium-smoking is not a good idea; "Theosophy abused and occultism mis-represented"; obituary of Laura Bridgman; Hudson Tuttle exalted;
• July: Sirius continues cutting and pasting J. A. Froude; F. M. Holland on (!!) Giordana Bruno; "The Labouring Man's House"; Molly Fancher, fasting; "a vigorous and suggestive letter from Madame Elise von Calcar" on reincarnation; reincarnation in practice; yet another recycled tale from "The Wildfire Club"; "Mrs. Besant and Theosophy"; Was Jesus A Medium?; more from Captain Pfoundes;
• August: Emma bans pro-reincarnation positions from her pages; one Arthur Edward Waite (nobody really) on "higher possibilities of alchemy," "earnestly reiterat(ing his) desire to receive communications from all students of esoteric literature who have the welfare of humanity at heart, and whose eyes turn to the light of the ancient mystics for help in their sublime purposes..."; Emma thundering on "Spiritualism, Theosophy and Reincarnation"; another letter from J.J. Morse in America; Emma wishing she'd written The Light Of Egypt, but confessing she lacks the capacity to have done so; more Marie Gifford (who she?); yet more Captain Pfoundes, on Sinnett, HPB and Olcott; J. L Mahony on "Spiritualism And The Materialistic Conditions Of Society" - "the amelioration of the social condition of the people" should be Spiritualism's objective; Emma contra capital punishment, the "murder of criminals"
• September: no, really, Ada Foye is a great test medium; no, really, it's all Egyptian solar worship; no, really, Christian Science is completely intellectually bankrupt; the International Magnetic Conference; "Sparks From The Foundries Of Progress"; Sirius, having undergone a complete personality transplant, comments on an article in the Manchester Evening News, adopts the EHBian "we", calls himself "a prophet....and the son of a prophet", and proclaims Spiritualism "the only religion of the future"; "How The Toilers Live"; whacks at George Jacob Schweinfurth
• October: transcript of a debate between Marsden Gibson and Charles Bradlaugh; Vesper asks "whether politics, reforms, strikes and subjects of that purely secular character are in harmony with spiritualism" and is politically corrected by the editor; Emma on "the celebrated Samaritan dog of San Francisco"; a letter from the Countess of Caithness to EHB; "Spiritualism in India"; E. W. Wallis takes off the gloves and batters Colonel Olcott, who won't debate EHB on an open platform - "a more immoral doctrine was never promulgated"; Emma announces she'll speak against Theosophy in public if Olcott won't debate her
• November: "Indian Ghost Charms"; more on Giordano Bruno; The Impassible Lines of Demarcation Between Spiritualism And Theosophy" ("Finding nothing of interest to reward them...they one after another quietly withdrew"); Emma's own double (re-telling of the Rose Cross stalking episode); the death of Dr. Gabriel the occulist; "A Practical Lesson in Co-Operation" for "those working men who desire to alter the social arrangements of this country"
• December: "The Communistic Employment Of Labour"; spiritualism in western India; more Fox sisters recantation dissection; "devil and ghost worsjip in western India"; a Christmas story from Emma;the second annual census of societies.

End of reel. Please rewind.

Spreading The Light

The more I see of him, the more E. W. Wallis interests me.

Or, considering the "try and sell" Americanism, is this Emma?

On The Side Of The Angels

The larger world of the late 1880s does not seem, on the whole, to make it to the pages of The Two Worlds. So this snippet sticks out like flypaper, soaking in a bowl of water.

The Maybrick Case was truly a sensation, largely for its relevation of the sexual lives of the victim and his alleged assailant, and also for its exposure of a bit of Victorian laundry that still has not gotten the airing it needs: arsenic and alkaloid addiction. Modern criminologists are inclined to agree, pretty much exactly, with E. W. Wallis' assessment of the case, and to find -- with the long (nosed) view of history to help them -- that Florence Maybrick was punished not for murder, but for her sexuality.

The misguided connection of James Maybrick with the Ripper murders muddies the significance of the case almost completely; there's plenty of speculative material on that connection out there for those who are interested.

In the issue after this snippet appears, Emma devotes two pages of the issue to her own discussion of the Maybrick case, and refers to it several times in later issues.

Another Bounty

Urgently sought, generous reward offered. Will pay carriage as well.

The Light In The Tower: 1889

Scattered across the issues of The Two Worlds for late winter and spring of 1889 is yet another serialized EHB novella: The Light In The Tower...

The Two Worlds For 1888

The Two Worlds for 1888 is now available on the Archive web site.

• J. B Tetlow kicking off a year's worth of discussion of a "school for prophets" that very much signals the beginning of "institutionalization of spiritualism" as a theme in TTW
• the best article title ever, "Christian Pugilism or Anti-Dancing Piety -- Which?"
• anti-vaccination and anti-vivisection propaganda
• excerpts from both Art Magic and Ghost Land (creating yet more textual issues for your faithful bibliographer)
• the edges of Emma recycling her "Spiritual Gifts" material from The Banner of Light two decades earlier
• "Spiritualism in India" (alas, not local material)
• Lizzie Doten poems galore (where's the Doten scholar?)
• Sirius (bless him!) on Theosphy, Occultism, Spiritualism, Rosicrucianism and FWH Myers
• letters of J.J. Morse on his American tour
• Hudson Tuttle welcomed on Emma's pages (he'll become increasingly someone whose work she'll conjure with)
• Emma slagging off Christian Science (in two editorial slots, no less)
• obituaries for Mary Howitt and Anna Kingsford
• E. W. Wallis taking the lid off the anti-Xian agenda in March with a Rostrum piece entitled "The Disestablishment of Hell"

And that only takes us through March.

Theosophy folks, take note -- the "amorphous opposition" is in full swing this year.

The newspaper changes format in February, moving advertisements to a four-page outer wrapper and running an inner banner. Pay attention to the advertisements -- E. W. Wallis is selling his space to more mainstream merchants, and beginning to take control.

A Word On The Creative Commons License For The Two Worlds

Since you asked (all of you), the Creative Commons license under which the issues of The Two Worlds are released is in no way (a) an attempt to limit what you may do with the material or (b) to establish any sort of copyright over the digital version of the newspaper. It is there for one purpose only -- to give me a basis for making a lot of trouble for the first "reprint house" who takes the material, prints it and perfect-binds it, and attempts to sell it for a ton of money to someone who cannot use Google effectively enough to find the free versions... If you want a paper copy, download it and print it ;->

Emma At Ground Level, Late 1887

Editing a weekly newspaper, and carrying a speaking schedule that boggles the mind...By 1887, Emma is clearly enmeshed in the doings of the spiritual community of the midlands.

Magic lantern, limelight -- Emma the technocrat. What I wouldn't give to see her slide set from New Zealand...which is still, today, a paradise.

For calibration - Emma is still doing the Manchester spiritualist bazaars in the year of her death.

The Two Worlds for 1887

The Two Worlds for 1887, the inaugural year of the publication, are available on the Archive web site.

Some of the interesting bits I've noted while preparing the texts for digital re-publication:

• a unique, never-to-be-reused banner image for Issue #1
• in Number 1, the famous "Occultism Defined" by "One Who Knows", which as Paul Gaunt argues, might not a "Sirius" article (depending on how you attribute significance to the point size of headings in a multicolumn article -- I read "one who knows" = "Sirius"), and which names Bulwer Lytton, Richard Morrison and "the author of 'Art Magic'" as members of what we habitually refer to, today, as the Orphic Circle
• An often-repeated advertisement offering shares in The Two Worlds Publishing Company, Limited -- it's a measure of changes that such an advertisement would today be effectively illegal
• A significantly altered version of "The Wildfire Club", Emma's possibly autobiographical short story about occult practices and a ritual marriage, renamed "The Last of the Merlinites" and published as "A Christmas Eve Narrative" in Number 6 for 23 December, 1887.
• scattered evidence that Emma is in communication with various occult practitioners and groups, all of which are anxious to obtain copies of Art Magic and Ghost Land.
• an awful lot of material on the "Cabala", which as a comment on p. 39 of the 2 December 1887 issue makes plain, is warm-up material for (surprise) excerpts from Ghost Land and Art Magic.
• James Robertson, Emma's future biographer, showing up as "J.R." as early as Number 3 with a short piece on "Spiritual Progress in Scotland"
• a refusal to let go of Slade as he becomes increasingly contaminated. The coverage of his tour through the UK as "Mister Wilson" is instructive for Slade followers.
• plenty of indications (very gratifying to me) that Emma had close connections to the large and edgy spiritualist communities in Oregon
• wonder of wonders -- a full-length article by William Britten himself, in the 16 December issue. Like Emma, William has a fondness for the exclamation point.
• almost immediate pressure (which Emma will later attribute to her channel to market, the independent news sellers) to reduce the cost of the paper from 1.5p to 1p

In general, the tone of the periodical is set by the end of 1887, as far as I can tell -- each issue a mix of new material, recycled matter from Emma's large repository of published work, a bit of engineered controversy, and really intrinsically fascinating on-the-ground views of Spiritualism in the midlands in the period. The tension between the local material and Emma's "internationalist' reliance on non-UK material for the remainder of the typical issue's matter is palpable from the outset -- and it's going to cost her the editorship, by early 1892, as the "people's penny publication" raises its political flag.

Similarly, it's clear to me that Emma is paying a tax (the local on-the-ground information) to build an anti-Theosophical platform for herself, and to try to gain control of "Occultism" as a topic. But the press of getting a weekly out must have been too much, even from the outset, for her, judging from the amount of recycled material and scissors-and-mucilage work in each issue.

I have a hankering to turn the on-the-ground data in this run into a database, so we can map speakers' circuits and analyze the census data - if anyone is of similar mind, get in touch and let's talk.

Release of EHB Primary Texts

The EH Britten Archive's bibliography of Emma's primary work has been updated, and links provided to all extant electronic texts in the Archive at present.

Spiritualism is Religion: 1889

I've remarked elsewhere on Emma's propensity to modify her messages to the situation at hand. Her uneasy relationship to organized protestant xianity is a notable case in point: confrontational, conciliatory, dismissive, deconstructive, as the situation demanded.

As I'm processing the digital version of The Two Worlds, I'm watching Emma's position against other institutional contenders harden, as Modern Spiritualism begins to organize and institutionalize itself, as Theosophy begins importing "eastern" religious notions and constructs into the spiritualist and occultist discourses, and as the pages of The Two Worlds begin to take on the "socialist" tone promised by the masthead's tagline: "The People's Popular Penny Spiritual Paper".

This snippet, from The Two Worlds of 25 January 1889, is Emma-at-home amongst her peers and following in the midlands.

The army of love, light and heaven needs alliance with none to triumph.

Through Emma Hardinge, By The Spirits

America and Her Destiny: Inspirational Discourse Given Extemporaneously At Dodsworth's Hall, New York, On Sunday Evening, August 25, 1861, a rare (but oft-referenced) political trance lecture, is now available.

Thanks, Jay, for stirring....

The Creed Of The Spirits

Two versions of what may be Emma's single most famous address, "The Creed of the Spirits": the original lecture, delivered in Cleveland Hall, London on April 20, 1871, and the Seed Corn pamphlet version, part of a series designed for distribution by Spiritualists at events and on street corners.

The advertisements in the back of the Seed Corn version illustrate nicely how open was the boundary, at the time, between Modern Spiritualism and alternative medical practice. Other open boundaries worth talking about -- between Spiritualism and the anti-vivisection and anti-vaccination movements -- are on my list for future posts.

---

A reader -- one who ought to know -- (thanks, Paul) points out that in fact the pamphlet version of the address differs materially from the prior publication of the address in The Medium and Daybreak, so we'll have a bit of collation to do when that text is recovered.

The Elfin Vesper Bell

If recovering the bits and bobs of marginal Occultist figures is a difficult proposition, imagine how much more difficult is the work of the musicologist, trying to recover the ephemeral work of the composer and songwriter: people who produce a large body of often transitory material, who -- in the nineteenth century at least -- were often working at their craft in their spare time, and who left no trace of themselves in the larger documentary record.

Tracking down Emma-the-composer has been, to say the least, tedious, and reliant on happenstance, on fortune. I have managed to find three repository libraries that, together, could supply me with the microfilm comprising a complete run of The Court Gazette, for which Emma supposedly wrote (as Ernest Reinhold), but the thought of ploughing through eight years of that periodical (even with the assistance of text retrieval)....does not motivate.

I have found, however, the traces of yet another piece of popular music attributed to Emma: a song called "Oh! I'm The Elfin Vesper Bell": music by Louise A. Denton, words by Emma Hardinge, published in Boston by Oliver Ditson & Company, for the 1859 Christmas season.

Mrs. Louise A. Denton advertises herself in the New York papers of the late 1850s as a teacher of piano forte, working from her home on Prospect Avenue, in Brooklyn. Her advertisements, and the 'new music' notices in "ladies" periodicals of the period, are the only traces of Louise A. Denton and the Elfin Vesper Bell that remain to us, but there are a couple of repository libraries that list the sheet music in their catalogs.

H. Bielfeld, Esq.

A hundred dollar bounty for a copy of this lost gem...

Henry Bielfield. Wife Anne. Artist and gentleman. Watercolourist, oil painter and painter-on-glass of some repute, whose work still fetches at auction, apparently, among specialist collectors. Author of several books on painting technique.

Emma, Hay Nisbet, David Duguid and The Glasgow Association of Spiritualists

There's a nexus here: one that matters, if we are to explain how Emma was involved with Davidson and Burgoyne, the founders of the HBofL.

Hay Nisbet, the spiritualist and publisher who brought out Davidson's book on the violin, and who was so aggressive in promoting David Duguid the spirit painter and automatic writer (in the advertising section of The Two Worlds and elsewhere), has something to do with that nexus, or may be that nexus.

Imagine my pleasure, on finding a copy of the Second Annual Report of the Glasgow Association of Spiritualists (from 1868) -- which I was interested in obtaining because it contains a version of Emma's lecture on "What is Spiritualism?" and her rules for the formation of spiritual circles -- to discover in addition to those texts, the fact that Hay Nisbet was a member of the Association's organizing committee, and was promoting Duguid (unnamed, in this document) as early as 1868.

I don't find James Robertson, the only biographer of Emma (excluding Emma herself) and the employer of David Duguid, in this document, but I expect we'll find him in the third or fourth or fifth annual report.

Reception Aesthetics: 1868

In March of 1868, a professor of elocution who called himself Artis attended Emma's lecture on Spirit Mediumship at Cambridge Hall in London, and wrote an extended precis of that address for the Brighton Observer, from whence it was plucked for use as Number 7 in a series of pamphlets entitled "Extemporaneous Speaking", published by one E. Lewis at the Electric Printing Works in Brighton.

The transcription is inexact, but the material of Emma's address is thoroughly familiar.

1866: A Second Attempt At Transition?

What to make of this advertisement?

The billing is true enough, as far as it goes, since the Winter Soiree lectures were not strictly speaking public, and since Emma did have quite a reputation in the US, by 1865, as a public (trance) speaker.

The advertisement in question forms the last page of a twelve-page pamphlet, published in late 1865 by Thomas Scott (who also published the Soiree transcripts), entitled Miss Emma Hardinge's Political Campaign In Favour Of The Union Party Of America, On The Occasion Of The Last Presidential Election of 1864. When we couple the title and contents with the names of the lecture promoters -- none of whom, as far as I can determine, were Spiritualists -- this looks, for all the world, like a pre-lecture puff piece for a secular orator with first-hand knowledge of a political contest very interesting to British audiences (who were substantially pro-Confederate).

It's hard to say whether this is one of Emma's texts, or not. It references, and substantially quotes from, a work by Emma entitled Sketches of California that I have never seen, or seen referenced, before: a text the preamble claims "was printed in the New York and California journals shortly after the occurrence of the scenes they describe." Where that text may be, we have yet to determine, but we have what purports to be a substantial chunk of that text in this pamphlet, and it is, for two different reasons, the single most interesting EHB text I've come across since I started this spelunking expedition.

• The entire text elides, almost completely, Emma's career as a test medium and trance speaker, making only a reference to her "alleged claims to sybilline gifts" and her "prevision" -- words, in my estimation, calculated to distance herself from the Modern Spiritualist controversy she was, at that very moment, engaged in elsewhere in town. In the pamphlet, she is represented as a philanthropist, on the strength of her work to establish her institution for fallen women (abortive) and her contributions to the Sanitary Fund discussed in an earlier post. No mention whatsoever of the primary means by which she earned a living for most of the decade prior to 1866. None.
• this text is assuredly the origin of the assertion -- oft-made but never referenced -- that Emma toured California speaking for Abraham Lincoln in the run-up to the 1864 presidential election. Here, Emma makes the claim explicitly -- solicited by a Mr. S_______ (if he existed, we'll run him down) of the "Union State Central Committee of California" (in other words, a Republican party apparatchik), Emma "commenced these Lectures (in support of Lincoln) some thirty-eight days before the day appointed for the polling, and during that time I delivered thirty-two lectures; each Address usually occupying two hours and a half in its delivery."

Those addresses were all in California, and go a long way toward explaining stray bits of Emma I have found in the records of backcountry California in 1863-4: including a gold mine and a famed race horse both named "Emma Hardinge".

Personally, I find this text thrilling -- it is, it seems to me, Emma's second attempt to break free from what I think she felt to be the stifling inauthenticity of her career as a trance medium.

Of course, this attempt -- like her institution for fallen women -- failed completely. Her career as a public (secular) lecturer was over, I would argue, by early 1867, and she never again attempted to foreground secular topics in her prepared lectures.

"Mystical marriage" fans -- please to note the "Miss"....I think we can safely say at this point that the mythical first marriage was fabricated after it became widely known that Emma Hardinge -- speaking in trance in one part of town, and on secular political topics in another -- was a former actress, who by her own admission had traveled unchaperoned throughout the wildest places of the United States. Of necessity, she became a widow.

Emma's Winter Soiree Addresses: 1865-6

The text of these addresses can be had in any number of forms these days, but -- like most textual inheritance trees -- later versions silently remove elements of earlier versions of the text, elements that are insignificant to editors intent on 'getting the text out there' but significant to others (like bewildered would-be bibliographers)

Now having the original pamphlet version of Emma's November 6, 1865 address (answering the question 'In what particulars are the teachings of Christianity and the facts recorded in the Gospels eludicated and confirmed by Spiritualism?') and the original pamphlet version of her November 20, 1865 address (answering the question 'It has been alleged that Modern Spiritualism is the witchcraft or necromancy referred to in the Old and New Testaments: will you be good enough to define the difference between them?'), we can recover some of what was stripped from later published forms.

The first thing worth noting is that -- and this should come as no surprise, given Benjamin Coleman's role as the promoter of Emma on her first return to England -- the pamphlets reproduce the text of Emma's trance lectures as previously published in The Spiritual Magazine, making those texts the 'first edition' of the trance lecture transcripts.

The second thing we can recover -- lost in most of the later editions of the texts -- are the names of the people who posed the questions Emma answered, during these lectures, after her initial trance speech. They include (unsurprisingly) Benjamin Coleman himself, and S. C. Hall, and, somewhat surprisingly to me at least, Dr. George Wyld, who asked Emma: 'Granting that the body of a certain man appears to pass through the substance of a closed wooden door and that the garments of other men are removed apparently through solid ropes, what is the scientific explanation of such facts? Is the operation conducted by the spirits of departed human beings or by the spirits of living men present, suspending by some force the laws of the cohesion of solid bodies?'

Emma's answer, once unwrapped from her elocution, is interesting: the action is performed by the spirits of departed human beings, whose superior understanding of chemistry and "inconceivable rapidity" of action, makes their work invisible to an observer, and since "the door offers no obstacle to the transmission of electricity...the electrical body of the medium readily passes through it...Subject then to the laws of the physical universe, neither the objects of clothing which you have alluded to nor the knots which fastened the bound form of the medium are disintegrated, but by the speedy force of mechanical action they are loosened, changed, and altered by the simplest modes."

The Third Serapis Letter, 1875

Olcott received this communication from Serapis in 1875:

It reads:

I pray thee, Brother mine, to take necessary steps to adjourn the meeting untill (sic) Saturday which will be. Sister (that is, HPB) has a labour to perform. Be friendly to the English seer Emma for she is a noble woman and her soul hath many gems hidden within it. Begin not without our Sister. Unto the regions of Light I send for thee my prayer.

I can't determine whether "Begin not without our Sister" refers to Emma, or to HPB, but the letter suggests that, in 1875 at least, HPB had a use in mind for Emma (and that Olcott was no fan of Emma's). But what were those "many gems hidden within" Emma? Did HPB see, in Emma, the propagandist HPB could not be? Did Emma's (relatively speaking) squeaky-clean history, and her reputation as a propagandist, suggest to HPB that Emma was the mouthpiece of the occult machine HPB was contemplating? If HPB had the notion that Emma was to go on the road as the advance man for the TS, at the same point in time that Emma was desperately -- and ultimately unsuccesfully -- trying to find a means of generating revenue that would allow her to stop her endless circuit-ing, it's no wonder the two ultimately parted company.