Chasing Down Emma

The Home For Outcast Women, Boston Version

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:35:00 +0000

Thanks to the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, I've been able to recover enough of the records of the organizing committee for Emma's attempt, in Boston, to found a home for outcast women -- the Female Horticultural Institute -- to be able to say something reasonably coherent about this period of her life (roughly, late 1859 until her departure for California in late 1863).

First, and perhaps most interestingly, Emma's explanation for the failure of her Boston-based initiative is born out by the records of the organizing committee -- her venture failed in the face of the start of the Civil War, and her backers' concern for other, more pressing matters (in the case of the Boston initiative, the equipment of the Massachusetts soldiery).

Emma was remarkably successful in winning over financial backers: some 50 people joined her "solicitation committee" from the greater Boston area, including a few folks of national and international stature.

As far as the records go, they suggest both that Emma acted with probity -- footing the miscellaneous expenses of the organizing committee herself -- and that she was the ultimate beneficiary of the fund-raising activity: when the Boston organizing committee realized that it was improbable that the Institution would ever float in Boston, they released the funds raised for the Institution -- some $3000 in 1861 dollars -- to Emma herself.

Updated Edition of Robertson's Noble Pioneer

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:46:00 +0000

An updated version of James Robertson's essay on EHB, Noble Pioneer, is now available from the Archive. Kudos to Paul Gaunt of Psypioneer for discovering the original version of the text, and sparking the update.

A New Monetization Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:28:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Middle-Aged Rosicrucians?

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:13:00 +0000

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

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

Emma the Infidel: 1878

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:32:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Emma and Her Shadows: Lotti Wilmot, 1878

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 08:22:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emma as Reformer

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:28:00 +0000

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

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

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

Getting At The Meat of Emma's Lectures

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:09:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Ernest Reinhold (Again)

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:55:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

certain agents of Mr. Berkeley, being also Charity Trustees

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

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

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

The Album and the Encyclopedia

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:35:00 +0000

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

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

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

Art Magic: A Bibliographical Note

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:05:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bibliographical puzzle, for sure.

Emma's Theatre Career: A New Chronology

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:48:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:32:00 +0000

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)

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:14:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:22:00 +0000

Covered in metaphorical dirt, but nuggets remain...

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

The Magic Mirror

Ah vous dirai je

that statue is none other than the very pretty and fascinating Miss Floyd

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

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:18:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Wrong. Dead wrong. Or rather, woefully incomplete.

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

Shame, shame, shame...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curatorial Heart Attack (Almost)

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:56:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Ebenezer's Death

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:50:00 +0000

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

From The Bristol Mercury for May 5, 1834:

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

June 1886: The First Spiritualist Marriage In England?

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:13:00 +0000

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

May 12, 1871: Brand Issues

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:07:00 +0000

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

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

April 1871: Emma as Metonym

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:57:00 +0000

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

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

April 1, 1865: Emma, Defensive

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:29:00 +0000

The Liverpool Mercury for Saturday, April 1, 1865:

The World

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

Reception Aesthetics: Modern American Spiritualism

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Demarest) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:42:00 +0000

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

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

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