Some e-mail chatter this morning amongst a few of us (thanks, Leslie!) on EHB details led me to test an assertion I made: that Emma largely disappears from the BofL (indeed from the public record entirely) in the period 1867-69. In testing it -- yes, it's true -- I discovered a single letter from EHB to the editor of the Banner of Light, in the issue for September 11, 1869. The letter announces a brief return, by EHB, to the US, but is mostly about puffing the soon-to-be-issued Modern American Spiritualism. I don't know how I missed this letter, or how previous researchers did, but the letter reveals one startling fact: Emma had an agent, an author's representative, in the US, who spent a good part of 1868 and 1869 trying to find a mainstream US publisher for MAS (which was finally published by the BofL's New York wholesaler, the American News Company, which had already published EHB in pamphlet form once or twice).
That agent: Charles Edwards Lester (1815-1890): abolitionist, "author, editor, translator, diplomat, art connoisseur and critic" (as one writer has it) and somehow related to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. You can see a wide range of Lester's publications in Google Books. Now, I can see -- which I did not before -- Emma's note of thanks to Lester at the close of MAS. Interesting point: Lester is, more or less, a canonical figure. The connection with Emma -- what might it be? As Lester spent significant time in England in the early 1840s, we could be looking at a very old association. A good topic for a snowy weekend day's spelunking....
Lester writes in to the BofL, in the November 27 issue, to explain the details of the publication of MAS.
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