Priscilla Penn Cropper

Priscilla Penn Cropper was a reformer, spiritualist, entrepreneur, and collector whose brief correspondence with Randolph Henry Ash became a formative document in her descendant Mortimer Cropper’s life. Her history joins nineteenth-century experiments in social reform and spiritual inquiry to the later accumulation of Ash’s papers: a family inheritance becomes, in Mortimer’s telling, both a scholarly vocation and a claim to understand the poet.

Identity and Background

Born in Maine into a family of committed abolitionists, Priscilla took part in the ferment of new ideas and ways of life in New England. She spoke fervently for women’s emancipation and engaged with other movements for human rights. Her interests extended to mesmeric healing, which she believed had helped her, and to spiritualist experiments that spread in the United States after the Fox sisters reported hearing spirit raps.

Priscilla’s home in New York hosted Andrew Wilson, author of Univercoelum, or Key to the Universe. There, he claimed to converse with the spirits of Swedenborg, Descartes, and Bacon. Mortimer notes that his own research found no solid connection between his family and the Pennsylvania Penns, despite Priscilla’s not disclaiming such kinship. Her public reputation instead rested in part on her proprietary remedy, Priscilla Penn’s Regenerating Powders.

Fortune and Family Legacy

The Powders made Priscilla a fortune, although Mortimer treats their medical claims with wry caution: he believes they killed no one and may have helped some of the thousands of people whose lives she claimed they saved, if only through placebo. Their proceeds funded Everblest House, which the family still inhabited in Mortimer’s account. The house was built as a replica of a Palladian mansion in Mississippi that had been lost by his paternal great-great-grandfather, Mortimer D. Cropper, during the American Civil War.

Priscilla’s marriage also connected her reforming project to the Cropper family’s southern inheritance. Sharman M. Cropper, Mortimer’s great-grandfather, came north seeking a livelihood and, according to family legend, was drawn to Priscilla while she spoke at an outdoor meeting about Fourierist principles, harmony, and free passion and pleasure. He followed her west to New Mexico in 1868, where a group attempted to establish a phalanstery. The settlement failed: it never reached its intended population of 1,620, and its members lacked agricultural expertise and knowledge of desert conditions. Sharman later proposed a more practicable household ideal, and the Powder fortune financed the house that embodied it. Priscilla’s wealth thus passed from social experiment into domestic stability and, through her descendants, into collecting.

The Letter to Ash

During the 1860s and 1870s, Priscilla’s house became a centre for spiritualist research. Her energetic efforts to involve prominent thinkers appear to have prompted her to write to Ash. The letter she sent him has never been found; Mortimer feared that Ash might have destroyed it. What survived was Ash’s response, addressed to Mrs Cropper and preserved among the family papers.

Ash acknowledged her account of planchette writing and her suggestion that he might be interested in anything produced through the pen of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He rejected the spiritualist interpretation: he could not accept that Coleridge’s spirit should be made to move tables or produce what Ash regarded as nonsensical writing. Ash described his own attendance at attempted demonstrations and proposed fraud and collective hysteria as the likeliest explanations. He also placed spiritualist enthusiasm within a broader crisis of belief, in which materialism and intellectual inquiry unsettled inherited religious narratives. His answer was not simply a dismissal of Priscilla’s particular experience; it made the disputed status of spiritual manifestations part of a larger argument about evidence, faith, and uncertainty.

Mortimer Cropper’s Inheritance

Mortimer presents the surviving letter as the document that awakened his absorbing interest in Ash. As a child, he encountered it in the family’s possession; his father gave him its handwritten pages, preserved in tissue, to see whether he could decipher them. Mortimer recalls the experience as a powerful contact with the past. He wondered whether Ash’s rebuff of Priscilla had stirred a desire to prove that the family was worthy of understanding—and, figuratively, entertaining—the poet, while admitting that he could not know why this particular document moved him so strongly.

That attachment developed into a collecting and editorial enterprise. Mortimer became chairman of the Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University, whose portrait holdings included works solicited or acquired by Priscilla. He later printed her letter in volume nine of his edition of Ash’s Collected Letters and included an excerpt in the notes to Mummy Possest. His disagreement with James Blackadder over whether Priscilla resembled the credulous fictional Mrs Eckleburg in that poem also shows how the family document entered scholarly disputes about Ash’s work and its sources. Priscilla’s surviving letter therefore mattered not only as a relic: it helped make Mortimer’s family inheritance the starting point of a career devoted to Ash.