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Hail! Wondrous Combination!!!—but chief—THOU FIRE ELECTRIC!

—Celestial Renovator!—Thou Life of all Things—Hail!

——In Majesty and Mystery combin'd!

Enthron'd—unveil'd—in this tremendous—this most genial Temple!

To the teenage Goddesses, the Temple was a hilarious joke. Behind the glitz was a chaotic mass of hired clutter, and Graham was always trying to seduce young girls (Mary Robinson later gave up acting to write novels and ridiculed him in Walsingham as a lecherous fraud). And yet it was surely hard not to be affected by the pathos of the desires of many of those who gazed upon them: youthful health, happiness in love, and children. When Graham stopped ranting about electricity, his advice to the infertile was genuinely useful. Borrowing his point from Dr. George Cheyne's influential English Malady that plain living was the cure for society's debilitating addiction to fashion and luxury, Graham declared that moderate consumption of rich food and alcohol, fresh air, and exercise, along with regular sex, could encourage conception. To cure overindulgence, he recommended a diet of vegetables, plain meat, and barley, a striking precursor to modern wheat- and dairy-free diets. Rather less beneficial was his extreme detoxifying diet, composed of apples and half a roast potato a day.

The Goddesses had to sell Graham's “cures.” He wrote hundreds of pamphlets and books claiming that his potions of electrical fire could remedy every possible ill, including “excessive gaiety,” consumption, blindness, and infertility, as well as preserving beauty through “exciting the electrical fire in the body and limbs.” Graham made preposterous claims for his special potions, probably a collation of salts and water, if not arsenic or worse. Electrical Aether rallied the impotent “exhausted by inordinate and excessive sacrifices to Venus and Bacchus,” and Imperial Pills cured venereal disease. Nervous Aetherial Balsam induced an abortion, or as Graham put it, abolished "every menstrual obstruction in the world— however complicated, or however confirmed."

Many declared the Temple no better than a brothel.∗ Although Graham declared that the Bed was reserved for married couples, many men followed the example of the Prince of Wales and took their mistresses. It was said that the Goddesses were available for hire on the bed. A rake living nearby joked that one of Graham's beautiful employees had caught a fatal chill after spending too much time in "the damp sheets of the Celestial Bed." Lucrative as the Temple appears to have been, Graham soon moved on. By 1781, he had given up on electricity in favor of the restorative qualities of mud bathing in a cheaper house off Pall Mall. He was later arrested for debt and for allowing gambling and immoral activities. After his release, he toured the provinces selling pills but was imprisoned again for debt and in 1794, just short of fifty, he died, in penury and allegedly insane.

Gossip columnists in Emma's later years could never resist commenting on her short period of work at the Temple, and caricaturists nearly always depicted her on the Celestial Bed. When she married, the newspapers tittered that her husband fell in love with her after he saw her modeling for him in a show. Twenty years later, they still burbled about how her perfect figure ensured her job at the Temple, and recalled Graham's description of Goddesses as "veined with alabaster and streaked with celestial hue." Despite its preposterous side, the Temple taught Emma useful lessons about dance, posture, and performance. Shows she performed later would seem spontaneous when in fact they had been carefully planned, and like Graham, she exploited lighting and music to add to the effect of a pose and build up an atmosphere around her performance.

Emma soon left the Temple. The wages were poor and Graham was unreliable. She probably left because she was offered a better job, perhaps after being spotted by one of the silver-tongued ex-soldiers who worked as scouts for the bawdy