L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  Those who chose to read L.E.L. as an innocent sentimentalist included Bernard Barton, whose tribute poem prompted the editor to reveal to readers that she was a lady yet in her teens in 1822. In real life, Barton was a “sober Quaker” who worked in a provincial bank. In a previous Gazette contribution he had championed Felicia Hemans for her Christian spirituality, attacking the male Satanics for failing to support “religion’s cause.” However, even Barton admitted that he was turning a blind eye on purpose: “nor do I wish to know thee.”

  Some readers no doubt genuinely believed that the lady yet in her teens was employing erotic literary conventions without understanding their import. The Edinburgh Review had, after all, decried Thomas Moore’s Della Cruscan poetry as more dangerous than downright old-fashioned “obscenity,” because it did not “excite the suspicion of the modest,” and therefore failed “to become the object of precaution to those who watch over the morals of the young and inexperienced.” After her death, Letitia Landon’s memoirist Emma Roberts claimed, in a roundabout, delicate fashion, that the young poetess had been blind to the sexual implications of her own verse:

  [T]he wonderful precocity of her intellect rendered it scarcely possible for those readers, beyond the then narrow circle of her acquaintance, to imagine that her poems were the production of a girl who had not yet left off her pinafores, and whose only notion of a lover was embodied in a knight wearing the brightest armour and the whitest of plumes.

  However, the poetry L.E.L. published in the early 1820s reveals how knowingly she teased her audience. She presented a split perspective on her imagined self:

  There were two Portraits: one was of a Girl

  Just blushing into woman; it was not

  A face of perfect beauty, but it had

  A most bewildering smile,—there was a glance

  Of such arch playfulness and innocence.

  The face in the second picture is “wasted.” The girl has been “wrecked by love’s treachery.” Her “young flower” has been “crushed.” It was up to the reader to decide which image best suited the nameless melodist.

  L.E.L.’s perspective segued between external and internal, but she was always most tantalizing when writing in the first person. Nearly forty of the poems she published in the Gazette begin with the word “I.” She experimented with a new form, the dramatic monologue, usually assumed to have been developed later in the nineteenth century by Tennyson and Browning. With all narrative context removed, all that was left was a voice.

  One was a study in erotic abjection that invited readers to eavesdrop on the inner turmoil of a nameless young woman in the grip of uncontrollable emotions: the “throbs” of desire like some disease, the obsessive overinterpretation of the love object’s “looks and words,” the endless feverish “circling” of her thoughts. A variation on Faust’s Gretchen, the speaker was a girl on a self-appointed trajectory toward seduction and a suicide’s “unhallow’d grave.”

  “[C]oncealment preys on me,” she confesses. Yet the poem, contrariwise, bares all, forcing the reader into a voyeuristic position. Full of repetitions and panting parentheses, the nearly sixty lines of blank verse flow so unstoppably that they are barely verse at all:

  I must turn from this idol: I am kneeling

  With vows and homage only made for heaven;

  I must turn from this idol. I have been

  Like to a child who plays with poisoned arrows,

  And then is wounded by them. I have yielded,

  Foolishly, fondly yielded, to the love

  Which is a curse and sickness to me now.

  I am as one who sleeps beneath the power

  Of some wild dream; hopes, fears, and burning throbs

  Of strange delight, dizzy anxieties,

  And looks and words dwelt upon overmuch,

  Fill up my feverish circle of existence.

  “I would bring order to my troubled thoughts; / Like autumn leaves scattered by driving gales, / They wander round,” says the voice. But the very point of the poem is its studied portrayal of uncontrol. Whoever wrote it had as elastic a facility with blank verse as the great Regency actor John Kemble, who was famous for being able to converse in iambic pentameters as naturally as in ordinary speech.

  L.E.L.’s best poems, however, were her achingly plangent first-person love lyrics. They invited readers to suppose that the author was genuinely experiencing her own tragic romance, in real time: that she had given her heart—and by implication her virtue—to some mystery man, who failed to return her feelings. A title such as “Extracts from my pocket book” suggested true-life, diaristic confession. Her pellucid love plaints were mini-masterpieces of distilled emotional pain. But, like horoscopes, they were open-ended enough to be applied to the private romantic travails of any reader. Her “I” was elastic, an empty space to be filled.

  The following example, plucked at random, was published in the Gazette on May 31, 1823:

  Farewell, farewell! Then both are free,—

  At least we both renounce our chain;

  And love’s most precious boon will be

  Never to feel the like again.

  There is no gift beneath the sky,

  No fairy charm, no siren lure,

  Would tempt me yet again to try

  What love once taught me to endure.

  Its burning hopes, its icy fears,

  Its heartlessness, its sick despair;

  The mingled pains of many years

  Crowd into its one hour of care!

  I blame you not,—you could not tell

  That love to such a heart as mine

  Was life or death, was heaven or hell;

  How could you judge my heart by thine.

  Each pulse throbs to recall again

  What once it was my lot to feel;

  I have flung off my weary chain,

  The scar it left I may not heal.

  Anyone who had ever experienced romantic disappointment could identify with the sentiments, while those who knew Byron’s work were also invited to congratulate themselves on identifying an allusion to his lyric “The chain I gave” from The Corsair. L.E.L., though, took the metaphor of love as a chain binding two people to a much more visceral level than he had: her chain had chafed in such a way as to create a bodily wound.

  The plain monosyllables of the final line—“The scar it left I may not heal”—belied their seething suggestiveness, created with extraordinary economy of means. The scar would have been read by salacious contemporaries as a metaphor for loss of virginity, but that’s only the start of the semantic slippage. She could have written, more straightforwardly, “the scar it left may never heal,” but L.E.L. chooses a first-person pronoun and the transitive form of the verb “to heal,” making the “may not” seem less a conditional than a prohibition. As a result, she subliminally conjures up the idea that the speaker is unable to stop herself from picking at her “scar.” Compulsive self-harm shades into compulsive masturbation as she throbs to re-create, solo, what she once experienced with her lover.

  Masochistic pain and narcissistic self-destruction were central to L.E.L.’s poetic self-image. She had long been as “half in love with easeful Death” as Keats in his “Ode to a Nightingale” of 1819. After Shelley drowned himself and his companions in 1822 off the coast of Italy, after recklessly refusing to trim the sails of his yacht in the face of a coming storm, Romanticism as we now call it was increasingly defined as a death cult.

  By May 1823, L.E.L.’s wreath, which had hung so pure and white over the maiden’s bed in her “Song” of 1821, had become her funeral wreath, and at the same time her poet’s laurel crown, a composite leitmotif fusing sex, fame, and death:

  Twine not those red roses for me,—

  Darker and sadder m
y wreath must be…

  The blighted leaf and the cankered stem

  Are what should form my diadem.

  She greeted the new year, 1824, in suicidal tones, as if aching to join Keats and Shelley: “A deep, a lone, a silent grave / Is all I ask, dark Year, of thee.”

  Yet far from planning her own death, the real Letitia Landon was aiming for greater literary success. So far, she had managed to establish herself as a minor cult figure via her Gazette column. But in the summer of 1824, at the age of nearly twenty-two, she burst onto the wider scene with her best-selling book The Improvisatrice. Following its publication, she revealed herself in society for the first time. Few concluded from the title the extent to which she was improvising her own identity.

  Literary London queued up for a sighting of the new girl genius, including many who had never followed her column. Curious callers started arriving at her home in Sloane Street, where she was living with her grandmother. She was said to be an orphan.

  The callers were bemused by what they found. There was seemingly nothing in common between the love plaints of “L.E.L.” and the “restless little girl, in a pink gingham frock” who met their eyes. When the novelist Anna Maria Hall turned up, she was astonished to find her “frolicking from subject to subject with the playfulness of a spoiled child.” The tragic poetess

  had been making a cap for her grandmother, and would insist on the old lady’s putting it on, that I might see “how pretty it was.” To this, “grandmamma” (Mrs Bishop) objected. She “couldn’t,” and she “wouldn’t” try it on; how could Laetitia be so silly? And then the author…put the great be-flowered, be-ribboned thing on her own dainty little head with a grave look…and folding her pretty little hands over her pink frock made…a curtsey, skipping backwards into the bedroom.

  Another visitor, Rosina Wheeler, who also called at 131 Sloane Street “in hot haste,” some time later, recalled finding the infant phenomenon somewhat more provocatively attired:

  I was surprised, and somewhat scandalised, when I first saw her; for though only 2 p.m., she had her neck and arms bare, a very short, but elaborately flounced white dress, and a flower in her hair.

  Two sorts of females wore short, ankle-revealing skirts: schoolgirls and courtesans. Letitia Landon was as ambiguous in her person as in her poetry.

  These two vignettes were written long after the event and were colored by the writers’ subsequent relations with Letitia Landon. While Anna Maria remained protective, Rosina turned against her. A comparatively confused on-the-spot testimony, written on August 24, 1824, is perhaps more instructive. It comes from a letter written by Mary Howitt, a young married Quakeress who later made her name as a children’s author.

  Mrs. Howitt had not yet seen L.E.L. for herself. But she was so fascinated by the gossip she had heard that she could not resist passing it on. The new young poetess baffled and mesmerized onlookers as her fame spread like wildfire through the literary community. According to Mrs. Howitt, Letitia Landon had caused a stir at a recent party that she had attended with her patron, William Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette:

  She is, I understand, rather short, but interesting-looking, a most thoughtless girl in company, doing strangely extravagant things; for instance making a wreath of flowers, then rushing with it into a grave and numerous party, and placing it on her patron’s head….However, she is but a girl of twenty, a genius, and she must be excused.

  L.E.L.’s dumb show with the wreath was in reality more calculated than “thoughtless.” At one level, it was a coded expression of her allegiance to the forbidden poetic counterculture: Keats and Leigh Hunt had similarly crowned one another with wreaths in 1817, as recorded in Keats’s poems “On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt” and “To the Ladies Who Saw Me Crown’d.” More daringly, it was also a public offer of sexual availability from the young poetess to her patron, William Jerdan, the editor of the Gazette, who was a married man twenty years her senior. Anyone conversant with her use of the floral wreath as a literary symbol could have known that.

  Mary Howitt chose not to read the signs. She assumed that the infant phenomenon was the editor’s ward. In fact the “restless little girl” had been sleeping with him for some time. The previous year, she had given birth to his baby. She would go on to have two more children by him during the course of their long liaison.

  * Edward Bulwer changed his surname to Bulwer-Lytton in 1844 following his mother’s death.

  CHAPTER 3

  Keeping Up Appearances

  Letitia Landon’s affair with her Svengali is the key to understanding her life. The equivocal way in which she played on her backstage sexual “secret” is also the key to understanding much of her poetry. Yet these crucial aspects of her career were so successfully buried after her death that posterity was left in the dark, unable to make sense of the clues she left.

  By the time she died, the Regency culture of what was called demi-connaissance, or half-knowledge, through which high society tacitly condoned illicit sexual relationships, had hardened into the full-blown denial of Victorian bourgeois hypocrisy. Her contemporary memoirists did all they could to draw a veil over her shameful history.

  Even her early life, before she became L.E.L., was sanitized in retrospect. As with almost every aspect of her existence, her childhood and family background can be reconstructed only by patchworking a range of sources. Her memoirists cannot be relied on straightforwardly, although they often let slip comments that only make sense in the light of recent revelations about her suppressed sexual history. Public records, bald and unemotive as they are, are telling. Widening the net to include contemporary commentary, not directly referencing Letitia Landon but tangentially connected to her or those who knew her, builds the jigsaw puzzle further.

  In his 1841 Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., Laman Blanchard traced Letitia’s family back four generations, and drew on her brother’s vivid memories to create a heartwarming picture of a happy childhood in a well-to-do home. His comments have been taken at face value to date, but he in fact suppressed the more rackety elements of her Regency upbringing because they had so inexorably led to her dangerous life choices.

  As Blanchard rehearsed in ponderous detail, Letitia was descended on her father’s side from the landed gentry. She was also related to a plethora of respectable clergymen, including her great-grandfather, her grandfather, two of her uncles, and her brother. The most successful was her illustrious paternal uncle Whittington Landon, who became dean of Exeter, provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and, for a time, vice chancellor of Oxford University. Another uncle, James, pursued a quieter career as a Yorkshire vicar.

  By emphasizing these connections, Blanchard strove to make Letitia look beyond reproach, both socially and morally. The true situation was more ambiguous. Letitia’s great-grandfather had only gone in the church as a desperate career move after his father, Sir William Landon, lost the Herefordshire family seat as a result of unwisely investing in the South Sea Bubble in the early eighteenth century. Despite their loss of property, the family retained control over the local living, so there was little choice for the next generation but to take Holy Orders if they were to maintain caste and garner a guaranteed middle-class income. Even Letitia’s high-flying uncle Whittington was more worldly than godly. In 1829, he was attacked in the press for his lack of interest in the “spiritual welfare” of his nominal flock in Bow parish, Devon, and for raking in £1,000 per annum for the rectorship, despite the fact that he never turned up and paid his deputy a pittance.

  Letitia’s father, John (c. 1756–1824), grew up in Herefordshire, the eldest son of a country clergyman. He must have been less academic than his brothers, as he was sent to sea, rather than university, in his youth. One of the voyages he made was to Africa, where his famous daughter later died. However, his naval career came to an end in 1794 when his sponsor, Admiral Bowyer, appare
ntly a distant relative, retired after being wounded in a naval battle during the French revolutionary wars.

  Only exceptional talent could trump family connections in the navy. John clearly did not have it. By then in his late thirties, he found himself out of a job. Luckily, his well-connected brother managed to find him a civilian position in London with an army agency, Adair and Co. The firm had offices just off fashionable Pall Mall, soon to be the site of the capital’s first gas street lighting, installed in 1807, and its first department store, Harding and Howell, established in 1809.

  Despite the misleading job title, army agents needed wheeler-dealer financial skills, not prowess on the battlefield. The agencies were quasi-banks, firms that managed military finances, which were at that time outsourced to the private sector. One of the agencies’ functions was to negotiate the purchase of supplies on behalf of the War Office, which deposited funds with them for that purpose. They were also the middlemen responsible for brokering the sale of officers’ commissions.

  While the more traditional navy depended on quasi-feudal family connections, military rank depended on purchasing power. Socially somewhat anomalous, the agent’s role suited a “gentleman” without private means, since a patina of class was helpful for schmoozing privileged young bucks keen to buy their way into regiments. Jane Austen’s brother Henry also became an army agent, after an early stint as a soldier, before going on, in his case, to run a civilian bank. Both he and John Landon eventually went bust following the financial crash of 1816. Letitia’s father’s ruin would be the making of L.E.L.

  During the Napoleonic Wars, however, business was good for army agents. John was soon promoted to a partnership at Adair and Co., which was by then doing so well that it almost ran itself. Following his promotion, he felt financially confident enough to marry. The wedding took place at St. Luke’s, Chelsea, on June 15, 1797.