L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  Although John was not a young bridegroom, neither was his new wife, Catherine Jane Bishop, in her first flush by the standards of Regency marriage market. At twenty-five, she had almost reached the age at which Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot in Persuasion assumes she will never find a partner. How the couple met is nowhere divulged.

  Letitia’s biographer Blanchard remains tight-lipped about her mother. All he tells us is that she was of Welsh extraction, in contrast to the care he lavishes on her paternal heritage. Since the Landons’ ancestral Herefordshire was on the Welsh border, some long-standing local connection may have played a role. More likely, the couple first hooked up in London, perhaps encountering one another at some ticketed event, the Regency equivalent of online dating. By the early Victorian age, the notion of paying to procure personal introductions had become infra dig, with Punch inveighing against the fictional “Mr and Mrs Spangle Lacquer,” at whose house “you will always be certain to meet…a great many persons…to whom you can assign no fixed position in society, having generally met them in places where distinction was acquired by paying for it.” The previous generation was less squeamish. In Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney meet after buying tickets to the Assembly Rooms in Bath.

  Memoirists less discreet than Blanchard hint that Catherine Jane Bishop’s background was less comme il faut than John Landon’s, which might explain why she had not previously succeeded in hooking a husband. In a novel based on Letitia’s life, published by her friend Anna Maria Hall in the 1850s, Catherine is fictionalized as a woman who “had been elevated by her marriage, and regarded those who knew her in her days of obscurity as if they were prepared to do her an injury.” Every fragment of independent evidence supports this.

  Catherine was the daughter of a “Mrs.” Letitia Bishop, but no marriage certificate or Mr. Bishop can be found. Evidently illegitimate, she remained so cagey about her origins that, as an impoverished old lady living in a rented room in Chelsea, she gave conflicting information about her place of birth in the 1841 and 1851 censuses. In the former, she took the path of least resistance, simply ticking the box for same as current parish. Her mask appears to slip in the second, in which she reveals that she had been born in France, though she was a British subject. Perhaps Letitia Bishop crossed the Channel back in the 1770s to give birth discreetly to Catherine out of wedlock.

  These details matter, because Letitia Landon’s poetic persona was based on the idea that social status, and identity itself, were fictional constructs. In L.E.L.’s universe, masquerade is the ultimate human condition, both life’s greatest opportunity and its inevitable tragedy. The self beneath the mask, if it exists at all, is no more than an amorphous “mass”:

  Oh, what am I, and what are they?

  Masquers but striving to deceive

  Themselves and others; and believe

  It is enough, if none should know

  The covered mass of care below.

  Public records point to the conclusion that Letitia’s maternal grandmother was not from the same class as the educated Landons. Her will, made in 1829, is signed with an “X.” Her mark bears no sign of shakiness to suggest that infirmity was the reason. Evidently, she never learned to write, although that did not necessarily mean she was unable to read. Nevertheless, she had enough of a private income to enable her to live “genteelly” in Sloane Street. She was clearly some sort of superannuated kept woman. William Jerdan later expressed a vague idea that Mrs. Bishop herself was the natural daughter of a nobleman. He may have shifted the stain of illegitimacy back a generation to spare the feelings of Catherine, who was still alive when he published his autobiography.

  Whoever Catherine’s father was, he was wealthy enough to provide for his daughter. She brought to her marriage “£14,000, her horse and her groom.” While not plutocratic, that was a substantial sum, which would have yielded a comfortable upper-middle-class income of £700 a year, even without John’s salary from the army agency. For comparison, Jane Austen’s Mr. Elton in Emma is proud to catch Augusta Hawkins, who has £10,000, while in Pride and Prejudice a Miss Grey with the same sum attracts the fortune-hunting Wickham. Emma Wodehouse and Georgiana Darcy are in a different league with £30,000 apiece.

  Like their fictional counterparts in Anna Maria Hall’s 1857 novel A Woman’s Story, John Landon and Catherine Bishop appear to have contracted a “late marriage of convenience.” She traded her fortune for his respectable name. Certainly, their union, which ultimately ended in separation, did not inspire Letitia with a sentimental view of matrimony. She later described it as “a treaty in which every concession is duly weighed.”

  Material comfort was not in question when John and Catherine moved into their first home, 25 Hans Place, in 1797. It was a new-built terraced house in a pleasant garden square in the then burgeoning London suburb known as Brompton. It was there, near the site of today’s Harrod’s, that Letitia, their first child, was born in 1802. She went on to spend almost her entire life in the same area, much of it in the same street.

  Although L.E.L.’s poetry dealt in roses and lilies and songbirds, Letitia Landon was incorrigibly metropolitan. On a visit to the real countryside in 1826, the only emotion she confessed to feeling was aroused by the provincial shops, which made her “sentimentally recal [sic] the glories of Bond-street.” In one of her funniest short stories, “Grasmere Lake,” a Londoner relocates to the Wordsworth country in the hope of finding poetic inspiration, but becomes afflicted by ennui. In an effort to enliven things, he plots to persuade a few idealistic young poets to come and commit suicide in his front garden.

  The fast-growing metropolis in which Letitia Landon made her career terrified the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle. He thought it was “like the heart of all the universe; and the flood of human effort rolls out of it and into it with a violence that almost appals one’s very sense. The people are situated here like plants in a hot house, to which the quiet influences of sky and earth are never in their unadulterated state admitted.” But Letitia, herself a hothouse plant, thrived on the city’s febrile anonymity. London was, for her, “my country, city of the soul.”

  Brompton was a paradigm of the frenetic urbanization that changed the face of London during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Residential terraces, built by speculators, sprang up among market gardens in what had previously been countryside. Hans Place itself was scarcely finished when the new Mr. and Mrs. Landon first moved in; they may have been the very first occupants of number 25.

  The neighborhood provided the perfect cover for anyone, such as Catherine, keen to disguise less than genteel origins. It was so recently developed that no one there had long-standing local roots. In 1807, Robert Southey complained that social and geographical mobility were making it so difficult to “place” people that “there never was an age or any country so favourable to the success of imposture, as this very age and this very England.”

  Although it had a leafy rus in urbe feel, Regency Brompton was far from suburban in attitude. Aspirational middle-class residents—including Henry Austen, who moved between various different addresses in the neighborhood, including 23 Hans Place—were attracted by its genteel comforts, but equally drawn to its edge of boho-bourgeois glamour. The area was popular with stage celebrities, such as the opera stars Mrs. Billington and Angelica Catalani. The actress Mrs. Jordan later set up house in Brompton after her long-standing and highly publicized affair with the future William IV broke down.

  Letitia’s maternal grandmother’s one recorded social connection is intriguing. Mrs. Bishop was an old friend of the fabled Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons, whose daughter Sally, Catherine’s contemporary, embroidered the first cap ever placed on baby Letitia’s head. As Mrs. Siddons and Mrs. Bishop were both of Welsh extraction, their acquaintance might have gone back a long way. It is even possible that Letitia’s maternal grandmother was a minor ac
tress herself in her youth. A single “Mrs Bishop” is recorded as having performed in London theaters in the 1770s, in bit parts and out of season—when Letitia’s grandmother, who was eighty-two when she died in 1832, would have been in her twenties—though that may be a false lead.

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  Certainly, the performative poetic voice Letitia later created was rooted in a thespian sensibility. She regarded her public role as a writer as being similar to that of the actress. In later life, she confessed to the dramatist James Planché that she “would give all the reputation I have gained, or am ever likely to gain, by writing books, for one great triumph on the stage; the spontaneous thunder of applause of a mixed multitude of utter strangers, uninfluenced by any feelings but those excited at the moment, is an acknowledgment surpassing, in my opinion, any other description of approbation.”

  Actresses emerged in the late eighteenth century as the original modern celebrities, but their position in society remained doubtful long into the nineteenth. Letitia’s grandmother’s friend Mrs. Siddons was worshipped as a great artist. Yet even she felt she had to be hyperprotective of her image as a virtuous woman, despite the fact that she was genuinely (if problematically) married, unlike many who adopted the title “Mrs.”

  In the late 1790s, Siddons made friends with the famous firebrand feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, but unceremoniously dropped her when it became public knowledge that the latter had given birth to a baby out of wedlock by the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. Siddons had been more than happy to turn a blind eye to any irregularity as long as Wollstonecraft kept up appearances by calling herself “Mrs. Imlay.” It was only when Wollstonecraft married the radical philosopher William Godwin—thus making it plain that she had not been legally married before to the father of her child—that the actress rejected her.

  Mrs. Siddons was fearful of contaminating her own reputation by being seen to consort with a known fallen woman. Whatever a woman did in private, her reputation was defined by her public sexual status and that of her associates. “Love, love is all a woman’s fame,” Letitia later wrote as L.E.L. Her doubling of the word “love” encoded the contorted double standards of the culture in which she was raised. She grew up to test and shape them to the limit.

  As a child, Letitia was raised in a comfortable, polite, bourgeois world recognizable from Jane Austen’s fiction, complete with clergyman uncles, amateur theatricals, and feminine accomplishments. Yet an undertow of insecurity pervaded her milieu from the start. Even the suburban square where she was born was less respectable than it appeared on the surface.

  The history of Hans Place offers a microcosm of the tensions in Regency literary culture, which later fed into the voice of L.E.L. Genteel Jane Austen stayed there twice, in 1814 and 1815, after her banker brother Henry took up residence at number 23 following his wife’s death. Yet in 1815 lodgings in Hans Place were also chosen by the rebel runaways Shelley and Mary Godwin as a suitably anonymous location for the birth of their first—illegitimate and short-lived—child. In 1816, it was also from Hans Place lodgings that Shelley’s abandoned wife, Harriet, walked out to drown herself in the lake in Hyde Park, pregnant with another man’s baby.

  The Landons were no longer in Hans Place at the time Jane Austen and Shelley stayed there, but they retained deep local connections and were soon back in Brompton. The family undoubtedly had acquaintances in common with Henry Austen, and the teenage Letitia may have heard local gossip about rebel Shelley and his women.

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  As children, Letitia and her younger brother, Whittington, two years her junior, were well provided for. There was a “magnificent rocking-horse” in their nursery. However, their socially ambitious mother appears to have been less interested in hands-on childcare than in gossiping with her friends about “Mrs Siddons and the French fashions.” During the week, Letitia was often farmed out to her grandmother, Mrs. Bishop, who lived in nearby Sloane Street.

  On Sundays, the children were frequently left at home alone while their mother went out visiting. The servant who was supposed to mind them often went out for the day, locking them in. No older than five and seven at the time, they used, Letitia later recalled, “to sit at the open parlour-window, to catch the smell of the one-o’clock dinners that went past from the bakehouse, well knowing that no dinner awaited us.” In her posthumously published novel Lady Anna Granard, or keeping up appearances, Letitia caricatured her mother as a monstrous social climber who abandons her daughters to go to a prestigious house party, and refuses to return even when one of the girls falls dangerously ill and the maid absconds with the silver.

  Where John Landon was on Sundays is not recorded, but it is unlikely he was with his wife. Sometime in Letitia’s childhood, he acquired a “fancy farm” in Barnet just north of London, where he could play at being a landed squire. Its elegant and commodious former cowsheds and dairies survive today as the headquarters of Mill Hill Golf Club, paying testimony to its former glory as a luxury status symbol. Long after Marie Antoinette was guillotined, the English upper classes regarded dairy farming as an elite hobby. The exquisite dairy at Lord Mansfield’s North London seat, Kenwood House, just a few miles from John Landon’s farm, can still be visited to this day.

  The farm provided John with a gentlemanly leisure activity. It also gave him an excuse to spend time away from home, which may have been a boon as the Landon marriage appears to have become troubled early on. In Anna Maria Hall’s novelization, A Woman’s Story, the parents quarrel constantly. Their daughter is used as a go-between, made to lie to her father on her mother’s behalf about the latter’s extravagant spending. In the light of L.E.L.’s subsequent canniness at playing off different factions among her readership and in the world of literary politics, that rings true.

  In such an environment, Letitia grew up attention-starved and precociously driven. She learned to read early. Although it would have been the norm in middle-class households for her mother to teach her, she had to rely on a kindly neighbor, who scattered alphabet tiles on the floor and gave her a treat whenever she picked the right letter. Letitia never failed to “display” her reward when she got home. She was less interested in the treats—which she instantly handed over to her little brother—than in impressing Catherine.

  At the age of five, Letitia was sent to a fashionable girls’ school. It was located seconds from the family home at 22 Hans Place. She later returned there in adulthood to lodge in the attic, a symptom of her lifelong yearning for stability.

  The school’s prestigious alumnae included the aristocratic future Lady Caroline Lamb. In his early Victorian biography, Blanchard made it sound like a model of calm Victorian propriety, but Regency girls’ schools had a reputation for being more permissive than prim, as seen in Edward Francis Burney’s satirical cartoon (see plates). The atmosphere at 22 Hans Place was in reality febrile, with a high turnover of privileged but insecure students. Lady Caroline stayed less than a year after being sent there at ten in 1795 because her family could not control her, even with laudanum, the Ritalin of the day.

  Letitia’s childhood school at 22 Hans Place, located only a few doors down from her family’s home at number 25. As an adult she returned to Hans Place to live in an attic room above the school.

  The couple in charge were a French émigré, Dominique St. Quentin, who styled himself comte, and his English wife, Anne. They had previously run Jane Austen’s old school at Reading, but had had to give it up due to Monsieur’s gaming debts. They had arrived at Hans Place with a former pupil, Frances Arabella Rowden, in tow. She took on the bulk of the teaching, while Madame St. Quentin sat in the parlor in a stupor.

  Frances Rowden proved an inspirational schoolmistress. A published poet herself, she focused her curriculum on literature and drama. She took pupils on theater trips and organized them in amateur theatricals, as “stage-struck,” to
use a Regency coinage, as the characters in Mansfield Park. Henry Austen, whose interest in amateur theatricals is often cited as a source for that novel, may thus have found something more in common with Frances, when he moved in next door in 1814, beyond her connection with his sister’s old school.

  Prior to her teaching Letitia, Miss Rowden’s pupils had included the writer Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855). According to the latter’s letters, Miss Rowden was involved in an illicit amitié with her boss and quondam teacher Monsieur St. Quentin. The ménage à trois went on for many years. After the St. Quentins finally gave up the Hans Place establishment sometime after 1816, Miss Rowden followed them in hot pursuit to Paris. There among her pupils was the future actress Fanny Kemble, Mrs. Siddons’s niece, who was amused to find a portrait of her uncle John Kemble in pride of place on the teacher’s wall. Miss Rowden finally succeeded in marrying the comte after his wife died in the 1820s.

  In his mealy-mouthed 1841 biography of L.E.L., Blanchard did not mention the St. Quentins, only Miss Rowden, who, he erroneously stated, kept the school. However, he admitted in a footnote that Miss Rowden afterward became Madame St. Quentin, indicating that he knew of the scandal but chose not to publicize it. It was politic not to draw attention to the less than decorous aspects of Letitia’s early education. Miss Rowden’s affair paralleled that between Letitia and her Literary Gazette Svengali rather too closely.

  Blanchard stated that Letitia was only taught by Miss Rowden between the ages of five and seven, when the Landons moved out of London for a time. However, Letitia’s early published poetry shows Rowden’s literary influence so plainly that it is likely they kept in touch. L.E.L.’s later “amorous and botanical” mode was a more daring variant on Rowden’s early work A Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany, a sentimental verse treatise on flowers influenced by the works of Erasmus Darwin, which personified plants to describe natural reproduction.