In The Pleasures of Friendship, published in 1810, Miss Rowden went on to offer a coy hymn to a mystery beloved mentor, whom Mary Russell Mitford immediately identified as St. Quentin. Rowden delicately distanced herself from the “grosser” aspects of human intimacy in her preface, declaring, “If the introduction of the passion of Love should be deemed incompatible with the chaster feelings of the mind, let it be understood that by love is only meant those delicate movements of the soul.” The critics were not so convinced. “[W]e do not agree with her in thinking that Friendship inspired the Maid of Corinth with the idea of tracing her lover’s likeness on the wall,” went one arch review.
It is unlikely that Letitia between the ages of five and seven could have been consciously aware of the sexual tensions in the school. But even that experience could have habituated her to the idea that adult reality included a mysterious hinterland, a harbinger of her later poetic double dealings. Certainly the love triangle became her narrative trope of choice, and the erotic hint her stock-in-trade.
As a child, Letitia was twitchy, insecure, and determined to grasp attention at all costs. She hated to walk in line with the other girls on school outings. On one occasion she slipped away, ran off home, and burst into the nursery. Outraged to find her little brother sitting astride the rocking horse, she threw a tambourine at him with such force that he fell off and was hurt.
It is a testimony to her charisma that she not only made her mark as the school rebel but simultaneously became its prize pupil. When she left at seven, she was presented with the top award: a dress embroidered by Miss Rowden’s own hand. It must have been some accolade, as Mary Russell Mitford recalled the teacher as a scatty seamstress who was always leaving her sewing things around. Blanchard recorded straight-faced that the dress was thenceforth known in the family as Letitia’s “robe of grace.” That pseudo-evangelical phrase was more likely a sarcastic Mary Crawfordism of Mrs. Landon’s.
Letitia received her prize from the hands of none other than Lady Caroline Lamb, who returned to the school as a young married woman to present the awards. Although Lady Caroline was yet to disgrace herself with Byron, the irony was not lost retrospectively on Letitia’s memoirist Katherine Thomson. “How little could Lady Caroline have imagined that the future L.E.L.’s was among those smiling eager faces, or that in that very room was to be decided her tragical fate,” she opined darkly.
In 1809, the upwardly mobile Landons moved out of London to a more prestigious new house in Hertfordshire, Trevor Park, a minor Jacobean mansion with a grand oak staircase, set in substantial grounds, since demolished. It even had a romantic history that might have appealed to the already rebellious young Letitia: the Jacobean princess Arabella Stuart was briefly held captive there in the early seventeenth century after eloping without the king’s consent.
At that time, it was fashionable for businessmen to relocate out of the city to bucolic residences within easy reach of their offices. The brewing magnate Walker Grey, for example, commissioned a grandiose neoclassical villa at Southgate from John Nash (now an upmarket mental hospital). From Trevor Park, John Landon could commute to his office in Pall Mall, and to his “toy” farm, on horseback.
He may have been attempting to restore the fallen fortunes of the Landons, who had lost their country seat a century before in the South Sea Bubble. More likely, as William Jerdan later inferred, he was trying to keep up with his old boss at the army agency, Alexander Adair, by then retired. That rings true when one discovers that Adair already had a Jacobean mansion, Flixton Hall in Suffolk.
In the 1790s, utopian radicals wanted to believe that all men were equal on the inside. In the wake of the French Revolution, social mobility increased, but the outside turned out to be what mattered. Competitive conspicuous consumption proved to be more of a leveler than liberty, equality, and fraternity. Social status became ever more tied to what you bought.
According to the arriviste dandy Beau Brummel, personal status depended on the right cravat, as long as it was correctly tied and bleached into perfect whiteness by a team of expensive laundresses. His own cravat gave him the confidence first to cultivate his “fat friend” the prince regent and then to insult him. In 1824, William Thomson complained in his An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness, “Who is not alarmed at the every day increasing tendency…to the ostentation of excessive wealth on the part of the few?” According to the more cynical commentator Edward Gibbon Wakefield, “respectability has various meanings in England: with some it means to keep a carriage, with others a gig.” For Jane Austen’s Mrs. Elton in Emma, it meant a barouche-landau.
John Landon was entering a race that he could never win. Trevor Park was a mere manor house compared to Flixton. Surviving photographs of the latter, which was demolished in 1953, show that it was a massive Jacobean jewel. In Adair’s day, it was a stately home filled with old masters, including a Rubens. In 1821, shortly after John Landon had been ruined, Flixton was featured in an envy-inducing book on the gentlemen’s seats of England.
Alexander Adair’s engraved portrait shows him lolling in a landscape with an entitled mien. Known for his extravagance, he was a very rich man, whose tax records reveal an income in 1800 alone of £14,000, as much as Catherine Landon’s marriage portion. However, his main wealth did not come from the army agency, on which John Landon relied, but from ancestral estates in Ireland.
Despite the loosening of class boundaries, entrenched privilege still won out. Letitia grew up bitterly aware of the inequality of opportunity in her society. As she put it in 1837, the “child of the rich”—a boy, obviously—is cosseted from birth, heir to educational advantage and crucial social networks as much as to inherited wealth:
Eton or Westminster, Oxford or Cambridge, have garnered for his sake the wisdom of centuries; he is launched into public life, and there are friends and connexions on either hand, as stepping stones in his way. He arrives at old age: the arm chair is ready and the old port has been long in the cellars of his country-house to share its strength with its master.
* * *
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John Landon did not retain his country house long enough for the port in his cellars to age. Indeed, he did not even own it. Trevor Park was leased. The portraits on the walls—Letitia never forgot one stately lady in a ruff—gave the impression of old money. But they were of someone else’s ancestors. Nor could John afford to maintain the grand new property. Letitia later recalled Trevor Park as a “large, old, and, somewhat dilapidated place” where “only part of the grounds were kept up in their original high order.”
In 1836, two years before she died, Letitia recorded her memories of her childhood at Trevor Park in a fictionalized first-person sketch titled “The History of a Child.” Her biographer Blanchard went on to dismiss it as pure invention, bearing as much relation to reality “as phantasies do to facts.” However, Letitia herself privately told another friend at the time she wrote it that it was literally autobiographical, and it contains numerous corroborative details about Trevor Park.
If Blanchard was at pains to dismiss its real-life basis, it was because he was desperate to dispel the idea that there could have been any “original melancholy” in Letitia’s nature that might ultimately have led her to suicide. The little girl in the sketch is not just unhappy but plainly disturbed. Blanchard chose instead to rely on Letitia’s brother Whittington’s lighthearted recollections. Even those, however, reveal a dysfunctional childhood beneath the positive spin.
Letitia’s relationship with her brother remained symbiotically close into adulthood, although he turned out a wastrel and a drain on her resources, despite attending Oxford and taking Holy Orders. Their interdependence was cemented in childhood through a bizarre system of vicarious discipline instituted at Trevor Park. When one sibling was naughty, the other was punished by being locked in a closet. The porous i
dentity boundaries on which L.E.L.’s poetic persona later relied were rooted in childhood experience.
In the recollections he passed to Blanchard, Whittington professed to find the punishment system funny. But it seemed so cruel and unusual to the children’s nursemaid at the time that she used to push sweets under the door to succor the sufferer within. When Letitia was incarcerated, she used to save the sweets to give to Whittington on her release. Perhaps she did not quite realize that she was thus inciting him to further acts of naughtiness and visits to the closet for herself. On the other hand, she might even have sought the closet as a welcome release from the tensions of daily life in the Landon family.
The confusing atmosphere at Trevor Park certainly led Letitia to retreat into escapism. She used to walk up and down in the garden talking to herself, holding out her “measuring stick” (presumably a ruler) as a weapon or magic wand to ward off intruders. If anyone approached, she would tell them not to speak to her because she had such a delightful thought in her head.
Schooled in poetry by Miss Rowden, Letitia soon gave her metrical form to her imaginings. She used, she later recalled, to “lie awake half the night, reciting my verses aloud,” and was only too pleased if she could get her mother to listen to them. Her prize dress must have been awarded for recitation rather than writing, as her preternatural capacity to memorize verse was a response to a disability unusual in someone destined for a literary career. Although she was a precocious reader, she had extreme difficulty learning to write. However hard she tried, the letters came out looking like “pothooks.”
She was probably left-handed and forced to write with her right hand. However, her dyspraxia was treated as naughtiness in the family, leading to frequent cupboard punishments for Whittington. Even in adulthood, her script never achieved the elegance admired in the nineteenth century. As a professional poet, Letitia always relied on an amanuensis to correct her manuscripts before they were sent to the printer, first her Svengali Jerdan, and later, after their relationship broke down, her brother.
As a result, L.E.L.’s literary imagination was essentially aural. She habitually composed verse by ear in the first instance, writing it down afterward. Her poetry often only comes to life when read out loud, her seemingly naïve sentimentalism exposing its bitter and cynical depths when voiced.
Like the sensualists Keats and later Swinburne, L.E.L. was often accused by her detractors of putting sound ahead of sense. Because she was female, her supposed errors of prosody were put down to ignorance. Yet there is rarely a moment in her poetry when the disjunction between metrical rhythm and meaning is random. In, for example, her early “Song” about the girl who places a white rose wreath above her bed to conjure a vision of her lover, L.E.L. makes the metrical emphasis fall inappropriately on the insignificant particle “for,” rather than on “him,” the object of the girl’s devotions:
Let sleep bring the image
Of him far away—
It is worth all the tears
I shed for him by day.
The point is to create a first-person speaker so narcissistically caught up in the incantatory rhythms of her own love spell that the identity of “him” is incidental to the fantasy.
According to Whittington, little Letitia was helped in her handwriting endeavors by a shadowy old gentleman, but even he gave up in the end, dismissing her with a kiss and telling her that her “dear little fingers” were too straight. Who he was, and what he was doing hanging around the household, is not explained. Perhaps Mrs. Landon, who had married for prudence rather than passion, was one of those “fine ladies” who “were going to the devil now-a-days that way,” as Fanny Price’s forthright father puts it in Mansfield Park.
Letitia’s memoirist Katherine Thomson later attested to Catherine’s warm nature and noted that one could tell from the expression in her eyes whence her daughter’s talents came. Only in the light of our new knowledge about Letitia’s own sexual behavior does the insinuating subtext come to life. After the move to Trevor Park, Catherine gave birth to another baby, Elizabeth Jane. Letitia and Whittington never regarded this new sister as any more than an irritation at best. The extremity of their negative reaction goes so far beyond normal sibling jealousy as to make one wonder whether they suspected that she was not John Landon’s child.
An anonymous short story called “The Boudoir,” published in The Keepsake for 1831, prefigures Henry James’s What Maisie Knew in its picture of a puzzled, knowing little girl trying to make sense of the adult world. Her naïve question “what is a boudoir?” elicits embarrassed mumblings from her governess. It transpires that the boudoir is the room in which her mother receives her lover, sometimes in the presence of the child herself. Unsurprisingly, given its risqué content, the story is unsigned, but it was probably written by Letitia, who contributed three signed pieces to the same volume and admitted in 1837 that her “contributions to various periodicals—whether tales, poetry, or criticism—amount to far more than my published volumes.”
After the move to Trevor Park, Letitia, like the girl in the story, was taught at home by a governess: her cousin Elizabeth Landon, who came to live with the family. Aged around eighteen when she arrived, she must have been a poor relation on John’s side. However, she was commandeered into becoming Catherine’s right-hand woman. Even after the family broke up, the two ladies continued to live together, in reduced circumstances, through the 1841 and 1851 censuses.
Catherine, who gloried in her trophy acquaintance with Mrs. Siddons, created an atmosphere in which poetic feats were prized. Letitia was sometimes ushered into the drawing room to recite for her parents, and possibly their guests, who may on occasion have included Sarah Siddons herself. Even John, who was more interested in his farm, became caught up in the family metromania. When Whittington asked him for three shillings, he offered him half that amount, but only if the boy would learn a long ballad by heart. Whittington refused, but Letitia learned all thirty verses instead, recited them perfectly, and was rewarded with a paternal kiss and the full three shillings. She immediately handed the coins over to her brother and went on, with extraordinary patience, to teach him the ballad line by line.
L.E.L.’s poetess heroines always have to pay for their superior talent by abjection to the men they love. Yet Letitia also learned to use poetry as a source of underhand power. She refused to play with Whittington unless he agreed to listen to her recite the battle scene from Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. She knew the entire text by heart. It is six cantos long and came out when she was eight.
In other moods, she and Whittington were partners in crime, running wild in the grounds with their bows and arrows in war games of Spartans. She was the better shot. On one occasion they annoyed the gardener so much that he deposited them on the top of a high yew hedge from which they could not get down. Letitia suggested they should punish the unfortunate man by making him a “public character.” She was brought up to believe that social humiliation was the worst possible fate, but as L.E.L, she would transform herself into a scandalous “public character” herself.
Part rebel tomboy, part feminine people-pleaser, Letitia was conflicted in her gender identification. She idolized her father, whom she rarely saw, waiting patiently at the gate for the sound of his horse’s hooves when he was expected home, and listening rapt to his seafarer’s tales. Her favorite books in childhood featured lone male adventurers: Robinson Crusoe, Captain Cook’s Voyages, The Travels of Sylvester Tramper Through the Interior of South Africa. Increasingly isolated after Whittington was sent to boarding school at Merchant Taylors’, she used to play out her lonely Crusoe fantasies on an island in the pond at the bottom of the garden, reached by a fallen tree, with the family dog as her Man Friday.
Yet her favorite book of all, a present from her father, featured a female protagonist whose very life depended on her storytelling prowess: The Arabian Nights. Its power over her
was such that she could never forget the odor of its leather binding. As L.E.L., she would become the Scheherazade of her generation, destined to please the public while risking social death.
Things were different in the schoolroom. Although Catherine was not an involved mother, she expected results. Her fictional counterpart in A Woman’s Story wants her daughter to excel “just to outshine” other girls. She spends every penny she can on her education, instilling in her a “panting for admiration” and a “love of display,” reluctant to suppose that her own child should turn out to be anything but “A STAR.” The fact, recorded by Blanchard, that Letitia was taught the piano by Miss Bisset confirms that in real life no expense was spared. Catherine Bisset was a renowned virtuoso who made her London debut in 1811.
The Regency culture of feminine accomplishments could be ruthlessly competitive and demanding. “Talk of education! What course of Eton and Oxford equals the mental fatigues of an accomplished young lady?” opines a character in Letitia’s novel Romance and Reality. Although the underlying purpose was to make girls attractive in the marriage market, accomplishments became an end in themselves, a form of parental conspicuous consumption and a symbol of social aspiration.
Letitia was brought up during an era of academic hothousing, a joint result of Rousseau’s theories, which stressed the innate ability of children, and a new emphasis on “talent,” fueled by the relaxing of old hierarchies. Her near contemporary John Stuart Mill (born 1806) was taught Greek at the age of three. Dickens later struck out at the pressure put on children in David Copperfield, whose protagonist endures misery-filled math lessons at the hands of Mr. Murdstone.
The fact that girls were not being educated for jobs or university did not reduce the pressure on them. Although the female curriculum focused on displayable skills, girls were encouraged to be as aggressively driven as boys, but with the additional burden of having to appear modest and self-deprecating at the same time. The results could be damaging.
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