L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  In 1829, Robert Southey expressed disquiet at female hothousing in an article on the American poet Lucretia Davidson, who died at sixteen from what would now be called anorexia. Letitia, who was later marketed as an “infant genius,” was educated to emulate female prodigies. As a teenager, she devoured the posthumous works of Elizabeth Smith, a literary and linguistic wunderkind who died young.

  Letitia’s governess piously told Blanchard that her pupil had always been a compliant marvel. However, Whittington’s memories are somewhat different. He recalled that his sister used to fling her books around in a rage, and was then made to perform the ritual of kneeling to beg God for forgiveness. Humiliation later became a key ploy in L.E.L.’s poetic erotics, her portrayals of masochism sometimes startlingly literal. In Romance and Reality, a discarded mistress is shown kneeling in an act of self-flagellation, a flail in her hand, drops of blood on the floor.

  Letitia looked back on the schoolroom as a place of pain and degradation. Punishments included boxes on the ears, bread and water, and the dunce’s cap. The regime also featured “stocks and dumbbells” and “backboards and collars,” devices designed to perfect the Regency girl’s body along with her mind. The lovely arms Jane Austen’s Mary Crawford displays to Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, when she plays the harp in an effort to seduce him, were no doubt toned with dumbbells. Stocks were fitted on the hands to straighten them. Due to her dyspraxia, Letitia probably received, on a minor level, attentions comparable to the painful truss Byron was forced to wear in a vain attempt to cure his clubfoot.

  As a result, Letitia became crippled with performance anxiety, even in tasks she should have found easy, such as memorizing the multiplication table. Despite her prodigious memory for verse, she often found herself so anxious that she was unable to repeat the schoolroom lesson that she had in fact learned by heart, leading to further punishments, which she had to bear alone after Whittington was sent to boarding school and the vicarious system collapsed.

  Moreover, the emphasis on physical perfection added to her chronic self-consciousness. In her “History of a Child” she recalls how mortified she was to overhear the servants describing her as plain when she was being dressed up for a children’s party. Although she later invited readers to imagine L.E.L. as a classic beauty, the unvarnished reality was less rosy. She was short and dumpy, and her face failed to fit conventional standards. As her friend Anna Maria Hall put it, she was “certainly not beautiful—perhaps she can scarcely be described as handsome…her features were not regular.”

  An eyewitness anatomization of her looks in Blanchard’s 1841 biography isolates some features for praise: her “dark silken hair”; her long eyelashes that cast a shadow under her “grey, well-formed and beautifully set” eyes; her eyebrows, “perfect in arch and form”; and her ears, which were apparently “of peculiar beauty.” Her small stature is depicted as “sylph-like,” but there is a hint of bathos in the statement that her figure “would have been of perfect symmetry were it not that her shoulders were rather high.” More worrying is the assertion that “the underjaw projected a little beyond the upper.”

  From this, one could conclude uncharitably that Letitia had a Neanderthal look: a low forehead, a protuberant jaw, and a squat neck. Some hint of those characteristics is found in certain of the extant portraits of her. One unflattering posthumous engraving, published by Colburn in 1839, gives her such a short neck as to render her dwarfish. Visual evidence from her many portraits—even allowing for idealization—suggests that her chin was marked, but not that she had a grotesque Habsburg jaw.

  Nevertheless, it is clear that when she later conquered society, her attractiveness was a performance, an act of will. As Anna Maria Hall put it, it was her “EXPRESSION” that seduced onlookers, her features constantly in motion. “It was strange to watch…the many shades of varied feeling which passed across her countenance even in an hour,” says an anonymous source.

  As a child, it was only when reciting verse, or retreating into lonely literary fantasy, that Letitia felt able to escape the humiliation of being herself.

  In the Romantic period, artistic creativity was often believed to result from childhood trauma. In his Confessions, Rousseau traced the roots of his own genius to the sexually charged whippings he had received from a pretty child-minder in infancy. In a poem published in 1826, L.E.L. ascribed Byron’s genius, in a similar vein, to some unmentionable early betrayal, which left him unable to form stable adult relationships but fed his poetic drive. She was probably alluding to gossip that he had been sexually and physically abused by his nurse May Gray, as was indeed the case.

  In her “History of a Child,” Letitia portrayed her own Ur-betrayal as her abandonment by her nursemaid, presumably the kindly woman whom Whittington described pushing the sweets under the cupboard door. She described being so emotionally starved that she used to push her little brother off the nurse’s knee, demanding that she love “me, and only me.” The nurse promised she would stay with her forever, but was secretly planning to leave the household to marry a sailor, as Letitia learned by eavesdropping on the servants. The discovery that she had been deceived made her feel “worthless.” On the morning of the nurse’s departure, she crept out of the house to intercept her in the drive, clinging, kicking, and screaming.

  With the coach waiting, the woman tried to soothe her by cajoling, but finally lost patience and shook her off as a “tiresome” child. Letitia went cold. Politely wishing her former ally good morning, she ran off, threw herself down on the grass, and decided never to expose herself to the humiliations of intimacy again. This single incident cannot in reality have led to Letitia’s loss of trust, but the nurse’s betrayal provided a useful symbol in retrospect. As she put it, “childhood…images forth our after life.”

  Letitia came to realize that outward compliance was the only route to survival. At seventeen, after her first poetry had been accepted for publication, she wrote a thank-you letter to the governess who had hit and humiliated her. “It has always been my most earnest wish to do something that might prove your time had not been altogether lost,” she wrote. “To excel is to show my grateful affection to you.”

  By adolescence, Letitia’s literary tastes had moved on. No longer attracted to lone wolf Robinson Crusoe types, she turned to romantic fiction. Her governess later primly told Blanchard that she had forbade her charge to read novels on moral grounds. However, Letitia’s own account of the books she enjoyed as a teenager shows that she lapped up the sensibility fiction of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, and the gothic of Ann Radcliffe (though she thought the latter’s heroines too pure). She read Jane Austen too, but found the novelist’s worldview frustratingly polite and controlled, dismissing Mr. Darcy as a wooden cutout. Only the melancholy of Persuasion appealed.

  According to Whittington, the young Letitia also worked her way through Cooke’s Library, a hundred-strong series of popular novels. The titles turn out to have included earthy eighteenth-century works by Fielding and Richardson, written before the age of Bowdler, as well as Hugh Kelly’s soft-porn Memoirs of a Magdalen (1767), a Fanny Hill spin-off, republished by Cooke in 1795.

  Girls’ reading was a site of controversy in the Regency. The moralist Hannah More saw female addiction to romantic novels as equivalent to heavy drinking among young men. By exciting girls with imaginary vistas of forbidden passion, they paved the way for the “surrender of virtue.” Letitia’s own “fall” when it came was in some respects a textbook example.

  Letitia’s literary preference was, however, for poetry, in which taste she had been schooled by Miss Rowden. “Happily for her, the pure high toned works of Walter Scott were the reading of the day. Well does every parent judge who has them in his library,” wrote her memoirist Katherine Thomson at the height of the Victorian cult of domesticity in 1861, expressing relief that the young Letitia’s reading had been “free from the poisonous casuistry of
Shelley” and “devoid of the passionate gloom of Byron.” That beggars belief, given the numerous allusions to Shelley and Byron found in the poetry Letitia published before she was twenty.

  Although Letitia is unlikely to have read Shelley before she came into the orbit of the Literary Gazette in 1820, she could hardly have avoided the ubiquitous Byron, the superstar of her youth. Even after the separation scandal, his works were widely read by respectable young ladies. Letitia’s contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of a puritanical American pastor, read The Corsair with her aunt as a child. In Letitia’s Romance and Reality, the heroine reads it with her governess. Charlotte Brontë later read Don Juan as an adolescent, although she advised her schoolfriend Ellen Nussey to avoid it.

  Girls were fed a diet of double standards. In a letter of 1822, Letitia pointed out the odd juxtapositions that appeared in young ladies’ albums, where racy passages from Moore or Byron rubbed shoulders with sententious extracts from sermons. The mixed message was endemic in the culture of her day. She went on to transform it into her poetic calling card.

  In 1816, the year Letitia turned fourteen, her father’s finances began to suffer as a result of the nationwide economic crisis that succeeded the Napoleonic Wars. Though not yet ruined, he was forced to give up his farm and Trevor Park, and moved his family back to London. Blanchard says that they lived briefly in Fulham, but within a year they were back in Brompton.

  Their new home was not so grand as Trevor Park, but it was still more than a step up from the terrace where they had started out. A substantial detached house with a large garden and paddock, it was described by a contemporary real estate agent as a “[r]emarkably neat and retired VILLA, most delightfully situated…modern brick-built House…9 bed chambers, 2 dressing-rooms, a handsome drawing-room, breakfast and dining-room, kitchen, larders, store room, wash-house, and cellaring; double coach-house, six-stall stable, cow-house and piggeries, pleasure grounds, productive kitchen garden.”

  Now that they were back within a stone’s throw of her old school at 22 Hans Place, it is likely that Letitia returned to Miss Rowden for extra lessons, even if there was no more money for expensive outside tutors. Catherine was also concerned about the teenage Letitia’s pudgy physique. In Romance and Reality, young ladies do “calisthenic exercises” to improve their figures. Letitia was made to run around the garden bowling a hoop. She registered her resistance by holding a book in the other hand so she could read as she ran.

  Brompton Villa was “most delightfully situated,” according to a contemporary real estate agent. William Jerdan’s cottage backed onto the garden and he used to ogle the teenage Letitia from his window when she went out to exercise.

  Adjacent to the garden of Brompton Villa was a narrow passage called Love Lane. On the other side was a row of smaller houses. In one of them, Rose Cottage, lived William Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette, with his wife, Frances, and their young family. He took to watching the girl from his window as she ran around with her hoop and her book. As he later recalled, he was enthralled by the sight of her “plump” body and “exuberance of form.”

  Exactly what happened in the Landon family between 1816 and 1820 is shadowy. Blanchard skates over their financial embarrassments as quickly as he can. Anna Maria Hall’s novel A Woman’s Story offers parallels, but the extent to which she fictionalizes is uncertain. In the novel, the father, a City banker, at first shores himself up with loans, while his wife receives visitors in yellow satin and jewels in a pathetic attempt to keep up appearances. They struggle on for another three years, but eventually face total ruin. The wife leaves the husband, disgusted at his failure and the loss of her own capital. He ends up in debtors’ prison.

  After 1816, John Landon perhaps attempted new business ventures, but may have simply eaten into Catherine’s capital. His wife was certainly left with little money of her own. By 1820, he could hold out no longer. He left the family and ran off to evade his creditors. When he died in 1824, he was living in the parish of Yarpole, in the Landons’ ancestral Herefordshire, where his high-achieving brother held the living in absentia.

  Bankruptcy was common in the roller-coaster economy of the period. In Lady Blessington’s 1823 short story “The Auction,” we are guided through the house of a once opulent bankrupt to inspect the books, paintings, musical instruments, and furniture now on offer to the highest bidder. The narrator imagines the impact on the daughters of the house, “delicate looking females driven from their home, stripped at once of all the elegancies of life, and sent to brave a world, the hardships of which they are now for the first time to learn.”

  Whittington’s education was safe, guaranteed by his Landon uncle, who soon received him into Worcester College, Oxford. But the marriage prospects for his sister had evaporated. It was with John Landon off the scene, and the prospect of eviction looming, that the first move was made toward attempting to establish Letitia in a literary career, probably engineered by her mother but put into motion by her governess.

  Her poetic precocity had previously been viewed as an ornament. Now it offered some hope of remuneration. As Letitia herself later put it, the “embarrassed state of my father’s circumstances…led to a thousand projects for their amelioration—among others, literature seemed the resource.”

  Despite the reputational risks of stepping into the public sphere, talented women from genteel backgrounds often did so when pressed by financial need. Letitia’s former piano teacher Miss Bisset was the daughter of an intellectual clergyman, Edmund Burke’s biographer. She turned professional, even appearing on the Paris stage, when the family hit hard times.* Mary Russell Mitford, similarly, became a professional writer when her father’s gaming debts spiraled out of control. The poetess Felicia Hemans turned to her pen for her bread when her marriage broke down, leaving her with small children to support. Apart from governessing, regarded as a grim fate by Jane Fairfax in Emma, writing was almost the only possible employment option for an educated woman.

  On February 13, 1820, the editor of the Literary Gazette received an unexpected note from Letitia’s governess. Enclosing a poetry manuscript, it went as follows:

  Miss Landon, though not having the pleasure of personally knowing Mr Jerdan, from the very great politeness the family have at all times received, ventures to intrude the enclosed lines. They are written by a young friend, for whom Miss Landon feels most anxious solicitude. If Mr Jerdan will, therefore, give his candid opinion whether he considers any taste or genius is expressed, or, on the contrary, if he should only call it a waste of time from which no benefit can arise. Miss L. feels the liberty she is taking; trusts Mr Jerdan will believe it is an obligation never to be forgotten.

  * According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Catherine Bisset’s father, Robert, kept an academy in Brompton’s Sloane Street in the early 1800s, which is presumably how the Landons found her.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Songbird and the Trainer

  William Jerdan is scantly mentioned by Letitia Landon’s contemporary memoirists, but he was one of the most flamboyant and ubiquitous figures in the publishing industry of the first half of the nineteenth century. If he has been ignored by literary history until recently, it is because the Victorians brushed him under the carpet, owing to his reputation for dubious ethics and his scandalous affair with his protégée.

  Carlyle called him the “satyr-cannibal Literary Gazetteer,” and determined to keep as far away from him as possible. His shameless libertinism rendered him a joke figure in the eyes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who found him “drunken and rowdyish on the edge of the grave” in the 1850s. But Jerdan had appealing energy, as well as an enormous appetite for alcohol and a reputation for having “seduced innumerable women.”

  In his heyday, Jerdan’s ebullient glee was infectious. According to one contemporary, many “liked and regarded without respecting” him. More t
o the point, he oversaw the transformation of the Literary Gazette into a powerhouse whose reviews were capable of making or breaking a book. As S. C. Hall recalled in the 1870s, “It would be difficult now to comprehend the immense power of The Literary Gazette for a period of time extending over the years between 1820 and 1840. A laudatory review there was almost sure to sell an edition of a book, and an author’s praise was established when he had obtained the praise of that journal.”

  Like the Landons, Jerdan was an incomer to Brompton, having been born in Kelso, Scotland, in 1782. His father, a small landowner, ensured that he received a good grammar school education, while he was “pampered and petted” in childhood by his “mammy” and his equally adoring aunt “Mammy Nan.” Jerdan makes his own spoiled self-indulgence a running theme of his autobiography, a rambling four-volume affair published in the 1850s. He remained as forgiving of himself as his doting mother had been.

  His chutzpah was apparent early. In his teens he made his way to London to pummel his way into the office of the prime minister’s public secretary, where he presented a cipher of his own invention for use in secret government documents. He was turned away, but his confidence—some called it his “indomitable effrontery”—remained undimmed. His interest in ciphers and secret messages would later resurface in the coded erotic poetry of L.E.L.

  After an uncertain early start, including an abortive apprenticeship in an Edinburgh lawyer’s office, he returned to London to make his living by his pen. One of his first jobs was on a magazine catering to the hotel industry, an indication of the new commercial opportunities opening up in journalism. Like many young writers—including, later, Dickens—he briefly served as a parliamentary reporter. He was present in the lobby of the House when the prime minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated in 1812. Jerdan himself wrested the gun from the assailant and did not stint in publicizing his own role. He briefly edited The Sun and secured the patronage of the powerful Tory politician George Canning, who went on to stand godfather to one of his sons.