L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  Jerdan’s big break came in 1817, when he took on the editorship of the Literary Gazette, which had recently been founded by Henry Colburn, one of the most ruthless businessmen in publishing. Along with another publisher, Thomas Longman, Jerdan also became a third shareholder. He would remain at the helm until the 1850s.

  Colburn initially founded the Gazette because he realized that it was in the interests of a book publisher to own a magazine, since it could offer a source of endless free publicity in an era when reviews were conventionally unsigned. Having exploited the Byron moment by publishing The Vampyre by Byron’s doctor, Polidori, without the author’s consent, and Caroline Lamb’s kiss-and-tell novel Glenarvon, he became known as the father of “puffery,” a concept that incorporated the modern “hype” but was surrounded with a seamier penumbra of corruption and insider trading. By 1830, puffery’s dark arts were so endemic and considered such a blight that Thomas Babington Macaulay complained that “no artifice by which notoriety can be obtained is thought too abject.”

  Throughout his career, Jerdan was accused of being a “puppet of certain booksellers” who “dispensed praise or blame at their bidding, and, it may be feared, ‘for a consideration.’ ” The book publishers to whom he was most frequently said to be in hock were his own fellow shareholders in the Gazette, especially Colburn. His undoubted literary enthusiasm was combined with a wheeler-dealer mentality, though, as we shall see, he was less competent in the latter than he believed himself to be.

  A surviving early letter of his to the publisher William Blackwood, written in 1819, is indicative of his attitudes. Acting as agent for the poet “Barry Cornwall” (Bryan Waller Procter), he solicits a good review for Cornwall’s new book in Blackwood’s Magazine, offering to repay the favor, either in kind—that is, with positive coverage of Blackwood’s books in the Gazette—or “in any other…manner,” presumably cash payment:

  A friend of mine in whose literary fame I take a sensible interest is about to publish a small volume under the assumed name of B. Cornwall….[A]s I greatly admire my friend’s poetical genius I trust my recommendation will awaken a kindred feeling in you, in which case you will favour him with an early and kindly Review. By doing so you will confer an obligation on me which I shall be happy to requite, in any other or the same manner.

  Notably, Jerdan clothes his negotiations in the vocabulary of sensibility: “friend…sensible…kindred feeling…kindly.” The emotionalism of L.E.L.’s poetry would also cloak its market function, which was to seduce readers and build the Gazette’s circulation.

  From the start, the Gazette was conceived as a commercial enterprise. As the first cultural weekly in a world of quarterlies and monthlies, its unique selling point was that it was able to provide up-to-the minute coverage of the latest books, plays, and exhibitions. On the advice of his patron George Canning, Jerdan steered clear of political commentary. An apolitical press was in the interests of the ruling elite at a time of instability, but it also made publishing sense. The revolutionary 1790s had seen a boom in radical pamphleteering, but by 1817, the war-weary public was looking for entertainment. The expanding middle class was, moreover, increasingly defining itself through cultural aspiration.

  In the early days, the Gazette’s target demographic was the youth market, as is shown by the inclusion of university news in its pages, an intuitively canny move on Jerdan’s part at a time when the nation’s average age was falling, due to the population boom that caused Malthus such anxiety. In addition to privileged undergraduates, the Gazette’s young target audience included “sallow clerks” too poor for university, who were equally caught up in the Byronic moment; “even our footmen compose tragedies,” complained Blackwood’s. A surviving unpublished letter to Jerdan from one such anonymous reader asks for guidance on library provision in London on behalf of young men who had “betaken themselves to literature.”

  In the age of “metromania,” many readers had a special investment in a literary magazine because they saw themselves as potential poets. In contrast to the Olympian pose of the Quarterly Review, Jerdan strove to build a close rapport with his audience. His innovations included a readers’ column and a “By Correspondents” poetry section for amateurs. It was there that Letitia’s first poem appeared in print, on March 11, 1820, signed with the single initial “L.”

  The creation of “L.E.L.” was still some eighteen months away, but Jerdan’s interest had been piqued as soon as he received the manuscript from her governess. He later affected to believe that the governess herself was the true author, prompting Letitia to perform more and more poetic feats to prove her worth. In reality, he must have instantly suspected that the “young friend” responsible was the plump pubescent he had secretly ogled from his window. Mrs. Landon had previously told him in passing that her daughter was “addicted” to writing poetry.

  Nevertheless, the poem submitted by the governess jarred with Jerdan’s preconceptions. It seemed to him too sophisticated to be the work of a young girl who had on occasion played with his own children in the lane between their houses. Grandly titled “Rome,” it showed off a knowledge of classical history. Written in heavy anapests, to sound like the beat of a funeral drum, it began:

  Oh! how thou art changed, thou proud daughter of fame,

  Since that hour of ripe glory when empire was thine,

  When earth’s purple rulers, kings, quailed at thy name,

  And thy Capitol worshipped as Liberty’s shrine.

  But it was not the secondhand classical learning, nor the distinctive meter (in fact derived from Byron’s Hebrew Melodies), that made Jerdan sit up. It was the poem’s incendiary political message. To submit a threnody for republican liberty, some mere six months after the Peterloo Massacre, was a daring choice for a genteel young lady about whom the editor so far knew little save that she lived in a mansion far superior to his own cottage. Perhaps he already hoped that a girl so keen on political freedom would be equally open to the idea of free love—which would explain why he published “Rome,” despite Canning’s strictures.

  The revolutionary despair encoded in “Rome” is indeed surprising. The Landons were so unimpeachably “Church and King” that the epitaph on Letitia’s great-grandfather’s grave lauded his determination to support the establishment by routing dissenters. However, the upwardly mobile Catherine was said to have loved the republican French nation even during the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps inspired by Napoleon himself, the ultimate parvenu, as well as by her own French heritage. Liberalism had been so fashionable in the 1790s that even the heir to the throne had been painted by George Stubbs in relaxed anti-aristocratic attire. After Waterloo, English liberals continued to register dissent through republican symbols. Hazlitt had a statuette of Napoleon; Keats had a Napoleon snuffbox.

  Competing discourses of liberty mixed and separated. Rather as the idea of sexual liberation in the 1960s was seen by some to mean Playboy and by others to mean feminism, liberty could encompass everything from the moral high ground of Mary Wollstonecraft to the depravity of the Marquis de Sade, from slavery apologists campaigning under the banner of free trade to proto-socialists demanding equal rights. No one was better attuned to the power of the mixed message than Letitia. Her voice was already so compromised by her circumstances that it could only thrive on uncertainty and ambiguity.

  L.E.L.’s late novel Ethel Churchill, published the year before her death, features an unlikely friendship between two contrasting characters: a politically idealistic but doomed young poet, and a cynical actress who cheerfully exploits her wealthy lovers. Even in childhood, Letitia herself exhibited a split personality, swinging between the “Spartan” rebel and the manipulative people-pleaser. At eighteen, she was a bold political dissenter, but also fully fledged in the coquetry and guile that Wollstonecraft regarded as the bane of socially constructed femininity.

  After the shock tactics of “Rome
,” Letitia’s next submission to Jerdan could not have been more ladylike or refined. It was a slight lyric on the purity of the Michaelmas daisy in which she coyly paraded her own innocence. In fact, she was gearing up for a mutual seduction that had more in common with the erotic brinkmanship of Les liaisons dangereuses than with Wollstonecraft’s ideal of love as an equal, open, and sincere partnership.

  In August, Letitia’s mother wrote to Jerdan, soliciting a further publishing opportunity for her daughter. Catherine’s unpublished note, preserved among Jerdan’s papers in the Bodleian, is dated from 138 Sloane Street, indicating that the eviction from the big Brompton house had already taken place. Its language suggests that she was desperate for Jerdan’s patronage, although not herself highly educated:

  Should the favour Mrs Landon requests be admissible, or not, she trusts Mr Jerdan will pardon, the very great liberty she is taking; a friend of Mrs Landons [sic] wishes much to see a triffle [sic] of Letitia’s in the Gazette of the next or the following Saturday. The kindness her family have experienced from Mr and Mrs Jerdan will not be obliterated from the mind of Mrs Landon, it will give her much pleasure to hear they are all well.

  Catherine’s warm reference to Mrs. Jerdan shows that the neighbors were by now socializing en famille, which they had not done when the Landons were living in their mansion with John there as head of the family. The constipated formality of the prose makes her social anxiety only too plain. The former mistress of Trevor Park was by now so sunk that she was forced to employ another aspect of the discourse of liberty: that of taking a liberty with a superior.

  Catherine was still too embarrassed to admit that she had any longer-term pecuniary motive in pushing her daughter forward, ascribing her desire to see Letitia’s work in print to wanting to please “a friend.” There may have been an element of truth in that, as by now the socially conscious Catherine had little else to show off about. Even the exaggerated etiquette by which she referred to herself in the third person underlined the pressures on her status and identity.

  Letitia’s “triffle” was duly published in the Gazette on August 5. The poem was a tasteless squib about a nouveau riche “West Indian dandy” and his sly black valet, probably intended to be regarded as a slave. In it, she took a detached view of the power relations in which she was herself already immersed. We can see her laughing, beneath Catherine’s radar, at the values of conspicuous consumption that had contributed to the Landon family’s ruin.

  Although superficially at odds with the romantic tones she later adopted, the “triffle” reveals that the young Letitia was already rehearsing the ideas that she subsequently fed, underhand, into her self-construction as “L.E.L.”: mirroring; splitting; doublespeak; the notion of identity both as a costume put on and as vested in the eye of the beholder. The humor turns on verbal slippage, and on an ironic inversion of power.

  The wealthy plantation owner struts in front of the glass in his new suit and tight stays, inviting admiration for his “Bond Street” chic from his “Negro,” who fawningly tells him he looks like a “lion.” But the would-be dandy is so out of touch that he fails to register that “lion” is the on-trend slang word for a celebrity socialite. Taking his valet literally, he questions how the latter could know what such an animal looked like, assuming that he could never have seen such an exotic beast (itself an irony given the African heritage of West Indian slaves).

  Pretending to be as stupid as his “massa” thinks he is, the valet insists in pidgin that he knows exactly what a lion looks like, but goes on, sarcastically, to describe a long-eared donkey, claiming he can see one right there. His master turns to the window to look out into the street. The final line deploys a crude pun on “ass,” as he looks back over his shoulder to see his own backside reflected in the mirror (one recalls Mary Crawford’s crude pun on rears and vices in the navy, which continues to astound readers of Mansfield Park).

  Letitia later became a literary “lion” herself in London society, but retained the perspective of the outwardly sycophantic but secretly snickering “Negro.” Under the silken surfaces of her poetic sentimentalism, she always configured human relationships in terms of brutal power dynamics. The final irony in the squib’s mesh was that, in his literalness, the “massa” is unwittingly right in exposing human pride in “lion” status as a base animal instinct.

  Parallels between the position of women and that of slaves were frequently drawn by radicals in the 1790s. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft complained that patriarchy had duped women into putting on “silken fetters,” manipulating them “into endurance, and even love of slavery.” L.E.L.’s iconic poetess figures were often romantically portrayed as slave girl singers in exotic harems. But Letitia was a generation younger than Wollstonecraft, and had no faith in feminist idealism. “I do not dwell,” she wrote in 1823, “amid the days / Utopia may have known.”

  Letitia’s next submission to Jerdan marked a watershed. It told the story of a girl abandoned by a lover “careless of the passion which / He had awakened into wretchedness.” For the first time, she used a floral metaphor to indicate loss of virginity: “But love is like the rose, so many ills / Assail it in the bud.” Neither her mother nor her governess questioned the poem’s propriety. However, it sent Jerdan just the message he wanted to hear.

  Letitia was now dispatched out of London to stay with friends or relatives in Bristol at what must have been a trying time. There, she began working a more ambitious project: her first book. Its centerpiece was a narrative poem in two cantos, The Fate of Adelaide, written in the same meter as Miss Rowden’s Pleasures of Friendship, and devised as a concoction of sub-Scott medievalism with a Byronic love triangle at its center. Letitia privately had few illusions about the passions she depicted. “I wished to pourtray [sic] a gentle soft character and to paint in her the most delicate love,” she archly told her governess. “I fear her dying of it is a little romantic; yet what was I to do as her death must terminate it?”

  However, she was desperate for Jerdan to recognize her talents. When she sent him Canto One, her covering letter flattered his sense of power. “I am too well aware of my many defects, and the high advantages of your opinion, not to anxiously avail myself of your permission to submit it to your inspection,” she wrote submissively. She also slipped a seductive message into the text of the poem, in which she addressed him as the anonymous “belov’d Inspirer of thy youthful minstrel’s dream,” just as Miss Rowden had namelessly hymned her mentor in The Pleasures of Friendship.

  Canto Two was then dispatched. It included an even more flattering declaration of fealty from poetess to patron. Letitia informed Jerdan that her ambition was unstoppable. She wanted to rank among the “bards of Greece.” But she could not do it without her male muse: “It is…my cherish’d prize, / To breath one song not quite unworthy thee.” Miss Rowden’s tribute to Monsieur St. Quentin paled by comparison.

  The Landon women waited on tenterhooks for Jerdan’s answer. It did not come. Catherine wrote to him anxiously on November 4 on her daughter’s behalf: “Need I say how anxious she is for your opinion?” she wrote. “I trust you will not think her arrogant, as I believe you are aware of her reasons for wishing to publish.” This was Mrs. Landon’s first explicit allusion to their reduced circumstances, which would in fact have been obvious to the editor from the moment they moved out of their big house. By openly admitting the weakness of their position, Catherine was effectively placing herself—and her daughter—in Jerdan’s hands.

  Catherine wrote again to Jerdan in increasing desperation. She was anxious not to be “troublesome,” but without his encouragement her daughter had “no resolution to go on.” She had asked the revered Mrs. Siddons to accept the honor of a dedication, but the actress was not prepared to put her name to Letitia’s volume unless Jerdan wrote a testimonial. The friendship was evidently less important to the status-conscious ac
tress than it was to the imperiled Mrs. Landon.

  Letitia’s depressed state when Jerdan did not reply was replaced by a manic high when he finally did, expressing his approval of her work. “How happy I am!” she wrote to her mother. “[I]t so surpasses my expectations, convinced as I am that a kind of curse hangs over us all, it seemed too delightful to happen to one of the Cahets.” (The Cahets were not, as has been suggested, a long-lost branch of Letitia’s mysterious maternal family, but a fabled race of goitered outcasts supposed to inhabit the cut-off mountainous regions of Europe, alluded to by Letitia herself in her 1831 novel Romance and Reality, where she refers to “the frightful goitres which so disfigure the inhabitants of the Valais.” She was making a joke of her financially disgraced family’s pariah status.)

  After these letters, the on-the-spot trail goes dead until the publication of The Fate of Adelaide just over six months later, in July 1821. No poems of Letitia’s appear in the Gazette for more than a year. No relevant correspondence is extant.

  Jerdan’s autobiography, however, waxes lyrical on this lost year. He reveals that during that period he took Letitia on as his pupil to prepare her for a literary career. “From day to day and hour to hour,” he recalled, “it was mine to facilitate her studies, to shape her objects, to regulate her taste, to direct her genius.” During the course of the lessons, he also endeavored, as he somewhat quaintly put it, “to cultivate the divine organisation of her being.”