L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  Not for nothing was the editor and art critic Samuel Carter Hall (1800–1889) later immortalized by Dickens as the arch-hypocrite Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843). According to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, who met him in the 1850s, his “unctuous solemnity,” “simpering self-complacency,” and “oily and voluble sanctimoniousness” needed “no modification to be fitted to appear before the footlights in satirical drama.” Like Letitia herself, Hall was a walking paradox: “an ingenuous hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar.”

  In all his published memories of Letitia, Hall never described when and how he first met her, probably with good reason. He did not want to be associated with her disreputable beginnings in Jerdan’s libertine circle. During the 1820s he and his wife, Anna Maria, whom he married in 1824, transformed themselves from rackety Irish literary adventurers into evangelical propagandists. The subtitle of the publication Hall edited from 1828 says it all: The Amulet: A Christian and Literary Remembrancer.

  This metamorphosis is visibly apparent in Anna Maria’s extant portraits. In a drawing made by Daniel Maclise in the 1820s, she appears bold and sassy with unkempt hair. In a photograph taken in later life, she kneels at a prie-dieu in an attitude of exaggerated piety, her hair covered by a black lace shawl.

  S. C. Hall must in fact have first encountered Letitia soon after he came over to London, from Cork, in 1822, whereupon he immediately wormed himself into Jerdan’s circle. Hall may even have helped inspire The Improvisatrice, as he soon found employment as secretary to the émigré Italian man of letters Ugo Foscolo, a well-known libertine who was said to keep a harem of attractive young female servants at his Regent’s Park retreat, Digamma Cottage. Hall later paid tribute to Anna Maria for supposedly saving him from Foscolo’s pit of vice, although Foscolo himself claimed that they parted company after Hall embezzled funds.

  Like her husband, Anna Maria also smudged over when she first encountered Letitia. She told Blanchard that she did not meet her until 1828. But she later published a vivid account of their supposed first meeting at Mrs. Bishop’s Sloane Street apartment, soon after the publication of The Improvisatrice in 1824, in which she portrayed Letitia skipping around in a gingham frock. Intriguingly, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records that Anna Maria (née Fielding) attended the 22 Hans Place school after coming over to London from Ireland with her mother at fifteen in 1815. If so, her acquaintance with Letitia might have gone back to the period before she met Jerdan, and she may already have been Letitia’s confidante during the very period in which the latter began her career-enhancing affair with the editor.

  In their published comments, both Halls did all they could to reduce to the minimum linking Letitia’s name with Jerdan’s. But they were so intimately involved in the ménage that S. C. Hall and William Jerdan were the only friends Letitia invited to her grandmother’s funeral in 1832, the time of which was arranged to their convenience. Elsewhere, Hall wrote pregnantly, “I would gladly say more than I have felt justified in saying of William Jerdan. No doubt he was of heedless habits; no doubt he cared little for the cost of self-gratification.”

  As Irish émigrés with a perilous hold on their social status, the Halls were hyper-aware that their position in London depended on their perceived respectability. As James Grant attested in The Great Metropolis, the middle classes staked their identity on their visible support for sexual morality, unlike the more freewheeling upper and lower orders. Hall himself admitted that he and his wife were not of “sufficient rank” for there to be any leeway in the matter. He had particular scruples about female morals. It was not, he thought, sufficient for a woman to be “pure.” She must also seem pure so as not to encourage impurity in others.

  In pursuit of this ideal, he had a genius for reinterpreting the evidence before his eyes. After Letitia’s death, he printed a warmhearted anecdote about introducing her to the Scottish writer James Hogg, who, he recounted, was so charmed by her innocence and grace that his suspicions of the dubious “L.E.L.” were instantly dispelled. As Hall recalled, Hogg “looked earnestly down at her for perhaps half a minute, and then exclaimed in a rich, manly ‘Scottish’ voice, ‘Eh, I didna think ye’d be sae bonnie! I’ve said many hard things aboot ye. I’ll do sae nae more.’ ” The letter Hogg wrote to his wife at the time reveals what he was actually looking down at: Letitia’s cleavage. He conceded that “Miss Landon is a pretty girl” but was “sorry to see” that she was “quite naked all above the apron string.”

  Hall had a particular interest in art criticism and later founded an art magazine. He was probably the author of the disapproving critique of Pickersgill’s portrait of Miss Landon in the rakish Spanish hat that appeared in The European in 1825. In 1830, he published an engraving of another Pickersgill fancy portrait of Letitia, that was much more to his taste, in his annual The Amulet: The Minstrel of Chamouni.

  Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1828, this new take on Letitia combined elements from the artist’s L’Improvisatrice of 1823 and his “Spanish hat” portrait of 1825 (see plates). The costume is remarkably similar, down to the crucifix necklace, to the former. But the tone is completely different, the setting a clean Alpine landscape, not sultry Mediterranean heat. Instead of a female Don Juan, this new image showed Letitia as Hall wanted her to be seen: in the guise of a pure and simple peasant girl, wearing an unimpeachably innocent straw hat and a demure apron.

  This more hygienic minstrel has attached prim pink ribbons to her lute, which she delicately plucks with a plectrum, as if afraid of touching the strings directly. The pose is so similar to that of the Spanish hat portrait of 1825 that Pickersgill probably went back to the original drawings he had made for that and simply changed the costume, as with a paper doll. Whoever commissioned the portrait—almost certainly Jerdan—clearly never paid for it, as it remained in the artist’s possession. It was subsequently inherited by Pickersgill’s niece Emily Maria. Her granddaughter married into the Benthall family, as a result of which the painting is currently on display in their ancestral seat, Benthall Hall in Shropshire, now a National Trust property.

  The Minstrel of Chamouni (see plates) represented a belated change in Letitia’s image, an attempt to desexualize her while keeping her in the fancy-dress realm of romance. The fact that the identity of the sitter was only visible to the in-crowd points to the paradox of the new mass marketing: the democratization of culture placed the emphasis more and more on exclusivity as the marker of fashion. Despite Hall’s belated championship, the press was not taken in by the modest demeanor of The Minstrel of Chamouni at its first exhibition in 1828. The Gentleman’s Magazine punctured its pose of innocence as yet another masquerade, describing it somewhat insinuatingly as a “pleasing portrait under the disguise of one of those interesting minstrels so intimately blended with every romantic feeling and ardent passion.” The London Magazine was more direct in its brief and scathing review: “No. 147. The Minstrel of Chamouni. H.W. Pickersgill,—This minstrel is an imposter. Shut the door upon him.”

  Since the “Spanish hat,” Letitia’s visual image had in fact had a bumpy ride. In 1827, the Gazette had attacked a “pseudo portrait” of her by Adam Buck that had appeared as the frontispiece to the second volume of Richard Ryan’s Poetry and Poets in 1826. More pert than pretty, it showed her in contemporary dress with an impressive embonpoint, a distinctive chin, and the short curly hairstyle she had recently adopted. If the Gazette wanted to distance itself following the Sunday Times debacle, it may have been because the Buck image subliminally showed Letitia as a seller of sexual secrets, her coiffure and dress aping the style of the kiss-and-tell courtesan Harriette Wilson as the latter had been portrayed in an engraving of 1825.

  If the Halls were desperate to maintain Letitia’s reputation, it was because they cared so much about their own. They regarded female impurity as contagious, especially from woman to woman. After the scandalous Countess of Blessin
gton established her London salon at Gore House in Kensington in 1829, Mr. Hall attended her glittering parties along with all the male elite of the day. But as no respectable lady would be seen there, Anna Maria stayed at home.

  Although Lady Blessington was the widow of a fabulously rich Irish earl, she was also a former kept woman, having run away from a marriage to a violent abuser, into which she had been sold by her father at fifteen. Her first protector—for whose friends she was said to have danced naked on a table—had reputedly gone on to sell her to her noble husband. Following their marriage, she became notorious for sharing him with his effeminate young favorite Comte d’Orsay in an unconventional ménage à trois. In widowhood, she remained inseparable from d’Orsay, who cohosted her salons and was believed to be her lover, despite concurrent rumors that he was gay.

  For these reasons, Anna Maria could not countenance openly socializing with the widowed Lady Blessington. However, she was happy to pursue a private friendship with the countess, visiting her solo during the day for a cup of tea and a chat. Whatever Mrs. Hall knew about Letitia in private, it would not have been in her own interests to admit it.

  Sometime around 1834, Rosina Bulwer told Anna Maria Hall, in an exaggerated display of shocked horror, that she had burst in unexpectedly at 22 Hans Place to find Letitia sitting on old Jerdan’s knee with her arm around his neck. Anna Maria responded, “Oh, I don’t chuse to believe anything against Miss Landon—that is, it’s like Lady Blessington—it don’t suit me to do so.” Her comment was almost a quotation from “Lines of Life”: “none among us dares to say / What none will choose to hear.”

  A complex system of Chinese walls ruled the society depicted in “Lines of Life.” Rosina’s horror at such ocular proof is unlikely to have been aroused by moral disgust. She was far from unworldly. The riotous parties the Bulwers hosted in the early 1830s were attended by a rag-bag of undesirables, including the late Byron’s half sister and former mistress Augusta Leigh. Letitia and Jerdan would turn up together. Disraeli pranced around in velvet trousers, seeking attention for himself, even though he avoided talking to the contaminating L.E.L.

  The kiss-and-tell courtesan Harriette Wilson, 1825. Letitia had more in common with her than her respectable friends would have admitted.

  Bulwer had in fact already told Rosina that he had heard Jerdan boasting in his cups about his sexual conquest of Letitia at a drunken dinner, coupled with “some disgusting toast.” As a result, Rosina had warned Letitia to forbid Jerdan’s visits. Rosina was outraged to find them in a clinch because Letitia had not followed her advice. Moreover, she may have been furious that her supposed friend—whose reputation she had defended “against all the world, and firmly at that time believing in her innocence”—had not confided in her openly, face-to-face. She did not consider that Letitia might have held back from full disclosure for the more generous motive of avoiding explicitly compromising her. Intimacy was the first casualty of the hypocrisy culture.

  The Halls, however, must have been privately apprised of Letitia’s affair from an early stage. They were, by their own admission, her daily intimates. They took her under their wing, offered her hospitality at their nearby Brompton home, and, around 1831, even helped fix up a curacy in Devon for her feckless brother, Whittington (probably with Jerdan’s complicity), in an attempt to sort him out. Jerdan summed up his long-standing relationship with the couple in the jovial pun “(H)all’s well.” It was rather more complicated in reality.

  Letitia aping Harriette Wilson’s hairstyle in Adam Buck’s portrait, engraved for Richard Ryan’s Poetry and Poets in 1826. The Gazette later dismissed it as pseudo.

  Despite depending on them, Letitia could never quite trust the Halls. She was always careful in her dealings with them to pass her words “through flattery’s gilded sieve.” Scurrilous articles could be shrugged off, but there was always the possibility that she might be betrayed by members of her own inner circle.

  The Halls were keen to save Letitia from her own recklessness, to protect their own respectability by association. The trouble was that the ever-rebellious poetess continued to betray herself in print, in what looks more and more like a cry for help. According to S. C. Hall, she was “slow to believe that…evil words could harm her. At first they seemed but to inspire her, with a dangerous confidence, and to increase a practice we always deplored of saying things for ‘effect.’ ”

  By 1829, Letitia’s addiction to risking her reputation was like that of a gambler who thinks he has found a “system” to cheat fate and, as he is losing, puts his faith in it yet more. Letitia’s “system” was verbal ambiguity and the confessional hint. But while manipulating the selective blindness of her readers, she also blinded herself.

  In The Venetian Bracelet Letitia referenced her private situation in acts of compulsive fictional projection more egregious than anything she had done before. Nothing could more literally dramatize the horror of losing “face” than her depiction of the corpse of a woman so shamed by her forbidden love affair that she has kept it secret unto death:

  still her face was bow’d

  As with some shame that might not be avow’d;

  They raised the long hair which her face conceal’d

  And she is dead, her secret unreveal’d.

  The most disturbing poem in the volume was titled “The Dying Child.” Letitia presented it as a public poem, inspired by a newspaper report on the sufferings of the poor. It is written in the voice of a pauper unmarried mother who rejects medicine for her feverish little daughter and instead wills her to die:

  Her cheek is flush’d with fever red;

  Her little hand burns in my own;

  Alas! and does pain rack her sleep?

  Speak! for I cannot bear that moan.

  Yet sleep, I do not wish to look

  Again within those languid eyes;

  Sleep, though again the heavy lash

  May never from their beauty rise.

  …

  I may have sinn’d, and punishment

  For that most ignorant sin incur;

  But be the curse upon my head,—

  Oh, let it not descend to her!

  …

  Tears—tears—I shame that I should weep;

  I thought my heart had nerved my eye;

  I should be thankful, and I will,—

  There, there, my child, lie down and die.

  As ever, Letitia had her finger on the pulse of social and political change. Attitudes toward single mothers were hardening, subsequently encoded in the “Bastardy Clause” of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Prior to that, the absent fathers of illegitimate children were financially responsible for their upkeep, and could be chased for funds if the mother sought parish relief. The Bastardy Clause made the mothers instead financially responsible. It was part of a campaign designed to lower the illegitimacy rate—and the burden on the public purse—by stigmatizing single mothers.

  But if the mawkishness of Letitia’s poem repulses, it is because, alongside its public message, it channels so much suppressed personal rage. On June 20, 1829, just three months before “The Dying Child” was published, she had given birth to her third illegitimate baby, Laura.

  Like those of Ella and Fred, the circumstances of Laura’s birth are clouded. She was probably born in Tunbridge Wells, which Letitia is known to have visited in the summer of 1829: a conveniently anonymous spa town with a ready supply of trained nurses. Contemporary clues suggest that she was by now relying on the Halls, the Thomsons, and their allies to get her discreetly through the ordeal.

  From Tunbridge Wells, Letitia wrote to a Mrs. Tayler, who turns out to have been the wife of the Reverend Charles B. Tayler, a social reformer and contributor to S. C. Hall’s The Amulet: A Christian and Literary Remembrancer. He later went on, with his 1835 tract Live and Let
Live: or, the Manchester Weavers, to influence Elizabeth Gaskell’s famous factory novel Mary Barton. Letitia told Mrs. Tayler that she would soon be going home to London, where, after a few days at Hans Place, she would be spending a week staying with Dr. and Mrs. Thomson at their house in Hinde Street, presumably to recuperate.

  The situation is reminiscent of another of Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic philanthropic Victorian novels: Ruth (1853). Its story concerns a well-meaning Christian minister and his sister who find themselves entangled in a mesh of lies and deceit when they take in a young unmarried mother and try to protect her by passing her off as a widow. The buried interconnections between L.E.L.’s post-Byronic world and that of the Victorians offer much food for thought. It is odd to think that Dr. Thomson’s first wife was Elizabeth Gaskell’s aunt. Katherine, his second wife, had taught at the boarding school in Warwickshire to which the eleven-year-old Gaskell was sent after her mother died. After the adult Gaskell finished Mary Barton, her first novel, she sent the manuscript to Katherine for literary advice. The latter, who may have resented the competition, responded negatively. It may be no coincidence that Gaskell’s final novel, Wives and Daughters, features a widowed doctor who marries a second wife who is caustically presented as worldly, pretentious, and a bad influence.

  In her letter to Mrs. Tayler, Letitia thanked Mr. Tayler for inspiring her with the idea for “The Ancestress,” written for inclusion in The Venetian Bracelet. Its theme was a daughter cursed by her mother’s sin. Letitia appears to have been vicariously dramatizing her own victimhood as a fallen woman to arouse the sympathies of the do-gooders on whom she by now depended for practical help. Ever aware of the transactional nature of such relationships, she later repaid the favor by puffing Tayler’s Records of a Good Man’s Life in the Gazette as a “work calculated to do much good.”