L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  Letitia had to rely on others because Jerdan was much less supportive than he had been back in 1823, when he had personally conveyed her to Canterbury for Ella’s birth. “I am disappointed at not being in town before this; the week after next you will receive the rest of my M.S. I want you very much to see the lost Pleaide,” she told him, referring to the title of one of the poems, “The Lost Pleaide,” in her forthcoming The Venetian Bracelet. “I am sure you will see to making the best arrangements, but I am ashamed to return to Hans Place with any remains of an harassment.”

  The unspecified “harassment” sounds like childbirth and its physical aftermath. Letitia did not want to go home to Hans Place until she was fully fit. The “arrangements” must have had to do with the care of the child. “But I am tresspassing [sic] upon you so addio,” she concluded mournfully. By the end of the year she would be telling him that she was anxious to know what he was doing and missed “so very much not being able to talk to you.”

  Jerdan’s eye was wandering again. At twenty-seven, Letitia was no longer by any stretch of the imagination an infant genius. His taste was for very young girls. In the 1850s, Julian Hawthorne was astounded by the inappropriate attentions the by then aging editor paid to his infant sister, Rose. Having secured the squirming child on his knee, Jerdan “coquetted at her” until in desperation she finally offered a faint propitiatory smile, “upon which he threw up his hands, emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and exclaimed, ‘There—there it is! I knew I’d get it; she loves me—she loves me!’ ”

  By 1829, Jerdan had developed an interest in a new teenage poetic prodigy named Mary Ann Browne, whose work he had begun to showcase in the Gazette. In his autobiography, Jerdan claimed unconvincingly that she and Letitia were firm friends. However, a torn-up fragment of a letter from Letitia to Mary Ann Browne survives in which the former coldly turns down an invitation from the latter on the unlikely grounds that she is such a slow writer that she cannot afford to take the time off work for socializing. A letter from Browne to Jerdan querulously compares the number of column inches she and Miss Landon have been given. He clearly enjoyed playing the poetesses off one against the other.

  In The Venetian Bracelet, Letitia addressed a double-edged tribute to her younger rival, flattering Browne with faint praise while at the same time deflating her aspirations. Only those who truly suffer can be real geniuses, says L.E.L. Mary Ann’s doting family provide her with too cocooning an environment:

  With thine “own people” dost thou dwell

  And by thine own fire side;

  And kind eyes keep o’er thee a watch,

  Their darling and their pride.

  I cannot choose but envy thee;

  The very name of home to me

  Has been from youth denied.

  The quotation marks around “own people” seem twee until one reads the words aloud in a tone of vicious sarcasm. Letitia was covertly warning Browne—and her proud parents—against the blandishments of the puppeteer Jerdan, while sending her Svengali a message to keep his hands off the new prodigy.

  With The Venetian Bracelet, Letitia began to get under Jerdan’s skin. Despite his libertinism, he had a sentimental weakness for little babies, demonstrated by his sorrow at the death of Georgiana, and by a strange short story he wrote in the first person from the viewpoint of a newborn, with whom he clearly identified (the baby’s desires are focused solely on breasts). Indeed, Jerdan so loved babies that during the course of his long life he fathered no fewer than twenty-three acknowledged children, including those by Letitia and by a later mistress as well as by his wife, Frances.

  “The Dying Child” was calculated to hit home. In contrast to the puffery with which he had greeted her previous collections, Jerdan’s review of The Venetian Bracelet in the Gazette accused L.E.L. of “nourishing of sickly aspirations.” He attacked the “sentiment of self-condemnation running through this volume,” wishing it was merely an “imagining” and not an expression of the poet’s “apparent moods.” The mood of the volume as a whole was indeed more twisted than that of her previous works. Most of her heroines die of broken hearts. But the heroine of the title poem turns homicidal, murdering her love rival with poison concealed in the eponymous Venetian bracelet, and framing her unfaithful lover for the crime.

  If this was a dig at Jerdan, Letitia was also cranking up the sensationalism in response to the fact that her actual sales were falling as the taste for pseudo-Byronic poetry declined. “The Dying Child” suggests that she was prepared to take more and more risks with poetic semi-self-exposure as her stock fell.

  The sadomasochistic dynamic that infused L.E.L.’s poetic portrayals of romantic love was by now being reenacted in Letitia’s real-life relationship with the press. In publishing “The Dying Child” she offered fresh fuel for satirists. In December 1831, an unsigned titbit appeared in the unlikely forum of The Royal Lady’s Magazine, a publication usually concerned with fashions and floristry. On this occasion it thrust in the knife: “It is very strange (and we only mention it on that account), but it is very strange (and therefore we cannot help mentioning it), that L.E.L. and Mr Jerdan should be so fond of writing about scandal and little children.”

  In February 1832, the same magazine went on to advise “the injudicious friends of Miss L.E.L. not to talk too much about their ‘innocent female’—‘virtuous girl’—‘ornament of her sex’—‘praiseworthy lady,’ &tc.” It concluded with “The Lament: A Poetical Dialogue between L.E.L. and W. Jerdan, in the Manner of Both,” which portrayed “L.E.L.” bewailing the fact that she has forsaken the children her “Willy” has given her. His response was not designed to reassure:

  Then grieve no more—for here I swear—

  (Nay, smile, my love, you must—)

  I’ll give again whate’er I’ve given,

  As freely as at first.

  Given the culture of anonymous publication, we cannot know who wrote this, but nor could Letitia herself. According to The Royal Lady’s Magazine the satirist was a woman who had known her “from early life.” The hint was sadistically calculated to increase Letitia’s paranoia. The likeliest candidate for the false friend is Rosina Bulwer, whose taste for writing comic epigrams is on record, and whose husband openly flirted with Letitia in her presence.

  As with Ella and Fred, there is no evidence that Letitia had any further contact with her third child after her birth. Jerdan, however, was in touch with Laura when she was a young adult, describing her in a letter to Ella as a “dear Creature.” She is the only one of the children whose birthdate is recorded on her baptismal certificate. However, she was not christened until she was nearly twenty-one. This suggests that she only discovered her true parentage, and the fact that she had not been baptized as a child, on approaching her majority.

  The baptismal certificate shows an interesting correction in the box for “father’s occupation.” The words “silk manufacturer” are crossed out and replaced with “gentleman,” the word Jerdan used to describe himself on Ella’s baptismal record and in some censuses. Silk manufacturer was in fact the profession of Laura’s foster father, a man named Theophilus Goodwin. In the 1851 census Laura is listed as living with him and his wife, Mary Anne, at Rose Cottage in Dalston. She is described as their “niece,” a common euphemism for illegitimate foster children.

  The childless Goodwins, who adopted Laura, were clearly able to offer her a comfortable home, as the census states that Theophilus was successful enough to employ over two hundred people in his silk-manufacturing business. Further censuses show that she continued to live with them until she finally made a late marriage in her forties after Mrs. Goodwin died. On being widowed, she took in lodgers. Her existence was more circumscribed than Ella’s, but clearly not so desperate as Fred’s.

  Laura Landon’s baptismal certificate. She was not christened until she reached adulthood. P
erhaps she had only just learned the truth about her parentage. The words “silk manufacturer”—her foster father’s profession—are crossed out and replaced with “gentleman,” the word her birth father, Jerdan, used to describe himself in some of the censuses.

  It seems likely that, prior to living with Theophilus, Laura was brought up with her elder sister, Ella, in early childhood. A census return for 1841 lists an Ella Goodwin and a Laura Goodwin of “independent means” living with an Anne Goodwin in Regent’s Park, along with other young people, also of independent means, all surnamed Goodwin. Although the ages are wrong for Letitia’s daughters, the confluence of the two unusual Christian names is striking. Laura, who would in fact have been eleven going on twelve on June 6, 1841, when the census was taken, is listed as being ten. Ella, who would in fact have been eighteen going on nineteen, is listed as being nine, possibly a clerical error for nineteen. The Anne Goodwin with whom they were living seems to have taken in multiple children and registered them under her own surname for the purposes of the census. She does not appear to be the same woman as Theophilus’s wife, Mary Anne, as she was older, single, and, unlike Mrs. Goodwin, born in India. Perhaps she made her living by fostering and subsequently placed Laura with Theophilus, a relative.

  After the publication of The Venetian Bracelet in 1829, Letitia’s private life became an ever more open secret among the literati. Soon after Disraeli cut her at a party in 1832, he heard from his writer friend Julia Pardoe “that it is well known to everyone that L.E.L. has no less than three children by Jerdan.” Yet Letitia continued to laugh off the gossip.

  She managed to find a new niche among a group of ladies on the loucher, lower fringes of high society, who reveled in her whiff of scandal. They included Lady Emmeline Wortley and the wealthy, willfully vulgar Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, whom Disraeli himself married after she was widowed. In addition, Letitia also secured the patronage of the scandalous Countess of Blessington, who developed an affection for her and regarded her as a kindred spirit. Although no eyewitness accounts survive, it is likely that the reckless Letitia was one of the few females who risked being seen at the countess’s soirees.

  Lady Blessington in the 1830s. Men crowded to her salons but respectable ladies kept away. The portrait in the background, by Thomas Lawrence, shows the countess in her alluring youth. She regarded the wayward Letitia as a kindred spirit.

  All the while, Letitia’s “respectable” lady friends not only lied for her to others, but to her face. As Mrs. Thomson admits:

  Our gifted friend defied slander, and gaily referring to the hosts of well-bred and titled dames who visited and caressed her, asked “If any one believed it?” Could any one have the heart to answer “Yes?” And yet the rumour grew and spread, and spread and grew; it ran its course underground: people were mighty civil to her face; but they inflicted on her friends the torture of hearing certain questions in her absence. Who could tell her of it? Not I—I couldn’t have vexed her for the world.

  By lulling Letitia into a false sense of security, they unwittingly fed her paranoia. “How can…I trust / When I have full internal consciousness they are deceiving me?” says the poetess-heroine in “A History of the Lyre,” referring to the entourage of deceitful flatterers surrounding her. Reading the seemingly straightforward but insinuating memoirs later written by Katherine Thomson and the Halls, it is hard, as Letitia’s biographer, not to feel forced into a similarly paranoiac position.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Cash Nexus

  Money haunts Letitia’s story like that of no other poet. From the Landons’ ancestral losses in the South Sea Bubble to her own father’s ruin, the vagaries of the market loom large. Her career coincided with capitalism’s most rapid, unregulated growth spurt, which affected the publishing industry as much as any other sector.

  “L.E.L.” was not just an author but a brand, as Thomas Carlyle registered when he responded to the news of her death in 1839 with his melancholy reference to her “pictures in the Print shops.” Later that year, in Chartism, he gave voice to the growing fear that “cash payment” had become the “sole nexus of man to man,” eroding the emotional bonds that had once held society together.

  No writer’s work is more demonstrably reactive to market forces than L.E.L.’s. Her poetry appeared to offer buyers the emotional capital—love—that, according to Carlyle, “cash will not pay.” But the love in her verse is forever unrequited, mimicking the cycle of dissatisfaction inscribed in the dynamic of consumerism itself.

  Letitia’s writings are remarkable for the profound but subtle way in which they expose and surreptitiously subvert the commercial conditions of their own production. Her work makes the invisible hand of the market visible. Nothing could better embody the so-called contradictions of capitalism than the mutually assured destruction encoded in her paradoxes. Like the slave in the glass, she mocked the system that created her.

  It is no coincidence that the conceit behind The Golden Violet is a poetry contest. Letitia knew what the “principle of individual competition,” in the phrase of early-nineteenth-century economists, meant for the “modern minstrel.” “Alienation” and “false consciousness” were later codified into Marxist theories, but the ideas are already there as inchoate metaphors in poems such as “Lines of Life.” When L.E.L. wrote of poetic genius that its victims were its votaries, she could have equally been addressing the market, a similarly abstract and arbitrary taskmaster.

  Victorian moralists such as George Eliot later spurned L.E.L. for commercializing poetry. Yet how much money Letitia personally received from her work is uncertain. She was said by James Grant to have accrued both “fame and profit” as a result of William Jerdan’s support. Yet according to her memoirists, there was something mysterious, if not murky, about her finances, especially in the second half of her career.

  “A record of L.E.L.’s personal expenses would have astonished many who were acquainted with the amount of the sums she earned,” wrote Emma Roberts. Katherine Thomson made the same point more insinuatingly:

  But in spite of great and constant success, she was always poor. I asked not why:—in my opinion ’tis a direct insult either to the dead or the living to dive into their money matters…or to meddle with their cash accounts….So, dear L.E.L., I will not touch upon thy difficulties, in detail. I merely repeat, “She was not rich.”

  From the early 1830s, stories of Letitia’s day-to-day struggles with poverty abound. She was placed in the humiliating position of having to accept gifts from the wealthy Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, who gave her a black velvet dress, and also handed her a diamond ring, “saying gently that she need not keep it, thus tactfully implying that…Miss Landon might sell it to raise money for herself.”

  Yet in his autobiography, Jerdan estimated that Letitia made on average £250 a year from her books. That would have been almost enough to keep a whole family on the right side of respectability. According to James Grant in The Great Metropolis, “the Middle Classes consist of those families whose annual expenditure exceeds 250l. or 300l. a year, and who have no accident of birth or station in society which would justify in us ranking them among the higher classes.” Some in middle-class professions earned far less. A clergyman, according to Grant, could be paid as little as £100 a year. Patrick Brontë’s annual salary as perpetual curate of Haworth was £200. Although Letitia was well known to have supported her mother following John Landon’s death in 1824, that alone cannot have eaten up all her earnings. Far from maintaining a full household, Catherine scraped by in down-at-heel rooms, living as the lodger of Thomas Carlyle’s postman at one stage.

  Rumors later circulated that Letitia was a victim of blackmail. Extortion was certainly common in the age of cant. Owing to a legal loophole, it was not at that time a criminal offense to demand payment for not publishing a story. Harriette Wilson, the courtesan, notoriously charged former clients to delete their names from h
er memoirs. The scandal sheet The Age was said to base its entire business model on the practice. In 1826, Letitia lied her way out of the Sunday Times crisis, but it was uncertain whether her luck would hold a second time.

  The Age’s editor, Charles Westmacott, is certainly on record as having waged a long-standing campaign of ridicule against Jerdan. As early as 1822, when he was editing the short-lived Gazette of Fashion, a direct competitor to the Literary Gazette, he published a squib on Jerdan’s reputation for puffery and his in-hock relationship with Longman. The Age itself later jibed at “Miss Landon in swansdown muff and tippet, acting The Improvisatrice, with a necklace of Jerdan mock brilliants; her appearance is more of the gazelle than the gazette, although much puffed by the latter, a man-milliner.” However, no evidence has so far emerged to suggest that The Age did more than mock her.

  The rumors regarding Letitia’s money problems are much more likely to have originated in the messy financial ties that yoked her to her Svengali. In Anna Maria Hall’s 1850s novel A Woman’s Story, L.E.L.’s fictional surrogate, the poetess “H.L.,” has to hand over her literary earnings to a mysterious older man who is threatening to expose her shameful secret, which, in the novel, is that she is illegitimate herself, rather than the mother of illegitimate offspring. In the 1860s, it was also alleged that some editor had “made use of his influence in the literary world to obtain power over her for her personal seduction” and had gone on to extort Letitia’s literary earnings under threat of exposure.

  William Jerdan’s incorrigible indiscretion, and his keenness to boast about his sexual conquest of Letitia, make him an unlikely blackmailer by any conventional definition of the term. Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that he exploited his songbird financially. Some more recent critics have attempted to portray L.E.L. as a self-empowered literary businesswoman. Sadly, that was not the case.