L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  The surviving accounts for the Literary Gazette, now buried in the British Library, reveal a surprising absence. The names of regular contributors, such as the art critic and the medical columnist Dr. Thomson, appear like clockwork, along with those of occasional writers such as “Mrs [Mary] Shelley.” Jerdan’s salary as editor (seven guineas a week) is also regularly logged, along with his profits as third shareholder.

  But Miss Landon’s name does not occur once, even though during the period covered by the extant records (January 1826 to December 1829), she contributed around fifty individual poems to the magazine, far fewer than in previous years but still a substantial quantity, plus an unknown number of unsigned reviews, in addition to providing other editorial support. Jerdan described Letitia in his autobiography as his effective coeditor. It appears he omitted to pay her a salary.

  At the very start of her career, Letitia was effectively taken on as an unpaid apprentice or intern. It seems she continued to repay Jerdan for his tuition by filling his column inches gratis long after the initial training period. It is hard not to conclude that her sentimentalized portrayals of poetesses as exotic slave girls had as much of a tawdry real-life undertow as her depictions of overblown love agonies.

  Although Mrs. Landon hoped that her talented daughter would take on the role of family breadwinner, she had raised her to identify upward in the social scale. The young Letitia wanted to be like the moneyed Romantic rebel Lady Caroline Lamb, not like the middle-class professional writer Mary Russell Mitford.

  At eighteen, she had never had to worry about money. Following the Landon bankruptcy, she went along with Catherine’s plan to sue for Jerdan’s patronage. But she resisted being turned into a cash cow. Implicitly pushed onto the casting couch by a mother in denial of the sexual quid pro quo, she rebelled by showing as little interest in financial reward as she had done as a child when she handed over her shillings to Whittington.

  According to Shelley, “poets’ food” was only “love and fame”; breadwinning played no part. He was able to bypass the literary cash nexus because he could raise funds on the prospect of his future inheritance. Byron refused payment for his poetry out of aristocratic disdain, at least in the earlier part of his career. Letitia had no such financial backup. Yet in her early poetry it is always marriage that is the grubby bargain, while transgressive affairs are represented as the existential ideal.

  Jerdan, however, proved to be as interested in cash as Catherine. In fact, one of Letitia’s early Gazette poems shows her chafing at his demands when he exploited her talent too blatantly for commercial ends. In 1823, he commissioned her to produce a series of poems promoting a set of wafers manufactured by Messrs. Thomson of Wellington Street: gummed paper stickers used on letters in the days before envelopes as a cheaper alternative to sealing wax. In a frank exercise in product placement, Jerdan’s advertorial encouraged readers to purchase the wafers for use in “lovers’ correspondence.”

  Letitia obliged by providing a series of copybook verses describing the lovers from classical mythology, such as Hercules and Iole, shown disporting themselves on the wafers. However, she ended the series with a first-person “Conclusion” that is very different in tone from the third-person decorative fripperies that had gone before.

  Addressed to an unnamed lover whose “name is breathed on every song,” this angry, paradox-infused lyric turns out to be one of her knottiest: a personal poem privately inscribed to Jerdan but slippery enough to remain generalized to a general audience. She will, she tells him, achieve artistic renown once her apprenticeship is over, though she predicts it will be compromised by her gender and her sexual fall:

  I will be proud for you to hear

  Of glory brightening on my name;

  Oh vain, oh worse than vanity!

  Love, love is all a woman’s fame.

  For now, however, she has decided to break her lute and retreat into “silence.” It is as if Letitia is threatening to go on strike at the humiliation of being required by her patron-lover to write advertising copy to order.

  This lyric defines itself through ambiguity; its verbal simplicity is a sliding surface that becomes a brainteaser if scratched. When “reality” is an “echo,” actuality and illusion merge:

  I did not dream, when I have loved

  To dwell on Sorrow’s saddest tone,

  That its reality would soon

  Be but the echo of my own.

  But the most interesting buried “echo” here is to be found in the last line: a seeming verbal allusion to an almost identical line at the end of a stanza in Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” of 1819, his radical response to the Peterloo Massacre.

  “What is Freedom?—Ye can tell

  That which slavery is, too well—

  For its very name has grown

  To an echo of your own.”

  Shelley’s next stanza makes an explicit link between power relations and economic oppression:

  “ ’Tis to work, and have such pay

  As just keeps life from day to day

  In your limbs, as in a cell

  For the tyrants’ use to dwell.”

  Although “The Mask of Anarchy” was unpublished at the time Letitia was writing, it was known in London, having been sent by Shelley to Leigh Hunt in 1819, though the latter declined to print it in the Examiner because of the prevailing political climate. In fact, many of Shelley’s antiestablishment political poems enjoyed a limited samizdat-style circulation in manuscript in the aftermath of his death, under the auspices of his widow, Mary, herself an occasional contributor to the Literary Gazette in the 1820s. Letitia may have come across “The Mask of Anarchy”—spelled “masque” in the version that was finally published in 1832—through her now buried connections in “Cockney” literary circles.

  It was only through the masquerade and subterfuge of buried allusion that Letitia could tangentially express her resistance to playing slave to Jerdan’s sultan, although it is unlikely that the busy Tory editor would have picked up on her Shelleyan reference. Certainly, Letitia’s situation meant that she was little able to detach herself from the economic and power nexus Jerdan represented. Despite her threat to withdraw both her love and her labor, two weeks later we find her publishing a new series of verses in the Gazette, promoting the pictures in a commercial gallery in Soho Square. It is unlikely that the gallery owner, Mr. Cooke, recompensed her for the poetical publicity, any more than did the wafers’ manufacturer, Jerdan himself, or the Gazette’s other shareholders, Longman and Colburn, who were implicitly in on the deal.

  In real life, Letitia was able to cocoon herself from economic reality and dismiss money matters with pseudo-aristocratic disdain as long as she was living rent-free with her grandmother, and before her estranged father’s death made her responsible for her mother’s upkeep. In 1824, she grandly rejected a fee from fellow Gazette contributor A. A. Watts for a contribution to his new annual The Literary Souvenir:

  As to pecuniary recompense, for poems given with so much pleasure, I cannot hear of it. I really did think you had been too much of a poet yourself to think of linking pounds, shillings and pence to my unfortunate stanzas….Henceforth I put a bar on the subject.

  Her de haut en bas manner would rile the ambitious but ultimately disappointed Watts, whose own attempt to set himself up as a “Cockney” poet from lowly origins failed, where hers succeeded. She then added to his humiliation by boasting with studied unconcern that she had made over £900 from The Improvisatrice and The Troubadour combined. Her lack of diplomacy with Watts was a strategic error that later came back to haunt her.

  As this last boast suggests, despite the fact that Letitia was not paid for her Gazette work, her books indeed commanded publishers’ fees (with the exception of the first, The Fate of Adelaide, which was brought out at her grandmother’s expense
). Jerdan provided a list in his autobiography:

  For the Improvisatrice [Hurst and Robinson, 1824] she received £300

  For the Troubadour [Hurst and Robinson, 1825] 600

  For the Golden Violet [Longman, 1827] 200

  For the Venetian Bracelet [Longman, 1829] 150

  For the Easter Offering [Fisher, 1832] 30

  For the Drawing-Room Scrap Book, per vol. [Fisher, 1831–38] 105

  For Romance and Reality [Colburn and Bentley, 1831] 300

  For Francesca Carrara [Bentley, 1834] 300

  For Heath’s Book of Beauty [1832] 300

  And certainly from other Annuals, Magazines and Periodicals, not less in ten or twelve years than 200

  In all 2,585

  However, with Jerdan as her agent, it is uncertain how much Letitia personally saw of these earnings. Those who imagined that she was his “ward,” when she made her salon debut in 1824, were not far wrong. “L.E.L.” was effectively a family business in which Jerdan played the role of patriarch and banker.

  When, for instance, Jerdan negotiated Letitia’s contract with Hurst and Robinson for The Improvisatrice in late 1823, he so regarded “L.E.L.” as a joint project that he even had to remind himself that she should be permitted to revise the text herself:

  [T]hough I will correct the press and do everything in my power for the work, I should wish every page to be revised by the sweet writer whose intelligence will probably be beneficially exercised on the printed copy.

  “I have written to Miss L.,” Jerdan went on, “to say I have concluded the arrangement with your House, that I shall, as soon as is agreeable to you, have the pleasure of enclosing her a draft of 30 guineas.” It does not sound as though Letitia received the full £300.

  In the wake of the Sunday Times exposé of 1826, Letitia dismissed the rumors about her sexual intimacy with Jerdan by stating that “circumstances” had made her “very much indebted” to the “gentleman” concerned, but only as her financial manager:

  I have not a friend in the world but himself to manage anything of business, whether literary or pecuniary….Place yourself in my situation. Could you have hunted London for a publisher, endured all the hot and cold water thrown on your exertions; bargained for what sum they might be pleased to give; and, after all, canvassed, examined, nay quarrelled over accounts the most intricate in the world? And again, after success had procured money, what was I to do with it? Though ignorant of business, I must know I could not lock it up in a box. Then for literary assistance, my proof sheets could not go through the press without revision. Who was to undertake this—I can only call it drudgery—but some one to whom my literary exertions could in return be as valuable as theirs to me?

  If Letitia’s writings were indeed as valuable to Jerdan as they were to her, he must have been taking a fifty percent cut, which sounds rather steep.

  Jerdan seems to have held the purse strings, giving Letitia handouts from her own earnings. In one surviving note, undated but probably from around 1824–25, she politely asks him for a banker’s draft:

  Dear Sir,

  So many thanks—an order if procureable—would be gratefully received—sent here—

  He was, however, a very poor choice of “treasurer.”

  Despite his genius for generating marketing ideas, Jerdan was no accountant. In his own estimate, his “blunders in attempting numbers, reckonings or accounts have been so hideous, that a schoolboy of ten years old would have been whipt for making them.” This is borne out by the fact that, in adding up Letitia’s book fees as listed in his autobiography, the total he comes to is out by £100. His fiscal irresponsibility and wild credit addiction were such that his autobiography reads unintentionally like a Victorian moral treatise on the evils of debt.

  He is unlikely to have felt any compunction about “borrowing” from Letitia’s earnings. He did not even pay his tailor. The actor William Macready’s diary is indicative: “A note from Jerdan asking me to withhold the cheque for £70 upon the faith of which he had borrowed that sum of me. The fact cannot be disguised; he is a man who has no conscience obtaining the means of other men. The money is gone!”

  Plotted as a graph, L.E.L.’s fees as listed by Jerdan show a sharp spike followed by a decline. The success of The Improvisatrice was such that he was able to secure double the fee, also from Hurst and Robinson, for Letitia’s next work, The Troubadour, published in 1825. However, Hurst and Robinson then went bust.

  Letitia’s next book, The Golden Violet (1827), was published by Jerdan’s Gazette partner Longman, but for the reduced fee of £200, on the basis of what turned out to be an accurate sales prediction. Two thousand copies were printed, but the publisher still had 640 in stock after the first six months, which did not sell out for ten years. The yet lower price of £150 paid for The Venetian Bracelet, also by Longman, reflected the fact that even fewer were printed, only 1,500. If “L.E.L.” was a speculative venture, its value did not hold up.

  Why Longman—who had refused The Fate of Adelaide in 1821—should have taken on L.E.L. at the moment her stock began to fall is intriguing. The answer is to be found in the fact that by 1827 Longman was not only William Jerdan’s fellow Gazette shareholder but also his creditor. A surviving unpublished letter from Jerdan, in which he asks Bulwer to do him the favor of guaranteeing a new loan from a moneylender, reveals that a large tranche of the £4,000 debt he had taken on “in purchasing and furnishing Grove House” was owed to Longman, to whom he still owed £1,000 in 1830. It is hard not to conclude that the Svengali was selling on Letitia’s labor as collateral to service his own debts.

  Jerdan prided himself on being L.E.L.’s puppeteer, but he himself was also the “puppet” (as H. F. Chorley put it) of the Gazette’s co-owners, Longman and Colburn, whose publishing businesses depended on a steady stream of good reviews in the magazine. Jerdan’s lack of editorial independence from them—and later from Colburn’s partner Richard Bentley—was a constant topic of snide discussion in the press at the time. The role of these sinister éminences grises in Letitia’s life and career is barely documented, although it must have been greater than recorded. Unlike the profligate peacock Jerdan, they were hard-nosed businessmen with no urge for self-publicity and did not leave posterity with colorful accounts of their careers. Colburn’s long relationship with Jerdan was, however, testy, its tensions exacerbated by the fact that Colburn was also the proprietor of both The Sunday Times and The Wasp, which exposed and mocked Letitia’s pregnancies. He was also involved in The Athenaeum, which was set up as a rival to the Gazette in 1828. Jerdan’s full interrelations with Colburn and Longman remain shadowy, but the key fact is that he borrowed money from both. They had more leverage over him as his creditors than as his colleague.

  Longman gave up on publishing Letitia after The Venetian Bracelet in 1829 because L.E.L. was no longer commercially viable in her original form, and her poetry had ceased to be so valuable as collateral. By the end of the 1820s, the demand for the “poet of fashion,” and for pseudo-Byronic poetry collections, was indeed diminishing. The appetite for the strutting poetic ego was replaced in popularity by the so-called silver fork novel, prose fictions that provided peep-show glimpses of modern-day high life. The newcomer Benjamin Disraeli had made a splash with Vivian Grey in 1826, which Bulwer had equaled if not trumped with Pelham in 1828. Neither author was in reality quite so aristocratic as the milieu they described, but appetiteful provincial readers who longed for access to the exclusive in-crowd—such as the young Brontës in Yorkshire—were not to know that.

  Commercial motives alone can explain why Letitia herself now turned to prose, publishing her own first novel, Romance and Reality, in 1831. No longer able to call on Longman,
Jerdan turned to Colburn and his new partner Bentley to publish it, despite the fact that Colburn had recently set up The Athenaeum as an explicit competitor to the Gazette. By owning two competing magazines, Colburn figured he could generate controversy and boost the sales of both. Jerdan was no match for his Machiavellian business strategy.

  In February 1830, Jerdan wrote to Colburn’s new partner Bentley to clinch the contract for Romance and Reality, enclosing a document signed by Letitia in which she formally appointed him her “Treasurer and Agent.” However, Jerdan’s negotiating position was weak. “I am afraid it is out of order, but if you cd make the date of the bill three months it would facilitate what I am asked to do,” he begged Bentley, desperate to see the money as soon as possible.

  The fee Jerdan secured was £300, twice as much as for The Venetian Bracelet, but only the same sum as Letitia had started out with for The Improvisatrice. Compared to the £1,500 Bulwer got for Devereux at about the same time, it was pathetic. Bulwer himself lamented that Jerdan had sold Letitia’s talents short. But Jerdan was by that time already touching Bentley for petty loans of £50 or £100, complaining to him about Longman’s demands. He was in no position to ask for more.

  Letitia did not personally benefit from the deal. In 1832, Anna Maria bumped into her outside Youngman’s shop in Sloane Street. Letitia had just been in to buy a pair of gloves. She told her it was “the only money I spent on myself out of the £300 I received for Romance and Reality.” In resting her hopes on Jerdan she had made as much of an error as her forlorn heroines, who yearn for lovers who can never fulfill their needs.