As a novel, Romance and Reality is a failure. Although Letitia’s short stories are masterful, long-form fiction was not her forte. The plot—if it has one—is derisory: an engagement that never happens, leading to the heroine dying of a broken heart. More a series of picaresque sketches than a sustained narrative, the book only comes to life in its fly-on-the-wall scenes of social satire. They cynically depict a world ruled by the cash nexus.
“Now society is a market place,” the author tells us. Nature, once worshipped by the Romantics, now exists just to provide the raw materials for consumerism: the glistening shells of beetles are transformed into jewelry to be hawked in the high-end shops of Burlington Arcade. Sheet music for a new tune is marketed as danced by a duke. An aristocratic lady sells tickets for a private concert in her own home. Everyone is in the business of image-making. “A part is to be played in company….The natural face may be a thousand times more attractive, still a mask must be worn.”
The world of samizdat Romanticism, with its secret allusions to Keats or Shelley, had been transformed into the coded culture of the silver-fork roman à clef. The new genre was defined by its hidden references to real-life high-society figures, many of whom were by now penning their own post-Byronic novels, including Lord Normanby, whose Yes and No receives a glowing puff in Romance and Reality as an “especial favourite.” The world of the Regency “Exclusives”—those able to get into the exclusive Almack’s Club in St. James’s—was being mass-marketed.
Letitia bucked the trend by attempting to make literary rather than aristocratic society the coterie du jour. She invited readers to test their inside knowledge by identifying the originals to her cameo characters, including flattering fictional versions of writer allies such as Mrs. Hall and the Bulwers. Belatedly trying to move her own image away from its hypersexualized origins, she also teasingly portrayed herself as “Miss Amesbury,” the celebrated author of “The History of a Modern Corinne.” The character, a great beauty with a brow fit for Madame de Staël, is said to make the error of creating poetess heroines tortured by love, when everyone knows that female writers have to work so hard that they have no time for romantic relationships.
Letitia was still playing a game of liar lyre. When the subject of truth comes up during a salon scene, she offers a proto-Wildean quip on the importance of being earnest:
“Mr Lillian,” observed Mr Morland, “is one of the most brilliant supporters of paradox I ever met. His conversation only requires to be a little more in earnest to be perfectly delightful…we like and require truth—always supposing and allowing that the said truth interferes neither with our interests nor our inclinations.”
Yet Letitia’s underlying cynicism was by now perilously close to the surface. Not just equivocation but self-deconstruction had become a habit. She self-sabotaged even in her preface, by making it insultingly clear to readers that she had only switched from poetry to prose to please the market: she informed them archly that “the novel is now…the popular vehicle for thought, feeling, and observation, the one used by our first-rate writers.”
Her attitude was not lost on the Westminster Review. It opined that “the fair accountant” must have been “under the necessity of forcing herself to business,” but eventually “the book was full, the balance struck and the publisher arrived at his first stage of satisfaction.” Its critic cast an unrelenting eye on the L.E.L. brand and at the hollow commercial narcissism of celebrity culture:
The title page should simply contain the three magical letters which she has immortalized, opposite to which we would have engraven the portrait of a smart girl whose picture was hung up in the Exhibition a few years ago, and next by way of vignette in the title there should be a little piece not larger than a medal: in the distance on a throne should be sitting with brows encircled with laurel a Sappho or a Corinne surrounded by as many heads of kneeling adulators as Martin [John Martin, painter of sensational panoramas] could crowd into an inch square.
The sheer quantity of words produced by L.E.L. had once been viewed as a sign that she was a natural genius from whom poetry flowed as from a songbird. Now her prolific output was reconfigured as industrial production, “L.E.L. at her spinning jenny.” The critic pointed out that Letitia’s very preface mocked the idea of authorial integrity, by exposing the production-line nature of modern literary genius. When she thanked the compositor for correcting her errors, the “division of labour” was “carried even into authorship.”
No writer was in fact more consciously alert than Letitia to the idea that poets were not Shelleyan nightingales singing alone in the forest, but constructions dependent on a nexus of economic interrelations. Authorial identity was a function not of the author alone, but of publishers, critics, typesetters, booksellers, and especially of the readers whose consumer choices could determine whether a writer’s voice lived or died. It is perhaps no accident that L.E.L.’s work features so many dead poets: in her awareness of the impact of commercial mass culture on literature, she anticipated the postmodern notion of “the death of the author.”
Privately, Letitia was under increasing pressure, with her brand value in decline and her sexual hold over Jerdan decreasing. In early 1831, she also became the subject of a petty attempt at extortion, when a former maid, Sarah Clarke, who had left her service five years previously, turned up at Hans Place demanding money in a “most insolent manner.” Clarke must have left Letitia’s service around the time she left off living with her grandmother in 1826, pregnant with Fred and on the run from The Sunday Times. Servants, like the Jerdans’ charwoman, had access to their employers’ daily lives and often little to command their loyalty save the cash nexus.
Not daring to say what none would choose to hear, the maid exploited the insinuating power of the unsaid: she “alleged no grounds for the demand only that she should swear a debt against me and led me to suppose it was for a large sum….I particularly recollect one expression ‘five pounds Miss won’t pay me nor five to the back of that.’ ” However, Letitia stood her ground and refused to pay.
The maid retreated. Having scaled down her demands, she later tried to bring a case against Letitia in the small claims court for £1 11s for outstanding wages and purchases she had supposedly made on Letitia’s behalf, but her case was scuppered by Jerdan, who pulled strings with the magistrate, Thomas Hill, a bibliophile and literary hanger-on. Writing to Hill, enclosing Letitia’s formal written statement of the case, Jerdan expressed the hope that the maid’s “sheer imposition” would not prosper. Instead of offering a vulgar pecuniary backhander, he rewarded Hill in the coinage of L.E.L.’s fame and Letitia’s privacy, ending his letter with a postscript: “If you are an autograph collector, the enclosure will reward you.”
Jerdan enclosed Letitia’s scrawled covering note to himself, forwarding it without her knowledge:
My dear Sir,
I herewith send my statement and the summons. Is there nothing I can do for you in the live way [?] I am still quite lame.
Your most obliged,
L. E. Landon
It is hardly a love letter, but the phrase “Is there nothing I can do for you in the live way” could easily have been interpreted salaciously, given the prevailing culture of coded sexual language. Hill was known among contemporaries as a man addicted to “defamatory gossip” and “all the petty details.” He was “supposed to know, everything about everybody, and was asked to dine everywhere in order that he might tell it. Scandal was, of course, the great staple of his conversation.” Letitia might simply have been referring to the fact that a foot injury would prevent her from attending court, but her interrogative word order, the personal “for you,” and the underlined “live way” comment could have been taken as suggestive. Whatever she actually intended, Hill could have crudely surmised that she was offering Jerdan sex in exchange for sorting out her court case.
Meanwhile, Letitia’s attempt
to recast herself as a novelist with Romance and Reality was not wholly satisfying to either her readers or herself. She always found verse easier to write than prose, and she remained desperate to find a new outlet for it once the appetite for traditional poetry collections had dried up.
After around 1830, the only commercially viable format for verse was to be found in a new publishing phenomenon: the “annual” or “gift book.” Letitia jumped on the bandwagon. Most of her prolific post-1830 poetic output is to be found in the annuals, large-format compilations of poetry, pictures, and occasionally prose: the coffee table books of the day. Designed to be given as presents, they typically came out in the run-up to Christmas, and were invariably found, as Thackeray disdainfully put it in 1840, “upon the round, rosewood, brass-inlaid drawing-room table of the middle-classes.” Their cozy titles, such as Friendship’s Offering, appeared to bypass the cash nexus. But Charles Heath, who founded the most prestigious, The Keepsake, in 1827, made no bones about his “motive”: “to get the Profit of my own Labour and Talent.”
Nothing better exemplifies the concept of the “commodification of culture” than the annuals. Previously, individuals had had to copy out chosen extracts into their private albums or commonplace books. Now they could get a literary compilation ready-made.
The first English annual, The Forget-Me-Not, was initiated in 1822 by Rudolph Ackermann of Ackermann’s Repository, the Regency fashion and interior design bible. Indeed, the annuals were furnishing items in themselves. They came ready-bound in spectacular jewel-colored silks, at a time when most books were sold in plain paper covers, requiring the purchasers to go to the bother of taking them to the binders’ themselves. Ackermann had been inspired by German models, including the almanac Urania, in which Franz Schubert first encountered the Winterreise poems that inspired his masterpiece. The line between high and commercial art was flexible in the 1820s. Letitia took advantage of that ambiguity.
Letitia contributed occasionally to the annuals from their inception, including Ackermann’s Forget-Me-Not. But in 1831, she was hired by the publisher Robert Fisher to provide the entire content for his annual Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book. Its very title sums up the genre, with its deceptive message of informal domesticity, as if its readers had curated the contents themselves in the privacy of their own living rooms. She continued to write for Fisher’s scrapbook year after year until her death, contributing all the texts, effectively a new poetry collection annually. But her brand value had by then diminished so far that the title page subordinated her name to that of the publisher, relegating her to the role of putative “editor”: Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book, edited by L.E.L.
L.E.L. was well placed to become the voice of the annuals, as their target audience was primarily female. Although the nameless melodist’s early admirers had been young men without neck-cloths, her fan base became increasingly feminized, as is demonstrated by surviving ladies’ albums of the period, in which forgotten fans—with names such as Mary Groom, Elizabeth Duncan, and Mary Ann Payne, among others—copied out her poetry in their best handwriting. Although Letitia’s annuals poetry was later disparaged by the Victorians, it struck a chord with women readers because it reflected their sense of thwarted agency in an era that saw the public discourse of feminism, once spearheaded by Mary Wollstonecraft, contract to the point of nullity.
Outsider readers, such as the adolescent Brontë sisters in Yorkshire, were entranced by the annuals because they seemed to give free rein to their imaginative yearning for wider horizons. In late 1830, fifteen-year-old Charlotte and thirteen-year-old Emily both made painstaking copies of the illustration to a poem by L.E.L., “The Disconsolate One,” from the new Forget-Me-Not for 1831, which had been given to them as a present by their aunt. The picture showed a young woman leaning her head on her arm in an attitude of despair, a letter dropping from her other hand. Letitia’s accompanying text has a diluted, pattern-book feel, compared to her early Satanic effusions. Yet its themes of forbidden love and jealousy would later reecho in the Brontës’ published works.
George Eliot, on the other hand, denounced the annuals. Her novel Middlemarch—set in the late 1820s and early 1830s, though written between 1869 and 1871—includes a scene in which the naïve provincial youth Ned Plymdale attempts to impress Rosamond Vincy with the latest Keepsake. Rosamond is only too eager to see it, though she carefully curbs her enthusiasm as soon as the sophisticated Dr. Lydgate dismisses it as trash. She is in fact a secret fervent admirer of L.E.L.
Pencil copy made by Emily Brontë at thirteen of the illustration to L.E.L.’s poem “The Disconsolate One” in The Forget-Me-Not
In making the monstrously shallow and narcissistic Rosamond a fan, Eliot delivered the ultimate insult to Letitia Landon. The Victorians in general looked askance at their immediate predecessors of the 1820s and 1830s, a period they regarded as a bankrupt age devoted to Mammon and lacking in moral vision. As an accomplished amateur singer who “only wanted to know what her audience liked,” Rosamond embodies the performative notion of femininity that had been L.E.L.’s undoing.
Had Eliot given any attention to the 1829 Keepsake (probably the one Ned shows to Rosamond), she would however have found that L.E.L.’s contribution, “The Altered River,” offered a thoughtfully ironic take on the annuals’ consumerist aesthetic. The poem follows the course of a river through the countryside, then into a dismal, smoke-filled industrial landscape. It ends with a poet leaning over the water, a modern Narcissus poised to drown himself. In doing so, it secretly exposes the self-defeating, circular dynamic driving the industrialized literary economy. L.E.L. was only too aware that the job of cultural producers was to reflect consumers’ sentimental tastes back at them, ultimately to be displayed on the drawing-room table as commodified symbols of status and emotional refinement.
Although Letitia continued to rely on Jerdan as agent for her book contracts, her correspondence shows her haggling with annuals’ publishers on her own. By the 1830s, she had abandoned her pseudo-aristocratic unconcern with filthy lucre and was looking for a separate income stream independent of her Svengali. This placed her in a weak position, as women writers were rarely taken seriously as business negotiators. Jane Austen, for example, had had to rely on her banker brother Henry to broker her contracts.
In 1832, Fisher attempted to extend the seasonal market by commissioning Letitia to produce the entire poetic content for a new volume, The Easter Gift: A Religious Offering. Letitia agreed, keen to change her dubious image in the eyes of respectable bourgeois readers. But her lack of religious faith made her ill placed to recast herself as a Christian proselyte.
Clearly feeling unable to call on Jerdan, she wrote to another male literary crony, the antiquarian Crofton Croker, for advice. Her letter reveals how cynical she was in her desperation to please the publisher by reflecting readers’ prejudices back at them: “The Madonna puzzled me the most, I had in mind a vesper hymn, when I suddenly recollected that rosaries crucifixes etc were abominations in the sight of the good Protestants for whom the Easter offering is destined and so I have taken quite the opposite side.” The hymnlike verses in the collection jangle emptily. Only the poem on Mary Magdalen reads with anything like commitment.
By now Letitia was, according to Katherine Thomson, writing “with the loathing of a slave” to fulfill publishers’ deadlines. On one occasion she fell asleep late at night before completing a commission. She was only woken in the morning when the boy arrived to collect her copy. In fifteen minutes, she hurriedly produced a polished verse.
The rise and fall of the annuals as a literary phenomenon echoes that of L.E.L. herself. When Charles Heath created the idea for The Keepsake in 1827 he intended it as a high-end product. The deluxe version, bound in tooled morocco, cost a whopping £2.12.6. He employed the latest steel-engraving technology to reproduce the illustrations at the highest possible quality. The originals were provid
ed by Turner, no less.
Fat fees enabled Heath to attract top names. The 1829 Keepsake included new writing from Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Felicia Hemans. Mary Shelley provided a previously unpublished text by her dead husband, in an effort to rehabilitate his reputation. Letitia and Jerdan also had their fingers in the pie, contributing a poem apiece.
In their heyday, the annuals were the most lucrative format in publishing. General sales of annuals generated £90,000 in 1828 alone, according to S. C. Hall, who cashed in on the craze with his own The Amulet: A Christian and Literary Remembrancer. However, publishers soon became hard-pressed to find new ways to differentiate their products and resorted to gimmicks. Schloss’s Bijou Almanac, for which Letitia provided the entire poetic content in 1834 and 1835, was a miniature three-quarters of an inch long and half an inch wide. Although it was a triumph of Lilliputian book production, the text was unreadable by the naked eye. Letitia had sought to exploit her readers’ selective blindness. Now they could not even read her without a magnifying glass.
Schloss’s Bijou Almanac: a triumph of Lilliputian book production, but the text was unreadable by the naked eye.
* * *
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Eventually the annuals spawned so many downmarket imitators that they lost their status as exclusive markers of taste and fashion. By about 1850 they had almost petered out. Like Narcissus, or L.E.L. herself, they ended up destroyed by their own success.
Letitia’s need to diversify into the annuals was created by Jerdan’s weak grip on money matters. He had as little capacity for relating pecuniary paper promises to actual circumstances as he had in connecting L.E.L.’s stylized poetic cries of erotic rage and despair with their everyday relationship. In 1834 his inability to compute reality resulted in a financial crisis that impacted them both.
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