L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  According to the vague and convoluted account he gave in his autobiography, Jerdan had got to know two brothers, sons of an apparently wealthy man who had just returned from India. He began negotiations with one of the young men to make him a partner in the Literary Gazette, which he unconvincingly claimed to have been prepared to do out of the kindness of his heart. The other brother wanted to “enter into a co-partnery with one of a reputedly very rich Jewish family in the city” and apparently persuaded Jerdan “in an evil hour” to put his name as security against certain bills “to enable him to show something against the Leviathan fortune in the administration of which he was about to participate as a broker.” Jerdan signed a document guaranteeing the young man’s stake in the brokerage business. The upshot was that Jerdan was sued for between three and four thousand pounds when the young man fled to the Continent. In a replay of John Landon’s crisis a decade before, he faced bankruptcy.

  * * *

  —

  Although Jerdan does not name the family with whom he was dealing, they must have been the Twinings, whom he named as his main creditors in an unpublished letter to Bulwer of December 1830. The Twiningses’ long-standing tea concern was intimately connected with India, although they also diversified into banking in 1825. To this day, Twinings Tea still has a shop on the Strand near to the former premises of the Literary Gazette.

  Back in 1825, it was the Twinings who had persuaded Jerdan to take the lease on Grove House, having briefly considered taking it themselves. They offered him an instant loan, telling him that it was essential to his professional status to be seen to live in a grand house, and that they hoped that he would promote their banking services among his numerous acquaintances. However, the loan mounted as Jerdan fitted out his impressive new residence.

  By the end of 1830, Jerdan was asking Bulwer to underwrite a new loan he wanted to take out with a professional moneylender. “I suppose troubling a friend on one’s private affairs is something like the confession of a lady’s love—after the first blush is over there is no stint,” he wrote, in an apparent allusion to L.E.L.’s endless love poetry. He complained that his prospects were not solidly vested in real estate but in “copyrights,” which adds to the impression that he was using L.E.L. as collateral. By the time of the Twiningses’ final demand in 1834, Jerdan was in no position to pay.

  All accounts of the extreme money troubles Letitia faced in her latter years coincide chronologically with Jerdan’s bankruptcy. After Colburn published her next novel, Francesca Carrara, in 1834, she complained that she “lost the whole of the proceeds…at one swoop,” because of “the debts to which it had been appropriated.” It is hard not to conclude that her debts were joined at the hip with Jerdan’s. She had not done enough to separate her finances from his.

  CHAPTER 9

  French Connections

  Jerdan’s financial embarrassments took some time to result in a fait accompli. But they were common gossip by April 23, 1834, when he attended a supper party at the Garrick Club in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday. “I thought (not, I hope, uncharitably) that it would have been more graceful to have absented himself from a festive meeting under his peculiar circumstances, which he evidently cannot feel very strongly,” commented the actor William Macready in his diary.

  In June, Letitia jumped at an impromptu invitation from a Hans Place neighbor, Miss Turing, to accompany her on a visit to Paris. As she put it in a note to Jerdan, “it would be something to be out of the perpetual worry here [money short]” (the words in brackets were supplied by Jerdan in his autobiography in the 1850s). Miss Turing (a forebear of the computer genius Alan Turing) was the spinster daughter of a Scottish banker, some years older than Letitia. Like many respectable ladies, she was prepared to overlook any hints of the untoward as regarded Miss Landon’s reputation.

  The 1830s saw what Thackeray called an “invasion of France” by English tourists. Visitors flocked to Paris for its buzzing nightlife and for its shopping, made all the more attractive by a favorable exchange rate. Miss Turing was particularly keen to visit the fashionable boutiques, but Letitia had literary reasons for wanting to go.

  She had a half-formulated idea of writing a novel about the French Revolution and was keen to visit the scene. The projected tale, which was never written, was to feature an Icarus heroine: Charlotte Corday, the Girondin sympathizer who was guillotined after murdering Marat in his bath in 1793 in a desperate attempt to stem the tide of Jacobin extremism. Letitia was still as interested in the corruption of political ideals as she had been when her first published poem, “Rome,” appeared in 1820.

  Letitia and Miss Turing took the steamer to Boulogne. It picked up passengers on the Thames in the heart of the City, near London Bridge, as described in Thackeray’s Paris Sketch Book, written in the late 1830s. Thackeray vividly depicted the social potpourri on deck in which distinctions of class and respectability were thrown into carnivalesque confusion. In Thackeray’s account, English gentility is represented by a mother corralling her children, a couple of trainee governesses, and a clergyman, who rub shoulders with a racy danceuse from the Paris opera and a pair of dubiously overdressed French milliners returning from a sales trip to London. Two young Englishmen, desperately growing their mustaches to emulate the French dandies, ogle the danceuse in anticipation.

  Many tourists were attracted by the perceived hedonism of Parisian society compared to relatively straitlaced England. The onboard lunch, according to Thackeray, was, however, unappetizingly English for those looking forward to champagne and ices at the Café de Paris and Tortoni’s: boiled beef, pickles, a “great, red raw Cheshire cheese,” and “little dumpy bottles of stout.” Only about a dozen passengers choose to partake, he tells us. The rest are feeling queasy.

  Letitia was prostrated with seasickness when she arrived at Boulogne on June 22. She and Miss Turing traveled from there to Paris by coach. The start of the journey was “delightful,” the road a long avenue through the countryside, roses landing in the carriage flung by urchins asking for sous. After Abbeville, however, Letitia was paralyzed by fatigue. On arriving in Paris, she had to be lifted out of the diligence to be conveyed into the “pleasant apartments, looking on the Boulevards” they had booked in the rue Louis le Grand.

  The street view seemed “gay” at first. Letitia expressed surprise that the people looked so clean and neat, a nod to Paris’s reputation as a moral swamp. But the lodgings proved far noisier than anything in London, with a print works above, a carpenter opposite, and clattering carriages on the cobbles below. She and Miss Turing then moved, more satisfactorily, to 30 rue Taitbout, where they had delightful bedrooms, a little antechamber, and the prettiest saloon looking out on a charming garden. Those of the houses in the rue that still survive today as they were in the 1830s have courtyarded spaces behind large street-side double gates.

  Rue Taitbout was located in the heart of Parisian haut bohemia, near the theaters, the Café de Paris, and Tortoni’s. The Rothschilds’ glittering mansion was nearby. A few years later, Balzac installed his fictional high-class courtesans in glamorous apartments in the rue Taitbout, while Chopin set up residence there in real life with George Sand. In G. W. N. Reynolds’s Dickens spin-off Pickwick Abroad; or, The Tour in France (1837–38), rue Taitbout is where a dubious English hostess, implicitly on the run from British society, hosts her rackety salon.

  Rue Taitbout, photographed in the 1850s. Letitia stayed here in 1834 at number 30. Only a few of the houses in the street today retain their original appearance, the street doors opening onto inner courtyards.

  The series of long letters Letitia wrote to Jerdan from Paris in 1834 are the only writings of hers that give anything like a sustained impression of the daily texture of their relationship. Not until over a decade into their affair do we get such intimate access. The originals have, typically, disappeared, but the texts were printed by Jerdan in his autobiography.


  Their tone suggests an easy, quotidian familiarity, although they always begin formally “Dear Sir.” Unlike L.E.L.’s poetry, they contain no high-flown passion, but they testify to Letitia’s emotional dependence on Jerdan. At the start of their relationship, she had used all the wiles at her disposal to seduce him into publishing her. Three children later, their relationship had become an attachment as nonnegotiable in her eyes as a family bond.

  She wrote to him as soon as she reached Boulogne: “We parted on Thursday, though not at all too soon, much as I regretted it. You cannot think how I missed you….However, I have taken two things for granted, first that you would expect my first letter, and also that you would be glad to hear how I was.” As soon as she reached Paris on June 26, she wrote again, and then again the next day. “Pray write to me,” she begged, longing to hear from him.

  Yet when she finally received Jerdan’s tardy response the following day, she violently upbraided him for having enclosed the Gazette, rather than sending it separately as printed matter, because she had had to pay extra postage costs as a result. Her bickering tone offers more proof of intimacy than any of L.E.L.’s extravagant declarations. This is the only occasion, outside her poetry, on which she used the word “love” in relation to her feelings for Jerdan:

  Love and fear are the greatest principles of human existence. If you owed my letter of yesterday to the first of these, you owe that of today to the last. What, in the name of all that is dreadful in the way of postage, could induce you to put the “Gazette” in your letter? Welcome as it was, it has cost me dear, nearly six shillings. I was so glad to see your handwriting that the shock was nearly lost in pleasure; but truly, when I come to reflect and put it down in my pocket-book, I am “in a state.” The Gazette alone would have cost twopence, and the letter deux francs; but altogether it is ruinous. Please when you next write let it be on the thinnest paper, and put a wafer. Still I was delighted to hear from you, and a most amusing letter it was. The Gazette is a real treat. It is such an excellent one as to make me quite jealous.

  She ended with heartfelt postscript: “I was so glad of your letter.”

  Jerdan was not so assiduous a correspondent as she wanted him to be. His replies are not extant, but from Letitia’s letters it appears that they were derisory. “I hope you will not think that I intend writing you to death,” she wrote on June 30, well aware that she was sending him more letters than she received. The unfulfilled yearning of her childhood had repatterned itself.

  She niggled and nagged. “I write on purpose to scold you,” she wrote to Jerdan a few days later in peremptory tones. “Why have you not sent me the ‘Gazette’; it would have been such a treat,” she complained. He was probably still smarting from her previous reaction. “Also, you have not (like everybody else) written to me,” she carped. This was the everyday banality behind the woman wailing for her demon lover.

  Letitia’s visit to Paris is significant in terms of literary history because it highlights the French connections in her career and her international reputation in her lifetime. If her brand value as “L.E.L.” was declining in England by 1834, her cult status was still in the ascendant in Paris, where her work had recently been showcased in a long article in the prestigious Revue des deux mondes. Posterity later consigned L.E.L. to a feminine ghetto unconnected with wider cultural currents. But her voice was in reality both more embedded in Romanticism and less Anglocentric than has previously been supposed.

  The international fallout from Byronism meant that Anglomania was raging in Europe, where English writing was so admired that the greatest composers of the day looked to it for inspiration, often creating works that outlived their sources in popularity. Scott’s Lady of the Lake inspired Rossini’s La donna del lago. Byron’s Childe Harold was reworked by Berlioz in Harold en Italie. Schumann’s Paradise and the Peri was a musical interpretation of Moore’s Lalla Rookh. Even Bulwer’s now unread 1836 novel Rienzi inspired Wagner’s first opera, of the same name.

  Letitia’s contacts with the European literary world went back a long way. At the time she began to publish her verses in the Gazette, its Paris correspondent was Stendhal, although he transferred his allegiance to the New Monthly Magazine (also owned by Colburn) in 1822 because Jerdan cut his copy when it became too overtly political. However, it may have been through Stendhal that Jerdan secured a glowing front-page review of The Improvisatrice in Le Globe in 1824.

  In many ways, Letitia’s real-life career seems as much a parable of “ambitious mania” as Stendhal’s 1830 novel Le rouge et le noir. Its parvenu antihero Julien Sorel fuels his social rise from obscure origins on a combination of talent, hard work, risk-taking, deception, and sexual seduction. He ultimately overreaches himself and ends up on the guillotine.

  Another French author who fascinated Letitia was her contemporary Balzac, although she was already an established writer when he began to publish. Her short story “The Talisman” (1833) was inspired by a review of his early work La peau de chagrin that she read in Le Globe. Her enormous productivity and ironic references to the mechanics of the literary marketplace match those of Balzac himself. Both writers were fascinated by the theme of corrupted literary aspiration.

  In verse, Letitia rendered the price of fame as stylized tragedy, but in prose she was more of a realist. Her late novel Ethel Churchill, published in 1837, features an impoverished, idealistic young poet, Walter Maynard, who is ultimately destroyed by the cash nexus. It has something in common with Balzac’s Illusions perdues, which appeared in serial form between 1837 and 1843. The efforts of Balzac’s poet-protagonist Lucien Chardon to promote himself on the literary and social stage lead him to debt, crime, and a suicide attempt. As a historical figure, Letitia is not Shelleyan nor Dickensian, but more like a power player out of a Balzac novel, one of his writers or one of his courtesans.

  Letitia’s French sensibility almost certainly had family roots, given that her mother stated in the 1851 census that she was born in France. Catherine may even have been educated there, possibly alongside Mrs. Siddons’s daughters, Maria and Sally, her contemporaries, who were sent to boarding school in France to get them out of the way while their mother pursued her acting career. Sally was clearly close enough to Catherine to embroider a baby cap for Letitia, although she died the year after she was born.

  Letitia spoke French well. She was complimented on her accent while in Paris and had no trouble understanding people. Indeed, she was confident enough in the language to suggest to Jerdan that she should put together an “annual, consisting entirely of French translations,” which she could get ready “in about a month,” although the idea never reached fruition.

  In one of her Paris letters Letitia makes a curious throwaway reference to “an old friend and relative” whom she had been seeing there, a Colonel Fagan. This, it turns out, was Christopher Sullivan Fagan, later a general, whose wife, Marie, was the addressee of Letitia’s last letter from Cape Coast Castle. All researches into a possible family connection between the Irish Fagans and the Herefordshire Landons draw a blank. He must have been related to Letitia on her mysterious maternal side.

  Colonel Fagan, who was involved in the East India Company, was the nephew of the Irish cavalry officer Christopher Alexander Fagan (1733–1816). Known as the “Chevalier Fagan,” the latter served in the Irish Brigade of the pre-revolutionary French army, and went by the title comte. Letitia’s mother, Catherine, was said by Jerdan to be descended illegitimately from a nobleman. The Chevalier himself may have been Catherine’s father, although his brother Andrew, who was also involved with the French army before transferring his allegiance to the East India Company, is another possible candidate. Given the fact that Letitia found so many Irish-born allies—from the Halls to Lady Blessington—it would make sense if she had an Irish family connection. The Chevalier Fagan was a close family friend and mentor of the Irish radical leader Daniel O’Connell. In
October 1797, a few months after Catherine and John Landon married and settled at 25 Hans Place, Daniel O’Connell is on record as living at 12 Hans Place, from where he addressed a letter to his brother Maurice.

  The Fagans were also connected to the theatrical demimonde, which looms so large in Letitia’s story. The Chevalier’s most significant love affair was with the French courtesan-actress Hyacinthe Varis, which produced an illegitimate daughter, Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland, who also appeared on the stage, before becoming the mistress of the Duke of Wellington’s brother, the Earl of Mornington.

  The image of L.E.L. Letitia initially created had much in common with the French culture of the “femme libre,” epitomized by actresses such as the two Hyacinthes. Her early work shows an uncanny similarity to the poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859), whose Elégies et romances (1819) and Elégies et poésies nouvelles (1825) feature flowers, songbirds, secrets, and lyres. Desbordes-Valmore’s youth was also defined by her father’s bankruptcy, but by the time she published her first book, she had been on the stage and to Guadaloupe and back. She drew a calculated veil over her early life, but was an adept manipulator of her own enigma. Her work addresses a mystery lover, “Olivier,” but her real secret was, in the view of a recent critic, “her ability to play the secret for all it was worth.” Like L.E.L., she transformed herself into a “poem authored by pain,” a “chronically wounded enigma of second hand literary production.”

  Balzac, who knew Desbordes-Valmore in later life, made her the model for the chillingly cynical middle-aged protagonist of Cousin Bette (1846). Nadar made a startling deathbed photograph of her bony corpse in 1859. Her poetry was worshipped by Baudelaire, and she became the only woman allowed by Verlaine into his pantheon of poètes maudits, or accursed poets. Twentieth-century critics later despised the poetess tradition as vapid, but its sadomasochistic, self-deconstructing theatrics fed surreptitiously into modernism via Verlaine and Rimbaud.