L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  The current cold and deadly to the heart.

  Anger and fear are in them; grief and joy

  Are on their sound; yet slight, impalpable:—

  A word is but a breath of passing air.

  In “Gossipping,” she lashes out at the “spiders of society” for spreading slander, while in “Self-blindness” she admits that only self-deception can bring repose. In “Life has dark secrets,” personal secrets burrow into the heart, working to create incessant fear of future exposure. In “The Marriage Vow,” a wedding altar becomes a sacrificial slab. More sinisterly, “Death in the flower” is addressed to the almond tree, in whose kernels are the raw ingredient for prussic acid.

  Ethel Churchill in many ways anticipates the “sensation” novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon, which were designed to titillate Victorian readers by shaking their comfortable assumptions. Unlike theirs, it does not seek its power directly from a mystery plot. Yet its moral ambiguities are equally destabilizing.

  The one character in it who tries to resist determinism, by being “mistress of my fate in this world,” is the antiheroine Lady Marchmont. Equally enraged against her cold husband and her faithless lover, she plans to murder them both. In one phantasmagoric scene, worthy of Collins or Braddon, she is shown concocting prussic acid in a laboratory. Before simmering the crushed kernels of bitter almonds on the fire to create the poison, the villainess dons what Letitia was by now wearing: a “glass mask.”

  When Lady Marchmont’s lover drinks the fatal cup of coffee that she has laced with the poison, Letitia spends several pages subjectively imagining what it must feel like to die of prussic acid, as the victim gasps for breath, feels his heart racing, experiences a fiery thirst, and staggers for support against a tree. After Letitia’s own death by prussic acid, an excited reader from Bedford wrote to The Times, pointing out the thrilling coincidence.

  The reviews of Ethel Churchill were generally good. Even Fraser’s, perhaps realizing that it had gone too far in its mockery of L.E.L., admired the novel’s “astonishing qualities,” though it also complained of its insufficiently “healthy” tone. The novel was also translated into German and published in Leipzig. Letitia’s low was replaced with a manic high once her book was well received, although she was “still on strict regimen, and under Dr Thomson’s care.” “All the misery I have suffered during the last few months is past like a dream,” she told Laman Blanchard, rhapsodically misquoting Coleridge’s drug-induced poem “Kubla Khan”:

  I on honey-dews have fed,

  And breathed the airs of Paradise.

  The “opium of praise” had its effect.

  Another reason for her better mood was that her engagement was now decisively, and publicly, on. “I saw L.E.L. today,” wrote Bulwer. “She avows her love to her betrothed frankly, and is going to Africa, where he is governor of a fortress. Is that not grand? It is on the Gold Coast, and his duty is to protect black people from being made slaves. The whole thing is a romance for Lamartine. Half Paul and Virginia, half Inkle and Yarico. Poor Miss Landon! I do like and shall miss her.”

  Bulwer’s comments were spiced with sarcasm. In Paul and Virginia, Bernardin de St. Pierre’s late-eighteenth-century best seller, the heroine dies in a shipwreck en route from Mauritius. In the 1787 English comic opera Inkle and Yarico, set in the Caribbean, an English trader’s love affair with a native woman turns sadistic when he plans to sell her into slavery.

  Letitia and Whittington had by now been taken together under the Liddiards’ wing and were constantly at their house. Maclean was often invited for dinner, or joined the group in outings to the theater, according to Maria Liddiard’s diary (one show they attended was La Donna del Lago, based on Scott’s Lady of the Lake, which Letitia had memorized in childhood). Absorbed into the Liddiards’ comfortable and respectable family circle, Maclean did not spend much time alone with his fiancée.

  Even Emma Roberts had begun to get cold feet. In a letter to the Liddiards’ daughter Maria, written on November 28, 1837, she expressed her pleasure in the fact that Letitia’s health seemed improved, but was “unable to say” whether or not she desired “the marriage to take place.” “[A]nxious as I am that she should have a protection, I do not like her going out to Africa,” she wrote. Her fear was that “the climate and the dearth of books and other congenial entertainment may exercise an injurious effect upon her health and perhaps oblige her to return to England without him which would be a very disadvantageous circumstance.” Miss Roberts indicated in the most delicate fashion—calculated to go over the head of the innocent Maria, unless she was less innocent than her parents supposed—that she was afraid that Letitia would rebel against her exile and return to England as a renegade wife, yet more fallen than before.

  In March, Matthew Forster gave a “sumptuous” all-male dinner for Maclean and “a select party of gentlemen connected with the African trade” at the Albion Tavern, Aldersgate Street, near the Forster and Smith offices in the City. Whittington attended. The highlight of the evening was the formal presentation to Maclean by Forster of the silver centerpiece, which according to the London Evening Standard was valued at 500 guineas. One of the guests was a leading Quaker abolitionist. He must have had as much of a talent for selective myopia as his fellow Quaker Bernard Barton, who had shut his eyes to L.E.L.’s sexual subtexts back in the early 1820s.

  Blanchard attests that throughout the period of their acknowledged engagement, Maclean was Letitia’s most loyal defender in the matter of her sexual reputation. Of course he was. Whatever he privately knew or suspected, he would not have wanted anyone to think he was marrying a dishonored woman. As Bulwer’s comments suggest, Letitia for her part trumpeted Maclean’s antislavery credentials. Their very lack of intimacy enabled each to promote the other’s reputation. However, all accounts suggest that Maclean continued to impress upon Letitia the discomforts and unsuitability for a lady of Cape Coast Castle.

  From the viewpoint of some outsider observers, he was not an attentive fiancé. According to Lady Blessington, from “the moment of his return from Scotland to that of their departure [for Cape Coast], he was moody, mysterious, and ill-humoured, continually sneering at literary ladies, speaking slightingly of her works, and, in short, showing every symptom of a desire to disgust her.” Yet Letitia was not to be disgusted; her “pride shrank from again having it said that another marriage was broken off.” It was the lady’s prerogative to withdraw from an engagement. Letitia refused to do so.

  Pressed by further demands from a moneylender for a £75 debt of her brother’s, Letitia applied to Richard Bentley on May 1, 1838, for an advance of £100. She had plans for another novel. However, her last major project apart from Ethel Churchill was a perversely doomed act of resistance to the cash nexus: an uncommissioned tragedy, Castruccio Castracani, about the toxic power of political factionalism.

  Set in Renaissance Italy, inspired by Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani, and based on Mary Shelley’s 1823 novel Valperga, it was written in the manner of Shelley’s own closet drama The Cenci. It was unperformable. Unrealistically hoping to get it put on, Letitia made vain efforts to get Bulwer to obtrude it on the notice of the actor-manager Macready, unaware that the latter had damned her in his diary as a “fallen” woman.

  During her last months in London, Letitia appears disconnected. Her mood seems labile, her sense of her own place in the world unstable. In wild optimism—and grandiose denial of her dubious social position—she addressed the opening poem of the latest Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book to the new queen, Victoria, going straight to the top, with Jerdan-like effrontery, in a quest for fresh patronage. According to Katherine Thomson, it was apparently suggested that Miss Landon herself should be presented at court. She was said to have declined the proposal because she was so modest she did not like to put herself forward. More likely, the palace felt that association with L.E.
L. would be a public relations disaster.

  The last poetry volume Letitia wrote, Flowers of Loveliness, was also inscribed to Victoria. Large-format, and illustrated with fine-quality, if disturbingly kitsch, engravings, it was published by Ackermann and featured a series of poems on different flowers and the female character types they supposedly represented. Despite the decorous dedication to the young virgin queen, the verse was decidedly more decadent than Letitia’s standard annuals’ offerings. She explained to her editor Robert Fisher at Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book that it could not possibly interfere with his comfortably bourgeois market as it was so “utterly different.”

  With its floral leitmotif, the volume was a throwback to Miss Rowden’s botany treatise. The cloying sweetness of the engravings and the poetess’s careful use of metaphor meant that innocent readers might still escape unscathed. Yet Letitia went riskily back to riffing on the dangerous themes with which she had originally created L.E.L.

  The poem on the poppy, for example, featured a voluptuous woman lying on a divan, under the gaze of a female friend, with her Turkish-style bodice awry. The text explained, in politely poetical language, that the heroine had become an opium addict as the result of a sexual trauma, her life blighted by “one huge serpent, and one only.” At this late stage in her career, was Letitia returning to making anonymous digs at Jerdan as the one lover who had defined and defiled her life?

  In Flowers of Loveliness, Letitia portrayed a lovelorn woman as a swooning opium addict.

  Flowers of Loveliness is a work of cynical surface prettification. Like the best kitsch, however, it is not blandly shallow but deeply shallow, embracing shallowness as a form of covert rebellion. Its underlying perversity anticipates Baudelaire’s similarly named 1857 shocker Les fleurs du mal, which was itself influenced by the poetess tradition of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. The word “loveliness” sounds twee to our ears, but in 1838 it was ambiguously on the cusp, not quite yet domesticated into the wishy-washy semantics of today. “Lovely” was the word used by Shelley in Adonais to evoke Keats’s rebellious sensualism back in 1821. Flowers of Loveliness was L.E.L.’s last stand.

  Even at this late stage, Jerdan was still, in fact, involved behind the scenes in the business of creating L.E.L.’s image. Unable to let go of his songbird, he could not give up his Pygmalion habits. As late as 1838 he was puffing her latest Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book in the Gazette and was almost certainly involved in persuading the great American artist Thomas Sully (whose portrait of the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, still graces the $20 bill) to paint her.

  Sully had come to London with his daughter Blanche in the hope of securing a sitting from the new queen. As he waited for a yes from the palace, picking up other commissions along the way, he joined the Garrick as a temporary member, which is where he probably first came across William Jerdan. Blanche Sully told her mother in a letter of January 1, 1838, that just as she and her father were leaving the house of the artist George Healy, who should walk in but “a Mr Jordan [sic]—editor of some magazine here.” In March, Jerdan puffed Sully exorbitantly in the Gazette as an exceptionally talented American painter, proffering the insider knowledge that the new queen had sat for him the previous Thursday. The Marquess of Lansdowne, who knew Jerdan and had purchased L’Improvisatrice from H. W. Pickersgill in the 1820s, may also have been involved; Sully’s diaries record how gratified he was to receive a dinner invitation from the marquess, as he wanted to get in with the nobility, so keen was he to paint the young queen.

  Sully was eventually granted five sittings with Victoria at Buckingham Palace, resulting in his now iconic image of the young monarch in her coronation robes. The first sitting he made of Letitia—now in a private collection—was never finished. Like his English equivalent, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sully was famous for his flattering portraits of female sitters. His take on Letitia is alluringly enigmatic. Her dark eyes are as expressionless as they are deep. The fact that Maclean did not leap at the chance to purchase a marriage portrait of his intended is further proof, if it were needed, that theirs was no standard love match.

  According to Blanchard, another portrait was also commissioned during Letitia’s last months in London in 1838: “a medallion portrait, in plaster,” by the sculptor Henry Weekes. The latter made his name later that year with a bust of Victoria, the first of her reign, but his image of Letitia was never, according to Blanchard, reproduced and marketed as planned, probably because no fee was forthcoming (a similar profile plaster medallion of Tennyson was made in the 1850s and sold as a souvenir to poetry lovers; in this, as ever, L.E.L. was before her time). Labeled “Miss Landon,” Weekes’s plaster medallion shows Letitia wearing a flimsily girlish circle of flowers around her head, an ironic reminder of the wreath with which she had crowned Jerdan in the first flush of her fame.

  This medallion appeared to have been lost until I found a reference to “an early Victorian plaster cameo portrait of Miss Landon in an oval gilt matt and bird’s-eye maple frame by Henry Weekes” in a sale catalog for a small auction house in West London, where it went (as lot 507) for a pitiful £85 on March 30, 2010. Neither the auctioneers nor the buyer, whom I contacted, had ever heard of the poet Letitia Landon.

  Blanchard regarded Weekes’s effort, with reservations, as a good likeness. “Although the profile was not the happiest view of her face, the likeness is sufficiently faithful to be very agreeable; and were the throat less long and the bust less broad and full, the resemblance would be perfect.” If Weekes lengthened Letitia’s short neck, Sully must have stretched it to giraffe proportions. All her portraitists idealized her face, but in different ways, with the result that all her portraits look like different people. Her attractiveness was, as Anna Maria recalled, to be found in motion. The mobility of her face—an act of performance—was her emperor’s new clothes.

  Sightings of Letitia during her final few months in London are rare, but suggest she was less and less able to put up a social front outside the comfortable bubble of the Liddiards’ home. In the run-up to her planned departure for Africa, Mrs. Thomson took her to call on the writer Harriet Martineau, who had a cousin in Sierra Leone, to get advice about what to pack to take to West Africa.

  Miss Martineau was dismayed by Letitia’s detachment from practical realities and by her depressed and dissociated demeanor. “I was at first agreeably surprised by Miss Landon’s countenance, voice and manners,” she wrote, having clearly girded her loins to expect a brazen scarlet woman. Instead she was moved by the melancholy torpor of her guest:

  [I]t was all so sad that my mother and I communicated to each other our sense of dismay, as soon as the ladies were gone. Miss Landon was listless, absent, melancholy to a striking degree. She found she was all wrong in the provision of clothes—was going to take out all muslins and no flannels, and divers pet presents which would go to ruin at once in the climate of Cape Coast. We promised to go to Dr Thomson’s and hear the new play before she went; and I could not but observe the countenance of listless gloom with which she heard the arrangement made. Before the day of our visit came round it was discovered that she had been secretly married and I saw her no more.

  As that last comment suggests, an atmosphere of furtiveness hung over the wedding, which finally took place at St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, in Marylebone on June 7, 1838. Blanchard later painted a rosy picture of the bride at the altar surrounded by her friends, but it was a hole-in-the-corner affair. It took place by special license, for which Maclean applied a week before the ceremony. That meant that the banns did not have to be read. Clearly, neither party wanted the wedding publicized in advance.

  Letitia initially anticipated that the ceremony would not occur until just before they sailed for Africa, but Maclean later told his uncle it had supposedly been brought forward to accommodate the wishes of her “two nearest relatives” who wanted it to take place, “privately at least,” before th
en. The Liddiard diaries, however, suggest that it was touch and go to the end. A wedding had been anticipated in April, but had come to nothing, leaving Miss Landon “very strange and out of spirits” in May.

  Whittington, as a clergyman, performed the ceremony. According to the marriage register, the other witness was “Mary Elizabeth Landon.” The latter could have been Letitia’s Yorkshire cousin but was probably the former governess, known as Elizabeth, who was living in London with Letitia’s mother, Catherine, at the time of the 1841 census. She had been present, barely traceably but in the background, throughout Letitia’s long career as Jerdan’s mistress.

  Bulwer gave the bride away. Maclean’s brother was present but not his uncle, Sir John Maclean, the head of the family, who was not even informed until afterward. In an embarrassed letter to Sir John, Maclean later explained that he had not wanted to say anything as the marriage plans had been so on and off.

  Letitia’s signature on the marriage register leaps out. Her round, disconnected, childlike hand is shakier than normal. It contrasts vividly with the flowing, educated signatures of her husband, brother, and cousin.

  After the service, according to Katherine Thomson, the couple spent the night at the Sackville Street Hotel, but then Letitia returned alone to the Liddiards’ and continued to use her maiden name for at least a fortnight. Maclean later explained this away to his uncle by saying that they had not wanted the expense of setting up an establishment before leaving for Africa. “In this way it was that Miss Landon continued Miss Landon after the marriage had actually taken place,” Maclean put it in some embarrassment. One wonders why she could not have stayed with him at his hotel, or he with her at the Liddiards’, as her biographer Blanchard—erroneously, and in an effort to smooth away the irregularities of the situation—states he did.

  Letitia’s signature on her marriage register. Her round, childlike, shaky letters contrast with the educated signatures of her husband and brother.