The Improvisatrice, frontispiece. A girl accepts from a wizened magician strange roots that turn out to be poison.
Letitia’s long-standing drug addiction explains why by 1838 she needed prussic acid “for her very life.” Whether she took her fatal overdose by accident or by design remains to be asked. As with her entire poetic oeuvre, an unresolved issue of intentionality hovers.
Mrs. Bailey told the inquest that on the evening before her death, Letitia had seemed “affected” at the thought of her leaving her. She had “had the spasms rather badly” and signaled her intention of taking some of “the medicine in the bottle.” Without the Baileys, Letitia would have no allies in the castle.
Letitia could have chosen to sail home with the Baileys. Before she left England, Matthew Forster predicted that she would not be able to take the hardships of Cape Coast Castle and would be back by the next ship. But a few days before her death, on October 12, she wrote to him, in a tone of forced jollity, “No my dear Mr Forster, you will not see me back by the Maclean, I never was in better health.” She had made the decision to stay.
It would have been humiliating for Letitia to return. Having been effectively cast out, she could not crawl back. All that would await her would be her “one fear, withering ridicule”: more gossip, more “slanders,” questions about why her marriage had failed. She no longer even had a home in London. Nor could she expect her old friends to welcome her with open arms, since they had propelled her into exile. She might also have simply recoiled from the prospect of reliving the physical horrors of the long voyage, the seasickness that had caused her such unbearable suffering.
On the night before she died, Letitia handed Mrs. Bailey two letters to deliver in London. One was for Whittington, the other for an unnamed Mrs —— (probably Mrs. Thomson or Mrs. Liddiard). She also cut off a lock of her hair, which she handed to Mrs. Bailey to give to her brother.
After the tragedy, Mrs. Bailey passed the letters to Maclean, but they subsequently disappeared. They were later said to have been mere letters of introduction. It is hard to see how Mrs. Bailey would have needed a letter of introduction to Whittington, as she must have met him at Portsmouth when he came to see Letitia off. Mrs. Bailey kept the hair, rather than passing it immediately to the widower, as one might have expected. She finally gave it to Whittington in London over a year later when, having changed her plans for departure, she finally returned to London.
If Letitia’s lost letters were indeed formal suicide notes, they would have contrasted startlingly with the upbeat tone of the letter to Mrs. Fagan found on Letitia’s portable writing desk. Up until she died, she continued to live in a world of split perspectives and alternative realities.
By now she was exhausted. Unbroken rest had been impossible on the passage out, even with narcotics. Sleep had been no easier at the castle, with its iron beds, its cacophonous band, and the constant noise of the Atlantic waves. In the fortnight before her death, the sleep deprivation had been even worse. For ten days, probably around the beginning of October, Maclean had been very ill. Letitia had had to sit up with him for “four nights” running, only able to rest for the odd half hour on the floor beside the bed when he was “still with opiates.”
By the morning of her death, however, he was on the mend. According to Maclean’s testimony at the inquest, she brought him his arrowroot drink as usual at 6 a.m. but complained of weariness, which he attributed to her “attendance upon himself while sick, and want of rest for three previous nights.” Despite her inability to sleep, she appeared to him to be “in her usual spirits.” She then returned to bed for about an hour and a half before removing to her so-called dressing room, where she had her own cup of morning coffee.
Mrs. Bailey soon looked in on her and found her “well,” whereupon Letitia gave her a leaving present and then dismissed her, intimating that she would send for her later to help her dress. According to Brodie Cruickshank’s later recollections, the maid then went to attend to some errands, including fetching some pomatum, used as hair oil or skin cream, from a store cupboard. When she returned to the dressing room around thirty minutes later, between eight and nine o’clock, she found Letitia’s body blocking the door.
In her last moments Letitia was alone, without witnesses. She must have taken her final dose direct from the bottle, as it was found in her hand: not a drop in a glass of water, as was her usual habit according to Mrs. Bailey. That suggests a firm intention to die, but perhaps she was simply trying to still worse symptoms than usual. The fact that Mrs. Bailey would soon be coming back to help her dress suggests she half hoped to be stopped or revived. The maid thought Letitia’s body was by the door because she had been trying to open it to summon aid.
If Letitia had indeed attempted suicide on a previous occasion in London, as Bulwer later told Lord Normanby, she may not quite have believed that she was going to succeed in a repeat performance. Or perhaps she changed her mind and panicked. It was a messy ending to a career built on poetic ambiguity.
Laman Blanchard devoted his 1841 Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L. to protecting Letitia’s memory from the stain of suicide. But at the moment he first received the news of her death, he privately had no doubt that she had killed herself. On January 2, 1839, “poor Blanchard” appeared in Macready’s dressing room “in dreadfully low spirits” to tell him that “poor L.E.L., that gifted creature, perished by her own hand!”
* * *
—
Blanchard’s anguish at the time is apparent from an unpublished letter he wrote to Lady Blessington on Friday, January 4, 1839, shortly after receiving the news. He confided his conviction that Letitia’s true experiences at Cape Coast Castle had been very different from the positive spin she had put on them in her letters home:
Dear Lady Blessington,
She was indeed worthy of the praises and honour which your liberal feelings award her. But her fate is more pitiable and shocking than you even yet suppose. The depositions relating to her death [i.e., the inquest transcript]…tell us clearly how she died but they do not tell us why. The tale is one of wretchedness indeed—and perhaps may never be told. The letters to…friends are awfully contrasted with the story of her real feelings during her short sojourn in that living grave—the Castle.
Her whole life was one of sacrifice and sorrows—of calumnies on the part of others, and incautiousness on her own part. But its end was a concentration of suffering. What an effort must that last letter have cost her—that horrible resolution to be gay and happy in addressing Mrs Fagan—while the one sole servant that reminded her of England was being sent away and the desolate scene was becoming yet more desolate. Who can wonder that her strong pride gave way, and the noble mind was on the instant overthrown by the recoil. Without seeing what she had previously written, the misery of the story cannot be imagined.
Little survives of “what she had previously written,” but it includes a passage from an undated letter to Whittington that depicts Maclean as coldly refusing to let her have a room of her own, as she had had at Hans Place, and of treating her like a servant:
There are eleven or twelve chambers here empty, I am told, yet Mr Maclean refuses to let me have one of them for my use nor will he permit me to enter the bed-room from the hour I leave it, seven in the morning, until he quits it at one in the afternoon. He expects me to cook, wash and iron, in short to do the work of a servant. I never see him till seven in the evening when he comes to dinner; and when that is over he plays the violin till ten o’clock when I go to bed. He says he will never cease correcting me till he has broken my spirit, and complains of my temper, which you know was never, even under heavy trials, bad.
Her allegation about not being allowed a room seems strange since she clearly had the use of the room in which she died. Perhaps she wanted a separate, more private space farther away from the governor’s apartments. Perhaps she simply felt opp
ressed that she had no say in the choice.
Maclean was a man who wanted to feel in control. He was obsessed with scientific instruments and charting the position of the sun. “That poor Sun, he never seems to get a moment’s rest,” exclaimed Letitia during the voyage. But his sense of autonomy was under continual threat: from Matthew Forster and the merchant committee; in his subordinate relation to the British government, with its unrealizable diktats on slavery; and in his relationship with the slippery Letitia. His initial sexual infatuation with her had made him feel a fool, but he had been trapped into taking her away. No wonder if he became chilly and controlling on his own turf. As Letitia herself put it in a newly discovered letter to the Liddiards’ daughter Fanny, written from Cape Coast Castle, “no wonder that a man whose whole life is past in the exercise of authority and who sees every hour the advantages arising from its exercise should be somewhat of a disciplinarian even in what with most men is a matter of sentiment and careless yielding. You would no longer wonder at the way of his marriage—‘such is Jove’s will and what he wills is fate.’ ”
Yet Letitia, who was inured to being badly treated by men who professed to be her friends, kept up such a complaisant and accepting countenance that Maclean had no intimation of the impact of his coldness on her. In a household bustling with staff, she was personally in the habit of bringing him his morning arrowroot. Her own breakfast coffee was brought by a young black boy.
On the day of her death, Brodie Cruickshank recalled Maclean’s state of total shock and disbelief, sitting staring into space over her dead body. Back in 1837, Maclean had dismissed her threat to kill herself as no more than a “bee in her bonnet.” Although he was alarmed to discover her taking prussic acid on the voyage out, he never anticipated he would end up with a suicide on his hands.
“I must have seen it, had she been so unhappy. She could not, would not, have so concealed it,” he wrote to Whittington after her death, unaware that she had long since regarded concealment as her survival route. He recalled Letitia’s very words to him during his illness, at a moment when he feared he might die. “And do you really think that I could survive you? Never believe it or take any thought about my fate, for I am sure I should not live a day after you,” she had told him, in the stilted clichés of romantic melodrama.
Letitia describes Maclean as a “disciplinarian” in this manuscript letter to Fanny Liddiard from Cape Coast Castle.
Life for Letitia had long been a two-faced masquerade. She complained to her brother about Maclean’s coldness. But to her husband’s face, she continued to keep up a front, as she brought him his arrowroot, charmed his guests, and tended him when ill. “And yet this is she who had written but a few days before, that her existence was insupportable on account of my ‘cruelty and indifference’!” Maclean wrote to Whittington in incomprehension, apparently quoting from another lost letter. He was unable to process the disjunction. Cut off from intimate knowledge of her previous fifteen years’ experience, he had never been able to read Letitia. She showed him only the face she thought he wanted to see.
Their relationship had always been a muddle. Both parties were in denial about the transactional substratum, and the fact that neither was quite a free agent.
At the inquest, Maclean testified, somewhat otiosely, that an unkind word had never passed between him and his wife. However, hearsay evidence suggests that a cause of matrimonial tension might in fact have arisen shortly before her death. In the 1920s, Sir William Brandford Griffith (1858–1939), a former chief justice of the Gold Coast, recalled what his father had told him relating to the death of L.E.L. In 1886, Griffith senior, who was governor of the Gold Coast in the 1880s, heard the following story from a mixed-race Cape Coaster: Edmund Bannerman, the son of Ellen Maclean’s half brother James, who said he had been told it by a relative who was actually in the castle on the day Letitia died. That a Bannerman was present reinforces the testimony of Richard Madden, who depicted Letitia as isolated at the castle amid a community loyal to Ellen, who, as we have seen, was a Bannerman herself.
* * *
—
Edmund related the following story. One day, the post arrived during dinner. After Letitia retired, Maclean opened a letter addressed to her that she had overlooked. Its contents convinced him that she had a child by another man. He showed her the letter and accused her, soon after which she poisoned herself.
It is hard to see how such gossip could have come from a published source. The scandal sheets of the 1820s and early 1830s, with their insinuating references to Letitia’s “baby,” were not circulated at Cape Coast, and had gone the way of ephemera by the 1880s, when this story was told. Yet knowledge of Letitia’s secret past was clearly current in the area for decades after her death. In his Wanderings in West Africa (1863), the explorer Richard Burton declared:
The true history of Mrs Maclean’s death is known to many, but who, in writing the life of “L.E.L.,” would dare tell it? Owning that de mortuis nil nisi verum should be our motto, how would it be possible to publish facts while actors in the tragedy are still on the stage of life. And after their death it will be forgotten.
By “actors in the tragedy” Burton could not have meant George Maclean, who had died in 1847. Those still alive in 1863, whose privacy Burton felt honor-bound as a “gentleman” to protect, can only have been Letitia’s illegitimate children. Her status as a fallen woman made men who knew about it feel bound to protect her privacy.
Brodie Cruickshank recalled that Mrs. Maclean had been as charming as ever at dinner on the night before her death. Perhaps the incriminating letter was opened after he left. A ship from England had recently docked, bearing mail.
The possibility that Letitia’s true past was revealed to Maclean via a letter from London is supported by Blanchard’s gnomic comment in his Life and Literary Remains that her enemies pursued her even to Africa, and also by an unpublished letter from Bulwer in response to a lost letter from him. “I conclude from your letter that her persecutors were not contented with exile, and that their malice found her in Africa,” Bulwer told Blanchard on January 6, 1839. “I should like much to hear more of this mournful event. Can you dine with me on Tuesday, six o’clock? Let me know.” As we cannot know what was divulged over dinner, the identity of the so-called persecutors remains unknown. Some unnamed creditor may have threatened to expose Letitia to her husband if she did not pay up. However, the person most likely to have contacted her about her children is their father, Jerdan.
Exposure to Maclean would have left Letitia undefended, without a mask. An honor suicide would have been the logical consequence of such a loss of face, echoing that of the humiliated slave Kobina. In the European context, Balzac explained the psychology of suicide in his novel Lost Illusions:
Suicide results from a feeling which if you like we will call self-esteem…the day when a man despises himself, the day when he sees that others despise him, the moment when the realities of life are at variance with his hopes, he kills himself and thus pays homage to society, refusing to stand before it stripped of his virtues and his splendour.
However, given her previous form, Letitia would have lied, lied, and lied again to her husband in the face of any incriminating letter, assuring him it was all “slander.” Her ambiguous end had none of the glory of the Roman falling on his sword. She could have chosen to reenact the dramatic death of Sappho by throwing herself from the castle battlements into the ocean in an unequivocal grand gesture. But there was no poetry in the befuddled circumstances of her final overdose.
Balzac’s analysis of suicide divides it into three types: “firstly the kind which is no more than the last bout of a longstanding sickness and surely belongs to the domain of pathology; secondly suicide born of despair; thirdly suicide which is reasoned out.” Whatever factors prompted Letitia to put the bottle to her lips in the moment, her self-induced death resists a final, single
definition, just like her poetry. It may have been one of those cases in which, as Balzac puts it, “the three causes come together,” but without the two lost letters we cannot be sure how premeditated it was.
In addicts, the line between active suicide and suicidally reckless drug use is notoriously hard to define. Even now, coroners’ verdicts often err on the side of accident to spare the feelings of survivors. The merchant jury at Letitia’s inquest was composed of men who were Maclean’s close daily associates. No doubt they wanted to spare his feelings by recording a verdict of accidental death. But they were also keen to deflect negative publicity. A celebrity suicide scandal had the potential to shine an unwelcome spotlight on their “dark nook of colonial dependency.”
CHAPTER 14
Cover-up
The fact that Cape Coast was weeks away by ship from England meant that Letitia’s death was already old news by the time it was announced in London. Distance added to the sense of public uncertainty since there was no easy way of getting or checking information. Yet the atmosphere of mystery, subsequently handed down to posterity, arose because so many of those connected with her had something to cover up that they feared her death might expose. The result was a confusing web of concealment, consisting of separate, differently motivated strands.
L.E.L. Page 32
