L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  After the burial, Maclean departed for Accra in the dark, presumably to seek solace with Ellen. Two days later, he wrote a letter to his uncle in Scotland, telling him that “a great blow has fallen on me so dreadful and so utterly unexpected, that it has almost broken my heart. My dearest wife is no more!—I cannot tell you the particulars, I am so ill, and ill at ease.”

  Maclean was indeed shocked that Letitia had taken her life. But his uneasiness was not simply the grief of a stunned widower. He instantly realized that news of her death might fuel other, unconnected suspicions surrounding his role at Cape Coast. Even before writing to his uncle, he took time out to pen a letter to an antislavery campaigner, Thomas Fowell Buxton, for inclusion in the latter’s forthcoming treatise The Africa Slave Trade and Its Remedy. Written on October 16, the very day after Letitia’s death, it shows Maclean conspicuously trying to tie his colors to the antislavery mast, but dolefully questioning that it would ever be possible to suppress the trade:

  My neighbour (as I may call him) De Sousa at Whydah, still carries on an extensive Slave Trade; judging by the great numbers of vessels consigned to him, he must ship a vast number of slaves annually. He declares, and with truth, that all the slave treaties signed during the last 25 years have never caused him to export one slave fewer than he would have done otherwise.

  A further signatory to Buxton’s book, which was published by John Murray in 1840, was W. Forster: Matthew’s brother William, who was in charge of the Forster and Smith enterprise in Sierra Leone and Gambia and clearly felt no compunction at all over his hypocrisy.

  Maclean would not have been wrong to suppose that the news of Letitia’s death might exacerbate preexisting suspicions surrounding his governorship. However, neither he nor the merchants anticipated that it would spark the unsubstantiated allegations of murder that were soon doing the rounds in London. They came from a surprising source, unconnected with the slavery controversy: Letitia’s brother Whittington. In January, he wrote to the Colonial Office to lodge, in the words of an official’s memo, a “complaint in which he charged a former mistress of Mr Maclean with the murder of that gentleman’s wife, not obscurely intimating that Mr Maclean had some participation in the act.”

  The newly installed colonial secretary, Lord Normanby, failed to reply. He did not believe a murder investigation was necessary because he had been confidentially informed by Bulwer that Letitia had previously attempted suicide in London. If he did not answer Whittington’s letter—which he even managed to lose after taking it home for discretion’s sake—it was because he was too embarrassed to spell out to the bereaved curate what the latter did not want to hear: that his sister had killed herself. Suicide was still illegal and regarded as a sin in the eyes of the church.

  Whittington was indeed resistant to accepting that the sister on whom he had been emotionally dependent since childhood had chosen to abandon not just life but him. “My darling Whittington…I feel selfish in leaving you,” she had written to him from Cape Coast Castle, subordinating her own needs to his almost to the last. He was traumatized by her demise. Any death other than suicide would have been preferable from his viewpoint.

  Ellen’s existence had clearly made Whittington uncomfortable from the start, since Letitia had to explain to him that country marriages were, as she put it, a “temporary bargain.” Why he made the leap to murder becomes apparent when one reads his two follow-up letters to the Colonial Office, which, unlike the first, survive in the archives. They reveal that he was not acting alone, but in concert with Dr. Thomson.

  Desperate to absolve himself of the charge of having prescribed Letitia with prussic acid, Dr. Thomson was at the weak-willed Whittington’s shoulder, encouraging him in his lurid suspicions. According to a surviving letter from Whittington to the Colonial Office, it was the doctor’s “medical comment” that convinced him to request an inquiry. Dr. Thomson was, he said, “most anxious” to go in person with him to the Colonial Office to make a deposition on oath, presumably to the effect that he had not supplied the prussic acid, leaving the way clear for a homicide allegation (the offer was not taken up).

  The doctor was desperate to lay the blame on anything—and anyone—other than prussic acid. Ellen was a useful scapegoat. He gambled on the probability that even if inquiries were initiated, which would take months if not years at such a distance, his word as an English gentleman would carry more weight than that of any “native woman.”

  When Maclean belatedly got to hear of the murder allegations, he told his uncle that he had little to fear on that score, but that he was astonished that Whittington “of all men” had propagated them. The unpublished Liddiard diaries attest to the frequent contact between Maclean and Whittington in the long run-up to Letitia’s marriage. Unaware of Dr. Thomson’s input, Maclean simply could not understand how his brother-in-law could have conceived the idea.

  Within a year of Letitia’s death, Whittington himself had abandoned all notions of a homicide inquiry, which he had not in any case pursued with much determination. Grudgingly accepting Maclean’s assurances, he skidded over the fact that he had originally accused his brother-in-law of being an accessory to murder, and made out instead that the investigation he had initially sought was into her alleged suicide. As he put it in a mealy-mouthed, syntactically slippery letter to Blanchard, “I do not hesitate to say that George Maclean’s narrative is marked by the desire, and goes to remove any impression of suicide from my sister’s memory, and is just so far acceptable as it is calculated to attain the end which alone I had at heart in soliciting investigation by Government.”

  The murder rumors soon began to lose traction, though they remained abroad. It can be no coincidence that the person who tried hardest to keep them alive in the coming years was Dr. Thomson’s wife, Katherine. In her 1860 book The Queens of Society, which she published under a pseudonym that disguised her personal interest, she vigorously reiterated that there was no prussic acid in the medical chest and went further than her husband had done back in 1839 by explicitly extrapolating from that fact that Letitia’s London doctor could never, ever, at any stage have prescribed it for her. She shifted the focus onto the cup of breakfast coffee, which had been brought to Letitia by a “little native boy” on the morning she died, asserting that it must have been poisoned with some mystery agent on Ellen’s orders. More than twenty years on, Katherine still felt the need to finger the first Mrs. Maclean to cover up her husband’s medical incompetence.

  The murder allegations were able to continue rumbling because Letitia’s death had been purposefully wrapped in a veil of obscurity from the start. The inquest jury’s efforts to cover up an apparent suicide had unintentionally opened the door to more lurid suspicions. In the immediate aftermath, the merchant community at Cape Coast also took steps to prevent the spread of gossip to London about Maclean’s cold treatment of his wife, which might damage his personal reputation and rebound on them.

  The English servants, Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, who had been so sympathetic to Letitia, had been about to sail home on the day she died. Instead, they were given an offer they could not refuse to remain at Cape Coast for another full year. Mr. Bailey was found employment as an overseer, presumably on a palm plantation. It was not a job for which his previous experience as a ship’s steward—which required the skills of a butler—had prepared him. In an attempt to deflect suspicion, the Baileys’ initial change of plan was later put down to no more than the fact that they had had an argument with the captain of the ship that was to take them home; even if so, they need not have waited a whole year for another passage. Forster and Smith alone had at least fourteen vessels plying the seas between England and West Africa.

  After her return to London over a year later, however, Mrs. Bailey began to talk, putting it abroad that Maclean had mistreated his wife. According to Brodie Cruickshank, who described her as a “malignant woman,” she was the main source responsible for the
“calumnies which were circulated of [Letitia Landon’s] self-destruction.”

  Forster and Smith did all it could to silence and discredit her.

  In December 1840, an unusual story appeared in The Times among the police reports. A Mrs. Moroner, living in the Mile End Road, had been robbed of various household articles by a servant, hardly newsworthy in itself. However, during the course of the ensuing case, the victim’s daughter-in-law asked the magistrate’s advice on another, unrelated matter. This was Emily Bailey, who was staying with her mother-in-law because her husband had gone off to sea again on another job.

  Mrs. Bailey told the magistrate that she had been intimidated by some “gentlemen,” who had on repeated occasions come to their house. Refusing to give their names, they had demanded that she hand over any documents relating to Letitia Landon: notes she had taken on the voyage out, and at Cape Coast, and even letters she had written to her husband after he was again at sea. The men’s conduct was “offensive” and “not at all becoming gentlemen,” although “they came in their carriage.” They made verbal threats; they were “abusive” and “annoying.” Although they represented themselves as “mercantile travellers,” they had the appearance of “persons of distinction.”

  A few days later another item appeared in The Times: a letter to the editor dated from the offices of Forster and Smith, signed “W. Forster.” Matthew’s brother William announced himself as “the only friend of Mr Maclean at the moment in town,” and claimed he had investigated Mrs. Bailey’s allegations of intimidation with “the care required by the woman’s position and past conduct.” Having forced Mrs. Bailey to go to a police station, William Forster had leaned on the officers to make her sign the following statement:

  I hereby declare, that the statement which I made to Mr. Norton [the magistrate], at the Lambeth-street Police-court, on Thursday last, to the effect that I have been visited by different persons, some of them apparently of distinction, coming in their carriages, and requiring me to give up documents which I alleged to have in my possession, in reference to the death of the late Mrs Maclean, is entirely unfounded; and that I am possessed of no such documents or papers of importance….I very sincerely regret having been led by the public excitement on this subject to invent these stories. It is true that I embarked with Mrs Maclean as her personal servant at Portsmouth and attended her in that capacity up to the time of her death at Cape Coast Castle, but I hereby solemnly declare that I never saw or heard of anything to justify the calumnies which have been circulated against her husband on the subject of her death. I neither saw nor heard of any ill-treatment, nor do I believe Mr Maclean capable of any of those things which I have heard laid to his charge by public rumour.

  “It is singular,” continued William Forster in The Times, “that the first of the calumnious fables founded on the death of Mrs Maclean…should have been terminated in so speedy and complete an exposure of the author.” Singular indeed. “I am sorry to add,” he concluded,

  that I have reason to believe that the extraordinary fabrications of Mrs Bailey are not the last links in the chain of falsehood by which it has been sought to enthral the character of my friend [Maclean], for the sake of pandering to the public appetite for scandal. But his absence from this country, added to the indefinite nature of the charges against him, have hitherto afforded impunity to his libellers, which it may not be safe for themselves to rely upon.

  That last clause sounds like a threat.

  By the time this appeared in The Times, the merchants had reason to feel particularly vulnerable. No doubt galvanized by the high-profile coverage surrounding Letitia’s death, the Colonial Office had finally decided to get to the bottom of the allegations of illegal trading by appointing Richard Madden to conduct his inspection tour of West Africa. A fervent abolitionist, who had recently overseen the dismantling of slavery in the West Indies, he was not the man Matthew Forster would have chosen. That Madden was also a friend of the dead Letitia’s patroness Lady Blessington only made matters worse.

  Once he arrived at Cape Coast Castle in 1841, Madden investigated and dismissed the murder rumors, as we have seen. However, when it came to breaches of the slave trade laws, he was not reassured by what he found. While he was actually staying in the castle, one of Forster and Smith’s ships, the Robert Heddle, commanded by a Captain Groves, anchored just beyond the harbor. She was fitted out with equipment for slaving and reported to have traded along the coast at Whydah with the notorious slave trader De Sousa.

  Dr. Madden thought this justified the ship being seized, but Maclean declined. “All I was worth in the world would not pay the damages that must inevitably be given against me,” he told Madden, apparently afraid that the merchants would sue him. He would not change his mind when Madden told him that the British government would take the legal responsibility, and then even offered to do so himself.

  Madden then sent for the ship’s captain, who said that all he had done was to deliver goods for which he received cash. He expressed the view that De Sousa had been calumniated, as he had not personally seen him selling slaves while at Whydah. As with adultery in London, only ocular proof counted. The captain said he had been given permission by Maclean before taking the goods on to Whydah, although Maclean denied it. Madden believed that Maclean was reluctant to interfere because the vessel belonged to Forster and Smith.

  When Matthew Forster discovered what had been going on, he became apoplectic, bombarding the Colonial Office with lengthy diatribes in which he insisted that the office itself would have to furnish him with information on which traders along the coast were slave traders. “It was no part of Captain Groves’ duty to sit in judgment on his customers,” he thundered. Matthew may have initially hoped that an alliance between Letitia and Maclean would help him cultivate the Colonial Office. Her unexpected death, followed by the Madden inspection, had rattled him.

  On returning to England, Madden wrote his damning report, in which he repeatedly queried the business activities of Forster and Smith. However, by the time it was presented to Parliament, the government had changed. In the election of 1841, the Whigs lost and the Tories came in. One of the new MPs was Matthew Forster himself, who was elected on a free-trade Tory ticket for the constituency of Berwick in Northumberland, where he had family roots. Finally achieving the political heft he had long craved, he now found a more sympathetic colonial secretary in the new incumbent, Lord Stanley.

  The Parliamentary Select Committee that was convened to consider the Madden report rejected most of its findings. It comes as no surprise to discover that the Select Committee’s most assiduous member was Matthew Forster, MP. Richard Madden meanwhile was subjected to a campaign of press vilification, which included the charge that he had failed to complete his medical studies as a student (not something that had ever held Anthony Todd Thomson back) and thus had no right to call himself “Dr.”*

  Having seen off Madden, Matthew Forster became ever more hubristic. By 1843, he no longer felt the need to disguise his attitude to the slave trade laws, openly telling a House of Lords Select Committee that “it was painful to hear the twaddle that is talked on the subject of the sale of goods to slave dealers on the coast of Africa. People forget that there is scarcely a British merchant of any eminence who is not proud and eager to deal as largely as possible with slave importers in Cuba and Brazil, and slave buyers and sellers in the United States.” The fallout from Letitia’s death had made Forster and Smith nervous, but for now Matthew was riding high.

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  In contrast to its tangential effect on the world of international business, the tragedy hit at the heart of literary London. Not only was it a shocking personal bereavement for those who had been close to Letitia, but her fate had the potential to implicate the entire ecosystem that had colluded in the creation and destruction of L.E.L.

  On Monday, February 4, just over four weeks
after the story of Letitia’s death broke, Charles Dickens attended an all-male dinner party at the home of the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. He noted the guest list in his diary. It included Letitia’s former lover William Jerdan, her former fiancé John Forster, and her friend and future biographer Samuel Laman Blanchard. The others present were the aging Cockney Leigh Hunt, the cartoonist George Cruikshank, and the Literary Gazette contributor Richard Harris Barham.

  The fact that there was no woman at Ainsworth’s dinner table is an indication of how much literary networking had changed in the fifteen years since Letitia made her social debut in the bluestocking salons of Miss Spence and Miss Benger. By 1839, literary men were choosing to meet in the new male-only clubs, such as the Garrick. In his recent hit, The Pickwick Papers, Dickens had ridiculed the very idea of the female salon. His fictional literary hostess, Mrs. Leo Hunter, makes her name by publishing rickety sentimental poetry under the coy moniker of an “L” followed by eight stars, and gives a fancy-dress breakfast at which she recites her effusive “Ode to an expiring Frog.” One female guest plans to go as Apollo but is dissuaded by her embarrassed husband from appearing in a mini-tunic. She agrees to cover her legs in a long dress but worries that no one will know what character she is supposed to be. Don’t worry, they’ll see your lyre, he reassures her. Nothing could satirize Letitia’s milieu more bitchily.

  Dickens’s brief diary entry does not record the conversation at Ainsworth’s table. However, an absent woman, L.E.L., is likely to have been the main topic. Her death, reported only a month before, was still “great talk” in London, to quote Carlyle’s gossipy letter to his brother, written that very same day.