L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

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  The death of a family man’s beloved wife was an acceptable Victorian excuse for self-slaughter. Letitia’s suicide in contrast was mired in a life shaming not just to herself but to all who had been complicit in it. By no stretch of the imagination could her motives be made to concord with the ideology of “the angel in the house,” even though she did not subject any of her children to a trauma comparable to that visited on Blanchard’s youngest son, who saw him slit his throat.

  In another, unrelated case, L.E.L.’s poetic idealizations of lovelorn female suicides, and the highly publicized reports of her death, may have prompted an act of copycat behavior: that of the servant girl in Kentish Town who poisoned herself with a cocktail of prussic acid and laudanum in 1839, whose death was ruled by the coroner to be a clear-cut instance of self-destruction through love.

  The victim, Elizabeth Abbott, was said by her employers to have been somewhat eccentric and “fond of copying poetry.” What she read is not recorded, but it is highly likely that it included the work of L.E.L., the most popular female poet of the day, whose readership was by then slipping down the social classes as the annuals went mass-market, often through cheap pirated versions. Elizabeth Abbott’s last note, found on the kitchen table, was a semiliterate verse epistle to the object of her unrequited passion, a James Roberts. It was a pathetic echo of the “passionate songs of beating hearts” with which Letitia had made her name:

  It is not the blood of my body i do wish to wear

  But the heart of James Rogers i do wish to tear

  Hopeing he may never sleep or happy be

  Untill he comes & speaks his true sentiments to mee.

  Letitia’s death by prussic acid had been one of the major news stories of 1839. Was this the ultimate act of reader response?

  Within the charmed circle of literary London, from which lower-class readers such as Elizabeth Abbott were excluded, the dead Letitia aroused guilt. A fund was set up to support her destitute mother, who rejected an offer of money from Maclean because she was afraid it would look as though she had been paid off. The subscribers included Letitia’s onetime fiancé John Forster and his friend Charles Dickens. A leading role was played by Edward Bulwer, who told Blanchard shortly after Letitia’s death, “I have heard too much calumny to believe various stories, however plausible, relative to one whom calumny can torment no more; I never, indeed, would listen to them—true or false;…Even if partially true—what excuses! Friendless, alone, with that lively fancy; no mother, no guide, no protection. Who could be more exposed? Who should be more pitied?”

  Lord Normanby also felt some duty to Letitia’s memory. Her death had been one of the first problems he had had to deal with after taking over as colonial secretary in February 1839. Having been privately told by Bulwer that she had a history of attempting suicide, he had ignored Whittington’s letter and shrunk from making any public comment on the matter. He made amends by fixing up a governess job for Letitia’s eldest daughter, Ella, with his family in Paris.

  By the 1840s, census records show that Catherine Landon was living in poverty as the lodger of Thomas Carlyle’s postman in Chelsea, together with Letitia’s former governess Elizabeth Landon. Catherine wrote a series of pathetic letters to Bulwer dating into the 1850s, thanking him for his “donations.” They open a window onto the humiliations of nineteenth-century charity, showing the onetime mistress of Trevor Park reduced to beggary, addressing her benefactor in mawkish tones of self-abnegation, larded with stilted religious clichés.

  “Sweet indeed is the bread I partake of from your bounty,” she told Bulwer; “how thankful I should be to hear you are well God bless Sir Edward, may the kindness you have shown to me and others be returned ten fold to yourself that my prayers are ever offered at the throne of mercy that God will give you comfort.” Her eagerly expressed concern for Bulwer’s health makes it only too patent how afraid she was that he might die, leaving her without funds.

  Catherine was by now in a genuinely destitute position, but her letters show her playing up to the role. Like the poetry of L.E.L., they are a performance. For street-corner improvvisatori, the line between busking and begging was thin. The only time when Catherine’s voice relaxes at all is when Bulwer invites her to stay at his family seat, Knebworth, clearly a Potemkin offer as she was by then too old and infirm to travel. Suddenly, for a moment, the status-aware Mrs. Landon experiences the illusion that she is being treated as an equal.

  Despite his sister’s efforts to procure it for him, Whittington resigned shortly after her death from the secretaryship of the Literary Fund, having been detected in petty embezzlement of around £10. It had turned out to be “not worth having,” an honorary post without a proper salary. However, he remained hopeful that he would find a more prestigious position.

  A fortnight after he heard the news of Letitia’s death, he began bombarding Lady Blessington with requests for patronage. His illustrious uncle, the provost of Worcester College, had died on December 29, 1838. Whittington imagined that with Lady Blessington’s support, he would be a shoo-in as his successor. The failed curate was out of touch with reality. Lady Blessington wrote back that it was beyond her powers. But Whittington continued to bother the countess with demands for the next couple of years.

  Among Lady Blessington’s papers, preserved today in the British Library, is a lock of L.E.L.’s hair. In an effort to cultivate her, Whittington must have handed over the last keepsake Letitia had entrusted to Mrs. Bailey on the night before her death. A part of Letitia’s physical body had become a currency of exchange, even though it did not in the end reap any career benefits for the brother who parted with it.

  However, Whittington did succeed in marrying the Liddiards’ daughter Anne, an outcome that would have pleased Letitia, who had always worried about his prospects. In 1840, Whittington began his married life in a fashionable villa in bohemian St. John’s Wood, presumably funded by his father-in-law. By the time of the 1851 census he had moved to Wales, as perpetual curate for the parish of Slebech, and was the father of three children. He appears to have remained dependent on his father-in-law, as he had once been dependent on Jerdan. Records show that in the 1850s “John William Liddiard of Streatham” brought a suit in chancery against the lord of the manor of Slebech relating to the financing of the parish church and rectory.

  Whittington named his eldest daughter Letitia. On his mother Catherine’s death in 1856, he wrote to Bulwer, formally thanking him for supporting her, and apologizing for his own inability to do so. His tone was that of a pained but entitled gentleman.

  Jerdan did not contribute to the fund set up to support Catherine Landon, although unpublished correspondence shows that Katherine Thomson wrote inviting him to do so. In her letter, Mrs. Thomson explained that “united contributions of several old friends of dear L.E.L.” made £85, but that her own contribution was not secure, as its value had declined from £30 to £15—which suggests that she herself was trying to extricate herself from the commitment. “Any aid would therefore be acceptable,” she concluded.

  Given Jerdan’s own parlous financial situation by this point, he cannot have had much spare cash. The children he kept fathering by Mary Ann Maxwell were a drain on his resources. He did, however, succeed in making some small profit from the dead Letitia. On December 8, 1846, he received confirmation from Richard Bentley that the latter was willing to buy from him the copyrights of Letitia’s novels Romance and Reality, Francesca Carrara, and Ethel Churchill for a mere £25 apiece. Presumably the copyrights had reverted as the original editions had by then sold out, but there is no reason to suppose that Jerdan had the right to them. Legally they should have gone to her next of kin, but it may be that Jerdan had always been regarded informally if not formally as the copyright holder. The initial advances for her last novels had probably been earmarked from the start to pay off his debts t
o Colburn and to Bentley, their publishers, from whom Jerdan had separately borrowed.

  In July 1862, the by then octogenarian Jerdan wrote to Bulwer, revealing how much the past was haunting him. L.E.L. and the world she represented had become ghostly memories:

  When the lamp is flickering out, there are shadowy intermittent periods during which the reflections of its early light and burning assume vivid hues from their nature imperceptible to the world. It is at such times that I am apt to recall the memory of friends who were near and dear to me—much in Communion—and of circumstances once so deeply interesting.

  After his partner Mary Ann died in 1862, in the asylum at Maidstone, Jerdan lived on for another seven years, finally dying himself at the age of eighty-seven in 1869.

  Mr. and Mrs. Hall, who had treated Letitia as their surrogate infant, remained childless. Throughout their long lives they continued to promote their own moral superiority and married bliss. In 1874 they sent out an invitation greeting their “friends” on the occasion of their golden wedding. The card featured photographic portraits of themselves. Dr. and Mrs. Thomson also continued to keep up their place in society. Their grandson married Nancy Mitford.

  After the collapse of their marriage, the Bulwers remained locked in a lifelong war of attrition. Rosina became ever more unstable, drinking all night, sleeping all day, and taking whatever opportunity she could to embarrass her estranged husband, who responded with equal vitriol. He tried to have her committed to a lunatic asylum. She wrote an autobiography called A Blighted Life. Having switched sides to the Tories, Bulwer succeeded in becoming a cabinet minister and continued to write novels. Neither he nor Rosina showed any interest in their two children. Their daughter died young of tuberculosis in lodgings. However, their son managed to shake off his childhood and grew up to become viceroy of India.

  John Forster never said anything in public about his embarrassing youthful engagement to L.E.L. He became Bulwer’s factotum, supporting him in his battle against Rosina. In 1856, he married Eliza, the widow of the shadowy Henry Colburn, who had left an estate valued at around £35,000. Thereupon, he reputedly became “an exacting husband, a despot in his own house.”

  In 1840, two years after Letitia died, Lady Blessington expressed concern that no monument had been erected to her. Writing to Richard Madden on the eve of his departure for his inspection tour of Cape Coast, she confessed that she “entertained such a deep affection for her” that she was prepared to defray the expense herself for any such memorial.

  When, shortly after arriving, Madden duly brought up the issue, Maclean told him that he had in fact already commissioned a handsome marble tablet from England, but had not yet got around to putting it up. It was an index of the widower’s ambivalence to have ordered a memorial stone but kept it in storage. In February 1841, during Madden’s visit, the plaque was finally set up on a wall near Letitia’s grave on the parade ground of Cape Coast Castle. The inscription commissioned by Maclean was composed in formal Latin. It ended:

  Quod spectas, viator, marmor,

  Vanum heu doloris monumentum

  Conjux moerens erexit.

  (What you see, traveler, is a marble,

  Vain, alas, a monument of pain,

  Erected by her doleful spouse.)

  Even on her gravestone, Letitia was defined by the eye of the beholder.

  George Maclean remained governor of Cape Coast Castle until 1843. That year, in a typical official fudge, the British government simultaneously “exonerated and demoted” him: he was absolved of corruption but relieved of his post. In an atmosphere of controversy, it was decided that the only course was to take the Cape Coast settlements under direct central government control. The British imperial project in West Africa thus began. Soon after the new governor, Henry Hill, took up his post in 1844, complaints were made that he had alienated the tribal chiefs and was at loggerheads with the merchants. He had perhaps underestimated the political challenge of the post. Maclean stayed on in the region, but lived only another two years, dying at the age of forty-six in May 1847. He was buried beside Letitia on the parade ground.

  Matthew Forster lived on until 1869. His subsequent career, during which he switched from the Tories to the new Liberal party, was not without incident. In 1857 he was deselected as MP for Berwick on being found “guilty of bribery” after conspicuously offering sweeteners to voters in his constituency.

  More embarrassing was a petty episode which reveals that he was just as capable as Jerdan of effrontery. Traveling to or from his office on the omnibus, he was caught fare-dodging between City Road and Broad Street. As a result he was taken to court and forced to pay not just the fare, but three shillings costs and four shillings to the conductor for loss of time. As a man who at his death left £120,000 in his will, this escapade could hardly have been prompted by necessity. There is perhaps some poetic justice in the fact that in 1852 his butler at Belsize Villa was jailed for stealing silver worth between £200 and £300.

  The two Ashanti princes, whom Maclean had brought to London in 1836, were shown “the moral beauty of England” by their clergyman guide. After several years of being tutored, they finally returned to West Africa in 1841 with a pension of £100 apiece, on the understanding that they would promote British values. One of the men, Kwantabisa, was soon detected in adultery with a tribal chief’s wife. As in England, the penalty was worse for the woman. Kwantabisa was spared, but the chief’s wife was put to death.

  * By coincidence, Madden studied medicine at St. George’s Hospital, and may have been there in 1822 when Letitia wrote her early poem on the subject.

  CHAPTER 15

  Hauntings

  The Victorians wanted to forget L.E.L., and yet she haunted them. She was the scapegoat whom the literary profession had had to eject in order to recast itself in a more respectable mode. An entire culture had been complicit in her rise and fall.

  After her death, her memory was hard to process, not simply because her true story could not openly be told, but because she herself had been so ambiguous, both as a poet and as a person. The friends who took on the management of her posthumous image were of course keen to suppress the scandal about her affair with Jerdan and her self-induced death—to protect their own reputations as much as hers. But they were also unable to let her go because she had been so slippery in life that they had never been able to grasp her fully. She remained unfinished business, her history open-ended. There could be no closure.

  The least restrained of Letitia’s many memoirists was William Jerdan himself. His brief memoir, written for the 1848 reissue of Romance and Reality, offered some new tidbits about Letitia’s family and also some previously unpublished poetic fragments, dating from the very early days of L.E.L., written in the voice of a lovesick girl bewailing the fact that her “ruin’d wall / Lies worn and rent.” The lines, in his view, were worthy to be placed by those of Eloise to Abelard. They had, he coyly revealed, been inspired by a real-life “flirtation.” He went on to explain that the “feelings conjured up in the composition, compared with those inspired by the occasion, were as death from spontaneous combustion, instead of a casual burn from a particle of hot sealing-wax.” Perhaps even the narcissistic Jerdan never believed that Letitia had fallen passionately in love with him when she first traded her body for career advancement.

  Jerdan’s autobiography, published in the 1850s, was yet more indiscreet, boasting of Letitia’s Sapphic warmth, and claiming that he was the only begetter who had inspired all her delicious verses. When it came out, reviewers recoiled from directly engaging with the sections on L.E.L. They were clearly embarrassed by Jerdan’s shamelessness, and wanted to draw a Victorian veil over the literary industry’s sleazy past.

  Yet the rumors continued to arouse fascination, especially among those at the fringes of British literary gossip, keen to enter its penetralium. When posted to Live
rpool as American consul in the 1850s, Nathaniel Hawthorne was intrigued to meet Jerdan. The author of The Scarlet Letter was unable to “see how such a man…attained a vogue in society, as he certainly did,” but he was fascinated by sexual secrets. Hawthorne salaciously cross-examined Jerdan’s neighbor, Francis Bennoch, as to whether there was “any truth in the scandalous rumours in reference to Jerdan and L.E.L.” Bennoch replied that he thought there had been “great looseness of behaviour,” but that it had “fallen short of the one ultimate result,” saying that he had been assured by Jerdan “on his honour” that “L.E.L. had never yielded her virtue to him.” However, it is also on record that Bennoch knew about Fred Stuart, Jerdan’s son by Letitia, and probably about the other children too. Bennoch was teasing Hawthorne, just as L.E.L. had once teased her readers.

  It was not only in nonfiction memoirs—including those by Blanchard, the Halls, Katherine Thomson, Grantley Berkeley, and A. F. Chorley—that Letitia lived on. Her self-fictionalizing tendencies proved contagious. In 1857, Anna Maria Hall’s novel A Woman’s Story transformed L.E.L. into the mysterious poet H.L., filling the tale with personal details about Letitia’s family background, but making the heroine sexually pure, targeted by a blackmailer over her own illegitimacy, not over having illegitimate children.

  Anna Maria’s fictional take was personally motivated, but L.E.L. had so long existed “in others’ breath” that her image continued to replicate at the hands of writers who had had little or no contact with her. In 1847, for example, George Eliot’s future lover G. H. Lewes created an unsympathetic portrait of a poetess with distinct echoes of L.E.L. in his novel Rose, Blanche and Violet (the title was taken from George Sand’s Rose et Blanche). Lewes was probably too young to have met Letitia personally, since he was born in 1817, but their paths could conceivably have crossed before she left London in 1838, as he began his ascent of the literary greasy pole while still in his teens. However, he later became intimate with both Daniel Maclise and John Forster, who would have been able to tell him much about her in private. As Isaiah Berlin once reputedly remarked, a “secret” is something you tell to one person at a time.