A NOTE ON MANUSCRIPT SOURCES
L.E.L. was a poet of print culture, and surprisingly few holograph manuscripts of her literary works have emerged. In contrast to, say, Emily Brontë, who wrote for herself and copied her poetry into treasured private notebooks, L.E.L. appears to have made no effort to preserve her originals. Given her dependence on Jerdan, and afterward on Whittington, to “correct” her manuscripts, it is possible that some of them arrived at the printer’s in another’s hand.
As a result, she is a literary figure who seems posthumously to rebuke the ideal of authenticity we tend to associate with the actual handwriting of poets on paper: the sense, not entirely misplaced, that the original manuscript is somehow infused with the aura of the writer, whose physical traces it bears, and can offer insights into the moment of literary production. The historical Letitia Landon thus remains symbolically fugitive, the touch of her hand forever out of reach. Even the texts of many of Letitia Landon’s most important private letters exist today only in their printed forms, as reproduced by memoirists such as Laman Blanchard and William Jerdan.
The Liddiard family papers, in the private collection of David Burgess, a descendant, include not only Maria Liddiard’s diary, but two letters from Cape Coast Castle in Letitia’s own hand and the manuscripts of her verse epigraphs to Ethel Churchill. Unpublished manuscripts by others consulted for this book include Jerdan’s papers in the Bodleian Library (including letters to him from Letitia’s mother, Whittington, and the Thomsons), and the papers of Lady Blessington in the New York Public Library (including Whittington’s pathetic requests for patronage). The British Library provides more Blessington papers (including the lock of L.E.L.’s hair), as well as the surviving accounts of the Literary Gazette, the papers of Thomas Hill, and those of the Royal Literary Fund. Edward Bulwer Lytton’s papers at the Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, located in County Hall, Hertford, include the letters from Landon to Bulwer transcribed by F. J. Sypher in the appendix to his 2004 biography, but also many other unpublished letters, including some from Laman Blanchard, William Jerdan, and Letitia’s mother, Catherine Landon. The Colonial Office files relating to George Maclean and Cape Coast are housed in the National Archives in Kew. The letters of the artist Thomas Sully, housed at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, are now available in transcription online.
One of the great paradoxes of Letitia Landon is that many of the facts of her private life are only accessible via public records, such as birth, marriage, and death records, wills, and census returns. Lodged in the London Metropolitan Archives and the National Archives, these can now also be accessed online at www.ancestry.co.uk.
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