As a cash-strapped minor, Letitia was in a far more perilous position. Out of feminine modesty, she declined Richards’s request that she inscribe a memorial volume of Keats’s 1817 poems with a tribute of her own. She must have been afraid of appearing too pushy. The volume still exists, but the tributes are all by male keepers of the flame. Although Cockneys were politically liberal, they had long since dispensed with Wollstonecraftian ideas of gender equality. “I have an utter aversion to Bluestockings. I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means,” wrote William Hazlitt in 1821.
Letitia registered her resistance to her situation by playing her hyperfeminine role with over-the-top extravagance. Her stylized poetic theatrics were comparable to the virtuoso operatic performances of the great bel canto sopranos she admired, such as Henriette Sontag and Giuditta Pasta (her memoirist Emma Roberts, in a somewhat unfortunate turn of phrase, described how Letitia used to “kneel down in the front of the box…as she gave her whole soul to Pasta”). Sontag she regarded as having the “finest natural organ modulated by first rate science,” but she preferred those singers, like Pasta, who took technical risks in pursuit of creating emotional effects.
Mutually complicit in the performativity of L.E.L., Letitia and Jerdan shared a love of the theater in all its forms, benefiting from the Gazette’s endless supply of complimentary reviewers’ tickets. However, his tastes were more lowbrow than hers. He had a particular penchant for female freak shows, such as the Sicilian fairy, only nineteen and a half inches tall. He caused a stir at the exhibition when he picked the fairy up and kissed her, expressing amusement when she wiped her diminutive cheek in disgust. In 1822, the Gazette also covered the exhibition in Bond Street of Tono Maria, the scarified “Venus of South America.” She had 100 scars, one for each act of adultery. It was said that her tribe would allow 104 such acts, but would kill her when she got to 105.
If Jerdan was the showman, Letitia was his female freak, the “infant genius” from whom sexually suggestive poetry poured in such abundance. How many adulterous scars (“The scar it left I may not heal”) would she be able to sustain before her own tribe turned on her?
The relationship between female freaks and their impresarios was notoriously problematic. After the South African “Hottentot Venus,” Sarah Baartman, was exhibited in London in 1810, anxious abolitionists protested and attempted to liberate her through the courts. They had to retreat after she testified that she was acting of her own free will and was being paid for her appearances. How “free” she really was remains a disturbing historical condundrum. Letitia was English, white, and educated, but her frequent allusions to female poets as harem slaves suggest that, as a disillusioned liberal, she conceived her own situation as less than free.
Letitia’s mother had tacitly encouraged her to flirt with Jerdan at the start. She turned a blind eye as long as there were no physical consequences. But when the inevitable occurred, and Letitia became pregnant, Catherine could not cope.
Memoirists refer obliquely to a mysterious froideur arising between mother and daughter. Elizabeth Barrett complained on reading Blanchard’s biography that there was only one letter from Letitia to her mother and that it was oddly cold. In a letter to Bulwer, Katherine Thomson privately admitted that Mrs. Landon blamed Mr. Jerdan for the rift. The real cause was almost certainly Letitia’s pregnancy. On discovering it, Catherine, who was already ashamed of her own illegitimacy, threw her daughter out.
Letitia never forgave her mother, although she later supported her financially. Her poem The Zenana, published in the 1830s, features the honor killing of an Indian princess, who creeps out of the harem for a tryst with her lover. As she “runs over the grass, half-woman half child,” we can almost see Letitia exercising in the garden with her hoop. The heroine’s mother cannot forgive her dishonored daughter. She demands that she commit ritual suicide, and stands over her as she drinks “the death cup.”
Real life was less luridly melodramatic. Rather than swallowing poison, Letitia was taken in by her grandmother Mrs. Bishop, whose own sexual history made her more tolerant than her socially anxious daughter. Mrs. Bishop appears to have smiled on Jerdan and to have facilitated the continuance of the affair. When she died, she left him her gold watch as a memento. Her estate went to Letitia but Catherine was left nothing.
Exactly when Letitia became pregnant can only be dated by piecing together disparate clues. We know from the baptismal record that this first baby was christened at St. James’s Church, Paddington, on April 4, 1824. Her parents presented themselves as “Laetitia and William Stuart,” using Jerdan’s mother’s maiden name as an alias. They called their daughter Ella, after their other joint creation, “L.E.L.”
As there was no legal requirement to register births at the time, there is no record of exactly when Ella was born. According to family tradition among her descendants, her birthday was on December 31. But her age was registered as eighty-seven when she died in Melbourne, Australia, on July 10, 1910, suggesting that she must have been born in an earlier month in 1823.
Ella’s baptismal record. Her surname, “Stuart,” was Jerdan’s mother’s maiden name. He habitually adopted that alias in public records relating to his illegitimate offspring.
As Anna Maria Hall put it in her novel about L.E.L., A Woman’s Story, “clouded births are seldom correctly dated.” Numerous clues conspire to indicate that Ella was actually born in September 1823. That date was in fact alleged in a scurrilous press report of 1826, in which Letitia was said to have given birth in “Canterbury of all places,” to where Jerdan had allegedly conveyed her for that purpose. It is corroborated by an unlikely source: a surviving letter from Letitia to the “sober Quaker” Bernard Barton, written in September 1823, and dated from Mrs. Bishop’s home at 131 Sloane Street, where Letitia was later to be found receiving callers.
On the surface, the letter is all polite platitude. Letitia apologizes to Barton for having been so slow in responding to his last letter of April 15, explaining that she has been unwell. “For the first two or three months after your last letter writing was equally painful and fatiguing,” she explained; “then as you will perceive from the date we moved into another house, where we are hardly…settled even now.” The unspecified ill health was in all likelihood her pregnancy and its attendant stresses, the move the result of the row with her mother.
Following the Landon women’s eviction from Grove House in 1820, Catherine wrote to Jerdan from 138 Sloane Street. This was presumably where Mrs. Bishop, recorded as a long-term Sloane Street resident, was then living. Catherine came encumbered with two daughters and the governess. That Letitia was sent off to Bristol suggests how cramped the lodgings were for them all.
However, after the row, 138 was given up. Letitia and her grandmother appear to have taken new lodgings together a few doors down at 131, while Catherine and her younger daughter, Elizabeth Jane, moved to Halkin Street a little to the east of Sloane Street, probably with the governess in tow. At least that is the address on the burial record for Elizabeth Jane, who died of consumption, aged fourteen, in September 1825. Letitia’s split with her mother must have been total until then. She later recalled her shock at her sister’s emaciated appearance on her deathbed, as she had not seen her for so long.
In her letter to Barton, Letitia mentions in passing that she has only just returned from a stay at the seaside, though “few things are to my taste more tiresome than a sea excursion, mine was to Ramsgate, of all dull places surely the most dull.” The visit was undoubtedly more interesting than she let on. Ramsgate is near Canterbury, where Letitia was later alleged to have given birth. It was just the place to convalesce. The poem L.E.L. published in the Gazette the day before Ella’s christening records what sounds like a significant seaside visit:
Do you recall one autumn night,
We stood by the sea-side,
And
marked a little vessel tost
Upon the foaming tide?
Letitia’s letter to Barton is bland and smooth. However, the unusual seal she used to close it tells another story. Pressed into the wax is the image of an all-seeing eye. It was a private joke at the myopic Barton’s expense.
A birth in September 1823 would have meant that Letitia’s pregnancy would have become apparent the previous spring. She was clearly too “ill” to respond to Barton’s letter of April 15. Her poetry in the Gazette shows an unusual departure that month. Normally, her heroines die of love. But the “dramatic scene” she published on April 12, 1823, features a fallen woman who lives on to give birth to a “child / Of sorrow and of shame.” The piece is loosely inspired by Lover’s Vows, the racy play featured in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which involves a transgressive affair between a young woman and a tutor.
In May, by which time Letitia’s pregnancy would have been a fait accompli, she published her most flamboyantly morbid poem to date: the love-hate lyric “Twine not red roses for me.” The poetess announces that she will die “for love,” and in doing so wreak her revenge on her lover, leaving him “drooping” like a fallen tree over her grave, his potency sapped. Suicide was the clichéd response to the dishonor of an illegitimate pregnancy, as demonstrated in real life by Harriet Shelley. Letitia made her surrogate, L.E.L., threaten suicide, so that she would not have to do so herself.
Letitia’s pregnancy came at an inconvenient moment in her career. She had been contributing week after week to the Gazette for over a year, but the “mystery poetess” strategy could not hold out indefinitely. Jerdan could not count on L.E.L.’s readership remaining “for ever panting,” like the lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn. She would have to raise her game by publishing a book and appearing in person.
The Improvisatrice, which launched her to stardom in June 1824, was in fact written “a year” before she saw the proof sheets, that is, in the spring of 1823. Her pregnancy is the only possible explanation for the delay in publication. The infant genius could hardly be launched on society as a literary lion with a swelling belly.
The enforced delay scuppered some extravagant publicity plans. It is likely that the launch of The Improvisatrice was originally intended to coincide with the unveiling at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1823 of a new picture called L’Improvisatrice by Henry William Pickersgill (1782–1875), depicting a sultry female minstrel playing the lute in Italian peasant dress (see plates).
Pickersgill was one of the most skillful and prolific portraitists of his generation, with a sideline in exotic genre images of female subjects, such as The Oriental Nosegay, featuring a melancholy harem beauty (made the subject of a “poetical illustration” by L.E.L., 1825). Frequently puffed in the Gazette during the 1820s, Pickersgill later made two “fancy portraits” of Letitia herself, each in a different theatrical costume. His L’Improvisatrice, now in a private collection, is almost certainly an earlier variant on that theme, possibly the unspecified early Pickersgill portrait of Letitia that Blanchard refers to as having been made in “1822 or 1823”: the first glimpse of her.
A work on the cusp between portraiture and genre painting, it is as much a fantasy as a realistic portrayal of an individual, and exactly how an artist would have portrayed an imaginary female Byron in 1823. The ethnic costume echoes Byron’s portrait in Albanian dress by Thomas Phillips, already iconic by that time, while the full-profile pose recalls Richard Westall’s equally celebrated portrait of Byron. Despite her ethnic attire, the sitter is not quite a peasant. Instead of the traditional Italian folded headscarf, she is wearing a turban: the liberal female intellectual’s headgear of choice, popularized by Madame de Staël. A few dark ringlets—artificially curled?—escape from the scarlet cloth she has wrapped nonchalantly around her head. This is in fact a masquerade costume, owing as much to London stylishness as to indigenous Italian traditions. A fashion plate from Ackermann’s Repository of 1819 shows a lady playing the guitar in a similarly shaped headdress.
The postponement of Letitia’s launch must have been irritating to Pickersgill if he had counted on joint publicity. But he must have been mollified by the fact that L’Improvisatrice was instantly sold in exhibition—to a Gazette contact, the second Marquess of Landsdowne, who may have been the illegitimate half brother of Henry Colburn.
Letitia may already have suspected she was pregnant by the time she was sitting for Pickersgill and, contemporaneously, writing the long title poem for The Improvisatrice. She completed it in “less than five weeks.” Her manic drive always intensified with her pregnancies, as if a book would make up for the baby she would have to give away. But her increased productivity was also a response to the fear that Jerdan might abandon her if she did not offer him further feats of poetic prowess.
His eye was already wandering, probably in reaction to his mistress’s inconvenient pregnancy. In 1823, he began to showcase the work of another teenage poetess in the Gazette, Louisa Costello. Louisa chose the irritatingly egotistical initials “M.E.” under which to publish her romantic effusions. On October 4, 1823, not long after Letitia had given birth to Ella, “M.E.” and “L.E.L.” rubbed shoulders in the Original Poetry column, both with love lyrics of unrequited torment. However, Letitia clearly succeeded in roping Jerdan in. Louisa Costello’s contributions to the Gazette dried up, and Jerdan joined his young mistress at Ella’s christening in April.
There is no evidence that Letitia ever saw Ella again. The baby must have been farmed out to foster care, as often happened with illegitimate children, who were frequently referred to euphemistically as “orphans.” However, family letters show that Jerdan was in touch with Ella in later life. As an old man of “eighty-four and upward,” he sent his “dearest Ella” an inscribed copy of his recently published autobiography.
Despite her dubious origins, Ella grew up to defy the odds. In adulthood, she earned her living as a governess, before emigrating to Australia in 1852, when she was twenty-five. She married the ship’s captain, James Gregson, whom she met on the voyage out, and went on to bring up five children while running a girls’ school in Melbourne. She enjoyed riding to hounds but was said by her children to have had particularly strict Victorian standards of morality.
Writing to Ella on the eve of her departure, Jerdan wished her a “prosperous and happy journey into the distant world to which she is now going,” expressing the hope that “the new generation in the next few years may lead to many acceptable recognitions when I am in the grave.” Ella’s Australian family, however, later recalled that she had left for the colonies with her father’s voice “ringing in her ears that she would never be welcomed back.”
CHAPTER 5
Fame
From her first printed poem, “Rome,” onward, the rhyming words “fame” and “shame” recur again and again in Letitia’s work. Her career was a tightrope act between the two. A hint of scandal could boost celebrity and sales. Too much could kill them. With the publication of The Improvisatrice in June 1824, both the potential rewards and the potential risks increased.
The title poem drew on recent literary trends to fashion a Frankenstein’s monster of a best seller. It was written in the first-person voice of an unnamed Italian Renaissance poetess, or “Improvisatrice,” who is feted by audiences of adoring Florentines but unhappy in love. Readers who had recognized Byron in Childe Harold were primed to identify the character with the writer. As the title implied, Letitia was improvising the new identity glimpsed in the Pickersgill picture of 1823.
The real-life Italian tradition of the poetic improviser went back to the Renaissance, and enjoyed a revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The male improvvisatore or female improvvisatrice (the word has a double “v” in Italian) occupied an ambiguous space between the performing and creative arts. Their oral riffs, sometimes on themes sprung on them by audience members, were usually accompan
ied by music on the lute or guitar. Some were low-life buskers on the street. Others were high-class salon artistes, who impressed with the erudite literary allusions they could weave into their acts. The most celebrated could sell out theaters. In 1778, the virtuoso improvvisatrice Corilla Olimpica was crowned poet laureate at a special ceremony at the Capitol in Rome, although the accolade was not without controversy, given her gender, her actress status, and her reputation for taking lovers.
During the Romantic period, the phenomenon attracted widespread international interest. Wilhelm Müller—the poet of Schubert’s Winterreise—compared himself to an improvvisatore. So did Hans Christian Andersen, whose first successful book was the teasingly semiautobiographical The Improvisatore, or Life in Italy (1835). Mary Shelley, who witnessed the phenomenon in Italy, thought that the improvisers channeled divine inspiration. Byron was equally fascinated to hear the celebrated exponent Tommaso Sgricci perform in Milan in 1816, but, in contrast, cynically set him down as a poseur.
England was already in the grip of improvising fever by the time Letitia leveraged it for her best seller. Thomas Lovell Beddoes had published his The Improvisatore (a poem in “three fyttes”) in 1820. Around the same time, the Italian émigrés Ugo Foscolo and Gabriele Rossetti (father of the painter Dante Gabriel and the poet Christina) began giving lectures in London on the Italian literary imagination. In March 1823, probably just before Letitia began writing The Improvisatrice, the Literary Gazette reported on a polyglot “Dutch improvisator,” who could “pour forth a torrent of original ideas and images clothed in the most beautiful poetic diction” at a moment’s notice in a range of languages. It was another challenge, like the test Jerdan had set her the previous year.
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