And I,—I felt immortal, for my brain
Was drunk and mad with the first draught of fame.
However, female fame inevitably brought with it the risk of female shame. In aiming at Sappho’s glory, Letitia had flown too high.
CHAPTER 6
Shame
In his 1841 biography, Laman Blanchard could barely bring himself to mention the rumors that now began to spread about Letitia, leaving their contents unspecified and alluding to them with “a reluctance which will at least ensure brevity.” His oblique account makes them sound like vague whispers in corners. So it comes as a surprise to discover that the gossip was not only convincing and circumstantial, but printed in the recently founded Sunday Times.
On March 5, 1826, that newspaper published a report under the headline “Sapphics and Erotics,” which resolved the equivocations of “L.E.L.” into a storyline of explosive simplicity. It revealed that there was one person for whom the voyeur fantasies of the poetess’s readers had indeed become a reality: the Jerdans’ charwoman. She had spied on the adulterous couple in flagrante through a slit in the study blinds at Grove House and gone on to sell her story.
Neither party was overtly named, but the identities of the “well-known English Sappho” and the “literary man” were obvious to anyone in London publishing circles. The article went on to allege that Letitia had given birth to a baby in September 1823, although it misreported Ella’s sex, calling the child a “young Terpander” after the male Greek poet. It also gave a lively account of the matrimonial fracas that, according to the charwoman, had occurred in the house of Jerdan after she informed her mistress of what she had seen. The story ran as follows:
A well-known English Sappho, and like her Greek prototype famous for the amorous glow of her fancy, has just been detected in a faux pas with a literary man, the father of several children. The discovery happened when the placens, or rather “complacens uxor,” and brats were sent off à l’ordinaire last September to the waterside, and was effected by means of a charwoman, who did for the family. (Indeed she did; but we much wonder how literatuli and blues can employ such marplot reviewers.) Observing, that as often as the youthful Sappho arrived at the embowered recess of Love and the Muses, the blinds on the ground-floor study were pulled down, and the shutters pulled up; and wondering how books could be read in the dark, this female busybody stationed herself so ingeniously on one of the Uplands of the Suburban Parnassus as to see the whole poetical mystery, by which “hearts throb with hearts” and “souls with souls unite.” This she expounded to the wife, whose face immediately exhibited an “intensity of blue,” sufficient to have made anyone a first-rate blue-stocking: “fair was foul and foul was fair”: chaos was come again: and every link in the chain of Platonic friendship was broken for ever. Other truths then came out, from which it appeared that the “virgin gentleness, the orphan muse” had honoured her…Phaon with a chubby young Terpander, or son of a lyre, two years before, and at Canterbury of all places, whither the gay deceiver cantered with her (so he gave out) on his way to Margate, for the purpose of seeing his better half and seven fractions, like a good spouse, back to London.
The Sunday Times exposé, “Sapphics and Erotics.”
Oral gossip was one thing, but factual revelations in the public prints were quite another, a shibboleth exploited by the blackmailing courtesan Harriette Wilson in her salacious kiss-and-tell memoirs of 1825. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Maria Rushworth becomes a social pariah when details of her adultery with Henry Crawford are published in a gossip column, courtesy of her mother-in-law’s maid. According to Henry’s sister Mary, the affair could have been “hushed up” and continued ad infinitum had not Maria given the maid the power of exposure by her careless talk. Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram are horrified to discover that, in Mary’s view, Maria’s only mistake is to have been found out.
Today, the charwoman could have used her phone to take a photograph through the gap in the study blinds, but no such ocular proof was possible in 1826. The story could be denied. That is what Letitia did next.
She tactically chose to issue her rebuttal through a private rather than a public channel, in a letter to her friend Mrs. Thomson, a doctor’s wife who was known, according to Blanchard, for her high sense of moral rectitude. Undoubtedly composed with a wider audience in mind than its named recipient, the letter was printed in Blanchard’s 1841 biography as proof of Letitia’s innocence, and subsequently taken at face value by later commentators.
Letitia couched her self-defense in the shape of a formal apologia for the professional woman writer. As such, her letter is a rhetorical tour de force. But though it spoke many truths about the struggles facing female authors in the 1820s, it was also of necessity a masterpiece of dissimulation.
She began by proclaiming her commitment to her craft in the face of the male-dominated press, which had built her up and was now gleefully knocking her down:
I must begin with the only subject—the only thing in the world I really feel an interest in—my writings. It is not vanity when I say, their success is their fault. When my Improvvisatrice [sic] came out, nobody discovered what is now alleged against it. I did not take up a review, a magazine, a newspaper but if it named my book it was to praise “the delicacy,” “the grace,” “the purity of feminine feeling” it displayed….But success is an offence not to be forgiven. To every petty author, whose works have scarce made his name valuable as an autograph, or whose unsold editions load his bookseller’s shelves—I am a subject of envy—and what is envy but a name for hatred?
She then went on to throw the ball back into her critics’ court, claiming that only the dirty-minded could find anything indecent in her work: “With regard to the immoral or improper tendency of my productions, I can only say that it is not my fault if there are minds which, like negroes, cast a dark shadow on a mirror, however clear and pure in itself.” Behind her casually racist simile lurked the West Indian dandy’s slave, smirking in the glass behind his self-lionizing master as he pretends to simple-minded innocence.
“You must forgive this,” Letitia continued, rising to an emotional peroration. “I do not often speak of my own works, and I may say this is the first time I have ever done so boastingly; but I must be allowed to place the opinions of the many in opposition to the envious and illiberal cavillings of the few.” Only then, as if in a postscript, did she come to the point.
“As to the report you named,” she wrote in allusion to The Sunday Times, “I know not which is greatest—the absurdity or the malice.” She admitted she was “very much indebted to the gentleman, for much of kindness,” refusing even to name Jerdan, but only in a professional sense as her agent and editor. “But it is not on this ground,” she went on, “that I express my surprise at so cruel a calumny, but actually on that of our slight intercourse….He is in the habit of frequently calling on his way into town, and unless it is on a Sunday afternoon, which is almost his only leisure time for looking over letters, manuscripts, etc., five or ten minutes is the usual time of his visit.”
By some sleight of hand, Letitia managed to present as negligible what sounds like rather frequent contact. Jerdan came to see her at 131 Sloane Street on a near-daily basis on his way to work. In addition he spent his Sunday afternoons with her—plenty of time in which to conduct an affair while her sympathetic grandmother made herself scarce.
The letter is all the more intriguing because its recipient, Katherine Thomson, was not just any respectable doctor’s wife, but the wife of Letitia’s own doctor, Anthony Todd Thomson. With a fashionable practice in Sloane Street, he had attended her since her “girlish days” and was her “constant medical friend and advisor.”
It beggars belief that Letitia could have hidden her pregnancy from her own doctor. Dr. Thomson certainly had obstetric experience. In 1810 he delivered the future novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, wh
ose aunt was his first wife. He was also, quite literally, in Jerdan’s pay. Since January 1824 he had been the Gazette’s regular medical columnist. The column was initiated shortly after Ella’s birth in the last quarter of 1823, perhaps as a quid pro quo for discreet medical attentions to the editor’s mistress during her first pregnancy.
* * *
—
In her 1837 novel Ethel Churchill, Letitia compared the personal physician to a confessor priest. How much she openly confided in her friend Katherine, Dr. Thomson’s much younger second wife, is more debatable. In the era of demi-connaissance, respectable ladies had to distance themselves from fallen women, even to the extent of pretending not to notice their swelling pregnancies. Letitia’s letter was self-defensive, but it may have also been designed to protect Mrs. Thomson from overt knowledge that might have impacted on the latter’s reputation.
Dr. Anthony Todd Thomson, Letitia’s personal physician
Letitia was certainly careful to put Mrs. Thomson in her debt. She flattered her to the hilt in the spring of 1826 when her first book, a biography of Henry VIII, came out: “Already I see you a regular lioness. ‘Have you got Mrs Thomson’s autograph? I am sure you will be at my party when I tell you Mrs Thomson is to be there—she is the great historianess, a most charming delightful woman.’ ” Letitia was no doubt responsible for the glowing review of Mrs. Thomson’s book that then appeared in the Gazette in May 1826. Later that year, the Gazette also published a blistering attack on a book entitled On Hypocrisy, which attempted to expose and excoriate the double standards of the day. The reviewer—probably Letitia herself—mocked the author for his determination to call a spade a spade. She herself was dependent on hypocrisy for her social survival.
However, Letitia signed off her letter to Mrs. Thomson with a sentence that spoke more truth than it openly confided: “No one knows but myself what I have had to contend with; but this is what I have no right to trouble you with.” At the time she wrote this, in June 1826, she almost certainly had more to hide than even The Sunday Times had alleged.
So much obfuscation surrounds this period of Letitia’s life that documentation is hard to come by. Yet what clues survive point to the probability that by March 5, when the Sunday Times exposé was published, she was pregnant for a second time. By June, when she penned her letter to Mrs. Thomson, she was either about to give birth or had just done so.
That Ella had a brother, Fred, who shared her parents and her surname Stuart, is not in doubt. An undated letter from Fred to his “dear sister” Ella, written in adulthood, survives. Yet his date of birth is yet more clouded since he has no extant baptismal record. When Ella was christened, Letitia was still the nameless melodist. By 1826 she was a literary lion whose private life was being raked over by the press. It would have been prudent to keep any new “child of shame” out of public records.
On October 7, 1826, The Wasp, a short-lived satirical periodical, claimed that the previously sylphlike Letitia had “in the course of a few months acquired so perceptible a degree of embonpoint, as to induce her kind friend Jerdan to recommend a change of air, lest her health and strength should be affected. She followed his advice, and strange to say, such was the effect of even two months’ absence from Brompton, that she was returned as thin and poetical as ever!” A week later, The Wasp went on, charging “L.E.L. (alias Letitia Languish)” with having “written a sentimental elegy on the Swellings of Jordan. She pleaded that the flood had gone off; but the plea was overruled; and she was ordered into the country to gather fruit, and to deliver an account thereof on her return.”
During 1826, Letitia is indeed on record as having spent much time out of London. She paid two long visits to Aberford, the Yorkshire home of her uncle the Reverend James Landon, the less successful brother of the dean of Exeter. The first stay occurred around Christmas and New Year of 1825–26, the second between July and October. But the rest of her movements that year are hard to trace, to the extent that it seems that a move is afoot to cover her tracks.
It is not clear where Letitia was in “June” when she wrote to Mrs. Thomson. She was probably out of town giving birth to Fred. Her next letter to Mrs. Thomson was written in July from Aberford, where she had evidently only just arrived, as she described her coach journey. She apologized to Mrs. Thomson for not having called on her in London before departing for Yorkshire: “I had intended, my dear Mrs Thomson taking my chance of spending Monday evening with you, but my cousin’s return home with me, and the beneficial effect of leaving everything to the last, prevented my going out.”
Clearly, Letitia had been away from home somewhere else with her “cousin” before returning to London to pack hurriedly and set off for Aberford. The cousin she mentions can only have been her former governess Elizabeth Landon, who had initially pushed her in Jerdan’s direction, and was now, it seems likely, dealing with its consequences by taking Letitia away for her confinement.
The attack of The Wasp at the beginning of October resulted in Letitia’s staying out of town longer than she had intended. Instead of going straight home from Aberford, in October she traveled from there to Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, where she remained until the end of the year, apparently staying with a local “Mr Ashwell,” whom she mentions as having driven her to the high road to pick up the London coach when she finally returned to Brompton in December. As the name Ashwell does not reappear in her correspondence, he may simply have provided her with paid lodgings.
Letitia’s son Fred Stuart is the most enigmatic of her children. As with Ella, it is not known how he was brought up, but a hint exists in the 1841 census. It lists an “Alfred Stewart,” aged fifteen (i.e., born c. 1826), as pupil at a boarding school in Uxbridge, then a village just outside London. In his autobiography, Jerdan mentions that one of his schoolboy acquaintances was an English lad who had come to Scotland under the care of a tutor who was the former headmaster of a school in Uxbridge. Jerdan may have remembered the place when looking for somewhere to send his natural son by L.E.L.
Whether or not the “Alfred Stewart” of the 1841 census was in fact Fred Stuart, it is all too likely that Letitia’s son would have been sent to boarding school. Anyone who has read David Copperfield or Jane Eyre will shiver at the thought of such pre-Victorian establishments. Some, chillingly, boasted “no holidays” in contemporary newspaper advertisements, an obvious advantage to parents keen to get inconvenient offspring out of the way.
When Fred grew up, Jerdan “exported” him to the West Indies, as he also did with one of his legitimate sons, the latter of whom died in Jamaica. In the 1850s, the increasingly indiscreet editor told his neighbor Francis Bennoch that Fred was “going on prosperously in Trinidad and his sister Ella so well married in Melbourne as to be able to send him £50 to clear off early settling scores.” Fred’s one surviving letter, written to Ella, offers a less rosy picture. He describes himself as “penniless and homeless” and suffering from “bad West Indian fever.” In Trinidad, he apparently tried to pursue journalism, but unsuccessfully. He seems to have married and had a child, since a Victorian photograph survives in the family archive of a pitifully sickly-looking little girl named “Emily Ella Stuart,” taken in a Port of Spain studio. After that, Fred and his emaciated little daughter disappear from the historical record.
Since the triumphant high point of the spring of 1825, when her portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy, Letitia had undergone a series of traumatic experiences. In September 1825, she had seen her sister on her deathbed, and had been forced to reestablish contact with her mother for the first time since their estrangement. That same month, her lover’s wife had been apprised of the affair by the charwoman, causing a marital row, with whatever consequences for Letitia that involved. Soon afterward she discovered she was pregnant again.
Then in March came the blow of The Sunday Times. It was followed by a private tragedy in the Jerdan family that would
inevitably have impacted Letitia’s relationship with her lover. On April 25, William and Frances’s youngest daughter, Georgiana, died, aged sixteen months. Their devastation is suggested by the unusually full death notice Jerdan inserted in the press, and by the fact that it was one of the very few family events he referred to in his autobiography. We can only surmise what Jerdan felt about Letitia’s pregnancy in the light of losing a beloved legitimate child. The same goes for Letitia’s feelings about his public expressions of grief for Georgiana, when her own baby would have to be given up.
Mrs. Jerdan, meanwhile, had little choice other than to be complaisant until humiliated by the charwoman into putting on a display of anger. Even after that, Letitia appears to have been accepted as a part of the family setup. When Dickens’s future father-in-law George Hogarth wrote to Jerdan in 1829, “with a delightful recollection of the great kindness we received from you when in London,” he particularly asked to be remembered to “Miss Landon.”
However, Jerdan’s 1831 short story “The Sleepless Woman” points to marital tensions. An exercise in ludicrous light gothic, it features a tormented young baron who drowns himself in a lake to escape the permanently open eyes of his wife. It is, the author boasts, an “ingenious allegory”: “if a jealous wife can’t drive a man out of his mind and into a lake, we do not know what can!”
Astonishingly, through all this, the literary partnership between Letitia and Jerdan carried on as if nothing had happened. While no longer contributing at the extraordinary rate of 1822–24, Letitia continued to write plaintive love lyrics for the Gazette, marked by her characteristic combination of emotional acuity and narrative vagueness. Some of the poems invited dangerous interpretations from readers now primed more than ever by The Sunday Times to find personal import in the thwarted love scenarios imaged in her verse.
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