It was not until just after The Wasp fired its first sally on October 7 that her contributions to the Gazette finally dried up, not to resume again until the start of 1827. By coincidence, L.E.L.’s last poem of 1826 was published on the very same date, October 14, as The Wasp’s second assault, with its satiric reference to “Letitia Languish” gathering “fruit.” Her poem included a fruit image that was perhaps too embarrassingly apropos even for her and Jerdan:
Leaves grow green to fall,
Flowers grow fair to fade,
Fruits grow ripe to rot—
All but for passing made.
Katherine Thomson later claimed that Jerdan considered bringing a libel action against The Sunday Times. This is unlikely given the facts. It would have been as self-defeating as Oscar Wilde’s action against the Marquess of Queensberry later in the century. It was not until December 30, 1826, that the editor finally responded to the allegations, on the back page of the Gazette:
When we can find nothing better to entertain readers with, and not till then, will we notice the contemptible writers who (we are told and in a few instances have seen) find a constant exercise for their eminent talents in attacking the Literary Gazette. Should they ever succeed in attracting any public attention by their lively and entertaining malignity, we shall begin to think it time to change our plan, and contribute our share to the general fund of intelligence, instruction, and improvement by devoting our columns to interesting personal squabbles and abuse of distinguished contemporaries, instead of the dull subjects of literature, science and art.
In the same issue, he gave front-page prominence to a review of a new book called A Treatise on the Law of Libel and Slander that dismissed lawyers as pests and made the case for free comment. It was a disingenuous attempt to make it look as though it was the editor’s principled devotion to press freedom that lay behind his failure to sue, not the inconvenient truth that the facts were against him.
In contrast to her real-life situation, Letitia’s letters to her female friends written that summer sparkle with brittle wit. It is as if there is no communication at all between the manic Miss Landon and the melancholic L.E.L., for whom fruits rot and flowers fade. After the serious and considered self-apologia she wrote to Katherine Thomson in June, her epistolary tone returned to high-spirited archness.
In July, having just arrived at her uncle’s in Aberford, she joked to Mrs. Thomson that the strangers she met in the coach had not “the slightest idea of my original sin, no thought of my taint of blue”—as if bluestocking intellectualism, not a sexual fall, were the only shocking thing about her. Her letters from Aberford to Rosina Wheeler and Emma Roberts are positively bubbly, although at times the comedy seems forced.
In August, for example, she made a labored pun on ants/aunts in a letter to Rosina:
We have past divers rural days, dining in woods &c. to my taste more picturesque than pleasant, while a chair or a table are to [be] had, I shall infinitely prefer them in their rosewood or mahogany shapes, to making a chair of a stump, a table of my knees and par consequence a table of my frock, much as I like my relations, I prefer taking my dinner with any than my ants.
But she was on form when she transformed a minor eye infection and a bonnet disaster into a major drama:
A heavy misfortune befell me the other day—one of those misfortunes which really do affect my feelings. I was ruralizing, was caught in violent rain, and my bonnet, my best bonnet, new trimmed, was utterly hopelessly spoilt; and what was worse, my beauty, if I have any; for I caught cold, and had a great gathering in my left eye, which besides being very painful gave me a most pugilistic appearance. I arranged a black silk handkerchief as well as I could over the poulticed side, but, alas! it did not at all resemble
—“the mask which shades
The face of young Arabian maids,
A mask which leaves the one eye free
To do its best in witchery.”
The image of the mask (a quotation from Thomas Moore) refracted Letitia’s own facade: the lightness of tone she had to adopt in the face of public humiliation; the denial of her children’s existence; the pose of modesty overlying sexual realities. Before cranking up her satirical mode, Letitia made a brief, bitter allusion to the “utter cold worldliness” of London society, where “disinterested friendship” did not exist. Her only acknowledgment of any emotional life of her own, in a letter to Katherine Thomson, was a parenthetical reference to “feelings (if I have any).”
On August 19, the Gazette ran L.E.L.’s most cynical lyric to date, “The World as It Is.” The speaker responds to the coldness of her lover by embracing a disconnected and purely exchange-driven view of human relations:
Why should I shed a single tear,
When none is shed for me?
Or sigh amid a careless crowd,
Where sighs should never be?
Why should I love? a fair exchange
Is all my love will give:
As I am loved, ’tis fair for that
An equal love should give.
Acknowledging that “Utopia’s days” are over, L.E.L. cleaves to the “modern creed,” which she expresses in a sardonic cliché: “when out of sight / Best to be out of mind.” The “careless laugh and mocking eye” are her only defenses.
* * *
—
Letitia’s own mask was firmly in place when she declared in a letter to Emma Roberts in December, “if such a novelty as a lover should ever fall to my share, I should not be able to help bribing the bellman to make it generally known.” Given her situation, her bravado astounds.
A clue as to its cultural meaning is to be found in a throwaway reference to “the author of Rouge et Noir” in her letter to Rosina. Letitia was alluding to a book published in 1821 by William Read, a fellow Gazette contributor (not to be confused with Stendhal’s later masterpiece Le rouge et le noir). It was an adroit Don Juan–style verse satire, with prose interludes, on gambling. The title alluded to the card game rouge et noir.
Throughout her career, Letitia gambled on her reputation. She manipulated her culture’s clichés of emotional femininity with the insouciance of a high-stakes poker player. As she wrote in 1833, in a private letter to a worldly man of letters, Crofton Croker: “when in doubt, lead trump—so I have taken refuge in sentiment, the court card of the poet’s hand.” Had she allowed herself to feel for real, she would have fallen off her tightrope.
With The Sunday Times, Fred’s birth, and The Wasp, the stakes had grown higher, the danger greater. In allowing nothing to ruffle her outer composure, she was like Read’s gambler who hazards his whole fortune “with that au fait air which one assumes in doing something which might be thought uncommon quite as a matter of course; although a summersault from the Pont Neuf, or a black bench at the Morgue, would perhaps have been the consequence of an unfavourable turn in the instance of a single card.” In the honor cult of the rouge et noir player, suicide was the inevitable result of ruin. According to Thomas De Quincey, the same went for the sexually shamed woman: “there is no man, who in his heart would not reverence a woman that chose to die rather than to be dishonoured.”
Suicide had long been one of Letitia’s favorite literary themes, but her pregnancy with Fred only made her more prolific as a writer. Using work as a distraction, she continued to pour out poetry “by the pound.” By the end of 1826, she had finished a new collection, The Golden Violet, published at the start of 1827.
She strategically inscribed it to her Yorkshire uncle, insisting to anyone who might suspect otherwise that her recent absences from London had been due to respectable family visits to a country vicar, not to an untoward pregnancy:
To the Reverend James Landon,
Rector of Aberford and Amstery
My dear Uncle,
I inscribe to
you this volume, the greater part of which was written under your affectionate roof, during the two pleasant seasons I have passed with you. To have it deemed worthy of your critical judgement, and your more partial approval, would indeed be the pride and pleasure of
Your gratefully attached,
L.E.L.
December 1826.
Like The Troubadour, the new book’s long title poem eschewed the first-person mode that had first established L.E.L. as a cult figure. Its conceit was a medieval poetry festival. Minstrels, both male and female, convene at the court of a Provençal princess to compete for the trophy of a golden violet by performing their songs. The structure gave Letitia the opportunity to show off her skill at versification in a series of contrasting lyrics and ballads in which her signature themes of love and bloodshed could be treated in a detached manner, without her inhabiting a particular protagonist.
The narrative ended on an uncertain note, without the trophy being awarded. Readers were invited to decide for themselves which poem deserved the prize. Like the gambler in Rouge et Noir, Letitia was symbolically giving up her destiny to fate.
In a final envoi, she again stepped out of the narrative to speak in her “own” first-person voice, adopting a faux-naïf style in a bid for sympathy, this time alluding to the travails of her own career:
what art thou, fame?
A various and a doubtful claim
One grants and one denies; what none
Can wholly quite agree upon.
A dubious and uncertain path
At least the modern minstrel hath.
The very badness of the lines is shifty. What none could “wholly quite agree upon” was of course the truth of the allegations against her sexual virtue. The creaking versification only comes to life if one imagines Letitia speaking the words with coquettishly simulated wide-eyed innocence.
By now, Letitia’s high-wire act had become a compulsion. She continued to draw attention to her “fall” and to invite confessional readings of her poetry, whose value, she asserted, was to be found in
Feelings whose truth is all their worth,
Thoughts which have had their pensive birth
When lilies hang their heads and die,
Eve’s lesson of mortality.
The pure white lily hangs its head in shame at its own sexual corruption. L.E.L. knows, like Eve, that she is naked.
The poem in the collection of which she was most proud was “Erinna,” written at the end of October, just after The Wasp’s attack. Like The Improvisatrice, it had a first-person poetess heroine, this time an ancient Greek contemporary of Sappho. Letitia explained in a note that she was not attempting to reconstruct the historical Erinna but “to draw the portrait and trace the changes of a highly poetical mind, too sensitive perhaps of the chill and bitterness belonging even to success.” In other words, the poem was designed to engage readers’ pity for the assaults L.E.L. herself had endured in the wake of becoming a best seller.
Unlike Letitia’s usual heroines, Erinna has no lover. Her tragedy is played out not with a man but with the public. As an idealistic child, she believes that poetry will create an ideal bond between her and her readers. But she finds, on the contrary, that fame exposes her to “mockery” and “plague spot,” bringing calumny on her head and causing her private agony, a clear allusion to Letitia’s recent real experiences:
I have scorned myself
For that my cheek could burn, my pulses beat
At idle words.
Erinna confesses to have taken a “deep and dangerous delight” in celebrity, but describes it as an addiction, “the opiate of my heart.” She also represents it as a quasi-sexual violation: “I do not hope a sunshine burst of fame, / My lyre asks but a wreath of fragile flowers.” To in-crowd readers looking for salacious hidden meanings, it must have seemed that Letitia was asking for the return of the virginity that she had traded with Jerdan for her career.
If “Erinna” continued to offer fodder for gossip, so did Jerdan. On December 16, 1826, he gave The Golden Violet glowing prepublicity in the Gazette. His applause was indeed calculated to make Letitia’s cheek crimson. “When we…remember that this is the third work in the course of two years…by a young female, hardly of legal age to be considered more than a child,” he leered, “we confess we are lost in amazement at what she has accomplished.” What, he continued, was the reason for her “extraordinary popularity”? It was that her poetry was “the bold adventure of a mere girl welling forth such strains (with all their imperfections) as the deepest natural feelings and the truest genius alone could inspire.” It was because, he wrote, “She began to write so early in years, and having had so little intercourse with the world, that she wrote not only with freedom but without fear. The genuine sentiments of nature thus came to be expressed with a freshness, force and truth which, perhaps, her future works may want, but which were re-echoed by every heart where the best feelings were not obliterated.”
“Freedom,” “genuine sentiments of nature,” and “truth” were treacherously suggestive signposts. The trainer was rewarding his songbird with punishment, humiliating her with praise. He probably hoped that salacious stories would actually boost the sales of the Gazette, while revealing him in the flattering role of a sexual conquistador.
In her everyday life, however, Letitia took practical steps to protect her reputation. When she finally returned to London from her hideout in Biggleswade at the end of 1826, she did not go back to her grandmother’s apartment at 131 Sloane Street, where Jerdan was known to have been a regular visitor. Instead, she removed to lodgings above the girls’ school at 22 Hans Place, where she herself had been a pupil a decade earlier. Now under the new management of two sisters called the Misses Lance, the school provided a potential refuge. Emma Roberts was already a lodger there. “I look forward to the decided advantage of being under such a highly respectable roof as the Misses Lance,” Letitia told Miss Roberts from Biggleswade on December 19.
Letitia looked forward to the move as self-empowering: “when I arrive at 22…for the first time in my life [I] shall know what I am about.” The attic she moved into was later fictionalized by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh as a symbolic woman writer’s “room of one’s own” avant la lettre. But it was a world away from the perfumed boudoir strewn with silks in which L.E.L.’s fans imagined her writing.
According to a contemporary visitor, it was a
homely-looking, almost uncomfortable room, fronting the street, barely furnished with a simple white bed, at the foot of which was a small, old, oblong-shaped sort of dressing table, quite covered with a common, worn writing-desk heaped with papers, while some strewed the ground, the table being too small for aught besides the desk; a little high-backed cane chair which gave you any idea rather than that of comfort—a few books scattered about completed the author’s paraphernalia.
Letitia’s own feelings on arriving there are hinted at in a short story:
I cannot describe to you how my heart sank within me when I first entered the gloomy attic, henceforth destined to be my home, my study, and where so much of my life was to pass. I gazed upon the low ceiling, which seemed to press the air down upon me; a slip of looking-glass, cracked and coarse-grained enough to make you discontented even with yourself, stuck in the plaster; the white-washed walls; the small stove, like that in the cabin of a ship; the wretched little wash-hand stand; the common check furniture of the bed; the parapet before the window—oh that parapet!…to the parapet my eye never became reconciled.
She would live and work in that room for a decade, while Jerdan carried on carousing in his big house with his family and his wine cellar.
Hans Place was, conveniently, even nearer to Jerdan’s home than 131 Sloane Street. After Letitia moved out, her complaisant grandmother Mrs. Bishop also relocated. By the time she ma
de her will in 1829, she was living a few steps from Hans Place at a new address in Queen Street (now Hans Road), which may have provided a convenient love nest.
Despite the increased risk of scandal, the editor did nothing to protect his protégée, and she did equally little to protect herself. “Mr Jerdan is awful! Poor Miss Landon ought not to go home in a hackney coach alone with him. The ill-natured who have read Miss Landon and not seen Mr Jerdan will talk,” wrote Bulwer in the spring of 1827. The significance of his comment comes into focus when one reads the courtesan Harriette Wilson on the mores of Parisian society ladies at the same period:
As long as they will be hypocrites, in public, refusing, even, on a rainy night, to step into the carriage of the very man, whom they slyly slept with, the night before; and though these ladies are known for what they really are, they are, nevertheless, considered femmes honnetes until they no longer affect that virtue, which they, in reality, never possessed.
Egged on by Jerdan, the rebel in Letitia did not even bother to adhere to the outward rules. This was, Bulwer feared, to her own detriment. “Miss Landon is amusing and would have passed anywhere for an extremely clever person, if she had never written a line; but she loses far more in interest than she gains in admiration. All women lose by wit if not very, very chaste and refined,” he wrote.
Letitia was indeed in danger of losing “interest”: social capital, the support of influential people. Her racy conversation was as risky as her sexually suggestive poems. Even without scandalmongering by The Sunday Times, the position of the literary lion was notoriously insecure. “Let such a person’s popularity only decline which is a very common case in the literary world and see how the aristocracy will treat him,” wrote James Grant in his early work of sociology The Great Metropolis (1836).
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