L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

“I cannot get over my disappointment about Whittington’s book,” she complained. “You should have made one or quotations….Can you not say omitted last week by mistake? and give a column or so—I almost despair of hearing from you—I have now been away all but three weeks—except two days—and I have only had a very brief hurried note.” She was clearly counting the days.

  “Well good bye or I lose the post,” she concluded. “I have lost the post…no letter today again,” she added underneath. Letitia’s fictional heroines writhed with unrequited love. This was the commonplace of being ignored.

  By the end of 1834, Jerdan was bankrupt. He had lost his Brompton mansion and seen its contents auctioned, replaying the Landons’ fate of nearly fifteen years before. In a further uncanny repetition, his ruin precipitated the breakdown of his marriage, although his autobiography is characteristically silent on that point. Following the loss of the family home, he moved into bachelor lodgings in Parliament Street close to the Gazette’s offices.

  By the time of the 1851 census, Frances was living alone with one of her daughters in a modest laborer’s cottage in her ancestral Hampshire, near the village of Elstead, where she had been christened in 1781. She pointedly described herself as both “married” and “head” of the household. In contrast to her neighbors, all agricultural workers, she described herself as a “gentlewoman.”

  Jerdan was already experiencing Letitia’s emotional demands as a problem, but the collapse of his marriage dislodged the geometry of what had been for around twelve years a secure triangle. Although his autobiography waxes lyrical on the early phase of his infatuation with his songbird, he remains silent on the long, slow process of its disintegration, as he sought—unsuccessfully—to extract himself.

  The most significant clue as to the crisis in their relationship lies in a baptismal record for a baby named “Marion Jerdan Stuart,” who was christened on February 24, 1836, at St. Peter’s church, Walworth, in the London borough of Southwark. The baby’s birthdate is given as January 17, 1836. Her father is recorded as “William Stuart,” a “gentleman.” Her mother’s name is given as Mary Ann.

  Jerdan’s new woman was not the poetess Mary Ann Browne (who had perhaps listened to L.E.L.’s veiled warnings), but another Mary Ann. This new character is a young woman of obscure origins whose surname was Maxwell. Given that her baby must have been conceived in the spring of 1835, Jerdan was probably already seeing her by the time Letitia wrote to him on December 23, 1834, complaining of his neglect.

  Very little can be established about Mary Ann Maxwell. Her baptismal record has not turned up, not has any marriage certificate for her parents, which suggests that she was illegitimate. We can tell from the 1841 census, however, that she was born circa 1817 in Bath, which was a mecca for members of the Regency entertainment industry at that time. It is possible that she and her mother were in some way connected to the lower echelons of the stage. Willing women who did not demand marriage could easily be found there, as Dickens later discovered when he established his ménage with the young actress Ellen Ternan, with the approval of her mother. The Gazette’s theater reviews in 1834 express boundless admiration for the physiques of the young dancers at the Strand Theatre.

  Public records show that after losing Grove House and retreating to bachelor rooms near his office, Jerdan also set up another discreet establishment just across the river in Lambeth, near the church in which Marion Jerdan Stuart was christened. It is there, in Hercules Buildings, that we find him in the 1841 census as “William Stewart,” domiciled with his supposed wife, “Mary Ann Stewart,” their four children under five, and Mary Ann’s mother.

  In contrast to Brompton, Lambeth was insalubrious, a place where the struggle to keep up appearances was often put under insupportable strain. In the late 1830s, Stendhal and a friend went back there for sex with a pair of amateur prostitutes. The men were taken aback by the shabby-genteel aspect of the girls’ tiny house, their pathetic gratitude at being given a bottle of champagne, and also by their self-consciousness and residual shame. Stendhal’s girl had a lovely figure, but in bed she insisted on blowing out the candle as she was too embarrassed for him to see her naked.

  Although Jerdan no longer had an impressive residence, he now had two women on site to look after him: a young sexual partner in Mary Ann and a housekeeper in her mother. The contrasting roles taken by Letitia and Frances could be performed under one roof. Mary Ann would remain Jerdan’s partner for the rest of her life, though they never married. After bearing him thirteen children, she eventually died in a lunatic asylum in Maidstone, aged forty-five.

  Letitia had long specialized in stylized representations of abandoned heroines, including a “maniac,” but Jerdan had been faithful to her in his fashion for over a decade. Mary Ann Maxwell was eighteen or nineteen when her first child was conceived, around the same age that Letitia had been when her affair with Jerdan began. Now he gave Mary Ann the family life whose loss Letitia had bewailed in the voice of “Eulalia,” the poetess-heroine of her “History of the Lyre” who laments that she has given up the prospect of a happy home life for the sake of her genius. (In another mood, Letitia was, however, relieved not to have to look after her offspring. Romance and Reality includes a comic vignette of a married authoress desperately trying to carve out writing time while her feral children run wild and her husband retreats behind the newspaper.)

  The irony is that by this stage in her career, the alter ego “L.E.L.” no longer provided Letitia with an outlet for expressing the misery of erotic abandonment. The poetry she was commissioned to write for Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book that year included verse descriptions of engravings that offered little scope for self-projection: a view of Beverley Minster; a portrait of the governor of Greenwich Hospital.

  Yet buried in the final volume of her 1834 novel Francesca Carrara is the following appeal, composed at a time when her primary reader, Jerdan, was losing interest. She constructs a bond of imagined intimacy with her anonymous audience, while confessing that she is unable to confide in her everyday companions:

  I have often been told that my writings are too melancholy. How can that be a reproach if they are true?…Good Heaven! Even to myself how strange appears the faculty, or rather the passion, of composition! how the inmost soul developes [sic] its inmost nature on the written page! I, who lack sufficient confidence in my most intimate friends to lay bare even an ordinary emotion—who never dream of speaking of what occupies the larger portion of my time even to my most familiar companions—yet rely on the sympathy of the stranger, the comprehension of those to whom I am utterly unknown. But I neither ordered my own mind, nor made my own fate.

  It was a mannered performance, compared to her letters to Jerdan, but it was also a cri de coeur. In Letitia’s story, theatrics and authenticity are never mutually exclusive.

  However, unlike her heroines, Letitia did not instantly die of a broken heart. Having griped to Jerdan that “one ought to be married,” she took a surprising new course of action. She became engaged to another man. This promised to give her the chance to become “respectable” and to distance herself from her old identity. However, the engagement was not to last. Its dissolution would plunge her into further crisis.

  Blanchard treats this episode in prose so contorted by embarrassment that it is hard to get his drift. He states that in 1835 Letitia’s friends heard rumors “that ‘L.E.L.’ would soon cease to be the designation of the favourite of the public,” that is, that she was going to change her name by getting married. Left anonymous in Blanchard’s account, Letitia’s fiancé was in fact John Forster, later known to posterity as Charles Dickens’s intimate friend and biographer. He was a decade Letitia’s junior.

  The age gap was not so unlikely as it might appear. Toy boys were de rigueur among the women writers of the era. George Sand, the German poetess Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and the American feminist writer Margaret Fuller
all took younger lovers. Even the sainted Felicia Hemans may have been less pure than she pretended, owing to her discreet but “tender” friendship with a younger man, Robert Perceval Graves, alluded to by his descendant Robert Graves in his memoir Goodbye to All That. (Letitia and Hemans were far from being sisterly sentimentalists, as was until recently assumed. L.E.L. slyly exposed Hemans’s less than perfect marriage, while a lyric by Hemans, probably addressed to Mary Ann Browne, urges a young poetess to avoid being “like that lost lyre” or “that lost flower,” an underground reference to the less than virginal L.E.L.)

  Letitia’s engagement to a younger man was not, however, driven by passion. In her correspondence with world-weary male insiders, she made her cynicism only too apparent. “When I have the good luck or ill luck (I rather lean to the latter opinion) to be married, I shall insist on the wedding excursion not extending much beyond Hyde Park Corner,” she wrote unsentimentally to the Irish writer Francis Mahoney at the end of 1834. “As for falling in love, it seems to me quite out of place except in a book,” she told the publisher George Huntley Gordon on February 20, 1835.

  No gentleman who knew about Letitia’s past would have regarded her as marriage material. John Forster was convenient because he was such a new entrant into the literary world that he was not party to her open secret, which was by now such old news among the in-crowd that it barely passed as gossip and was therefore not a matter of constant comment.

  Forster had been a twelve-year-old schoolboy in Newcastle when the Sunday Times exposé appeared in 1826. As Letitia herself later put it, the “cruel slander was old,” had been “forgotten by most—and scorned by all.” If Forster read any of the intervening satires, he must have convinced himself they were unfounded. He was transfixed by Letitia’s fame and by the entrée she appeared to offer into the heart of literary London.

  S. C. Hall later stated that Letitia first encountered John Forster at his house. It is only too possible that the Halls had a hand in the enterprise. It would have been in the interests of their own, as well as their wayward friend’s respectability, to see her safely married.

  * * *

  —

  The first recorded on-the-spot sighting of Letitia and Forster together occurs on August 18, 1834, not long after her return from Paris. It is to be found in the diary of the actor William Macready, who had taken the young theater critic under his wing, a friendship that benefited both professionally. Macready and Forster joined Letitia in a box at the opera to see the diva Giulia Grisi in Rossini’s Anna Bolena, along with “two other nice girls,” sisters called Nanon and Ellen Williams, who were Letitia’s fellow lodgers at Hans Place.

  That Macready described Letitia and her companions as “nice girls” suggests that her sexual reputation was still intact in his eyes. Keen to keep on the right side of the Literary Gazette, whose theater reviews were influential, he had no desire to register her fallen state. “Jerdan was in the box,” the actor added as an afterthought, clearly unwilling to draw any conclusion from the coincidence even in his private journal.

  The actor William Macready: a model of Victorian respectability in a rackety profession

  Macready’s diaries attest to his near-paranoiac desire to construct a bubble of respectability around himself. As a family man in a rackety profession, he erected a bourgeois cordon sanitaire around his life. Personally, he was so afraid of untoward gossip that on one occasion he refused to walk a young actress home after a show when her chaperone failed to turn up, regarding her safety in the dark London streets as less important than his own moral reputation. Whatever he suspected in private, Macready was committed to keeping up appearances. He was also painfully aware of the need to keep the press, including Jerdan, on his side.

  When news of Letitia’s sexual history finally began to reach John Forster, he was humiliated to discover that he had been duped into proposing to a woman who was regarded among the cognoscenti as damaged goods. We do not know exactly when in 1835 the couple became engaged. But we do know that by November 20 their relationship was over.

  The evidence comes, again, from Macready’s diary entry of that date:

  Called on Forster, and stayed some time listening to a tale of wretched abandonment to passion which surprised and depressed me. He told me that he had been on the point of marriage with Miss L——, but that rumours and stories pressed in such number and frightful quality upon him that he was forced to demand explanation from one of the reported narrators or circulators Mr A. A. Watts—that his denial was positive and circumstantial, but that it was arranged between themselves and their mutual friends that the marriage should be broken off. A short time after, Forster discovered that Miss L—— made an abrupt and passionate declaration of love to Maclise, and on a subsequent occasion repeated it! It has lately come to light that she has been carrying on an intrigue with Dr Maginn, a person whom I never saw but whom all accounts unite in describing as a beastly biped; he is married and has four children. Two letters of hers and one of his were found by Mrs Maginn in his portrait [pocket?], filled with the most puerile and nauseating terms of endearment and declarations of attachment! I felt quite concerned that a woman of such splendid genius and such agreeable manners should be so depraved in taste and so lost to a sense of what was due to her high reputation. She is fallen!

  Maclise? Maginn? Where is Jerdan? What are these two other men doing in Letitia’s story?

  CHAPTER 10

  Vile Links

  Letitia’s afterlife has been so contaminated by the smoke and mirrors of her self-creation as L.E.L., and by the censorship of her memoirists, that it is full of blind alleys and confusing evidence. This is nowhere more evident than in the case of these fresh allegations about her love life.

  On the basis of Macready’s diary entry, twentieth-century literary sleuths focused almost all their attention on Maginn, and to a lesser extent Maclise, in their attempts to get to the bottom of the “slanders” against L.E.L. Emerging from the morass of contemporary hearsay with nothing definite, they concluded that all the rumors of sexual misconduct against her were probably false. Ironically, they took less seriously the slanders about Jerdan, who is in fact the only man we now know for certain slept with her.

  The discovery that Letitia was no virgin makes the possibility that she was sexually involved with more than one partner worth entertaining; but no hard proof, such as that embodied by Ella, Fred, and Laura, has come to light to prove it. What is certain is that these fresh allegations take us deep into the incestuous, factional milieu in which she was by now up to her neck. It is appropriate that one of her first meetings with her fiancé John Forster took place at a performance of Anna Bolena. Literary London in the 1830s could be almost as risky as the court of Henry VIII for a public woman whose professional currency was flirtation.

  Letitia had long been playing a double game. While cozying up to the Halls, who invested in her public purity, she had also been cultivating a male clique who, in contrast, took delight in her reputation for sexual availability. This “set of coarse men” was centered on Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, to give it its full name: a rambunctious London-based Tory monthly, founded in 1830 as an offshoot of the Edinburgh Blackwood’s—the most self-consciously sophisticated and provocative publication of the day.

  Giulia Grisi as Anna Bolena in the production attended by Letitia and John Forster in 1834.

  The two men with whom Letitia was now accused of having had improper relations were closely associated with Fraser’s. William Maginn was its de facto editor, contributing much of the copy under a variety of aliases, including “Oliver Yorke.” The artist Daniel Maclise provided the illustrations under his Frenchified pseudonym “Alfred Croquis.”

  Like S. C. Hall, who knew them both, Maginn and Maclise came originally from Cork in Ireland. Both worked their way into Jerdan’s circle—and thus into Letitia’s orbit—soon af
ter arriving on the mainland: Maginn in 1822, Maclise (who was younger) in around 1828. Like L.E.L. herself, they were defining cultural figures of the “strange pause” between the Romantics and Victorians. Like hers, their work was too embedded in the ambiguities of its own time to lend itself to posthumous recognition commensurate with their raw talents.

  After its initiation in 1830, Fraser’s soon established itself as a prominent and commercially successful periodical. Bulwer complained that its stock-in-trade was “the personal scurrility—the coarse slander—the artful misrepresentation—the audacious lie.” He was a frequent object of its jibes, having aligned himself with the radical tendency and taken on the editorship of the rival New Monthly Magazine. But even Bulwer admitted that to “take these from periodical composition, would be to take the seasoning from the sausage.”

  Fraser’s in-jokes were often so obscure as to be “hardly intelligible (not at all so except to persons of the craft)” according to Carlyle, making it peculiarly tricky for modern historians to interpret. Even in its own time, outsider fans, such as the young Brontës, could not get all its gossipy references. However, their sense of exclusion only enhanced their desire to enter its charmed circle, adding to its circulation.

  The teenage Brontë sisters, painted by their brother Branwell, c. 1834. As outsider readers, they admired both L.E.L. and Fraser’s Magazine, but could not get all its gossipy references.

  A “set of coarse men”: the Fraserians by Maclise (undated). Maginn (center) stands over a clutch of bottles, while Jerdan clinks his glass in the foreground with the diminutive Irish antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker.

  No periodical did more than Fraser’s to promote an image of the London literati as a raffishly glamorous in-crowd. The Fraserians, as the contributors and their allies called themselves, were a macho lot. In a sketch by Maclise they are portrayed sitting around a table piled with bottles. Jerdan himself is in the foreground, holding up a glass.