L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  The true hold the Fraserians had over Letitia almost certainly was the fact that they had inside information on her sexual history. In throwing in her lot with them, Letitia was making yet another Faustian pact.

  Although no letters or diaries exist to document Maclise’s or Maginn’s private relations with Letitia, their public portrayals of her and Jerdan speak volumes if read in context. The most popular series run by Fraser’s was its “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters,” a sequence of profiles with texts mainly by Maginn and portraits by Maclise. Jerdan’s vanity must have been tickled by the fact that he made the number 1 slot, ahead of Walter Scott (number 7), Wordsworth (29), Coleridge (37), and Letitia herself (41). The naïve young Brontës, who longed to join the pageant of literary stars, took the series straight, as have many subsequent modern critics. But like L.E.L.’s own poetry, it was more underhand than it appeared.

  Placing Jerdan in pole position was an in-joke. The text snidely insinuated he was a has-been by claiming he was born in 1730, which would have made him a hundred years old, while also accusing him of being in hock to Colburn and Longman. Praise for his “just indignation against the vices of society” was a sarcasm, pointed up by Maclise in his accompanying portrait. It showed the “satyr-Cannibal Literary Gazetteer” (to use Carlyle’s phrase) reading a manuscript by the light of an oversized phallic candle that throws a sinister shadow on the wall. His hand is clenched in a fist at his crotch (see plates).

  In her Fraser’s profile, Letitia was lavished with unctuous praise for writing on the “feminine” theme of love. At the same time, it implied not only that that the Fraserians considered the pen a male tool, but also that they were metaphorically ejaculating over her:

  LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON! Burke said, that ten thousand swords ought to have leaped out of their scabbards at the mention of the name of Marie Antoinette; and in like manner we maintain, that ten thousand pens should leap out of their inkbottles to pay homage to L.E.L. In Burke’s time, Jacobinism had banished chivalry—at least, out of France—and the swords remained unbared for the queen; we shall prove, that our pens shall be uninked for the poetess.

  The piece went on to claim disingenuously that Fraser’s had no right to ask whether L.E.L.’s love poems were based on personal experience, inviting readers to suppose the opposite. She had little choice but to simper in response, despite the fact that she was trying change her once erotic image.

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  Letitia’s complicity in the misogyny of the dominant culture inspired distaste even in her own day. In 1827, the Westminster Review attacked her poetry for its “pernicious” practical effects on “the happiness of women,” opining that she “takes every opportunity of preaching up this perfect subordination, and of bestowing admiration on the qualities which fit women for being useful and agreeable slaves.” Her works, it argued, were only good for “the vanity of men,” while her stylized medieval fantasies of “knights” and their pursuit of bloodshed revealed an unspoken gender politics of sadomasochism.

  The anonymous critic was probably John Stuart Mill, Letitia’s contemporary and fellow child prodigy. He later published The Subjection of Women, inspired by the woman he loved, Harriet Taylor, who was married to someone else at the time. Despite the fact that they later married after her husband died, Taylor’s influence on Mill’s work remained hidden during their lifetimes for fear of scandal. Long into the nineteenth century, the convolutions of the hypocrisy society continued to entwine even rationalist moralists in its net.

  The Tory Fraserians had atavistic notions of medieval chivalry and regarded themselves as Romantic renegades. But they were essentially amoral contrarians with an instinct for media manipulation. Maginn even inspired possibly the earliest use of “spin” in the political sense in a doggerel epitaph by John Gibson Lockhart:

  And, whoever was out, and whoever was in,

  For your Tories his fine Irish brains he would spin.

  More interested in power play than in ideology, he took his definition of “Tory” from its original meaning; it was coined in the seventeenth century from the Irish word for “outlaw.”

  Letitia was, in contrast, a radical manqué, who had lost her faith by the time she was twenty. In 1834, she looked back nostalgically to the utopianism of her youth while admitting that she had gone over to the other side for expediency’s sake. “I am refreshing my Tory principles and beginning to doubt whether republics, equality, and our old favourites, are not very visionary, and somewhat reprehensible,” she wrote to Mrs. Hall. She added significantly, “you know my mirror like propensities.”

  It was her uncanny ability to reflect back whatever her interlocutor wanted to hear that made Letitia a spy in more than one camp. She conducted simultaneous alliances with the prudish, supposedly progressive Halls, with the Tory Fraserians, and with their enemy Bulwer, who had been elected to Parliament on a Whig Radical ticket in 1831.

  In the days of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, sexual liberation had been connected with proto-socialist ideals of truth and liberty. By the 1830s, Tory libertarians offered perhaps the only available space—albeit a mocking one—for the fallen woman. What we might now call the “Left”—abolitionists, pressure groups promoting the rights of the poor—had aligned itself with a religious tendency whose attitude toward sex was moralistic.

  Was a “femme libre” liberated in the revolutionary Wollstonecraft mold, as Letitia may have wanted to believe at nineteen? Or was she a woman with whom men made free?

  By the 1830s, Letitia’s sexual reputation had become the arena in which men played out their political rivalries. While the Tory Fraserians claimed her as a sexualized trophy, their political enemy Bulwer fictionalized her as the embodiment of unsullied purity in his 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii. Ostensibly set in ancient Roman times, but actually a commentary on the decadent society of contemporary London, it transformed Letitia into “Ione,” a Greek poetess who holds literary salons, expresses Wollstonecraftian ideals, and regards herself as a reincarnation of “Erinna” (a clear reference to L.E.L.’s poem of the same name).

  Unlike Letitia, Ione escapes intact from the rapacious clutches of her guardian: the Egyptian high priest Arbaces. He is painted as a pantomime villain version of Jerdan, a sensualist with a taste for young flesh, whose favorite dish is nightingales’ tongues.

  “It has ever been my maxim to attach myself to the young,” says this evil genius. “From their flexible and unformed minds I can carve out my fittest tools. I weave—I warp—I mould them to my will,” he leers. His project is to “form the genius and enlighten the intellect of Ione,” but he also plans to groom her for sex, declaring that “woman is the great appetite of my soul”:

  I love to rear the votaries of my pleasure. I love to train, to ripen their minds—to unfold the sweet blossoms of their hidden passions, in order to prepare the fruit to my tastes. I loathe your ready-made and ripened courtesans; it is in the soft and unconscious progress of innocence to desire that I find the true charm of love.

  Arbaces simultaneously attempts to corrupt Ione’s naïve young brother by offering to induct him into the metaphysical mysteries of Egyptian religion. The supposedly transcendental rites, perhaps a metaphor for Shelleyan Romanticism, turn out to be no more than a drunken orgy. The brother too escapes and converts to Christianity, a buried allusion to the fact that Whittington had in reality been sent off from London to be a country curate.

  In contrast to Bulwer’s loyal attempt to idealize Letitia, by 1834 most men in literary London were openly laughing at her. When she appeared at the theater in a hair accessory topped with a black feather, Comte d’Orsay quipped to his companion that L.E.L. was wearing her inkwell on her head and had not even forgotten her quill pen. He was so pleased with his own witticism that he went on to repeat it to Letitia’s face. She laughed “like a hyena” at
her own humiliation.

  Letitia had to smile at the Fraserians’ jokes and flatter their masculine vanity if she was to have any chance at all of controlling their anarchic pens. This, then, is the context in which the allegations about her supposed sexual relationships with Daniel Maclise and William Maginn should be viewed.

  In the case of the artist Maclise, the only primary evidence of his feelings is to be found in his portraits of her. Taking on the role of her portraitist from Pickersgill after 1830, he made at least eight. The first, now lost, was an oil exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1830. Like those by Pickersgill, it must have been commissioned by Jerdan, as Maclise wrote to him asking for his permission to exhibit it. The editor also puffed it in the Gazette and went on to commission another portrait of Letitia from Maclise, which was subsequently engraved in 1835.

  Jerdan’s involvement in at least two of Maclise’s portraits of Letitia indicate that her relations with the artist were conducted against the background of her established partnership with her Svengali. Taken together, Maclise’s images of L.E.L. suggest that he took a detached but not unsympathetic attitude toward the feminine masquerade she was required by her situation to perform. As such, they do little to support the idea that they were involved in a romantic affair.

  A highly finished sketch, now in the National Portrait Gallery collection, may be a study for the lost 1830 oil. It portrays a somewhat blousy and fleshy Letitia staring out provocatively, hand on hip, dressed to the nines in the high fashion and extreme coiffure of the time. However, a much more candid, quick-fire pen-and-ink drawing—apparently made at the same sitting, given the similarity of costume and coiffure, and now in the Harry Ransom collection—exposes Letitia shorn of her masquerade. She appears in profile as the little woman whom Bulwer described in 1826 as being “short and ill-made.” It is not how a man in love, or even in lust, would have presented the object of his devotions.

  Letitia as fashionable and flirtatiously forward, in a highly finished sketch by Maclise

  Maclise’s caricature of L.E.L., made for the Fraser’s Gallery in 1833, offers an oblique commentary on her reputation, contrasting ironically with the accompanying text’s aggressively masculine imagery. It shows her as the incarnation of ladylike fragility, with huge doelike eyes, a minute wasp waist, and tiny hands and feet. As Maclise’s pre-Raphaelite admirer Dante Gabriel Rossetti later put it, “the kitten-like mignonnerie required is attained by an amusing excess of daintiness in the proportions.”

  Letitia shorn of her masquerade: an uncharacteristically candid undated sketch by Maclise

  As such it promulgated an image of unfeasible girlishness, given that Letitia was by then in her thirties, had toughed it out on Grub Street for over a decade, and had given birth to three children. The face is so expressionless as to support the famous eighteenth-century satirist Alexander Pope’s contention, in his Epistle to a Lady, that “most women have no Characters at all.” Letitia indeed had no “character,” in the sense that her reputation was besmirched. The overblown rose in the vase beside her was the only hint that she was not in her first flush. The irony, which Maclise perceived, was that Letitia knowingly manipulated her hyperfeminine image, but was in reality vulnerable.

  “Kitten-like mignonnerie”: Maclise’s portrait of Letitia for the Fraser’s Gallery, 1833. The accompanying text was ribald and mocking.

  In other moods, Maclise portrayed Letitia as overtly sexually available. In one unpublished sketch, probably a discarded study for a public image, she appears as a flirty equestrienne, whip in hand (see plates). Her liveried groom, in a cockaded hat, stands in for all men. He ogles her from behind, while the mare’s long eyelashes mimic the rider’s. The animal’s huge peachy buttocks are presented to the viewer in such a way as to suggest that they are standing in for hers. It could be a picture of a high-class courtesan in the Bois de Boulogne. Maclise must have given the sketch to Letitia’s fiancé John Forster, as it is held today in the Victoria and Albert Museum archive as part of the Forster bequest.

  In fact, Macready’s diary entry does not allege that Letitia slept with Maclise, just that she made a pass at him on two occasions. That seems quite possible. Given her documented interest in the French poet Antoine Fontaney, she was attracted to younger men with the sort of pale, saturnine good looks she had given to Lorenzo in The Improvisatrice. A stupendous watercolor self-portrait Maclise made around this time shows him dark and handsome, as he gazes out at the viewer with a mix of dandy arrogance and cautious self-containment, a ruby glistening on his finger, his waistcoat casually unbuttoned (see plates). Compared to the jejune John Forster, Maclise would have been a catch. He was good-looking, coming up in the world, widely regarded as brilliant, and only four years Letitia’s junior.

  Letitia’s face is as blank as a fashion plate in this 1835 portrait by Maclise.

  The year 1835 saw Maclise working on his magnum opus to date: a massive medievalist canvas portraying The Chivalric Vow of the Ladies of the Peacock, which secured his election to the Royal Academy later that year. Letitia expressed her interest by composing a companion volume, The Vow of the Peacock, in homage. Conceived as a lengthy poetical illustration of Maclise’s painting, it turned out to be her last independent poetry collection. Published by Saunders and Otley, as Longman had by then given up on her, it did not sell well, even though Jerdan tried to obtrude a review copy on Blackwood’s and commissioned a portrait from Maclise for the frontispiece. A clear attempt to present her as demure, the image shows Letitia standing in a garden in a bonnet, her figure enveloped by her ballooning walking dress, her face as blank as a fashion plate. Jerdan failed to pay the ten guineas Maclise charged him for the picture, so the artist took it back. Letitia said that she supposed Mr. Maclise could keep it.

  Letitia summed up the subject of The Vow of the Peacock as “a lady in distress applying to some renowned knight for assistance.” If she indeed indicated to Maclise her need for assistance, he is unlikely to have responded positively. As fellow strivers in the creative professions, she and Maclise were peers. But Letitia was a Grub Street hack who had slept her way to fame. In medieval courtly love the lady was supposed to be unattainable.

  Gossip about Letitia’s relationship with Maclise certainly set the spiders of society spinning. In March 1837, the Rural Repository of Hudson, New York, reported, tardily and inaccurately, that the “spirituelle” L.E.L. and “the celebrated Croquis of Frazer’s [sic] Magazine” had just got engaged, though it admitted, “We give it as London gossip which as the papers say yet wants confirmation.”

  But by then Maclise had in fact shown where his true romantic tastes lay, having embarked on an affair with an unattainable upper-class married woman, Lady Henrietta Sykes, Disraeli’s former mistress. As the son of a Cork shoemaker living on his wits, he was probably initially drawn to Henrietta as much by her status as by her other attractions. But the affair ultimately ended in disaster when Henrietta’s husband discovered them in bed and avenged himself by publishing “an extraordinary advertisement” in the public prints, informing the world of his wife’s adultery with the painter.

  Following his calamitous affair with Lady Henrietta, Maclise never married. Taking refuge in work, he went on to establish himself as the artistic face of Victorian triumphalism, with his murals of Wellington and Nelson in the Houses of Parliament designed to boost national pride. In this he was helped by his fellow Corkonian S. C. Hall, who promoted him in print. The opposing factions surrounding Letitia in the 1830s were in fact incestuously close.

  Maclise’s earlier paintings from the 1830s, often based on literary, historical, or mythological subjects, are much more discomfiting. While his intimate pencil or watercolor portraits get to the heart of their subjects with extraordinary subtlety, his public oils thrust their Technicolor kitsch at the viewer with a covert aggression which, like L.E.L.’s poetry, seems as much designed t
o repulse as to enthrall. As with her poetic medievalism, Maclise’s paintings suggest a covert acknowledgment that the taste for historical fantasy had something rotten at its heart.

  His Shakespeare-inspired Disenchantment of Bottom of 1832 assaults the viewer with its mesmeric ugliness (see plates). It exposes not just the private madness of sexual obsession, but, more subtly, the public culture of delusory perception in the age of cant. In his autobiography, Jerdan blithely went on to portray himself as Bottom to Letitia’s Titania. Unlike Bottom, Letitia always knew that she was dreaming when she used her literary skills to transmogrify Jerdan into the object of her readers’ dreams.

  Letitia’s relations with William Maginn are far harder to unravel than her nonaffair with Daniel Maclise. According to Macready’s diary, they had an actual “intrigue,” and Mrs. Maginn found love letters to prove it. No corroborating evidence has come to light to support that allegation, but Letitia certainly had a long-standing and twisted connection with the editor of Fraser’s, who also moonlighted for the blackmailing scandal sheet The Age.

  William Maginn is one of the strangest characters thrown up by the periodical culture of the 1820s and 1830s. Like Letitia, he embraced masquerade as the condition of the times. If every hack wanted a cult of personality just like Byron, Maginn deconstructed the idea from the inside with his multiple fictional identities.

  The son of a Cork schoolmaster, he was a preternaturally precocious linguist, who gained his doctorate from Trinity College Dublin before he was twenty-one. He and Letitia had in common their extraordinary facility with words. Both treated literary composition as a conjuring trick. She could turn out a poem to order in double-quick time. He was said to be able to converse intently on one subject while simultaneously writing an article on another.