Maginn first made his mark in Blackwood’s in 1819 through the unlikely medium of an anonymous metrical Latin translation of the medieval folk ballad “Chevy Chase,” which included a footnote accusing Professor Leslie of Edinburgh University of a lack of proficiency in Hebrew. Leslie sued and received a farthing in damages. Maginn got attention. When he finally appeared in person at the Blackwood’s Edinburgh offices in 1821, he adopted a pantomime Irish brogue and pretended to be the victim of libel by the magazine. His chutzpah and thespian talents endeared him to the editor. He went on to develop the ribald Noctes Ambrosianae column in Blackwood’s, cast in the form of a tavern dialogue in which the contributors discoursed rumbustiously from behind pseudonymous masks on topics such as pugilism and Byron’s sex life.
Although Maginn made himself a central figure in the British periodical culture of the day, the slippery voices he created indicate a liminal outsider. No one doubted his brilliance. But, addicted to personal invective and increasingly hampered by a drinking problem, he never completed a major work.
William Maginn first met Letitia Landon in London in 1822 when she was still the nameless melodist and he was suing for Jerdan’s patronage at the Literary Gazette. According to his contemporary biographer Shelton Mackenzie, he was so smitten by her that he proposed, only to be turned down. Given the content of the poetry Letitia was publishing at the time, it is much more likely that Maginn made a ham-fisted sexual overture and withdrew when he realized she was already Jerdan’s property. He returned briefly to Ireland, where he picked up a conventional domestic wife, before returning with her to the mainland to pursue his career, first at Blackwood’s and then at Fraser’s.
Unlike Jerdan, Maginn had no reputation for priapism. Wine rather than women was his weakness. The one recorded instance of his sexual appetite is of a halfhearted visit to a low-rent brothel with Thackeray. However, he retained a psychological obsession with Letitia. When he was dying of consumption in 1842, he imagined he had a visitation from her ghost.
Fraser’s offers no evidence that Maginn was Letitia’s lover but ample proof that he used his inside knowledge of her sexual history to subject her to salacious bullying. In 1833, when she was trying to shake off the scandal of L.E.L. and reinvent herself as the respectable voice of the annuals, he mocked her in the attempt by publishing an obscene squib. It suggested that she was smuggling unmentionable sexual secrets into middle-class homes by stealth, and in doing so surreptitiously undermining the morals of the nice girls for whom genteel parents bought The Keepsake. It is intriguing to think that the young Charlotte Brontë read both the annuals and the following:
Papa and ma delighted that I’m getting on so well,
Were good enough to send me for a year to L.E.L.;
Where, a “Keepsake” being bought me,
All the new effects were taught me,
Besides some useful secrets, which I promised not to tell.
One only that I feel myself at liberty to name,
Was “always make the leading words of every verse the same”;
I got so good at this,
That I wrote a little piece
Of four and twenty stanzas, and they each began “She came!”
In this conjugating style I also proved a great adept,
The next piece published was “She’s gone!” soon after which, “He wept!”
Till each number, tense, and person
I’d a separate piece of verse on.
“She sighed!” produced “We laughed!”—“He wrote” was followed by “They slept!”
Yet although Maginn subjected Letitia to lubricious ridicule, in other moods he addressed her tenderly as his Shakespearean “dark ladye.” Letitia, for her part, exploited Maginn’s obsession, getting him to help her with her incessant annuals’ workload. He was widely alleged to have written some of the contributions for her.
The letters Mrs. Maginn found—supposedly filled with “nauseating terms of endearment” (according to the credent Macready) and addressed by Letitia to her “dearest William” (according to the skeptical Shelton Mackenzie)—are unlikely to have been genuine billets doux. As Letitia’s letters to her authenticated lover, William Jerdan, begin formally “Dear Sir,” it seems most unlikely that she would address another lover in such tones.
Given that Maginn was well known for his literary practical jokes and powers of ventriloquism, it is far more likely that the letters were yet another tease designed to make Letitia squirm, possibly intended for publication. The “William” to whom they were addressed is more likely to have been William Jerdan than Willian Maginn.
Such jokes were apparently considered funny in those circles. A little later, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Laman Blanchard, a devoted couple, became the objects of a similar cruel epistolary tease at the hands of none other than John Forster, who sent Anne Blanchard the following message: “You must no longer call that little perfidious S.L.B. ‘Jack’ or ‘Sam’ or any other such familiar and loving name, for he is wholly unworthy of you….I have just detected him in writing to a lady whom he terms ‘My dearest Eliza.’ I have done the duty of a friend—my heart bleeds for it.”
According to Shelton Mackenzie, Mrs. Maginn put the offending letters in a blank envelope and sent them on to Letitia’s fiancé. But she never seriously believed that her husband had been unfaithful with Letitia, and retracted her allegation as soon as she realized it had done real harm to the latter’s marriage prospects.
Letitia’s on-the-spot response, in a letter to Anna Maria Hall, is very different in tone from the considered self-defense she wrote to Katherine Thomson in 1826 in the wake of the Sunday Times exposé. It is more natural, more bitchy, and much less like a calculated attempt to hide the truth.
Letitia rebuts the idea of an “attachment” with Maginn as too absurd even for denial, and lays cattily into Mrs. Maginn, putting her actions down to “sheer envy” and recounting with a toss of the head that she has since seen and cut her decidedly. As a downtrodden housewife, excluded from her husband’s professional circle, Mrs. Maginn may indeed have felt resentful of a woman such as Letitia who appeared to move freely among literary men, unencumbered by domesticity.
“The letters, however, I utterly deny,” Letitia went on. “I have often written notes, as pretty and flattering as I could make them, to Dr Maginn, upon different literary matters, and one or two of business. But how any construction but their own could be put on them I do not understand. A note of mine that would pass for a love-letter must either have been strangely misrepresented, or most strangely altered. Dr Maginn and his wife have my full permission to publish every note I ever wrote—in The Age if they like.”
Letitia also admitted, however, how scared she was of Maginn’s unpredictable pen. “The fact was,” she confessed, “I was far too much afraid of Dr Maginn not to conciliate him if possible; and if civility and flattery would have done it, I should have been glad to do so. As it has turned out, I have, I fear, only made myself a powerful enemy; for of course, on the first rumour that reached me, I felt it incumbent on me to forbid his visits, few and infrequent as they were.” It seems likely that Maginn was dangerous not because he was sleeping with Letitia, but because he knew her secret.
In fact, the “rumours and stories”—which, according to Macready, “pressed in such number and frightful quality” upon John Forster—must have come from more than one direction. Shelton Mackenzie says that Forster also received anonymous letters reviving the old Jerdan slanders, prior to his receiving Mrs. Maginn’s blank envelope containing the supposed love epistles. Macready’s diary also refers to an unspecified “tale of wretched abandonment to passion” that reached Forster before he was informed about the additional allegations concerning both Maclise and Maginn. That can only have been the old story about Jerdan, which was far more damaging since it had, as we now know, produced three actual
children, all of whom were recognized by him as his.
In the honor culture of the day, the anonymous letter was the ultimate weapon. In 1837 the Russian poet Pushkin died in a duel after receiving anonymous letters accusing him of being a cuckold. The anonymous letters that reached John Forster were almost certainly written by the poet, journalist, and annuals’ editor Alexander Alaric Watts, the man named in Macready’s diary as the supposed source.
Letitia had known A. A. Watts since the early 1820s when each was contributing “Cockney” poetry to the Literary Gazette. However, she had gone on to alienate him by boasting about how quickly she wrote and how much money she made, adding insult to injury by refusing to accept payment for her contribution to his annual The Literary Souvenir. We can now establish that Letitia was not in charge of her own earnings, which may have been largely pocketed by Jerdan. But Watts did not realize that her comments were bravado. He smarted at the thought of being outdone by a female contemporary, and his resentment rankled.
Watts was aspirational, sensitive about his status, and was well known for bearing grudges. Like many others at that time, he was a struggling striver in the literary trade, but he lacked Jerdan’s easy manner or Maginn’s talents. A surviving drawing by Maclise of Watts’s wife, Priscilla, known as Zillah, shows her attired in the most expensive fashions, her clothes clearly regarded as a status symbol by the couple, though their son went on to marry the daughter of the Quaker Mary Howitt.
Thin skin and an inability to conceal his desperate literary ambition made Watts a magnetic target for Maginn, who had known him since 1823, and who went on to mock him constantly in print as “the principal fribble among the namby-pambies of the annuals.” Watts might have fared better had he adopted a pose of Olympian detachment, but anger management was not his forte. In a memoir, his own son devoted a chapter to “Temper” in which he said his father suffered from “some obscure form of disease more or less akin to hysteria.”
Watts’s enraged responses to mockery led to him being satirically rechristened Attila by Maginn (“pray, Alaric Attila, where do you find those fine names—your own and Zillah Madonna? I’m told you hope to supply posterity with sugar-plums, and that they’ll say the sweet, sweet Watts was the very one worth all the rest”). He tried to fight back with his own insults, accusing Maginn of “despicable treachery,” but they never seemed to hit the mark. Instead, he became irately litigious. In one of the cases he pursued, he sought legal damages against the printer and publisher of Fraser’s. When his annual The Literary Souvenir was parodied in its pages in November 1834, Watts claimed that it had led to loss of circulation and earnings on his count, but at the close of the trial, in December 1835, the jury dismissed his case.
Fraser’s remained conspicuously unrattled throughout. In the run-up to the trial, it showcased Watts in its Gallery in June 1835. Maclise’s caricature portrayed him as an art thief, sneaking out of a grand house with pictures under both arms, an allusion to the fact he was having to supplement his literary earnings by dealing in pictures. Watts, who was privately living on a financial knife edge, wanted recognition as a serious player in literature and in society. The caricature was so much the last straw for him that even its republication fifty years later caused “conniptions” in his son.
A. A. Watts, scurrilously caricatured in Fraser’s as an art thief, 1835. He may have been responsible for alerting John Forster to Letitia’s sexual history.
On November 20, 1835, when Macready recorded that John Forster turned up to tell him that his engagement was off due to his discovery of Letitia’s sexual secrets, Watts’s legal case against Fraser’s was gearing up for trial. His enmity with Maginn was long established. Getting at the Fraser’s female mascot, L.E.L., who had already humiliated him, was a way for Watts to get at its editor.
However, given the widespread knowledge of Letitia’s open secret, there must have been other informants too. In a desperate but far from fully candid letter she wrote to Bulwer in the midst of the crisis, Letitia referred to the “gossiping of Mr Hall” as a supposed source, although she affected not to take it seriously. Hall had apparently pointed the finger at Watts when he himself was accused of spreading smut about her, but had gone on to “eat” his “words.”
Although “Pecksniff” later boasted of having set up the match with John Forster in the first place, it is only too easy to imagine him switching sides as soon as hints of Letitia’s past began to reach her fiancé. If he joined in the muckspreading, it was because he was fearful of being seen to have inveigled a callow young man into marrying a woman with an unsavory past.
Jerdan’s presence in the theater box at the first on-the-spot sighting of Letitia with Forster suggests that Hall may not have been the only backstage prime mover. By now, the bankrupt Jerdan was ensconced with Mary Ann Maxwell and finding Letitia a burden. He himself, despite their long-standing intimacy, may well have wanted to marry her off, perhaps convincing her to go along with the plan by promising that they would remain lovers.
Laman Blanchard descends into incoherence at this point in his 1841 biography. From the moment John Forster receives untoward information about Letitia, the narrative disintegrates. Blanchard states that a group of Letitia’s allies sought to investigate the source of the slander in order to refute it. He then wordily announces that “the refutation which the evil report met, in the course of that investigation, was as effectual and complete as in the nature of such charges—charges so brought and circulated—it was possible to be.” He then goes on to claim, somewhat circularly, that the “refutation consisted in the utter disbelief in the charge, and the honourable zeal to trace the source of the calumny, that were everywhere evinced.”
The “sole object” of the friends’ inquiry, Blanchard said, was “to trace the false accuser, and to drag him forward.” However, they failed. That is unsurprising, given that the charges were actually true, and indeed an open secret among insiders. If the loose-tongued Jerdan himself was one of the gossips, it would have been impossible to finger him without calumniating Letitia.
That the crisis indeed led to frantic negotiations behind the scenes is evident from Macready’s diary entry in which he says that it was agreed among the couple’s friends that the engagement should be called off. It was Letitia, not Forster, who officially made the break. Although she was in no position to bring an action for breach of promise, an accepted proposal of marriage was a binding contract, unless the woman chose to withdraw. It was up to Letitia to do so.
Writing to Bulwer, Letitia dismissed the slanders but expressed a genuine desire to put “all connection between myself and Mr Forster at an end” because of the aggressive way in which he had been questioning her over the “shameful calumny”—and because she feared he had been questioning others, spreading the rumors further in the process.
Her letter offers an insight into the culture in which, as “Lines of Life” puts it, “none of us will choose to say / What none will choose to hear.” Forster had failed to stick to the rules. His worst crime, in Letitia’s view, was to have made the unspoken spoken, by repeating to her face the rumors that she could not bear to hear: “I cannot get over—the entire want of delicacy to me—which could repeat such a slander to myself. In no way has Mr Forster spared my feelings—The whole of his conduct to me personally has left behind almost dislike—certainly fear of his imperious and overbearing temper.”
Anthropologists define dirt as matter out of place. Sexual so-called secrets only became explosive if they were spread through the wrong channels to the wrong people in the wrong language. Letitia could laugh off ribald verses in the press, but she could not deal with direct interpersonal communication. She may have hoped for a no-questions-asked union of convenience with John Forster, imagining she could exchange her literary contacts and professional know-how for the title “Mrs.,” just as her mother had traded her fortune for John Landon’s name. However,
once the allegations reached Forster, his male pride was stung.
Letitia’s letter to him breaking off the engagement speaks the language of cheap melodrama, as if she is writing for the stage. She claimed she was retreating to save her fiancé, not herself: “Why should you be exposed to the annoyance—the mortification of having the name of the woman you honour with your regard, coupled with insolent insinuation?” She descended to near parody: “The more I think, the more I feel I ought not—I cannot—allow you—to unite yourself with one accused of—I cannot write it. The mere suspicion is dreadful as death.”
Letitia was trying to control the situation through desperate casuistry. To Forster, she bemoaned what must privately have been a great relief: that the only evidence against her was hearsay. “Were it stated as a fact, that might be disproved,” she wrote. “I might say, look back on my life—ask every friend I have—but what answer can I give, or what security have I against the assertion of a man’s vanity, or the slander of a vulgar woman’s tongue?” We see her clinging to the fiction that she had no dubious past, notably alluding only to Maclise’s supposed claim that she made a pass at him, and to Mrs. Maginn’s flimsy allegations. She makes no reference at all to the Jerdan rumors.
In his Book of Memories, S. C. Hall spilled much ink in sagely shaking his head over Letitia’s supposed lack of decorum in her dealings with Maginn, whom, he opined, she had treated without the respect due to an older, married man. It is hard not to conclude that Hall gave space to the false allegation to distract attention from the truth. He took great care to excise the Jerdan allegations from his account.
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