L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  When Laman Blanchard was researching his biography of Letitia, he interviewed Maginn at length. As private correspondence shows, they agreed that Maginn’s name should not be mentioned at all in Blanchard’s Life. In an odd turn of phrase, Maginn pronounced himself prepared to spare Letitia at his “own cost.” This cryptic statement suggests that rather than have Blanchard explicitly clear him of seducing Letitia, Maginn opted to let the accusation against him remain abroad in the vague but swirling cloud of rumor. That would help to protect the dead L.E.L.’s reputation because the thicker the cloud, the less likely it would be to disperse, leaving the true facts about her affair with Jerdan visible. As his own deathbed hallucinations suggest, Maginn ultimately felt guilty about his treatment of Letitia. Having subjected her to the psychological torture of sexual mockery, while knowing full well about her struggling private situation as a mistress and single mother, he had every reason to feel guilty.

  In the wake of the crisis, Letitia had a breakdown. Stress had been the motor of her life for years, but now she finally collapsed. By the time she wrote her letter formally breaking off the engagement, she was under the care of her regular doctor.

  “I have suffered for the last three days a degree of torture that made Dr Thomson say, ‘you have an idea of what the wrack is now,’ ” she told John Forster. “I look back on my whole life—I can find nothing to justify my being the object of such pain—but this is not what I meant to say,” she added pregnantly.

  Her medical complaint, she explained, was “inflammation of the liver.” The illness was considered at the time to be connected to the “pains of thought.” In his Elements of the Pathology of the Human Mind, published in 1838, Thomas Mayo describes curing a case of “melancholia”—in which the patient exhibits “hysterical crying,” “shocking thoughts,” and a suicide attempt—by treating the subject’s “torpor of the liver.”

  Mrs. Thomson later referred to Letitia’s “feverish illness; with no other source but a harassed and over-wrought mind, a wounded spirit that disdained, on that one point, sympathy, and shrunk, on that one point, from confidence.” Even to her doctor’s wife, she could not bring herself to discuss her situation openly.

  The John Forster debacle was calculated to render Letitia in reality the outcast woman she had so often ventriloquized through the mouthpiece of L.E.L. At the time of the Sunday Times crisis a decade earlier, she had had Jerdan as her partner in crime and could ride the storm on the back of his talent for effrontery. Now he was financially struggling and deep into his live-in relationship with Mary Ann Maxwell, who gave birth to their second child, Matilda, in 1837.

  Jerdan was also poised to start dandling a new teenage poetic protégée before the world in the Gazette: Eliza Cook, the precocious self-taught daughter of a Southwark brassworker. He was evidently as keen to “cultivate the divine organisation of her being” as he had once been to nurture Letitia’s. The youthful Eliza told him excitedly, “My ‘fastidious master’ has a pupil, who deems herself honoured by the trouble he has bestowed on her, and begs to tell him his kind and just criticism is well appreciated; my muse is wild, and my judgement very immature and crazy.”

  In the honor culture, men could fight duels, but suicide was the only way out for women. After so many poetic rehearsals, Letitia may well have considered it as a real life option at this juncture. After she was finally found dead in Africa, many thought it suspicious that the Colonial Office failed to investigate. A private memo shows why the colonial secretary, Lord Normanby—whose silver-fork novel Letitia had puffed in Romance and Reality back in 1831—decided not to pursue the matter. The reason was that his old friend Edward Bulwer had called to tell him that he was bound to state that Letitia had once before attempted suicide when in England.

  Eliza Cook (1818–1889), Jerdan’s new poetic protégée, was sixteen years Letitia’s junior and a teenager when he first took her up. Here she is painted by William Etty in 1845.

  Emma Roberts later told Mary Howitt’s husband, William, about the “agonies of mind” her housemate L.E.L. had suffered at Hans Place when “calumny” was “dealing freely” with her name:

  “Have those horrible reports,” she eagerly inquired, “got into the papers, Miss Roberts?” Miss Roberts assured her they had not. “If they do,” she exclaimed, opening a drawer in the table, and taking out a vial of Prussic acid, “I am resolved—here is my remedy!”

  The date on the bottle found in Letitia’s hand at her death was 1836. It may have been the same one.

  Letitia’s mask was slipping. As Katherine Thomson recalled,

  I found her, as I have said, variable in spirits, and so far uncertain in temper, that she would sometimes break forth in a bitter invective upon the hollowness of society—the worldliness of all mankind—“everybody was selfish and cold—there was no one to be trusted—no one to be believed.” But, the instant afterwards, her fine heart redeemed itself. She made exceptions to her censure, spoke warmly…upon the merits of some friend—and often, suddenly breaking off the middle of her harangue, would burst into a flood of tears—check them—walk about the room, and sit down again.

  Letitia was by now desperately in need of allies as she sought to buttress her increasingly exposed position. She cultivated Lady Blessington, but it is uncertain how much social protection the notorious countess could provide. By the mid-1830s, Letitia was becoming persona non grata. “The truth of Miss Landon’s story and her situation had for some time oozed out; it was felt that her literary reputation had been exaggerated; that her social position was, so to say, not the pleasantest in the world,” H. F. Chorley, editor of the Gazette’s rival The Athenaeum, recalled guardedly in his 1873 memoirs.

  Katherine Thomson later compared Letitia at this point in her life to the heroine “in the exquisite novel of ‘Violet.’ ” This obscure allusion was to the anonymously published succès de scandale of 1836: Violet; or the danseuse. The heroine of the novel is a naïve young ballerina, brought up by doting but cash-strapped artistic parents, who put her on the stage in nothing but a flesh-colored body stocking because they need the money. Violet falls desperately in love with an upper-class admirer and runs off to become his mistress. Her more worldly-wise friend meanwhile refuses to sleep with her admirer unless he marries her.

  In one late scene, Violet goes to the theater alone and sees her protector in a box. He is flirting with her former friend, now a high-society married lady, with whom he is on track to form a discreet adulterous dalliance. Realizing her own pariah status, Violet kills herself by taking an overdose of laudanum.

  During the period of Letitia’s incapacitating illness, however, Fraser’s kept up its toxic banter. The issue for January 1836 contained a group portrait by Daniel Maclise of celebrated women writers. Although Letitia’s swelling white bosom is clearly visible, she is portrayed turning away from the viewer, as if trying to hide her face in shame. Directly behind her is a black liveried servant, an avatar of the “Negro” in her early squib. Maginn’s accompanying doggerel slips in a sly joke about her relations with Maclise: “isn’t she painted con amore?”

  In an article in the same issue on Greek pastoral poetry, Maginn (under the pseudonym Oliver Yorke) added an insinuating footnote to the phrase “the virgin’s melting kiss”: “Why does the pretty L.E.L. not take it for a motto? Would she like to learn Greek? Would she like OLIVER for a tutor?” These sarcastic references make it highly unlikely that Maginn was actually Letitia’s lover, but they show how insensitive he was at a time when he must have known that she was under extreme pressure. To the Fraserians, she was not a person but a persona.

  Letitia’s few published works of 1836 include her volume of short stories Traits and Trials of Early Life. Designed as a book of moral tales for young girls, it was a last-ditch attempt to move her public image away from its former eroticism. The book contained her melancholy autobiographical sketch “The His
tory of a Child,” in which she tried to puzzle out the psychological causes of her fate.

  John Forster, meanwhile, retreated into male bonding. His humiliation was turned into a rite of passage, proving his entrée into the “freemasonery” of gentlemen. Inside knowledge of Letitia’s dubious past was the glue that held male alliances together. At a Garrick Club dinner in June 1836, William Macready “begged to propose a toast” to two “earnest supporters of the cause of the drama.” They were John Forster and William Jerdan.

  The incestuous carnival of pre-Victorian periodical culture was, however, about to implode. In the summer of 1836, Maginn’s talent to annoy reached its apogee and its nemesis. Back in 1824, De Quincey had briefly considered challenging Maginn to a duel, after the latter cast aspersions in a review, accusing him of bedding his servant-maid and claiming (accurately as it happens) that Mrs. De Quincey had given birth to their first child out of wedlock. However, he thought better of it.

  Now Maginn succeeded in penning a book review that provoked a genuine challenge. This time the author in question was not an opium-eating hack but an upper-crust, moneyed Whig MP and sporting enthusiast, the Hon. Grantley Berkeley, who had leapt on the “silver fork” bandwagon by publishing a novel, Berkeley Castle. His untalented foray into fiction represented everything the self-made Tory Maginn despised.

  Instead of focusing on the novel’s literary shortcomings, Maginn got personal. He hit Berkeley, a “man of honour,” in the most taboo region: that of illegitimacy. “There could be,” Maginn wrote, “no indelicacy in stating that Mr Grantley Berkeley’s mother lived with Mr Grantley Berkeley’s father as his mistress, and that she had at least one child before she could induce the old and very stupid lord to marry her.” That Berkeley’s uncertain birth had already been proved by a legal case in the House of Lords mattered to him not a jot. He only cared that Maginn had printed it. The definition of “slander” had less to do with the facts than with the act of publication.

  Incensed at the slight, Grantley Berkeley and his brother Craven turned up at the offices of Fraser’s Magazine on August 3, 1836, where they found the managing editor, James Fraser, at his desk. While the aptly named Craven kept watch, Grantley viciously assaulted James Fraser with a weighted whip, causing grievous bodily harm. Two days later, he and Maginn met in a field near the Edgware Road. Shots were exchanged, but neither party was hit.

  James Fraser, the managing editor of Fraser’s Magazine, at his desk in an undated, unpublished drawing by Maclise, 1830s. In 1836, Grantley Berkeley surprised Mr. Fraser in his office and assaulted him. Fraser later died as a result of his injuries.

  Maginn was forced to publish a grudging apology, but his glory days were numbered. He left Fraser’s, which had paid him well (“sixteen guineas per sheet” at the minimum, according to James Grant), and sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism and debt. James Fraser was eventually awarded (inadequate) damages by a court, but he never recovered from his injuries, dying in 1841. An impoverished Maginn followed him to the grave in 1842.

  The incident demonstrates with crass literalism how close to the surface violence and cruelty were in the literary culture in which L.E.L. made her career. But it also bears more closely on her history, for when Grantley Berkeley came to publish his colorful My Life and Recollections in 1865–66, he claimed that he had fought the duel on her account.

  Berkeley recalled how he had been introduced to Letitia after wangling an invitation to one of her literary salons at 22 Hans Place. The following day he called on her, whereupon, in his account, she burst into tears and, without naming names, told him that in her youth “a certain person…had made use of his influence in the literary world to obtain power over her for her personal seduction.” This unnamed powerful magazine editor had demanded her acquiescence to his “vile proposition” as the “price of her public praise.” Now he was threatening to ruin her reputation if she did not hand over the “greater portion of the proceeds of her pen” to pay his debts.

  Taking the reprobate to be Maginn, an outraged Berkeley proposed himself as Letitia’s defender. He believed that it was in revenge for his chivalrous intervention on her behalf that Maginn went on to write the offensive review of his novel that resulted in their duel.

  Given her history, and the culture of the unspoken in which she operated, it is impossible to believe Letitia confided directly in Berkeley, who was no insider. However, his depiction of her suddenly dissolving into tears fits with other accounts of her unstable state of mind by 1836. In fact, his story is so clearly a garbled version of what we now know to have been Letitia’s actual relationship with Jerdan that he must have confused the Irish editor of Fraser’s with the Scottish editor of the Gazette. Berkeley may have hinted to Letitia what he had (mis)heard on the grapevine, and then took her humiliated, tearful response as confirmation.

  After Berkeley published his account of his acquaintance with Letitia in the second volume of his memoirs, S. C. Hall leapt into print to dismiss him as a fantasist. In the ensuing debate, Berkeley pounced on Hall’s unguarded reference to a “blight” in Letitia’s “springtime,” asking, quite reasonably, “what blight?” But he never realized that he had fingered the wrong editor in Maginn.

  Nevertheless, Berkeley’s claim that Letitia had invited his attentions—on the advice of her patroness Lady Blessington—may not have been wholly unfounded. His anecdotal memories of spending an evening with her and a female friend in the parlor at 22 Hans Place are convincingly circumstantial. On one occasion, he recalled, a small ornament fell down. When Letitia bent to retrieve it, the friend told her not to move as she was presenting such a beautiful tableau in the candlelight. This was probably Letitia’s spinsterish fellow lodger Emma Roberts, who was, according to Crofton Croker, slavishly in love with her.

  Letitia is certainly on record as flattering Grantley Berkeley. She wrote a gushing review of his awful novel in the New Monthly Magazine, telling him in a private letter, “I could not praise a work as I have done yours unless I really admired it.” In this enterprise she was encouraged by Lady Blessington, who numbered Berkeley among the Whigs in her salon, and told him that Miss Landon “should be proud of her bard.”

  Since childhood, Letitia had had to defend her fragile identity by playing off different factions against one another. She had long since been trying to keep both the Whig Radical Bulwer and the Tory Fraserians on her side. If the Fraserians continued to mock her in print about her supposed love affairs, following her failed engagement to John Forster, it would not be surprising if Letitia had sought a new Whig ally in 1836.

  In the event, the crisis of the duel put paid to Berkeley’s chimerical protection. Yet in the wake of the debacle, Letitia continued to maintain her gambler’s insouciance, pretending that nothing had happened, just as she had done after the Sunday Times exposé. Clinging to her increasingly threadbare position in society as a literary lion, she desperately accepted whatever invitations still came her way, while firing off studiously flippant correspondence. On November 1, 1836, she wrote to the Fraserian Crofton Croker, puffing herself desperately, boasting of the supposed sales for her latest volume for Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book and of her recent social conquests:

  I have been so gay lately—visiting at one place then at another. I have been staying at Sydenham with Lady Stepney—at Shirley Park with Mrs Skinner—at Harrow—at Dulwich—and at Ham[p]stead, wither, whither, there I have spelt it at last—I go again on Friday.

  The hostesses to whom she referred were not in fact of the first rank, but she was keen to show that she was still in demand both as a guest and as a writer. Nor was her self-conscious spelling correction casual. Literary men had long since hated overtly intellectual women. Coleridge had once praised a female correspondent’s poor spelling, explaining, “The longer I live, the more I do loathe in stomach, and deprecate in Judgement, all, all Bluestockingism.” The faux-naïf style of L
.E.L. had always been consciously fashioned. It was the price she had to pay to be accepted in the male-dominated world of literature.

  However, Letitia now had a genuine cause for excitement. A possible escape route had emerged. At a dinner party in Hampstead, she had caught the eye of the man she would eventually marry: George Maclean, the governor of Cape Coast Castle in West Africa.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Governor

  George Maclean’s entry into Letitia’s narrative opens up a new seam of conflicting evidence and suspicious lacunae. The truth about her surprising marriage, which led her to Africa and ultimately to her death, sinks almost out of sight beneath the gabble of gossip, speculation, and disinformation that subsequently flooded the public prints.

  As with the mysteries surrounding her affair with Jerdan and her three children, those surrounding this last act of her drama often turn out to be the product of deliberate occlusion. Via Maclean, Letitia was about to be vicariously drawn into a new and separate web of lies and corruption far more significant in global terms than anything in literary London: the history of illegal involvement by British business in the slave trade following abolition. From this point on, her story is mired in overlapping conspiracies of silence, in which she herself forms the absent center, as ambivalently abdicating of her own agency as she was as a teenager when her governess first thrust her in Jerdan’s direction.

  The contradictions begin with the retrospective testimonies of her “friends” on the subject of her marriage. Her housemate Emma Roberts described the union as a love match that “promised…lasting happiness.” Katherine Thomson attested that Maclean was the only man Letitia ever loved. But other contemporaries took a less sentimental view. According to S. C. Hall, Letitia’s only motive was to “change her name, and to remove from that society in which, just then, the old and infamous slander had been revived.”