L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  To Letitia’s relief, Whittington was eventually elected to the secretaryship. She was so wound up that when the news came through she collapsed. “I never shall forget waiting on Wednesday—I never suffered so much in my life—when I heard of our success the blood rushed from my nose and mouth in torrents,” she told Crofton Croker on April 14. Maria and Anne Liddiard had spent the day with her so that she should have some support at the moment of the announcement.

  In his bitter first-person lyric of the 1820s, “Warte, warte, wilder Schiffman,” Heinrich Heine used the image of blood streaming from the eyes and body as a self-consciously over-the-top metaphor to describe the combined trauma of a lost love and exile over the seas from Europe: the exact fate that Letitia was now facing. Heine’s poem was part ironic, part felt. Letitia—who had so enjoyed Heine’s company in Paris, and published several poems based on German originals—may have known it. But there was neither irony nor romance in her real-life nosebleed.

  CHAPTER 12

  Engagement

  Cape Coast represented escape, but to what? Letitia had long since played with ideas of the exotic. As a child, she had thrilled to her father’s traveler’s tales and had even fantasized about making her own voyage to Africa. But Cape Coast was in reality far from an ideal destination. The region’s health risks were notorious, while the castle itself was associated in the public mind with the horrors of the slave trade. Unlike India, where Emma Roberts had spent some years, West Africa had no mixed-sex European society. Yet Letitia had no option but to clutch at it as her last chance.

  Until her engagement was a fait accompli, she could not relax. The trouble was that Maclean began to get cold feet during his long absence in Scotland. As Katherine Thomson recalled,

  Mr Maclean had sought her hand in marriage; it was promised: and then, after a temporary separation, after a kind farewell, after several letters, written in the approved style of persons so situated in respect to each other, behold! the correspondence on the gentleman’s part suddenly ceased. No explanation—no regrets followed.

  According to Mrs. Thomson (writing, of course, pseudonymously), Letitia made “one false step” during the courtship. In nineteenth-century parlance, that meant only one thing: that she had slept with Maclean in the hope of entrapping him into matrimony. It was a high-risk strategy. The man’s sense of duty might kick in, but he could equally reject the woman as a whore.

  The breach-of-promise law was designed to prevent lusty men from reneging on vaguely pledged engagements after the event. In Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836, the year Letitia met Maclean, an absurd breach-of-promise action is brought against Pickwick by his landlady, after a misunderstanding lands them in the same bed and leads her to believe that they are engaged. But Letitia was in no position to sue.

  Two letters Maclean wrote to Matthew Forster in May and June 1837 expose his dithering and ambivalence, as well as his anxiety not to displease his patron. He may have been too embarrassed to send them, as they exist only in draft. “[E]very body makes a fool of himself once in his life, and I candidly admit that I have done so to perfection,” he confessed. “A priori I should have said that there does not exist a man in the world less likely to ‘fall in love’ (as it is called) than myself. Nothing could be more ‘out of the way,’ I am free to acknowledge, and nothing could be more foolish….[L]ooking at the matter as I now do…I am only surprised at my own folly in ever having dreamed such a plan.

  “Nevertheless, it is equally true,” he went on, “that both verbally and in writing, I am pledged to the lady; that is, I left her with the understanding that I was to marry her on my return to London, unless my love be cooled by the cold winds of the north. I must confess also, that I would have married her when in London—at least I think I would—and I must do the lady justice to say that she refused to allow me to enter into any engagement until I should have an opportunity of knowing my own mind.”

  His reference to the “cold winds of the north” must be a quotation from Letitia, as Maclean was not a man of metaphors. She had clearly subjected him to the strategies of paradox and equivocation she had perfected in her poetry, making it appear that she was giving him the right to retract, while at the same time making him feel contractually bound.

  Maclean was cornered. “What the devil I am now to do is another matter. I suppose, as you say, that I must pay the penalty of my own folly and precipitation, and marry the girl,” he concluded limply. “I cannot, I suspect, recede honourably, & cannot go forward with safety.—However, I must make up my mind in some way or another,” he wrote.

  “She possesses wit, talents, and powers of literary composition in no ordinary degree—but you have no conception of the violence of her temperament when excited,” he went on. Though a self-confessed “ignoramus” as regards womankind, he wondered whether Miss Landon had “a bee in her bonnet.” Was she mentally unstable?

  When he happened to mention to her that a lady he had seen in Edinburgh had “won” his “heart” with her exquisite singing, Letitia had exploded with jealousy, as if she could not tell the difference between a throwaway remark and a serious expression of attachment. After manipulating so many romantic clichés in her poetry, perhaps she really could not. However, her insecurity was real. For fifteen years she had “sung passionate songs of beating hearts” to a receptive public. Now she felt threatened by the drawing-room singing of an amateur.

  Even the stability of Letitia’s familiar long-term residence at 22 Hans Place had by now evaporated. Early in 1837, her landlady, Mrs. Sheldon, who had taken over from the Misses Lance when they retired, moved out. Letitia had had to expend endless energy on winning the suspicious Mrs. Sheldon over. She went with her to her new address in Upper Berkeley Street. Nevertheless, the change had been a blow.

  When Maclean tried to cool things off, he received a note from Mrs. Sheldon “telling me that if I do not write Miss Landon will kill herself.” He did not take it seriously (perhaps he should have done so). But he found himself emotionally blackmailed into making fresh declarations of love at the very moment when he wanted to disentangle himself. “What on earth” could he do under such circumstances, but “say something very soothing and tender”?

  Letitia’s swinging moods were not, however, Maclean’s only reason for wanting to withdraw. He had become “acquainted with various matters which have somewhat altered my opinion of Miss Landon.” News of her dubious sexual reputation had finally reached him, whether through anonymous letters or oral gossip.

  The prospect of a second broken engagement was terrifying for Letitia. “Never shall I forget the anguish of my poor friend,” recalled Katherine Thomson. Letitia, desperate, told Maclean to apply to her respectable acquaintances for evidence of her virtuous character.

  Proof that she did so rests in a long set-piece letter she wrote to Mrs. Thomson in June 1837, defending herself against the “invidious remarks of which I was made the object.” No doubt intended to reach the eyes of Maclean himself, it reads like a reprise of her 1826 apologia, though composed with less rhetorical bravura.

  Letitia was brazenly deceitful in rebutting the “slanders”—and pathetically honest in describing the pain they caused her:

  To those who [to] indulge in a small envy, or a miserable love of gossip, talk away my life and happiness, I only say, if you think my conduct worth attacking, it is also worth examining. Such examination would be my best defence. From my friends I ask brief and indignant denial, based only on their conviction of falsehood. As regards myself, I have no answer beyond contemptuous silence, an appeal to all who know my past life, and a very bitter sense of innocence and injustice.

  To Maclean’s discomfort, Letitia also got Matthew Forster to plead her cause: “her applying to you has…surprised and disappointed me exceedingly,” he complained. “It shows a want of delicacy which I could not have conceived possible.” He was
mortified by having to question not just Letitia’s honor but, by implication, that of the rich and powerful man who had introduced them.

  But as Maclean wavered, Letitia grasped the upper hand. After responding soothingly to her suicide threat, he was astonished to receive a cold reply, upbraiding him at his “impudence in having written to her so kindly.” Letitia intimated her intention of closing the correspondence, alluding to “various reports” about him that had reached her. This was an act of desperate gamesmanship.

  Letitia had heard, probably from Matthew Forster, that Maclean was already involved with a local woman at Cape Coast. That was indeed the case. Such “country marriages,” as they were called, were the norm among European men in West Africa, who were often stationed there for years at a stretch. It was understood that the partnership was not for life. If the man went back to Europe, he was free to marry there, in line with the local practice of polygamy. But they were not casual relationships.

  Although not married under British law, the women involved were regarded as wives, not mistresses, and as such had acknowledged rights. Their marriage contracts had typically been brokered by their families in financial detail. Many were of mixed race, the product of previous unions between European traders and local women. They typically lived family lives with their partners and any children they had together. The men were expected to compensate the women if they left the country and ended the relationship. “Country wives” had a greater claim on their men than Letitia had on Jerdan as his mistress.

  Little is known about Maclean’s African partner, with whom he is said to have had an unspecified number of children. However, her name, “Ellen Maclean,” occurs in an 1837 list of Cape Coast female traders. This suggests she was not an exotic concubine with hot veins, but an entrepreneurial businesswoman.

  One unintended consequence of the Abolition Act in West Africa was to increase the number of women involved in commerce. Reduction in slave exports created a glut in the local market and a consequent lowering of prices, widening the number of entrants into business able to afford slave bearers to transport goods. Ellen herself was probably one of them. Maclean may also have transferred to her the legal ownership of his own slaves, following the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, in line with the typical behavior of male British nationals with local “country wives.”

  According to Richard Madden, Maclean’s country wife was the half sister of a Mr. Bannerman, a man “of colour, of respectability, living in Accra.” This was James Bannerman (1790–1858), a leading local merchant, himself the son of a Scottish father and a Fante mother. He married an Ashanti princess, Yaa Hom, and named his daughter “Elen,” presumably after his half sister. The family remains to this day significant in Ghana. When I visited the country in 2017, the candidate on election posters in the impoverished Jamestown district of Accra was a Bannerman.

  Maclean’s “country marriage” reveals the extent to which he had “gone native.” It was not something he would have wanted to advertise in London. Such cross-cultural relationships became less and less acceptable in England as proto-Victorian notions of race replaced the laissez-faire attitudes of the eighteenth century. Ironically, as antislavery became the majority view, the horror of miscegenation increased.

  In this respect, Letitia’s own poetry acts as a mirror of the times. In the 1820s she romanticized a love affair between a white Crusader and a Moorish princess. But by 1832 we find her crystallizing the new attitudes in her mawkish poem “The African,” designed for her bourgeois annuals’ audience. In it, an African prince is wrested from his homeland and sold into slavery. But he finds a new and better “home” in his conversion to Christianity by a sexless, blue-eyed female child, a prototype of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  The poem shows L.E.L. cannily playing to both sides in the slavery debate. She attempts to put across an abolitionist message, while carefully avoiding alienating the large constituency of ordinary Britons who invested at a remove in slaves. The year after she wrote it, many such small investors would be claiming government compensation for the loss of their property following the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. L.E.L. did not want to rub her readers’ noses in the brutality of plantation life. In an act of breathtaking denial, she described the Caribbean island, where her African prince is exiled, as a tropical paradise hung with flowers. His sorrows are divorced from material reality. They are only those of a sensitive soul.

  The African, from Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book. Letitia’s accompanying poem sentimentalized slavery for her annuals’ audience.

  Letitia was not in reality put off by the discovery that Maclean had a country wife. She had spent her entire adult life as the “other woman.” Both in her poetry and in her daily experience, the love triangle was her relationship norm. “I can scarcely make even you understand how perfectly ludicrous the idea of jealousy of a native woman really is. Sentiment, affection, are never thought of—it is a temporary bargain—I must add that it seems to me quite monstrous,” she later told her brother. Yet what had her affair with Jerdan been if not a “temporary bargain”? There is no reason to suppose that Maclean’s relationship with the mother of his children precluded affection any more than did Letitia’s transactional relationship with Jerdan.

  The information about Maclean’s country wife came at an opportune moment for Letitia, when she most needed to distract his attention from the “invidious remarks” he had heard concerning her. His squirming gave her further opportunity to hold him to the engagement. It was also to her advantage that his departure for West Africa was postponed for month upon month by official Colonial Office business. He was needed to lead a delegation to The Hague to discuss the Dutch settlements in West Africa.

  The anxieties created by her on-off engagement made Letitia ill throughout 1837, reliant on Dr. Thomson’s care. That year she is repeatedly reported as “ill” in Maria Liddiard’s diary. She was without a fixed abode by now, having parted company with her landlady, and instead relying on the hospitality of the Thomsons and the Liddiards. The two families were clearly at one in their attempts to offer Letitia a refuge. In one of her anonymously published memoirs, Mrs. Thomson pointedly praises Mrs. Liddiard’s respectability and Christian virtues, as well as her “large fortune” and luxurious house.

  * * *

  —

  Yet still Letitia’s fatal facility continued unabated. At the end of 1837 she published her novel Ethel Churchill. Ostensibly set in the eighteenth century, it offered a chilling portrayal of the literary marketplace of the 1830s, with its tragic tale of the idealistic poet Walter Maynard destroyed by the literary cash nexus.

  For the cynical publisher Curl, life is “only a long sum,” “sentiment” and “personality” are mere “marketable commodities,” the writer’s only duty is “to write what will sell,” and the publishers’ advance is a form of debt bondage. Letitia took the name from Edmund Curll, the unscrupulous bookseller satirized by Alexander Pope. But she probably based him on Henry Colburn, who had been in the background throughout her career. If Letitia hoped to puncture him it was in vain. All Colburn cared about was the bottom line.

  One reviewer of Ethel Churchill detected signs that L.E.L. was becoming “a sort of Radical” because the novel exposed the sufferings of the poor. But the novel has no Victorian philanthropic optimism and decidedly no political idealism. Its view of life is materialistic, deterministic, and pessimistic.

  The verse epigraphs Letitia wrote as chapter headings—which survive in manscript in the Liddiard archive—would have been bypassed by the casual reader. But they offer a unique insight into her state of mind. Compared to the calculated equivocations of the early L.E.L., they are remarkable for their lack of ambiguity, suggesting she had finally lost faith in her own system of equivocation.

  Taken out of context, they seem much more naked than any of her previous poems. She was no longer using the mask of L.E
.L., either as a way of teasing readers or as a psychological distancing device. There are no playful double entendres, nor does she put her words into the mouth of a romanticized double. Her mask had become transparent.

  In “Gifts Misused,” she looked back in bleak despair at her own career and the “idol” she herself had created in “L.E.L.”:

  Oh, what a waste of feeling and of thought

  Have been the imprints on my roll of life!

  What worthless hours!…

  My power of song, unto how base a use

  Has it been put! With its pure ore

  I made an idol, living only on the breath

  Of idol worshippers.

  In “Life’s Mask” she openly stated her cynic’s creed of fatalism:

  Which was the true philosopher?—the sage

  Who to the sorrows and the crimes of life

  Gave tears—or he who laughed at all he saw?

  Such mockery is bitter, and yet just:

  And heaven well knows the cause there is to weep.

  Methinks that life is what the actor is—

  Outside there is he quaint and jibing mask;

  Beneath the pale and careworn countenance.

  In another, yet more striking fragment, she reduced language and human emotion to mere physiology. Offering an irredeemably materialist message, she wonders at the capacity of words to redden the physical cheek and make the heart pulse, since they are nothing but a breath of air:

  ’Tis a strange mystery, the power of words!

  Life is in them, and death. A word can send

  The crimson colour hurrying to the cheek.

  Hurrying with many meanings; or can turn