The marriage was tardily announced in The Times on June 23. By then, the couple had gone out of town together, presumably to absent themselves at the moment of the announcement. The Liddiards, though they were providing Letitia with bed and board, do not appear to have been invited to the wedding itself.
Their daughter Maria, then in her early twenties and about to get engaged herself, was not even told it had taken place. Everyday life went on as usual on the surface in the Liddiard household. On June 10, three days after the marriage, Maria recorded in her diary that her father had taken her sister Louisa and L.E.L. to the zoo during the day, probably a welcome distraction for the latter. In the evening, however, “Papa” had “a long confab with Mr Maclean in his room—a crisis seems looming.” Whatever was said in Papa’s room was not shared. Maria’s diary is a testimony to how much was kept from her by her parents about Miss Landon’s situation. Only on June 21, a fortnight after the wedding, was Maria finally informed: “Miss Landon told me what surprised me greatly—her marriage!—I will make no comments. I said little talking by the conservatory.”
On June 23, after noting that the marriage announcement had been printed in the papers, Maria added that “2 strange notes came from Mr Maclean in the evening—not himself—what a wretched affair this is—she extremely angry.” Clearly it was no fairy-tale wedding.
The couple returned to London on June 27 for a small farewell party. The guests included the Earl of Munster—William IV’s illegitimate son by the actress Dora Jordan—whom Jerdan had cultivated for two decades. The Thomsons could not come, but called at the Liddiards’ in advance. The rest of the guest list recorded by Maria Liddiard includes the minor novelist Lady Stepney, whose books were claimed by Mary Russell Mitford to have been honed into publishing shape by Letitia. Otherwise, it comprises a select clutch of unknowns or hardly knowns, including the elderly novelist Miss Jane Porter (1776–1850), whose sister and fellow novelist Anna Maria Porter’s romantic portrayal of goitered outcasts had long ago inspired Letitia, in a family joke, to compare the bankrupt Landons to the Cahets.
Bulwer and S. C. Hall both made speeches. The latter boasted of his affection, regard, and respect for Letitia, “which she could not have so long and continuously retained had they not been earned and merited.”
Maclean’s response to such Pecksniffery was laconic: “If Mrs McLean [sic] has as many friends as Mr Hall says she has, I only wonder that they allow her to leave them.” Even at their wedding party, Letitia’s new husband could not disguise his conviction that he had been inveigled into taking away an inconvenient woman whose friends could not wait to get her out of the country. “More disquietude about the party on Wednesday. What disagreeables this affair has involved,” noted Maria Liddiard in advance of the occasion.
The next day, June 28, was Queen Victoria’s coronation. Letitia watched the procession from a balcony in St. James’s Street. It was her last public appearance in London and a symbolic moment for L.E.L. Despite her attempts to change her image, she remained mired in the rackety Regency, associated with the illegitimate Earl of Munster and not with the new queen, who would make such efforts to remold monarchy in the image of middle-class morality. Letitia, poised for exile, could not survive under the incoming regime.
Just before she was due to sail, Letitia wrote to Maclean’s clergyman father. He had a volume of sermons just out—including one, ironically enough, on “sincerity”—which he had arranged to have sent to her. “I trust that Mr G. Maclean will at least not find his happiness diminished by being accompanied by one who has the sincerest affection and esteem for him,” she wrote. Sensibility, once a sign of Romantic rebellion, had become a sine qua non in respectable bourgeois marriage, but her double-negatived platitude was hardly a declaration of passion.
The newlyweds originally intended to board the Governor Maclean at London the day after the coronation. However, Letitia viewed the cabin and found it too basic. Nothing had been done to fit it out for female comfort. In the end, the couple boarded at Portsmouth a few days later, where Letitia found the cabin had been improved. Only at the “eleventh hour” was a maid “permitted” to join her on the voyage, she told Katherine Thomson. This was Emily Bailey, the wife of the ship’s steward. She was destined to be the last person to see Letitia alive.
Whittington went with Letitia to Portsmouth. They missed the train, because she found it so hard to say goodbye to her London friends and kept putting off their departure. It was late in the evening when they reached Portsmouth, where they checked into a hotel.
In the morning, Whittington found his sister “sitting on a hassock, on the floor, with the window-seat for a desk, busy writing a number of little farewell notes.” They discussed her plans for writing once in Africa. When asked, “What will you do without friends to talk to?” she replied, “I shall talk to them through my books.”
More farewell notes were written as they waited for the cutter that was to take them to where the Governor Maclean lay at anchor. Letitia gave a start when the guns fired a salute as Maclean himself stepped on board. But at the final farewell dinner on the ship Whittington remembered her as being in high spirits. Then her brother took his leave. As he sailed off in the cutter he watched her “standing on the deck and looking towards us, as long as I could trace her figure against the sky.”
They set sail on July 2 or 3. Letitia had experienced seasickness crossing the English Channel in a steamer. The long voyage to Cape Coast was hellish. Not until after their brief stopover in Madeira—where Maclean but not Letitia briefly disembarked—did she feel able to write:
Never is there one moment’s quiet,—the deck is about a yard from your head, and it is never still; steps, falling of ropes, chains, and the rolling of parts of machinery, never stop: if you sleep you are waked with a start, your heart beating—by some sudden roll….Till to-day I have attempted to do nothing, and even this scrawl is a labour of Hercules; the table rocks to which the sofa is tied, and the sofa rocks too.
The sofa was where she spent her days, retching, while Maclean busied himself with his scientific instruments, charting the ship’s position. Her brief journal of the voyage—a mere handful of paragraphs—does not dwell on her new husband. He would be up at eight to “take the sun”—to measure its altitude—before breakfasting with the captain. After that he “generally comes for a moment to see how I am,” which does not sound overly attentive.
But on deck there were moments of disorienting beauty:
The sky is filled with stars, and there is a new moon—just Coleridge’s description:—
“The moon is going up the sky
With a single star beside.”
All seem to be racing—I can use no other word—up and down the heaven, with the movement of the vessel. It is tremendous to look up, and see the height to which the sails ascend—so dark, so shadowy; while the ship seems such a little thing, you cannot understand how she is not lifted out of the water. The only light is that in the binnacle, where the compass is placed, by which the course is steered; it is such a speck of light for the safety of the whole to depend upon. The colour of the sea is lovely…we had a slight tornado last night, the lightning was splendid, the thunder appeared to me much louder than I ever heard; it was at night, and I was luckily on deck; it was very striking—the sudden stir on the deck that had been so still—the men who start up, you cannot tell from whence, and the rapid furling of the sails!
The two poems Letitia wrote during the voyage were not designed to make her “friends” in London feel easy. One was addressed to the Polar Star, which she watched sinking lower and lower in the horizon each night as they neared the equator, until at last it disappeared. It suggested that her own star was waning and prophesied a death:
But thou hast sunk beneath the wave,
Thy radiant place unknown;
I seem to stand beside a grave,
The second, “Night at Sea,” dwelled in melancholy tones on her coming exile, each verse ending with the same two-line refrain:
’Tis Night, and overhead the sky is gleaming,
Through the slight vapour trembles each dim star;
I turn away—my heart is sadly dreaming
Of scenes they do not light, of scenes afar.
My friends, my absent friends!
Do you think of me as I think of you?
The open-endedness of the final question was a typical L.E.L. ambiguity. How did her absent friends think of her? Mrs. Thomson, who had shepherded her to Harriet Martineau’s to make sure she made the right preparations? Mr. Hall, who had insinuated even in his farewell speech that her respectability was in doubt? Even the sympathetic Bulwer had given “poor Miss Landon” away. And what of Jerdan? As H. F. Chorley later remarked, “Those who had, in some measure, compromised her, were in no case to assist her; those who had stood aside, had become aware of the deep and real struggle and sorrow which had darkened her whole life, from its youth upwards, and the many, many pleas for forbearance implied on such knowledge.”
On Friday, August 10, they first sighted land. “All I can say is, that Cape Coast must be infinitely worse than my worst imaginings, if it does not seem paradise after this ship,” wrote Letitia. They reached the harbor on the night of the fifteenth.
Maclean went on ahead alone, in a small boat, at two o’clock in the morning. It was later surmised that he had gone to check that Ellen had left the premises, or to tell her to leave if she was still there.
He came back from his foray soaked to the skin and with bad news. The young man who had been acting as his secretary in his absence had died of fever and the castle was in confusion as a result. Letitia’s first introduction to Cape Coast was thus an instant reminder of the “white man’s grave.”
But when, next day, she disembarked herself, she was relieved to have put an end to her sea sufferings. “Cape Coast Castle! Thank goodness, I am on land again.” Two months to the day after they reached the harbor, Letitia herself was found dead.
CHAPTER 13
Heart of Darkness
Ellen had probably already left the castle with her children to join her family in Accra, alerted by letter in advance, as Thomas Hutchinson later reported (according to one of Letitia’s own letters home from Cape Coast Castle, the locals were fond of receiving letters; if illiterate, they dictated replies). The sources offer no corroborative evidence to substantiate the rumors that she plotted to murder Letitia, possibly with Maclean’s connivance.
Significantly, the government inspector Richard Madden found nothing to support the idea when he visited Cape Coast in 1841, despite his suspicious attitude toward Maclean. Although his official task was to investigate the allegations of illegal commerce, he had a sympathetic interest in finding out what he could about Letitia’s fate, as he had met her in London through their mutual friend Lady Blessington. He was certainly no friend to Maclean or the merchants, against whom he eventually submitted a highly critical report. Nor was he immune from paranoia: while actually staying at the castle, he caught a fever and imagined in his delirium that the cook was trying to poison him and that Letitia’s ghost was wafting through his bedroom. Yet even Madden dismissed the murder theory, having questioned the castle staff and interviewed Ellen in Accra.
Letitia’s state of mind during the last eight weeks of her life is, however, crucial to understanding her death. One reason why the unsubstantiated murder theory was able to establish itself was that her letters home from Cape Coast Castle to friends such as Anna Maria Hall and Katherine Thomson, which were published in the newspapers in the aftermath of her death, offered no hint that she had been suicidal, or even ill.
Soon after her arrival, Letitia wrote to tell Mrs. Hall that she had recovered from her seasickness and was now “as well as possible.” Everything pleased her: the castle was a “very noble building,” its rooms large and cool. The one in which she was writing, “painted a deep blue, with some splendid engravings,” would be “pretty even in England.” This was probably the room—referred to by Brodie Cruickshank as her “dressing-room”—in which she was later found dead.
Letitia was delighted with the castle’s situation: “On three sides the batteries are dashed against by the waves; on the fourth is a splendid land view.” The “cocoa trees, with their long, fan-like leaves,” were “very beautiful.” As for the “natives,” they looked “very picturesque with their fine dark figures, with pieces of the country cloth flung round them.” They even had “an excellent ear for music,” she enthused: “the band plays all the old popular airs, which they have caught from some chance hearing.”
Letitia’s only “troubles,” she told Mrs. Hall, were of the “housekeeping” variety. At Hans Place she had been effectively infantilized. She had dined early with the schoolgirls and had never had to worry about how the meals appeared. Now she was expected to take charge of an unfamiliar domestic economy, where there was plenty of silver but nothing to clean it with, in which the mahogany furniture was expected to be constantly dusted, and where the diet consisted of unfamiliar foods such as yams and plantains. Although she does not mention it, her insecurity was compounded by the fact that the castle staff remained loyal to their previous, more competent chatelaine, Ellen. To add to her discomfort, other members of the Bannerman clan must have been frequently present in the castle, which, with its warehouses, remained the local center for trade.
Yet Letitia told Mrs. Thomson optimistically, “I begin to see daylight. I have numbered and labelled my keys—their name is Legion—and every morning I take my way to the store, give out flour, sugar, butter, &c., and am learning to scold if I see any dust, or miss the customary polish on the tables.” She claimed to have taken in her stride the sight of half-naked black prisoners sluggishly scrubbing the floors overseen by a soldier with a bayonet, only complaining that they were less effective at the job than a single old woman in England.
She was even getting pastry-making lessons from Emily Bailey’s husband, who had served as the ship’s steward on the Governor Maclean. Both Baileys were happy to help as they waited for their passage home to England. “I am very well and happy,” Letitia concluded, although she admitted that she missed her English friends.
In his 1841 Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., Laman Blanchard described Letitia’s letters home as rehearsing “without variation” and “in the strongest terms” her “favourable impressions of the country, her satisfaction with her new abode, her enjoyment of health, and her cheerful hopes and prospects.” The lack of variation is indeed remarkable.
Soon after arriving, she told Whittington, “The castle is a fine building….I am very well.” “I am very well and happy. The Castle is a fine building,” she reiterated in a letter to Blanchard himself. “The [room] in which I am writing would be pretty in England—it is of a pale blue—and hung with some beautiful prints,” she added, reprising her earlier comments to Mrs. Hall. West Africa was “like living in the Arabian nights.” “I am most uninterestingly well and happy,” she informed Bulwer.
On October 10, five days before her death, she told Katherine Thomson, “I cannot tell you how much better the place is than we supposed….I must again repeat how infinitely better the place is than we thought.” Her use of the word “we” reveals Mrs. Thomson’s complicity in the enterprise. On October 12, she told Robert Fisher, publisher of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book, “I never was in better health and like the place exceedingly. The Castle is a fine building.”
In her letter to Marie Fagan, found on her desk the day she died, she repeated herself yet again: “The castle is a fine building….I do not suffer from heat; insects there are few or none and I am in excellent health….The land-view, with its cocoa and palm trees…is like a scene in the Arabia
n Nights.”
The key phrase in that final letter is “insects there are few or none.” One of the few European women ever to have visited Cape Coast Castle previously—Sarah Bowditch, who spent time there in 1816 and 1817 with her husband—was a keen naturalist. She left a detailed record of the insect life at Cape Coast Castle: the poisonous centipedes she found in her bed; the scorpions that hid themselves among her books; the tarantulas; the cockroaches; the plagues of red and white ants that devoured everything, including clothes packed in chests, and the wooden chests themselves, which had to be placed on well-tarred legs set in water to discourage them. Then there were the mosquitoes.
Letitia’s letters home were her last exercise in puffery, her final masquerade. In equating Cape Coast with the fantasy vistas of the “Arabian Nights,” she was playing Scheherazade to the end. Letitia’s poetry had transformed her commonplace affair with William Jerdan into a grand passion. Now she was “working up” her descriptions of Cape Coast to please her audience, to save her own pride, and to protect her “friends” from their own guilt at having encouraged her to go.
In some of her letters, however, her resolve to mask the “covered mass of care” wavers. The sheer physical discomforts were more trying than she admitted to Mrs. Hall. She confessed to Whittington that the aftereffects of seasickness went on for some time, leaving her “stone deaf” on one side. Although she told most of her correspondents that she did not suffer from the heat, in her one letter to her mother she admitted that “the nights are so hot you can only bear the lightest sheet over you. As to the beds, the mattresses are so hard, they are like iron—the damp is very destructive—the dew is like rain, and there are no fireplaces; you would not believe it but a grate would be the first of luxuries. Keys, scissors, everything rusts.”
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