Sleep, it seems, was as rare a commodity at Cape Coast Castle as it had been on board ship. The castle band did not provide unmixed pleasure. Letitia’s old arch humor resurfaced when she described the noise disturbance in a letter to Bulwer: “At first I thought it rather hard that they should fire the gun at five o’clock every morning—neither did I see the necessity of the bugle again at six—moreover—the band seemed to play all day long—but now I hear none of them.”
She was still able to put on her witty society voice, regaling Bulwer with a mildly racy anecdote:
The people appear very intelligent—fond of getting letters which they dictate—having a passion for a dictionary in which they look out words—I was a little alarmed the other day—when a note came whose writer said he had sent Mr Maclean a quantity of—“darlings—” I thought he might have spared his present—however it only turned out to be some honey—Most indefatigable research into the said dictionary—having discovered some connection between the words, honey sweet—darling.
But, she went on, she had seen nothing beyond the “batteries” that bordered the castle precincts.
Letitia needed to block out the noise of the band to carry on writing; perhaps she also used writing to block out the noise. She could not stop. “You may suppose what a resource writing is,” she told Blanchard, explaining that she had already completed a series of essays on the female characters in Walter Scott for Fisher, as well as the first volume of a new novel. She had since childhood been “addicted,” as her mother told Jerdan when she was still an adolescent, to the escape offered by literary composition. Now she had to write, whether or not she wanted to: she was still in debt.
Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book represented her steadiest income stream. Ironically, she did not know that Robert Fisher was planning to sack her. On December 15, 1837 (after Letitia died but before the news reached England), he wrote to Thomas Moore asking him to take the Scrap Book over. “I found,” Moore complained, “that the payment to poor L.E.L. for her 60 pages of verse…amounted at first to only £100, though afterwards to £120 or 130. On hearing this I could not help telling him laughingly that even if I could have agreed to write for him it was plain he knew nothing of the scale by which my prices (however undeservedly) had hitherto been measured.” Letitia had been selling herself short.
The one friend in literary London whom she treated with anything like “confidence” was Laman Blanchard, her future biographer. But when her one surviving letter to him reaches the topic of her financial embarrassments it suffers complete syntactical breakdown. As if afraid of spelling out the situation, she takes refuge in dashes, expecting him to fill in the gaps:
If my literary success does but continue—in two or three years—I shall have an independance [sic] from embarrassment—it is long since I have known—It will enable me comfortably to provide for my mother—who I made a point of seeing before I left England—whatever of complaint I might have—though all I had done had been in vain—still I thought—leaving my country—I would only consider—what might best be done for the future—Mr Maclean—besides what he did in England—leaves my literary pursuits quite in my own hands—and this will enable me to do all for my family that I could wish—I treat you—you see with all my old confidence—I hope you will write to me.
Letitia put a positive spin on her financial independence within marriage, a rarity at the time, since a wife was not a separate legal person from her husband. In fact Maclean would have been responsible in law both for her earnings and for her debts. She clearly had not told him how much she owed her creditors, probably because her debts were so entwined with those of Jerdan. Even in the run-up to her marriage she had been anxiously sounding out Bulwer as a possible sponsor for her future publishing “arrangements,” desperate to make some money. By then she had ceased to rely at all on Jerdan’s editorial input, and was hoping to use Whittington instead as a proofreader (“My brother who has lately acquired the habit will look over the proofs”).
Even in otherwise cheerful-sounding letters from Cape Coast, Letitia’s isolation shows through. Lone but tellingly repetitive sentences, devoid of emotional affect, recur again and again. To Anna Maria Hall: “You cannot think the complete seclusion in which I live.” To Laman Blanchard: “The solitude is absolute—I get up at seven o’Clock—till I see Mr Maclean at our seven o’Clock dinner—I rarely see a living creature—except the servants.” To Bulwer: “My solitude is absolute—from seven—when I rise—till seven when Mr Maclean comes in to dinner from the court—I rarely see a creature.” To Catherine Landon: “At seven Mr Maclean comes in from court—till then I never see a living creature but the servants.” To Marie Fagan on the morning of her death: “The solitude, except an occasional dinner, is absolute; from seven in the morning till seven when we dine, I never see Mr Maclean, and rarely anyone else.”
Though Letitia depicts herself, with a nod to childhood fantasy, as a “feminine Robinson Crusoe,” the castle complex was in fact teeming with people: prisoners, house slaves and other local staff, merchants’ agents, soldiers, the cacophonous band, and the two English servants, Mr. and Mrs. Bailey. Her isolation was a state of mind.
The courtroom, where Maclean conducted his official business, is in fact only a couple of doors down, along an outside veranda, from the room that Letitia adopted as her boudoir. Another wife might have been comforted to think that her husband’s place of work was so near at hand. Another husband might have joined her for his lunch break.
Since her arrival, Letitia had also been introduced to the British merchants and merchants’ agents living in the nearby hills. Those with whom she dined included Brodie Cruickshank, who later recalled her sparkling conversation at table the night before her death, and his shock at seeing her dead body laid out on a bed the following morning. She had in addition presided over two formal dinners for visiting dignitaries, the governor of Guiana and the commander of the nearby Dutch fort. Such occasions, however, stretched her housekeeping skills to the limit. It was also awkward, she confessed to her friends in London, being the only lady at dinner.
On the morning the Dutch delegation was due to depart, Maclean was ill and refused to leave his bed. Letitia had to see them off alone. She felt very uncomfortable taking the salute on the parade ground. Some women might have thrilled at the prospect of taking on such a masculine role. But Letitia’s defense had always been the feminine masquerade.
The only human warmth Letitia expresses in her letters home was for the Baileys, he a “godsend,” she a “most civil, obliging person,” without whom “I know not what I should have done.” The couple was planning to board the Governor Maclean for their return passage to England on the day Letitia was found dead by Mrs. Bailey in the blue room, with the bottle of prussic acid in her hand.
That Letitia died from a self-administered dose of prussic acid is one of the least uncertain aspects of her story. The label on the bottle found in her room was carefully transcribed at the inquest: “Acid Hydrocianicum Delatum, Pharm. Lond. 1836, Medium Dose Five Minims, being about one-third the strength of that in former use, prepared by Scheele’s proof.” If the castle surgeon chose not to perform an autopsy, it was because he had so little doubt as to the cause of death. How and why she was in possession of the bottle, and her intentions on taking the drug, are the questions that remain to be answered.
Prussic, or hydrocyanic, acid is a compound of hydrogen and cyanide diluted in liquid. Derived from bitter almond kernels, it was first developed during the eighteenth century by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, from whom the name “Scheele’s proof” derived. It was initially hailed as a wonder drug but very soon developed a controversial reputation. Owing to its extreme toxicity, except in the tiniest of doses, it soon become a suicide’s cliché. In June 1822, Shelley asked Edward Trelawny to get him some because, although he had “no intention of suicide at present,” it would be “a comfort to me to ho
ld in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest.” Dickens subsequently made comic capital out of prussic acid as the romantic self-slaughterer’s drug of choice in The Pickwick Papers.
After Letitia died, her doctor, Anthony Todd Thomson, queried how she could possibly have had access to such a dangerous drug. His objection, however, makes little sense. Prior to the Pharmacy Act of 1868, prussic acid was freely available over the counter. The ease with which it could be obtained is indicated by a coroner’s report that appeared in The Times on December 23, 1839, relating to the suicide by prussic acid and laudanum of a maidservant from Kentish Town, in the northern suburbs of London. The coroner questioned the pharmacist’s judgment in having sold her the poison, but maintained that he could not be held responsible because the “law was very defective on this point.”
It is, however, unlikely that Letitia had to obtain the drug herself from the chemist. Maclean testified at the inquest that he had seen her frequently resorting to the bottle to calm her “spasms and hysterical affections.” When he tried to take it away from her in alarm on the voyage out, she had told him that it was necessary for her very life, and that it had “been prescribed for her by her medical attendant in London (Dr Thomson).”
After her death, Dr. Thomson denied he had prescribed it for her and released to the press the pharmacist’s inventory for the traveling medical chest he had ordered for her to take out to Africa in 1838. It did not contain prussic acid. However, that does not preclude the possibility that he had indeed prescribed it for her at some earlier point. The date on the bottle found in her hand was 1836. Given the tiny dosage—a single drop in a glass of water—a bottle would have lasted a long time.
Maclean’s evidence that Dr. Thomson indeed prescribed it is corroborated by overwhelming circumstantial clues. By the 1820s, most of the medical profession had lost faith in prussic acid’s supposed curative properties. But Dr. Thomson is on record as remaining a fervent champion of the drug well into the 1830s, despite the fact that it had by then come to be regarded with caution if not suspicion among doctors.
Thomson was a long-standing proponent of prussic acid. His enthusiastic experimental use of it on a consumptive teenage girl at a boarding school in Brompton’s Cadogan Place was recorded in his friend Dr. Augustus Bozzi Granville’s Historical and Practical Treatise on the internal use of the hydro-cyanic (Prussic) acid, published in 1820. The girl had died, but only, Thomson maintained, because she had not been given the acid early enough.
For years afterward, Dr. Thomson’s own publications frequently recommend prussic acid for conditions ranging from pulmonary disease, dyspepsia, and palpitations to fainting fits and depression of spirits. He even found it “extremely useful as an external application” to treat acne. In the 1830 edition of his popular medical textbook The London Dispensatory: A Practical Synopsis of Materia Medica, Pharmacy and Therapeutics, he described it as “a remedy of great efficacy” for “spasmodic coughs,” “palpitations of the heart,” “painful and difficult menstruation, floodings, haemoptysis, and nervous diseases.”
By 1838, the ambitious Thomson had sold his private practice in Sloane Street and been elevated to the first Professorship of Materia Medica at the newly formed London University (even though he himself had never completed his own medical studies as a student at Edinburgh). Throughout his tenure, he was dogged by snide remarks on his clinical competence. His peers regarded him as “pompous in his phraseology, indistinct and doubtful as to diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment of the cases which were under his care.” The only reason why Thomson published the pharmacist’s inventory after Letitia was found dead was to protect his professional reputation from the imputation that he had negligently caused the death of his celebrity patient by supplying her with a dangerous drug.
Why he prescribed it for her is another question. The list of diseases for which he recommended it is long. Yet the “spasms” and “hysterical affections” to which she was subject seem vague. At no point did Dr. Thomson offer any account of an existing medical condition that might on its own have explained her death.
In fact, Letitia was using prussic acid because, “if properly diluted and dispensed,” it was, in the words of a modern historian of medicine, “by far the most efficient alternative to narcotic opium.” According to Thomson himself, it “certainly is a very powerful sedative; and may be employed in all cases in which sedatives and narcotics are indicated with decided advantage.” Letitia was an addict. The frequent opiate images in her work had as much of a squalid real-life undertow as her romanticized portrayals of forbidden love.
On January 22, 1839, soon after the news of her death hit London, an anonymous paragraph appeared in The Times under the headline “L.E.L.,” describing her drug use. “We all know, whatever anyone says,” confided the writer, “that she was subject to the most violent spasms in the head and stomach, and that when on a visit four years since she used laudanum so very carelessly that Mrs —— told her she would certainly poison herself.” It was said that Letitia had gone on to try prussic acid on the advice of an acquaintance who claimed to have benefited from it himself.
The anonymous writer’s purpose was to insist that Letitia’s death had been accidental, not suicide. Emma Roberts—who later told William Howitt that Letitia had shown her a bottle of prussic acid at Hans Place—was probably responsible. Some of the phrasing echoes her 1839 memoir of Letitia almost word for word.
Letitia’s drug dependency was in fact well known in literary London. According to Lady Blessington, she could not sleep without “the aid of narcotics and that violent spasms and frequent attacks of the nerves left her seldom free from acute suffering.” After Letitia’s death, it was common gossip at Cape Coast that she took prussic acid nonmedicinally to “stimulate her energies, a use probably unknown to Scheele.” For those so addicted to laudanum that it no longer worked for them, prussic acid was the next step.
Letitia’s addiction cannot preclude the possibility of an undiagnosed underlying medical condition, but her “spasms” could have been caused by the drug use alone. Withdrawal was not then well understood. Her unexplained blackouts and fainting fits, referred to by Roberts and by Madden, could have been the result of drug abuse too, analogous to the “nodding” of the heroin addict.
Chemical addiction was widespread in the literary community. Many, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, became dependent on laudanum after initially using it for pain relief as it was the standard over-the-counter painkiller before the introduction of aspirin. However, it was also used to combat stress, especially by writers.
Harriet Martineau was told by a clergyman who “knew the literary world of his time so thoroughly that there was probably no author of any mark then living in England with whom he was not more or less acquainted” that “there was no author or authoress who was free from the habit of taking some pernicious stimulant. The amount of opium taken to relieve the wear and tear of authorship was, he said, greater than most people had any conception of, and all literary workers took something.”
Few writers of Letitia’s generation had made themselves more vulnerable to the “wear and tear of authorship” than she had. According to The Times’s anonymous correspondent, her drug use was already spiraling out of control by the beginning of 1835, even before the disaster of her broken engagement to John Forster. That might explain why she was so unsteady on her feet in Paris in 1834, constantly slipping over on the parquet, and why her appetite was so suppressed that ice cream was the only thing she could force down.
Letitia’s drug use almost certainly began in the 1820s. Her early poems in the Gazette feature more drinking songs than opiate references. But by 1827, in the wake of the Sunday Times exposé, we find her using the vivid insomniac image of “the opiate which may lull a while, / Then wake to double torture” in her dramatic monologue “Love’s Last Lesson.”
> Although Letitia became dependent on narcotics to sleep, she may in fact have started as a recreational user. Though a sedative in larger doses, laudanum was a stimulant in smaller quantities. “Many fashionable women attempt to light up their spirits previous to the reception of a party by a dose of Laudanum,” reported Dr. Thomson in one of his popular medical texts, noting its popularity among English “females” for “exhilarating the spirits.” Letitia was painfully shy in childhood. Her social vivacity was probably chemically enhanced.
She is also likely to have used laudanum as a literary stimulant. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” was supposedly composed under its influence, as was Mary Robinson’s gothic poem “The Maniac.” Shelley and Byron dabbled in laudanum for nonmedicinal purposes, as did Keats, who in his “Ode to a Nightingale” compared the creative poet’s dissociated state to that of a laudanum user who had “emptied some dull opiate to the drains.” De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater came out in book form in 1822, Letitia’s most productive year as the Gazette’s “nameless melodist.”
Opium dreams like that supposedly recorded in “Kubla Khan” were atypical. According to De Quincey, hallucinations were rare. Letitia did not use drugs to raise visions, but her addiction offers an illuminating angle on the English improvvisatrice’s method of composition. Her drug use was comparable to that of jazz improvisers such as Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, who used heroin as a facilitator, to dampen performance anxiety and to block out distraction, as too much conscious cognition could impede the improvisatory flow. In her repetitive but varied use of the same themes and phrases, Letitia treated language in the same way that jazzmen later employed melodic building blocks.
The earliest oblique allusion to prussic acid in her oeuvre occurs in a lyric of 1825, addressed to “The Almond Tree,” whose kernels were used in its preparation: “Fleeting and falling, / Where is the bloom / Of yon fair almond tree? / It is sunk to its tomb.” It was no doubt through Dr. Thomson that she first encountered it. On December 6, 1823, shortly before he initiated his regular medical column, the Gazette featured a reference to his friend Granville as the pioneer of prussic acid, just above a pre-puff for The Improvisatrice. The frontispiece of The Improvisatrice, published the following year, depicted a girl receiving strange roots from the hands of an evil, wizened magician. She believes they are the raw ingredients for a love potion, but they turn out to be poison.
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