L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  No one around the table had a more intimate interest in the subject than Jerdan. His immediate response to the tragic news can be gauged from the unpublished letter he wrote to Lady Blessington on January 5 in reply to a condolence note from her. It offers his most explicit admission of his affair with Letitia. But it is very different in tone from the agonized letter that Letitia’s devastated friend Blanchard wrote to Lady Blessington at the same time.

  Jerdan descanted in orotund phrases on the “miserable calamity” that had “closed the earthly career of our wonderfully gifted friend.” But he continued, Pygmalion-style, to deny Letitia’s gifts by taking the credit for her work:

  My poor, dear all but adored L.E.L.—the creature whose earliest and precocious aspirations it was mine to cherish and improve, whose mind unfolded its marvellous stores as drawn forth and encouraged by me—well did she sweetly paint it when she said

  “We love the bird we taught to sing.”

  He rose to a rhetorical pitch as he summed up her life, but showed no apparent awareness that he had contributed to her demise. It was a textbook example of the attitudes summed up in Violet; or the danseuse, in which gentlemen who ruined “poor unfortunate women” did not feel morally to blame, but instead regarded themselves as the deserving beneficiaries of the natural female tendency to self-sacrifice:

  A life of self-sacrifice from infancy to the grave—of sufferings vainly concealed under mocking brilliancy and assumed mirth—of a heart broken by mortifications, of spirits always forced, of the finest of human chords ever crushed and lacerated by the rudest handling, of sensitiveness subjected to perpetual injury—in features such as these are to be read the sad story of L.E.L. Men are exposed to unhappiness, but, alas what else is there for their beautiful and gentle companions?

  Hard is the fate of womankind;

  and the serpent who contends with the heel of the one, gnaws the hearts and drains the lifeblood of the other.

  “Truly…did I love her for fifteen eventful years,” Jerdan confessed, his choice of adverb uncomfortably if unconsciously recalling L.E.L.’s poetic equivocations on the word “truth.” He went on to explain to Lady Blessington that he had written “Private” at the top of his letter because he had “been led to unbosom myself to you in a manner that would not do for many in our bad world.” He reminded the countess that he could depend on her discretion because he knew that she too had things to hide, employing the coded language of sensibility in what almost sounds like a veiled threat: “Yes, I do know how it is! It is because I am writing to one, every emotion in whose heart is attuned to the dearest and loveliest sympathies of our nature.

  “Could her life be told, what a history would there be of Woman’s fated wretchedness and of the woes which genius must endure,” Jerdan wrote theatrically, as if the mother of three of his children had been an abstraction not an individual. However, he raised a pertinent point. There was no way in which Letitia’s true history could be told, not just for the sake of her memory but to preserve the reputation of the literary industry as a whole.

  Authorship was at a crossroads. When Letitia started her career, the Byronic model of literary fame, based on illicit hints of sexual transgression, was dominant. But by 1839, Dickens was on his way to creating a new image for the celebrity writer, defined in terms of “Victorian” family values. His best seller Oliver Twist, published in installments between 1837 and 1839, literally marginalized the “fallen woman,” once L.E.L.’s poetic stock-in-trade, by killing off the hero’s unmarried mother in the first chapter. In the early days of her affair with Jerdan, Letitia associated her own bohemian antics with upward mobility and the aristocratic peccadilloes of Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb. As it turned out, her trajectory had been downward toward that of Violet the danseuse.

  Around Ainsworth’s table, the aging Leigh Hunt represented the old guard, providing a backward-looking link to the sexually transgressive world of Shelley and Byron. But Dickens and John Forster were the coming men. With the new queen poised to import bourgeois morality into monarchy, the younger generation was determined to turn the rackety trade of letters into a respectable middle-class “profession.”

  By 1839, the Regency culture of so-called demi-connaissance was hardening into full-blown Victorian denial. In private life, a deeper level of secrecy had already begun to govern literary men’s sex lives. In the 1820s, Jerdan had paraded Letitia as his trophy mistress, handing her into a carriage at the end of an evening in full view of party guests. But his new liaison with the invisible Mary Ann Maxwell was a sign of the times. Victorian men wanted silent women who could provide domestic retreats, not flamboyant lovers with careers of their own.

  Following the breakup of his marriage, Bulwer too had a new mistress, whom he kept so discreetly that he referred to her by an alias in his will. Although she gave him several children, all his modern biographer can discover about her is that her real name was Laura Deacon and that she worked for a while as a teacher in Brompton. A jealous and angry Rosina spittingly noted that Laura was friends with Letitia, which is confirmed by references to Miss Deacon in Maria Liddiard’s diaries.

  A similar secrecy later surrounded Charles Dickens’s relationship with his much younger mistress, Ellen Ternan. Their affair was later studiously suppressed by John Forster when the latter came to write his classic Victorian biography of the novelist in the 1870s. Forster was equally discreet about his own private life, leaving no published remarks at all about his embarrassing youthful engagement to Letitia. If Byron had fetishized the confessional hint, and L.E.L. had commodified it, the Victorians pulled a cordon sanitaire around the private life.

  The men at Ainsworth’s dinner were quite used to the idea of keeping each other’s sexual secrets. According to Rosina “that patent Humbug Mr. Charles Dickens” and his “clique” were notorious for practicing “that freemasonry which exists among ‘gentlemen,’ that each gentleman’s vices should be held sacred by any other gentleman, as there is no knowing when their own turn may come.” But in Letitia’s case more was at stake than was usual. Her history was not just a potential embarrassment to Jerdan, who was in fact constitutionally unembarrassable, but to the industry as a whole.

  The pressing question was how to manage the story as it spread through the public prints. As editor of the evening paper the Courier, Samuel Laman Blanchard had already been attempting to do that, though in a zigzag, stumbling fashion. His early reporting of Letitia’s death hinted at his private conviction that she had been unhappy. But he had then been prevailed upon to call for a moratorium on all public commentary.

  Soon afterward, Blanchard lost his job at the Courier. His literary confreres may have convinced themselves that they were doing him a favor by proposing him as Letitia’s official biographer. With a wife and children to support, and no job, he needed the commission. It came from Henry Colburn, the shady éminence grise who had founded the Literary Gazette back in 1817, had played a long-term but mostly unrecorded role in L.E.L.’s literary career, and now had some stake keeping her sales posthumously afloat. However, the main reason why Blanchard was chosen had to do with his personality. In a world in which duels could be fought over book reviews, he was known for his soft, sweet, pliable nature. The biography would prove his poisoned chalice.

  Laman Blanchard’s story is as emblematic of the times as Letitia’s own. Born in Lambeth in 1804, the son of an impoverished painter and glazier from a Jewish background, he began his career as an aspirant “Cockney” poet. In his youth he dreamed of following Byron to Greece (which he did not do) and of going on the stage (which he did briefly, in Margate). After struggling as a clerk, he briefly secured a sinecure as secretary to the Zoological Society, which enabled him to publish his one and only poetry collection, Lyric Offerings, in 1828. It includes a sub-Shelleyan ode on liberty, and a clunky courtly lyric to an unnamed “earthly beauty” who is probably L.E.L. since she is �
�more Sappho than Eve” and inspires “sweet sighs for the wrong.”

  Letitia was taken with Blanchard from the moment they first met sometime in the mid- to late 1820s. She told Mrs. Hall how good-looking he was. He was her type. His “dark, handsome jewish features” were similar to those she gave Lorenzo in The Improvisatrice and appreciated in the French poet Fontenay.

  Yet Blanchard was in fact uxorious. Having married his childhood sweetheart Ann at nineteen, he became a devoted father of three sons and a daughter: Sidney, Walter, Edmund, and Lavinia (in one touching surviving letter, he expresses concern for one of his little boys, who had been injured by flying fragments of glass from a bursting soda water bottle). Instead of flirtation, a friendship sprung up between Letitia and Blanchard that was perhaps the most disinterested she ever experienced in the literary world. The way in which she writes to him, given her self-confessed “mirroring tendencies,” reveals much about his own kindness and good humor. One of her warmest and funniest letters was written to Blanchard from 22 Hans Place in 1837:

  Do you, my dear Mr Blanchard, know of any person in want of a “young woman, sober, honest, and good-tempered,” “would not object to waiting on a single gentleman?” If you do, for mercy’s sake, recommend me. For the last fortnight I have been qualifying for the situation. Everybody has been ill and in bed but myself; one servant gone home, the other turned out at a moment’s notice for too great devotion to “ardent spirits,” and we are left alone!—desolate as Babylon, or the ruins of Palmyra. I have run about with a saucepan of gruel in one hand, and a basin of broth in the other. I have not yet lost the keys, and have only broken one candlestick. I hope my patients are recovering, and then I shall leave the kitchen for the attic.

  Blanchard’s life was, however, a constant struggle. To keep his family afloat he turned from poetry to journalism. He was appointed to a number of short-lived editorships that were well paid, but he could not hold them down. As a writer he became known for his humorous columns on the so-called sunny side of life, but he was haunted by depression. As with the essayist Charles Lamb, who befriended him, his upbeat whimsy disguised a troubled soul. In his youth he had experienced suicidal thoughts, threatening to throw himself off Westminster Bridge, and writing a sonnet on Werther. In an unpublished letter of 1832, thanking Bulwer for a belated review of Lyric Offerings in the New Monthly Magazine, he complains about the pressures of daily journalism. His letter is dated from an asylum.

  Blanchard was, in Bulwer’s view, quite unfitted for the Darwinian struggle of the literary marketplace. He did not have the mental toughness required of the literary “free lance,” a metaphor whose martial-mercenary implications were very much alive. Starstruck by “noisier aspirants of fame,” he was renowned for “monstering” Letitia with a blind devotion that made more cynical contemporaries cringe.

  No one was less likely to dig the dirt than Blanchard. Despite his intimate, insider knowledge of her private life, his stated aim was to “keep her memory as a pleasant odour in the world.” As his son-in-law Blanchard Jerrold later put it, the “domestic fight this gallant little woman made alongside her literary battle was known to very few, if to any, save Laman Blanchard.” The cloying Dickensian image of the gallant little woman twisted the seedy L.E.L. into a virtuous Little Nell, convincing unsuspecting future commentators that her domestic fight involved no more than dutifully supporting her widowed mother.

  Too sensitive for the Darwinian struggle of the literary marketplace: Letitia’s friend and biographer Samuel Laman Blanchard, after Maclise, published 1846

  In the course of his research, Blanchard interviewed everyone intimately connected with Letitia, but he omitted Maginn entirely and redacted John Forster’s name from the book. References to Jerdan were kept to a minimum. When he was mentioned it was as a respectable family man and father figure.

  As keen not to offend anyone as he was to protect Letitia’s reputation as a virtuous woman, Blanchard was put under pressure from all sides. In deference to Dr. Thomson, for example, he repeated the latter’s assertion that there was no prussic acid in the medicine chest, although he could not quite bring himself to cast doubt on the presence of the bottle altogether, given the clear evidence of the inquest. In increasing desperation he flailed around for an explanation to avoid the conclusion she had knowingly dosed herself with prussic acid. Perhaps, he suggested unconvincingly, it was an old bottle, which had been recycled to contain a more innocuous drug? Perhaps Letitia did not know what “hydrocyanic acid” meant? Perhaps she had merely applied some of the contents topically to her jaw and been overcome by the fumes?

  Forster and Smith also exerted its will. A curious note appended on the back flyleaf of Blanchard’s biography, clearly added just before it went to press, tells readers not to trust any testimony offered by Emily Bailey.

  Letitia’s official biography was the most high-profile project Blanchard ever undertook, but it was a critical failure when it was published in May 1841. “We have rarely opened a more painful or unsatisfactory book than this,” opined The Athenaeum, censuring the biographer’s reluctance to give “a full and unanswerable statement in explanation” of the slanders against L.E.L. The sententious reviewer was probably H. F. Chorley, who had seen Letitia dissolve into tears when he condescended to offer her his support for Whittington’s job application to the Literary Fund in 1837. In his memoirs, he later moralized over literary London’s failure to support L.E.L. in her hour of need. Yet he failed to offer Blanchard forbearance for the impossible task he had undertaken.

  Another disappointed reader was the housebound poet Elizabeth Barrett. She was dismayed not only by the gaps in Blanchard’s biographical narrative, but also by his critical comments on Letitia’s work. Blanchard bent over backward to deny that there was any connection between the tragic emotions in L.E.L.’s poetry and her own life experience. Barrett was disappointed to discover that the poetess she so admired had not written from the heart: that her “passion” was “pasteboard,” that she was “the actress and not Juliet.” And yet when she heard the “Jerdan rumours,” she hoped them “into slander.” She wanted it both ways: for L.E.L.’s love agonies to be authentic, but for Letitia to remain unsullied. Both Barrett and Blanchard were caught in the trap that Letitia herself had set. She could not be read as both an honest poet and an honest woman.

  Blanchard knew he had failed as a biographer because he had had to keep silent about the sexual relationship that had underpinned Letitia’s poetic career from the start. “If I have failed,” he told S. C. Hall gnomically, “it is because there were difficulties in the way that I cannot explain; and if some of her enemies escape, it was because I was fearful of injuring her.” In the wake of the failure of The Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., Blanchard never got another salaried editorial post or another major book commission. His once idealistic, generous nature became increasingly bitter and cynical, according to his contemporary Peter George Patmore. Struggling to make an increasingly precarious freelance living, he used to walk the streets, desperate to come up with ideas for articles, troubled by constant anxiety attacks, which increased when his wife fell ill with a paralytic condition in 1844. When she finally died in 1845, Blanchard collapsed. He was seized by attacks of psychosomatic paralysis, “sudden attacks of tears,” night-after-night insomnia, and “fits of hysteria” so extreme that it required “several persons to hold him down.”

  At 1 a.m. on February 15, 1845, Samuel Laman Blanchard slit his throat in the upstairs bedroom of his home in Union Place, Lambeth, just around the corner from Hercules Buildings where Jerdan was by then living with Mary Ann Maxwell and their growing family. He was forty years old. As he grabbed the cutthroat razor, he called out to the hired nurse, who was supposed to be minding him, that she had better not leave him as he felt a strong desire to throw himself out of the window. She ran downstairs to get his burly elder son to help restrain him. But it was
too late. While she was still on the stairs, she heard a scream. It came from his younger son, Edmund, aged thirteen, who had been asleep in the bedroom and had woken to witness his father’s final act.

  Although the immediate trigger for Blanchard’s suicide was the death of his wife, Bulwer believed that it had longer-term origins in the “sores and evils” of commercial literary culture “where mind is regarded but as a common ware of merchandise.” In his memoir of Blanchard, he also pointed to the coincidence by which both Letitia and her biographer had killed themselves, the only acknowledgment in print by any of Letitia’s circle of her suicide. It was a hint that her death and the stress of writing her biography for money to support his family had reawakened Blanchard’s old suicidal tendencies. After becoming a father, he had told friends that he would never give in to the temptation of suicide for fear of the impact on his children. But suicide, as Dr. Forbes Winslow argued in his 1840 Anatomy of Suicide, could be contagious.

  Despite the appalling details, reactions to Blanchard’s death were universally sympathetic. No attempt was made to hide the fact that he had killed himself “during a moment of temporary insanity” when his mind was disturbed by grief. A pious Victorian monument was eventually erected in Norwood cemetery as a “tasteful tribute to the genius and private worth of Laman Blanchard.”

  Immediately after his death, literary colleagues rallied round to support his orphans. Bulwer, John Forster, and Harrison Ainsworth joined forces to get Blanchard’s eldest child, Sidney, a job as secretary to Disraeli, although he then “drifted away into London journalism.” The daughter, Lavinia, was found a place to study at the Royal Academy of Music and later married William Blanchard Jerrold, son of the journalist Douglas William Jerrold, Dickens’s friend.