“remotest and darkest nooks”: Weekly True Sun, January 20, 1839, unpaginated. This article was widely reprinted, for example in the Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier on January 29.
“strange and dismal place”…“fatal spot”: Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, no. 933, January 26, 1839, front page.
“All manner of outrageous reports”: Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast, vol. 1, p. 230.
Such were the suspicions…the relevant documents had been lost: Whittington Landon’s first letter to the colonial secretary was indeed lost, but much of the correspondence in fact survives in the National Archives, CO 267/157.
“What newspapers do you see?”: Thomas Carlyle to John A. Carlyle, February 4, 1839, Carlyle Letters Online.
“I lived / Only in others’ breath”: “Erinna,” The Golden Violet, p. 257.
“These are the spiders of society”: LLR, vol. 2, p. 276.
“We have been a long time without letters”: Eden, Up the Country, p. 302.
“elucidat[e] all that was mysterious in her fate”: LLR, vol. 1, p. vi.
“After fully examining the evidence”: Poe, “Review of New Books.”
“There is a mystery somewhere”: Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, vol. 1, p. 252.
In 1858, the printing plates: St Clair, The Reading Nation, p. 615.
“Do you know the story of L.E.L.?”: Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, September 3, 1927, Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, p. 418.
“sexually ignorant”: Enfield, L.E.L.: A Mystery of the Thirties, p. 111.
In the 1940s, one critic: McGann and Reiss, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, p. 16.
Stokes-Adams syndrome: Watt, Poisoned Lives, pp. 129, 198–99, 224.
“virgin”: Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, p. 120.
“knew only that she had never yielded”…“fantasies”: Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls, p. 263.
“slander more utterly groundless”: S. C. Hall, A Book of Memories, p. 264.
Gorman’s claim was confirmed: Lawford, “Diary.”
family correspondence: See Matoff, Conflicted Life.
“morbid symptoms”: Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 276.
CHAPTER 2 THE THREE MAGICAL LETTERS
“We were young and at college”: Bulwer, “Romance and Reality,” p. 546.
“I know not who, or what thou art”…“a lady yet in her teens”: LG, no. 264, February 9, 1822, p. 89.
“We soon learned it was a female”: Bulwer, “Romance and Reality,” p. 547.
“stamp of originality”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 40.
“In all the work of L.E.L.”: Enfield, L.E.L.: A Mystery of the Thirties, p. 67.
“moon of our darkness”: Poetical Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, p. xvii.
“all is vanity”: S[arah] S[heppard], Characteristics of the Genius and Writings of L.E.L., p. 165.
“no one sees things exactly as they are”: L.E.L., Romance and Reality, vol. 1, p. 202.
“All things are symbols”: LLR, vol. 2, p. 275.
“metromania”: “Of all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the most common, seems to be no other than the Metromanie.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3 (August 1818), p. 519.
Gowland’s Lotion: Ackerman’s Repository, November 1809, sourced from www.pemberley.com.
The success of Scott and Byron: On Scott’s and Byron’s new poetic methods, see Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, pp. 13–46.
the many fan letters he received from women: Corin Throsby, “Byron, Commonplacing and Early Fan Culture,” in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Shelley had succeeded in shocking: On Godwin’s relationship with Shelley, see St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, also Sampson, In Search of Mary Shelley.
“paradise of exiles”: Shelley quoted in Stabler, The Artistry of Exile, p. 15.
“the Godwinian colony”: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 10 (December 1821), p. 696.
“I had such projects for the Don”: Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 6, p. 232.
“men of diseased hearts”: Southey, A Vision of Judgement, preface, pp. xix–xxi.
“Satanic mania”: Bulwer, Pelham, preface, p. ix.
“sorrow, indignation and loathing”: LG, no. 226, May 19, 1821, pp. 305–8.
“lay before our readers”: Ibid.
“foolish young man”: LG, no. 254, December 1, 1821, p. 772.
“daystar was even in dawning o’ercast”: PLG, p. 14.
“bright star”: PLG, p. 19.
“Sweet Poesy!”: PLG, p. 23.
“cameleon [sic] poet”: John Keats to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818, Letters of John Keats, p. 157.
“Six Songs”: PLG, pp. 9–14.
“I shall not shrink”: PLG, p. 10.
“Oh! come to my slumber”: PLG, p. 11.
“unfit for ladies”: Rollins, The Keats Circle, vol. 1, p. 91.
“leafy couch”…“bulbul”: PLG, pp. 12–13.
“my heart sickens”: Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2, p. 905.
“foolish and profligate”: Blackwood’s, vol. 10 (December 1821), p. 696.
“I thought thus of the flowers, the moon”: PLG, p. 13.
“He must be rich whom I could love”: PLG, p. 13.
“combination of willed naïveté”: Kramer, “The Schubert Lied,” p. 218.
“die virgins”: Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls, p. 263.
“sweet ruin”: PLG, p. 39.
“She leant upon her harp”: PLG, p. 32.
“bold lover”…“goal”: Keats, Complete Poems, p. 345.
“Truly it has been thine”: PLG, p. 493.
“Long may the sorrows of thy song”: LG, no. 317, February 15, 1823, p. 107.
“sober Quaker”: Mary Howitt: An Autobiography, p. 188.
“religion’s cause”: LG, no. 233, July 7, 1821, p. 428.
“obscenity”: Quoted in Kelly, Ireland’s Minstrel, pp. 65–66.
“[T]he wonderful precocity of her intellect”: Roberts, A Memoir, p. 11.
“There were two Portraits”: PLG, p. 34.
dramatic monologue: See Baiesi, Letitia Landon and Metrical Romance.
“I must turn from this idol”: PLG, p. 131.
“Extracts from my pocket book”: PLG, pp. 191–95.
“Farewell, farewell! Then both are free”: PLG, p. 160.
“The chain I gave”: Poetical Works of Lord Byron, vol. 3, p. 49.
“half in love with easeful Death”: Keats, Complete Poems, p. 347.
“Twine not those red roses for me”: PLG, p. 158.
“A deep, a lone, a silent grave”: PLG, p. 228.
“restless little girl, in a pink gingham frock”: S. C. Hall, A Book of Memories, pp. 268ff.
“I was surprised, and somewhat scandalised”: Devey, Life of Rosina Lady Lytton, p. 41.
“She is, I understand, rather short”: Mary Howitt: An Autobiography, p. 188.
“On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt” and “To the Ladies Who Saw Me Crown’d”: Keats, Complete Poems, pp. 97–98. See also Barnard, “First Fruits or ‘First Blights,’ ” p. 90.
CHAPTER 3 KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
“spiritual welfare”: Western Times, September 5, 1829, p. 4. My thanks to Peter Selley for this reference.
“Mr and Mrs Spangle Lacquer”…“paying for it”: Quoted in Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People, p. 37.
“had been elevated by her marriage”: Anna Maria Hall, A Woman’s Story, vol. 1, p. 4
9.
“Oh, what am I, and what are they?”: L.E.L., The Golden Violet, p. 7.
Her will: TNA, Prerogative Court of Canterbury and Related Probate Jurisdictions, Will Registers: Class: PROB 11; Piece: 1807.
“genteelly”: AWJ, vol. 3, p. 180.
“£14,000, her horse and her groom”: [Thomson], The Queens of Society, p. 162.
“late marriage of convenience”: Anna Maria Hall, A Woman’s Story, vol. 1, p. 49.
“a treaty in which every concession is duly weighed”: L.E.L. to Rosina Wheeler, November 30, 1825, Letters, p. 21.
“sentimentally recal [sic] the glories of Bond-street”: L.E.L. to Katherine Thomson, August 1826, Letters, p. 33.
“Grasmere Lake”: Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (London, 1834), pp. 45–47.
“like the heart of all the universe”: Thomas Carlyle to Alexander Carlyle, December 14, 1824, Carlyle Letters Online.
“my country, city of the soul”: Letters, p. 24. The allusion is to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4, lxxvii: “Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!”
“there never was an age or any country”: Southey, Letters from England, vol. 3, p. 290.
A single “Mrs Bishop” is recorded: Highfill, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, vol. 2, p. 138. She was in Samuel Foote’s summer company at the Haymarket Theatre on September 18, 1776, playing Mrs. Wisely in The Miser, and appeared at the same theater in the out-of-season performances of 1778.
“would give all the reputation I have gained”: Planché, Recollections and Reflections, vol. 1, p. 103.
“Love, love is all a woman’s fame”: PLG, p. 125.
“magnificent rocking-horse”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 8.
“Mrs Siddons and the French fashions”: Anna Maria Hall, A Woman’s Story, vol. 1, p. 111.
“to sit at the open parlour-window”: S. C. Hall, A Book of Memories, p. 274, note.
“fancy farm”: Jerdan, 1848 memoir, p. ix.
“display” her reward: LLR, vol. 1, p. 7.
included the aristocratic future Lady Caroline Lamb: Douglass, Lady Caroline Lamb, p. 22.
Frances Arabella Rowden: DNB.
Fanny Kemble: David, Fanny Kemble, p. 26.
“amorous and botanical”: Athenaeum, no. 216, January 7, 1832, p. 6.
immediately identified as St. Quentin: Mary Russell Mitford to her father, February 7, 1809, L’Estrange, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, vol. 1, p. 63.
“grosser”…“If the introduction of the passion of Love”: Rowden, The Pleasures of Friendship, p. viii.
“[W]e do not agree with her in thinking”: Monthly Review, April 1812, p. 434.
her little brother sitting astride the rocking horse: LLR, vol. 1, p. 8.
“robe of grace”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 7.
“How little could Lady Caroline have imagined”: [Thomson], The Queens of Society, p. 165.
Arabella Stuart: Page, A History of the County of Hertford, vol. 2, pp. 337–42, sourced from British History Online.
“toy” farm: Jerdan, 1848 memoir.
Flixton Hall: Suckling, The History and Antiquities of the County of Suffolk, vol. 1, p. 189.
“Who is not alarmed”: Thompson, An Inquiry, p. xvii.
“respectability has various meanings”: Wakefield, Popular Politics, p. 26.
envy-inducing book: Views of the Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1821). Flixton, the seat of Alexander Adair, Esquire, appears in vol. 4 as no. 20.
Adair’s engraved portrait: Drawn by H. Edridge and engraved by H. Meyer, c. 1810, https://www.grosvenorprints.com/.
an income in 1800 alone: Jackson, “British Incomes Circa 1800,” p. 257.
“Eton or Westminster”: L.E.L., Ethel Churchill, vol. 3, p. 33.
“large, old, and, somewhat dilapidated place”: L.E.L., “The History of a Child,” Traits and Trials, p. 295.
“as phantasies do to facts”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 22.
privately told another friend: L.E.L. to S. C. Hall, mid-1837, Letters, p. 167.
“original melancholy”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 22.
push sweets under the door: LLR, vol. 1, p. 12.
“measuring stick”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 10.
“lie awake half the night”: Letters, p. 167.
“pothooks”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 12.
“dear little fingers”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 16.
“fine ladies” who “were going to the devil”: Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 409.
warm nature: [Thomson], The Queens of Society, p. 167.
“The Boudoir”: The Keepsake, 1831, pp. 209–21.
“contributions to various periodicals”: Letters, p. 168.
“public character”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 15.
“just to outshine”: Anna Maria Hall, A Woman’s Story, vol. 1, pp. 49, 131.
“Talk of education!”: L.E.L., Romance and Reality, vol. 1, pp. 96–97.
Lucretia Davidson: Low, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets, pp. 19–20.
Elizabeth Smith: LLR, vol. 1, p. 28.
discarded mistress: L.E.L., Romance and Reality, vol. 1, pp. 118ff.
“stocks and dumbbells” and “backboards and collars”: L.E.L. to Rosina Wheeler, November 30, 1821, Letters, p. 21.
“certainly not beautiful”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 290.
eyewitness anatomization of her looks: LLR, vol. 1, pp. 292–93.
“It was strange to watch”: LLR, vol. 1, p. 292.
In a poem published in 1826: LG, no. 512, November 11, 1826, p. 705.
abused by his nurse: MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend, pp. 22–23.
“me, and only me”: L.E.L., Traits and Trials, p. 287.
“tiresome” child: Ibid., p. 291.
“childhood…images forth our after life”: Ibid., p. 312.
“It has always been my most earnest wish”: L.E.L. to Elizabeth Landon, late 1820, Letters, p. 6.
forbade her charge to read novels: LLR, vol. 1, p. 10.
the books she enjoyed: L.E.L., Romance and Reality, vol. 1, p. 192.
“surrender of virtue”: More, Moral Sketches, pp. 244–45.
“Happily for her”: [Thomson], The Queens of Society, p. 188.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: See Caroline Franklin, The Female Romantics (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
Charlotte Brontë later read: Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 129.
odd juxtapositions that appeared: L.E.L. to Bernard Barton, ?August 1824, Letters, p. 15.
“[r]emarkably neat and retired VILLA”: Sypher, The View from Rose Cottage in 1818, p. 7.
“calisthenic exercises”: L.E.L., Romance and Reality, vol. 1, pp. 96–97.
read as she ran: AWJ, vol. 3, p. 174.
Rose Cottage: Sypher, The View from Rose Cottage in 1818.
her “plump” body: AWJ, vol. 3, p. 174.
“exuberance of form”: Jerdan, 1848 memoir, p. x.
“delicate looking females driven from their home”: Blessington, The Magic Lantern, p. 4.
“embarrassed state of my father’s circumstances”: Letters, p. 167.
“Miss Landon, though not having the pleasure”: Letters, p. 3.
CHAPTER 4 THE SONGBIRD AND THE TRAINER
ignored by literary history until recently: Matoff, Conflicted Life, offers a wealth of documentation.
“satyr-cannibal Literary Gazetteer”: Thomas Carlyle to John A. Carlyle, November 27, 1835, Carlyle Letters Online.
“drunken and rowdyish”…“seduced innumerable women”: Hawthorne, English Notebooks, pp. 282–83.
“liked and regarded without respecting”: S. C. Hall, A Book of Memories, p.
285.
“It would be difficult now to comprehend”: Ibid.
“pampered and petted”: AWJ, vol. 1, pp. 21, 38.
In his teens he made his way to London: AWJ, vol. 1, pp. 41ff.
“indomitable effrontery”: Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, p. 143.
“no artifice by which notoriety can be obtained”: Cited in Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, vol. 3, p. 162.
“puppet of certain booksellers”: Personal Reminiscences by Chorley, Planché and Young, p. 8.
“A friend of mine in whose literary fame”: St Clair, The Reading Nation, p. 574.
“sallow clerks”: Bulwer, Pelham: or the Adventures of a Gentleman, preface (to the 1835 edition, reprinted in the 1842 edition), p. ix.
“even our footmen compose tragedies”: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3 (August 1818), p. 519.
“betaken themselves to literature”: Bodleian Library, MSS. Eng. lett., d. 113–14, vol. 2, p. 342.
“addicted”: AWJ, vol. 3, p. 175.
played with his own children: L.E.L. to S. C. Hall, mid-1837, Letters, p. 167.
“Oh! how thou art changed”: PLG, p. 1.
epitaph on Letitia’s great-grandfather’s grave: LLR, vol. 1, p. 2.
Catherine was said to have loved: Anna Maria Hall, A Woman’s Story, vol. 1, p. 10.
had been painted by George Stubbs: Royal Collection.
Hazlitt had a statuette of Napoleon: Cook, Hazlitt in Love, p. 85.
Keats had a Napoleon snuffbox: Roe, John Keats, p. 181.
“Should the favour Mrs Landon requests be admissible”: Bodleian, MSS. Eng. lett., d. 113–14.
“West Indian dandy”: PLG, p. 2.
“into endurance, and even love of slavery”: Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 79.
“I do not dwell”: PLG, p. 349.
“careless of the passion…in the bud”: PLG, p. 3.
“I wished to pourtray”: Letters, p. 6.
“I am too well aware of my many defects”: Letters, p. 4.
“belov’d Inspirer of thy youthful minstrel’s dream”: L.E.L., The Fate of Adelaide, p. 7.
“bards of Greece”…“not quite unworthy thee”: Ibid., p. 35.
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