L.E.L. Read online

  Declaring it to be the duty of the press to penetrate into the “remotest and darkest nooks of colonial dependency,” the Weekly True Sun alleged that there was indeed a person at Cape Coast “towards whom suspicion might naturally point”: an African woman. It revealed “that according to the rude, unchristian, and of course, not legal, customs of the country, the Governor of Cape Coast Castle had a half-caste domestic partner who shared his battlemented state.” While he was away in England, “wooing and winning the English poetess,” this shadowy woman had allegedly “remained, unaware of his proceedings, in the Castle, awaiting his return.” In her veins ran the “hot blood of Africa.”

  Fueled by the doctor’s assertion that Landon had no prussic acid in her possession, rumors were soon rife that Maclean’s jealous African consort had done away with her English rival. Cape Coast Castle took on gothic dimensions in the popular imagination. It was, according to the Mirror of Literature on January 26, a “strange and dismal place,” a “dreary abode,” a “fatal spot.”

  “All manner of outrageous reports were circulated and eagerly believed,” recalled Brodie Cruickshank. “It was…told, from mouth to mouth, that there was a dark secluded portion of the castle, to which Mrs Maclean was never admitted; and the imagination was allowed to people this abode with shapes of infamy.” The purported scenario prefigured that of Jane Eyre (1847), with its madwoman in the attic, the Creole Bertha Mason, another hot-blooded first wife from the tropics.

  “Cape Coast Castle—that dreary abode, the strange and dismal place of sojourn, and the fatal spot wherein that gifted being, ‘L.E.L.,’ closed her valuable life”: the Mirror of Literature reports on Letitia Landon’s death in January 1839.

  Some asked whether Governor Maclean himself had connived with his African consort to do away with his new bride. Such were the suspicions of the dead woman’s own brother, the Reverend Whittington Landon, who wrote privately to the Colonial Office demanding a murder inquiry. It was never pursued. The reason given by officials in a tardy response was that the relevant documents had been lost.

  On February 4, from his home in Chelsea, not far from where Letitia Landon had lived before her marriage, Thomas Carlyle passed on the latest gossip to his brother in Scotland:

  What newspapers do you see? Great talk has been here in certain circles about the death of L.E.L. by Prussic acid. It is generally suspected there was some foul play in it and not a mere mistake. At any rate, the poor creature is now heavy and asleep for ever[.] Her Pictures in the Printshops nor no gabble of tongues will now touch her any more.

  His combined image of word-of-mouth whisperings and mass-produced prints perfectly summed up the texture of Letitia Landon’s fame. Few poets have ever commented so acutely on their own dissemination. “I lived / Only in others’ breath,” wrote L.E.L. in the voice of one of her many fictional alter egos.

  In the anarchic print culture of the 1820s and 1830s, information and misinformation mixed and separated as promiscuously as on the web today. Even before her death, rumor had replicated around L.E.L. like a virus. Before she married George Maclean, she had spent most of her career living in a rented room above a girls’ school. But the respectability of her spinster lodgings had not prevented her romantic poetry from provoking a welter of salacious speculation about her private life. Aspersions were cast on her virtue, and several men were named as her supposed lovers.

  Writing about passion in a female voice was a risky business for any nineteenth-century woman, as Charlotte Brontë later discovered when she published Jane Eyre and was suspected by the London literati of being the mistress of Thackeray, whom she had never met. In her late poem “Gossipping” [sic], L.E.L. hit back at the rumormongers:

  These are the spiders of society;

  They weave their petty webs of lies and sneers,

  And lie themselves in ambush for the spoil.

  Her death gave the spiders something new to spin. As far away as India, tongues were gabbling. On June 15, 1839, more than five months after the story broke, Emily Eden, sister of the governor-general, wrote home from Simla, demanding an update. “We have been a long time without letters, and nobody knows when we shall have any again,” she complained. “There are several stories left hanging on something which ought to have been cleared up a long time ago, and never will be now—poor L.E.L.’s death! We have heard twice from you since the first account, and it never appeared whether Maclean was a ‘brute of a husband’ or she, poor thing! very easily excited…we never could find the end of that story.” But the end of the story was a long way off.

  Meanwhile, an official biography was commissioned from a journalist, Samuel Laman Blanchard, who had known Letitia Landon since the mid-1820s and was also a friend of the up-and-coming Charles Dickens. His aim, he said, was to “elucidat[e] all that was mysterious in her fate.” When his Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L. was published in 1841, anyone looking for lurid sensation would have been disappointed, however. He dismissed the rumors about her love life as mere malicious gossip, and put her death down to prosaic natural causes, tentatively diagnosing a bursting ear abscess.

  Some readers professed themselves satisfied. “After fully examining the evidence relating to this tragedy, the author arrives at the conclusion that her death was natural and instigated neither by her own sorrows nor by the jealousy of others,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in Graham’s Magazine. However, few in London were so convinced. “There is a mystery somewhere. Indeed, everywhere over the book we are perplexed in the extreme,” complained Elizabeth Barrett. Not only the story of Letitia Landon’s death, but that of her life, seemed only half-told.

  Soon afterward, L.E.L. suffered a second death: that of her reputation. In 1858, the printing plates for her onetime best seller, The Improvisatrice, were melted down. By the end of the nineteenth century her poems had ceased to appear even in anthologies. Yet she continued to lead a half-life on the sidelines of literary history as an unsolved case.

  “Do you know the story of L.E.L.?—the poetess who committed suicide, as some say; but others feel sure was murdered?” wrote Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey in September 1927, keen to tell him that she had just commissioned a book on the subject for the Hogarth Press from their mutual friend Doris Enfield. When it came out in 1928, Enfield’s L.E.L.: A Mystery of the Thirties, did little to rehabilitate its subject’s literary reputation. Looking down on Letitia Landon with Bloomsbury hauteur, Enfield saw her as a “sexually ignorant” fantasist who had unwittingly opened herself up to lubricious gossip by publishing her naïve romantic effusions, and had gone on to commit suicide after marrying because the reality of sex failed to live up to her flowery imaginings.

  Yet Enfield left so many ends untied that the case remained open. In the 1940s, one critic picked up on contemporary reports that Letitia Landon had suffered from unexplained blackouts, and concluded that she had died of epilepsy, not prussic acid. More recently, the heart condition Stokes-Adams syndrome has been proposed as the cause of the mysterious fainting fits and also of her death.

  In the light of the contradictory and inconclusive evidence, it is hardly surprising that the current edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography concludes, open-endedly, that Letitia Landon’s death is unlikely ever to be satisfactorily explained. However, a more recently discovered aspect of her personal history—too new and untried to have made it into the latest DNB article of 2004—has the potential to illuminate the enigma of her life, her work, and her death.

  It first emerged on the fringes as long ago as 2000, when a man named Michael Gorman, of Antipodean heritage but then living in Japan, came forward claiming to be a direct descendant of Letitia Landon. On the face of it, that seemed unlikely. Her union with George Maclean had produced no children; she had died only four months after their wedding. The then critical consensus was that she had been a “virgin” until her marriage: a woman who “knew
only that she had never yielded to another’s passion” when she composed her poetry with its “painfully vivid narcissistic fantasies.” Letitia Landon’s contemporary memoirists, including her biographer Blanchard, had all united in asserting that “slander more utterly groundless never was propagated.” Feminist critics of the 1990s as a result dismissed the gossip about her love life as a clear example of patriarchal prejudice: the smearing of a woman simply because she had dared to step outside her proper sphere by publishing at all.

  However, Gorman’s claim was confirmed after he was put in touch, via the internet, with an American researcher, Cynthia Lawford, who managed to find the baptismal records for two of the children, Ella and Laura; their brother Fred was not christened. Since then, a wealth of family correspondence has emerged confirming the three children’s existence.

  Lawford had hit on the first significant clue to unlocking what had been referred to as the so-called mystery of L.E.L. since at least the 1850s. But it left many questions unanswered, and its wider cultural and historical ramifications were not fully recognized. With its scene ranging from the publishing offices and salons of literary London to the murky world of corrupt business in West Africa, Letitia Landon’s true story turns out to offer unique access into the “strange pause” between the age of Byron and that of the Brontës, an era dominated by unregulated capitalism, rapid media expansion, and commercial celebrity culture. Without L.E.L., we cannot fully map the contours of nineteenth-century literature. She is the missing link, one of those “morbid symptoms” that, according to Antonio Gramsci, appear in moments of historical transition.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Three Magical Letters

  Letitia Landon’s story ends with the brute fact of a body against a door, but it does not begin with her physical birth. This is the biography not just of a woman but of an imaginary persona, an image, a poetic brand. It first came into being in late 1821, when fugitive poems signed with the enigmatic initials “L.E.L.” began appearing in a magazine called the Literary Gazette.

  A decade later, the novelist and future politician Edward Bulwer*—who had by then become a friend of the real-life Letitia Landon—recalled the excitement generated by the mystery poet among his fellow undergraduates at Cambridge:

  We were young and at college…and there was always in the reading room of the Union a rush every Saturday afternoon for the Literary Gazette; and an impatient anxiety to hasten at once to that corner of the sheet which contained the three magical letters “L.E.L.” All of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed at the author.

  The fact that the students only had to wait until “Saturday” for the next poem was in itself a novelty. In a world of quarterlies, the Gazette was cutting edge: the first cultural periodical to come out weekly, speeding up the traditional publishing cycle. From the start, L.E.L.’s persona was bound up with the means of its dissemination; the medium and the message were inextricably entwined.

  Readers clutched at clues as to L.E.L.’s identity as, week by week, more poems appeared. Internal evidence suggested that she was young and female. The initials even sounded like the echo of a girl’s name. Glimmerings of an absent woman’s form shimmered through the disembodied page.

  Three months on, the editor of the Gazette printed a tribute poem from an admirer, “To L.E.L., on his or her Poetic Sketches in the Literary Gazette.” The author, Bernard Barton, was happy to sign his work, but declared himself content for L.E.L.’s identity, and even gender, to remain veiled:

  I know not who, or what thou art;

  Nor do I seek to know thee,

  While thou, performing thus thy part,

  Such banquets canst bestow me.

  Then be, as long as thou shalt list,

  My viewless, nameless Melodist.

  However, the editor added a footnote that confirmed what many readers already hoped and suspected: that L.E.L. was “a lady yet in her teens.” Interest surged in the Cambridge Union. As Bulwer recalled, “We soon learned it was a female and our admiration was doubled, and our conjectures tripled.”

  The fact that she was “a female” cannot alone explain the excitement. Readers of 1822 were used to women poets. Spearheading the older generation was the dramatist Joanna Baillie, widely regarded as a modern Shakespeare. More recently, Felicia Hemans had made her name with Poems of the Domestic Affections, and with The Sceptic, which made the case for religious faith, attacking Byron’s moral character en route.

  However, L.E.L.’s poetry had such a “stamp of originality” that “it was impossible to trace in the character of her imagination and the peculiarities of her style, any resemblance to those qualities which had gained distinction for other gifted women,” according to her 1841 biographer Laman Blanchard. He neglected to explain exactly what made her work so different.

  L.E.L.’s appeal to young male readers of 1822 would be inexplicable were one only to read her posthumous critics, who generally dismissed her as a saccharine lady sentimentalist. “In all the work of L.E.L. there is no observation, no insight, no power of analysis; to the end her phantasies remain those of a schoolgirl,” wrote Doris Enfield witheringly in 1928. During the twentieth century, L.E.L. was relegated to a feminine backwater as a minor poetess who wrote bland verses about flowers and birds. She was certainly never mentioned in the company of red-blooded male Romantics such as Keats, Shelley, and Byron. However, when she first began to publish in the early 1820s, contemporaries saw her as following directly in their footsteps. Rebel Shelley had fallen like a comet. Would L.E.L., one critic asked, be the “moon of our darkness” in his wake?

  L.E.L.’s twentieth-century critics were hampered by the fact that her early, most daring work was published in the ephemeral format of a magazine column and thus escaped their notice. In fact, her first fans regarded her as edgy, dangerous, and (if it is not anachronistic to use such a term) cool. Yet even from the start her rebel allure was not to be found on the surface. Her poetry worked via buried allusions, half-quotations, and hinted insinuations. It took its meaning, sometimes ironically, from the contemporary web in which it was enmeshed, and from the implicit connections that her audience was silently invited to make.

  Later critics looked for eternal verities in L.E.L.’s poetry. Finding it wanting, they dismissed it as superficial and naïve. The real Letitia Landon had no faith in eternal verities. Knowingly mired in her own moment, she was less a winsome sentimentalist than a proto-postmodern. As one of her most perceptive contemporary critics put it, her true subject was not romance but “all is vanity”: what happens in a world emptied of intrinsic value.

  Absence was the heart of L.E.L.’s aesthetic. It is no coincidence that two of her favorite formats were the “song” without music and the “poetical illustration” of a painting that her readers could not see. L.E.L. made meaning radically unstable. Epistemologically she was a skeptic, who believed that “no one sees things exactly as they are, but as varied and modified by their own method of viewing.” She vested her identity in the eye of the beholder, and yet constructed herself as a moving target. She was indeed moonlike, always waxing and waning.

  Words were mere counters in her sophisticated linguistic game. “All things are symbols,” she later wrote, questioning the existence of any accessible reality behind the web of language. The postmodern concept of intertextuality could have been invented for her. Her flowers and birds were never just flowers and birds. They always gestured toward something else.

  In the early 1820s, that something else usually meant the unmentionable topics of sex and suicide. Letitia Landon’s self-invention as L.E.L. can only be understood in its historical micro-context. The persona she created in 1821 was a product of the culture wars that were gripping the reading nation that year, as what we now call Romanticism came under increasing attack from the moral majority.

  The first two decades of the nineteenth cen
tury—the lead-up to L.E.L.’s creation—had seen poetry enjoying a cultural capital not dissimilar to that of pop music in the 1960s. Dubbed “metromania” by Blackwood’s Magazine, the craze for metrical composition was seen at every level of creative endeavor, from advertisements for the face cream Gowland’s Lotion (“Eruptive humours fly before its power, / Pimples and freckles die within the hour”) to the abstruse abstractions of Shelley. As L.E.L., Letitia Landon would combine the wily marketing tactics of the former with the wayward genius of the latter.

  The poetry boom achieved its first spike in 1810, when Walter Scott’s verse romance, The Lady of the Lake, sold twenty-five thousand copies in the first eight months. Two years later, it reached new heights when Byron burst onto the scene with the first installment of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. It sold out in three days and went through five editions in 1812 alone. The success of Scott and Byron was rooted in their manipulation of new poetic methods, which engaged the emotional complicity of their audience, techniques L.E.L. would expand and refine.

  By flooding the text with floating emotions and nonspecific subjectivity, Scott invited readers to project their own feelings onto his poetry, and to come away believing that he understood their own inner lives better than they did themselves. Byron took the method further by relocating the center of interest in the poet himself, inventing a brooding hero who was generally supposed to be a self-portrait. Readers were no longer simply projecting their own emotional experiences onto the work. Each imagined that he—or more often she, as is attested by the many fan letters he received from women—could alone understand Byron. His work hinted darkly at nameless crimes that made the public imagination run riot.