#65, September 22, 2005

L.E.L.

The Murder Mystery (part 1)

Were I to write a murder mystery it would be based upon the life and death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a poet of some renown during her day, but now almost lost to the canon following her mysterious death above the cannons of Cape Coast Castle.

This loss to the canon is a loss indeed, in my humble opinion. We know of all those great romantic poets – especially the men – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and the Victorian Age’s favorite, Alfred Lawn Tennison. But we know them for a particular kind of bucolic aspect, their disdain for the industrial age and celebration of the country and those bumpkins residing therein.

But L.E.L. was altogether a different character. At one level, she was a poet who often wrote doggerel – or maybe I just haven’t studied it close enough. But at another level she summed up her age in a way that few other poets managed to do. Her Birthday Tribute to Queen Victoria, for example, placed the empire at the center of the story – and this is long before 1857 and the making of the empress.

And more than glory, or than gold,

May British merchants say,

Look on what blessings infinite

Have followed in our way.

To civilize and to redeem

Has been our generous toil;

To sow the seeds of future good

In many a thankful soil.

Where’er to dark and pagan lands

Our path has been decreed;

Have we not brought the Christian’s hope,

The Christian’s holy creed?

From glowing Ind to Huron’s waters spreading

Extends the empire that our sword hath won;

There have our sails been, peace and knowledge spreading;

Upon thy scepter never sets the sun.

But she went further than this. While celebrating the empire pre-Kipling, she also celebrated the urban, as opposed to the rural landscape. That is unusual for this time, and she in many ways was in advance of Baudelaire and all the poets of the demi-monde. Though, of course, she was a lot more genteel than these French folk. Her sensibility was in stark contrast to the romantics. While they came together in their urban coteries and celebrated the other, L.E.L. celebrated London. “Poor London,” she wrote, “has its merits as little understood as any popular question which everybody discusses. I do own I have a most affectionate attachment for London – the deep voice of her multitudes “haunts me like a passion.” I delight in observing the infinite variety of her crowded streets, the rich merchandise of the shops, the vast buildings, whether raised for pomp, commerce, or charity, down to the barrel-organ, whose music is only common because it is beautiful.” The recognition of the “deep voice” of the “multitudes” places Landon in the vanguard of an empire-induced multiculturalism – though that may be stretching it a little.

She continued, with a critique of the bucolic:

The country is no more left as it was originally created, than Belgrave Square remains its pristine swamp. The forest has been felled, the marsh drained, the enclosures planted, and the field ploughed. All these, begging Mr. Cowper’s pardon, are the works of man’s hands; and so is the town – the one is not more artificial than the other. Both are the result of God’s good gifts – industry and intelligence exerted to the utmost. Let any one ride down Highgate Hill on a summer’s day, see the immense mass of buildings spread like a dark panorama, hear the ceaseless and peculiar sound, which has been likened to the hollow roar of the ocean, but has an utterly differing tone; watch the dense cloud that hangs over all – one perpetual storm, which yet bursts not – and then say, if ever was witnessed hill or valley that so powerfully impressed the imagination with that sublime and awful feeling which is the epic of poetry.

That’s original. A very apt epigraph was deployed by one of her biographers: “Criticism never yet benefited a really original mind; such a mind macadamizes its own road.” The reference to originality and to tarmac are oh so fitting.

And L.E.L.’s lifestyle brought a lot of criticism. As almost the equivalent of a movie star in her day, people following her every move as a celebrity, the fact that Landon lived surrounded by a small circle of female friends living under the same roof raised many eye-brows. Many of the scandals directed toward her, tales of men with whom she had illicit contact, were quite possibly put out by the coterie of women who surrounded her just to keep the public from focusing more on this womanly commune. “Being perfectly aware of her entire freedom from any affair of the heart,” a friend reminisced, “[her] friends were sometimes amused, and sometimes provoked, by the various reports which gained universal credit.”

So what is the murder mystery here? What led this major poet to suddenly marry a soldier who was widely considered no more than a fortune-hunter, go off to live off the coast of Africa (where he was in charge of suppressing the slave trade), and how did she end up dead as a result of a poisoning from Hydrocyanic acid only a few weeks later? How do we explain this? Therein lies the tale and a pretty good Merchant-Ivory movie too!