Biography
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Poisoned Lives
The Regency Poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and British Gold Coast Administrator George Maclean
Julie Watt was, until retirement, Head of Arts & Media at Stevenson College, Edinburgh. She continues to work part-time for the SQA as a Principal Assessor in Media Studies, and for the OU on the reading experience of Robert Louis Stevenson. Her OU doctorate is in TV drama, a subject on which she has written, broadcast and lectured internationally. Her interest in Letitia Landon stems from a family connection.
Poisoned
Lives is a double biography of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, best-selling
Regency poet known to her contemporaries as the female Byron’,
and her husband George Maclean, British administrator on the Gold
Coast, known as the Father of Modern Ghana. L.E.L.’s reading
public adored her writing and poetry and made her the best-selling
female author of her time. As an early media celebrity her life
was the subject of society gossip, so her sudden death in Africa
shocked the nation (a ‘melancholy catastrophe’ ran one
headline) and led to rumours of suicide or murder. Her husband’s
name was henceforth blackened by London society, which unwittingly
superimposed the plots of L.E.L.’s fictions upon the circumstances
of her death.
Despite the fact that Maclean cleared 200 miles of Western
African coast of British slave trading, made peace with the warlike
Asante, instituted a judicial system still in use in many African
democracies, and encouraged successful and fair trading, the scandal
unjustly ruined his career. According to the inquest L.E.L.’s
death was caused by her improper use of a prescribed medicine, but
the rumour mongers discounted the difficult circumstances of life
on the Gold Coast in the mid 1800s, and hinted that ‘Mrs Maclean,
only recently married, owed her death to the revengeful passions
of the natives, who poisoned the wife in order to have vengeance
on the husband’.
Among those who enjoyed her work or recognised her influence
were Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti
and her brother, Dante Gabriel. It might be said that, to reflect
fully the aesthetics of early nineteenth-century poetry, one has
to consider, together, the works of William Wordsworth, Felicia
Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
| Hardback ISBN: | 978-1-84519-420-8 |
| Hardback Price: | £55.00 / $74.95 |
| Release Date: | November 2010 |
| Page Extent / Format: | 272 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
| Illustrated: | Yes |
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Prologue
1 The End
2 Letty: Childhood
3 George: Childhood
4 Letitia: Starting Out
5 George: Starting Out
6 Letitia: Making a Name
7 George: Making a Name
8 Letitia: Changing Tack
9 George: Changing Tack
10 Letitia: Coming Together
11 George: Coming Together
12 Together
13 Death at the Castle
14 The Inquest
15 The Affair of the Dos Amigos
16 The Commission of Inquiry
Bibliography
Index
Watt renders [the lives and tumultuous
love of Letitia Elizabeth Landon and George Maclean] with the
brio of a skillful storyteller with a keen eye for local detail,
the wit of a well informed, casually deployed knowledge, and
the authority of an intrepid scholar-researcher. The research
is considerable, drawn from wide reading in the history and
culture of a half century of British and West African colonial
worlds, from the literary world, as well as archives in England
and Scotland, the Maclean family papers, the faculty of medical
colleges, the records of life in Cape Coast Africa, and personal
travel to this site. Poisoned Lives is capably animated with
an array of histories, local lore, cultural anecdote, and inset
biographies (Bulwer Lytton, John Foster, Daniel Maclise, Rosina
Wheeler, Lady Blessington, William Maginn). It is not only the
most important publication on L.E.L. since Cynthia Lawford’s
news [about LEL’s illegitimate children], but also a tour de
force on the cultural turmoils of Great Britain – from the Highland
Clearances and forced emigrations from Scotland in transatlantic
conditions rivalled only by the slave-ships, sans manacles;
Church politics (High and Low); the adventures of post-Waterloo
military life, especially in foreign lands essential to British
commercial hegemony; Paris in the mid-1830s; the currents of
gossip, slander, and jealous rivalries amid the variety, freedom,
perpetual novelty and cultural excitement of ever-modern London;
silver-fork novels, annuals, and the late-Georgian beau monde;
the puffery and put-downs of magazine and gazette reviewing;
the fashioning and fracturing of celebrity; the promises and
perils of aspirational female authorship in pre-Victorian Romanticism;
and the force-fields of gender and class. Watt threads her biographies
with rich research in to the homes and haunts, scenes and cultures,
poetry and politics, in which these dynamically memorable lives
arose, took shape, met challenges, prospered, joined and divided.
A storehouse of valuable research and superbly coordinated information, Poisoned Lives is also a lively, literate, engaging
g story, rendered with the craft and flair of an artful novelist.
From a review by Susan Wolfson, Princeton University, in The Wordsworth Circle, Volume XLII, Number 4, Autumn 2011
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