L.E.L. in and out of the Birkbeck Album: Poetics and Politics

Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s contributions to Anna Birkbeck’s album may seem out of place among entries by radicals and reformers associated with the London Mechanics’ Institution, among them John Bowring, William Hone, Robert Owen, and John Thelwall. Yet contrasting sentimental poetics with radical politics fails to capture the radical aesthetics of the 1820s. Thelwall, for instance, placed Landon, whom he called ‘Sappho’, among ‘Poets and Poetry of the Age’. The album authors include editors of journals that shaped Landon’s career: William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette, where Landon made her reputation in the 1820s; and Samuel Carter Hall, the editor of The Amulet and the New Monthly Magazine, which were important venues for her later poems. This article analyses the Landon poems entered into the Birkbeck album after being published in the Literary Gazette, together with later poems published in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (1832) and the New Monthly Magazine (1836), teasing out the poetics and politics of her poetry in challenging an egotistical, Wordsworthian strand of Romantic writing, and arguing instead for ‘the public circulation of affect and the necessity of dreaming as a social need’.