# 46172

LANDON, Letitia Elizabeth (1802-1838)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, poet and novelist: autograph note, signed, to Miss Dutton, who is known to have painted a portrait miniature of the writer. London, [1837?].

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Manuscript in ink on white notepaper, 105 x 115 mm; written entirely in the hand of Letitia Elizabeth Landon and signed by her at the foot ‘Yours in great haste but most truly, L. E. Landon’, the note is addressed to ‘My dear Miss Dutton’, and is simply headed ‘Friday’, without any further date; laid down on a section cut from a leaf removed from a nineteenth-century autograph album (see note on provenance below), with an annotation by the album’s compiler at lower right; some mild wrinkling from when the note was mounted, otherwise well preserved.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (aka L.E.L.) (1802-1838) was an English poet and novelist sometimes referred to as “the female Byron”, whose work influenced such writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, among many others in Britain and the United States.

This signed autograph note by Landon has never been published. It is addressed to ‘My dear Miss Dutton’, whom Landon asks whether a meeting tomorrow will suit: ‘If it will, home[?] – but use your own convenience’ (i.e. Landon will be home all that day, and she invites Miss Dutton to visit whenever convenient).

There can be little doubt the note is addressed to the London artist Miss Dutton, whose portrait miniature of Landon was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838 (see Richard Walker, Regency Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, 1985, no. 842). However, her miniatures are only recorded in catalogues of the time under the name ‘Miss Dutton’. Much more is known about her more celebrated sister, Mary Martha Pearson (née Dutton) (1798-1871), who was also a portrait painter. We know that Mary had two sisters: Jane and Louisa. There is a Miss Jane Dutton listed as a commercial photographic artist in the Post Office Trades Directories for London in the years 1857-1860; since it was common practice for artists to take up photography in the mid nineteenth century – a field in which there were not many women practitioners – it is possible that the mysterious ‘Miss Dutton’ and this particular Jane Dutton may be one and the same artist, who in the 1850s was working as a studio colourist specialised in the overpainting of photographic portraits.

Landon’s note must have been written prior to her private marriage to colonial governor George Maclean on 7 June 1838 and the couple’s subsequent departure for the Gold Coast, where Landon would be discovered dead at Cape Castle on 15 October 1838, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to posit that Miss Dutton’s portrait of Landon would have been done around 1837 (given that it was exhibited in 1838), at which time Landon was still residing in Hans Place, Knightsbridge, and Miss Dutton in Hart Street off Bloomsbury Square.

Provenance: Autograph album compiled by Jane Emma Murphy (Balcombe) (1854-1924), of “The Briars”, Mornington, Victoria, Australia; thence by descent through the à Beckett family, Melbourne.