Scrapped Sentiment: Letitia Landon and Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-Book, 1832–1837

This essay examines several ‘companion poems’ that Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) wrote for the literary annual Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-Book between 1832 and 1838. Each of these poems was designed to ‘complement’ the visual content of an engraving with which the poem was paired. Most of the poems are written in the first person. The ‘I’ that speaks each one seems motivated by a particular set of ideological allegiances that clash with the apparent ideological allegiances of other ‘I's. No attempt is made to account for the discrepancies. I argue that the companion poems ultimately showcase the unsettling resemblance between moral convictions and commodities. The net effect is that the annual implies – in the words of Dickens's villainous character James Harthouse – that ‘any set of ideas will do just as much good as any other set, and just as much harm as any other set’.

‘A FONDNESS FOR BEING SAD’: SOME PORTUGUESE SOURCES FOR ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S POETICS OF MELANCHOLY IN SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE (1850)

In seeing melancholy as the antithesis of poetic creativity, the Victorians often broke with the traditional Renaissance and Romantic attitudes of equating melancholy moods with artistic or poetic genius. This article proposes to explore how, initially viewed as an emotional and ‘depressed’ woman poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to resist and escape the sickening disempowerment or abandonment which had affected poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, and engage in a new poetics of melancholy in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). It demonstrates how the poet plays this poetics out in most of her later sonnets, where she indeed attempts to prove that good poetry can be written without melancholy, even if she herself does not always succeed in this deliberate rejection of ‘dejection’. The article thus intends to suggest, through a brief comparative analysis, that her apparently contradictory poetics of melancholy very probably derived from a specifically Portuguese poetic tradition, namely the ‘fondness for being sad’ of Luís de Camões, as well as the sorrowful love of Mariana Alcoforado’s epistles (1669) and of Soror Maria do Céu’s mannerist poems, an influence that is supported in the great similarity of motives and language that can be found in the respective texts.