No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
“Extraordinary Action for Libel — Yescombe v. Landor”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The story of Landor's relations with the Yescombes, and the background of the libel suit which caused him to fly from England showered with the abuse of respectable Englishmen, has never been told. It was shunned by those of his friends who might best have told it, John Forster and Mrs. Lynn Linton, and we are left to reconstruct the tale principally from Landor's three pamphlets on the subject, now quite rare and never reprinted, and from contemporary newspapers.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1941
References
1 Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 1715–1886, s.v. Yescombe.
2 Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, s.v. Massy.—She was Massy's second wife, married him on October 1, 1834, and was widowed on September 5, 1835.
3 John Forster, Walter Savage Landor (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), ii, 547.
4 The Times (London), January 6, 1857, p. 11. Cf. also December 30, 1856, p. 10, and January 1, 1857, p. 6.
5 The Bath Express and Literary Observer, December 27, 1856, January 3 and January 10, 1857, carried the fullest account of the trial, and on January 3 brought out a special second edition in the evening to complete the report and carry the vereict of the case. On December 27 it reprinted Landor's letter to the judge. Mr. Saunders's remarks on Landor are identically reported in this paper and in The Bath Herald on January 10.
6 The Times, January 6, 1857, p. 11.
7 Published in The National Magazine, ii (ca. June 13, 1857), 165, but rejected at the insistence of Landor's friends from his volume of Dry Sticks, which appeared at the end of that year.
8 This affair probably arose simply from a misunderstanding. Landor's account is confused, and the story as he re-told it in his Remarks two years later differs in its details from this.
9 Eliza, an intimate friend of Landor's, became the second Mrs. Linton.
10 The pamphlet has survived in two states: the earlier has the writings of June 21 on a separate leaf; the later has crowded the added type onto the original twelve pages. The first edition, without the additional material, must have existed but has nowhere been recorded.
10a The identity of E. N. James I do not know. Her letters to Hunt are in the Luther A. Brewer Collection, The University of Iowa, the catalogue of which collection describes her as a man. I owe this information and the extracts from her letters (nos. 48 and 47 in the collection) to Dr. S. Rhodes Dunlap of that University.
11 Forster, op. cit., ii, 553–554.
12 Dry Sticks, pp. 70, 38, and 168.
13 Landor's letters to Mrs. Lynn Linton are preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City, and are quoted with the kind permission of the Director. These are dated from the postmarks on their envelopes.
14 Stephen Wheeler, in his edition of Landor's poetical works, has gathered these poems at the end of his last volume under the heading “Senilia.”
15 From the report of the trial in The Times (London), August 24, 1858, p. 9.
16 Saturday Review (London), vi (August 28, 1858), 204.
17 John Bull (London), xxxvin (August 28, 1858), 557–558, the heading of which article we have adopted for our title. The trial is reported at much greater length in the Bath and Bristol newspapers of that date, copies of which are to be found in the British Museum newspaper library.
18 The Times, loc. cit.
19 The letter, from Th. Allsop to Dr. Bernard, was read at Bernard's hearing at the Bow-street police-court on March 13, and again at his trial at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, on April 13, 1858. Landor saw this letter in the Times' report of the former examination, and denied that he had recommended the assassination of the emperor. His denial was published in that paper on March 17.
20 Athenaeum (August 28, 1858). p. 269.
21 The Critic, xvii (August 28, 1858), 511.
22 John Bull, XXXVIII (August 28, 1858), 552. The quotation from the Daily News appears on p. 549 of the same number.
23 Saturday Review, vi (August 28, 1858), 203.
24 Literary Gazette, n.s. i (August 28, 1858), 272; Critic, xvii (September 4, 1858), 534; John Bull, xxxviii (September 4, 1858), 569.
25 Forster, op. cit., ii, 556.
26 Houghton, Monographs, Personal and Social, 2d ed. (London: John Murray, 1873), p. 132; Forster, op. cit., ii, 559.
27 This arrangement underwent several changes; in 1858 the situation was as here described. Cf. Forster, op. cit., ii, 557–559.
28 London Quarterly Review, xxiv (April, 1865), 187; the copy with Robert Landor's notes is in the Forster Collection, So. Kensington Museum (No. 5084).
29 The case is reported briefly in The Times, June 1, 1859, p. 10, and more completely by Charles Beavan, Reports of Cases in Chancery, argued and determined in the Rolls Court during the time of the right honorable Sir John Romilly, Knight, Master of the Rolls (London: 1861), xxviii, 80–87.
30 Forster, op. cit., ii, 568.
31 Note in the Bath Herald, August 21, 1858.
32 Forster, op. cit., ii, 569–570.
33 H. C. Minchin, Walter Savage Landor (London: Methuen, 1934), p. 32.
34 James T. Fields, biographical notes and personal sketches, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1882), pp. 70–74.—Fields's intention to publish a volume of selections from Landor was announced in Littell's Living Age, lxviii (January 5, 1861), 45.
34a Minchin, op. cit., 68.
35 Undated MS in the Boston Public Library, Kate Field Collection, quoted by permission of the Director.
36 Cf. W. J. Linton, Memories (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1895), pp. 156–157.
37 G. J. Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892), ii, 11.
38 The letter from Holyoake's lawyer to this effect survives, in private hands. Cf. Landor to Holyoake, in Holyoake, op. cit., ii, 13–14.
39 G. J. Holyoake, op. cit., ii, 13. The letter is dated in TLS, 1928, p. 472.
40 M. Q. Holyoake, “The Last Writings of Landor,” Gentleman's Magazine, cclxxxvi (January, 1899), 12–13. The year of the letter is conjectural; Holyoake's guess in 1861.
41 Mr. Landor's Remarks, p. 3. The clergyman is apparently not Mr. Yescombe, but an equally scoundrelly divine who is “reported to have had his gown stripped off his shoulders in a distant part of England.”
42 The Times, for example, though not guilty of the former error, does introduce the offending comma into the second line of the couplet:
“Tho' you've made her pale and thin
As the child of Death, by sin,“
while John Bull prints it correctly. Similarly (though Landor does not mention this in his pamphlet) The Times misquotes Mr. Landor Threatened, a few sentences of which were read at the trial, while John Bull again quotes them correctly.
43 Mr. Landor's Remarks, p. 5.
44 To this might be added the testimony of A. J. C. Hare, the son of one of Landor's best friends, who wrote to his mother when he heard of the case. “Dear Mr. Landor! I had always hoped and intended to be near him and watch over the last years of this old, old friend. I feel certain that there is much, which the world does not know, to be said on his side. I have known Mrs. Y. for years ... and always prophesied that she would be the ruin of Mr. Landor some day.”—A. J. C. Hare, Story of my Life (London: Allen, 1896), ti, 111.
45 T. A. Trollope, letter to Kate Field, December 25, 1864; MS in the Kate Field Collection, Boston Public Library.
46 Minchin, op. cit., p. 128.—There is nothing to show what the “compromise” was.
47 Forster, op. cit., ii, 589.
48 Stephen Wheeler, Letters of Walter Savage Landor, Private and Public (London: Duckworth, 1899), p. 216.
49 Gosse and Wise, edd. Leiters of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Heinemann, 1918), i, 140.