Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  For Lucy, it meant seeing her mother in a wholly new light, sometimes enjoying but more often enduring her celebrity. On the one hand admiring crowds gathered to look at Mrs Jordan when she left her lodgings; a hundred people might be ‘waiting to put me into my Carriage’.14 On the other it was a tiring way of life, often uncomfortable and never wholly predictable. It was pleasant to hear a cross-looking old man abruptly urging someone in the Bath Pump Room, ‘Have you seen Mrs Jordan? If NOT, lose no time, SEE as much of her as you CAN,’ especially when he was a 76-year-old chief justice, Sir James Mansfield. It was less amusing to find herself ‘talked out’ of visits to the market and the library, where she went to read the papers, ‘for I heard nothing but Mrs Jordan’s name, and tho’ nobody knew me, I could not stand it and would not encounter it again on any account, therefore I shall stay at home except when I can get into the fields.’ The letter went on to describe how she heard people discussing her private life, and even giving a detailed account of ‘a most pathetic parting’ between her and the Duke.

  To get away from this, she ‘slipped out yesterday with Lucy into the fields leading to Bristol, and walked, which procured me a good night, the only one I have had since I left Bushy’.15 Walking in the country was always a solace to Dora when she felt at all bruised; but gossip is an inevitable part of fame, and she was too much of a realist not to understand that, and take most of it lightly. She had been hearing about her imminent parting from the Duke for years; in reality he was coming to meet her at Maidenhead on her way home, and their letters were full of affectionate teasing. She told him that he appeared ‘just to have found out that we go on together very well. It was fortunate that you concluded the sentence with the hope that it would never be otherwise. You may have your doubts about it; I have none. Mind, I only answer for myself.’16

  How did Dora appear to the world as she approached fifty? She had lost her slim waist and slight figure, but she was still bright-eyed and seductive when she chose to be. She tired more easily, but was still able to summon up reserves of energy and spirits. Boaden, pressed to say whether she had been handsome by someone who never saw her, answered simply, ‘Had you seen her as I did, the question would never have occurred to you!’17 Leigh Hunt wrote still better,

  though she was neither beautiful, nor handsome, nor even pretty, nor accomplished, nor ‘a lady’, nor anything conventional or comme il faut whatsoever, yet was so pleasant, cordial, so natural, so full of spirits, so healthily constituted in mind and body, had such a shapely leg withal, so charming a voice, and such a happy and happy-making expression of countenance, that she appeared something superior to all those requirements of acceptability.18

  Hunt was more than twenty years her junior, so he cannot have formed his judgement on her until she was in her mid-forties, and it is in these late appearances that he found her ‘a performer who unites great comic powers with much serious feeling,… not only the first actress of the day, but as it appears to me from the description we have of former actresses, the first that has adorned our stage’.19

  The actor and stage-writer William Oxberry, another who did not see her until after 1807, also called her ‘a wonderful woman… with more natural genius for the profession she followed than any actress we ever saw’.20 The great Victorian actor Macready received, as a very young player, some of his first lessons in acting from her after 1809, and wrote of her

  discrimination, an identity with her character, an artistic arrangement of the scene, that made all appear spontaneous and accidental, though elaborated with the greatest care. Her voice was one of the most melodious I ever heard, which she could vary by certain bass tones, that would have disturbed the gravity of a hermit; and who that heard that laugh could ever forget it?… so rich, so apparently irrepressible, so deliciously self-enjoying, as to be at all times irresistible.21

  John Bannister, after so many years playing opposite her, said, ‘No woman, I think, ever uttered comedy like her. She was perfectly good tempered, and possessed the best of hearts.’22 There is a great deal more along these lines, from fellow actors, critics and mere observers: Charles Mathews, Thomas Campbell, John Genest, Hazlitt. Byron called her ‘superlative’, Coleridge talked of the ‘exquisite witchery of her tone’.

  Strangers unconnected with the theatre – even hostile to it – were also struck by her sweetness of character. One of the most famous stories is of a Methodist preacher who observed her in Chester in 1809 as she was being thanked by a poor widow with three children whom she had rescued from a debtors’ prison, giving a sharp reprimand to the lawyer who had increased her debt under the guise of helping her. Dora made light of what she had done and sent the woman away with another pound. The minister then came forward to praise her, and offered his hand. She drew back and refused, saying if he knew who she was, he would send her to the devil. He insisted until Dora said, ‘I don’t like fanatics; and you’ll not like me, when I tell you who I am.’ – ‘I hope I shall.’ – ‘Well, then, I tell you. I am a player.’ The preacher sighed. ‘Yes, I am a player; and you must have heard of me. Mrs Jordan is my name.’

  There was a pause, then the minister again put out his hand, saying, ‘The Lord bless thee, whoever thou art; His goodness is unlimited; He has bestowed on thee a large portion of his spirit; and as to thy calling, if thy soul upbraid thee not, the Lord forbid that I should.’ He offered her his arm and walked her back to her lodging, where he shook hands with her again, and said: ‘Fare thee well, Sister; I know not what the principles of people of thy calling may be; – thou art the first I ever conversed with; but if their benevolent practices equal thine, I hope and trust, at the great day, the Almighty God will say to each – Thy sins are forgiven thee.’23

  If Dora had any religious faith it is rarely in evidence in her letters beyond mentions of prayers at home, occasional church-going, and a sarcasm at the expense of two bishops sent to give the Duke an improving lecture during one of her absences; but clearly, as the Chester minister saw, she was a Christian in the sense that mattered most – in her practice.

  She was also forthright, and capable of a sharp-tongued response to what she felt was false. When Sir Walter Scott told her he ‘could not perceive the smallest alteration’ in her since the last time he had seen her – some twenty years before – she found the flattery ‘so gross’ that she told him ‘that that was very extraordinary, as you are said to be particularly sharp-sighted in this part of the world’.24 But she was not a brilliant conversationalist, and some were disappointed, expecting her private talk to be a continuation of Wycherley’s or Sheridan’s dialogue – a common misconception where actors are concerned. Instead they found ‘the animated, lively, brilliant mimic on the boards, was in the saloon retiring, quiet, nay, almost reserved. Mrs Jordan seldom spoke much in company, particularly in very large assemblies; but then she spoke well. She made no exertion to appear distinguished, and became more so by absence of effort.’25

  Professionally she had the confidence of an actress who commands respect within her world and enthusiasm in her audiences, but personally she was not always so confident. In these later years she was torn between her pride in her absent sons and her fears for their safety. The fears were reasonable, but they sometimes drove her to the edge of hysteria in her letters home, particularly when she was without recent news, or when she knew that one of them was unhappy. This was the case with Henry, who began to hate the navy and asked to be transferred into the army. For many months she pleaded with the Duke to listen to him; it took a great deal of persistence before she succeeded. Anxiety about her sons became the danger point for her emotional well-being; her relations with the Duke, and their future together, caused her no worries, and were taken entirely for granted – at least within the context of Bushy. In her travels about the country she sometimes found her equivocal social position a strain. She did not talk of it directly to him, but she did mention both her reluctance to accept invitations, and her loneliness; reading between the l
ines of her letters, you pick up the painfulness of living between one layer of society and another. She might be amused when she overheard remarks about herself, but she was too intelligent not to be aware that some of her celebrity was as a royal mistress rather than as a working actress, and this could make her apprehensive of the sort of attention she was likely to attract. The Duke was never at her performances now; her life was absolutely divided between Bushy, where she was the good wife and mother, and the provincial theatres and lodging houses where she was the great, though not wholly invulnerable, Mrs Jordan.

  The most adventurous of her journeys in 1809 was her trip to Dublin. She was persuaded to make it by the stage-manager of the Crow Street Theatre, Atkinson, with a promise of great houses and certain profits; but she was anxious about leaving the Duke in June, when he was often struck down by asthma, and she set off braced to resist the whole experience, from the choppy sea crossing to what she remembered of exuberant Irish hospitality. Dublin is a foreign city for a Londoner, and Dora, in spite of her Irish upbringing, was prejudiced enough to view it pretty well as such. Some of the past had been exorcized at least. Daly was dead, and the cruelty of the Blands towards her mother dimmed by the years; she was forgiving enough to take a Bland nephew under her wing on the journey, on his way to join his regiment, and only too glad to go with his famous aunt. Lucy went with her too, as well as a maid and her butler Thomas.

  The sea did slop right into their beds during the crossing, and their first lodgings were dirty; she had to pay ten guineas to get out of them. The cook she hired presented herself in bare feet, declaring shoes ‘a mightly nadeless custom’; but, as Dora said, she was not going to dress the dinner with her toes, so that was all right. She was warmly greeted by Atkinson at the Crow Street Theatre but found she had been double-booked with Kemble, which meant ten wasted days. The manager tried to make amends by sending round haunches of mutton, and butter and cream; but he failed in the more important matter of providing competent supporting actors, and the theatre’s take had been exaggerated. All this was confirmation of her fears.

  It was flattering that Dublin society was agog to see her, arranging elaborate picnic excursions and dinners in her honour; but so many people hung about her door that she began to feel under siege. She was forced to put up muslin curtains, and to wear a veil whenever she went out. Her celebrity brought some real and surprising dangers too. The first time she was carried to the theatre in her curtained chair, Thomas was surrounded by a crowd and roughly informed that unless she opened the curtains and let them see her, ‘next time, they would throw stones into the chair’. Since they clearly meant it, she obliged; she also had to warn Thomas that he would be in danger himself if he did not mend his rude remarks about the Catholic faith.

  There were some comforts too. She had an old friend in Sheridan’s older sister, Alicia Lefanu, who came round to her lodgings to welcome her; the pleasure was only slightly lessened when Alicia drew out a play-script she had written and asked Dora to read it. (‘Pity me,’ wrote Dora. It was her entire comment; later the play, The Sons of Erin, did reach the Lyceum in London, but it ran for one night only.) Scripts apart, the Lefanus were good people, and made much of Lucy; their son, a clergyman, took a fancy to her, so strongly that Dora wondered whether there would be a match between her daughter and Sheridan’s nephew. But Lucy would not consider a Dublin husband; she ‘hates and detests the place as much as I do’, wrote her mother, her pen at its most acerbic.26 The Lefanus lived fully up to Dora’s ideas of Irish hospitality as both generous and disconcerting. At dinner they served a salmon so large that ‘the tail rested in my plate, and the head in the lap of my opposite neighbour, who, happening to be an Englishman, was, I believe, as much astonished as myself’. John Philpot Curran, the renowned politician, gave another great dinner for her, inviting ‘all the blue stockings and wits in the town… I shall be very glad when it is over.’ Dora wrote glumly, ‘I am convinced they will think me very stupid. I cannot help it. There is to me nothing so tiresome as that eternal driving at wit, nothing so delightful when spontaneous and unaffected.’ But later she called her host ‘very gallant’, so she may have enjoyed herself more than she expected. Another celebrated Dublin figure, Miss Sydney Owenson, author of The Wild Irish Girl, offended her by walking unannounced into her drawing room; their parents had been friends twenty-five years earlier, but Dora refused to accept her Irish spontaneity. She withdrew into a strict British formality, and refused to meet Miss Owenson.

  Some encounters from the past moved her: a doctor, who remembered seeing her as a child with the measles, and a very old man who had been present – and indeed pushed her on to the stage – on the first night she ever performed at Crow Street. Others pleased her less; at one of the Lefanus’ parties she met a general who had been at school with her father, now in his seventies, reputedly the largest man in Europe, and newly married to a beautiful girl about to have his child. ‘I never saw such a monster. What will some girls do for money… God forgive her. I think of the two SHE is the greatest beast,’ Dora wrote firmly to the Duke. You get the impression she was determined to see Ireland as a place of monsters, with its giant salmon and giant generals, shoeless cooks and stone-throwing street ruffians.

  Yet there was great and friendly interest in her. People started calling on her at ten in the morning to ask how she was after performing on the previous night (‘very obliging but very tiresome’), and she was up until midnight, when show and supper were at last over. As well as the Lefanus, she found other good friends in the family of Jonah Barrington, an Anglophile lawyer and theatre-lover. Dora needed his advice to deal with some bills of her brothers’, dating from years back, which were suddenly presented to her. They totalled nearly £400, and Barrington advised her to settle them. Otherwise, he warned her, she would face being insulted in public and even prevented from playing, as had happened to Mrs Siddons in a similar situation. He also offered to advance the money. Dora paid, of course. ‘This was an unexpected blow on me, tho’ I must say I had some vague fears when I came here,’ she wrote home, adding, ‘Let us bury all this in oblivion.’ She had the survivor’s capacity to put things behind her. ‘I will never mention, or if I can help it, think of it again.’

  All this while she remained anxious about the Duke’s health; Nixon kept her informed, and he got through the hay harvest without suffering a bad attack. There was Henry to worry about too, again at sea, and unhappy. She had bad dreams, and fears that she would never see any of them again; she said it was ‘the most cruel separation I ever experienced’, and when the Crow Street manager offered her another week at £100 a night and another benefit, she ‘quietly but steadily refused it’, to his considerable astonishment. She had made less than expected, only about £1,400, of which £400 was left for her brothers’ bills; but she trusted that ‘were it possible for me to return even poorer than I was when I left you, my welcome would not be less kind and sincere. It is the only recompence I look [for] for the vexations, anxieties and disappointments and real miseries of mind I have suffered.’

  She did not tell the Duke of the most disconcerting episode of her visit until just before setting out for England again. It involved the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, currently Charles Lennox, fourth Duke of Richmond. All the Lennoxes were descended from Charles II and his ennobled French mistress, Louise de Kéroualle; they were a handsome, fiery family. The present duke, a man of Dora’s age, had been a soldier, hot tempered enough to fight a duel with his own royal commanding officer, the Duke of York, in 1789, when he considered himself slighted by him; later he was a Member of Parliament and supporter of Pitt. He was known as a hard drinker, and had a large family; the Duchess and their daughters came to Dora’s first night, when she played The Country Girl, but he did not appear in his box until a later performance. The story she had to tell of the Duke went like this. It was

  an adventure, which I can laugh at now that it is over, tho’ at the time it had not so merry an eff
ect. The Sunday evening after the Command [performance], about 10 o’clock, Lucy being at the Barringtons, I was sitting waiting for Atkinson, who used to come at that hour to settle the weekly accounts, he had hinted to me that the Duke of Richmond was so delighted with my acting that he should not be surprised if there was a second command. I was sitting quite alone when Mr Parkhurst from the Castle was announced. It immediately struck me that this was the command. He was therefore shewn in. He talked for a long time but no mention made of a command. I thought the man looked very foolish and nervous. However, after a little hesitation he presented the Duke of R’s compliments to me, regretting that his situation prevented his doing himself the pleasure of calling on me, but that he should consider himself very much flattered and extremely happy if I would allow him to call on me alone, at half past 12 that night. It is impossible for me to give you any idea of the effect this had on me. Yourself and the children down to Mele swam before my eyes; speak I could not. At this very moment Atkinson came in, and on his asking me what was the matter I could no longer put any constraint on my feelings, and left the room as quickly as I could. They went away together. The latter returned in about half an hour, and when he saw me (for I was really ill) the tears ran down his cheeks, and he accused himself as the cause of all my vexations. He brought a thousand apologies from Parkhurst, who said he was greatly shocked at having distressed me so much, but that he could not refuse to bring the message. It is now over and I can really laugh at it… Atkinson is frightened out of his senses for fear I should mention it to you. To appease him I said I would not, but it is too ridiculous to be kept as a secret.