Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  It is not the thinking of a modern mother, but it seemed the correct course at that time. The same heartbreaking reasoning was followed by Claire Clairmont in giving up her only, and adored, child to Lord Byron: a father with a high social position could ensure that his daughter would be brought up to enter society, and the marriage market, at the right level – and what else was there for a daughter? Dora made her decision with her usual vigour, which does not mean it did not cost her pain; she said it ‘would be death to me if I was not so strongly impress’d with the certainty of its being for their future advantage’.12 She was fully justified in the event, although she never knew it: after her death all five daughters lived interesting and easy lives, and married men of rank and fortune, as every mother would then wish.

  Barton came to discuss the return of the children in July. She took the opportunity to tell him she would have to go back to the stage, since she would be losing half the Duke’s allowance, and needed to earn. He was unfriendly (‘behaved very ill’ was her phrase) and calmly contradicted what she had been previously told, saying the Duke had never had any objection to her acting. In fact, he insisted, the Duke was perfectly indifferent to anything she might do: it was a calculated snub as well as a lie.

  The children remained with her until the day after their father’s birthday in August, which was celebrated again this year at Windsor where, for the first time, George was invited. Dora’s letter to him makes her feelings about the Duke and his mother, the Queen, abundantly plain without quite overstepping the mark:

  I give you joy of this day [i.e., his father’s birthday] and trust God you will all see the return of many of them. I hope your being at Windsor will be the means of introducing you to your amiable grand mama for I think she can scarcely leave you out on this day; if she does – if she does, it will only serve to confirm the opinion that I have ever had of her.

  Since the next letter begins ‘The old b—h conduct is just what I expected & I should have been surprised had it been otherwise’, it looks as though George’s amiable grand mama may not have treated him as nicely as Dora had hoped. Dora could not fail to blame her and suspect her influence on the Duke; she expended more sarcasm in a later letter, in which she called the Queen ‘as beautiful in person as amiable and generous in disposition’.13

  Now, after a break of a year – and one of the most painful and difficult of her fifty years – Dora again set about looking for work. Drury Lane was reopening in October, not under Sheridan as we have seen, but headed by a committee of rich businessmen and amateurs, one of them well known to her: the Regent’s adviser, McMahon. The committee paid her £600 owing from before the fire, but made what she regarded as a shabby offer for the new season; she thought ‘no single performer draws a single shilling anywhere but myself – this I may be allowed to say for it is truth’, and so she decided she could make more in the country.14 After seeing Frederick, she set off for Exeter, calling on Lolly and Tuss at school on the way. The old routine of the road established itself again, almost as though nothing had changed.

  From Exeter she went on to Portsmouth; managers wrote to her wherever she was, and the tour prolonged itself into the winter, covering Gosport, Southampton, Salisbury, with Bath planned for January 1813. She enjoyed taking in the sights, including the dockyards, ‘like the infernal regions’, and Exeter Cathedral, worth seeing but ‘at a disadvantage to me who have so lately seen York Minster’. Miss Sketchley, attentive but inept as ever, went with her; she became an irritating companion, so zealous in her care that Dora began to call her ‘my jealous old husband’, and even the innkeepers asked if she had been set to spy on her by the Duke. Everyone knew Dora’s story, of course. There were good days, when she was entertained by an admiring clergyman and his wife, and taken on board Nelson’s old flagship the Victory, where a band played for her and the Captain invited her to dine with him on board: ‘but I did not like to encounter so many men – with only Miss Sketchley’. There were also bad days, when an admiral she knew well looked her ‘full in the face & never touched his hat’ – a contemptible gesture, as she said.15

  She missed getting the newspapers – on her earlier tours the Duke had sent them to her – and she relied on George to keep her in touch with events in the great world: Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, Wellington’s advance through Spain, and the war with the United States. And she missed the past. On 15 December she thought of ‘the two dear boys’ (Lolly and Tuss) going home from school: ‘I used to long for this day – it now brings nothing but recollection and consequently pain.’16

  The news from Fanny did nothing to cheer her. She and her husband were still in ‘a shocking state’, and Alsop had been obliged to resign his clerkship. The Duke very decently exerted himself to get him the promise of a voyage to India, but Dora thought Fanny would not let him go without her, and felt she could not afford to pay Fanny’s passage – ‘THEY have given me more trouble than all my family put together.’ Henry was back from Germany, but there was some question of him going to India also, and George as well; much to their mother’s relief the Duke opposed the idea, and after a ‘very long and serious discussion’ with the Regent it was agreed it was more in the interest of the boys to pursue their military studies in Europe. Lolly, however, was due to start his naval career as a midshipman in March, when he would be eleven.

  At the end of the year Dora was in Salisbury, tired, with a sprained ankle, and painfully upset that George, who planned to visit her, had been advised that it was ‘not prudent’ to do so. She had to cheer herself with her professional success. The management of Covent Garden had invited her to do a season of thirty nights in the new year, at £50 a night. She was pleased and flattered by their offer, but she also knew there would not be many more like it; she was determined not to make a fool of herself and resolved that, ‘as long as the power is left me to do it [i.e., act] with credit to myself I will not spare myself, and I think I may trust to my vanity not to continue one hour longer’.17 She wrote a clutch of letters to her children (‘dear Mary – this is her birthday’) and asked George to ‘give my love to all and [may] you all spend a happy Christmas & a great many of them together’.18 She also sent him a post-dated cheque for £100, telling him her old friend Jones the ironmonger in Bond Street would cash it for him early if needs be. She wanted him to have ‘efficient horses’ and enough to pay for a picture of himself he proposed to send her; she knew young men needed money; and she told him he could pay her ‘at some future time when I trust in God you will be a rich man – and probably I may want it then more than I do now’.19

  On 10 February 1813 she appeared at Covent Garden in Susannah Centlivre’s hundred-year-old comedy, The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret. The great house was full, and she was warmly applauded as soon as she came on, and again at the end. The next day The Times attacked her, and the Duke, and the management – but mostly her. It began by suggesting that the audience had gathered to see Mrs Jordan for the wrong reasons – which was very likely true of some of them, including the critic of The Times – and went on to say how ludicrous most actors’ and actresses’ representations of fashionable life, as required in The Wonder, were. She, however, was different, because she had been ‘admitted to the secrets of harems and palaces, seen their full exhibition of nude beauty, and costly dissoluteness, the whole interior pomp of Royal pleasure, the tribes of mutes and idiots, sultans and eunuchs, and lavish passion and lordly debility’. As an account of life at Bushy, this was on the purple side, but The Times was only getting into its stride.

  It went on to describe her as a

  woman to whom nature has so few reserves – whose ‘proper study’ as Pope says, has been ‘man’ – whose opportunities of study have been furnished in the course of a diligent life, from every rank and every age – who has adopted Shakespeare’s conception in its fullness, and come ‘home to the hearts and bosoms of men’ with such unremitting assiduity – who has eminently, above all other women, deserved the r
enowned motto of ‘humani nihil alienum’.

  All this was an elaborate way of saying she had lived a promiscuous life. Then it suggested her stage representation of fashionable people consisted only of ‘the perpetual lisp – the laborious lounge – the vulgar voice – the vacant expression – the inanity of mind’ that she had learned ‘during the long observation of twenty years’, meaning, of course, from the Duke of Clarence.

  Having laid about in this way, the article rose to a magisterial conclusion:

  The managers of a theatre are, of course, in some measure excusable for bringing forward any show that attracts a crowd, and we have no idea that they are likely to be restrained in this object by any voluntary zeal for public decency; but are there no other persons concerned? Is not the public forced to find the alternative for this degraded woman’s appearance in the decline of life, either in her own vile avarice, or in her viler breach of stipulation by those who should never abandon her to poverty? We cannot believe that the latter is the case; and if the former, what share of public approbation should be permitted to one for whom it is impossible to feel any share of personal respect? Whose sons and daughters are now strangely allowed to move among the honourable people of England, received by the Sovereign, and starting in full appetite for Royal patronage, while their mother wanders, and is allowed to wander, from barn to barn, and from town to town, bringing shame on the art she practises, and double shame on those who must have it in their power to send her back to penitence and obscurity?20

  Whoever was behind this attack had judged the public as wrongly as they had judged Dora. The next evening, when one of the characters in the play spoke the lines, ‘You have an honest face and need not be ashamed of showing it anywhere’, the audience shouted its applause repeatedly until the tears came into her eyes. When, a few days later, she played Rosalind, she was again cheered even before she opened her mouth. Two critical opinions not remotely skewed in her favour show it was not just the pit that applauded her. Madame de Staël came to Covent Garden and was ‘delighted with her’, and Crabb Robinson, though he thought her voice less sweet, and her age and bulk a handicap when playing young girls, declared her acting in other parts ‘truly admirable’ and ‘in no respect what it should not be’.21 The rest of the press rallied to her defence, saying she should be judged only as a servant of the public, and suggesting the author of The Times’s article must be feeling ashamed of himself.

  Dora was never able to resist writing to the papers. She sent off a letter to a sympathetic journal, saying she would have endured the attack on herself silently, but could not let the insinuations against the Duke stand.

  In the love of truth, and in justice to his royal Highness, I think it my duty, publicly and unequivocally to declare, that his liberality towards me had been noble and generous in the highest degree; but, not having it in his power to extend his bounty beyond the terms of his own existence, he has, with his accustomed goodness and consideration, allowed me to endeavour to make that provision for myself, which an event, that better feelings than those of interest, make me hope I shall never live to see, would entirely deprive me of.

  This, then, Sir, is my motive for returning to my profession. I am too happy in having every reason to hope and believe that, under these circumstances, I shall not offend the public at large, by seeking their support and protection: and, while I feel that I possess those, I shall patiently submit to that species of unmanly persecution, which a female so particularly situated must always be subjected to. Ever ready to acknowledge my deficiencies in every respect, I trust I may add, that I shall never be found wanting in candour and gratitude – not forgetful of the care that every individual should feel for the good opinion of the public.22

  Her letter had a good effect. As she told George, it was

  copied into every paper in the kingdom, and the editor of The Times was forced to put it yesterday into his own paper. I have heard that a certain family are greatly pleased. This I don’t care a farthing about. It was at last but an act of justice, & had I suffered in doing it I would have still done it. You may suppose that I have been most harassed both in mind and body, but I am getting over it. Thank God Lolly is quite well and goes to school on Monday. I have very little time on my hands. God bless you.23

  You can’t help hoping that George was properly proud of his mother for this letter in which she showed herself, point by point, at her best: shrugging off her own pains while tenderly concerned for those of her children; forgiving where she might have attacked, but properly elated at routing a mean and cruel enemy; and just, and disinterested, in declaring the truth.

  19

  ‘Bitter thankless’: 1814

  After the defeat of The Times there were no more public attacks. Dora had made her return successfully, and her career could now continue as before – or so she convinced herself. Some part of the audience came to see the celebrity rather than the actress of course; there is always this element in the theatre. There were a few private doubters: Boaden, loyal as he was, thought the distress of the separation had marked her performance, and that ‘it was impossible for her to be a veteran on the stage’.1 But there are enough solid tributes to prove she could still deliver something uniquely attractive. Byron, least gentle of critics, gave his unstinted praise to her Miss Hoyden in A Trip to Scarborough; and this was a year later, in 1814.2 Another commendation came from an American painter, Charles Leslie, who saw her for the first time in 1813 in As You Like It and ‘was quite as much pleased with her as I expected; indeed, more so, for I had been taught to expect an immensely fat woman, and she is but moderately so. Her face is still very fine; no print that I ever saw of her is much like. Her performance of Rosalind was, in my mind, perfect.’3

  To Leigh Hunt she remained unsurpassed. He wrote about her in January 1815 from the prison to which he had been sent for libelling the Regent.

  Of all the actresses whom we were in the habit of seeing before we came to prison, and who still keep possession of the

  stage, the truest and most native is unquestionably Mrs Jordan. The last time we saw this charming actress she was of a size, however convenient for the widow, certainly obstructed a little the dancing vivacity of the hoyden; but such is the effect of native feeling, vivacity, and a tone of generous temper that even a portly young girl of forty hardly appeared an extravagance; and we had scarcely to shut our eyes in order to fancy ourselves in the middle of a school room when the governess had gone out of the way. Mrs Jordan is not only the first living actress in comedy, but we fear that when our readers consider the matter nicely, she will be found to be the only actress since the retirement of Miss Pope, who can any way be reckoned great and original.4

  Playbill for a performance of As You Like It and The Devil to Pay, Mrs Jordan taking the lead in both, at the Bath Theatre Royal in 1813, when she was fifty-one years old.

  She had become an institution, with passionate admirers among critics, public and fellow actors alike; and she continued to give the roles she had made famous.5 There were no good new ones being written – Sheridan still talked of another play, but there was no sign of it – and she would not consider making the transition to playing older women, although some advised her to do so.6 Yes, there was probably a touch of the ageing actress’s vanity here, but there was a real reason too: how many proper parts were there for middle-aged women? She did not see herself as Mrs Malaprop or Juliet’s Nurse, although her Gertrude could have been interesting; more important, her public did not want her to change, and was still prepared to pay to see her in the old parts. In June 1813 she and Mrs Siddons, who had formally retired a year before, raised £1,000 between them in an evening for the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, a charity for ageing actors. It would not have occurred to Dora that there was any element of irony here; she had made money in such large amounts for so long that she could not easily imagine the dwindling of her own power to earn. Dora played in another benefit to raise money for Isabella Mattocks, a retired a
ctress whose son-in-law had swindled her out of all her savings, without stopping to think about what her own sons-in-law were doing with hers.7 Dora saw herself, always, as a supporter and provider.

  The Duke, with no earning power at all, viewed life differently, and was given to reminding his children of the ‘great sacrifices’ he had made for them. He was now in desperate difficulties. His debts stood at over £50,000, and he was threatening to sell up everything at Bushy and move his entire family to St James’s. In May he applied to the Prime Minister and the Regent, and told Adam he feared public disgrace unless he was given immediate assistance. The combined efforts of Adam, Barton, the Regent and probably Coutts just kept him afloat, but it must have been an increasingly Micawberish existence at Bushy, with father, children and no doubt servants too all equally anxious for something to turn up. For the children what turned up mostly was a pound note in a letter from their mother. Everyone must have regretted the days when she contributed to the general funds. Although naturally she never came to Bushy any more, the Duke spent some time and energy that spring in acquiring portraits of her to hang on his walls. He wrote gratefully, if entirely ungrammatically, to Sir Henry Bunbury in April,