Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  She played Miss Hardcastle in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and appeared in two of Henry Fielding’s one-act farces: Lettice in The Intriguing Chambermaid, Lucy in The Virgin Unmasked. She was one of the great Nells in Charles Coffey’s The Devil to Pay, written in 1731, half opera and half farce, and perennially popular. Among playwrights of her own generation, John O’Keefe’s plays gave her roles early in her career: Cowslip in The Agreeable Surprise, Araminta in The Young Quaker (performed in Hull in 1783), Caroline Sandford in Dead Alive. O’Keefe also had a hand in The Fugitive in which she played Julia Wingrove in 1796, and the farce She’s Eloped in which she played Arabel to Bannister’s Plodden in 1798. She first appeared as Letitia Hardy in Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem four years after it was written, in Hull in 1784.

  The only original role Sheridan gave her was Cora in Pizarro – and he detested her performance – but she played Lydia Languish in The Rivals and Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal: this was her last London appearance, on 1 June 1814, with Charles Mathews in the cast. Elizabeth Inchbald wrote the farce of The Wedding Day especially for her, and she also played Amanthis in Inchbald’s The Child of Nature. She was in several of Thomas Holcroft’s plays – Susan Pole in Knave or Not? in 1798, Sophia in The Road to Ruin in 1792, Susan in Follies of a Day, his adaptation of Beaumarchais’s Le Manage de Figaro, and Eliza in Hear Both Sides in 1803: the play was a flop, but the song sung by Mrs Jordan was a hit.

  Singing was an important aspect of her skill and success, although her voice was untrained. She sang the Shakespearean songs, and many of the works in which she appeared were more like musicals or operettas than plays: James Cobb’s Strangers at Home was her first original singing part at Drury Lane, in December 1785; she had already scored a hit as William in Rosina, or Love in a Cottage, as well as Rachel in The Fair American, an ‘opera’, and Lionel and Clarissa, a musical version of Bickerstaffe’s School for Fathers, all given in Yorkshire in 1783; and her Matilda in Richard Cœur de Lion in 1786 depended more on singing than acting ability. Pizarro also contained several songs.

  Other contemporary writers who wrote especially for her were ‘Monk’ Lewis in his Gothic entertainments: she was Angela in his The Castle Spectre and Innogen in his Adelmorn the Outlaw. Kemble’s three-act farce The Pannel gave her an often repeated success; it was an adaptation of Bickerstaffe’s ’Tis Well It’s No Worse (1770), set in Spain, the plot depending on a movable panel behind which characters are concealed, and her part that of another strong-minded servant maid, Beatrice. Richard Cumberland gave her his sentimental play First Love in 1795, in which she played Sabina Rosny, an orphan of the French Revolution, and The Last of the Family in 1797; Andrew Cherry wrote The Soldier’s Daughter for her in 1804, a patriotic play produced during the invasion scare, in which she played the young Widow Cheerly and spoke the epilogue, ‘Should British women from the contest swerve? We’ll form a female army of reserve – /And class them thus. Old maids are pioneers /Widows, sharp-shooters – wives are fusileers; / Maids are battalion,’ etc. Boaden describes this as one of her very good parts, ‘attractive from vivacity, knowledge, and goodness’ and acted with zeal and skill. (Cumberland tried to rival it with his Sailor’s Daughter, with Dora as Louisa Davenant, but it failed.) Frederic Reynolds wrote the part of Albina Mandeville for her in his The Will in 1796, and of the fifteen-year-old Sir Edward Bloomly in Cheap Living in 1797.

  Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him (1760) gave her the role of the Widow Belmour, which she acted from her Yorkshire years until her Dublin visit of 1800; she was Lady Restless in his All in the Wrong (1761) in 1784, Maria in his The Citizen (1761) in 1798, and in 1801 Lady Racket in his Three Weeks after Marriage (1764).

  There were a few more plays by women: Mary Robinson’s ill-fated Nobody, which Dora championed bravely in 1794; Miss Cuthbertson’s Anna, in whose text she may have had a hand herself, another failure early in 1793. The School for Friends by Miss Chambers (1805), in which she played the part of Mrs Hamilton, was more successful, running for twenty-five nights; Genest calls it ‘on the whole a tolerable play’.

  Other parts she played in Yorkshire include Zara in a translation of Voltaire’s tragedy of that name; Fatima in Garrick’s Arcadian romance Cymon; Rutland in Henry Jones’s tragedy The Earl of Essex (1745); Calista in The Fair Penitent by Nicholas Rowe, adapted in 1703 from Massinger, and also Rowe’s Jane Shore (1713); Lady Alton in Colman’s The English Merchant; and Indiana in The Conscious Lovers by Steele (1721).

  In London she was Augusta in Better Late than Never by the MP Miles Peter Andrews (1790); Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child in 1790; Mrs Sneak in the farce of The Mayor of Garratt in 1791; Clara – disguised as Lucio – in The Female Duellist in 1793; Cowslip in Colman’s The Agreeable Surprise; Isabella Plinlimmon in Jerningham’s The Welch Heiress, a farce, in 1795; in the same year ‘Old Maid’ in the farce of that name; Rosa in Morris’s The Secret (1799); Julia in Colman’s Surrender of Calais; Julia in Indiscretion by Prince Hoare in 1800; Biddy Tipkin in The Tender Husband in 1801; Miss Racket in The Fashionable Friends, with Kemble as Sir Dudley Dorimant, author unknown, a flop, in 1802; Emma Harvey in The Marriage Promise by John Allingham, with music by Michael Kelly (1803); Clara in Matrimony, a farce translated from the French in 1804; in the same year Rosetta in The Foundling (1748) by Edward Moore, and Grace Gaylove and Lady Bab Lardoon in two farces, Review and Burgoyne’s The Maid of the Oaks; Mrs Beverley in The Gamesters and Mrs Doggerel in The Register Office and Lady Flutter in Discovery, all in 1805; Helen Worrett in Man and Wife by S.J. Arnold (1809); a part in another farce known as The Parrot; and so on.

  The list, which grows tedious on the page, represents an amazing range. It also underlines the way in which her distinction lay in her double appeal: for the beauty of her verse-speaking and integrity of her performance she was applauded by such as Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and Macready; for her humour, frankness and simplicity she drew the general, and largely uneducated, public. She was the least pretentious of beings, but she saw the role of the actress, and of the theatre, as a civilizing one; and having none of Sheridan’s ambivalence, she pursued her art with passionate dedication.

  The most childlike image of Dora, acting the part of Miss Lucy in Fielding’s farce The Virgin Unmasked, which she first played at the Crow Street Theatre in Dublin in November 1779, when she was eighteen, calling herself Miss Francis, and simply dressed in ‘a frock and a little mob-cap, and her curls, as she wore them all her life’.

  ‘Her face I could not see, owing to the amazing bunch of hair she had pulled over her forehead,’ wrote Sheridan’s sister-in-law, praising Mrs Jordan’s performance at Drury Lane: this print suggests the effect, and gives an impression of her vigour on stage. It is dated 1 November 1790, and entitled ‘The Comic Muse, by Goles!’ (‘Goles’ being a euphemism for God).

  ‘Mrs Tomboy and the Irish Manager’ in Town and Country magazine’s series ‘Histories of the Tête-à-Tête’ are Dora Jordan and Richard Daly. He seduced, or raped, her in Dublin in 1782, forcing her to flee, pregnant, to England. The print appeared in London in January 1787, when her success made her an object of ever increasing interest to the press.

  Tate Wilkinson, the great and good Yorkshire manager who in his youth acted with Dora’s mother and aunt, and took her into his company in 1782. It was Tate who suggested her new name of Mrs Jordan: ‘Mrs’ because she was visibly pregnant, ‘Jordan’ because she had passed across the waters from slavery in Ireland under Daly to freedom in Yorkshire with him, just as the Israelites crossed the River Jordan into the promised land. Wilkinson defended her against disapproving audiences and jealous theatrical rivals, remained her friend and was immensely proud of her success.

  An action picture of Dora on stage in 1785 as Priscilla Tomboy in the operatic farce The Romp, which she played for Wilkinson in Yorkshire, at Drury Lane and then all over the provinces on her tours.

  Henry Bunbury, courtier, passionate theatre-goer and
amateur artist, dedicated this 1795 engraving of Dora in boots and feathered hat to her ‘in gratitude for the Pleasure receiv’d from her Inimitable Performance’ in As You Like It. It shows Act III, Scene v.

  The fashionable and ambitious John Hoppner’s earliest portrait of Dora, done soon after her arrival in London in 1785: a delicate pastel drawing showing her dressed as smartly as the great Whig ladies, the Duchess of Devonshire and her sister Lady Bessborough, who came to admire her at Drury Lane. On the back of this picture is written ‘Given to Lady Friedrich Bessborough’ in an eighteenth-century hand, probably that of Hoppner himself.

  Note the spectacles: they are not merely a prop – Mrs Jordan was short-sighted. This is Hoppner’s portrait of her as Hippolita, the high-spirited Spanish heroine of Colley Cibber’s She Would and She Would Not, in which she and her maid are both dressed as young men throughout the play, she in full military uniform, with sword and plumed hat; she controls the whole action, going through a marriage ceremony with another woman, and challenged to a duel by her own lover. It was among her most popular roles, and ‘one of the parts on which I used to pique myself’, she told the theatre historian John Genest at the end of her career. This picture belonged to her daughter Elizabeth, who married the eighteenth Earl of Errol in 1820.

  A tremendous hit at the Royal Academy in May 1786, Hoppner’s large, elaborate, allegorical painting with a title to match: ‘Mrs Jordan as the Comic Muse supported by Euphrosyne, who represses the advances of a Satyr’. Did the Satyr represent the male theatre-goer, who regarded the actress as legitimate sexual prey?

  Richard Ford, slim, sensitive-looking and elegantly turned out, trained as a lawyer, and with his eye on a seat in Parliament, was the son of Dr James Ford, part-proprietor of Drury Lane and obstetrician to the Queen. Young Ford fell in love with Dora, old Ford disapproved; young Ford promised marriage and referred to Dora as ‘Mrs Ford’. They set up house together in Gower Street and three children were born, but he failed to make good his promise, and she grew angry at the insult.

  Another admirer appeared: Prince William, the third son of King George III, created Duke of Clarence in 1789 after spending his boyhood in the navy. William was ‘handsome, as are all the Royal Family, though he is not of a heigl to be called a good figure’. He was boisterous, lonely and affectionate, and longed for domestic comforts; but when he offered to help out hi: elder brother with his debts by marrying ‘someone very rich’, the Prince of Wales sneered, ‘Who would marry you?’

  Another Hoppner showing Dora as Viola in Twelfth Night, disguised as the boy Cesario and wearing a hussar’s hat. In this performance, said Joshua Reynolds, she ‘combines feeling with sportive effect, and does as much by the music of her melancholy as the music of her laugh’. Charles Lamb also praised her ‘plaintive’ Viola: ‘There is no giving an account of how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen… [but] some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought… She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it was nature’s own rhetoric.’

  Dora was particularly admired for her assured impersonation of young men. Here she is with her sword up: ‘she drove everything home to the mark, and the visible enjoyment of her own power added sensibly to its effect upon others. Of her beautiful compact figure she had the most captivating use – its spring, its wild activity, its quickness of turn…’

  This silhouette, cut by a Mrs Millicent Brown whose other subjects included the Duchess of Devonshire and the historian Edward Gibbon, shows the detail of one of Dora’s military costumes with short boots, legs revealed to mid-thigh, ribboned uniform, plumed hat, sword and rapier: a sensational effect for the 1790s.

  The royal romance between the Duke of Clarence and Mrs Jordan gave every caricaturist in the land a chance to do his worst, and the most brilliant, and the cruellest, was James Gillray. His work was displayed in windows of print shops and circulated very widely. Because a chamber-pot was known as a ‘jordan’, the chamber-pot became the symbol of Mrs Jordan; the braided jacket and striped trousers of a naval uniform stood for William. ‘The Lubber’s Hole, alias The Crack’d Jordan’ appeared on 1 November 1791, when Dora was performing almost nightly at the Haymarket. Gillray, incidentally, had been a strolling player himself in his youth. The attack was vicious; the surreal image he produced is unforgettable.

  Gillray shows William’s naval jacket, draped over the bedroom chair, and the chamber-pot labelled ‘Public Jordan Open to all Parties’ – beneath the bed in this drawing of 24 October 1791; but his portrait of Dora is far from cruel in fact it is very attractive. It has several captions: ‘Neptune reposing after Fording the Jordan’ is self-explanatory. ‘The Devil to Pay’ is the title of a well-known farce in which Dora often appeared as Nell, who finds herself magically transformed from the poor wife of a cobbler into the lady of the manor.

  ‘The Flattering Glass, or Nell’s Mistake’ also refers to The Devil to Pay. This cartoon by William Dent appeared on 28 October 1791, in the same week as the two preceding ones, and many others. It shows Dora in her dressing room at the theatre.

  Gillray’s finest drawing of Mrs Jordan and the Duke, done from life, as his ‘ad vivam fecit’ indicates. It appeared in April 1797 as a comment on their move to Bushy; but its most striking aspect is the way in which Dora is walking apart, trimly dressed in a riding habit and studying her play-script, while the Duke, with a doll hanging out of his pocket, pulls the three children in their perambulator. Was it Gillray’s contribution to the debate on the rights of women?

  A late portrait of Dora in her role of Nell in The Devil to Pay. According to tradition, this was the part she was due to play in Cheltenham in the autumn of 1811 when she had a message from the Duke telling her he wished for a separation She insisted on going on, although she could not prevent herself from crying on stage when she was meant to laugh. Jane Austen was in the audience at Covent Garden on 7 March 1814 to see her play Nell, and was ‘highly amused’.

  George FitzClarence, the eldest son of Dora and the Duke, was brave, gifted and good-looking. Both his parents adored him, but he was put into the army and sent to fight in the Peninsular War at the age of fourteen: ‘The distress of Mrs Jordan is not to be described: however, like what she is, one of the best and one of the ablest of women, she sees the propriety of his going,’ wrote his father to the Prince of Wales. All the Duke’s sons were sent into the army or navy, some as young as eleven.

  Isaac R. Cruikshank’s cartoon appeared in 1821, three years after the Duke married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. It shows Mrs Jordan rising in her grave-clothes from a coffin inscribed ‘Buried by Subscription at Paris’ to rebuke him in Shakespearean words, while in the background the FitzClarence children appear, labelled ‘Royal Bast… ds’.

  William’s remorse led him, once he was King, to commission a life-size statue of Dora from the country’s leading sculptor, Francis Chantrey. The King intended it to be placed in Westminster Abbey, ‘beside the monuments of the Queens’, but instead it disappeared from public view for good.

  William and Dora commissioned many paintings of their children, most of which have been lost. This one by George Henry Harlow shows Frederick, Eliza and Lolly, still ringleted and in pantaloons, in the gardens at Bushy with a pet dog, about 1805. Lolly is holding the royal standard bearing the arms of his grandfather King George III.

  Dora’s two youngest daughters, Augusta and Amelia, known as Ta and Mely; they were thirteen and eight when their mother died. This drawing dates from the mid-1820s, before their marriages: Ta to a Scottish aristocrat, John Kennedy Erskine, in 1827, and Mely to Viscount Falkland – Byron’s godson four years later.

  Lolly, who became Lord Adolphus FitzClarence, served in the navy and commanded Queen Victoria’s yacht, chose to be painted not as an officer but as a corsair, in a highly theatrical pose, by Henry Wyatt. He preserved his mother’s memory – and her letters – and always took a great inte
rest in the theatre.

  When the artist Charles Leslie saw Mrs Jordan in 1813 he remarked, ‘Her face is still very line, no print that I ever saw of her is much like,’ and it is true that the scores of portraits that exist make her look confusingly different. Some have been wrongly ascribed; it must also be remembered that she was most often represented in theatrical roles, her appearance deliberately varied to suit them. This impression of her by George Romney, with its dark ambiguous gaze and half smile, is the more haunting because it shows her at ease, in an informal setting, and representing no one but herself the tribute of one genius to another. Probably dating from the mid-eighties, it was with a mass of unsold work at Romney’s death in 1802, and was disposed of years later, in 1834, by his son, the Revd John Ramsey, for £13. It then remained at Northwick Park until 1965, when it was sold again for 17,000 guineas.

  Dora Jordan, ‘so pleasant, so cordial, so natural, so full of spirits, so healthily constituted in mind and body, had such a shapely leg withal… and such a happy and happy-making expression of countenance’ – Leigh Hunt’s words are borne out by William Beechey’s portrait of Dora as Rosalind in her delightful yellow knee breeches. She first played the part in April 1787, when Beechey was building his career as a fashionable, and no doubt flattering, portraitist, and the picture probably dates from the late eighties. ‘The Rosalind of both art and nature; each supplies its treasures in her performance of the character, and renders it a perfect exhibition,’ wrote her fellow actress, Elizabeth Inchbald. She continued to play the part for twenty-seven years; in 1813 an American artist, seeing her for the first time, commented, ‘Her performance of Rosalind was, in my mind, perfect.’ This painting was used by Chantrey when working on his statue of her, according to Lord Melbourne, who told Queen Victoria that it was ‘done after the picture Beechey did of her when she was quite young and thin’.