Mrs Jordan's Profession
Page 43
* Compare Boswell, who as a young gentleman about town had an allowance of £25 a quarter in the 1760s; Dora’s initial London earnings were twice that at £200 a year. Even deducting money from weeks when the theatre was closed – say twelve weeks – her earnings equalled those of a shopkeeper, a farmer, or a minor clergyman. Jane Austen writes of a country living being worth £140 a year, which she thought not much to marry on, but still possible. Note too that Francis Place’s brother-in-law earned £ a week as a chair-carver in 1788, but never saved a penny, drinking it all away as soon as he earned it.
* Among press comments were that she was not a beauty, more agreeable than handsome, though intelligent-looking; that she was rather short, but with a neat and elegant figure; that her voice was not particularly sweet, but strong and clear; and that she had vivacity and self-possession. She was said to be ‘a most valuable acquisition to the public stock of innocent entertainment’; and another critic wrote, ‘Upon the whole, we congratulate the public on such a valuable acquisition, that will greatly contribute to the support of the comic muse, and give an importance to the dramatic exertions of Old Drury.’
* Elizabeth Farren was about the same age as Dora, the daughter of an Irish surgeon turned player, who died young, leaving his family penniless. She worked as a child actress, often carrying the drum ahead of her group of strolling players. She was courted by Fox and by a fellow actor, John Palmer, but rejected them both, and won the love of the Earl of Derby. He was unhappily married; she refused to become his mistress, and when Dora met her he had been devoted to her for eight years. She moved in aristocratic circles, and was extremely sensitive about her early life.
* The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 was brought in by George III – and passed without a murmur in Parliament – when his brothers made marriages he disapproved of. It barred all members of the royal family from marrying unless they had the King’s consent declared in council and signified under the great seal, or unless they were over twenty-five years of age and had given twelve months’ notice to the privy council.
* The link is quite close. Michael Kelly was intimate with Mozart in Vienna; both he and Nancy Storace, who had shared a house with the young Sheridans in London, and gone on to become the first Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro in Vienna, returned to Drury Lane in 1787. Da Ponte, the librettist of Cosí, also turned up in London a few years later.
* A printed version sets her name to it, but Boaden, who knew her well enough to ask, mentions the attribution only to dismiss it. He says it was probably by Isaac Bickerstaffe, an Irish farce writer driven into exile on the continent under the threat of the death penalty for homosexual acts. I am inclined to believe Boaden. If Dora were the author, she had no reason not to say so. On the other hand, she could write, and was later credited with helping Mary Robinson to write Nobody (see p. 145).
* Eliza Courtney (the name given to the Duchess’s daughter by Charles Grey) was brought up at Fallodon, calling her grandmother ‘Mama’. The Duchess wrote to her, and worried about her, but was not allowed any close contact.17
* John Soane made a detailed survey of Bushy House in February and March 1797, presumably at the request of the Duke, that allows us to see the exact state of the house when he and Dora moved in. The plans can still be seen at the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There are references in Dora’s later letters to the bath and to missing the shower when she is away.
* Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s first novel, was published in 1811, and shows Marianne Dashwood settling for marriage to Colonel Brandon, a much older family friend suspected of fathering a natural child.
* In November 1826 the actor Charles Mathews was asked to perform for the Duke and Duchess of Clarence at Bushy and invited to spend the night. As he breakfasted with his hosts, he was somewhat surprised to see a large painting of Mrs Jordan over the chimney-piece. The Duke noticed Mathews looking at it and when the Duchess left the room said, ‘I know you have a collection of theatrical portraits, Mr Mathews, which I shall like to see one day. I hope you have not one like that?’ – meaning, he explained, that he would not want anyone else to possess so good a likeness as his. Mathews replied that he did not, and the Duke, gazing at the picture and clearly much moved, said, ‘She was one of the best of women, Mr Mathews.’ He spoke with so much feeling that tears came to Mathews’s eyes; at which the Duke reached out and pressed his hand, saying, ‘You knew her, Mathews; therefore must have known her excellence.’10
* On 23 March, Charles Greville wrote of George’s death, ‘The horror of the deed excited a momentary interest, but he will soon be forgotten.’26