Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  Their success encouraged a third sister to follow. She also found work and married a fellow actor, Usher. All three appeared at the Smock Alley Theatre under the management of Thomas Sheridan, whose skill and dedication as an impresario raised the reputation of his theatre close to the level of the great London houses, and brought their stars across to play for him. The Phillips sisters did not become stars, but they had their triumphs. Grace played Juliet to the Romeo of Sheridan, and Maria appeared as Jane Shore, both in November 1756.3 In the 1758 season Grace was Desdemona to the Othello of a young actor called Tate Wilkinson, who went on to become the most famous of all provincial managers, and to play a crucial part in her daughter’s life. This was also the year Francis Bland became Grace’s husband.

  If Francis entertained any passing hopes of following his elder brother in a stage career, he was disappointed. Grace continued with hers, while he received an allowance from his family, and on this the couple managed. A daughter Hester was born, and a son George. Then in the winter of 1760 the Smock Alley closed down after Thomas Sheridan decided to desert to England, and many of the company followed him in search of work; the Blands and Maria Phillips were among those who went.4 Sheridan was in London, lecturing, writing and making occasional appearances at Drury Lane, and he may have tried to help them. He and his wife, who was as clever as he was, and busy writing novels and plays, lived in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden; they had left their ten-year-old son, Richard Brinsley, behind in Dublin, but now they brought him over too, and sent him to Harrow school.5

  London was packed and busy throughout the autumn of 1761, as the coronation approached. The two big theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, both prepared ‘Coronation Spectacles’ to be put on after the main plays, in which large numbers of players dressed as the King and Queen, courtiers and other grandees paraded against elaborate backdrops. These shows were popular enough to run for forty nights, so that Londoners could take their pick of two royal processions on stage as well as the real festivities taking place outside, in which the members of the royal family paraded in still more elaborately artificial costumes.6 On the afternoon of 8 September – a day of intense heat – crowds assembled in St James’s Park as the King’s bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg, arrived at the garden gate of St James’s Palace to the sound of gunfire. It must have been a fine sight, as she was handed down from the coach, hair elaborately dressed, wearing a white and silver négligé trimmed with gold lace; she threw herself at the feet of her future husband, who raised her up, greeted her courteously and led her indoors to examine the heaps of jewels and ceremonial robes prepared for her. What she felt, a girl of seventeen from a quiet little German principality, educated by Lutheran nuns, and speaking not a word of English, is another matter. Bride and groom had never set eyes on one another until this moment. Her mother was dead and she came without even a sister; she had just endured a long, stormy sea passage, finally forced to put in at Harwich and finish the exhausting journey by coach. As the coach came over Constitution Hill, one of the English ladies accompanying her remarked that there was scarcely time to dress for the wedding. ‘The wedding?’ asked Charlotte, turning pale. She had not been told that it was to take place that very evening.

  No matter, this was a public ritual, and she had been most carefully vetted for the role she was to play. She was the King’s third cousin, with the all-important royal blood in her veins. She was no beauty, but passable-looking and – of course – Protestant and a virgin. She was also thought likely to be a good breeder; her elder sister had been rejected as too old at twenty-five.7

  And at ten o’clock that evening Charlotte was married to the King in the Chapel Royal, wearing the crown especially made for her. Its pendant diamonds swung and sparkled, and the bridegroom was dressed in stuff of silver with embossed plate and frostings. The effect was admirable, although she was so burdened by the weight of her clothes and jewels she could hardly bear them; she trembled, and was able to say nothing but the words ‘Ich will’. The next day there were two court drawing rooms and a ball, and on the following Monday she made her first official public appearance, going with the King to Drury Lane Theatre – not to see themselves represented, but David Garrick in a performance of the popular satirical comedy The Rehearsal.8

  As the theatre crowds pressed forward to look at her, the new Queen was frightened for a moment, because she had never seen so many people gathered together in one place; but once inside Drury Lane and installed in the royal box, she became noticeably cheerful. She had never seen a theatre before either, and she could not understand a word, but she liked everything about it. Perhaps the company of two thousand people laughing and enjoying themselves in the brilliantly lit space was more fun than being closeted alone with a plain, dullish young man who had suddenly become her absolute lord and master.

  Happily the King shared her new enthusiasm, and a whole series of royal command performances was quickly arranged. They ran steadily through the autumn and winter: Much Ado about Nothing, King John, Macbeth, Henry V, Cymbeline, The Beggar’s Opera, The Jealous Wife, Comus, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, and many musical entertainments. The theatre became a lifelong passion with the Queen.9 Forty years later, she still talked with great animation about plots and actors, and said she preferred ‘plays to all other amusements’.10 All her children were taken, from the early age of five, to Drury Lane, Covent Garden and other theatres in London and the provinces; she also enjoyed having them dressed up in specially made theatrical costumes, togas, tunics, Harlequin suits, frocks, feathers and tiny swords, as though they were little actors. Their portraits were painted wearing these fancy-dress outfits, and sometimes they put on performances of their own.

  Queen Charlotte’s life must at times have seemed to her to be largely given over to performance, even though it was the performance of duties that she did not question for a moment. She had been required to give up her native speech and customs, and to conduct most of her activities in the public eye, wearing ceremonial costume; a leading part but a lonely one, as the King told her he did not wish her to have any friends. Apart from theatre-going, her first English months were almost entirely taken up with ceremonies. In the gaps between them she and the King established intimacy as best they could; it was a good thing he could speak German, and both of them knew French. Their coronation took place on 22 September in Westminster Abbey. On 10 October she started to learn English with a tutor. On 9 November there was a state entry into the City of London and a great banquet at the Guildhall, given by the Lord Mayor, with crowds lining the streets and heads looking out of every window. By now the Queen was pregnant. On 2 December she went with the King to the Palace of Westminster where he was to give his royal assent to a bill providing for her support: she was to have £100,000 a year should she outlive him, a palace in London and a lodge in Richmond Park.

  Although her English progressed only slowly, and she refused to give up her habit of taking snuff, in all other respects her performance was beyond praise. The following August, 1762, her first child, Prince George, was born. Almost exactly a year later a second son, Frederick, appeared; and two years after that – there was a miscarriage in between – a third Prince, the William of this story, was born, once again in August, at Buckingham House, usually known as the Queen’s House, because she preferred its modern airiness to St James’s Palace with its maze of old rooms. At this point she was just twenty-one.

  The Bland family also continued to grow, although things did not go well for them in other respects. Soon after Dorothy’s birth they were back in Dublin. Whatever Grace’s family in Wales thought of her career and behaviour, her cousin Blanch offered a haven for her children when they needed one, at Trelethyn, near St David’s. Blanch’s affection for her young Bland cousins led her to give several of them a home, and in due course to bequeath her farmhouse to two of them, Nathaniel and Hester.11

  Certainly the young couple had all the appearance of a settled family. Children we
re born, year after year – one account says there were nine – and Grace sometimes used the name ‘Mrs Francis’ for her stage appearances. Like other actresses, she was accustomed to working throughout her pregnancies; audiences must have been so used to the pregnant shape that they hardly expected anything else. Maria did not marry, and moved to England to join Tate Wilkinson’s company in Yorkshire, but the young Blands stayed in Ireland, and Dorothy often spoke of herself as Irish, although she also said she detested the country, and had not a good word for any of her relatives there.

  Actresses often put their children on stage at an early age, and the taste for child performers was well established in Dublin; but there is no record of Mrs Francis doing so, or of Dorothy appearing in public before she was in her teens. Her father was not, after all, a stage manager but a gentleman, as were both her grandfathers. Sometimes she went to stay with her Welsh cousins. We know she was in Wales in 1771, because years later she met a man who remembered how she had chastised him for ‘drownding a mouse’ when he was five and she was a commanding ten-year-old.12

  If she and her sisters had little formal schooling, there was nothing unusual about that, and their mother at least ‘had received a finished and accomplished education’, which gave her something to pass on to her children.13 Dorothy learnt enough to become a vivid letter-writer and a decent occasional poet; her literacy compares quite favourably with, for example, that of Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince Regent, when she was being educated for the throne forty years later. And one of Dorothy’s brothers, Nathaniel Phillips Bland, got an education good enough to go on to Oxford, where he took his BA in 1790.

  So she grew among brothers and sisters. We know the names of George, Francis and Nathaniel, and of Hester and Lucy. They had the care of a loving if busy mother and a father who seemed a fixed feature of their world. But when Dorothy was thirteen, in 1774, this fixed feature disappeared.

  Thirteen is not a good age to lose your father. Nothing is known of how his behaviour was explained to his children. What is certain is that he abandoned them and went back to London, where he made a perfectly legal marriage at St Botolph’s in Aldgate to an Irish heiress, Catherine Mahoney of Killarney. Soon he had another family, a son and a daughter. He paid out something to his first family, but their situation became increasingly precarious. Grace’s stage career had been good but not outstanding, and now that she was no longer young she could not expect to earn much; and she was devastated by the behaviour of the man who had been her husband for so many years, and who now treated her with a contempt and cruelty she had done nothing to deserve. Dorothy wrote later of her mother’s ‘silent anguish’ and ‘curb’d resentment’, which suggests that she kept her pain to herself as much as she could.14 To add to her worries, at least one of her daughters, Lucy, was ill. She was sent to Trelethyn to be cared for. The elder children had to turn their hands to work. Dorothy shouldered the role of the good daughter, determined to protect and help her mother. She wrote, much later: ‘from my first starting in life, at the early age of fourteen, I have always had a large family to support’.15 Her first job was not very demanding, but not very interesting either: she became a shop assistant, selling hats for a Dublin milliner. With this, her childhood was over.

  Once she was of an age to choose, she became Dora rather than Dorothy. Others referred to her as Dorothy, or Dorothea, but she was Dora to herself; she signed her letters ‘Dora’, and later had her seals made with ‘Dora’ – so Dora she will be in these pages from now on. The further complications of her second name are still to come.

  How long she worked as a milliner’s assistant, and whether she tried her hand at anything else, are things we don’t know. Many years later she recalled that she had received a proposal of marriage from a young man called Smith, said to have been very much in love with her, and that his father, a clergyman, considered her far too young to marry. He made no comment about her being an actress, so she was probably still working in the shop; and she does not say what she thought of the proposal, which suggests it meant little enough to her; but after young Smith had died, she took some pleasure in the memory of his proposal, and visited his sisters.16 Meanwhile her own absent father’s new life turned out less well than he had hoped. His health began to break down, and in 1778 he decided to travel to the South of France, the traditional destination for the well-to-do invalid. He got only as far as Dover, and there died; and with his death, the small sums he had sent to Grace and their children dried up completely. Later something was again sent for the children, possibly by Francis’s widowed mother, but for the moment things were very bad. In this miserable situation news came from Trelethyn of the death of Dora’s younger sister Lucy: she was fourteen. A decade later Dora gave her name to a child of her own, as it happened the kindest and most loyal of all her daughters.

  About the time of her father’s death Dora left the milliner’s shop and made her first appearance on the stage. There is no doubt that Grace had divined her talent and guided the first steps of her career. She did not begin at her mother’s old theatre but at the rival one in Crow Street, and she was billed as ‘Miss Francis’: if her father had done little else for her, he could at least provide her with a stage name. By her own account, when the time came for her to go on for her very first entrance, she fled, terror-struck, through the wings, and had to be caught and pushed on to the stage; but once on, with the blazing candlelight above her and the swarm of faces in front, her courage came back.17

  Her first appearance was in a farce, traditionally put on after the main play of the evening. She had the lead, as Miss Lucy, in Henry Fielding’s The Virgin Unmasked, playing a girl who accepts proposals of marriage from a succession of suitors sent in by her rich father, and who at the end sends them all packing with the words, ‘By Goles, I will tell you – I hate you!’ and announces she has secretly married a handsome footman. One of the earliest engravings of Dora shows her dressed as Miss Lucy and is labelled ‘The Comic Muse, by Goles!’ Mockery of marriage was the staple fare of stage comedy – marriage as a trap, marriage between incompatible partners, marriage by fortune-hunters – although it may not have seemed so funny considered in the cold light of the Bland household; but the pert, innocent part suited Dora, and she made the Dubliners laugh.

  She was never considered a beauty. There was too much nose and chin about her face for that; but she had a charming and expressive face, with great sweetness in her smile and vivacity in the dark eyes under their dark brows: ‘sable eyes’, one poet called them, suggesting they were black – ‘keen’ he wrote too, but he was wrong about that. Dora was short-sighted; the world was always slightly blurred for her, and she carried spectacles on a chain.18 She was neatly made, not tall, with a small waist and what the eighteenth century called a symmetrical shape. Her most striking feature was probably her great mop of brown curls. Fashion dictated that they should be powdered when she was a young actress, so that, rather confusingly, she sometimes appears in paintings and prints as white-haired in her youth, and gets darker as she grows older. Her legs naturally went unnoticed until she appeared in male costume on stage, when they were found to be exceptionally beautiful – the finest ever seen on stage according to one connoisseur – and thereafter in constant demand.19 She was not vain, but not bashful either. There was altogether something natural, humorous, wholesome about her: she was seductive, not as a fine, elegant woman, but as one who simply made men want to put their arms around her.

  The way she would take a friend by the cheek and kiss her, or make up a quarrel with a lover, or coax a guardian into good-humour, or sing (without accompaniment)…, trusting, as she had a right to do, to the sole effect of her sweet, mellow, and loving voice – the reader will pardon me, but tears of pleasure and regret come into my eyes at the recollection, as if she personified whatsoever was happy at that period of life, and which has gone like herself,

  wrote one who cherished her memory.20

  At this time she
also played her first Shakespeare, as Phoebe, the simple-minded shepherdess in As You Like It. Thomas Sheridan’s daughter Betsy, who must have known the whole family, saw her perform and claims to have predicted that she would one day become ‘the first comic actress in England or Ireland…For her chastity of acting, naïveté, and being the character she represents, young as she is, she surpasses what could have been expected; but mark my words, she will one day or other be a favourite and the first in her line of acting.’21