Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  When the Dublin theatres closed for the summer, the companies toured. Dora went to Waterford, where she met a young army lieutenant, Charles Doyne, who fell in love with her. His intentions were honourable, and he was well born and educated, though not rich; and he felt hopeful enough to make a formal offer of marriage. It was her second proposal; but whatever she thought of him, her mother decided he would not do, and ‘worked upon her daughter to decline the proposal’.22 Grace had her own unfortunate marital history to brood on; and she was still in a sense stage-struck, now on her daughter’s behalf, and believed in her gift. Why should it be sacrificed to domestic life and perpetual child-bearing? So Doyne was sent packing. He said his heart was broken, but he found another bride, this time with a fortune, which may have helped to mend it.

  Miss Francis went back to Dublin and the pursuit of theatrical success. It was not a bad place to make the attempt. Anglo-Irish society revolved round the lord lieutenant, always an English aristocrat – Lord Chesterfield, the Earl of Northumberland, and the Dukes of Rutland, Dorset and Richmond all held the post – and he presided from his Castle in the city centre over a brilliantly fashionable and pleasure-seeking set. Life was very pleasant, if pleasure went with scores of servants, lavish eating and drinking – the men were rarely sober after dinner – gossip and quarrels, picnic parties and private theatricals; and everyone went to the theatre and the opera, to hear music and watch the dancers. As in most aristocratic societies, the great fear was boredom. The rich demand to be amused, and then amused again, and better; they like to be tickled and surprised. There was an appetite for sophisticated entertainment. In this climate the manager of Crow Street, Thomas Ryder, hit on the idea of adapting a comic opera by the young Sheridan, The Duenna, and of turning it into an entirely transvestite performance, all the male characters played by women, and vice versa. Miss Francis was cast in a leading part.

  She was at once seen – and heard, for she had to sing – to be extraordinary: a perfect girl-boy in her young man’s breeches that showed her slim waist and pretty legs. She was not shy, and she was not bawdy; she was easy and natural. Her face was finely expressive, her singing voice untrained, and all the more captivating for it. Either she had learnt her art quickly and without effort, or – as people preferred to think – she had simply been born with the gift for comedy. Her laugh bubbled up ‘from the heart’, they said; and when she laughed the audience laughed back, helpless and delighted, like a whole house full of lovers, and her charm infused the theatre from pit to upper gallery.

  Not surprisingly she caught the attention of a young rival manager, newly appointed to the Smock Alley Theatre. Richard Daly came from Galway, had studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and turned to the stage only when his personal fortune ran out. He regarded himself as a gentleman, and was the perfect type of the Irish buck, tall and elegant, always beautifully ‘embroidered, ruffled and curled’.23 He was also a frequent and ferocious dueller with sword and pistol, and equally enthusiastic and brutal in pursuit of women. His face was strikingly handsome in spite of a terrific squint. This was a positive asset in a duel, his opponent being unable to guess where he intended to strike from the direction of his eyes; and it hindered him no more than it did John Wilkes in his sexual conquests. On stage, though, it may have been disconcerting. He failed in England as an actor, and had to return to Ireland, joining a company in Cork and then moving to the Crow Street Theatre. Here he first met Dora; and here he married a widowed actress in 1780, and turned his thoughts to becoming a manager.

  The following year he was established at the Smock Alley. He relished the power his position gave him. ‘He was said to be the general lover in his theatrical company;… the resistance of the fair to a manager may be somewhat modified by the danger of offending one, who has the power to appoint them to parts, either striking or otherwise; and who must not be irritated, if he cannot be obliged.’24 Another account of Daly says he made a habit of advancing money to young actresses and then, when they were unable to repay the loan, suggesting they should make it good in a simpler way. If they were unwilling, he would threaten to have them arrested for debt, or resort to violence. Whatever Dora and her mother knew of his reputation, his professional offer was too good to turn down, and in 1781 she joined his company.

  There are various accounts of what happened between them. It may have been what is these days called sexual harassment and in those days had no name at all; or it may have started as outright rape: ‘the Irish gentleman of 1782 considered himself beyond [the reach of law]’, wrote Dora’s friend James Boaden, and added, ‘Who would have believed in the virtuous resistance of an actress?’25 Another reliable witness, Elizabeth Inchbald, who joined Daly’s company the following year, reported that he tried to seduce her and, when she refused him, at once dismissed her outright. Mrs Inchbald was not a young girl but a widow, highly intelligent and capable, and a well-established actress; if she could hardly cope with Daly, it is not surprising that Dora, younger and more dependent on his favour, managed less well and suffered worse treatment.26 He may have entangled her in debt, though it is curious that her careful mother should have allowed this to occur. It is even possible that Dora was fascinated by him, and fell in love: such things can happen, and her subsequent loathing by no means rules it out. He was the king of his court, with the sexual charisma that goes with that power. And whatever he did to her, or whatever passed between them, she did not immediately fly from him and turn her face to the wall, as moralists considered the proper course. She was no Clarissa Harlowe.

  We know that his wife was in an advanced state of pregnancy in 1781; her appearance on stage in November indicated that she was about to give birth.27 We also know that Dora conceived a child by Daly in February 1782, presumably while Mrs Daly was busy at home with her new baby. Dora was now twenty, and had just been allowed to take leading parts opposite John Kemble. In February she was Adelaide to his Count of Narbonne; in April Lady Anne to his Richard III. Kemble was not yet the mighty star he was to become, but he was rising rapidly, helped on his way by the established fame of his sister, Mrs Sarah Siddons. On his tour of Ireland, he noted the ‘idleness, drunkenness and dirt’ of the Smock Alley, but was glad of the princely £10 a night they paid him. Dora’s salary is unlikely to have exceeded a few shillings, on which she had to keep her mother, brothers and sisters. Later, Kemble was to quarrel with her more than once, but finally her sheer perfection in performance won even his resistant heart.

  At first she must simply have hoped and prayed to whatever power might be listening that she was not pregnant. Her prayers were not answered, and easy-going as the Smock Alley regime may have been, when Mrs Daly returned to the stage from her confinement, and Miss Francis’s pregnancy began to be suspected, her prospects in the company cannot have looked very good. If she hoped for anything from Daly – affection, moral support or financial assistance – it was not forthcoming. In early May she was playing Maria in The School for Scandal; but she made her last appearance on 16 May. Her mother was ill. Perhaps it was illness that had distracted the maternal eye, or perhaps the illness was caused by anxiety at the frightful turn of events; now Dora began to feel ill herself. There was nothing her aunt and uncle Usher could do for them. Dora had been the hope of the family, and now they were all sliding into the abyss with her; and the abyss in Dublin was as murky and as deep as you could go.

  June was a blank, for Dora a time of shame and terror combined with hatred of the man whose love had proved even less reliable than her father’s. If the family cast about for help – from Trelethyn, from the Blands – they got none; but Grace kept a flicker of faith in the future. In July she, Dora, Hester and George packed up their few goods and embarked for Liverpool, on their way to Leeds, where Grace’s sister Maria, who now worked for Tate Wilkinson’s Yorkshire company, was thought to be.

  In Leeds they found no Aunt Phillips, just the news that she was seriously ill in York, and could do nothing for them. They went to
an inn and sent a message to Wilkinson. Obligingly he set off to see them, more perhaps for old times’ sake than anything else, and at a distinctly unconvivial early hour of the morning. The sight of the little party dismayed him: ‘when I first met them at the inn, I cannot say they were so well accoutred, as I could have wished for their sakes or my own’.28 One look at Dora inclined him to turn down Grace’s suggestion that he should give her work. She had no money, no clothes apparently but those she stood up in – good clothes were a first necessity for an actress – and no friends from whom to borrow; England was to her a strange country and, although Tate was too polite to spell this out in his memoirs, she was visibly pregnant, and without any sign of a husband.

  This lack was made more troubling by the obvious dependence of the others. And so, early morning as it was,

  the mamma, like other mammas, and in particular actresses’ mammas, talked so fulsomely of her daughter’s merits, that I was almost disgusted, and very near giving a flat denial to any negotiation; knowing the disagreeable weight of a large family, which with moderate talents, I feared, even with economy, the young lady would not by any means be able to support.

  Worse, he could not discern ‘the least trait of comic powers in the features or manner of the young lady; indeed quite the reverse, dejected, melancholy, tears in the eyes, and a languor, that without the help of words pleaded wonderfully for assistance’. Wilkinson excused himself for half an hour, and went away to think how best to turn down Grace’s embarrassing professional offer of her daughter. But he was a good-hearted man, blessed with the kindness the theatre breeds in its own out of the very precariousness of their lives. He went back to the inn and asked if Dora could manage to speak a few lines.

  To his surprise, she refused. She said she wanted a ‘fair trial on the boards’. Disconcerted, and perhaps as a final gesture of friendship before leaving, Wilkinson ordered a bottle of Madeira and sat down to talk stage gossip with mother and daughter; after a while he again suggested that Dora should recite something. This time she agreed, and spoke some lines, rather appropriately from The Fair Penitent, a tragedy centred on a rape, with a hero called Lothario and a heroine Calista, on which Richardson had drawn for his Lovelace and Clarissa. This was interesting to Wilkinson, and when he heard her voice he felt surprise and delight; at first he kept it to himself, and then he burst out with a compliment. Dora, her natural charm beginning to work, answered that if she pleased him, she did not fear an audience.

  The situation was transformed. According to Wilkinson’s account, ‘we complimented and flattered, and flattered and complimented, till we really found a sudden impulse of regard, and parted that noon with mutual good wishes and assurances’. Dora’s own account goes one better. She says Wilkinson asked her whether she went in for tragedy, comedy or opera; to which she answered, her confidence now fully restored, with one word, ‘All.’ ‘I never saw an elderly gentleman more astonished,’ she added, which was a little hard on Wilkinson, who was not yet forty-five.29

  Between them they wasted no more time. Dora appeared as Calista in The Fair Penitent on 11 July 1782; perhaps Wilkinson, like some modern managers, enjoyed matching his actress to a part with which she could identify. No doubt intending to be tactful to her mother, he advertised her as Miss Bland, only to have Grace insist on changing this to Miss Francis on the playbills. She had another suggestion, that Dora should sing a song after the tragedy. Wilkinson thought this an absurd idea, but gave way, and it turned into a triumph; the public and the manager were equally delighted with her song, ‘The Greenwood Laddie’, delivered in ‘a frock and a little mob-cap’.

  He offered her a salary of 15s. a week, and a benefit – a performance for which she would drum up support, and get most of the profits – on 5 August. For this the theatre was packed. Wilkinson was now sure enough of her value to insist that she sign an article of agreement tying her to his company.

  The next move was to York for the season of the race meetings, always relied on to bring in good audiences. Here Grace and her children were able to visit Maria Phillips, who was clearly dying, some said of drink, possibly of laudanum addiction, perhaps simply of an undiagnosed illness. A sad family reunion took place around her bed. She expressed her faith in her niece’s talent in the most positive way possible, by bequeathing her entire stage wardrobe to her. Unfortunately, it turned out that the pawn-shop had already claimed it. Perhaps Mr Wilkinson obliged here. Aunt Phillips was also prompted, after one look at Dora, to a piece of practical advice. Whatever name she intended to appear under, it should now be prefixed by ‘Mrs’ rather than ‘Miss’.

  But ‘Mrs’ what? Grace had vetoed the use of Bland, for fear it should injure her daughter in the opinion of her father’s relations – something that suggests they did take some interest at least in the family. Wilkinson agreed that there were ‘obvious and pressing reasons for a change of name’, and he later claimed the credit for inventing her new name. He was the son of a clergyman, albeit one who had been threatened with transportation for conducting just the kind of illegal marriages that Dora’s parents had made and that had left her name in doubt; and as the son of a clergyman he made a biblical allusion to the passing of the River Jordan, out of slavery and into freedom, comparing it with her escape from Daly across the Irish Sea. ‘Why, said I, my dear, you have crossed the water, so I’ll call you Jordan.’30

  Both the joke and the name pleased her, and she became ‘Mrs Jordan’. It was not by any means the last name she used, and it was sometimes rudely turned against her; but it was also the one that represented the fame and success that came to her, and it is the one by which she is remembered.

  2

  The Yorkshire Circuit: 1782–1785

  For the next three years, Dora walked round Yorkshire. She was a tough woman, and she needed to be. Travelling was an essential part of the lives of most actors and actresses, and Tate Wilkinson’s company made their way annually over a cross-country route of about 150 miles; it was roughly triangular in shape, its three points being York in the north, Sheffield in the south and Hull on the coast. The journeys could be arduous over the high and desolate moors or across the flat, windswept east riding; a few of the men might go on horseback, the company’s scenery wagon might take a few of the women with children. Rides might also be begged from farm or even coal carts. The players would cheer one another on as best they could; walking was part of their way of life.1 Sometimes Wilkinson, travelling ahead in his carriage, would stop and order a meal to be ready for them at an inn. He enjoyed good food and offering it to others; and he presided over the Yorkshire circuit like the kindly head of a large, talented and quarrelsome family. A look at their playbills shows it numbered at least thirty adults plus assorted children: they must have made an impressive sight when they arrived in town, ‘the horse and the foot’, as Wilkinson said.2 They included eight married couples in which both partners played regularly, some with children already performing: the Lengs, Dancers, Cumminses, Chalmerses, Powells, Smiths and Kaynes. There was the chief comedian Mr Creswell, the young male lead, George Inchbald, the prompter Earby, the carpenter Bearpark and the treasurer Swalwell. When Dora joined the company all the other adult women were billed as ‘Mrs’ whether they had a husband or not: it may have been a safety measure of Wilkinson’s. He was devoted to his ladies, but disconcerted by their frequent habit of becoming pregnant.

  Wilkinson was a short man with a plain face and awkward movements from a crookedly set leg, broken in a fall on stage. He had made his name in the theatre as a superb mimic, the toast of his audiences, but not of the actors and actresses he took off with such sprightly malice. These antics were past, and he was long since settled into being a company manager, with a comfortable Yorkshire wife and a family of five children; one son, John, was already working with him. He had been running the circuit for fifteen years, and although he still acted occasionally – Dora played Emilia to his Othello, for instance – his reputation now rested on being
known as the best of all the provincial managers, admired for the efficient running of his company and envied for his undoubted ability to spot a future star. Wilkinson valued this reputation, and enjoyed playing the character he had established for himself: wise, eccentric in his conversation, humorous, gruff and whimsical. He was a busy, worldly, tolerant professional, with the manners of a gentleman, and generally accorded the respect due to one. This is the personality that comes through his memoirs, in which Dora makes many appearances; he was quite obviously fond and proud of her, and defended her against all comers while reserving the right to tease her himself.

  She had already discovered that he was kind and uncensorious. He looked his actresses over carefully to see how they would appeal to the public, but these were entirely professional inspections. He was not another Daly. And although he might tease, his control was more velvet than iron. Wilkinson knew everyone in the theatrical world. He travelled about, to Scotland and London and the other provincial circuits, to keep an eye on what they were doing. In turn he attracted the London managers, who came regularly to see his shows, and regularly poached his best players. At Dora’s very first appearance in York she was seen by a visiting actor from Drury Lane, William Smith – known as ‘Gentleman’ Smith on the grounds that he always took Mondays off to go hunting – who was there looking out for talent. Smith liked what he saw so much that he came back to watch every performance she gave during his stay in the north, and Wilkinson realized he had been wise to sign her up securely, or she might have been carried off on the coach to London with Smith when he left.

  Another admirer appeared, this one less dangerous to Tate: a very old man with the charmingly old-fashioned name of Cornelius Swan, a critic and Shakespeare scholar, who kept an eye on the theatre in York. He was delighted by Dora and offered to give her some coaching. According to Wilkinson, he visited her in her lodgings when she was ill in bed – this was during her pregnancy – and was admitted to her ‘little bed-chamber where, by the side of the bed, with Mrs Bland’s old red cloak round his neck, he would sit and instruct his pupil’. The picture is touching, and Swan forecast a great future for her. She was wonderfully quick to pick up his tips, he said, and every bit as good as any of the great stage ladies he remembered from his youth. He did something else for her. When Daly found out where she was, he tried to have her arrested for breaking her engagement with the Smock Alley and failing to repay money she owed him. Mr Swan paid off the money. He said he now regarded her as his adopted child.3