Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  3

  Drury Lane

  Hundreds of hopeful young women arrived in London every week all through the eighteenth century, but most of them came alone. Hardly any can have brought with them a burden anything like Dora’s, at twenty-three head of a family of three generations, and responsible for its provision and welfare. London was for the hopeful and ambitious; there was no safety net for failures. To succeed she had to prove herself as an actress in front of her new colleagues, the best in the profession, and before London audiences, far more demanding than any she had yet faced, and not given to making allowances for newcomers. She must learn her way about town, master its customs and manners, and, whatever she felt inside, put on a show of confidence.

  To begin with, lodgings had to be found. Mrs Bland may have recalled that Thomas Sheridan lived in Henrietta Street in Covent Garden at the time of Dora’s birth, and the memory served. They were able to rent rooms at No. 8, Henrietta Street; the house is still standing, one of a handsome four-storeyed terrace, with a broad door and windows, a fine staircase, barley-sugar banisters and wood-panelled rooms.1 At the back they looked out over yards to Maiden Lane; the front faced towards Inigo Jones’s barn-shaped church, St Paul’s, Covent Garden, with a glimpse of the pink columns of Lord Orford’s mansion beyond. Just along the street was Covent Garden Piazza, a clutter of market stalls and sheds in the centre, hotels, coffee-houses, bath-houses and taverns in the arcades; and a step further away, Drury Lane theatre. The area was naturally popular with players. Kitty Clive, one of Drury Lane’s chief comic actresses for forty years, had lived in Henrietta Street; Charles Macklin, the Irish actor and playwright, now in his eighties, was the founder of the Piazza Coffee House, and Garrick himself had owned a house in Southampton Street, just round the corner.*

  But the London Mrs Bland remembered from the 1760s had taken on a new look. Prosperity and civic pride had turned up the lighting: at dusk, elegant double-branched oil lamps were lit along the streets, so bright that strangers thought they must be celebrating some special event. But no, they were for the ordinary citizens going about their business: the shops were open from seven in the morning until ten at night. The old mud streets were now paved and cleaned, there were sewers beneath, and the first piped water. A third bridge crossed the Thames at Blackfriars, where families could take the air and admire the view on a fine Sunday; there was an embankment on the river where the Adelphi terraces stood, and near by, on the Strand, was Somerset House, also newly built, a civic palace intended as a home for a whole collection of official and academic bodies, from the Royal Academy to the Navy Office. To the west, squares and streets were being laid out and houses raised as fast as builders could get the work done: Bedford and Portman Squares, and Portland Place, opening on to the fields of Marylebone. Money, and the confidence of money, was the message of all this paving, lighting, bridging, sewerage, brick and stucco. The same message came from Hyde Park, where London’s richest and most powerful men, extravagantly and exquisitely dressed, paraded with their ladies, in their carriages or on horseback. They may have been ‘taking the dust’ as Dora’s witty new employer, young Sheridan, put it; but they were taking it in the most expensive and elegant fashion possible.

  Behind this splendid frontage there were also warrens of slums unblessed by paving, sewers or lighting; and their most wretched inhabitants were notoriously the Irish, the most despised of the immigrant groups. Some had begged their way to London, some came as seasonal visitors; they did the heaviest and dirtiest work, squashed into dirty rooms that they shared by ancient tradition with the pigs they kept for food. What they earned they spent on drink. They fought constantly among themselves, and set their children to thieve and beg. This at any rate was their reputation, and even the charitable were inclined to see them as a lower form of humanity; though they were undoubtedly useful, and the more amenable ones were given better jobs, as cooks, maids or footmen. To more aspiring Irish immigrants they offered a particularly depressing and disquieting spectacle. Dora voiced her dislike of all things Irish more than once, and it may not have been only her memories of Dublin that fuelled this feeling. The London Irish were tangible evidence of that fearful abyss into which you could fall if you had no money, and no one to protect you. People still died of starvation in London, and especially women.

  For the moment, young Mrs Jordan had enough with her £4 a week to keep her family in a satisfactory way. Rent would be at most 8s.* A joint of beef cost 2s., a pair of shoes 5, a good beaver great coat 25; a washerwoman worked for twenty-four hours, getting through several weeks’ worth of the family’s laundry, for half a crown – 2s. 6d. Mrs Bland could be comfortable, Hester would have nothing to complain of; George might smarten himself up, and Fanny could be spoilt. She could be shown all the splendours, from St Paul’s to Westminster Abbey, St James’s Park and Palace, the Mansion House and the Monument; she could enjoy boat trips on the Thames to Greenwich or Richmond, and go on a Sunday to a tea garden in the fields at ‘New Tunbridge Wells’ (Sadler’s Wells), Gray’s Inn Lane or Kentish Town. She might also be taken, under most careful supervision from her grandmother or aunt, to the theatre, to visit her mother’s dressing room and the dark, cavernous mysteries of backstage Drury Lane, where children hardly older than her were already employed: the son of the ballet master, Giuseppe Grimaldi, had been performing since the age of two and a half. But there was no question of Fanny working. She was not being reared for the stage.

  The back of the theatre was the usual maze of stairs and dim passages, some sloping to take wheels and animals, with wooden planks nailed across to stop them slipping. There was a general ladies’ dressing room, with a candle and a mirror assigned to each person, chalk marks on the floor to divide the space, and babies being tended while their mothers were on stage; Dora was used to all this, only now, as a principal player, she had her own room, to which her maid would carry her costumes in a large milliner’s basket. The hairdresser also came to her there. The only make-up consisted of powder of different colours, into which liquids could be mixed; you might rouge, or white yourself, not much more. At rehearsal time the prompter would be sitting with his books in the wings near the stage box; carpenters and scene painters, in their blouses and forage caps, moved about taking instructions, actors stood gossiping and going through their cues. Rehearsals were done with hardly any lights. One morning a friend of the proprietor, coming backstage to arrange for a box the next evening, settled down in the dark to watch, and found himself sitting in a pot of paint: it was Charles James Fox, a politician with a passion for the theatre; he ‘damnd the Prompter and disappeared’.2 During performances the stage lighting came from chandeliers in the wings – Garrick had moved them from their traditional place above the stage – and from oil lamps set along the edge of the stage, another of his innovations. No manager had yet turned down the house lights during the performance, because everyone knew that people came to see each other as well as the play.

  Reputations might be made or broken on the stage of Drury Lane, but its significance was far greater than the success or failure of any particular performance. The oldest and largest theatre in the country, it had become an institution that gathered in many different strands of the life of the nation, and wove them together with a power shared only by its sister, the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Physically, the Drury Lane seen by the public was always magnificent, as befitted its status; ‘the gay, gilded theatre’ Boswell called it in the 1760s, when he was ready to sit on a bench in the pit, packed from four in the afternoon until curtain-up at half past six, to make sure of seeing Garrick’s Lear. In the 1770s the building was remodelled for Garrick by the Adam brothers, with a sober, classical façade; inside was a great airy space, gold and white walls and a geometrically patterned ceiling. Three tiers of boxes ran along each side, three of benches along the back, and there were slender pillars inlaid with glass over crimson and green paintwork. The stage, edged with spikes as well as floats, extended forw
ard in an apron, the stage boxes beside it, lined with crimson-spotted paper. Above the proscenium was a painted head of Shakespeare, with the Muses of Comedy and Tragedy – Thalia and Melpomene – on either side. Two thousand could crowd in, and often did. No other theatre in the world was so big, so splendid, so conscious of a long and great tradition. Since 1780, when the Gordon rioters had damaged the building, it even boasted its own company of Guards, posted outside every evening to protect the precious national institution.

  The names of Dryden and Garrick – the former resident playwright and first poet laureate, the latter joint manager and leading actor from 1746 for thirty years – suggest Drury Lane’s particular combination of intellectual eminence and popular appeal. Historically, the company was closely associated with the sovereign; from 1660, when Charles II welcomed the revival of the theatre, its leading actors were sworn servants of the crown, some of whom were appointed Grooms of the Chamber, and supplied with scarlet and crimson livery that proclaimed them ‘His Majesty’s Servants’; and they had to sign themselves into the theatre books by order of the Lord Chamberlain.3 More important still than this formal link was the continued enthusiasm of the King and Queen, so firmly established at the time of their marriage, maintaining itself over the decades into their middle age, and shared with the Princes and Princesses: the Prince of Wales was now twenty-three, and there were twelve younger ones.

  Drury Lane was one of the chief places in which the different classes of society came together to share an experience: royalty, the aristocracy of both sexes, the squirearchy and Members of Parliament, professionals and intellectuals, City merchants and their wives and children, provincial visitors, undergraduates on vacation from Oxford and Cambridge, young men about town, soldiers and sailors on leave, whores both expensive and cheap, and the rest of the poor right down to the apprentices and other common Londoners. Everyone felt they had a stake in Drury Lane: it was in reality what we hopefully call our great building on London’s South Bank today, both a royal and a national theatre.

  Its surroundings mirrored the social mixture inside. A century earlier it had stood amid the mansions of the aristocracy; then London gave one of its heaves and the rich all moved westwards, leaving their houses and courtyards to dwindle into disreputable warrens, gambling and drinking dens. People complained that the whole district had become dirty, immoral and unsafe; but no one stayed away from the play on that account.

  It also served as a cosmopolitan centre and provided a link with the continent. Plays and operas moved about freely, and so did players and musicians: many of the works put on were translations, many of its singers and dancers came from or journeyed to Paris, Vienna, Venice, Naples and even St Petersburg. Mrs Garrick was a Viennese-born dancer. Marie-Thérèse De Camp, the daughter of a Frenchman, born in Vienna, brought to England as a child performer, remained to become a leading actress at Drury Lane, write plays in her adopted language, and marry a Kemble. Michael Kelly, who composed, borrowed and arranged much of the music at the theatre, was born in Dublin, trained in Naples, Palermo and Florence, and worked in Austria with Mozart. Sheridan’s other close musical associates, with whom he shared a house at one time, were Stephen Storace and his sister Nancy, and they were also Mozart’s friends; she was his first Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro in Vienna. Next to aristocrats, theatre people were the great travellers of the age; and until the war that began in 1792, isolating Britain for over two decades, Drury Lane was part of a common European culture.

  British aristocrats had always behaved as though they owned the theatre, but Garrick, Thomas Sheridan and other determined proprietors beat down their pretensions firmly. They were no longer allowed on stage, and at Drury Lane visits to the green room – the actors’ common room – could not be made merely at whim; special passes had to be agreed and provided by the management. And although the social standing of actors remained uncertain, Garrick raised himself to a point where no one condescended to him. As he grew older his company was sought by dukes and earls, and when he died they were pallbearers at his funeral.

  Actresses might also conquer the aristocracy, but they always presented more of a problem. Because they were thrilling to look at, and provoked speculation about the nature of the real woman, mysteriously concealed inside the role and the costume, they became a focus for doubts about the morality of the theatre. People agreed that it was a place of enjoyment, entertainment and relaxation, but worried in case it slid too far in that direction. So there were periodic outcries against its immorality, the improper jokes, the actresses who appeared on stage unnaturally and provocatively dressed as men, showing their legs, and against drunken behaviour and the presence of prostitutes in the audience. As part of the anti-vice campaign, Garrick rewrote the bawdy Restoration plays, removing the coarsest (and the best) jokes. He also gave up his mistress, the greatest actress of the mid-century, Peg Woffington, and settled down as a sober and faithful husband, on the model of the King. The Theatre Royal justified itself as a place dedicated to moral and cultural uplift, with a great tradition of national pride and high thinking. Yet without its Peg Woffingtons it would have been a poorer place; and she continued with her career after she and Garrick parted, and went on living as she pleased. Art and public morality do not always face in the same direction. But when the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales plucked a mistress, Mary Robinson, from Drury Lane – in 1778, after Garrick’s day – the public was as put out as the King, and her career remained blighted even after the Prince dropped her.

  Garrick had kept the balance pretty well; under his rule, which lasted until 1776, Drury Lane flourished as the meeting place of the rich, the well-born, the beautiful and the clever. Dr Johnson brought his only tragedy to be performed there, and earned more from it than from anything else he had written. For the first night he even kitted himself up in the scarlet and gold livery; then he took a taste for sitting in the green room and talking to the actors, and although he too announced himself disturbed by ‘the white bosoms and silk stockings’ of the actresses, he kept an interest in the profession. In his old age he was a friend of another great actress, Mrs Abington, as well as John Kemble, whom he questioned curiously about acting. Did Kemble ever feel himself actually transformed into the character he played? No, answered Kemble, he was always conscious of his craft; and Johnson approved. He also hailed young Sheridan as the author of the two best comedies of the day, The Rivals and The School for Scandal, before Garrick passed on the proprietorship to him.

  It was Sheridan’s theatre to which Dora was summoned. In his hands Drury Lane looked set to shine with more brilliance than ever; since he was a playwright, the son of an actor-manager, with a father-in-law who was a renowned musician to take over the musical directing, and a wife of rare gifts, prepared to read texts, do the theatre accounts, interview singers and advise on productions. He was as clever as anyone of his generation, and possessed of a charm few could resist. Garrick retired a wealthy man to his Thames-side house at Hampton; there seemed no reason why Sheridan should not make his fortune too. Yet, unlike Garrick, he was always ambivalent about the theatre’s role and status, and his own situation within it.

  He had a particular difficulty with actresses. A year before taking over from Garrick, he wrote what must be the most hostile private account ever penned on the subject. It was in a letter intended to prevent his sister-in-law Mary from accepting an offer of work from Garrick, whom he accused of being a liar and corrupter of innocence. He said Mary would be forced

  to play the Coquet, the Wanton, to retail loose innuendoes in Comedy, or glow with warm Descriptions in Tragedy; and in both to be haul’d about, squeez’d and kiss’d by beastly pimping Actors!… everything around them is unchaste – their Studies are Lessons of Vice and Passion. – Like Wretches who work in unwholesome Mines, Their senses are corrupted in the operation of their Trade.4

  Sheridan himself was never averse to illicit squeezing and kissing; it was the idea of it happening in the t
heatre to a woman in his own family that he disliked so much. He claimed that he himself ‘had always an Instinctive Abhorrence’ to the theatre as ‘the greatest Nursery of Vice and Misery on the Face of the Earth’; said he was convinced that most actresses were unhappy in their work, and that none could hope to marry decent men. It is an altogether extraordinary diatribe to come from a man who went on to make his living in the theatre, even in a private letter. They were not views he could ever make public; and it was as well that Dora could have known nothing of them when she arrived to work for him.

  She was asked to make her first appearance in a revival of Philaster, an old and sentimental play by Beaumont and Fletcher, her part that of a page who turns out to be a girl in disguise, behaves nobly, and loses her lover. It was announced in the press, with a puff explaining that Mrs Jordan was not a novice. Then she suggested her own, better idea. The fact that she had never faced a London audience in her life, while the manager and his men were all experienced, and trained by Garrick, did not deter her. She was determined to choose her own vehicle. She asked to appear in the play she had been preparing privately, The Country Girl: which, while it was Garrick’s own adaptation, had flopped badly when he put it on fifteen years earlier, and not been played in London since. Some of the company had actually played in Garrick’s production and seen it fail. Still, she insisted.