Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  The Prince of Wales and the Whigs were thought to be slow to share in the general jubilation, an attitude judged unsporting at the very least. A cartoon by Rowlandson depicted Sheridan, Fox, Burke, the Prince, Mrs Fitzherbert and several others, all visibly put out at the royal recovery. The inclusion of Mrs Jordan in this group – the only Drury Lane performer who figures in the drawing – suggests that her sympathies were believed to lie with them.4 It is extremely unlikely that they did; Dora wrote many times of her affection for the King in later years, and he had just praised her at Cheltenham. Of course she may have been caught up in a prevailing mood; she may even have been given lines with topical jokes and allusions, often put into the prologues and epilogues of plays, that identified her with the Whig cause. More likely the fact that everyone knew her face made her a good subject for cartoonists. It was a penalty of success; she could be depicted at the centre of events in London, and people would feel in the know, and laugh.

  In the spring the King and Queen attended a service of thanksgiving for his recovery at St Paul’s. There were illuminations, command performances and balls; Mrs Siddons impersonated Britannia for the Brooks’s ball, held at the opera house, and soon the Queen was seen again at the opera and the King at the play. Less happily, Dr Ford sold out his share in Drury Lane. Under Sheridan’s casual system of management, it had lost him a great deal of his money, and one way and another he felt obliged to go abroad for a while. He was not reconciled to his son’s domestic arrangements.

  In July Dora was engaged to appear in Scotland again, and she set off northwards with her mother, stopping in Leeds on the way to visit their old friend. Wilkinson had broken his leg for a second time, and it had set badly. She offered to play a benefit for him; unfortunately the ‘precise ladies of Leeds’ were shocked by her acting Sir Harry Wildair while visibly pregnant, and they gave her a cool reception. In nearby Harrogate the public was altogether less delicate; the guests staying at the various hotels there clubbed together to make up enough money to persuade Mrs Jordan to give them a few nights’ entertainment.

  This made her late for her Edinburgh engagement. The manager there, a Mr Jackson, was annoyed by such high-handedness, reasonably enough, and here she again had less than her usual success. ‘We were all to the play last night to see Mrs Jordan, who is to act six nights at Edinburgh,’ wrote the Duchess of Buccleuch at Dalkeith House to Lady Louisa Stuart. ‘She always delights me, and as the House was not very full, I was not so hot as I expected. She acts again tomorrow, and I see a strong inclination in the young part of the family to go again, to which, I believe, I must give way.’5

  So with cool, half-filled houses Dora had to be content; but Jackson was not, and they fell out. There was more on her mind than thin audiences. In Edinburgh Mrs Bland was taken ill; it must have been a sudden attack, because she would scarcely have made the long and tiring journey to the north if she was already feeling unwell. Within the space of days she was dead. Dora was with her to nurse her, and held her in her arms as she died. The pain of losing the one constantly loving and beloved person who had been with her all her life, and on whom she had always relied for support and advice, was hard to bear.

  Grace Bland cannot have been older than her mid-fifties. Her life had not been easy, although the last years, in which she was able to enjoy and participate in her daughter’s good fortune, must have made up for some of her sorrows. Dora was not so sure. The mourning poem she wrote for her mother insists squarely on the injury done to her mother by her father. She calls her mother a ‘suffering saint’ and a ‘patient wife’, stresses the cruel usage she endured, and emphasizes, along with her fidelity, her gentle acceptance of the wrongs done to her: her ‘silent anguish’ and ‘curb’d resentment’. The poem goes on to say that any comforts that came to her arrived too late to make much difference.6

  The verses praise her mother, but their very existence shows just how determined Dora was not to be like her. She would not curb any resentment or be silent in anguish; and she intended a public statement as well as an expression of personal grief. The poem was offered to an Edinburgh newspaper, where it appeared. Dora’s diction was wholly conventional, but she wrote effective couplets:

  Thus silent anguish marked her for her own,

  And comfort coming late was barely known;

  It, like a shadow, smil’d and slipp’d away –

  For churlish Death refus’d to let it stay;

  A two-fold dart he levell’d, to destroy,

  At once, both mother’s life and daughter’s joy.

  Even as she mourned her mother, she embarked on a public quarrel with the Mr Jackson of the Edinburgh Theatre. For him, the last straw was her request for a break in the arranged programme while she nursed her mother. He withheld some promised payment; she protested. When he attacked her in the press, she answered in the press, giving as good as she got. Her letter accused him of failing to pay her according to their agreement; the £100 bill he finally gave her in Glasgow, she wrote, bounced when she tried to cash it.

  Dora had by now acquired a pretty good understanding of the power of the press. Her ability to make use of it to defend herself and advance her own arguments is striking. Few women of her generation had the strength of mind to try such brazen methods. Letters by women might be charming, self-deprecating, cajoling, hesitant, gentle or wryly humorous; they were rarely combative. Dora was different. The conclusion to her letter about the Scottish manager goes like this: ‘I have now entirely done with this subject, and, thank God, with Mr Jackson, who I hope, by his punctuality, to pay his at present protested note, will not compel me to resume any acquaintance with him, by the methods the law points out!’7 Apart from her verses, this is the first time we hear her authentic voice, and its harshness is disconcerting; it is a tough Dora who appears before us here, fully armed, to remind us irresistibly that her grandfather was a judge, and a fierce old fellow, and that she had his genes in her.

  Her diminished party travelled south through Chester and she was back in London for the birth of her third daughter, christened with names chosen not from the Ford family but from hers: she was called Lucy Hester. Dora did not hurry back to Drury Lane; there was the baby to enjoy – this time strong and healthy – and her mother to mourn. There was rejoicing over Ford winning a parliamentary seat at East Grinstead; and there were also quarrels with John Kemble over the terms of her engagement. She did not appear on stage again until February 1790. Then she persuaded Kemble – a bit of hard bargaining – to let her brother George act Sebastian to her Viola. It was only a moderate success. He was small enough to be a credible twin brother, but there was little else to recommend his performance. He remained a steady drain on her patience and her purse; but at this moment her ascendancy was such that she could carry him easily enough. When Covent Garden tried to poach her away from Drury Lane this winter, she had only to mention it to Sheridan for her salary to be put up: now she was paid the same as Mrs Siddons, £30 a week for three performances.

  At this point Dora’s life looks as though it might be settled into its final shape. She was approaching thirty, was at the summit of her profession, and could expect perhaps another ten years on stage. She had three much loved little daughters, lived in a desirable part of London and could always get away to Petersham when they needed a change of air for a few days. Her ‘husband’ had achieved his ambition by getting into Parliament; they could feel pleased with themselves and with one another.

  Yet it was not quite like this. They lived surrounded by a society that was growing almost frenetic in its pursuit of excitement and pleasure. The great revolutionary events taking place in France thrilled, dismayed and divided people in Britain too, and even those who were not very interested in ideas felt the fever; some behaved as though gratification must be pursued to extremes as well as political theories. Serious happenings have never brought light behaviour to a stop, of course, and did not then. People continued to go to the theatre, fall in love and behav
e badly while the rights of man were debated, great polemics written, constitutions changed. The theatrical world overlapped with the world of politics, of the Whig aristocracy, of royalty; in the years 1789, 1790, 1791 they made up a social merry-go-round that span and whirled faster and faster, always drawing some into the brightness at the centre, and casting others out into the darkness. It was a frivolous, seductive, dangerous carnival. The Sheridans were deeply drawn in; the Fords were still at the edge, although Dora’s presence in the Rowlandson cartoon suggests that she was already associated with it.

  A few reports from Drury Lane, Carlton House and Devonshire House reveal the carnival atmosphere. They are not edifying, these tangled cat’s cradles of adultery and snobbery, but they do suggest the tightness of the interlocking circles and the steamy atmosphere of London. At Drury Lane a close colleague and friend of both Dora and the Sheridans was the musician Michael Kelly, who wrote most of the music for their productions after his return from Vienna in 1787. He fell in love with another singer, Mrs Anna Maria Crouch – she played Olivia to Dora’s Viola – and set up house with her, first as a ménage-à-trois with her husband, then without him. As a quasi-incestuous Drury Lane tangle, theirs was notable, since Mrs Crouch had earlier been on the point of marrying John Kemble; now, with Kelly’s complaisance, she became the Prince of Wales’s mistress briefly. Dora disliked her, and was friendly with the Prince’s earlier theatrical mistress, Mary Robinson, who had also spent some time under Fox’s protection; she was now ill and embittered, and had turned to writing plays, one of which Dora championed. It was a satire on society ladies who became compulsive gamblers, something for which the Duchess of Devonshire was well known. In this one tangle Dora could see the theatre and the great world outside enmeshed together.

  She got another view of the Prince of Wales from John Bannister, who was sometimes invited to dine at Carlton House. He was a well-educated man, counting among his friends both Fox and Gainsborough, but he found that, in the Prince’s dining room, the ‘public performers, sat all together, as all guests took their places according to rank… we never mixed in that [conversation] of the general party, further than to answer questions’.8 In other words, an invisible barrier was set firmly in his face. The Prince was unpredictable in this way. The Sheridans moved through most of his invisible barriers easily enough; they could and did invite him back to whichever house they were currently living in. The Prince and Elizabeth Sheridan were also on terms intimate enough to attend together sessions with the fashionable hypnotist Dr Marmaduke, and be thrown into fainting fits, while the Duchess of Devonshire had hysterics beside them.9

  The Duchess, Georgiana, and Harriet Duncannon, great ladies as they were, played out their own farces and tragedies; both became involved in scandals quite as murky as the ones based on Drury Lane during these years. They were Dora’s contemporaries, and, comparing their lives, they appear at first glance supremely fortunate and easy; but looking closer, you see they had been confined and limited to a degree she had never known. They were married at sixteen and nineteen to men chosen by their parents, and told by their mothers that absolute obedience to their husbands, religious observance and a quiet existence, preferably passed in the country with their babies, should be their complete programme for life. Both resisted. They cared about books, ideas, politics, pictures, the theatre, as well as clothes and parties. Georgiana wrote the music for one of Sheridan’s verses, and it was used at Drury Lane. Harriet wrote witty, well-informed letters; but they had no satisfactory outlets for their talents. Fox did something to enliven them by allowing them to play a part in his electioneering, though it could not be much more than a decorative role. Georgiana’s compulsive gambling was surely an expression of boredom; it meant she lived in terror of her husband discovering the extent of her debts, and staved off disaster by borrowing from anyone who would lend. She also lived in a ménage-á-trois with her husband and his mistress, who was also her best friend. Both the children of this liaison were born in France, and left there under false names; and Georgiana’s daughter by her lover, another Whig grandee, was similarly born abroad and kept successfully hidden. The great were skilled at shielding one another from public disapproval when they chose, though it meant sacrificing the children.

  Harriet Duncannon was not a gambler; she was more beautiful, better read and more intelligent than the Duchess, and Sheridan fell distractedly in love with her. His earlier flirtations and infidelities had shaken his wife without turning her seriously against him, but the affair with Harriet did real damage to all concerned. In 1790 Lord Duncannon threatened divorce and a ‘criminal connection’ suit against Sheridan: this would have meant humiliation, dirty linen washed in public, law reports in the press. Emotionally, things were so bad for Elizabeth Sheridan that she too talked of a separation. Harriet, appalled, became seriously ill: it was supposed to be a stroke, unlikely at her age, and considering that she made a complete recovery. Perhaps Duncannon pushed her downstairs in a rage. Whatever it was, she was ordered abroad, the standard resource for great ladies in trouble, and duly disappeared for a time.

  Elizabeth Sheridan had no such resource. ‘The World, my dear Hetty,’ she wrote to a friend,

  is a bad one, and we are both Victims of its Seductions. Sheridan has involved himself by his Gallantries and cannot retreat. The Duplicity of his Conduct to me has hurt me more than anything else, and I confess to you that my Heart is entirely alienated from him, and I see no prospect of Happiness for either of us but in the Proposal I have made him of Parting.10

  Elizabeth’s often stated preference for life in the country, her reluctance to be too much at Devonshire House, her warnings to her husband not to give too much of himself to politics and Brooks’s Club, and not to expect too much back from them, were all expressions of a sense that she and her husband were taking – had taken – a dangerous path. Now she was proved right.

  Elizabeth had her own temptations. She was being pursued by a new admirer, and a royal one, the Prince of Wales’s younger brother William. Elizabeth found him appealing: he was more than ten years younger than her, fresh faced and enthusiastic. She confessed to her woman friend that she was far from indifferent to his ‘devoted Attachment for me, and have thought more favourably of him still since I have had reason to make comparisons between his Conduct and S’s’.11 Later she told the same friend that she would probably have run away with William had he been nearer her age; adding wryly that she would also probably ‘have hung myself a Week afterwards’ had she done as he wished. Her letter goes on to describe his ‘importunate passion’ and her strong inclination to yield to it; she was at least a little in love with him.

  Before Lord Duncannon’s suit against Sheridan could proceed in Doctors’ Commons, the Duke of Devonshire intervened to have it removed, and succeeded in calming the injured husband. At the same time Fox begged Elizabeth not to insist on a separation from her husband and to accept his ‘Oaths and Professions’ of contrition graciously. She agreed to ‘throw off’ the attentions of her princely admirer, and the Prince of Wales, allying himself with Sheridan’s interests, spoke firmly to his brother on the subject.

  Elizabeth accepted that her marriage might be patched up after a fashion: ‘we are both now descending the Hill pretty fast… and perhaps we shall meet at the Bottom… and then our Wanderings and Deviations may serve for Moralising in our Chimney Corner some twenty years hence,’ she wrote.12 Things settled down – or rather they half settled down, because Sheridan was interrupted in the middle of seducing a governess called Miss Ford in a bedroom in Crewe Hall even as Fox was in the process of persuading Elizabeth to forgive him.

  There were many of these moments when princes, players, politicians, duchesses and governesses met on roughly equal terms, and many forms of entertainment that allowed social boundaries to be crossed for a few hours at least. Great ladies sometimes imitated the costumes of actresses, and sought their advice on clothes. One of the Prince of Wales’s social acco
mplishments was mimicry, and he particularly enjoyed imitating John Kemble. What was work for actors became a game for the aristocrats who set up their own amateur theatricals, which became very popular at this time. So was dressing up of all kinds.13 The Prince of Wales adored planning and appearing in extravagant costumes, from Van Dyck hats and suits – black velvet, with spangles, pink lining and pink heels to his shoes, or white satin with pink satin knots – to his own version of the tartan of a Highland chief, in which he and his brother William made an entrance at one o’clock in the morning at a party in Hammersmith in the summer of 1789, after which he invited Elizabeth Sheridan to sing trios with him.14

  On another evening the Sheridans were involved in a fancy-dress party in which all the women appeared masked and made the men try to guess their identities. The next night there was a return match when the men disguised themselves as a group of Turks, wearing masks and sitting silently around a table. With much laughter, the wives made their choices. At this point there burst in through a half-open door the real men – lords, princes, Members of Parliament, theatre managers or whatever – gleeful and triumphant at having tricked their women so thoroughly: the Turks round the table, they revealed to their ladies, were only servants, got up to deceive them.15