Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  Ford’s version of his parting with Dora was never given, and his silence leaves many questions unanswered. According to Boaden, he ‘resigned her with legal composure’; but Boaden was a hostile witness, the best he could find to say of Ford being that ‘of all the men it has been my chance to know, I never knew a man of whom there is so little to tell’, and that none of his legal colleagues had anything to say about him.3 So perhaps he was more upset by the public humiliation than by the break itself; he could, after all, have married her, and by doing so prevented the whole messy business. Yet other accounts suggest he was distressed. Hester Bland thought he had been ill-used, and wrote of Dora doing ‘so much to make him unhappy’; and another observer said he ‘seemed to enjoy no very enviable state of mind’.4 But we shall never know whether he kept his lips sealed as a perfect gentleman who felt he should say nothing either against the mother of his children or against the King’s son, or as a guilty fellow who knew he could not defend his own behaviour.

  He was deeply attached to his four-year-old daughter Dodee, as is clear from the offer he made at one point to forgo seeing little Lucy altogether if only he might keep her.5 Hester’s letters paint a woeful picture of wrangles over the children. When the Petersham house was given up, Dora leased and furnished another house in Brompton for them, giving Hester the furniture and Ford the lease. He insisted on paying all expenses there, but then tried to stop Dodee going to stay with her mother at Somerset Street. The Duke intervened to insist that Somerset Street should be Dodee’s home, and she should only visit the Brompton house. At this Hester threatened to withdraw altogether from the care of the children. Her allegiance went entirely to Ford; she said she pitied Dora and spiritedly asked her to ‘tell the Duke from me that I will not be consider’d as his nurse and housekeeper, nor will I continue in a house of which he is master’.6 Hester at least was immune to the royal glamour.

  The disputes over the two girls continued in a dispiriting way for several years. There is a letter accusing Ford of nonpayment of an allowance for them, and another in which Dora offers to let him have them entirely in his care provided he will guarantee that she can see them regularly and often.7 This did not happen; by 1795 Ford was married and had a legitimate son, and seems to have become quite detached from Dodee and Lucy, who grew up very close to their mother – and the Duke. Ford became a favourite of the King; he was often at court, and received a knighthood. He also gave up Parliament, and became a police magistrate. When he came to write his will in 1798 he at first assigned his large holding of shares in Drury Lane to ‘the use of my two illegitimate children by Mrs Jordan of Drury Lane Theatre’, but did not even name them; and a few weeks later he rewrote the will, reassigning the shares to his wife, and cutting out his daughters altogether.8 Perhaps he felt they were well enough provided for by their mother and saw no need to make any paternal gesture; he had also turned to religion, and may have felt his Dodee and Lucy represented the sinful side of his nature. Still, it leaves a sorry impression.

  The first of Dora’s private letters to survive are her letters to the Duke, written during the winter of 1791. It is a shock to hear her intimate voice after knowing her from the outside, through other people’s accounts, for so many years; and to be eavesdropping on such purely personal letters. Some are touching, some embarrassing; but then love letters are not written to be judged as literature. These contain the phrases you might expect – ‘never two people loved so well’, ‘you are dearer, far dearer to me than life’ – but also suggest that the lovers’ approach to one another was made with considerable awkwardness, and through a barbed hedge of difficulties and uncertainties. Sometimes he is ‘love’, sometimes ‘Your Royal Highness’. The writing is noticeably smaller than her later hand ever was, suggesting stress, and it is used to convey pain and embarrassment as well as excitement and pleasure.

  Although his side of the correspondence is missing, some of it can be guessed from hers.9 ‘What a task you give me when you desire me to tell you how much I love you,’ she writes, conjuring up at once the William who has suffered so long from feeling unloved and unappreciated, and is desperately seeking reassurance. She thanks him for sending her presents, prints and drawings, and a picture of himself; in a display of generosity he is at his most confident. She does assure him of his power over her heart and feelings, and of the happiness she feels at his ‘dear enchanting professions of love’; but she also worries about what the servants will think.

  She ‘could dye with shame’, and asks him not to come round. She has the worst headache she has ever suffered; then she is sick, too sick to eat dinner. She advises him – ‘permit me for the first time to take the liberty of offering you my advice’ – not to come out to meet her when he too falls ill. She begs him to delay moving into her house; she is ‘of a very shy disposition’. Could they meet in the country, ‘any where out of town’ rather than in the public eye? She goes out to meet him, but is turned back by the traffic after two hours’ struggle: a very modern love affair, this.

  She thinks of moving house at one point because ‘I have gone through so many cruel scenes in it, that there is a constant gloom hangs over my mind whenever I am in it’; but he does not encourage her, and she remains in Somerset Street. She tells him about her sister’s illness, and apologizes for her brother George, ‘whose uncommon affection for me made him more violent than he ought to have been’: you wonder whether he threw a punch at the Duke. She says she has been crying for two days, complains about enemies in the acting world, tells him she has been warned ‘that you never liked any woman above half a year’. Like most people in love, she is sometimes absurd, and at her silliest suggests she should have an anchor – symbol of the navy – painted on the panels of the carriage he has given her; and he, at his most sensible, vetoes the idea.

  At the same time she is wholly sensible and practical about the conditions and demands of her working life. When he expresses dislike of some of her roles, she replies tactfully that she has always disliked those too, ‘but the managers will study their own interest’, and she must do as the managers direct. She also explains that, while she can be relatively free in summer, in the winter months she must live in London, and near the theatre; it does not cross her mind for an instant that she should give up her career.

  She is feeling her way, in these letters, sometimes delightedly, sometimes nervously and uncertainly, towards a modus vivendi with the Duke. He is still a largely unknown quantity: one day a pleading boy, the next an overbearing man; sometimes generous, sometimes gross. There are several references to his delicacy and refinement: is she praising a virtue in the hope of producing it? Then the reader is drawn up short when she writes of her children, ‘How good, how humane you are, in not wishing to prevent my seeing those dear little things.’10 Did she ever for one moment think he would try to separate her from them? Perhaps she was led to expect he would; but it was not a condition she would have allowed.

  The deepest and truest notes in these letters are struck when she speaks of her daughters, and especially the eldest and most vulnerable. ‘You ask me kindly in what manner you can afford me relief and assistance. There is but one way; which is through my dear little Fanny – set my mind totally at [ease] with respect to her, and I will be yours for ever.’ In another letter she tells him, ‘A dear and amiable little girl made doubly dear to me by mutual misfortune, shall be taught to bless you as her only friend and generous benefactor.’ Then, ‘I will allow you to be jealous of my poor Fan; as she is the only rival you can ever have in my heart.’11 Fanny had seen that Ford was quite indifferent to where she was; the Duke was friendly, and she decided to like him.

  Once Dora and the Duke were known to be living together, press interest began to flag. The relief of escaping from the pressure of constant observation and ridicule must have been great. In other ways her life was not much easier – and in some ways probably harder – because she had to divide herself between so many places and people, lover,
children and theatre all making their conflicting demands on her attention. She was constantly travelling between Somerset Street – she did not get rid of it, and William and the children both used it – Brompton, where Hester was based with the children, William’s house at Petersham, and the Haymarket, where Sheridan was sometimes heard to express his aversion to her powerful friend.12 William also used his rooms in St James’s Palace, and sometimes took Dora there too. Even buoyed up by love, she must have found the arrangement tiring.

  In March 1792, after two and a half years of freedom, she was pregnant again. It made no difference to her working programme; she acted steadily on until the summer. Sheridan’s friend Joseph Richardson, a Member of Parliament and a Whig journalist, wrote a comedy called The Fugitive especially for her. He put in some fashionable references to women’s rights, inspired by the bestseller of the season, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. One character complained that woman was ‘a creature with regard to whom engagements lose their faith, and contracts their obligations’. As for men, their love was fiction, their real behaviour bad: ‘in your fictitious characters, as lovers, you endeavour to make us believe that we are exalted above human weaknesses; but, in your real characters, as men, you more honestly demonstrate to us, that you place us even below your own level, and deny us the equal truth and justice that belongs alike to all intelligent beings’.13 The comedy nudged her with a reminder of the painful truth: Ford had failed to keep faith with her, and she could have no certainty that her new lover would behave any better. At the same time she herself was a one-woman vindication of her sex’s energy. She put a new song into Twelfth Night, played The Country Girl yet again for her benefit, making £540 in the one evening, and on 7 June closed the season as Rosalind. Then she retreated to Petersham for the summer; only, with her customary good grace, agreed to come back into town to appear in a benefit for her old friend Mrs Bannister, who – unlike Dora – was retiring to devote herself to her family. This was at the end of July. A few days later she had a miscarriage, at Petersham. For some hours, her life was in danger. Perhaps this acted as a reminder that her youngest child, Lucy, remained unbaptized at nearly three years old; for on 11 August the omission was made good by Thomas Lloyd, curate of Ewell, soon to become Chaplain to the Duke.

  For the Sheridans, 1792 brought no comedy at all. Against all advice – ‘every time you touch her, you drive a Nail in her Coffin’ – Elizabeth was expecting a second child. But her son was already seventeen and away at school, and the new baby was not her husband’s. She had at last lost patience with him, and allowed herself to fall in love with one of his political friends: Lord Edward Fitzgerald was a cousin of Fox, a vehement radical, dashing, impetuous and unreliable. He became her lover in 1791; and even before she bore his child, Sheridan was called on to console her for Lord Edward’s flightiness. The baby was born in April. From that moment Elizabeth’s health slipped away fast. It was tuberculosis, but not only tuberculosis: as she wrote to a friend, she had eaten forbidden fruit and could not return to the ‘old Haunts and ways of Happiness and Innocence’.14

  Sheridan accepted and loved the child, defended Elizabeth against all criticism and devoted himself to her care with a patient tenderness he had not shown her for years. He told his grief to Harriet Duncannon in a series of letters that begged her to comfort him even as they mourned for Elizabeth: ‘I am just returned from a long solitary walk on the beach. Night Silence Solitude and the Sea combined will unhinge the cheerfulness of anyone, where there has been length of Life enough to bring regret in reflecting on many past scenes…’ He blamed himself: ‘the irregularity of my Life and pursuits, the restless contriving Temper with which I have persevered in wrong Pursuits and Passions makes… reflexion worse to me than even to those who have acted worse.’ He felt his bad conduct was responsible for his wife’s approaching death, and tried to find some consolation in religion; Harriet’s letters urged it on him, and Elizabeth turned entirely to her childhood faith, but he looked ‘in vain into my own mind for assent to her apparent conviction that all will not perish’.15 He entreated Harriet to keep writing to him. She was abroad, with serious problems of her own to cope with, helping her sister to escape the jealous fury of the Duke of Devonshire, and to conceal the birth of the Duchess’s child, whose father was another of Sheridan’s political friends, Charles Grey.16 This child, born at Aix-en-Provence a few weeks before Elizabeth’s, was sent back secretly to England to be brought up in her grandparents’ house, under a false name and ignorant of her parentage.* The Duchess returned and was forgiven; but Elizabeth went to her grave in June. Her infant daughter lived little more than a year; she became ill while Sheridan was giving a party, and he was informed of her death at the very moment the dancing was about to begin. The world of Così fan tutte had come to a bleak curtain.

  11

  Nell of Clarence: 1792–1796

  Dora spent the autumn of 1792 recovering from her miscarriage at Petersham. It was not quite the life of wicked luxury imagined for her by the curious world; nor had she floated free of her past and family. Her awkward brother George still put pressure on her to find him work and, when that failed, he asked for hand-outs; while Hester, rigidly disapproving in Brompton, had to be trusted not to impress the sinfulness of their mother too strongly upon Fanny, Dodee and Lucy. Whenever possible, Dora had her little girls with her, or went to them, often with the Duke in attendance; and sometimes she abandoned him in order to be with them.

  Petersham was as delightful as ever, but Clarence Lodge made a somewhat precarious home. The Duke held it on a mortgage, and his financial problems meant there was considerable uncertainty from month to month as to whether they could remain there; and it was small, with only eight rooms, hardly enough for the existing children, let alone any more. As soon as Dora started acting again she returned to Somerset Street, which remained the centre of their scattered life; during the next four years more than half her time was spent there while she worked, fitting in as best she could the births of two more children – she chose Somerset Street for both – and enduring two more miscarriages.

  Even during absences from the theatre, she remained intensely involved with it. Like all who live by the public, she worried about it at least as much as it thought about her; the memory of that moment when the Haymarket audience had turned against her in December 1791 made her determined not to risk losing it again. She spent the winter of 1792 writing, or helping to write, a play. It became the cause of one of the many quarrels that raged in a company full of strong-willed people with conflicting ideas: Kemble, a traditionalist; Sheridan, ready to try a novelty; Jordan, rather surprisingly appearing now as the assertive voice of female power. She wrote Anna in collaboration with another woman, a Miss Cuthbertson, who has left no other trace; and Tate Wilkinson credited it all to Dora, and reported that ‘the whole town was on tiptoe for Mrs Jordan’s New Comedy’.1 Sheridan gave his agreement to the production; then Kemble threatened to resign as manager if it went ahead. Dora accused him of wanting to put on nothing but revivals – a fair criticism – and the battle of wills flared up more fiercely because it was also a battle about the male manager being attacked by a female member of the company. Then Sheridan and Dora began to wrangle too, about money. As she rehearsed Anna in January 1793, everyone was at loggerheads over politics, over money, over the repertoire. She threatened Sheridan with a lawyer’s letter when he seemed to withdraw his support, and sent off another letter to the press accusing Kemble of trying to prevent her from appearing in new characters. Under this pressure, Kemble gave way.

  The story would come to a better conclusion if Anna had been a success; but it was a flop. Even her friends found it derivative, a mere juggling of stock ingredients. It was played once and then, in Tate’s Wilkinson’s good, vulgar phrase, ‘dropped like an unfortunate young lady’s pad’ – what we call a hair-piece today. Dora had apparently wasted her energy, and Kemble was vindicated; and we cannot disp
ute the verdict now, for the text, like so many others, has disappeared.

  The trials of Anna took place against great events in the real world; indeed, they may have helped to kill it. England and France were moving towards war; even Sheridan’s support for the revolution was somewhat shaken by news that the French king was to be put on trial. Mourning his wife as he was, Sheridan was deeply involved in calls for parliamentary reform in England, and in setting up a radical club, the Friends of the People; he mocked the fears displayed by so many of his countrymen and women as French émigrés arrived with tales of horror, and the English began to imagine their own society turning upside-down in the same dangerous way. He was right in believing the British would not behave like the French, and could have reform without violence, and his teasing voice was a voice of sanity. At the same time his personal behaviour was becoming more self-destructive. For instance, he could not resist placing bets on reform, one hundred guineas that it would pass into law in two years, five hundred on three, and so on: he could not afford the bets, the sums got bigger as he drank more, and the drinking got worse as he grieved for Elizabeth. At least he found a distraction during the autumn, when he fell in love with Pamela Egalité, a French girl who came to England to meet the British reformers; she was the adopted daughter of two prominent French radicals, the writer Madame de Genlis and the Duke of Orleans, and reared to show that nurture counted for more than blood. Pamela was also said to resemble Elizabeth Sheridan, and her beauty caused a brief sensation. Sheridan danced attendance and everyone in London wanted to know her. She was even introduced to the Duke of Clarence, who escorted her both to Carlton House and to see the King in Parliament; and in December she married Mrs Sheridan’s lover, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, neatly closing the circle, but leaving Sheridan no happier. Later Fitzgerald took her to Ireland, where he became an active revolutionary, and the Duke became quite nervous when he realized how close he had been to someone so dangerous.2