Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  Hart, Gwen, History of Cheltenham (1965)

  Jackson, Gordon, Hull in the Eighteenth Century (1972). The background to the Hull theatre.

  Foster, Peter, and Pyatt, Edward, Bushy House (1976). A most valuable source of information in pamphlet form.

  10. Miscellaneous

  Carey, G. S., The Dupes of Fancy (1792). A short play dedicated hopefully to Mrs Jordan, with a frontispiece of her.

  Maurice, T., Richmond Hill (1807). The poem mentions Bushy, the Duke and his family, as well as lamenting the deaths of Nelson, Pitt and Fox.

  Inchbald, Elizabeth (ed.), British Theatre (25 vols., 1808) and British Farces (1815), with introductions. Two formidable pieces of editorial work. Several of the introductions refer to Mrs Jordan’s performances.

  FitzClarence, George, first Earl of Munster, An Account of the British Campaign of 1809 under Sir A. Wellesley, in Spain and Portugal, first published anonymously in the United Service Journal, 1829, reprinted 1831 in volume of Memoirs of Late War. This is Mrs Jordan’s eldest son’s vivid narrative of his first weeks in the Peninsular War as a fifteen-year-old officer serving under Wellington.

  Journal of a Route across India, through Egypt to England, in the latter end of the year 1817, and the beginning of 1818, 1819. His account of his return journey.

  Reade, Charles, Peg Woffington (1853). A fictionalized version of Woffington, written when Reade was in love with the popular but unhappy Victorian actress Fanny Stirling, and fascinated by the combination of genius and sexual levity he saw in both the dead and the living woman. He also wrote a charming sentimental play about Woffington, Masks and Faces.

  Falkland, Viscountess (Amelia), Chow-Chow: being Selections from a Journal Kept in India, Egypt and Syria (2 vols., 1857). Mrs Jordan’s youngest daughter’s lively account of her time in India as wife of the Governor of Bombay, and her return journey through Egypt.

  FitzClarence, Wilhelmina, My Memories (1904). Mrs Jordan’s grand-daughter, eldest child of Augusta Kennedy Erskine (née Fitz-Clarence), married her first cousin William, son of George Fitz-Clarence, and became the second Countess of Munster. Her reminiscences go back to her grandfather King William IV and describe some of her uncles. She also wrote novels, including Dorinda (3 vols., 1889).

  Brown, Eluned (ed.), Henry Crabb Robinson On the Theatre (1966).

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  1. George Jones, Personal Recollections of Sir Francis Chantrey (1849), pp. 118–19.

  2. Chantrey’s ledger is in the library of the Royal Academy.

  3. Two preliminary studies for the statue survive in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. See Nicholas Penny’s catalogue No. 456 and Appendix, p. 649 (Catalogue of European Sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum, vol. 3, 1992). According to Penny, the statue was not completed until 1834. The mask is usually associated with Thalia, Muse of Comedy, the pipes with Euterpe, Muse of Music and Lyric Poetry – both appropriate to Dora Jordan, who also wrote verse and sang.

  4. Ireland’s bust is in the Bodleian Library.

  5. ‘The Old Actors’, London Magazine (October 1822) about Charles Mathews’s collection of portraits (bequeathed to the Garrick), reprinted in E.V. Lucas (ed.), The Letters of Charles Lamb, vol. 2 (1935), pp. 294–5.

  6. There is no record at Westminster Abbey of the King’s request, but Chantrey’s ledger note suggests it was made. Mary Hopkirk wrote in her book on Queen Adelaide (1956), that the King tried the Dean of St Paul’s in 1833, and that he too turned down the statue (pp. 131–2); but she gives no source, and here again there is no confirmation from the chapter minutes of St Paul’s. Thomas Campbell’s statue of Sarah Siddons was put in the Abbey in 1845.

  7. 25 July 1839, Lady T. Lewis (ed.), Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry, vol. 3 (1865), pp. 463–4 Miss Berry met Chantrey at Sir William Dundas’s, and said Lord Munster had made some objection to another proposed site for the statue.

  8. 28 December 1838, journal of Queen Victoria, RA, p. 122. Some of this is printed in Lord Esher, The Girlhood of Queen Victoria, vol. 1 (1912), p. 84.

  9. Sir William Beechey (1753–1839) was appointed official portrait painter to Queen Charlotte in 1793; he naturally painted her and George III and their sons. Two portraits of Mrs Jordan are believed to be by him, one showing her seated, as Rosalind, in yellow knee breeches, the other a full length of her standing; neither is an obvious source for Chantrey, but the seated one is possible.

  10. If there was an inscription, it has been removed. Another version of the alleged inscription is ‘To Dora Bland, by one who loved her’ (Lewis Melville, More Stage Favourites of the Eighteenth Century, 1929, p. 253).

  11. Esher, 16 January 1839, The Girlhood of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, pp. 101–2, gives part of the conversation between Queen Victoria and Lord Melbourne, which I have supplemented from the RA copy of Queen Victoria’s journal for 16 January 1839. On 16 January there was a further bit of conversation. ‘“She lived with Sir Richard Ford by whom she had a number of children before she lived with the King,” said Lord M. It’s with 2 of the children, and done after the picture Beechey did of her when she was quite young and thin, and not like what Lord M remembers her.’

  12. ibid.

  13. Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry, vol. 3, pp. 463–4.

  1 THE SINS OF THE FATHERS: 1761–1782

  1. See Parson James Woodforde’s diary (John Beresford, ed., 1924–31) between 1758 and 1797 for the many entries about his theatre-going, from the time he was an undergraduate and through his days as a clergyman. He managed to see a large repertoire of plays put on by strolling players in Somerset villages, by the troupe that played regularly in Norwich, and at Drury Lane and Covent Garden whenever he was in London.

  2. George Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 30 October 1756.

  3. See R. Hitchcock, An Historical View of the Irish Stage, vol. 1 (1788), p. 274. ‘Several performers of merit were brought out, amongst whom were two sisters, Miss G. and Miss M. Phillips, young ladies of a good family, who for many years afterwards were well received in a variety of characters, both in tragedy and comedy.’ See also pp. 279, 283, 307.

  4. See An Historical View of the Irish Stage, vol. 2 (1794), p. 53: ‘the two Miss Phillips’s returned to England in autumn 1760’.

  5. For Thomas Sheridan in Henrietta Street, see James Boswell’s London Journal 1762–3 (F.A. Pottle, ed., Penguin edition, 1950), p. 60, etc.

  6. The Coronation shows were played as afterpieces to the main play of the evening. Garrick did not take much trouble with his, and is said to have used the costumes left over from the 1727 coronation show: see W. Macqueen-Pope, Theatre Royal Drury Lane (1945), p. 177.

  7. The information about the arrival of the Princess comes mainly from Olwen Hedley’s Queen Charlotte (1975).

  8. A ‘court drawing room’ is a formal reception held by a member of the royal family at which ladies are ‘presented’ at court.

  George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham in the 1670s, wrote The Rehearsal, probably in collaboration with others; it was a satire on the heroic tragedies of his time, but remained very popular throughout the eighteenth century, and was often played with topical references. Garrick played Bayes, the author of the mock play.

  9. Queen Charlotte, pp. 47, 65.

  10. See J. Hemlow (ed.), The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 4 (1973), p. 79, where Madame D’Arblay reports her conversation with the Queen in February 1798.

  11. Information from Pedigree of Family of Bland, compiled by J. F. Fuller (London, 1907), reprinted from Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, and from Peter Davies and David W. James, both of St David’s.

  12. DJ to the Duke of Clarence, 30 January 1811, Arthur Aspinall (ed.), Mrs Jordan and Her Family, being the Unpublished Letters of Mrs Jordan and the Duke of Clarence, later William IV (1951), p. 183:

  an old Welsh acquaintance called on me the other evening of the name of Harris I had not the least recollection of him, till he reminded me of
a Little Boy, that I whipped once very smartly for drownding a Mouse, I then remembered the circumstance very well and we both laughed very heartily, he appears a very gentlemanly young man and says he is not a little vain of having been whipped by Mrs Jordan – he was then about 5 years old and I ten.

  13. An Historical View of the Irish Stage, vol. 2, p. 23.

  14. The phrases are from DJ’s poem of July 1789 on her mother’s death.

  15. See letter from DJ to James Boaden, 22 April 1809, in James Boaden, The Life of Mrs Jordan, vol. 2 (1831), p. 242.

  16. DJ to the Duke of Clarence, 10 November 1810, Mrs Jordan and Her Family, p. 166.

  17. See her letter to the Duke of Clarence from Dublin, 10 June 1809, in which she describes rehearsing and being ‘addressed by a very old man who was standing at the wing… It was the very person that brought me on to the stage the first night I played. He reminded me of my running off the stage behind the scenes, and his following me, and bringing me forward by main force. He is not a little proud of this’ (cited in Philip H. Highfill, A Biographical Dictionary of Stage Personnel, London 1600-1800, 1982, p. 256).

  18. John Williams, writing as ‘Anthony Pasquin’, referred to her ‘keen sable eye’ in 1792. Her short sight is well attested, and the Hoppner portrait of her in the National Portrait Gallery shows her carrying a pair of spectacles.

  19. Tate Wilkinson said ‘she sported the best leg ever seen on the stage’.

  20. Leigh Hunt, in Roger Ingpen (ed.), Autobiography, vol. 1 (1903), p. 150. Although Hunt did not see her until later in her career, this description catches something about her performance that seems to have been there from the first.

  21. According to Clare Jerrold, The Story of Dorothy Jordan (1914), p. 42.

  22. The Life of Mrs Jordan, vol. 1, p. 14. Boaden also says that Grace was advised by a fellow actor, Richard Owenson (father of the writer Lady Morgan), who must have made his own estimate of Dorothy’s talents.

  23. ibid., p. 11.

  24. ibid., pp. 11–12.

  25. ibid., p. 360.

  26. See H. Baker, John Philip Kemble (1942).

  27. See letter by Lady Carlow dated November 1781: ‘I was quite charmed with Mrs Daly at the play. She acted Miss Hardy in The Belle’s Stratagem and the opera singer in the Son-in-Law, which she did most admirably, notwithstanding her being ready to lye in.’ Mrs Godfrey Clark, Gleanings from an Old Portfolio, vol. 1 (1895), p. 166.

  28. All quotes in this section from Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee; or a History of the Yorkshire Theatre from 1700, vol. 2 (1795), pp. 132–40.

  29. The Life of Mrs Jordan, vol. 1, p. 23.

  30. Brian Fothergill, Mrs Jordan: Portrait of an Actress (1965), p. 52; this version comes from John Bernard’s Retrospections of the Stage (1830).

  2 THE YORKSHIRE CIRCUIT: 1782–1785

  1. So Elizabeth Inchbald reported. See S.R. Littlewood, Elizabeth Inchbald and Her Circle (1921), p. 23.

  2. Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee; or a History of the Yorkshire Theatre from 1700, vol. 4 (1795), p. 14.

  3. This story is not in Wilkinson, who accuses Swan of behaving meanly to Dora by failing to leave her anything in his will; but it may well come from Dora herself, since it appears in the anonymous Life published in 1832 (see Bibliography), p. 9 of 1886 edition.

  4. James Boaden, The Life of Mrs Jordan, vol. 1 (1831), p. 31.

  5. ibid., p. 41: ‘the quick study of Mrs Jordan could at any time supply her place at a day’s notice’.

  6. According to William Wilberforce, who grew up in Hull in the 1780s; quoted in Gordon Jackson, Hull in the Eighteenth Century (1972), p. 267.

  7. The Wandering Patentee, vol. 2, p. 173. Wilkinson wrote that she set off from Sheffield on 2 November, ‘but did not despatch her business to be ready to do mine until Thursday December 26’.

  8. The registration of births was not compulsory at this date, and if Fanny was baptized, no record exists in Hull. Later she went by the name ‘Frances Jordan’, then changed her name to ‘Frances Bettesworth’ in circumstances that remain obscure.

  9. The Life of Mrs Jordan, vol. 1, p. 43.

  10. Quoted in the anonymous Life (1886 edition), p. 112. No source given.

  11. The Life of Mrs Jordan, vol. 1, p. 48.

  12. When Mrs Robinson, a cast-off mistress of the Prince of Wales, sent Mrs Siddons some poems, she wrote to a friend that she might ‘long for the possibility of being acquainted with her. I say, the possibility, because one’s whole life is one continued sacrifice of inclinations, which, to indulge, however laudable or innocent, would draw down the malice and reproach of those prudent people who never do ill… The charming and beautiful Mrs Robinson! I pity her from the bottom of my soul!’ Sarah Siddons to John Taylor, 5 August 1793, Lewis Melville, More Stage Favourites of the Eighteenth Century (1929), pp. 131–3.

  3 DRURY LANE

  1. The house is considerably changed but has kept many of its original features from the 1730s, when it was built (on the site of an earlier house). It is now a publishing office.

  2. DJ to the Duke of Clarence, n.d., Huntington Library MS: ‘I saw Fox this morning who came over to take a Box for tomorrow – he made several Ah—s when the scene came down and I never saw him afterwards, but I heard he had sat down in a pot of paint and damnd the Prompter and disappeared.’

  3. See Dora’s letter: ‘I must be at the Theatre by 11 tomorrow to sign the Books by the order of the Lord Chancellor [a slip for Chamberlain] therefore I think I had better not go out of Town tonight.’ RA Add. 40/86, n.d. but watermark 1801.

  The company with which Shakespeare was most closely associated and for which he wrote most of his plays was known as the Chamberlain’s Men; under James I they were appointed Grooms of the Chamber and renamed the King’s Men, coming under direct patronage of the sovereign. This remained so until theatres were closed in 1642; and in 1660, with the restoration of Charles II, the Lord Chamberlain – a political appointee, and the highest court official – began to intervene directly in the regulation of theatres. The Lord Chamberlain’s Warrant books for 6 October 1660 show that the leading actors were ‘not only actors but sworn servants as well’, some appointed Grooms of the Chamber, and entitled to wear livery of scarlet and crimson velvet. Mrs Jordan’s contemporary, Robert Baddeley (1733–94), appears to be the last actor to have worn the livery; he was the first Moses in The School for Scandal.

  4. This and quotes in the next paragraph come from Richard Brinsley Sheridan to Thomas Linley, 1775, draft letter, Cecil Price (ed.), The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, vol. 3 (1966), pp. 293–307. He goes on for pages in this vein in order to persuade Linley to reject Garrick’s offer to Mary, saying the theatre was the nursery of vice, that no decent man would marry an actress, that ‘nine out of ten’ bitterly regretted ever going on the stage, that he would rather see her dead, that Garrick could not be trusted, etc., etc.

  5. James Boaden records these remarks, which sound authentic enough, The Life of Mrs Jordan, vol. 1 (1831), pp. 68–9.

  6. The Bruntons were a large theatrical family, and this Miss Brunton was probably the aunt of Elizabeth and Louisa Brunton, whose careers began fifteen years later.

  7. Quoted by W. Fraser Rae, Sheridan: A Biography, vol. 2 (1896), pp. 12–13. Sheridan’s drama with songs, The Foresters, was often mentioned but never finished; at his death drafts of it were found. Mary Tickell also points out that the Country Girl was the part Garrick had offered her, so enraging Sheridan.

  8. Sheridan: A Biography, vol. 2, pp. 13–14.

  9. ibid., p. 14.

  10. Kitty Clive’s joke about the man-midwife was much reported. For Ford’s delivery of Princess Amelia, see Olwen Hedley, Queen Charlotte (1975), p. 127.

  11. Reginald Blunt (ed.), Mrs Montague, Queen of the Blues, vol. 2 (1923), p. 203.

  12. Mrs Inchbald’s edition of The British Theatre (1808) contains introductory remarks to classic plays, several of which refer to Dora Jordan’s pe
rformances. This is from the Introduction to The Country Girl in vol. 16, pp. 4–5.

  13. Boaden says ‘the whig club’ gave her ‘a very handsome present’, The Life of Mrs Jordan, vol. 1, p. 84; the anonymous Life of 1886 (see Bibliography) names Brooks’s and the sum as £300, p. 15; but there is no record of this in the archives at Brooks’s.

  4 PROPRIETOR AND PRINCE

  1. See Madeleine Bingham, Sheridan: The Track of a Comet (1972), p. 343, quoting (presumably) Anne Mathews’s life of her actor husband, who remembered Sheridan entering ‘his own theatre as if stealthily and unwillingly… his appearance amongst his performers never failed to act like a dark cloud… one particular afternoon… Miss de Camp, after a somewhat animated colloquy with him, closed it by telling him “that the performers were all very happy before he entered the room, and that he never came but to make everybody uncomfortable”’.

  2. Richard Brinsley Sheridan to Thomas Grenville, 24 February 1773, cited by W. Fraser Rae, Sheridan: A Biography, vol. 1 (1896), p. 249.

  3. The letter she wrote him in 1809, when Drury Lane burnt down, is evidence of friendly and respectful feelings. See p. 209.

  4. Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, edited by her niece, vol. 1 (1842), pp. 170–71. This was in 1779, when he tried to persuade Fanny Burney to write a play. Her description of him follows a still more admiring one of his wife.

  5. Quoted by W. Fraser Rae in Sheridan: A Biography, vol. 2, p. 69; he gives the reference to Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works, vol. 2, pp. 421–2.

  6. Lord Holland’s account, told him by Mrs Fox, quoted by Arthur Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, vol. 1 (1963), p. 174.

  7. His name was Robert Burt, and he died in 1791, before he could get his bishopric, and confessed on his deathbed (The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, vol. 1, p. 174).