Mrs Jordan's Profession Read online

  CLAIRE TOMALIN

  Mrs Jordan’s Profession

  The story of a great actress and a future King

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword

  Prologue: ‘Beside the monuments of the Queens’

  1 The Sins of the Fathers: 1761–1782

  2 The Yorkshire Circuit: 1782–1785

  3 Drury Lane

  4 Proprietor and Prince

  5 Admirers: 1786–1787

  6 A Visit to Cheltenham: 1788

  7 Carnival: 1789–1791

  8 A Royal Education: Prince William

  9 Scandal: 1791

  10 ‘The only rival you can ever have’

  11 Nell of Clarence: 1792–1796

  12 The Man of the Family: Bushy, 1797

  13 The Long Idyll: 1797–1806

  14 The Serpent Enters Paradise

  15 London and Dublin Disasters: 1809

  16 ‘I am a better actress at this moment than I ever was’: 1810

  17 ‘My dear Mother… a Most Injured Woman’: 1811

  18 An Attack by The Times: 1813

  19 ‘Bitter thankless’: 1814

  20 Heartbreak: 1816

  21 The Children: ‘with the King they die’

  22 The Statue’s Story: 1830–1980

  Afterword

  Appendix: Mrs Jordan’s Roles

  Illustrations

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Family Trees

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Claire Tomalin has worked in publishing and journalism all her life. She was literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is the author of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize for 1974; Shelley and His World (reissued by Penguin in 1992); Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1988), a biography of the modernist writer on whom she also based her 1991 play The Winter Wife; the highly acclaimed The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which won the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the NCR Book Award in 1991, as well as the Hawthornden Prize; Mrs Jordan’s Profession (1995), a study of the Regency actress; Jane Austen: A Life (1998); a collection of her literary journalism entitled Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades (1999); and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which won the Whitbread Biography Award and which went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for 2002. All her books are published by Penguin.

  For my children

  Josephine, Susanna, Emily and Tom

  and for Rosa

  List of Illustrations

  Dora Jordan as Miss Lucy in The Virgin Unmasked, undated (National Portrait Gallery Archive)

  ‘The Comic Muse, by Goles!’: Dora Jordan as Miss Hoyden, engraving dated 1 November 1790 (by permission of Sir Brinsley Ford/photo: Eileen Tweedie)

  ‘Mrs Tomboy and the Irish Manager’ in Town and Country magazine, January 1787 (British Library)

  Tate Wilkinson (Hulton Deutsch)

  A scene from The Romp, with Mrs Jordan as Priscilla Tomboy, print dated 1785 (British Library)

  Charles Knight’s engraving dated 20 December 1788, showing a scene from As You Like It performed at Drury Lane, from the 1787 painting by Henry Bunbury (Theatre Museum by courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum)

  John Hoppner’s pastel heightened with chalk of Mrs Jordan, dated 1785 (Government Art Collection)

  John Hoppner’s portrait of Mrs Jordan as Hippolita in She Would and She Would Not, undated (National Portrait Gallery)

  John Hoppner’s ‘Mrs Jordan as the Comic Muse supported by Euphrosyne, who represses the advances of a Satyr’, painted in 1786 (The Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 1994)

  Drawing by Henry Edridge of Richard Ford (by permission of Sir Brinsley Ford/photo: Eileen Tweedie)

  The Duke of Clarence in 1788 (National Portrait Gallery Archive)

  John Hoppner’s portrait of Mrs Jordan as Viola in Twelfth Night (Kenwood House © The Iveagh Bequest, English Heritage)

  Mrs Jordan as Hippolita, engraving of a scene from She Would and She Would Not, undated (The Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 1994)

  Silhouette by Mrs Millicent Brown of Mrs Jordan as Hippolita, once in the collection of Lady Dorothy Neville and reproduced from E.N. Jackson’s History of Silhouettes, 1911 (British Library)

  James Gillray’s ‘The Lubber’s Hole’, 1 November 1791 (British Museum)

  James Gillray’s ‘Neptune reposing after Fording the Jordan’, 24 October 1791 (British Museum)

  William Dent’s ‘The Flattering Glass, or Nell’s Mistake’, 28 October 1791 (British Museum)

  James Gillray’s ‘La Promenade en Famille’, April 1797 (British Museum)

  Engraving from Steeden’s drawing of Mrs Jordan as Nell in The Devil to Pay (by permission of Sir Brinsley Ford/photo: Eileen Tweedie)

  George FitzClarence, from The Great Illegitimates, 1832 (British Library)

  Isaac R. Cruikshank’s ‘Cl----ce’s Dream: or, Binnacle Billy Receiving an Unwelcome Visit From ye Other World’, April 1821 (Theatre Museum by courtesy of the trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum)

  Statue of Mrs Jordan by Francis Chantrey, 1834 (The Royal Academy of Arts/The Royal Collection)

  George Henry Harlow’s painting of Frederick, Eliza and Adolphus FitzClarence at Bushy, c. 1805

  Drawing of Augusta and Amelia FitzClarence, c. 1820 (reproduced by courtesy of Viscount Falkland/photo: Derrek Witty)

  Lord Adolphus FitzClarence as a corsair by Henry Wyatt (Brooks’s Club, St James, reproduced by courtesy of Viscount Falkland/photo: Derrek Witty)

  Dora Jordan by George Romney, undated (in private possession)

  Sir William Beechey’s portrait of Mrs Jordan as Rosalind, undated but c. 1788 (in private possession)

  Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

  King’s Theatre, Haymarket (E.T. Archive)

  The Revd Matthew Peters’s portrait of Mrs Jordan in stage costume, undated (in private possession)

  John Russell’s pastel of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, dated 1788 (National Portrait Gallery)

  John Russell’s pastel of Mrs Jordan, dated 1792 (Guildford Borough Council/ Bridgeman Art Library)

  George Romney’s painting of Mrs Jordan as ‘The Country Girl’, 1787 (Waddesdon Manor/National Trust)

  View of Bushy House c. 1820 by Ziegler (Dr Clapham, Director of National Physical Laboratory, and Mrs Clapham)

  Sir George Hayter’s group portrait of the FitzClarence children at Bushy, c. 1830 (House of Dun, National Trust of Scotland)

  Sir William Beechey’s portrait of Mrs Jordan in Empire dress, undated (from the private collection of Viscount De L’Isle)

  TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

  p. 152 Playbill for the only performance of Vortigern, the Shakespeare forgery, at Drury Lane on 2 April 1796 (Theatre Museum)

  p. 180 Title-page of ‘The Blue Bell of Scotland’, published in 1800, giving Mrs Jordan’s name as composer (British Library)

  pp. 254–5 Letter from Mrs Jordan to John McMahon, adviser to the Prince Regent, written in January 1812 (Huntington Library)

  p. 271 Playbill for a performance of As You Like It and The Devil to Pay at the Bath Theatre Royal in 1813 (University of Bristol Theatre Collection)

  p. 300 The death certificate of Mrs Jordan, from the archives at Saint-Cloud, dated 5 July 1816 (Archives of Mairie de Saint-Cloud)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MRS JORDAN’S PROFESSION

  ‘Riveting… conjures up a rich, alluring period which,
in its brittle decadence and love of scandal and flamboyance, often seems closer than the nineteenth century to our own times… the most haunting biography I have read this year’ – Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times

  ‘The strangest and most sensational story she has told so far… a miraculously detailed portrait – as brisk, unsentimental, good-humoured and fairminded as its subject’ – Hilary Spurling in the Daily Telegraph

  ‘Tomalin triumphantly succeeds in saying – and in seeing – much that is new and worth while. In part she does so by her mastery of the context, brilliantly recreating Dora’s milieu… a fin de siècle atmosphere heavy with assignation, infidelity, betrayal and revolution… above all, she takes Dora seriously as a woman in ways that previous royal writers never did’ – David Cannadine in the London Review of Books

  ‘Enthralling… Ms Tomalin’s biography is as enchanting as its subject. It brilliantly brings to life a historical and theatrical epoch and a saga in which the nineteenth-century House of Hanover foreshadows the House of Windsor today’ – Michael Arditti in the Sunday Express

  ‘Only Claire Tomalin could have found this story – for such narratives have to be excavated… and only Claire Tomalin could have written this story with the same scrupulousness and sheer imaginative sleuthing that distinguished her last book [The Invisible Woman]’ – Neil Paraday in the Guardian

  ‘Claire Tomalin’s biographies hum with love and anger – an anger civilized and well researched, and all the more effective for that… she has never found a more appealing subject than Dora Jordan’ – Loraine Fletcher in the New Statesman & Society

  Foreword

  Books do not always obey the author’s orders, and this book, first planned as a general study of actresses working in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, quickly became obstreperous. As I absorbed myself in collecting material I soon realized that there was far too much for one volume. Then – and this was more important – came the realization that I had found, in one of the earliest of the actresses I planned to investigate, a character so strong and a story so extraordinary that she demanded a whole book to herself. Dora Jordan is not an entirely unknown figure, but she is at best half known: most people have heard of Mrs Siddons, few respond to the name of Mrs Jordan, although in their lifetime they were equally celebrated. Mrs Jordan has been written about occasionally over the two hundred years since she reigned at Drury Lane, sometimes abusively, sometimes admiringly; but I do not believe justice has been done either to her story or to her personality. There is a special tone that creeps into eulogies of actresses, presenting them as lovable, wayward creatures and striking them stone dead in the process; and an actress whose private life connected her with the royal family presents particular difficulties. Mrs Jordan has evoked embarrassment, jocularity, reverence and abuse, according to the writer’s prejudices.

  Most actresses have to sit down under whatever treatment critics and biographers hand out to them. The first well-established one to challenge the idea by producing an autobiography, Elizabeth Inchbald – a contemporary and friend of Dora – lost her nerve and destroyed her manuscript on the advice of her confessor: she was a Roman Catholic, and this was 1821. None of the great actresses of the eighteenth century – Peg Woffington, Frances Abington, Susanna Cibber, Kitty Clive – left memoirs, although a failed one, Charlotte Charke, did; nor, in the next century, did Lucia Vestris, Maria Foote, Fanny Stirling or Fanny Kelly, all highly intelligent and effective women. Only in the second half of the century did it become acceptable for them to give their private histories to the public, and then only up to a point; Fanny Kemble, Madge Bancroft and Ellen Terry all tidied themselves and their families up to appear more presentable. Dora Jordan produced no autobiography, but we have something almost as good, at least for twenty-five years of her life, and that is her letters. A few, treasured by theatrical friends, were published in the decades following her death, in memoirs, and by her first biographer, James Boaden, but most remained unpublished and unknown. None of her daughters seems to have kept any, or if any did, later generations destroyed them; but two of her sons preserved theirs, and passed them down through the family. These were the eldest, George, and the fourth, Adolphus, who was only fourteen when she died; forty letters to him are still in private possession. George also kept a good many; and he also preserved letters written by his younger brothers and sisters.

  Many hundreds of letters from Mrs Jordan to the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV, and the father of most of her children, have survived. They were preserved in the first instance by Queen Adelaide, who found them after the King’s death; she was kind enough to keep them and bequeath them in turn to Frederick, Dora’s eldest surviving son at the time of the Queen’s death. He clearly intended them to be kept together as part of his estate – there is a note to that effect, written not long before his death in 1854 – but he died in India, his only daughter did not marry, and they were somehow scattered. During the first three decades of this century letters appeared in various sales. Some were acquired by George’s great-grandson, the fifth Earl of Munster, who presented about 270 of them to the Royal Archives; and about 600 more went, in two batches, to the Californian collector Henry Huntington. In California they have sat, and as far as I know only one scholar has looked at them.

  This was Arthur Aspinall, Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading. In 1951 he produced an edition of Mrs Jordan’s letters at the request of the fifth Earl. Aspinall had already achieved the colossal task of editing the complete letters of King George III, and was engaged on an edition of the complete letters of his son, first Prince of Wales, then Prince Regent, then King George IV; also those of Princess Charlotte, granddaughter of George III and daughter of George IV. All these letters were published in full, with copious notes, and are a mine of information for students of the period; they fill many stout volumes. But when Professor Aspinall came to edit and publish the correspondence of Mrs Jordan he adopted a different style. To begin with, he made a great many unexplained cuts; and as well as being cut, the letters were incorporated into a curiously unsympathetic narrative. There are mistakes – for instance in giving the dates of the children – and Aspinall also omitted without explanation a crucial letter in the Huntington collection which proves that Mrs Jordan was innocent of accusations made against her in royal circles that she threatened to blackmail her royal lover.

  Aspinall’s cuts do her other disfavours and distort the picture of her character. He removed, for instance, much of the good and sensible advice she gave the Duke. He also removed all her warm expressions of sympathy for the troubles of the royal family – the King’s madness, the illness and death of his youngest daughter. He removed a mass of evidence of her conscientious care of her children and descriptions of daily life at Bushy, their house and estate near Hampton Court. He removed most of her humour. Professor Aspinall, so at ease in the world of politics and the royal family, was clearly not at ease in the world – or the mind – of Mrs Jordan.

  His approach is also generally condescending, which seems misplaced, for although she was no more highly educated than other women of her generation, her letters are intelligent and full of good sense, and she was by no means uncultured. She was able to write correct and charming verse. She knew Shakespeare and the chief dramatists, naturally, as well as Milton, Goldsmith, Sterne, Defoe and Shenstone. She read and appreciated Coleridge and Wordsworth and she mentions Dr Johnson and Hogarth; she recommended books to the Duke, read with her children and sent her sons books when they went off to school, and the army and navy. She composed, performed and published music. She employed talented artists to paint her children, as well as sitting herself to many leading painters.

  In certain respects Aspinall was a superb editor. His knowledge of the period was enormous, and he provides a lot of background information. He was working under the constraint of having to fit the material into one volume – not for Mrs Jordan the stately
spread of royal correspondence – and some of his cuts are justified, because there are boring and repetitious passages in her letters; although it must be said that the same is true of those by royal personages. Still, it is surprising to find how much failed to interest Aspinall; and the only biography to appear since he edited the letters – Brian Fothergill’s of 1965 – relied on his edition, and did not use the originals in the Huntington.

  History – and biography, which is a branch of history – is always a matter of choice and control. The writer or editor decides what is history and what is not. Percy Fitzgerald, the 1884 biographer who entirely omitted to mention Mrs Jordan in his two-volume Life and Times of William IV, took an attitude that seems extreme to us but was perfectly normal for its time. Professor Aspinall allowed her to exist, but ignored or devalued large areas of her expèrience, notably the domestic side of her life.

  My own prejudices make me devote much less attention to her theatrical performances than previous biographers have done; I believe it is hard for the general reader to follow detailed accounts of past productions, however fascinating to the theatre specialist. So I have not attempted to list every performance she gave. An appendix does what it can in this area. In the main text I have only tried to show, through the comments of her fellow players and the critics, what an incomparable actress she appeared to them, and through her own words what her profession meant to her.

  Shakespeare’s woman: Dora Jordan.– Charles Lamb

  … real solemn history, I cannot be interested in… the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. –Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

  Arrah, now, honey… won’t I sit in the gallery, and won’t your Royal Grace give me a courtesy, and won’t I give your Royal Highness a howl, and a hiss into the bargain!– Irish cook to Mrs Jordan