Mrs Jordan's Profession Read online

  Even with this encouragement and help, Dora’s first year on the northern circuit was a severe trial of her strength and spirit. However well Wilkinson understood his business and ran his company, conditions were testing, and his actresses needed their good health and energy at least as much as acting skills. It was not only the travelling across unfamiliar country while preparing to give birth. She also had to face jealousy, disapproval and malice.

  At the start of Wilkinson’s Yorkshire venture his company had often found itself playing in ‘theatres’ that were nothing more than rooms over the stables attached to an inn; he had changed that by his energy and enthusiasm. He knew how to make friends with high sheriffs, local landowners, mayors and aldermen, and work on their civic pride as well as their desire for entertainment. Since 1770 he had opened the new Theatre Royal in York and, observing that both Leeds and Wakefield were ‘opulent and genteel’ places surrounded by splendid new villas, built further theatres of his own in both these cities. Doncaster corporation put up a theatre in 1776. Pontefract also had one; so did Beverley, only nine miles from Hull. Dora had the good luck to arrive at the high point of a brief theatrical golden age for Yorkshire. The circuit was carefully planned to coincide with race meetings, assize weeks and markets, when the country gentry and farmers travelled into town and swelled the audiences. Local regiments were also important patrons and, at the lowest social level, the sailors of the Hull whaling fleets could fill the gallery, if not always to the benefit of the rest of the audience below, as food, drink and worse showered down from above.

  Wilkinson had a house in York, but it is unlikely that anyone else in the company could afford a settled home. So they lived on the road – players and their children, scene painters, prompter, musicians – carrying everything they needed with them from one lodging to the next. Inns were mostly too expensive for regular use; players found lodgings, as close to the theatre as they could. In Hull we find Dora installed ‘at Mr Dunn’s, in Myton-gate’: rooms over a shop. Perhaps Mrs Dunn obliged with some food, or it was brought in. With luck, the place was clean and not bug-ridden. Once settled in lodgings, there were lines to be copied and learned, costumes to be made or repaired, rehearsals in the mornings and sometimes the afternoons too. The theatre doors opened at four, and performances usually lasted from six until midnight. There would always be a main play and a farce, and often an extra short entertainment, and interludes of dances, songs and recitations: hard work all round. Of comfort and privacy there was little; of rivalry and spite there could be a good deal. The moral support and protection of her mother was very necessary to Dora under these circumstances. She earned the bread, but she depended on Mrs Bland for comfort.

  She had the trick of learning her lines fast. Wilkinson speaks of ‘her uncommon labour and study for the Theatre’, and another friend says she was ‘so indefatigable in her application, that she studied a new character and played it between day and day’.4 Not only played it, but played it better than anyone else. Her immediate success made some of the other actresses suspicious of her, and they decided Wilkinson was favouring her. There was always jealousy about stealing parts; and in the nature of things she was bound to do just that.5 During her first months with the company Mrs Smith, who was more advanced in pregnancy than Dora, was so worried about losing ‘her’ part of Fanny in The Clandestine Marriage that she insisted on getting up too speedily after the delivery of her child, and taking strenuous outdoor exercise to prepare herself for the eighteen-mile journey from Doncaster to Sheffield, due to take place only eleven days after her confinement. The result was that Mrs Smith did herself an injury, and the very thing she feared came about. Dora played Fanny; but the respectably married ladies of the company decided to use her pregnancy against her, and they agreed upon a campaign intended to drive her out of the company.

  Before it could take effect, while they were still in Sheffield, Dora was nearly killed by a piece of heavy stage machinery falling from the roof. It missed her by inches, but she kept her nerve, as she always did on stage; she was equally calm when, years later, her costume caught fire. She also found herself another admirer in Sheffield, in the shape of a local landowner, Charles Howard, currently MP for Carlisle. He was a man in his thirties, with radical ideas, and greatly interested in the arts; he was also son and heir to the Duke of Norfolk, moved in the highest circles in London, and was friendly with the Prince of Wales. Howard was generous to those whose work he liked, and befriended both Sheridan and Shelley later; and from now on he took a benevolent interest in Dora.

  The company left Sheffield at the beginning of November, moving to Hull for the Christmas season. Hull was a prosperous and cheerful city, richer than either Manchester or Liverpool, and one of their most important and reliable bases. Its money came from the whaling industry, which gave employment to the men and huge profits to the shipowners. They spent lavishly on their pleasures, hunting, horse-racing, gambling and entertaining; it was ‘as gay a place as could be found out of London. The theatre, balls, great suppers and card parties were the delight of the principal families of the town.’6 Wilkinson called it ‘the Dublin of England’ for the liveliness of its society, and the whole company looked forward to its season there; but little of the gaiety appeared to Dora at first, because after the journey from Sheffield she retreated into her lodgings – Mr Dunn’s in Myton-Gate, or some similarly modest place – where, in November 1782, round about the time of her twenty-first birthday, she gave birth to her first child; or, as Wilkinson put it tactfully in his memoir, she ‘despatched her business’.7

  She had her mother to help her through the ordeal, and everything went well. The child was a girl: and now, whatever her feelings for Daly, she loved her daughter with a painful, protective love, not least because she could identify so closely with her, as another illegitimate and fatherless daughter. She named her Frances. It was not a family name – unless she was thinking of her father – but it was one of the most popular of the period. Dora always used the affectionate form of Fanny, and she had just been playing a Fanny in The Clandestine Marriage, a girl who was misunderstood and turned out of her home, but finally won through to happiness: perhaps it seemed a good omen. No registration of her birth or baptism has come to light, so whatever second name Fanny was given is lost: Daly? Bland? Phillips? Jordan? At the time it hardly mattered. For nearly five years little Fanny would have no real rival in her mother’s love.8

  While Dora remained indoors with the baby – ‘in the straw’ was Wilkinson’s phrase – her character was being blackened by Mrs Smith and her fellow actresses among the people of Hull, especially the ladies. They found unexpected support from a tide of religious enthusiasm – Methodist and Evangelical – that was advancing across the north of England with great speed and force. Soon, even in merry Hull, it would direct strong disapproval at the theatre; and already, although audiences were still large, they were liable to engage in the pleasure of delivering judgement on erring players from their seats.

  Wilkinson decreed that Dora should reappear on the Hull stage on Boxing Day, playing Calista in The Fair Penitent. Both choice of play and casting turned out to be a mistake. The story is a shocking one, since it hinges on forbidden sexual pleasures, and until the last scene Calista herself is shown as far from penitent. She has been seduced by Lothario, and fallen in love with him despite his dishonourable behaviour. His description of the seduction makes it clear she was a willing victim; she is torn between anger and love, and they continue to enjoy themselves (‘let us melt the present hour in bliss’). He refuses to marry her, and she is desperate to preserve her good name, accusing another character of treating her ‘like a common prostitute’. All this was too much for the good people of Hull. A murmur ran through the house: the part of Calista was only too appropriate to what they had been told so assiduously by the good married ladies of the company. ‘There was a cold and sarcastic application of the character of the heroine (Calista) to the performer, among the ladie
s, which chilled the actress,’ wrote Wilkinson.9

  Through the chill Dora played on to the end, when she appeared in black velvet asking for heaven’s mercy and stabbed herself. In the wings her infant daughter was certainly waiting to be fed, held in her grandmother’s arms. Black velvet discarded, baby comforted, Dora resurrected herself and went back on stage to sing her song ‘The Highland Laddie’, which could be relied on to bring the house down; instead, she was hissed. It was a frightening moment.

  Now Wilkinson showed his strength. He at once came warmly to her support. To her, he made light of the incident: she was not to be discouraged. Better, he set about countering the hostile gossip running through the town by putting out a kinder version of her history. People were asked to observe that, although she had a child and no husband, there was no sign of any lover either. She lived with her mother. She was a victim, not a trollop. Everyone could see that she worked extremely hard and conscientiously. She also had good manners, and was evidently a nice young woman.

  A little grudgingly at first, the ladies of Hull decided to forgive her. ‘Mrs Jordan uniformly distinguished herself by propriety in her domestic conduct, and the untaxed modesty of her manners; thus rendering herself the more amiable and distinguished by supporting and firmly protecting a breach which had been so lately assaulted and violated’ – as one commentator delicately put it.10 Such was Wilkinson’s success and Dora’s grit – for she continued to play – that, by her benefit night in the middle of January 1783, she had won over the theatre-going population of Hull. The plot had failed, and although there were further sporadic attempts in the company to upset her and spoil her performance, they were also put down. The company returned to York. Recovered from childbirth, Dora put on boy’s clothes again to sing the part of William in a rustic operetta, Rosina. With this, she and Tate had the satisfaction of finding the theatre sold out, night after night, as long as she appeared.

  She settled into the routine of the circuit. Roads and lodgings grew familiar, and she learnt all the standard repertoire, from Shakespeare, Fletcher, Steele, Dryden and Cibber to the young O’Keefe. No letters from this time survive, and our picture has to come from Wilkinson, from playbills and from what she told her later friend and first biographer, James Boaden. She said nothing to him about the day-to-day detail of her life at this period, either because it all seemed obvious or because she did not want to relive a difficult time. What she did choose to talk of was how much she learnt about her profession from her fellow players, and particularly the women. There was the terrible example of Mrs Baddeley, who came from Drury Lane, where she had been acclaimed by the King and Queen for her beauty and charm, become enormously popular and earned herself a small fortune; on her way to Edinburgh she stopped off to act with the Yorkshire company and, to their dismay, dosed herself so heavily with laudanum before the performance that she could scarcely speak, and the audience decided she was drunk. Not long afterwards her addiction ended both her career and her life; she died at forty, in mental distress and without a penny left of all her earnings.11 At the opposite end of the scale was the shining example of Wilkinson’s earlier favourite, Elizabeth Inchbald, a Norfolk farmer’s daughter who began her theatre career by running away to London. She and her husband acted on the Yorkshire circuit, and when he died suddenly she went south; this was two years before Dora’s arrival, but the company still spoke of her charm, beauty and wit, which she turned to good use by writing plays of her own. George Inchbald was her stepson; before she left she offered to play Hamlet to his Horatio. Hamlet is a part many actresses covet but few achieve, and this was a typical piece of bravura by a woman who matched Dora in force of character, and was to become her friend and collaborator. For the present their link was George, acting regularly opposite Dora; if she got to play Hamlet too, there is unfortunately no record of it.

  As the young male lead George made love to Dora twice a week on stage, and backstage there was gossip that she was fond of him, and even had hopes of marriage; but he was wary of committing himself to a young woman with a child. So he lost the chance to emerge from obscurity, and remains nothing but the actor who had the good luck to work closely with two of the most remarkable women of his time, and failed to make anything of his opportunity.

  Patience was not Dora’s virtue, and during 1784, her third year on the circuit, she showed she had had enough, and became careless and difficult. There were days when she simply did not bother to give her best performance; then other actors criticized her, reasonably enough, and the public grew less warm. She would say she was ill; Wilkinson had to put pressure on her to sing the songs she had made popular, and sometimes to appear at all. She felt she had served her apprenticeship, and was ready for something different.

  Another actress gave her an idea. In the spring of 1785 Wilkinson put on a comedy called The Country Girl in York. It was a polite adaptation by Garrick of a rude old Restoration play, Wycherley’s The Country Wife. An experienced actress, Mrs Brown, took the title role, that of a nineteen-year-old girl who, through very innocence, makes a fool of her guardian. Dora saw the performance and was impressed by Mrs Brown’s technique. She went away, studied the text, and thought hard about it; said nothing to anyone, but decided privately that she would make the part her own. This was a crucial moment for her. When she became celebrated, she was always talked of as a natural actress, one who simply appeared, more or less, in her own character; on or off stage, she was the country girl, or so people liked to believe. The truth was quite different. She planned her most ‘natural’ part with the care, foresight and strategy of a general mapping out a campaign that will carry him from a skirmish in the provinces to a triumphant taking of the capital city.

  The most formidable actress in the country, Sarah Siddons, came from London on a visit to York and her old friend Wilkinson that August, and while she was there naturally went to see his leading lady perform. Dora was playing one of her popular boy’s parts, a soldier in a farce by O’Keefe, but she failed to amuse Mrs Siddons. Her verdict was that Mrs Jordan would do better to remain in the provinces; she was simply not up to London. The remark was made to Wilkinson, but it certainly reached Dora’s ears. No doubt he softened it with a reminder that Siddons was notoriously jealous of other actresses, and lacked any glimmer of comic talent herself. Yet her words must have wounded, especially coming from a sister in arms.

  Siddons was only six years older than Dora, and knew all about the hardships of their profession. She came from a poor acting family and had worked as a child performer. She had been a lady’s maid and when she married, against her family’s wishes, her husband turned out to have little talent. So she was the breadwinner, acting through her pregnancies, on one occasion even going into labour on stage. Ten years before, given the chance of a trial season at Drury Lane, she had been rudely rejected by Garrick, and sent back to provincial touring. The Siddons style was noble, statuesque, commanding, in every way opposed to Dora’s; and while Siddons was now at the very top of her profession, her success had been achieved only in the past three years. She had been forced to wait for a summons from Garrick’s successor at Drury Lane, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the son of Mrs Bland’s old friend.

  Young Sheridan’s faith in Siddons was justified, and he now depended on her to bring in the public, but privately he described her as a ‘magnificent and appalling creature’, adding with his own special brand of cheek that he would as soon think of making love to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not that Mrs Siddons would have welcomed Sheridan’s advances. She was a strict moralist, and her reputation was such that she had recently been appointed ‘Preceptress in English Reading to the Princesses’ by the King and Queen, and gave regular readings to their elder daughters, now in their teens. It was an official court appointment. Such a position demanded perfect discretion, and might make her unwilling to show sympathy or approval to less well-behaved female colleagues.12 However spotless Dora’s current behaviour, her history and the existence of
her child could not recommend her to the Preceptress; and she would have heard her brother John Kemble’s eyewitness account of Dora’s troubles with Daly in Dublin. Kemble was also now established at Drury Lane; like his sister, he excelled in tragedy, and much preferred it to any other form of theatre. Dignity was important to them both in their determination to raise the status of the stage, and with it their own status in society; and Dora was an unlikely ally in this ambition of the Kemble clan.

  Before Dora had time to brood on Mrs Siddons’s opinion of her any further, William Smith also arrived from London. This time he came with a firm offer of £4 a week to abandon the northern circuit for Drury Lane. She took it. Wilkinson may have felt some chagrin, but no surprise. He knew that every ambitious young player felt the draw of the capital like a magnet. However well you did in the provinces, you were still a strolling player; whereas you had only to look at Sarah Siddons to see what success in London could do for you. He gave Dora his blessing.

  She gave her last performance with Wilkinson’s company on 9 September 1785 at Wakefield, then made her farewells, packed up her precious costumes and books, gathered her family about her and set off south. With her went two-year-old Fanny and Mrs Bland, sister Hester, who made herself useful at the price of a temper, and brother George, hankering after a stage career of his own and ready to believe London might give him the opportunity he had somehow missed so far. According to Wilkinson, Dora did not go in high spirits, but ‘with a doubtful heart’: she knew it was a gamble. There were two days in the public coach to be endured, dusty, bumping, rattling hours of discomfort and heat punctuated by stop after stop at the inns along the Great North Road; one of those journeys when you ache to arrive, but also dread the moment of delivery into the unknown. At last they were on Highgate Hill, the city in its veil of smoke below. The final two miles took them through fields and brickyards, a farm here, an inn there, a green-edged stream, a scatter of houses, building sites. Then the streets closed round them, and there was din and confusion as the coach approached Holborn; and they were set down.