Mrs Jordan's Profession Read online

  In rehearsal they began to think she might be right. The company talked together: ‘I think she is clever. – One thing I can tell you, she is like nothing you have been used to. Her laugh is good! but then she is, or seems to be very nervous. We shall see.’5 Good-naturedly, they surrounded her with as solid a comic cast as could be found in the country. Almost all of them were old enough to be her parents. Tom King, who led the cast, had known Mrs Bland in Dublin in the 1750s; James Dodd, the fop, had been a crony of Tate Wilkinson for years. John Palmer and Mrs Wrighten were old troupers too; and among all these theatrical uncles and aunts, even the one player of her own age, her leading man, John Bannister, had been trained by Garrick.

  The opening was set for Tuesday, 18 October 1785. The theatre was not full by any means, but the audience included Sheridan’s sister-in-law, Mary Tickell, the same Mary to whom Garrick had offered a job, provoking Sheridan’s furious outburst; and the next morning she sat down and wrote a vivid appreciation of what she had seen and heard to her sister Elizabeth Sheridan, who was away in the country:

  I went last night to see our new Country Girl and I can assure you… she has more genius in her little finger than Miss Brunton in her whole body.6… little she is and yet not insignificant in her figure, which, though short, has a certain roundness and embonpoint which is very graceful. Her voice is harmony itself… and it has certain little breaks and undescribable [sic] tones which in simple archness have a wonderful effect, and I think (without exception even of Mrs Siddons) she has the most distinct delivery of any actor or actress I ever heard. Her face I could not see, owing to the amazing bunch of hair she had pulled over her forehead, but they tell me it is expressive, but not very pretty; her figure is such as I have described, and uncommonly pretty in boy’s clothes, which she goes into in the 3rd act. Her action is odd; I think there is something foreign in it, at least it is a little outré, which however was probably affected for the character – for nothing could suit it better. Tickell was in raptures, and, indeed, I think Sheridan would be almost tempted to give us the poor Forresters if he saw what a pretty boy Mrs Jordan makes.7

  The bunch of hair over her face, the little breaks in her speech, the superb delivery with something foreign in her action – Mary Tickell’s letter does conjure up a real person and performance. There was no doubt of Dora’s success. Everyone in the theatre responded to her and, while the farce that followed filled it with music and laughter, the best of the night’s gaiety had been hers. She went home knowing she had sailed over the first hurdle. The newspapers had their say, favourable on the whole, if rather grudging, but it was word of mouth that brought in the audiences.* Her second appearance, on 21 October, already showed its effects; at the third, a week later, the Prince of Wales was in his box, with his uncle the Duke of Cumberland. Lord North, the former Prime Minister, was also there, and was observed to laugh. By now one would expect Sheridan to have seen his own leading lady, but it is not at all certain that he had. His attendance was erratic, and he was distracted both by his friend the Prince of Wales and political business; for Sheridan was also a Member of Parliament. So it was Tom King, acting as his manager, who announced that she would play Viola in Twelfth Night next.

  The first performance, on 11 November, was as successful as The Country Girl, although Mary Tickell had a few reservations this time:

  Now for Mrs Jordan. I dare say I am wrong in my opinion, as everybody else likes her very much indeed, but I own I do not entirely approve of her Viola; to me she was too precise in her manner of delivery, too like tragedy, and, by-the-bye, she (I am sure) would make a sweet tragedian, for her voice in the pathetic is musical and soft, and she has the Siddons’ ‘Oh!’ in perfection… You can’t conceive how she was applauded, and really deserved it.8

  The Prince of Wales came twice to Twelfth Night and spoke publicly of his pleasure.

  Mary Tickell continued to monitor Mrs Jordan’s progress, and to report to Elizabeth Sheridan. On 21 November, having seen her again, she gave the last of her critiques:

  Well, ma’am, all I can say, now that I have seen her [as Imogen in Cymbeline and Priscilla Tomboy in The Romp] is that I think her by much the best comedian on either stage, or that I ever saw, the Imogen was but la la, that is, by way of anything great… the Romp, however, made amends for all, and very great applause indeed she very deservedly received… The Papers did not praise her half enough. I saw Mrs Siddons after the play… She had been in Dr Ford’s box and was delighted with Mrs Jordan.9

  So Mrs Siddons was honest, and generous, enough to change her mind, and to one of the theatre’s proprietors: the Dr Ford who entertained her shared the ownership of Drury Lane with Sheridan and his father-in-law, Thomas Linley. The Doctor’s investment in the theatre was large, but his interest was that of an enthusiastic amateur; he worked as an obstetrician at the Middlesex Hospital. He had become so successful and eminent that the Queen invited him to deliver her last child, Princess Amelia, in 1783, and he may have been preparing to do the same for Mrs Siddons, who had only a month to go before the birth of her next child.10

  Dora was happily free from any anxieties of this kind. It was just as well; she was working so hard she scarcely had time to appreciate her own fame, as it spiralled and grew from day to day. Already, at the stage door, small crowds gathered to watch her arriving for rehearsals; she could not go on foot any longer, but had to hire a coach. Her picture began to appear in prints and magazines: at the start of December there was one showing her as the Romp, and a few weeks later the Lady’s Magazine published an engraving of her as the Country Girl. When the death of Kitty Clive was announced on 6 December, Horace Walpole was prompted to write a poem lamenting that the comic muse was now dead; he was swiftly answered by Peter Pindar, the best known of the satirical poets, who pointed out that, on the contrary, she was alive and well, and appearing at Drury Lane.

  For several months Dora had hardly more than a single day off in the week, and often she was in both play and farce on the same night; in this whirl Fanny’s third birthday and her twenty-fourth passed. On 16 December the management triumvirate, Sheridan, Linley and Dr Ford, showed their delight in their astonishing acquisition by signing a new four-year contract with her. They did not forget to write in the usual penalties – no pay if she was sick, forfeits if she failed to come to rehearsals or performances as required, £105 to be paid in before each benefit – but they doubled her salary on the spot and promised her a benefit each season.

  In the new year (1786) she played Miss Hoyden in Sheridan’s A Trip to Scarborough, acting for the first time alongside the elegant Elizabeth Farren, an established star.* Sheridan’s sister Betsy, and his wife too, came to see her in this. The King also came. After this even Mrs Montague, learned, dignified and a little remote from the world, took notice of her in a letter, saying society was divided between Mrs Siddons’s admirers and Mrs Jordan’s, and that ‘all who have much frequented the theatre, speak of Mrs Jordan as the best actress in parts of humour that ever was seen on any stage’.11

  All through January, February and March, with the energy Wilkinson had admired so much keeping her at full blaze, she took on new parts and brought out ones she had played in the north to dazzle London. One more woman, Elizabeth Inchbald, summed up the achievement of Dora’s first season in London like this:

  She came to town with no report in her favour to elevate her above a very moderate salary, or to attract more than a very moderate house when she appeared. But here moderation stopped. She at once displayed such consummate art with such bewitching nature, such excellent sense, and such innocent simplicity, that her auditors were boundless in their plaudits, and so warm in their praises when they left the theatre, that their friends at home would not give credit to the extent of their eulogiums.12

  So, one after another, the disbelieving friends came to see her and went away converted. For her first benefit at the end of April she earned over £200. These were riches such as neither she nor her
mother had ever known; and there was more to come. The members of Brooks’s – the Whig club in St James’s, to which Sheridan belonged, and Fox, and the Prince of Wales, and many more rich, fashionable lords and aspiring politicians who liked to get drunk and gamble and gossip in fine rooms away from home – made a pretty gesture and presented her with a purse containing £300.13 The rich paid generously when they were amused, and she amused them. London’s money was flowing towards her in a deep, glittering, almost miraculous stream.

  4

  Proprietor and Prince

  When Dora signed her new contract with her three employers, Sheridan, Linley and Ford, on 16 December, she may have expected some friendly gossip with Sheridan, as the principal proprietor, the youngest, and the son of her mother’s old friend and Dublin manager, Thomas Sheridan. Some compliments on her performances were in order, even perhaps a hint of the play he might write for her; but it is unlikely she got much talk of this kind. He must have been aware of the chorus of praise that had greeted her and heard the glowing accounts from his own family; but he himself hardly ever sat through a complete performance of a play – he said so quite openly – and his attitude towards actresses, if not so fixed in disapproval as it had been ten years before, remained cautious. When he did occasionally appear in the green room, his presence was felt to cast something of a cloud; on one such visit Miss De Camp told him to his face that he made them all uncomfortable.1 He was also on bad terms with his father, who was known as ‘old Surly Boots’ in the family; Richard, unlike Thomas, disdained to act himself and took no responsibility for the day-to-day management of his company. When Dora joined Drury Lane, its affairs were of very much less interest to Sheridan than his parliamentary career. He needed the income from the theatre, but relied on a series of managers to do most of the work; it was an unsatisfactory state of affairs for everyone concerned.

  Neither Dora nor anyone else would ever find Sheridan easy to know; he was too complex and various. Yet they were to work together at Drury Lane for the next quarter of a century, their lives running strikingly parallel outside the theatre as well as in. Each was a brilliant performer, she on stage, he both in Parliament and in society; and both dazzled the watching world by taking risks, as good performers do. They were not such different creatures as he liked to think, and must at times have recognized their kinship. Their Irish background gave them a first point in common; both disliked it, but it was inescapable. His Dublin experiences were less catastrophic and painful than hers, but he had some grim years to remember when, still a small child, he was left behind in Ireland with only the servants to care for him, while his parents stayed away in England – leaving a first scar on his sensitive skin. Then, although there was nothing to be ashamed of in his family origins – scholars and writers on both sides, and his father’s work in the theatre more than honourable – he felt them as a profound humiliation. This sense of shame was learnt partly at Harrow, among the boys who could take money and privilege for granted. Sheridan suffered when his school fees went unpaid, as often happened, and when he was not provided with the proper clothes. Clever as he was, he found himself slighted by the masters and tormented by the boys as a ‘poor player’s son’. Such was the English educational system; and when he was fifteen, still struggling through its cruelties, he took another blow when his mother died, far away in France.

  Again like Dora, Sheridan put aside his griefs and relied on his skills, his wit, his charm, his toughness, to make the world do his bidding; and he rose with unprecedented speed and grace through the layers of English society. He was proud, and believed in his own power to succeed; as a young man, he wrote his own proclamation of the virtues of meritocracy:

  I shall one of these days learnedly confute the idea that God could ever have intended individuals to fill up any particular stations in which accidents of birth or fortune may have flung them… As God very often pleases to let down great folks from the elevated stations which they might claim as their birthright, there can be no reason for us to suppose that He does not mean the others to ascend.2

  So, without a penny behind him, he ascended.

  After Harrow he studied law for long enough to qualify as a barrister. He was quickly recognized as a prodigy. At twenty-five, just a year after writing the letter abusing Garrick for his bad faith, Garrick chose him as his successor. Sheridan took on Drury Lane and, still in his twenties, his plays made him famous all over the country; no one had written comedy like him for a hundred years. Then he met Fox, his equal in brilliance, charm and eloquence and a good deal more fortunate in his circumstances. Fox, born to riches and privilege, and possessed of complete social confidence, loved the theatre, and had none of Sheridan’s anxiety about actresses; he pursued several, then lived with and finally married an even lowlier woman, a theatre dresser. Despite this difference in their sexual tastes, the two men were instantly drawn to one another, each seeing something to envy in the other: Fox loved Sheridan’s wit and his power at Drury Lane, and Sheridan saw that Fox could carry him into the world of politics. By 1780 Sheridan was in Parliament, and in the same year he was elected to Brooks’s Club: of the two, the club was possibly the more difficult to enter, for getting into Parliament depended mostly on bribes, but Brooks’s on overcoming the snobbery and prejudice of its existing members. It became one of the centres of his life; you could run up your credit indefinitely with Mr Brooks, and stay all night drinking and playing whist with men who were splendidly careless about lesser things but passionate for politics. Within two years Sheridan was under-secretary for foreign affairs, then secretary to the Treasury.

  But there were no more plays from his pen, only fragments, translations and unfulfilled projects. This was a tragedy for him, for his players, and also for the English theatre. Good plays last better than even the most splendid parliamentary oratory. A Sheridan devoted to turning out serious comedies – an English Beaumarchais, a more intelligent O’Keefe, an early version of Granville-Barker – might have changed the dismal face of the nineteenth-century theatre in Britain. He had the benefit of an outstanding team of actors and actresses to work with, but they found themselves obliged to appear in a mixture of revivals and indifferent new stuff. It meant that the theatre depended heavily on its virtuoso performers – among them Dora – to attract audiences; they were perpetually redeeming thin farces and sentimental rubbish, and appearing in revivals. In due course Dora did perform both Sheridan’s Lady Teazle and his Lydia, but he never gave her a good play of her own, as he should have done.

  None of this was yet clear in 1785; on the contrary, it seemed there was still everything to hope for. Sheridan planned to finish his Foresters at last (he never did) and write more, if only because he needed money to maintain his way of life. The plays he had already written had earned enough to make him rich, but the income slipped somehow through his fingers. He rented too many houses, entertained too many friends, took too many hackney cabs, drank too much claret, spent too much at his club: all absolute necessities in the world he chose to inhabit.

  Whatever Dora expected of him, he would clearly not be another Tate Wilkinson: not an uncle, or a brother, with a ready shoulder to lean on. Measuring him up with a shrewd eye, she saw that she would have to forge her way in the company without favour or special support. She quickly learnt to be tough in her financial dealings with him; at Drury Lane, players who were not tended to go unpaid. None of this prevented her from expressing admiration for his genius, and affection too.3

  Mrs Sheridan certainly saw the value of Mrs Jordan and insisted on it to her husband. She too had been brought up as a professional performer – a singer – by her father, Thomas Linley; and she too had committed an early indiscretion, not so serious as Dora’s but damaging enough. At sixteen she had allowed Sheridan to persuade her to elope with him to France. They were separated by their angry parents, and Sheridan fought two duels on her behalf; they were not allowed to marry for another three years, and some of the shine may have
gone from their early love by then. Elizabeth was beautiful – as can be seen from her portraits – and elegant, good and clever. Her background was exceedingly modest; the Linleys were all working musicians, and her grandfather was a carpenter; and she had the same impulse as Sheridan to escape into a grander, more spacious world. The fame of her beauty and the beauty of her singing voice were such that Garrick had tried to persuade her as well as her sister to join his company as an actress; but whether from her own instinct, or tutored by Sheridan, she felt public performance as a degradation. Indeed, she soon became unwilling even to continue as a professional singer in oratorio, for which her father had trained her.

  Elizabeth Linley’s last public performance before her wedding was made before the royal family at Buckingham House. The King was enchanted by her and presented her father – not her – with £100, a telling transaction: she was the chief breadwinner for the family. Once married, Sheridan supported her in her wish to give up her profession altogether. Instead she helped him with his work, in the theatre and sometimes with the drafting of parliamentary speeches. They had one son; her frail health was a problem – there was tuberculosis in the family – and her father warned her husband, ‘You must absolutely keep from her, for every time you touch her, you drive a Nail in her Coffin.’ It was a hard admonition.