Mrs Jordan's Profession Page 9

  No two paintings of Dora make her look the same, and Hoppner was a glamorizer of women; he was attacked in the press for flattering his subject to please the ‘Jordan Mania of his poor countrymen’.1 Yet he evidently caught something of the shape and suppleness that were so much admired; and the picture was such a draw that he immediately advertised for subscribers for an engraving. It was made the following year. This particular image of Dora became one of the most popular, and it was sometimes copied with the figure of Euphrosyne cut out, leaving her alone with the satyr, and turning it into a much rawer representation of lust and danger than Hoppner can have intended.2

  Other painters were laying siege to her now. Many tried to catch her likeness quickly, working from the auditorium or the wings as she acted; but a few months later she began sittings with one of the great portraitists, George Romney, at his studio in Cavendish Square. Romney was at the height of his fame as a painter of the aristocracy and the theatrical world, and his usual fee for a full-length portrait was eighty guineas; he clearly chose to paint Mrs Jordan for his own interest and pleasure, and without a fee, confident that a buyer would be found later – and of course he was right. She went for the first sitting in the simple costume she wore for The Country Girl, a plain white dress with a blue sash, her hair unpowdered and tumbling loose down her back. The story goes that she and Romney could not agree on a pose, each rejecting the other’s suggestions, until Dora pretended to have had enough, sprang out of the chair in which Romney had sat her, went to the door and turned her head to say she was leaving. The truth was that she had used this pose on stage and knew how effective it was; and when Romney saw it he exclaimed, ‘That will do!’, and so painted her, in twelve sittings.3 He did not glamorize her as Hoppner did, but made her look like a real woman, with something gentle and vulnerable about her dark eyes and nut-brown hair.

  Going about London, she could hardly miss her image or her name. There were the theatrical engravings in print-shop windows, and the sheet music of the songs she sang at Drury Lane, inscribed ‘as sung by Mrs Jordan’, to be sold to the countless young women who entertained their families from the piano at home. Picking up the Morning Herald, she could read, ‘There is no company where Mrs Jordan is not named with uncommon applause’; in other papers find herself praised for her energy, her skill and her good humour.4 Her world expanded round her like a bright bubble. The narrow lodgings, her little family and its demands remained at the centre, rehearsals and performance continued as usual, but there were constant visitors and invitations. Men and women of all sorts and ranks tried to attract her attention and came to see her, offering to help her or asking to be helped. As well as painting her, they wanted to compose songs for her, or cook for her, or make hats for her; they wrote poems about her and discovered family connections with her. A cousin of her father’s, and a baronet too, suddenly decided she was worth knowing: Sir Francis Lumm and his lady invited her to a party. When they found she not only passed muster socially but was a success, they followed up the first invitation with another; she became a regular guest.

  Her fame in London quickly filtered out to the provinces. In Yorkshire those who had doubted her abilities had to change their tune and those who had believed in her nodded wisely. George Inchbald, still walking the circuit with Tate Wilkinson, began to think again about his rejection of her offered love. Now it seemed he had lost a pearl of great price. He took a few days’ leave to go to London, called at Henrietta Street and, with more optimism than finesse, explained that he had come to make a proposal of marriage after all. Dora was human enough to take satisfaction in this, as we know from her telling the story later, but the time it had taken him to have second thoughts had changed things for her too. She turned him down politely; in her mind he had already faded into the man who had missed his chance. He went away and was not heard of again.

  There was a further reason. At some point during this first year in London she met a man who wiped out the image of George entirely. It may have been through the Sheridans, or even in Dr Ford’s own box that she was introduced to his son Richard. Richard Ford became the second villain in her life, but he did not come on like a villain. A drawing of him preserved in his family shows a slim, sensitive-looking and elegantly turned out young man, remarkably handsome, with dreamy eyes and neatly arranged dark hair. He was twenty- seven (two years older than her) when they met, interested in the theatre, but not the sort of man who hung about the green room to see what he could pick up; not at all of the breed of satyrs, but gentle, well educated and serious. The Fords were a Sussex family, solidly established in the professions, and not only through Dr Ford’s medical eminence; there was a brother, and a brother-in-law, in the church – one on the way to a bishopric – and Richard had trained as a lawyer, like Dora’s grandfather, and like Sheridan. Now he had his eye on Parliament.

  There was nothing strange about his finding her adorable: half the men in London shared his view. But he had a better chance, as the son of one of the proprietors and the friend of another, of getting to know her privately; and soon they were evidently absorbed in one another. He was old enough to know his own mind and plan his life accordingly: or so it must have seemed to her. Each had a good deal to offer the other. His involvement in the theatre through his father allowed him to understand her work and encourage her in it; and she in turn could help him with her earnings, for he had still to establish himself as a barrister. He seemed likely to do well; his father’s court connections could do no harm, and his own abilities were soon to win him his seat in Parliament.

  Anyone observing them together – two handsome and gifted young people – might have seen the prospect of a fine professional, social and domestic life opening before them. It would not be lived at the dazzling level of the Sheridans, because Ford had none of Sheridan’s brilliance; on the other hand he was altogether steadier where debts, drink and women were concerned, and Mrs Ford would not expect to suffer the troubles of Mrs Sheridan. Dora let herself dream of a prospect of joint success and happiness that would allow her to obliterate the painful elements of her past; Fanny would be absorbed into their family. They exchanged lovers’ vows and agreed they would marry: or so it appeared.

  Dora did not intend to hurry matters. At the end of her first season, in June 1786, she left Ford in London and travelled north with her mother, Hester and Fanny. Their destination was Scotland, and Tate Wilkinson welcomed her on both north- and southbound journeys, with offers of benefit nights and star treatment. ‘Instead of a suppliant she came splish, splash, dish, dash, to the Leeds play-house, and tossels dangling, &c – Oh! it’s a charming thing to be a woman of quality, – and in lieu of her asking me for an engagement, the case was greatly altered, for I was obliged to solicit the lady who formerly solicited me,’ is his account of their transaction, which obviously gave him great pleasure. He loved his protégées to succeed; there were profits too, as the lady played to overflowing houses in Leeds, York and Wakefield.5 Then she went on her way to Edinburgh, where she found the other black sheep of her father’s family, her uncle John Bland, now the treasurer of the theatre there; and she played opposite his son in The Country Girl. They may well have laughed at the thought of Judge Bland turning in his grave as two of his grandchildren disgraced themselves together; but Edinburgh applauded.6 Her triumphs continued in Glasgow, where she was presented with a gold medal. Then she turned south again.

  The Sheridans, who had been away for the summer in Weymouth and Plymouth, were now back and busy preparing a new musical entertainment from Paris, Richard Coeur de Lion, with a central part for Dora. Elizabeth Sheridan was doing most of the work, adapting the music as fast as she could, because Covent Garden was putting on a rival version; Drury Lane got in first, opening in September, with Dora as Queen Matilda, disguised through most of the action as a blind boy minstrel – pathetic, but in breeches. They scored a success and wiped out the Covent Garden production, even though John Kemble, singing Richard, was tone-deaf. On
ly Horace Walpole grumbled that ‘Mrs Jordan was quite out of her character’, having hurried to Drury Lane to see her: she had become the actress nobody wanted to miss.

  Both Richards kept her busy through the autumn. In November the season was interrupted when the King’s aunt died. Two weeks’ closure of all the theatres was ordered while the court mourned; for the actors the mourning period had an extra edge, because it meant no pay. Dora could bear this without hardship; and the enforced holiday allowed her to resolve things with Richard Ford. What happened now was that she moved, with all her family, from Henrietta Street, and set up house with him in Bloomsbury: a whole house too, newly built and tall, where four-year-old Fanny could run up and down the stairs from attic to basement all day if she chose. No. 5, Gower Street, is just north of Bedford Square, then the northern edge of London: the country started beyond their backyard. There were friendly neighbours with children for Fanny to play with: Dora’s leading man, John Bannister, also lived in Gower Street, with his wife and their young family. Hester and Mrs Bland came with her to run the domestic side of the household, but the dynamics between them changed, because Dora now took on the dignified semblance of a married woman.

  Many people assumed she and Ford had been discreetly married. Ford never gave his side of the story, but he certainly referred to Dora as his wife in writing as well as in conversation, and allowed some very respectable friends, including her cousins the Lumms, to believe they were married, and to entertain them on that basis. So she went by the name. She also believed he intended to legalize the situation as soon as possible. Her friendship with his sister, attested to by letters exchanged after the separation, shows that Miss Ford took the relationship to be an entirely serious one.7

  Dora said later that Ford promised marriage before she agreed to live with him, and that he excused the postponement on the grounds of his father’s disapproval. The excuse was such an old one – Dora must have been in a dozen plays in which the seducer trots out a version of it – that she might have doubted its validity. But she did not; and perhaps Ford did mean what he said at the time. His father’s disapproval was genuine and must have put the Doctor into some difficulties; he was obliged to be tactful, since Mrs Jordan was bringing good money into his theatre, and it would not do to offend her. Nonetheless he is said to have threatened Richard with disinheritance if he went ahead with the marriage.

  Sexual arrangements are always mysterious, powered by forces that defy logic and prediction. The one bit of basic training all girls received in the eighteenth century, along with their needlework, was that they must be strict sexual bargainers. Any other woman could have told Dora not to trust her admirer, however much in love she might be, but to keep him at bay and hold out for a ceremony. Her colleague Elizabeth Farren did as much with the Earl of Derby, year after year, while they waited for the Countess to die, and was much admired for her cool determination. Dora was not so cool. She was not an easy conquest. She was prudent, sober and well behaved, and had lived chastely ever since the disastrous episode with Daly; but she allowed herself to warm up too soon, and failed to make the necessary hard bargain.

  There is an account of what it is like to be the lover of an actress that suggests there is something erotic in the alternation between her public triumph and her private submission:

  it was a dream of rapture to… take her to the theatre in a warm shawl, to stand at the wing and receive her as she came radiant from the dressing room, to watch her from her rear as she stood like some power about to descend on the stage… and hear the burst of applause that followed… to take her hand when she came off, feel how her nerves were strung like a greyhound’s after a race, and her whole frame in a high even glow… And to have the same great creature leaning her head on his shoulder, and listening with a charming complacency, whilst he purred to her of love and calm delights.8

  To have what other men desired, to command his own private performance, to possess the secret of the difference between Dora in private and Mrs Jordan on the stage, was intoxicating for any young man. As for Dora, she had no experience of tenderness from a man, or of domestic happiness. This, at least as much as passion, was the irresistible bait. Richard Ford would make everything good and safe for Fanny as well as for her.

  From Fanny’s point of view it may not have seemed such a good arrangement to be deposed from the centre of her mother’s attention, and no longer so welcome in her bed. And no sooner had they moved to Gower Street than Dora became pregnant. Now the press was on her heels. Town and Country magazine took notice of her move, confidently claiming that she did not love Ford but had taken him for reasons of ‘prudence’ (i.e., money), adding insultingly – and far from the mark – that she had always been ‘prudent in her amours’. Later it printed pictures of Dora and Daly together in its ‘Tête-à-tête’ series, labelled ‘Mrs Tomboy and The Irish Manager’. A more kindly paper, in order to explain the presence of Fanny, assured its readers that Dora had been ‘married to a sea-faring man, who left her next morning’. Ford may have winced, but they could have expected worse.

  The Drury Lane season kept her busy through the rest of 1786 and into the spring of 1787. The repertory system of alternating productions meant she did not have to appear every night; but she might be in either the main play or the farce, or sometimes both, the hours of performance as punishingly long as in the provinces. She continued to be greatly in demand in the parts she had made her own, the Country Girl, Viola, Miss Lucy, Hippolita and Matilda; and she added new ones, among them Miss Prue in Love for Love, in which she and Bannister were particularly admired in the comic love scenes.9 In April, half way through her pregnancy, she played Rosalind in As You Like It for the first time; this too became one of her most popular roles, and one she played to the end of her career. Several paintings show her as Rosalind, disguised as a boy, in yellow knee breeches, ruffled shirt and – sometimes – feathered hat. One, by an ambitious young portraitist, William Beechey, who moved on to many royal commissions, is the most beautiful of all the portraits of her.10 Another lively picture, showing her on stage surrounded by other characters from As You Like It, was the work of Henry Bunbury, a gentleman amateur and equerry to Frederick, Duke of York, the King’s second son.

  The season ran for the ten months from September to June, but the theatres always closed for Passion and Easter weeks, the traditional actors’ holiday; the summer was for touring – by no means a rest. Over the next few years Dora travelled north three times, and once to Cheltenham. To have somewhere to relax, the Fords took a country house by the Thames, at Petersham, near Richmond, a quiet but fashionable retreat for well-to-do Londoners who had to stay within reach of town; but soon this too became less restful than they had intended, as she was drawn into appearing at the Richmond Theatre. Work was her pleasure, and she found it hard to resist these invitations.

  In May 1787 she set off northwards once again. This time her family party included her ‘husband’; just as well for the Yorkshire audiences, given that she was visibly pregnant. Her admirer the Duke of Norfolk was in Leeds, ‘which did not make her profits less at her benefit’ according to Wilkinson, delighted to welcome his dear Jordan again on her way to Edinburgh. There, discreetly far from home, she gave birth to her second daughter. Fanny was almost five when Dorothea Maria – often known as Dodee – was born, in August. Inevitably word got about, and in September the Public Advertiser announced to its readers, ‘Homeward Bound… The Jordan from Edinburgh – a small sprightly vessel – went out of London harbour laden – dropt her cargo in Edinburgh.’ And small and sprightly, she was back on stage in September, and playing the lightest and airiest of parts.

  6

  A Visit to Cheltenham: 1788

  In the summer of 1788 the novelist Fanny Burney saw Dora Jordan acting in Cheltenham. She wrote in her diary for 25 July, ‘We all proceeded to the playhouse, which is a very pretty little theatre. Mrs Jordan played the “Country Girl”, most admirably; but the play is so di
sagreeable in its whole plot and tendency, that all the merit of her performance was insufficient to ward off disgust.’1

  Fanny Burney was there with ‘the Royals’, as she usually called them in her diary. She meant the King and Queen and, on this occasion, the three eldest Princesses, Charlotte, Elizabeth and Augusta, all now adult but still kept firmly under parental discipline; and she was with them as a keeper of robes to the Queen, an official position at court. There were no Princes in sight: they had all fled the rigidly respectable court as soon as they were old enough. Cheltenham was chosen for a summer visit because the King, who was now fifty and had been on the throne for twenty-eight years, had been feeling unwell, and his doctors decided he would benefit from a few weeks at a spa, taking the waters in peaceful surroundings. The arrangements were made as informal as possible. This meant the whole party setting off from Windsor at five o’clock in the morning in a procession of carriages, the royals stopping for breakfast with a conveniently placed aristocrat, Miss Burney and her fellow courtiers taking theirs at a Henley-on-Thames inn. They went on through Oxford, changed horses at Burford, and the journey was done by evening. It had not gone unnoticed: all along the road the towns and villages were crowded with people who had walked in from the surrounding countryside in the July rain to see the royal family pass by. People were as closely packed together as the audience in the pit of a playhouse, Burney noted; ‘every town seemed all face’, and every few miles there would be another band of fiddlers, tuneless and timeless but enthusiastically loyal, scraping out ‘God Save the King’.

  Cheltenham consisted of hardly more than a single street. It was extremely long, clean and well paved, and lined with inns – the George, the Plough, the Swan, the York Hotel; it had its newly built theatre and assembly rooms, but no building considered suitable for the reception of the royal party. A local landowner, Lord Fauconberg, offered them the use of his house, Bayshill Lodge, a short way out of town. Even there, space was so tight that all the male courtiers, the pages and the housemaids had to go back into town to be lodged; the only man sleeping in the house was the King himself. Burney was up at five with her duties, having no maid of her own to help her; but she found time to keep up her diary.