MRS JORDAN
The acclaimed biographer pays tribute to an 18th-century actress and subversive royal favourite
As soon as I came upon the actress Dora Jordan’s name and began to explore her history I saw that she was an extraordinary woman – a heroine in the theatre and in life. She was the greatest comic actress of her day – from the 1780s to 1815. Celebrated in John Hoppner’s painting, which now sits in the National Portrait Gallery, she could play farce and Shakespeare with equal skill. Everyone, from royalty to the poorest theatre-goer in the gallery, was eager to see her perform. Coleridge said her verse-speaking was the best he ever heard, Byron found her ‘superlative’. Yet she was written out of history. Why?
Born Dorothea Bland in 1761, she had a hard childhood in Dublin. Her father abandoned his family, her mother put her on the stage where she showed her gifts at once. But the theatre was a dangerous place for a girl and soon she was pregnant, raped by the manager. She fled to Yorkshire, joined a strolling theatre company and for three years walked from town to town, carrying her baby, facing down disapproval, winning audiences over with her charm.
In 1785 she arrived in London where her first appearance brought the house down. Within days the Prince of Wales was in the Royal Box, followed by lords, politicians, King George and his Queen.
She attracted suitors, lovers but not husbands (despite adopting the name Mrs Jordan), bore two more daughters, and determinedly organised her own professional life, continuing to do so even when Prince William, Duke of Clarence, third son of the King, wooed her. Their affair, considered scandalous, inspired some of Gillray’s wittiest cartoons, and Dora had to reassure audiences that she was not giving up the stage. She pursued her career while living in idyllic domesticity with the royal Duke and bearing him 10 children. King George gave them the use of a great house and estate at Bushy, near Hampton Court, where Dora brought up their sons and daughters – and went regularly into London to work, often taking the youngest baby with her. This was in the 1790s, when Mary Wollstonecraft was proclaiming the rights of women: Dora now looks like a living example.
Their happy life ended when the King decided his sons must produce legitimate heirs and told them to marry German princesses. William obeyed and Dora lost her home, but she went on acting, believing the theatre to be a civilising force in society. ‘A fresh audience gives me fresh spirits’, she told her son George, and considered herself ‘a better actress than I ever was’. The Times published an article attacking her as ‘a degraded woman’ who should be banished to ‘penitence and obscurity’, but when she came on stage at Covent Garden the next day, the audience rose and cheered her.
But her strength was waning. Her two eldest sons were sent to India by the Prince Regent. A son-in-law ran up debts by fraudulently using her bank account. Fearful of arrest, she fled to France. She died alone there, less than a year after her last stage appearance – as though, if she could not be an actress, she could not be.
We need to look at stories like hers, which show us history through women’s eyes. Her absolute commitment to her profession, and at the same time to her children, makes her a remarkable model to working mothers today and an inspiring example of female courage, in spite of the tragedy of the end of her life.