The deleterious effects of excessive sensibility are a recurrent theme of Austen’s fiction from her earliest jokes in Love and Freindship to Sanditon. Her joke about O’Neill’s sensibility is shared not only with Anna but also with her other favoured niece Fanny Knight:
I just saw Mr Hayter at the Play, & think his face would please me on acquaintance. I was sorry he did not dine here. – It seemed rather odd to me to be in the Theatre, with nobody to watch for. I was quite composed myself, at leisure for all the agitation Isabella could raise. (Letters, p. 285)
Austen’s ironic remark, ‘It seemed rather odd to me to be in the Theatre, with nobody to watch for’, comically portrays herself in the role of the chaperone of her young nieces, guarding their exposure to excessive sensibility or ‘agitation’. Earlier, we saw her worrying about Fanny’s agitation on seeing Kean. As indicated, both Kean and O’Neill were reputed to have the power of making their audience faint under their spell. Towards the close of this letter, Austen makes a striking reference to the two most famous tragediennes of the age, and uses the ardent acting style of O’Neill to express the contrasting natures of her young nieces:
That puss Cassy, did not shew more pleasure in seeing me than her Sisters, but I expected no better; – she does not shine in the tender feelings. She will never be a Miss O’neal; – more in the Mrs Siddons line. (Letters, p. 287)
This passage, perhaps more than any other single reference to the theatre, is revelatory of Jane Austen’s intimacy with the late Georgian theatre. As she was clearly aware, one of the current debates in the theatre world was the contrasting acting styles of Mrs Siddons and Miss O’Neill. The latter’s ‘extreme natural sensibility’ was played off against the former’s classical nobility. For Hazlitt, Siddons was the embodiment of ‘high tragedy’, O’Neill of ‘instinctive sympathy’.67
O’Neill’s biographer, Charles Inigo Jones, complained of ‘the rather too invidious comparisons constantly kept up betwixt her and Mrs Siddons’, and yet proceeded to make his own comparisons, contrasting not only the acting styles of the two women but their physical attributes which, he believed, embodied their acting styles. Thus Siddons’s ‘grandeur and dignity are pictured in her appearance’, and O’Neill’s ‘excess of sensibility is predominant … and well pourtrayed in her countenance’.68
One of the best comparisons of the two tragedians is made in Oxberry’s memoir of O’Neill:
Miss O’Neill was a lovely ardent creature, with whose griefs we sympathized, and whose sorrows raised our pity. Mrs Siddons was a wonderful being, for whom we felt awe, veneration, and a more holy love … Miss O’Neill twined most upon our affections, but Mrs Siddons made an impression on our minds, that time never eradicated.69
Austen’s observations in the scanty correspondence that survives offer decisive, hitherto neglected, evidence of her deep familiarity with the theatre of Siddons and O’Neill. In addition, her manner of comparing social conduct to theatrical models such as her niece’s Siddons-like dignified behaviour denoting a lack of sensibility (‘the tender feelings’) betrays a striking propensity to view life through the spectacles of theatre.
In January 1801, Cassandra Austen was compelled to abandon a trip to London, where she had intended to visit the Opera House to see the celebrated comic actress Dora Jordan (1761–1816). Jane wrote to her: ‘You speak with such noble resignation of Mrs Jordan & the Opera House that it would be an insult to suppose consolation required’ (Letters, p. 71).
The King’s Theatre or Italian Opera House in the Haymarket had been built by Vanbrugh in 1705. The Opera House was destroyed by fire in 1789 and was rebuilt on a vast scale in 1791.70 On the opening night, Michael Kelly sang in The Haunted Tower and Dora Jordan performed in Kemble’s farce, The Pannel.71 In 1799 the interior of the Opera House was partly remodelled by Marinari, the principal scene painter at Drury Lane.72 Austen’s sympathy for Cassandra’s double disappointment was therefore equally distributed between seeing the new Opera House and seeing the great Mrs Jordan.
In 1801 Dora Jordan was at the height of her powers, and the star of Drury Lane. As Siddons was the Tragic Muse of the London stage, so Jordan was the Comic Muse.73 Hoppner’s portrait of Jordan as ‘The Comic Muse’ was a huge success at the Royal Academy in May 1786.74 Not even Jordan’s long-term liaison with the Duke of Clarence (to whom she bore ten children over a period of twenty years) could stem the tide of ‘Jordan-Mania’ that swept the country in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her image was everywhere: in the theatre, in theatrical engravings in print shop windows, and in the numerous caricatures by Gillray and Cruikshank. Sheet music of the songs that she sang at Drury Lane were sold on the streets.
Dora Jordan was unparalleled in comedy.75 She appealed to both the critics and the theatre-going public who flocked to see her. Coleridge, Byron, Hazlitt and Lamb were among her admirers.76 Hazlitt described her as ‘the child of nature, whose voice was a cordial to the heart, because it came from it … whose laugh was to drink nectar … who “talked far above singing” and whose singing was like the twang of Cupid’s bow’.77 Leigh Hunt also singled out her memorable laugh and melodious voice: ‘Mrs Jordan seems to speak with all her soul … her laughter is the happiest and most natural on the stage.’78
Jordan’s extensive range was unusual in an era during which actors tended to be restricted to specific kinds of role. She played genteel ladies, such as Lady Teazle and Widow Belmour, and romantic leads such as Lydia Languish and Kate Hardcastle. She was also famous for her ‘low’ roles, playing chambermaids, romps and hoydens to much acclaim. Miss Prue, Miss Hoyden, and Nell in The Devil to Pay were among her favourites. She was also famous for her ‘breeches roles’, playing the cross-dressed Hippolita, Harry Wildair, Rosalind, Viola, and Little Pickle in the farce The Spoilt Child. The theatre chronicler John Genest claimed that she ‘sported the best leg ever seen on the stage’.79
Jordan’s performance as the innocent country girl in Garrick’s adaptation of William Wycherley’s highly risqué Restoration comedy The Country Wife combined the role of a hoyden with a ‘breeches part’. She played the Country Girl for fifteen seasons at Drury Lane from 1785 to 1800. In one of the most memorable scenes, Peggy takes a walk in St James’s Park, disguised as a young boy, as her jealous guardian is determined to protect her from other men. In a letter of 1799, Austen uses the notion of the ‘Country Girl’ to express doubts about the behaviour of an acquaintance, Earle Harwood, who had married a woman of obscure birth:
I cannot help thinking from your account of Mrs E. H. [Earle Harwood] that Earle’s vanity has tempted him to invent the account of her former way of Life, that his triumph in securing her might be greater; – I dare say she was nothing but an innocent Country Girl in fact. (Letters, p. 48)
Austen’s instinctive and imaginative way of using stage characters as a point of reference in her letters, coupled with her habit of weaving in quotations from favourite plays, offers yet another striking example of the range and extent of her familiarity with the drama. She is viewing the world around her through the spectacles of theatre, and, simultanously, showing her awareness of the intricacies and nuances of the kinds of social stratification reflected