“S. Siddons.”
“Cork, August 29th.
“I hope you will give me the pleasure of hearing from you soon.”
“London, October 7th, 1783.
“For God’s sake, my dear friends, pray for my memory. I had forgot to pay the postage, as you kindly desired, and this poor letter has been wandering about the world ever since I left Cork.
“It was opened in Ireland, you see, so I must never show my face there again. The King commands Isabella to-morrow, and I play Jane Shore on Saturday. I have affronted Mrs. Jackson by not being able to procure her places. I am extremely sorry for it, as I had the highest esteem for herself, and her friendship to you had tied her close to my heart. I have done all I could to reinstate myself in her favour, but in vain. Poor Mr. Nott has been in great trouble; he has lost a brother lately that was more nearly allied than by blood, and for whose loss he is inconsolable. He is not in town, but I hope soon to see him. Adieu! Mr. Siddons, &c., desire kindest wishes. The last letter I wrote to you I was very near serving in the same manner. Is it not a little alarming? I fear I shall be superannuated in a few years.”
Her acrimony is almost incomprehensible. After the expressions used in the above letter we can quite understand how she made herself unpopular. She might have wished secrecy kept, but she was not the woman to hide what she felt. She is unjust also in the statement that Irishmen “not only think but speak coarsely.” On this, as on other occasions, she allowed her wounded vanity to dim her power of observation. The punishment, however, came sharp and sudden, and destroyed her happiness for many a day.
While Mrs. Siddons was acting in Dublin, Jackson, the manager of the Edinburgh Theatre, opened communications with her with a view to an engagement. Finding it difficult to come to terms, he at last travelled over himself, but the history of the negotiation from beginning to end makes us understand Mrs. Siddons’s unpopularity with all her managers. There is too resolute an adherence to her own interests, too much of a calm, cold superiority. She “haggled” and bargained over every step, until Jackson almost gave the whole business up in despair. Encouraged, however, FitzGerald tells us, by a purse of £200, which some noblemen and gentlemen of Scotland had liberally made up to assist him in making the engagement, he at last assented to her terms. The Siddons’ demands for nine nights’ performance, besides a “clear benefit,” was £400. They soon, however, heard of the £200 subscription, and Mr. Siddons then wrote to know if that sum was to be included in the £400, or if it were to come under the head of an extra emolument. The manager was explicit in his statement that the £200 was intended for his benefit. On this Mrs. Siddons announced that she did not wish for any given sum, but would take half the clear receipts. Poor Jackson was obliged to agree to this breach of contract, as he had already gone so far with his patrons in Edinburgh. The history of the negotiation, however, is not pleasant reading for Mrs. Siddons’s admirers, especially when we find later that she contrived to have the £200 subscription paid over to her without the knowledge of the manager, and that at the end of her engagement Jackson found himself a loser. The “charges of the house” were put too low. Actors like Pope, King, and Miss Farren had always allowed something handsome on settlement. Nothing was to be obtained from Mrs. Siddons.
The average profit would have been about £25 a night. From Dublin she returned to London, and acted her second season there; it was even more brilliant than her first, and rendered noteworthy both by her first appearance with her brother, John Kemble, in The Gamester, who from that time frequently acted with her, and by her acting of Isabella in Measure for Measure, in which part she made her first success in a Shakespearean character in London. She looked the novice of St. Clare to perfection. In the spring she made her way northwards to keep her engagement with the Edinburgh manager, and on Saturday, 22nd May, 1784, she appeared on the stage of the Royalty Theatre, in Belvidera. The well-known impassibility of the Edinburgh audience affected Mrs. Siddons with an intolerable sense of depression.
After some of her grandest outbursts of passion, to which no expression of applause had responded, exhausted and breathless, she would pant out in despair, under her breath, “Stupid people, stupid people!” This habitual reserve she soon found, however, gave way at times to very violent exhibitions of enthusiasm, the more fervent from its general expression—once, indeed, the whole of the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth was so vehemently applauded that, contrary to all rule, she had to go over it a second time before the piece was allowed to proceed.