SOURCE: Weales, Gerald. “Here Comes Mrs. Jordan.” Sewanee Review 103, no. 4 (fall 1995): 111-14.

In the following review, Weales offers a generally favorable assessment of Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King, but finds fault in Tomalin's disinterest in Dora Jordan's theater career.

“Nobility, gentry, citizens, princes—all were frequenters of the theatre and even more or less acquainted personally with the performers. Nobility intermarried with them; gentry, and citizens too, wrote for them; princes conversed and lived with them.” So Leigh Hunt wrote in his autobiography, recalling the London theatrical scene as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth. His description might well introduce Claire Tomalin's Mrs. Jordan's Profession, in which Hunt makes a few cameo appearances commenting on the popular performer (“the first living actress in comedy”); but the biographer does not quote this passage, perhaps because Linda Kelly uses it to...