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Author: Jones, George

Biography:

JONES, George (b 1812? d 1879: ancestry.com)

pseudonym Leigh Cliffe

Known by his apparently genuine title, “Count Johannes,” this English-American tragedian was a vain and unstable character, a meddling litigant, and, in the last fifteen years of his life, a public buffoon. He wrote prolifically under the pseudonym Leigh Cliffe. Several sources state that he was born 10 Mar. 1810. He may instead have been born in 1812: according to his unpublished autobiography, when he and his family set out for America, to Boston, in 1818, he was age six; he gave his age as 38 when in 1860 he married his third wife, Mary Eliza Bigelow. In their marriage record, he identified his birthplace as London, his father as George Jones, chemist, and his mother as his father’s wife, Mary. On the terrible voyage to Boston, he survived storms, starvation, and even a Shirley Jackson-like lottery. He debuted as an actor either in Boston at the Federal Street Theatre in 1828 or at the Bowery Theatre, New York, in 1831. On 23 Dec. 1832, he married actress Melinda Sophia Topping (1815-1875); they divorced in 1850. Of their three daughters, one, Avonia (ODNB), became a well-known actress. During a period of residence in England, 1841 to 1857, in 1854 he married Rosetta Maria Van der Gucht, whom he soon divorced. His marriage to Mary Eliza Bigelow, noticed above, ended in divorce in 1869. Obituaries state that upon his death—of kidney disease in a hotel room in New York on 30 Dec. 1879—he was age 69. He died destitute. Several days prior to his death, his adolescent protégé and travelling companion, “Avonia” Fairbanks (a name he gave her), was arrested for assaulting the manager of a Jersey City hotel. The manager had ejected the Count for non-payment of board. In his final years, he was scoffed at for his grandiloquent title, for his pomposity, and for his histrionic mannerisms, yet he impressed many of his contemporaries as “a remarkably good actor.” Some who came to jeer him remained to applaud (Shafer). Obituaries appeared throughout the United States in which his life and career were reviewed sympathetically and at length. His grave is in Maple Grove cemetery, Kew Gardens, New York. (ancestry.com 12 Dec. 2023; Buffalo Commercial, 9 Dec. 1879; New York Sun, 1 Jan. 1880; Y. Shafer, "Count Johannes and the Nineteenth-Century American Theatre Audience," Journal of American Drama and Theatre 3:3 [1991], 51-63) JC

 

Books written (2):

London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1835