Search >> Jones, George ( Count Joannes )

Actor.

Jones and his first wife Melinda had been popular at the Bowery twenty-five years prior to the 1863-1864 season when their daughter Avonia made her stage debut. George C. Odell mentions that Jones’ acting was enjoyed at the Bowery. During the 1863-1864 season, however, Jones is described as "eccentric" and "posing as Count Joannes" with his new wife. Jones and the "Countess" are described as "self-advertising” (Odell 7). They gave a performance of Hamlet at the Academy on April 30, 1864 with an "oddly assorted cast." Odell speculates, "Perhaps if Joannes was mad, he was mad about himself; at any rate, his self-glorification in this event was sickening and perhaps inspired the public desire, exhibited later in his career, to throw fruit and vegetables on the stage he was treading." The show was called "self-made ridiculousness" (Odell 7).

On April 6, 1864, Jones appeared at the Cooper Institute and gave "a dramatic and historical oration, not from notes, but entirely from memory" that he also did for the Sanitary Commission. Jones also gave a Shakespeare jubilee oration at Cooper Institute with a tableaux from the plays (Odell 7).

Walt Whitman explains that Jones was a frequent visitor to Pfaff’s: "The ’Count Joannes’--George Jones, the actor--used to come there; and an able man he was, barring the ’Count’" (qtd. in T. Donaldson 208-09).

References & Biographical Resources

Donaldson, Thomas. Walt Whitman the Man. New York; F.P. Harper, 1896. 276 p. [more about this work]

[pages: 208-09]

Haynes, John Edward. Pseudonyms of Authors: Including Anonyms and Initialisms. New York, 1882. [more about this work]

This text identifies the following pseudonym: Count Joannes (25). [pages: 25]

Odell, George Clinton. Annals of the New York Stage: Volume VII (1857-1865). New York: Columbia University Press, 1931. [more about this work]

[pages: 546,583,605-606]

Wolle, Francis. Fitz-James O'Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties. Boulder, Col.; University of Colorado, 1944. 309 p. [more about this work]

Whitman mentions that he was a visitor at Pfaff's. [pages: 126]