CLAIRE HARMAN
Fanny Burney

A Biography

Dedication

To my mother and my father

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Burney Family Tree

Preface

A Note on Nomenclature

1 A Low Race of Mortals

2 A Romantick Girl

3 Female Caution

4 An Accidental Author

5 Entrance into the World

6 Downright Scribler

7 Cecilia

8 Change and Decay

9 Retrograde Motion

10 Taking Sides

11 The Cabbage-Eaters

12 Winds and Waves

13 The Wanderer

14 Keeping Life Alive

Post Mortem

Appendix A: Fanny Burney Undergoes a Memory Test

Appendix B: Additions to O.E.D. from the writings of Fanny Burney, compiled by J.N. Waddell

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Burney Family Tree

Preface

Dr Johnson: Ay, never mind what she says. Don’t you know she is a writer of romances?

Sir Joshua Reynolds: She may write romances and speak truth.¹

By dint of outliving her parents, five siblings, husband and child, the novelist Fanny Burney (then Madame d’Arblay) became the caretaker of a vast quantity of family papers in her later years. Her father’s archive alone seemed at one point to be taking over her life, for, as she discovered when she began to sort through his literary remains in the 1820s, he seemed to have ‘kept, unaccountably, All his Letters, however uninteresting, ceremonious, momentary, or unmeaning’. She destroyed quantities of these papers and edited the remaining ones ruthlessly using scissors and heavy black ink; a process she applied to her own archive in the last decade of her life and which was continued after her death by her niece and literary executrix Charlotte Barrett, who pasted over more than a thousand passages in Madame d’Arblay’s diary, and cut out or deleted many others.

Millions of words remain, nevertheless, in tens of thousands of family letters, diaries, memoirs, drafts, notebooks, manuscripts and Fanny Burney’s famous journal covering the period from 1768 until shortly before her death in 1840. The historical and literary importance of the Burney papers was recognised early on. Fanny Burney was one of the best-known and most highly respected novelists of her generation, whose ‘uncommonly fine compositions’² had been admired by writers as diverse as Jane Austen and Lord Byron. She had also led a long and eventful life which brought her into contact with some of the most famous men and women of her time; David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Warren Hastings, Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, Napoleon. She was a member of the Royal Household during the period of George Ill’s ‘madness’ in 1788 and a refugee in Brussels during the Battle of Waterloo: she had been an intimate of Dr Johnson in the 1780s, yet lived long enough to meet Sir Walter Scott. When the Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay were published in seven volumes between 1842 and 1846, she began a new posthumous career as the leading journalist of the Georgian age.

The first edition of the Diary and Letters was a re-editing, with some deletions, of Burney’s own selection, bequeathed to Charlotte Barrett in 1839 ‘with full and free permission … to keep or destroy’,³ though Burney must have calculated that the loyal and scholarly ‘Charlottina’ was unlikely to destroy much. The diaries have been in print ever since, in one form or another. Some editions, like Christopher Lloyd’s,⁴ were short and sweet, presenting Fanny Burney as a sentimental Regency ‘miss’; others, like Austen Dobson’s of 1904, attempted to put the work in its historical context. Annie Raine Ellis’s 1889 edition of the Early Diary (using material not touched by Mrs Barrett, who began her selection with the publication of Evelina in 1778) was remarkable for its thoroughness and completeness: she included everything she could read of the mauled manuscripts (cut away and pasted over by several generations of the author’s heirs) and included excerpts from Susan and Charlotte Burney’s papers as well.

Ellis’s approach prefigured that of modern scholars, who have laboured to recover every obliteration by means of the latest x-ray and photographic technology. The Burney Project at McGill University is dedicated to this task, which has been going on for some thirty years and is not yet within sight of an end. Joyce Hemlow, the great Burney scholar and biographer, brought out the first of what she expected to be a ten-volume edition of Fanny Burney’s Journals and Letters in 1972. In the event, she oversaw the publication of twelve volumes between that date and 1984 and the present team (under Professor Lars Troide) has published three of a projected further ten volumes of the Early Journals and Letters. Recently there have also been scholarly editions of Fanny Burney’s plays (all but one unperformed in her lifetime), Sarah Harriet Burney’s letters, Charles Burney’s letters and fragmentary manuscript memoirs, and there are plans to publish the letters of Susan Burney and possibly of Charlotte Burney too. By the time the Burney Project has exhausted its rich mine of material, we will know more about this logomaniac tribe and their associates than any other eighteenth-century family.

The very length and thoroughness of Fanny Burney’s journals and letters enforce their standing as a trustworthy record, but while they provide almost unrivalled documentation of fact, they also represent a huge input of authorial control over the interpretation of her life. Basically, a writer who seems to leave no stone unturned is not inviting interpretation at all. ‘Mystery provokes Enquiry’, as Burney herself warned her cousin Rebecca Sandford⁵ when she was arguing to keep intact the text of her forthcoming Memoirs of Doctor Burney – a book which, as we shall see, provides countless examples of the manipulation and invention of biographical fact. Burney’s nephew Richard was anxious about the book exposing the family’s humble origins, or, more specifically, his humble origins, since he had omitted to tell either his wife of twenty years or the College of Arms (when he was applying for armorial bearings in 1807) of his grandmother’s ‘undignified Birth’, not to mention – if he knew of it – his own mother’s illegitimacy. Fanny’s refusal to withdraw the Memoirs might seem to cast her in the role of fearless truth-teller on this occasion, but her motive was far more to avoid provoking Enquiry than to dispel ‘mystery’ per se. Her version of her father’s life may not have been the whole truth, but it was full: everything seemed to be accounted for. As a way of controlling information about the family it was highly effective; as proof of Fanny’s veracity it left much to be desired.

The Memoirs have consistently been viewed as an aberration, both of style and technique, an embarrassing filial rhapsody written by a woman in her dotage. Biographers look to Burney’s diaries (especially the early ones) as much purer sources of information: ‘we never turn from the Memoirs to the Diary without a sense of relief’, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his well-known essay on Madame d’Arblay; ‘the difference is as great as the difference between the atmosphere of a perfumer’s shop, fetid with lavender water and jasmine soap, and the air of a heath on a fine morning in May’.⁶ But since Memoirs of Doctor Burney was essentially Madame d’Arblay’s autobiography, based on and superseding her journals, they cannot be dismissed quite so readily. Nor does Macaulay’s delight in the heathy freshness of the Diary acknowledge the artificiality of the form which we take to show Fanny Burney at her most open and truthful. Burney began her diary in March 1768, aged fifteen, with a famous address to Nobody, surely one of the most self-conscious, attention-grabbing pieces of supposedly confidential writing ever composed:

To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance & actions, when the Hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a Journal: a Journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole Heart! But a thing of this kind ought to be addressed to somebody – I must imagion myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends – to one in whom I should take delight in confiding, & remorse in concealment: but who must this friend be? – to make choice of one to whom I can but half rely, would be to frustrate entirely the intention of my plan…. To whom, then, must I dedicate my wonderful, surprising & interesting adventures? – to whom dare I reveal my private opinion of my nearest Relations? the secret thoughts of my dearest friends? my own hopes, fears, reflections & dislikes? – Nobody!

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved – to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life!⁷

Behind the elaborate joke of this is the admission that the whole enterprise is unsound, that there is, literally, nobody with whom the diarist can be completely unguarded.

On matters of ‘unlimited confidence’ and ‘unremitting sincerity’ Burney was, like all diary-writers, on shaky ground. Matters of fact, on the other hand, she felt to be her forte. Fanny Burney was blessed with a phenomenal memory and could repeat back quantities of conversation on one hearing, as if, as her father joked, ‘you carry Bird Lime in your Brains – for every Thing that lights there, sticks’.⁸ This knack seems to have had an affinity with her sister Hetty’s prodigious ability to transcribe or play back pieces of music (Hetty amazed the composer Sacchini in 1773 by playing from memory the overture to his new opera Il Cid, which had not yet been published).⁹ When Fanny memorised speech, the sound of the words was pivotal: ‘my memory was not more stored with the very words than my voice with the intonations of all that had passed’, she said when recalling part of the trial of Warren Hastings.¹⁰ On another occasion she wrote of a friend’s speech-mannerisms, ‘I think, if possible, his Language looks more absurd upon Paper even than it sounds in conversation, from the perpetual recurrence of the same words’, which suggests that she was transcribing from memory word for word. This wasn’t the only way Fanny Burney recorded speech – sometimes she remembered the argument and reconstructed the wording more loosely (I have included an interesting example of this process at work in her recollection of Warren Hastings’ trial in the Appendix) – nor was her diary always freshly written, however spontaneous it sounds. She came to rely on ‘writing up’ her journal – sometimes at a distance of weeks or months – using notes she had jotted down on erasable ivory tablets. There was some element of hindsight at work in almost all her autobiographical writing.

Fanny Burney’s phenomenal powers of memory may well have made her overconfident about her own rightness, which she extended from being reliable in matters of fact to being correct in interpretation. Even in her own lifetime, some people thought Fanny Burney too much of a novelist to be taken seriously as a historian or biographer, and when in her later years she published Memoirs of Doctor Burney, the critic John Wilson Croker thought her ‘recollections’ betrayed ‘consummate art – or a confusion of ideas which has had the same effect’.¹¹ More damningly, several readers who had personal knowledge of people and events mentioned in the Memoirs objected very strongly to Fanny’s version. Her stepbrother Stephen Allen leapt to the defence of his mother, the second Mrs Charles Burney (who, as we shall see, came off extremely badly in the Memoirs), and Mrs Delany’s ex-servant, Anne Agnew, felt the portrait of her former mistress so faulty that the author ‘must fancy she was writing a novel and therefore could embellish her story in any way she liked’.¹² In the light of these criticisms, the affectionate joke that Samuel Johnson made about Fanny back in the 1780s rings a little hollow: ‘[N]ever mind what she says. Don’t you know she is a writer of romances?’¹³

Ironically, Madame d’Arblay prided herself on her ‘reverence for truth’;¹⁴ indeed she seems to have been obsessed with it. ‘I can use no softer term than Defamation for the least attack upon my veracity’, she wrote defiantly during the row with Stephen Allen following the publication of the Memoirs. Joyce Hemlow, the author of the first scholarly biography of Fanny Burney in 1958, defended her subject’s veracity rather weakly on the grounds that:

While she did not always tell the full truth about some of the family difficulties, sins, and errors, she did not tell un-truths. As a biography, therefore the Memoirs is limited by the point of view and selection of material, but within its limits it is authoritative, and more authoritative than anything else written on Dr Burney, or likely to be written. It is based on knowledge that no other biographer can hope to have.¹⁵

This was surely exactly the response Fanny wanted to provoke: no one could ‘know more’ about her father than she did, and any sins of omission she may have committed by suppression of certain facts were in the cause of filial piety and family privacy, and therefore excusable. Unsurprisingly, biographers of Charles Burney have taken a less charitable view of Fanny’s tampering with the evidence. Roger Lonsdale claims, very plausibly, that the effect is sometimes ‘to destroy the true nature of [Charles] Burney’s personality’,¹⁶ and concludes that Fanny was ‘consciously dishonest’ at times, to the effect that she ‘cannot be trusted’.¹⁷

It seems likely that the experience of going through her father’s papers in the last twenty years of her life made Madame d’Arblay acutely aware of the problem of how to control her own posterity. She was shocked to find how much the self-portrait that emerged of her father differed from her own view of him and decided to ‘set the record straight’. This led to a general overhaul of her own ‘record’ too. Fanny’s account in the Memoirs of her first meeting with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale on 20 March 1777, originally described in a letter to her elderly mentor Samuel Crisp, provides one of innumerable examples of how she rewrote biographical evidence to suit her own purposes better. In the Memoirs, the letter she quotes as offering ‘genuine detail’ of the occasion is an elaborate augmentation of the original. It is fascinating not just as an example of hindsight and score-settling (particularly in the material relating to Mrs Thrale) but of Fanny exercising an assumed right to shape her material; you can see in it both a novelist’s anxiety to convey character and a memoirist’s concern not to look foolish in his private and peremptory judgements. This particular letter was a prime candidate for careful polishing up, affording Fanny the opportunity to set in stone her ‘first impressions’ of the great man. Much of what she adds in her later version is decorative. Johnson arrived at the Burneys’ house in St Martin’s Street later than the other guests (Mrs Thrale, Miss Thrale, their cousin Miss Owen and the writer William Seward), disturbing the performance of a duet by Fanny’s sisters Hetty and Susan. Johnson was no music-lover, and was even more short-sighted than Fanny or her father. Instead of sitting and listening to the duet, he drew his chair up to the harpsichord and ‘poked his Nose over the keys’, as Fanny related in her original letter, expanding her description by several paragraphs in the Memoirs to include an account of her sisters’ discomfort at his behaviour and William Seward’s amusement at it. At other points in the Memoirs version, a few cracks begin to show. Not only does Fanny add a great deal more detail about Johnson’s uncouth appearance – ‘He is, indeed, very ill-favoured’ – but queerly apologises for noticing it at all, apparently addressing Crisp thus:

But you always charge me to write without reserve or reservation, and so I obey as usual. Else, I should be ashamed to acknowledge having remarked such exterior blemishes in so exalted a character.¹⁸

The description of Mrs Thrale – with whom Fanny later had a famous friendship and an even more famous quarrel – is brief in the original 1777 letter:

Mrs Thrale is a very pretty woman still, – she is extremely lively and chatty, – has no supercilious or pedantic airs, & is really gay and agreeable.¹⁹

In the letter quoted in the Memoirs this becomes a whole paragraph, with the superlative removed from ‘pretty’ and the following qualification added: ‘though she has some defect in the mouth that looks like a cut, or scar’. Giving with one hand in the revamp (‘she is full of sport, remarkably gay, and excessively agreeable’), Fanny is all too ready to take away with the other:

I liked her in every thing except her entrance into the room, which was rather florid and flourishing, as who should say, ‘It’s I! – no less a person than Mrs. Thrale!’ However, all that ostentation wore out in the course of the visit, which lasted the whole morning; and you could not have helped liking her, she is so very entertaining – though not simple enough, I believe, for quite winning your heart.

The last part of that sentence points up a bizarre aspect of Fanny’s rewrite: its ostentatious address to Samuel Crisp. Like almost everyone else mentioned in the original letter, Crisp was long dead by the time Fanny produced her new, longer version, but if anything, she invokes his goodwill and solicits his approval more in the false letter than in the real one. The futility of introducing such material is rather striking. Other sentimental tributes include an interpolation after the mention of the duet played by Hetty and Susan. Not only does Fanny adjust her elder sister’s name to the familiar ‘your Hettina’ (and use the opportunity to insert a jibe against the Thrale party’s lack of musical appreciation), she adds a convoluted and archly-worded eulogy to her father and Crisp: ‘But every knowledge is not given to every body – except to two gentle wights of my acquaintance; the one commonly hight il Padre, and the other il Dadda. Do you know of any such sort of people, Sir?’ Crisp’s answer, had he lived to read this, would have been a firm No, since Fanny never addressed him in her real letters in quite such gushingly intimate terms (though it is possible of course that she spoke like this).

Making up ‘private correspondence’ specifically for publication is a fairly unusual way of asserting one’s authority as a truthful historian. It gives some idea of the lengths to which Fanny Burney would go to create a strong enough impression of what she considered to be the truth. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that none of the best-known stories about her life bears close inspection; each is riddled with contradictory statements, inconsistencies, evidence of editing or elaboration. In the light of this, the extensiveness of the Burney papers begins to look less like a gift to a biographer than an intolerable burden. One begins to long for lacunae like those Cassandra Austen so thoughtfully provided for posterity when she burned her sister Jane’s private papers. And as the Burney archive continues to grow with the recovering of more and more formerly obliterated material, the problem becomes even more complicated. It is fairly obvious in most cases why particular passages in the family papers were suppressed – dullness, scandal, a hasty judgement, a literary blemish – but the reasons why others were rejected remain obscure, or worse, seem trivial. Trivial erasures are the most disturbing of all: the subjectivity of the whole procedure comes sharply before us.

Should we worry about Madame d’Arblay’s second and third thoughts? Are they not as likely to get us near the truth as her original statements did, for all her claims to being able to act like an eighteenth-century form of tape-recorder? As one pores over the details of her life, finding inconsistencies in the record, what is a biographer to make of this strangely creative autobiographer? Is she an inveterate liar, or an inveterate writer? I hope to demonstrate in this interpretation of her life that the layers of autobiographical information left by ‘a writer of romances’ may not be equally trustworthy, but can be equally significant. Fanny Burney understood intuitively that remembering things is a cumulative process, even a collective process, which the act of putting into words helps to arrest. Things didn’t ‘happen’ to Burney until she had put them into words. She then, typically, went on to find more words, and more again. By unpicking the layers of that record we may hope to see more clearly how her anxious and active imagination worked.

A Note on Nomenclature

Names and problems of identity are centrally important in all Fanny Burney’s novels, which makes it rather ironic that the name of the author herself has become a contentious issue. None of her novels revealed her name on the title page – her first novel did not even sport the conventional tag ‘By a Lady’, and the subsequent ones were attributed to ‘the author of Evelina’, etc. Memoirs of Doctor Burney ‘by his Daughter, Madame d’Arblay’, was the only work she signed in her lifetime. Her diaries, published posthumously, were attributed to ‘Madame d’Arblay’ until the publication in 1889 of the Early Diary, which introduced her baptismal name ‘Frances Burney’. ‘Fanny Burney’, the name by which she was known familiarly until her marriage in 1793 and to the world through Johnsoniana, was adopted in the title of Austin Dobson’s 1903 biography and was used extensively by critics and biographers during the twentieth century, including the eminent Burney scholar, biographer and editor Joyce Hemlow. This is the name under which the Burney Project is publishing her Journals and Letters and Early Journals and Letters even though a number of critics, notably and most eloquently Margaret Anne Doody, have been arguing since the 1980s that the diminutive is a patronising form which should no longer be tolerated. ‘It makes the author sound the harmless, childish, priggish girl-woman that many critics want her to be’, Doody has written. ‘Let her have an adult full name’.²⁰

But which ‘adult full name’? It comes in many forms, making the search for material in catalogues and indexes peculiarly time-consuming. She is variously listed under A [Arblay], B [Burney] and D [d’Arblay], sometimes, as in the London Library, under all three. As preparations are made to raise a memorial to the author in Westminster Abbey, an ardent debate is taking place among members of the Burney Society on both sides of the Atlantic as to which name will appear, with the threat of an absurd compromise: ‘Frances (Fanny) Burney d’Arblay’.²¹ Bibliographical convention would dictate the use of her name at death, Frances d’Arblay, but no one seems happy with that; it is unfamiliar. Similarly, though ‘Frances Burney’ is used on the title pages of several modern reprints of her novels, ‘correctness’ rarely extends as far as the cover, where the author is most often still known as ‘Fanny Burney’, presumably because it is more recognisable to the reading public.

I have decided to use the latter style (interspersed with her married name in the later part of her life), despite the danger of appearing overfamiliar. In a work of criticism, I feel that the more formal ‘Burney’ or ‘Frances Burney’ would be correct throughout; in a biography, that deals with a subject from earliest childhood, the informal name is often more appropriate. I have also used familiar versions of some names within the Burney family which are subject to confusion through multiple use; to distinguish between Fanny’s mother and sister I have called the first Esther and second Hetty, and have used the familiar shortening of Susanna Burney’s name to Susan and Frederica Locke’s to Fredy on the grounds that they were Fanny Burney’s intimates. Her father is called Charles Burney (Dr Burney after 1769), her brother Charles Burney Junior (although he too gained a doctorate in 1808). Her husband is referred to as d’Arblay or M. d’Arblay, and their son, who was given the anglicised form of his father’s Christian name, as Alex.

1 A Low Race of Mortals

‘The Burneys are I believe a very low Race of Mortals’, wrote Dr Johnson’s confidante Hester Thrale in February 1779 of her daughter’s music master and his family. The remark was scribbled in the margin of her journal as a gloss on her opinion that Dr Burney’s second daughter, Fanny, was ‘not a Woman of Fashion’.¹ This was such an obvious thing to say about twenty-six-year-old Fanny Burney that it hardly bore mentioning, unless from mild spite. The Burneys were indeed not ‘people of Fashion’; they were representative of the coming class, the intelligentsia; self-made, self-educated, self-conscious people in uneasy amity with their wealthy and well-born patrons. No doubt those patrons found it obliquely threatening that a ‘low race’ could produce so many high achievers: in 1779 Dr Burney, author, composer and teacher, was halfway through publishing his ground-breaking General History of Music; Fanny had shot to fame the previous year with her first novel, Evelina; another of the Burney daughters was a famous harpsichordist; and one of the sons had circumnavigated the world with Captain Cook. The Burneys, and people like them, had every reason to think they were being admired rather than sneered at.

There had been no patrimony, titles or property to smooth Dr Burney’s path in life; he had achieved his position through a combination of natural genius and unstinting hard work, his eye forever on the main chance, his ‘spare person’ worn to a ravelling. Mrs Thrale claimed not to understand the devotion Burney inspired in his children – ’tis very seldom that a person’s own family will give him Credit for Talents which bring in no money to make them fine or considerable’,² she wrote in her diary; but what was ‘no money’ to Mrs Thrale was riches to the Burneys, just as their reception among the ‘Great folks’ – at her own house, Streatham Park, for instance – was more than enough to make them feel ‘considerable’. Fanny Burney’s pride in the insignificant-looking man who had effected these miracles was boundless, and she saw no absurdity in describing her father as the powerful ‘trunk’ of the Burney tree.³ Charles Burney had so successfully overcome his humble background that he really did seem to have sprung up from nowhere and to have started his family history afresh.

One of the Doctor’s other harpsichord pupils in 1779 (they were all young ladies ‘of Fashion’) had told Mrs Thrale that ‘these Burney’s are Irish people I’m sure; Mac Burneys they used to be called’.⁴ Where the girl picked up this information one can hardly imagine, unless through class instinct; the Doctor did not advertise his changed name. Charles MacBurney, as he was first known, was born in Shrewsbury in 1726, the twin to a sister called Susanna and the youngest son of his father’s second family. His grandfather, James, who was of Scottish or Irish descent (accounts differ), had had an estate in Shropshire and a house in Whitehall in the late seventeenth century, but by the time of Charles’s birth the family money had all but disappeared. The story goes that the grandfather MacBurney was so disgusted by his son James running off with a young actress, Rebecca Ellis, that he disinherited him. The old gentleman rather perversely followed up this gesture of affronted rectitude by marrying his own cook and starting a second family, of whom the eldest son, Joseph, inherited most of the property. This son frittered his inheritance away, was imprisoned for debt and supported himself later by becoming a dancing-master; but despite his fall from grace and wealth, he seemed happy with his lot (or so Charles Burney, his half-nephew, thought when they met in the 1750s), and that branch of the family was noted for its cheerfulness and striking good looks.

The outcast older brother James and his teenaged bride Rebecca had their first child in 1699 and went on to have fourteen more over the next twenty years, of whom at least nine survived. James had been expensively educated at Westminster School and had had some training in portrait painting under Michael Dahl, a fashionable Swedish portraitist who had painted the Swedish royal family as well as Queen Anne and members of the English aristocracy. James’s character was not, however, one to capitalise on these advantages, being ‘volatile, & improvident’.⁵ He was more concerned with keeping up his reputation as a convivial dinner-guest and bon-viveur (an activity which presumably got him away from his home full of babies) than with establishing himself in any one place or profession long enough to make anything of his talents as a painter, dancer, copyist or fiddler. As one of his children recorded later, the inevitable consequence of his fecklessness was that ‘his family was left to lament, that his talent for pleasantry, & love of sociability, overcame his prudential care, either for himself or them’.⁶

Poor Rebecca MacBurney, the mother of fifteen children and still only in her thirties, died, it is assumed, some time before 1720. That was the date at which James made his second marriage, to Ann Cooper of Shrewsbury, the daughter of a herald painter. A painting said to be of Ann Cooper shows a very handsome and assured young woman. She is reputed to have had a small fortune and to have turned down an offer of marriage from the poet William Wycherley;* both these things make it the more mysterious that she accepted the proposal of James MacBurney, unemployed forty-two-year-old father of nine. But MacBurney’s charm was legendary, and perhaps Ann’s age made a difference – she was about thirty at the time. They had six children, four of whom, Ann, Richard, Rebecca and Charles, lived to great ages. The youngest child died in infancy and Charles’s twin, Susanna, at the age of about seven.

How much of a wrench the death of his twin was to the little Charles Burney is hard to tell, since he was ejected from the family at the age of three and sent with his older brother Richard to live with a woman called Ball in Condover, four miles outside Shrewsbury. He was left in the care of Nurse Ball nine years – his whole childhood – a fact which shocked his daughter Fanny when she discovered it almost ninety years later. Fanny was particularly appalled by the mother’s behaviour, which she thought ‘nearly unnatural’,⁷ and she destroyed what evidence there was of the ‘niggardly unfeelingness’ and neglect she felt her father had suffered. By editing the episode out of her father’s papers, Fanny hoped to conceal ‘a species of Family degradation’ from public view; but no member of the public could have been more upset by it than she. She had known her grandmother Burney all her childhood, when the widow was living in Covent Garden with her two unmarried daughters. It must have seemed astonishing that this same grandmother, so much part of the family background, had, for whatever reason, opted out of caring for her own sons all those years before. Fanny’s novels are full of orphaned or abandoned children laid open to peril through lack of parental care; in them, bad parents are punished or vilified and made to repent, but Ann Burney seemed to have committed the cardinal sin of unfeeling and got off scot-free.

Charles Burney himself did not seem embittered by the long separation from his parents, although his intense affection for his own children (especially when they were little) and his apparent desire to establish a solid, admirable and outstanding Burney dynasty within one generation may have been reactions against it. The splitting up of the MacBurney family in the late 1720s was probably necessitated by lack of money. James went back to London temporarily to take up work as an actor at the new Goodman’s Fields Theatre at about this time; perhaps he and his wife felt that the boys would be better off out of the way, getting some education at Condover village school. The fact that Ann Burney’s later relations with her sons were detached could of course have been the effect as much as the cause of her not bringing them up herself, but Fanny seems not to have considered the kind of harsh compromises that might have to be made when a couple with five children of their own (and nine older semi-dependants) find themselves close to destitution. The threat of poverty is the most potent danger that faces the heroines of Fanny Burney’s novels; all other evils stem from it. But it is also something that never really overcomes any of them. Poverty brings out the best in her heroines: they act with dignity, expand their sensitivities, and support themselves by plain sewing, teaching, governessing or becoming ladies’ companions. The charting of a gentlewoman’s descent into wage-earning carries a sort of illicit thrill for author and reader alike (one can say quite clearly a sexual thrill, because of the unspoken threat of prostitution, the obvious last-ditch job-opportunity for women), but class always ultimately protects Burney’s heroines from crossing the line into ‘degradation’.

In the 1740s, the MacBurneys were struggling to cross that line in the other direction. The family name was changed, soon after Charles’s birth, from MacBurney (or ‘Mackburny’ as the twins were christened) to plain Burney. This was probably done to facilitate James’s revived stage career, for as the scholar Roger Lonsdale points out, Charles Burney himself suggested the reason for another actor’s name-change from McLaughlin to Macklin might have been ‘to get rid not only of its Paddy appearance but of its harshness’.⁸ The new name had an added significance for Charles: it marked a fresh start. Burney’s later success, riding under the banner of an (as he thought) untraceable family name, became a source of profound pride to himself and his children, so important to Fanny that her stated reason for destroying most of her father’s early memoirs was to protect ‘the Name of Burney’, even if it was only a few decades old and had started life as a professional convenience.

Charles Burney was assimilated back into his re-christened family when they moved to Chester in 1739. He had led what seems a truly happy, country-boy’s life at Condover with Nurse Ball, and left her with an ‘agony of grief’.⁹ But the city offered obvious advantages, and at the Free School in Chester he began the musical training, as choirboy and then organist, which was to shape his life. The cathedral organist suffered from gout, and recruited the fourteen-year-old Burney as an assistant while the boy was still hardly able to read music. His success was such, both as a singer and player, that his half-brother James, who was organist of St Mary’s Church in Shrewsbury, asked to have him as an assistant. Charles ‘ran away’ back to his native town for a couple of years, despite his parents’ disapproval, but by 1744 was back in Chester, on the persuasion of his father ‘who I believe, loved me very affectionately’, as Charles wrote later.¹⁰

However fragmented their family life was at times, James MacBurney’s strong paternal love and good nature held the clan together, and there were evenings of great gaiety in the household. Charles Burney inspired similar affection among his own children, recalling after one family party in later years,

we were as merry, & laughed as loud as the Burneys always do, when they get together and open their hearts; tell their old stories, & have no fear of being Quizzed by interlopers. It was so in my poor dear old father’s time, & my boyish days – when my brother Thomas from London – or James from Shrewsbury came on a visit to Chester, we used, young & old, Male & female, to sit up all night – not to drink, but to laugh à gorge deployée.¹¹

Charles Burney’s important career break came the same year (1744), when the composer Thomas Arne was passing through Chester on his way from Dublin to take up the post of composer at the Drury Lane Theatre. Arne got to hear of the diligent and talented young musician, who was already composing as well as able to play the violin, harpsichord and organ, and suggested to James Burney that the boy ought to be apprenticed to ‘an eminent Master in London’. On a subsequent meeting, Arne said that he himself would take Charles for £100 down, with no further liabilities, and at a third attempt said he would take him for nothing, realising he was still getting a good deal. Delighted and grateful, the Burneys of course agreed, though Charles was to look back on the bargain with mixed feelings.

Once in London, Arne got as much out of his apprentice as possible, making him transcribe quantities of music, teach junior pupils, run errands, play in the Drury Lane band and sometimes sing in the chorus there, any payment always going straight into the master’s pocket. Arne himself was passing the peak of his fame; the revival of his Masque of Alfred in 1745, containing the popular patriotic song ‘Rule, Britannia!’, was not successful, but his close connections with the capital’s best musicians and actors were very valuable to young Burney, who lived with the curmudgeonly composer and his wife in Great Queen Street and attended parties with them at the house of Arne’s sister, the actress Susannah Cibber. The charismatic David Garrick, who was to become a close friend of Burney, was the star of this coterie, which included Drury Lane and Covent Garden’s other leading men and ladies James Quin, Peg Woffington and Kitty Clive. Burney met literary men too, through his friendship with ‘the Scottish Orpheus’ James Oswald, James Thomson, Tobias Smollett and Christopher Smart among them. His career as an arch-networker among London’s bohemians was off to an excellent start.

As time went on, Burney became disillusioned with his apprenticeship to Arne. He was a hard worker, but his master’s regime did not reward his zeal. In fact, he came to think that Arne was deliberately holding him back. He felt he was wasted and wasting almost ‘into a consumption’ as an amanuensis, a chore which he hated (but which, years later, he was happy to impose on his own daughters). Arne was immoral, unfriendly and unprincipled, and after two years Burney’s loyalty to him had evaporated. When Fulke Greville, direct descendant of the Elizabethan poet, and ‘then generally looked up to as the finest gentleman in town’,¹² expressed a desire to take Burney into his employ – not as an apprentice, of course, but as a gentleman’s companion and music-maker – an escape route opened. It was not possible to leave Arne immediately, but Burney began to be patronised by Greville, invited to his grand country seat, Wilbury House in Wiltshire, and taken about when Greville was in town.

Greville’s style of life was lavish, ‘even princely’, as Fanny Burney learned from her father; he spent a great deal of time at the races or gambling clubs, at country houses or city mansions, with his outriders and entourage always on show, and two French-horn players hanging around waiting to perform ‘marches and warlike movements’¹³ during mealtimes. Charles Burney’s position in this splendid circus was a privileged one, based as much on his affability and intelligence as on his undoubted musical skills.* Burney was treated with respect and entrusted with Greville’s confidences, taking an active part in his master’s dramatic elopement with the beautiful heiress and poet Frances Macartney in 1748. It was a marriage to which no one actually objected, so the secrecy was unnecessary, but it was typical of Greville that he turned his nuptials into something of an amusement, and his twenty-two-year-old companion, enjoined to give the bride away, was only too happy to act as accomplice.

Though Burney was sampling high life through his increasing involvement with Greville – who finally bought the young musician out of his articles in 1748 for a down payment to Arne of three hundred pounds – he had developed his own social circle independent of either master. He had made the acquaintance of a gentleman called William Thompson, and spent three months of 1745 at Thompson’s home in Elsham, Lincolnshire, in ‘one continued series of mirth, amusement & festivity’. Miss Molly Carter, with whom he was still corresponding in the year of her death, 1812, was one of the ‘young ladies of the neighbourhood’ with whom Burney was probably in love. She was ‘very young, intelligent and handsome’, as he recorded in his memoirs;¹⁵ adding meaningly, ‘[I] never passed my time more pleasantly in my life’. In London, he attached himself to the household of his brother Richard, who was earning a living as a dancing-master in Hatton Garden. Both young men had fond memories of their uninhibited village upbringing, and probably tried to reproduce something of its freedom and jollity in the regular private dances held in Richard’s house. Writing in 1806, Burney recalled ‘the familiar manner in which the sexes treated each other in the hops I had seen in my early youth, in a village, where those ballets were literally Country dances, not Contre-danse, as the French pretend’.¹⁶ Perhaps the same ‘familiar manner’ animated the Hatton Garden parties too. Certainly it was at one of them that Charles Burney met Esther Sleepe, an attractive young woman of about twenty-three. He had ‘an ardent passion for her person […] from the first moment I saw her to the last’,¹⁷ and Esther seems to have reciprocated his strong feelings. By the autumn of 1748 he had got her pregnant.

Esther Sleepe was an intelligent and accomplished young woman, a professional musician (at the time when she met Burney she was, unusually for her sex, a freeman of the Company of Musicians) of respectable but humble background.* Her father appears to have been Richard Sleepe, a jobbing musician and leader of the Lord Mayor’s band, which performed at civic functions, parades and other occasions which required ‘City musick’, such as the laying of the foundation stone of the Mansion House.²⁰ Esther’s mother was the daughter of a M. Dubois, probably Pierre Dubois, of an immigrant Huguenot family who kept ‘a Fan Shop in Cheapside’ at 43, The Poultry. The type of shop indicates some connection with musical instrument-making, since Parisian instrument-makers had no guild of their own in London at the time and ‘often became members of the company of Fan-makers’.²¹ No doubt it was through music-making that Richard Sleepe and Frances Dubois (who had anglicised her name to Wood) met. They were married in 1705.

In Memoirs of Doctor Burney, Fanny Burney gives portraits of her mother and maternal grandmother which are so idealised as to be positively irritating. Her maternal grandfather, however, comes off very badly. ‘Old Sleepe’ was, she roundly asserts, ‘wanting in goodness, probity and conduct’, leaving his daughter ‘nothing to boast from parental dignity, parental opulence, nor – strange, and stranger yet to tell – parental worth’.²² He lived until 1758, by which time he must have been at least in his seventies, and yet he does not feature in any of Fanny Burney’s personal reminiscences, nor in those of her father, and he did not have anything to do with his daughter’s marriage to Charles Burney in 1749. Taken with Fanny’s dark hints about his reprobate nature, Sleepe’s absenteeism suggests either that he had abandoned his wife and family, which was numerous, or perhaps spent time in prison. Thirteen children of the couple are recorded in the baptismal registers of three separate city parishes;* considering the extent of Blitz damage to parish records in the City, this has to be taken as a minimum number. At least six of the children must have died in infancy, because of the re-use of their Christian names; the seven possible survivors range in age from a brother eighteen years older than Esther to another brother five years her junior. The only siblings of hers known to survive into the latter half of the century were a sister called Mary, born in 1715, and a brother called James, born the following year, who was maintained as a poor relation and part-time handyman by the Burneys, much-loved but referred to as if slightly simple.

Another factor that suggests that Richard Sleepe may have absconded from family life is that Esther is said to have been brought up in her maternal grandfather’s household, the ‘Fan Shop in Cheapside’. French was the language spoken most often there; the little girl, we read in the Memoirs, did not learn that language so much as ‘imbibe’ it.²³ Esther’s grandfather Dubois was a Huguenot whose family had come to London in the great Protestant exodus following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, but his daughter Frances, very oddly, had been brought up as a Roman Catholic and continued to practise that religion devoutly all her life. In the Memoirs, Fanny Burney can only account for her grandmother’s religion by guessing that it was a matter of ‘maternal education’,²⁴ but if so, Frances Dubois Sleepe practised Catholicism in isolation and did not seek to pass it down to further generations.

Her influence and example were probably all the stronger for this, and, as we shall see, Charles Burney later feared Fanny might succumb to Roman Catholicism. The child of a mixed marriage in an age of bigotry, grandmother Sleepe represented a kind of ecumenical ideal: in her granddaughter’s opinion, ‘the inborn religion of her mind […] counteracted all that was hostile to her fellow-creatures, in the doctrine of the religion of her ancestors’. She had, in Fanny’s words, a nature ‘so free from stain, so elementally white, that it would scarcely seem an hyperbole to denominate her an angel upon earth’.²⁵ Little wonder that pious Fanny tried to copy such a paragon. ‘If praying for the Dead make a Roman Catholic’, she wrote to her sister many years later, ‘I have been one all my life’.²⁶ Esther Sleepe, too, believed in the power of prayer and in communion with the dead. Fanny was at pains to point out that her mother ‘adhered steadily and piously through life’ to the Anglican faith, but the truth is that they had both inherited a religious intensity and a degree of superstitiousness from their admired and beloved relative: they were both proud English Protestants, but said their prayers, as it were, with a pronounced French Catholic accent.*

Charles Burney’s fondness for his mother-in-law, whom he loved ‘as sincerely as if she had been his mother-in-blood’,³⁰ clearly owes something to the failure of warmth from his actual ‘mother-in-blood’, but also reflects gratitude for Mrs Sleepe’s support of her daughter through the shameful illegitimate pregnancy and beyond. Burney neither abandoned his mistress nor felt free to marry her in 1748, because of his arrangement with Greville, which had been in operation less than a year and had two more years to run. Not only would there be legal penalties applicable (in theory) if he married before 1751, but in a wider sense, Burney’s hopes of promotion in life depended on staying with Greville, to whom he felt he owed a debt of gratitude for buying him out of the articles with Arne. The prospect of waiting two years to marry must have been hard for Esther and her mother to bear; the pregnancy became daily more obvious, and Burney increasingly anxious about how to broach the subject with his patron.

The Grevilles themselves had their first child, a daughter called Frances (later the famous beauty Mrs Crewe, a friend and patron of Charles Burney) in November 1748, and by the next spring were ready to depart on an elaborate foreign tour, intended to last ‘some years’. They expected Burney to accompany them, and it seems, for a time at least, he felt he would have to go. He had a miniature portrait of Esther painted by the well-known artist Gervase Spencer ‘just before our marriage’ (though it is unlikely that Esther would have sat to any artist in the last months of her pregnancy or during the four weeks after the birth), ostensibly to take with him on the trip. Perhaps he thought she would see the expenditure of about three pounds on this memento as a gesture of commitment. It was an uncomfortable juncture; she could not have been anything other than alarmed at the prospect of her baby’s father leaving the country for so long, and in such grand company.

Boldness was not one of Charles Burney’s virtues. He dithered childishly about how to get out of the projected Italian tour, dropping hints to the Grevilles that he was in love, and looking gloomy. His child, a girl they named Esther, was born on 24 May 1749. Burney always doted on children, and perhaps the sight of his first-born and his vulnerable, patient mistress had a catalysing effect. He knew he couldn’t really leave them, and to introduce the subject in conversation with the Grevilles, he showed them the portrait of his sweetheart (not mentioning the baby, of course). There are indications that the aristocratic young couple found his melancholic behaviour a bit of a joke. Their light-hearted dismissal of his problem when it finally got an airing was to ask why he didn’t marry her. ‘May I?’ Burney asked, delighted at getting permission so easily. He and Esther were married the very next day, at St George’s Chapel, Hyde Park Corner, a popular venue for shotgun nuptials.

The critic Margaret Anne Doody has pointed out how significant this incident is in terms of Burney’s later example to his children, all of whom preferred devious or passive means of problem-solving to direct action. The idea of gaining permission and not offending one’s superiors became ingrained in the family ethos; as Doody says: ‘Charles was to inculcate in his children the pervasive dread of offending someone whose permission should be asked, and he indicates some unwitting enjoyment of being the person who had power to give or withhold permission from his children, the only group to whom he could give it and to whom he need not apply for it.’³¹ This ‘pervasive dread’ was felt most sharply and most destructively by his second daughter, Fanny. Even when she was sixty-two years old, Fanny did not dare address her father ‘contrary to orders’ as he lay dying: ‘[t]he long habits of obedience of olden times robbed me of any courage for trying so dangerous an experiment’.³²

When the Grevilles went off to Italy in the summer of 1749, Burney was left to fend for himself and his young family. He had not lost Greville’s goodwill, but the patronage had gone, and from the splendours of Wilbury House Burney had to adjust to life as organist of St Dionis’s Backchurch in Fenchurch Street. He had taken over payment of the rent on Mrs Sleepe’s fan shop at Easter 1749, and may have been living there with Esther as man and wife some time before their wedding in June. His father died around the same time, and it was perhaps as early as this year that his mother and sisters Ann and Rebecca came from Shropshire to live over the shop at Gregg’s Coffee House in York Street,* run by a kinswoman, Elizabeth Gregg. Female dependants became, from this period onwards, a given of Charles Burney’s life. He was earning a tiny salary of £30 per annum from St Dionis’s and had to supplement it with odd jobs of teaching and composing (his first published song was to words by his friend the poet Christopher Smart).

One of his pupils was the Italian opera singer Giulia Frasi, at whose house and at the Cibbers’ Burney used to meet George Friedric Handel. Burney revered Handel’s music and, starstruck, had shadowed the great man round Chester once in his youth. On closer acquaintance, some of the glamour necessarily faded. Handel was short-tempered and extremely impatient of mistakes, bawling at Burney for singing a wrong note in one of Frasi’s lessons, as Burney recalled in his memoirs:

[…] unfortunately, something went wrong, and HANDEL, with his usual impetuosity, grew violent: a circumstance very terrific to a young musician. – At length, however, recovering from my fright, I ventured to say, that I fancied there was a mistake in the writing; which, upon examining, HANDEL discovered to be the case: and then, instantly, with the greatest good humour and humility, said, ‘I pec your barton – I am a very odd tog: – maishter Schmitt is to plame.’³³

Burney was to meet a great many famous men on his way to becoming one himself, and had stories about most of them. Like his father before him, he knew the value of a good stock of anecdotes and told them well – comic voices included. He intuited that the ability to converse, to tell stories and (perhaps most importantly for his later connection with Dr Johnson) to listen was going to be his surest way to earn and keep a place in the influential company he craved. Fanny Burney thought her father’s written reminiscences did no justice to his anecdotal powers, or the charm and wit of his conversation, that they constituted ‘little more than Copying the minutes of engagements from his Pocket Books’.³⁴ She was clearly disappointed that he hadn’t left anything more solid for posterity to marvel at, but for Charles Burney the primary function of his stories (which drip with dropped names) was to make an immediate impression on a live audience.

With his patrons abroad and his responsibilities multiplying, the better life that Burney wanted for himself and his family seemed to be receding from his grasp in the early 1750s. Esther had given birth to two more children, James in June 1750 and Charles the year after. In order to keep the household going Burney pushed himself to do extra teaching, as well as playing in the theatre band almost every evening and composing. His rewriting of Arne’s Masque of Alfred had its first performance in February 1751 at Drury Lane, a momentous occasion for the twenty-four-year-old musician, but one he couldn’t attend because of a prior engagement at a subscription concert. ‘I fear my performance there was not meliorated by my anxiety for the fate of my Offspring at Drury Lane’, he wrote:

I hardly staid to play the final Chord of the last piece on the Organ, ere I flew out of the concert-room into a Hackney coach, in hopes of hearing some of my stuff performed (if suffered to go on) before it was finished; but neither the coachman nor his horses being in so great a hurry as myself, before I reached Temple bar, I took my leave of them, & ‘ran like a Lamp-lighter’, the rest of the way to the Theatre; and in a most violent perspiration, clambered into the Shilling Gallery, where scarcely I cd obtain admission, the rest of the House being extremely crowded, wch did not diminish the sudorific state of my person. I entered luckily, at the close of an Air of Spirit, sung by Beard, which was much applauded – This was such a cordial to my anxiety & agitated spirits, as none but a diffident and timid author, like myself, can have the least conception.³⁵

The impatience with the hackney coach, the muck sweat, the obscurity of the Shilling Gallery and the sense of eavesdropping on his own work’s first performance all seem to typify the urgency, anxiety and effort with which Burney strove to establish himself in the world. His work habits became almost manic; he pushed himself to the point of collapse, and then sank into protracted illnesses. In the winter before the debut of Alfred, he spent thirteen weeks in bed, a disastrously long time for a breadwinner, and certain to have agitated his restless mind. He was a small, very thin man, whose constitution was in fact as strong as an ox but who looked as if he might turn consumptive with every passing chill. In this, as well as in frame and feature, his second daughter was to resemble him closely.

The illness of 1751 must have alarmed Burney considerably. A short convalescence in Islington (then a balmy village) made him begin to credit his doctor’s insistence that he seek a permanent change of air. Reluctantly, he began to think of leaving the capital. When the offer of the post of organist at St Margaret’s Church in Lynn Regis, Norfolk, came up, combining sea air, light duties, a much larger salary and, since 1750, a regular coach service to London (splendidly horsed and armed to the teeth with muskets and bludgeons), it would have been folly to refuse. Burney moved there alone in September 1751 ‘to feel his way, & know the humours of the place’.³⁶

Lynn Regis (now known as King’s Lynn) was a thriving mercantile centre in the mid-eighteenth century, with valuable wine, beer and coal trade and corn exports worth more than a quarter of a million pounds a year. It supplied six counties with goods, and sent river freight as far inland as Cambridge. The wealthy aldermen of Lynn were keen to improve the cultural life of the town and to acquire a good music-teacher for their daughters; to this end they had increased the organist’s salary by subscription to £100 a year in order to attract Burney (clearly some influential friend or friends had a hand in setting this up), and were prepared to raise the pay even further when they feared they might lose him.

Burney at first resented his provincial exile: the organ in St Margaret’s was ‘Execrably bad’ and the audiences as unresponsive as ‘Stocks & Trees’,³⁷ but over the months his attitude changed. He began to be patronised by some of the ‘great folks’ of north Norfolk – the Townshends at Raynham, the Cokes at Holkham Hall, the Earl of Buckinghamshire at Blickling, Lord Orford (Horace Walpole’s nephew) at Houghton – and his spirits rose. All these grandees had large estates, beautiful grounds, art collections and libraries. Burney found that in Norfolk there might be, if anything, even more influential patrons at his disposal than in London, and that the burghers of Lynn were prepared to treat him as the ultimate authority on his subject. Soon he was writing to Esther in encouraging tones. Pregnant for the fourth time, she and the three children joined him in the spring of 1752, and it was probably at their first address in Lynn, Chapel Street, that their daughter Frances was born on 13 June. The new baby was baptised on 7 July in St Nicholas’s, the fishermen’s chapel just a few yards away, with Frances Greville, returned from the Continent, named as godmother.

The choice of Mrs Greville helped re-establish Charles Burney’s connection with his former patrons, but it also had a literary significance, since Mrs Greville was not just a formidable intellectual but an accomplished poet, whose ‘Prayer for Indifference’ – published in 1759 – became one of the most famous poems of its day. The Burneys must have expected something substantial to come of the connection, for Fanny’s sharp judgements of her godmother both personally – she thought Mrs Greville ‘pedantic, sarcastic and supercilious’³⁸ – and as a godparent – ‘she does not do her duty and answer for me’³⁹ – betray more than pique.

The modest provincial household into which Mrs Greville’s namesake, Frances, was born was bent on intellectual improvement; Charles and Esther Burney had set themselves a course of reading in the evenings which included ‘history, voyages, poetry, and science, as far as Chambers’s Dicty, the French Encyclopédie, & the Philosophical transactions’.⁴⁰ Not many young couples went to the expense of subscribing to the first edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and not many Lynn housewives would have relished reading it of an evening, but Esther Burney was an earnest autodidact, ‘greatly above the generality of Lynn ladies’,⁴¹ whose card-playing evenings bored her, and whom she was soon making excuses to avoid. Esther was a city girl, born and bred, and was probably keener even than her husband to get back to London. He had his teaching and the great houses to visit; she had four young children to look after in an unfamiliar provincial community. As their daughter was to observe later: ‘That men, when equally removed from the busy turmoils of cities, or the meditative studies of retirement, to such circumscribed spheres, should manifest more vigour of mind, may not always be owing to possessing it; but rather to their escaping, through the calls of business, that inertness which casts the females upon themselves’.⁴²

Esther found two like-minded women in Lynn during her nine years’ residence there, Elizabeth Allen and Dolly Young, with whom she formed a sort of miniature literary salon. They met regularly at the house of the richest, most beautiful and most voluble of the three, Mrs Allen, a corn merchant’s wife, who had a ‘passionate fondness for reading’ and ‘spirits the most vivacious and entertaining’.⁴³ Dolly Young was nearer to Esther in temperament; studious and sensitive, she became Esther’s particular friend, and a sort of aunt to the children, several of whom, including Fanny, she helped deliver. Unlike her two married friends, Dolly Young was not at all beautiful; her face had ‘various unhappy defects’ and her body was ‘extremely deformed’⁴⁴ (almost certainly through smallpox) – an odd companion for Mrs Allen, who was widely regarded as the town’s great beauty. Charles Burney admired all three: ‘I thought no three such females could be found on our Island’, he wrote later, noting with approval, ‘They read everything they cd procure’.⁴⁵

Only a few months after baby Frances was born, her year-old brother Charles died and was buried on the north side of St Nicholas’s. Esther was soon pregnant again, but this child, also named Charles, did not survive infancy. Her sixth child, a daughter christened Susanna Elizabeth, was born in January 1755, a frail baby who was lucky to escape the smallpox outbreak that lasted in Lynn from 1754 to 1756. There were so many deaths during this period that St Margaret’s churchyard was closed due to overcrowding, and the hours of burial had to be extended from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day to cope with the demand. Typhus outbreaks were also common in Lynn, and Charles Burney must sometimes have wondered if the ‘change of air’ for which he had left London was going to cure him or kill him.

By the mid-1750s the Burneys had moved to a house on the High Street, near to stately old St Margaret’s Church and in sight of the masts of the ships docked on the Great Ouse. It was a just a few minutes’ walk to the foreshore, where the children could watch the traffic on the river. The waterfront was full of warehouses with watergates to let small boats in at high tide, and the quays were always busy, with coal and wine and beer being loaded, or the fishing fleet bringing cod and herring in. Salters and curers’, shipbuilders’, sail and ropemakers’ premises lined the docks, with their noise and smell of industry. Once a year, in July or August, the whaling fleet came in from its far journey to Greenland, the decks laden with monstrous Leviathan bones. The bells of St Margaret’s would peal in celebration and the town enjoy a general holiday, for Lynn was proud of its mercantile nature, never mind the reek from the blubber houses as the rendering process got under way, or the stench of the Purfleet drain at low tide.

Fanny Burney, like her mother, was essentially a city-lover, and spent most of her adult life living right in the middle of London or Paris. Her childhood in Lynn was happy because she was constantly in the company of her ‘very domestic’ mother⁴⁶ (who nursed the children herself) and adored father, but country-town life does not seem to have appealed to her imaginatively, and she avoided writing about it. Spa-towns, seaside towns, rural retreats and, most of all, London, appear in her novels time and again, but workaday places like Lynn get short shrift. ‘I am sick of the ceremony & fuss of these fall lall people!’ she wrote when visiting Lynn Regis as a young woman. ‘So much dressing – chit chat – complimentary nonsence. In short, a Country Town is my detestation. All the conversation is scandal, all the Attention, Dress, and almost all the Heart, folly, envy, & censoriousness. A City or a village are the only places which, I think, can be comfortable, for a Country Town has but the bad qualities, without one of the good ones, of both’.⁴⁷

The Burneys’ was a self-contained and self-sufficient household. Charles Burney had stools placed in the organ loft of St Margaret’s for his family, from which they could look down on the rest of the town during services. Esther did not mix much with the local women and educated her children at home, except for James, who had a couple of years at the grammar school on grounds of his gender. Hetty was the child who showed greatest promise, both intellectually and musically. Even as a small girl, it was clear she had the makings of a first-class harpsichordist, and attention was lavished on her by both parents. Fanny, who showed no special ability at anything and no inclination to learn to read, was left to develop in her own time. There was always a baby to play with: another son christened Charles was born in December 1757, when Fanny was five and Susan almost three. An eighth child was born in late 1758 or early 1759, and christened Henry, but he died in 1760. Fanny had been too young to remember the death of the second baby Charles, but was turning eight when Henry died.⁴⁸ It must have affected her sadly, she was known as a ‘feeling’ child, of the most delicate sensibilities towards all living creatures.

Fanny Burney’s intense admiration for her father had its roots in these early years in Lynn. In such a community, a talented, energetic and ambitious man like Charles Burney was treated with enormous respect. He persuaded the corporation to have St Margaret’s ‘execrable’ organ cleaned, and when it fell apart in the process, got them to have a brand new one built, on which he performed dazzlingly various pieces of exciting contemporary music, such as Handel’s Coronation Anthem. Charles Burney’s playing in church, Charles Burney’s subscription concerts and Charles Burney’s evening parties were the best by far (there was no competition) in a town Fanny described as culturally in ‘the dark ages’.⁴⁹

But however popular he was in Lynn, Charles Burney never intended to stay there very long, and the children must have got used to their parents talking about London as if it were their real home. Burney made a couple of attempts to leave during the 1750s, but his obligations (and some strategic salary hikes) kept him in place. His noble patrons made him feel valued and full of potential; Lord Orford was particularly generous, and allowed the musician the run of his library at Houghton. Burney would get the key from the housekeeper and wander around when the master was absent, no doubt fostering fantasies of one day possessing such a library and such a lifestyle himself. Early on in his Norfolk days, Burney had bought a mare called Peggy on which to travel the long distances from Lynn to his aristocratic and county clients, and typically he made use of the time spent on horseback (she was obviously a very trustworthy animal) teaching himself Italian from the classic authors, with a home-made Italian dictionary in his pocket. He bore all the marks of a man in training for something greater. His mind was turning to literary schemes, and perhaps it was as early as in these years that Burney first conceived his plan to write a history of music, something monumental in the style of Diderot’s Encyclopédie or Samuel Johnson’s new Dictionary of the English Language, to which he was also a subscriber. He kept himself in touch with the musical and intellectual life of London by going to town every winter. He hardly needed the urgent advice of his friend Samuel Crisp, whom he had met through the Grevilles:

is not settling at Lynn, planting your youth, genius, hopes, fortunes, &c., against a north wall? […] In all professions, do you not see every thing that has the least pretence to genius, fly up to the capital – the centre of riches, luxury, taste, pride, extravagance, – all that ingenuity is to fatten upon? Take, then, your spare person, your pretty mate, and your brats, to that propitious mart, and, ‘Seize the glorious, golden opportunity,’ while yet you have youth, spirits, and vigour to give fair play to your abilities, for placing them and yourself in a proper point of view.⁵⁰

By 1760, Burney felt he had fulfilled his obligations to the ‘foggy aldermen’ of Lynn Regis. He decided to move his growing family back to London, ostensibly to further their chances in life, but more immediately to further his own. James, an easy-going boy who had not shone at school, was not to accompany them. It was agreed that he should join the navy, and he was signed up as Captain’s Servant on board the Princess Amelia. This was a recognised way for poorer boys to get some rudimentary officers’ training, but it was also an abrupt and dangerous introduction to adult life for a ten-year-old, and one wonders why his parents submitted him to it. Perhaps their ignorance of seafaring was as great as their backgrounds suggest. The Princess Amelia was a man-of-war, a huge floating artillery, with eighty cannon and 750 men on board, a far cry from the fishing boats and merchantmen James might have watched sailing up the Great Ouse. The Seven Years’ War was at its height, and the Princess Amelia was on active service: the year James joined the crew, it formed part of Hawke’s squadron in the Bay of Biscay and was almost blown up by French fireships in the Basque Roads the following year. News from the war took a long time to reach England, and the Burneys would have had little idea of the danger their son was in until it was well past. James’s career would keep him out of family life all through his formative years, and, not surprisingly, his own later behaviour as a family man was eccentric, to say the least. The violent contrasts between home life and the sea must have made the former seem vaguely surreal to him; he didn’t let one impinge on the other, and it is doubtful that his family ever understood the privations or excitements of his day-to-day existence.

The Burney family made their momentous move to London in September or early October 1760, to a house on Poland Street in Soho, a significantly better address than Charles Burney’s last one in the City. Soho, which had been very sparsely inhabited up to the sixteenth century but heavily developed by speculators after the Great Fire, was new and fashionable. The elegant squares and streets that spread their gridwork across the fields, the former military yard and around the old windmill* contained rows of houses quite different from the ‘Cottages … Shedds or meane habitacons’ that had straggled there as recently as 1650.⁵¹ Poland Street had been begun in 1689 and named, topically, in honour of John Sobieski’s intervention against the Turks at the siege of Vienna. It wasn’t one of the best addresses in the area – Leicester Fields, Golden Square and King’s (later Soho) Square had far more aristocratic associations – but it was a very respectable one for an ambitious music-teacher. Soho was full of middle-class families providing services to the rich: Huguenot craftsmen and jewellers, German instrument-makers, gun-makers, portrait-painters, wine merchants, watchmakers, architects and medical men. Next door to the Burneys was a hair-merchant who made wigs for the legal profession, a specialised business with dignified associations. The children of the two households played together in the little paved yards behind the properties.

By the time Fanny Burney was writing the Memoirs in the late 1820s, she was aware that her readers might be unimpressed by the family’s former address, ‘which was not then, as it is now, a sort of street that, like the rest of its neighbourhood, appears to be left in the lurch’.⁵² She stressed how genteel Poland Street had been in the 1760s, when the Burneys had lords, knights and even a disinherited Scottish Earl for neighbours, and exotic visitors such as a Red Indian Cherokee chief who was staying in a building almost opposite number 50 and whom the Burney children watched come and go with awed delight.

The contrast with Lynn was dramatic, the scope for entertainment and amazement seemingly endless. Though there were still fields and allotments a stone’s throw away in the undeveloped land to the north of Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), London was full of shows and spectacles guaranteed to impress young children straight from the provinces. The theatre at Drury Lane was well known to them through their father’s long association there with Arne and his friendship with Garrick; they also knew the rival theatre at Covent Garden and the splendid opera house in the Haymarket, which had room for three thousand spectators (about a third of the population of Lynn Regis). London was filling up with teahouses, coffee houses, strange miniature spas, assembly rooms, puppet shows and curiosity museums to cater for the leisure hours of the rapidly expanding metropolitan population.

The Burney children were too young to attend the famous pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, Bagnigge Wells or Marylebone, but they could admire the fashion-conscious crowds strutting and posing in Pall Mall and St James’s Park, or the guests, magnificently dressed for masquerades and balls, arriving by carriage or chair outside Mrs Corneley’s assembly rooms in Soho Square. When Fanny was writing her novel Evelina a decade and a half later, the remembered excitement of her own arrival in London made all the difference to her treatment of a familiar fictional device. The first impressions of a fresh-faced country heroine had been used by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, even Cleland (unlikely though it is that Fanny Burney ever read Fanny Hill), to provide a sardonic commentary on the London social scene, but Burney knew it from life as well as from fiction. Evelina’s breathless letters to her guardian, Mr Villars, catch the childish beguilement of the author herself experiencing the bustling, brightly-coloured, noisy, smelly and dangerous life of the capital for the first time when she arrived there in 1760, an open-minded, open-eyed and open-mouthed eight-year-old.

Charles Burney admitted that a great deal of his success as a music teacher on his return to London in 1760 derived from ‘the powers of my little girl’, eleven-year-old Hetty. Musical child prodigies were fashionable, and even before the family’s move to London, Hetty had performed on the harpsichord at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket⁵³ and attracted the praise of the king’s brother by her mastery of ‘some of the most wild and difficult lessons of Scarlatti’.⁵⁴ Burney wrote showy exercises for her and for his brother Richard’s eldest son, Charles Rousseau Burney, a precociously talented violinist and keyboard player. The next generation of musical Wunderkinder to hit London would be Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1764, but for the time being the Burneys held the laurels. The proud Charles published a volume of harpsichord lessons to cash in on the method he had used to teach these two celebrated young performers, and was overcome with requests for new pupils, especially from among the ‘great folks’ in whose drawing rooms and music rooms his ingratiating charm went down particularly well.

Compared with her high-achieving older sister, her lively brother James and ‘angelic’ little Susan, Fanny must have seemed dull. She did play the harpsichord, but unsurprisingly chose not to be heard doing so in a household full of virtuosi, restricting herself to ‘thrumming’ occasionally on the keyboard when she thought she was alone. Hetty not only got intensive music tuition from her father; she was also her mother’s ‘chief attention’.⁵⁵ Together mother and eldest daughter were reading all of Pope’s works and the Aeneid in translation, heavy fare by the standards of the day for female education, while at eight, Fanny couldn’t even make out the letters of the alphabet. Susan was more advanced than Fanny, though three years younger. The struggle to teach Fanny to read had been going on some time. In Lynn, she had been ‘taught’ by her older brother, who teased her by holding the book she was meant to be reading from upside-down. The letters were so incomprehensible to her that she didn’t notice any difference either way, but the real pathos of this story is in the fact that she had been relegated to the tutorship of James at all.

Though her father was to say that his second daughter ‘was wholly unnoticed in the nursery for any talents, or quickness of study’,⁵⁶ he admits that in her ‘childish sports’ she was unusually inventive. When she was with her siblings or playmates she displayed a marked talent for mimicry and spontaneous invention, repeating scenes they had seen together at the theatre (where the Burneys often had the use of Mrs Garrick’s box) and happy, before an uncritical audience, to ‘take the actors off, and compose speeches for their characters’.⁵⁷ In a memorandum book for 1806 Fanny included the reminiscence of one of her childhood acquaintances, a Miss Betty Folcher: ‘You were so merry, so gay, so droll, & had such imagination in making plays, always something new, something of your own contrivance’.⁵⁸ In front of adults, though, the young girl clammed up. When a family friend dubbed Fanny ‘the little dunce’, her mother stood up for her, saying she ‘had no fear about Fanny’; but privately Esther and Charles had begun to worry about their third child’s ‘backwardness’.⁵⁹ ‘Today’, the psychoanalyst Kathryn Kris has noted in a study of Fanny’s case, ‘such visual perceptive difficulty, in sharp contrast to auditory fluency, would be recognised as a form of dyslexia’.⁶⁰

When Fanny did eventually learn to read it happened, according to her father, ‘all at once […] as if by intuition, nor did any of the family ever know how the talent was acquired’.⁶¹ The miraculous style of this turnaround sounds suspicious, and one is tempted to see it as a symptom of Charles Burney’s curious inattentiveness to the details of his children’s lives. If the children did not display conspicuous ‘talent or quickness of parts’, he was unlikely to notice them, being, in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s opinion, ‘as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet-tempered man can well be’.⁶² Fanny wrote later of the ‘conscious intellectual disgrace’ she had felt about her illiteracy, indicating the degree of shame she experienced as well as the harshness with which she was apt to judge herself. Like many dyslexic people, she had developed complex and often arduous methods to get round the problem, and had learned a great deal of poetry, especially that of Pope, by committing Hetty’s overheard lessons to memory.* Her powers of recalling things, and of making up what she could not recall, were indeed very strong, although her parents didn’t seem to realise it. But the shame was strong, too. Later in life she habitually denied having any talents at all: if she wasn’t perfect in a subject, she would say she had no knowledge of it. On the question of her struggle into literacy, it is likely that she learned to read gradually, certainly with difficulty and mostly on her own, but waited to reveal her learning until it was substantial enough to impress her father.

Fanny claimed to have begun writing her own compositions as soon as she could read, using a scrawling form of handwriting, like ‘scrambling pot-hooks’,⁶³ that was ‘illegible, save to herself’.⁶⁴ This too sounds odd, more like the sort of scribble-writing most pre-literate children experiment with than the real thing. The earliest surviving examples of Fanny’s handwriting are remarkably neat and eminently legible. The ‘pot-hooks’ claim of a private, unreadable hand also suggests a childish stratagem to deflect the kind of jeering criticism she had experienced from her brother. It is worth bearing in mind that Fanny’s eyesight was poor, and that her short sight can only have hindered her progress with letters. Though apparently reading and writing by the age of ten, it is likely that she was still relying heavily on her memory and composing, as she had done for years, mostly in her head.

Charles Burney was often absent from the house because of his long teaching hours, both at Mrs Sheeles’s school in Queen Square, where he had an annual salary of £100, and at the many private houses he attended. He loved his family strongly and sentimentally, and if, as Macaulay rather acidly put it, ‘it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them’,⁶⁵ there are worse things he could have done. The affection he inspired in his family, and in Fanny particularly, was deep and sincere, and was often remarked on with envy by outsiders. He was a volatile man, highly strung and sometimes manically energetic. Family life was a balm to him, a source of entertainment and relaxation, and the more sensitive of the children must have intuited that it was important not to disturb this state of things. The girls strove all their lives to please and placate him, and the boys, oppressed by the struggle to be sources of pride to their father, each dropped out in rather spectacular ways.

Charles Burney had more than his usual preoccupations of work and money and self-advancement to deal with at this time. Not long after the move to Poland Street, Esther’s health began to decline. She was pregnant for the ninth time in twelve years, and had developed a cough which was thought to be consumptive. In the summer of 1761 she was ordered to Bath and Bristol Hotwells, leaving her husband tied to his teaching at Queen Square until the end of the term. At first, there seemed to be some improvement as a result of the curative waters, but back in London Esther grew weaker. The baby, Charlotte Ann, was born on 3 November and put out to nurse. All through 1762 Esther’s condition deteriorated, and she died on 29 September, after a week or more of ‘a most violent bilious complaint, wch terminated, after extreme torture, in an inflammation of the bowels’.⁶⁶ Of the children, only Hetty was at home to witness this dreadful calamity. Fanny, Susan and Charles had been sent to Mrs Sheeles’ ‘to be out of the way’,⁶⁷ and James, who had been discharged from duty on the Magnanime at his father’s request eleven days earlier, does not seem to have got home in time.

Mrs Sheeles said later that of the many children she had known, none had displayed so much grief over anything as Fanny Burney did at the death of her mother. She ‘would take no Comfort – & was almost killed with Crying’.⁶⁸ Fanny must have been dreading the blow for some time, for in a letter to her father many years later she described how one of the girls at the school (where the little Burneys seem to have been parked fairly often) had complained of her sullenness ‘when I had been dejected by some hints of the illness of my dear mother’.⁶⁹ When the ‘hints’ became sad reality, despite weeks, perhaps months, of desperate praying, Fanny was inconsolable. Stuck in Queen Square among strangers, she had not even been able to say goodbye to her mother, and must have heard with a pang of the melancholy deathbed intimacies with which Hetty had been honoured.

Charles Burney was prostrated by the death of his wife, catapulted into an impenetrable world of private grief:

I shut myself up inadmissable & invisible [to] all but relations, without a thought on anything else till after the funeral, and then for a fortnight did nothing but meditate on my misery. I wrote elegyac Verses on her Virtues & Perfection. […] It was painful to me to see any one who knew & admired her as all my acquaintance did. But having my mind occupied by business was a useful dissipation of my sorrow; as it forced me to a temporary inattention to myself and the irreparable loss I had sustained.⁷⁰

The younger Burneys, aged ten, seven and four, were not brought home immediately, but had to suffer the exposure of their bereavement among the rich young ladies boarded in Queen Square, one of whom, Lucy Fox-Strangways (the older sister of the girl who had complained about her dullness), compassionately took Fanny under her wing, ‘called me her Child, & took the office of School Mother upon her for me’.⁷¹ When they did go back to Poland Street, the children were neglected by their grief-stricken father. None of them, as Fanny wrote sadly, was ‘of an age to be companionable’,⁷² and he was writing to his old friend Dolly Young in desperate terms: ‘From an ambitious, active, enterprizing Being, I am become a torpid drone, a listless, desponding wretch!’⁷³ Fanny found this letter (she claimed) when going through her father’s posthumous papers: it was ‘so ill-written and so blotted by his tears, that he must have felt himself obliged to re-write it for the post’.⁷⁴ It contains a long and highly emotional account of Esther’s death and his subsequent distress. Perhaps Charles Burney thought better of sending it, or, as Fanny claimed to think, wept so much writing the letter that in order to send it, he had to make a fair copy.

The tears, conversely, might have been those of tender-hearted Dolly Young herself, who died in 1805 and might well have left this memorial of former times to her former friend. But it is odd that the document seems to have been unknown to Fanny when she was weeding her father’s papers in the 1820s and wrote to Hetty complaining how little material she had found ‘relative to our dear & lovely own Mother; […] from whatsoever Cause, he is here laconic almost to silence. 3 or 4 lines include all the history of his admiration & its effects’.⁷⁵ Roger Lonsdale has pointed out the inaccuracy of this statement – at least two pages of Dr Burney’s surviving memoirs deal with his first wife – but Fanny’s hyperbole indicates her disappointment at her father’s omission. The letter to Dolly Young only exists in Fanny’s printed version of 1832, but would seem to answer all the shortcomings she noted in Charles Burney’s memoirs, and bears witness to the perfect union which she believed her parents’ marriage to have been. She quotes the whole of it (131 lines rather than ‘3 or 4 lines’), with the prefatory remark that ‘a more touching description of happiness in conjugal life, or of wretchedness in its dissolution, is rarely, perhaps, with equal simplicity of truth, to be found upon record.’⁷⁶ Could she possibly have made this letter up, from the accounts of her mother’s death which she had heard her father and Hetty relate, in order to fill what she felt was a yawning gulf in the record? Could this long and gushing tribute to Esther, suspiciously materialising in her father’s archive and then disappearing again, have’ been another of Fanny’s attempts at impressionistic truth?

According to the letter, the dying Esther had attempted to comfort her eldest daughter by assuring her that they would meet again in the next world:

She told poor Hetty how sweet it would be if she could see her constantly from whence she was going, and begged she would invariably suppose that that would be the case. What a lesson to leave a daughter! – She exhorted her to remember how much her example might influence the poor younger ones; and bid her write little letters, and fancies, to her in the other world, to say how they all went on; adding, that she felt she should surely know something of them.⁷⁷

The role that was being passed on to Hetty was a heavy one; Charles Burney, in ‘an unrestrained agony of grief’ at his wife’s bedside, was incapable of giving consolation to anyone. Esther’s concern for Hetty and ‘the poor younger ones’, and her businesslike last day full of instructions and advice to her husband (including her recommendation to him that he marry Dolly Young), indicate how much Charles needed ‘mothering’ too. Mothering their father was what all the Burney daughters ended up doing to a greater or lesser extent all their lives – none more assiduously than Fanny.

But at the time, what must have affected the children most strongly in their mother’s dying words was the comforting assurance that she would be looking down on them ‘from whence she was going’, and the fantastical suggestion that she would be able to receive letters after she was dead. It was a fancy that had been given wide currency by Mrs Elizabeth Rowe’s bestselling book Friendship in Death: Twenty letters from the Dead to the Living, published in 1729 and kept more or less constantly in print until the late nineteenth century, a book which Fanny had certainly read* and which is highly likely to have been introduced into the household by her mother. Mrs Rowe’s book discouraged excessive mourning (which is of course, strictly speaking, an impiety): ‘If you could conceive my Happiness instead of the mournful Solemnity with which you interr’d me’, she imagines a two-year-old boy writing to his bereaved mother, ‘you would have celebrated my Funeral Rites with Songs, and Festivals’.⁷⁸ Esther Burney no doubt wanted to blunt her children’s grief in the same way, with the assurance of an afterlife that is suggested by her advice to Hetty to ‘write little letters […] to her in the other world’. But to Fanny, this must have made her unliterary status seem even more of a deprivation than ever, not simply ‘conscious intellectual disgrace’ but a barrier to communion with her dead parent. The ‘angelic’ mother on her ‘sublime’ deathbed had emphasised the value she set on literariness not just by quoting from favourite works (including parts of Gray’s ‘Elegy’) and suggesting poetry-writing as a form of therapy to her husband, but by endorsing the death-defying, almost magical properties of the written word.

After the death of his wife, Charles Burney threw himself into his teaching and often left the children to their own devices. The girls never had a governess; Hetty, who was busy at the harpsichord much of the time, was expected to undertake that function more or less. (It was no accident that both Fanny and Susan became extremely discriminating and appreciative listeners to music.) A succession of housekeepers must have been employed, but none stayed long enough or impressed herself on the children strongly enough to have been kept in the family records, apart from ‘an old Welsh woman’ whose accent amused Mr Burney.⁷⁹ It was a melancholy and lonely time for Fanny, who went to bed every night praying ‘for my dear Mamma, & that I might be good enough to join her’.⁸⁰

The children had always been close, but they drew closer, Fanny and Susan especially. Two anecdotes about them in their father’s fragmentary memoirs illustrate both his pleasure in their childish charms and the girls’ characteristics of sense and sensibility respectively. The story about Susan, the tender-hearted darling of the family, dates from before Esther’s death. At the age of five, she was so overcome by the acting in a performance of the melodrama Jane Shore that she cried out from the box to the apparently starving heroine of the piece, ‘Ma’am, will you have my ollange?’ which, her father recalls, ‘the audience applauded much more than the artificial complaints of the actress’.⁸¹ The story about Fanny illustrates her ‘natural simplicity and probity’, which in Charles Burney’s view had ‘wanted no teaching’. She and her sisters were playing with the wigmaker’s children next door:

[T]he door of the wig magazine being left open, they each of them put on one of those dignified ornaments of the head, and danced and jumped about in a thousand antics, laughing till they screamed at their own ridiculous figures. Unfortunately, in their vagaries, one of the flaxen wigs, said by the proprietor to be worth upwards of ten guineas – in those days a price enormous – fell into a tub of water, placed for the shrubs in the little garden, and lost all its gorgon buckle, and was declared by the owner to be totally spoilt. He was extremely angry, and chid very severely his own children; when my little daughter, the old lady, then ten years of age, advancing to him, as I was informed, with great gravity and composure, sedately says; ‘What signifies talking so much about an accident? The wig is wet, to be sure; and the wig was a good wig, to be sure; but its of no use to speak of it any more; because what’s done can’t be undone’.⁸²

This story is made to sound comical in the Memoirs,* and the thought of the little girls running round in judges’ and advocates’ wigs, screaming with laughter – until the accident, and probably then still sniggering – is a charming one. But it has a melancholy undertow. What’s done can’t be undone. If the statement of Fanny’s age is accurate, the incident took place in the year when Esther was dying or dead. The coining of such a fatalistic apothegm by a ten-year-old (‘the wig is wet’ became family shorthand for any situation that had got beyond their control) suggests an unusual degree of reflectiveness. It must have served to remind the wigmaker quite sharply that the ruination of a hair-piece was a relatively paltry loss.

Fanny was referred to in that story as ‘the old lady’, a nickname which settled on her ‘from the time she had reached her eleventh year’. In a passage from the Memoirs apparently ‘Copied from a Memorandum-book of Dr. Burney’s’,* she has her father recall:

in company, or before strangers, [Fanny] was silent, backward, timid, even to sheepishness: and, from her shyness, had such profound gravity and composure of features, that those of my friends who came often to my house, and entered into the different humours of the children, never called Fanny by any other name, from the time she had reached her eleventh year, than The Old Lady.⁸³

Fanny would not have left this in the record if she had not thought it to her credit. Behaving like an old lady, decorously, soberly and with ‘gravity and composure of features’, was for her the only proper way. ‘From the time she had reached her eleventh year’ clearly aligns the onset of ‘profound gravity’ with her mother’s death, after which it may have seemed to Fanny irreverent and inappropriate to be gay in public – in her novels, only the heartless characters ‘get over’ a death. People often described Fanny Burney as ‘shy’, but ‘reserved’ seems a much more accurate word. From her diaries and letters, which exist from her sixteenth year, we know that, privately, she was sharp, witty, devastatingly observant, judgemental, romantic and prone to ‘fits’ of irrepressible high spirits. Her sobersides public persona was clearly a form of camouflage, developed through the long habit of not wanting to have attention drawn to herself, with the criticism she imagined would inevitably follow of her looks, her melancholy, her ‘backwardness’, her lack of polish. To be reserved was also to be preserved.

* According to the ‘Worcester Memoirs’. Wycherley died in 1716, aged about seventy-six, and Ann Cooper was born in 1690, but although it sounds an unlikely courtship, Wycherley in fact married a woman even younger than Ann a fortnight before his death.

* Margaret Anne Doody’s suggestion that a homosexual attraction between Greville and Burney ‘does not seem impossible’¹⁴ seems to me too far-fetched to be helpful in this connection.

* Esther Sleepe’s parentage and date of birth are difficult to ascertain, and scholars disagree over them. She is either the ‘Esther ye Daugh’ of Mr Sleepe by – his Wife’ born 19 May 1723 and baptised on 9 June at St Vedast, Foster Lane (Joyce Hemlow’s choice), or the Hester, daughter of Richard and Frances Sleepe baptised at St Michael le Quern on 1 August 1725 (the choice of the editors of Dr Burney’s memoirs). Professor Hemlow bases her decision on the information given by Esther’s great-grandson, Richard Allen Burney, in his application to the College of Arms in 1807, where he names her father as ‘James Sleepe of Foster Lane’. The Memoir editors cite the passage by Dr Burney that describes his first wife thus: ‘the daughter of old Sleepe, the head of the City waits and furnisher of bands for municipal festivities, and Mrs Sleepe, the daughter of a M. Dubois, who kept a Fan Shop in Cheapside’. This encourages the identification of Esther’s father as Richard Sleepe, a freeman of the Company of Musicians (as was she) and leader of the City waits (the Lord Mayor’s band), who died in 1758. He married a Frances Wood in 1705, whom the Memoir editors reasonably assume was the daughter of the M. Dubois mentioned in Dr Burney’s account, with her surname anglicised, as were those of many exiled Huguenots.¹⁸ The two ‘Mr Sleepe’s could, of course, have been one and the same person (there is no mention of the name ‘James’ except in the 1807 document), or they could have been brothers. It also strikes me as a strong possibility that the two registered births – of ‘Esther Sleepe’ (1723) and ‘Hester Sleepe’ (1725) respectively – were those of sisters, and that the second girl was given, as was very often the case, the name of a sibling who had died in infancy. The likelihood of ‘Mr Sleepe’ and ‘Richard Sleepe’ being the same man and Esther and Hester sisters is increased by the fact that after the Great Fire of 1666, the parish of St Michael le Quern was amalgamated with that of its neighbour, St Vedast, Foster Lane (both churches having been destroyed, and only St Vedast rebuilt – by Wren). The two girl babies were therefore baptised at the same font, two years apart, and not at two different churches, as scholars have hitherto assumed. This would favour the identification of Esther as the daughter of Richard Sleepe, d.1758, and Frances Wood (Dubois), d. before 1776, who was baptised on 1 August 1725, which I take to be correct.¹⁹ Professor Hemlow’s alternative identification is further weakened by the uncertain reliability of Richard Allen Burney’s information. Known in the family as a snob (an accusation which seems borne out by his desire to acquire a coat of arms), Richard Allen Burney was trying to present his genealogy to the College of Arms in the best possible light. As I discuss elsewhere (see Preface), he may not have known of his own mother’s illegitimacy; or if he did, he concealed it from the College. His apparent knowledge of a ‘James Sleepe of Foster Lane’ may have been handed down in the family (though it is odd that it disagrees with Dr Burney’s version), or perhaps extrapolated, for purposes of establishing some presentable facts, from the very records which Professor Hemlow used to corroborate his evidence.

* St Ann’s Blackfriars, Christ Church Greyfriars, and St Vedast and St Michael le Quern.

* The date at which Fanny’s maternal grandmother died is uncertain, and the paucity of references to her in Charles Burney’s memoirs and Fanny’s early diaries slightly puzzling. She was alive in 1764, when Charles Burney wrote to his daughter from Paris to ‘tell your grandmothers’ he had arrived safely, and dead by May 1775, when Fanny recalls in her diary how deeply she mourned for her.²⁷ The reference to ‘writing a Letter to my Grand mama Sleepe’ in July 1768²⁸ may be misleading, since the word ‘Sleepe’ has been recovered from Madame d’Arblay’s emendations to her manuscript, and is possibly a simple error. Fanny was in correspondence with her other grandmother, Ann Burney (who died in October 1775), in August 1768.²⁹

* Now part of Tavistock Street, Covent Garden.

* Which was demolished by the 1690s, but is still commemorated in the name of Great Windmill Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue.

* Pope remained her favourite poet, with Shakespeare, for life.

* It appears in her third novel, Camilla, when one of the characters, overheard reciting from it, is thought to be reading an illicit love-letter.

* I have used the Memoirs version rather than the slightly different one in Dr Burney’s fragmentary memoirs, which does not, for instance, include the detail of the tub of water being there for the shrubs. The story did, after all, happen to Fanny; Charles Burney only knew it second-hand.

* But actually a reworking of his memoirs, or a piece of autobiography written in the third person – compare the fragment in Memoirs of Doctor Charles Burney, pp.141–2, with the ‘same’ passage in Fanny’s Memoirs vol. 2, pp.168–71.

2 A Romantick Girl

In the two years following his wife’s death, Charles Burney was too preoccupied with work and his own sorrows to realise how badly his household was being run; but the concern of his friends became clear. David Garrick and his wife Eva, whom Burney had known since the 1740s, began to take a special interest in the young family and found excuses to be kind to them. When the Garricks were going abroad in the winter of 1763, they asked the Burney children to take care of their spaniel, Phill, and on their return insisted the dog stay on at Poland Street permanently, claiming he preferred it. They also gave the Burneys free run of Mrs Garrick’s private box at Drury Lane, and Fanny and her siblings saw the great ‘Roscius’ perform there as often as they could, accompanied by a chaperone (not, one notices, by their father himself). In the early 1770s Fanny recorded seeing Garrick in some of his most famous roles, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III (‘sublimely horrible!’¹), Bayes in George Buckingham’s The Rehearsal and Abel Drugger in Jonson’s The Alchemist:

Never could I have imagined such a metamorphose as I saw! the extreme meanness – the vulgarity – the low wit – the vacancy of Countenance – the appearance of unlicked Nature in all his motions.²

Garrick, who loved children and had none of his own, called in at Poland Street whether he expected the master of the house to be present or not. The children idolised him, and he couldn’t resist the pleasure of entertaining them with ‘an endless variety of comic badinage, – now exhibited in lofty bombast; now in ludicrous obsequiousness; now by a sarcasm skilfully implying a compliment; now by a compliment archly conveying a sarcasm’:³

he used to take off the old puppet-show Punch, placing himself against a wall, seeming to speak through a comb, & to be moved by wires. Nobody talked such pretty nonsense, as our great Roscius, to children and lap-dogs.⁴

Charles Burney became a frequent guest at the Garricks’ house by the Thames at Hampton, being taken down there on Saturdays when Garrick was not acting, and delivered home on Monday mornings. He was often absent for long periods, or sealed in his study when at home. On such occasions the children were left with each other and the servants.

Burney’s thoughts were running on remarriage, but not to Dolly Young, despite Esther’s deathbed instructions and the children’s strong predilections. Dolly was the obvious choice as a second mother, but not as second wife; her ‘peculiarly unfortunate personal defects’ were clearly too much of an obstacle for Charles Burney. His eye was on Esther’s other close friend from Lynn, the handsome and spirited Mrs Allen, who had been widowed in 1763, only months after Burney’s own loss. Elizabeth Allen was thirty-eight and had three young children: Maria, aged twelve, Stephen, eight, and Bessy, who was only two. Her husband Stephen had left them a fortune of £40,000 from his business as a corn merchant: £5000 went directly to his wife (with a supplementary income of £100 per year until she remarried), and Allen’s two properties in Lynn were entailed on the children until their majorities (bringing in rent meanwhile to support them).⁵ By any reckoning, Elizabeth Allen was a wealthy woman, added to which she was clever and beautiful and familiar to the family from their happy days in Lynn and her friendship with Esther. Charles Burney must have found the prospect of an alliance with her almost irresistible.

In the fragments of his manuscript memoirs, Burney recalls how he pursued the attractive widow, who had kept in touch by letter and saw him regularly when she came to London every winter. He began to feel ‘very seriously impassioned’, and clearly believed he stood a good chance of success, but his advances were premature. The unambiguous verses he was writing to her offended rather than seduced ‘The Witch’:

Her image by night & by day

Still haunts me, both sleeping & waking,

Steals my peace & spirits away

And my heart keeps incessantly aching.⁶

Mrs Allen found this poem presumptuous, and refused to see the music master for over a year. He had to retreat with his tail between his legs, admitting later that, ‘After this rebuff I had very little hopes that our acquaintance wd ever be renewed’.⁷

With the failure of his attempt to restart some kind of home life, Burney began to wonder what to do with his children. He decided to send two of the girls to France to be educated on the cheap by boarding with a respectable Protestant woman in Paris, where they would pick up what they could of the language and culture. The two he chose were not the eldest girls, Esther and Fanny, but Esther and Susan. Burney’s anxiety about finding a suitably Protestant governess was such that he was prepared to pay over the odds: ‘I thought it best’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘whatever might be the expence, to avoid putting them in the way to be prejudiced in favour of any religion except our own, as it might distract their minds, &, if opposed, render them miserable for the rest of their lives.’⁸ Was this a reasonable fear on his children’s behalfs? Were they really made of such flammable stuff as to be ‘rendered miserable for the rest of their lives’ by a change of ideology? Fanny, certainly, became such a person, fiercely clinging to what she knew, but she, more than any other of the Burney children, had spent a lifetime trying to anticipate her father’s wishes.

There was another consideration in Charles Burney’s decision not to send Fanny abroad – her ‘backwardness’. Although Fanny had managed to learn to read and write, Susan was the quicker and more advanced student, and her education a more worthwhile use of funds. Burney was clearly thinking in terms of efficiency. He knew he couldn’t subsidise his children indefinitely (especially now that he had been spurned by the rich widow), and he sought to launch his family at the earliest opportunity ‘to shift for themselves as I had done’.⁹ Young Charles, aged only six in the summer of 1764, would cost money to educate (he went to Charterhouse in 1768 and on to Cambridge); James, fortunately, was already established in his naval career – he had joined the Niger as Captain’s Servant in 1763 and was made a midshipman as soon as he turned sixteen three years later. For the girls, however, ‘shifting for themselves’ could only mean marrying as well as they could, and for Fanny, the ‘dunce’, staying at home and acting as secretary-cum-housekeeper to her father was probably thought (by him, at any rate) more than sufficient preparation.

Charles Burney returned from depositing Hetty and Susan in Paris in the summer of 1764 in a mood of renewed optimism. He had bought a great many books and indulged one of his favourite pastimes, introducing himself to famous men (in this case the philosopher David Hume, then secretary to the English Ambassador). Burney’s ambitions were still unfocused. He couldn’t work out how to insert himself into the literary world except through the theatre, where his friendship with Garrick – who consistently encouraged his work as a composer for the stage – gave him a foothold. A nice opportunity opened up in 1765 when Garrick suggested that Burney should translate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s operetta Le Devin du village for production at Drury Lane. Burney happened to have made an English version of this piece some years before, and its transition to the stage was swift, though not as successful as the translator probably hoped. The first night of The Cunning-Man, in November 1766, was watched from Mrs Garrick’s box by the Burney children Hetty (who had stayed in Paris only a year), Fanny, Charles and possibly even little Charlotte, all sitting forward to monitor the audience’s reactions to their beloved father’s debut as a writer. They themselves were being watched from the orchestra by Garrick, who seems to have been more interested by the spectacle in the box than the one on the stage, and described to Charles Burney later,

the innocent confidence of success with which [the children] all openly bent forward, to look exultingly at the audience, when a loud clapping followed the overture: and their smiles, or nods; or chuckling and laughter, according to their more or less advanced years, during the unmingled approbation that was bestowed upon about half the piece – contrasted with, first the amazement, next, the indignation; and lastly, the disappointment, that were brought forth by the beginning buzz of hissing, and followed by the shrill horrors of the catcall: and then the return – joyous, but no longer dauntless! – of hope when again the applause prevailed.¹⁰

The possibility of hissing and catcalls had clearly not crossed the children’s minds. It was a rude awakening to the fact that though their father seemed a demi-god at home, he had yet to prove himself to the rest of the world. The children were not ignorant of theatre audiences’ rough manners. Noisy commentary, free criticism, missile-hurling and occasional fisticuffs were part and parcel of a night out at either of London’s licensed playhouses. The attention of the crowd was hard to attract and, once gained, fickle and demanding, and though the segregation of the crowd into gallery, pit and boxes afforded some protection to members of the audience from each other, no part of it felt any obligation to respect what was going on on the stage. Fanny Burney satirised the situation memorably in the Drury Lane episode in Evelina, where the fop Lovel says of theatre-going, ‘one merely comes to meet one’s friends, and shew that one’s alive. […] I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about, and finding out one’s acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage […] pray – what was the play tonight?’¹¹ The onus was on the manager and players, but most of all on the author, to entertain an essentially indifferent rabble. The unharmonious ‘buzz of hissing’ and ‘shrill horrors of the catcall’ that greeted their musician father’s first literary performance was, to the Burney children, a startling demonstration of that audience’s power.

With hindsight, Fanny Burney was in no doubt that her father’s ultimate aim in life had been to achieve fame as an author, and that The Cunning-Man marked a turning point for him. Her remarks in the Memoirs about the vocation they shared are revealing:

it was now that, vaguely, yet powerfully, he first fell into that stream of ideas, or visions, that seemed to hail him to that class indefinable, from its mingled elevation and abjectness, which, by joining the publicity of the press to the secret intercourse of the mind with the pen, insensibly allures its adventurous votaries to make the world at large the judge of their abilities, or their deficiencies – namely, the class of authors.¹²

Fanny was writing this (in the 1820s) at the end of her own long career as a writer, which makes her persistent anxieties about the ‘mingled elevation and abjectness’ of authorship all the more interesting. When her own first book came to be published she was impressed, with traumatic intensity, by the fact that the author’s initial ‘intercourse of the mind with the pen’ (secretive and confidential) led to the total exposure of him or herself to an unknowably large and critical audience. As a novelist, Fanny Burney became both audience and performer, watching and anatomising the world around her which then, in the form of her readers, was free to read and anatomise her.

The example of the careless crowd at Drury Lane hissing her father’s work is likely to have intensified her fears of the judgemental ‘world at large’, but also demonstrated the mutually exploitative nature of the compact between artist and audience and the complexity of the traffic between doing, looking, speaking, writing and reading. The passage in the Memoirs about the first performance of The Cunning-Man both describes and demonstrates this. It records Garrick’s observations, but was actually written up by Fanny, one of the children he was observing, when she was composing her father’s Memoirs sixty years later. The passage seems to be a recollection by Garrick of watching the Burney children watching the audience that was watching their father’s translation of Rousseau’s operetta. It is actually a recollection by the elderly Madame d’Arblay of what her father reported that Garrick had acted out for him after the performance. The ‘incident’ when unpicked is seen to be not one but many, the different parts relating to each other in casual or even chaotic ways. Madame d’Arblay’s objective as a biographer and autobiographer was to obfuscate such complexities. Consciously or not, she was aware that observation and recollection are dynamic processes that can be arrested by the act of writing. Writing things down became her way of taking possession of the past and attempting to impose on it shape and meaning.

In the same year that Hetty and Susan went away to Paris, Charles Burney accidentally met and renewed his friendship with Samuel Crisp, his old acquaintance from Wilbury days. This was to be of great significance to Fanny, for Crisp became, after her father, the most respected and influential person in her early life. Crisp had first met Burney in 1747, when he was forty and the young musician only twenty-one. He was in an enviable position – handsome, highly cultured, uncumbered by wife or family and possessed of a private income. He spent his life in the improvement of his mind and the refinement of his taste: he read a great deal, travelled, listened to music, studied paintings and sculpture and was regarded as a true connoisseur of the arts by his friends, many of whom were aristocratic and most, like him, rich. Charles Burney was grateful for a really well-informed mentor who could educate him in ‘almost every species of improvement’ and for whom ‘the love of music […] amounted to passion’.¹³ Thomas Arne had made the profession of music seem like drudgery, Crisp was the first person to show Charles that it could aspire to the highest aesthetic ideals.

Crisp, a collector of musical instruments and objets d’art, had brought back from one of his visits to Italy the first large pianoforte, or ‘harpsichord with hammers’,¹⁴ that was ever constructed. Burney had ample opportunity to play this remarkable instrument and appreciate the ‘magnificent and new effect’ of the sound it produced when Crisp sold it to Fulke Greville. Crisp could play several musical instruments and had a tenor voice which Charles Burney thought better than that of many professional singers. But he never took part in the Burneys’ later musical evenings, preferring to keep his accomplishments to himself. He was a true dilettante, in Fanny’s words in the Memoirs, ‘a scholar of the highest order; a critic of the clearest acumen; possessing, with equal delicacy of discrimination, a taste for literature and for the arts’.¹⁵

Unfortunately, there was one area where Crisp’s clear acumen and delicate discrimination failed him, and where he was not content with the status of gifted amateur. He was convinced that he was a dramatic poet, and by 1754 had finished his magnum opus, a tragedy in verse called Virginia (based on the story in Livy, retold by Chaucer in The Physician’s Tale) which he had been writing for at least five years. He offered it to his friend David Garrick for production at Drury Lane, and season after season expected it to be put on, but Garrick prevaricated. Sure of his play’s merits, Crisp decided to put pressure on Garrick through his influential friends. He got the Earl of Coventry to give a copy of it to the Prime Minister, Pitt the Elder, who said it was ‘excellent’¹⁶ and persuaded the Earl’s wife, Lady Coventry, to take the manuscript back to Garrick personally. This was ‘a machinery such as none could long resist’, as Lord Macaulay wrote of the incident.¹⁷ Lady Coventry (née Gunning) was one of the famous beauties of the day, idolised like a latter-day film star; she and her sister were followed by crowds of admirers, seven hundred of whom, reportedly, once waited outside an inn just to catch sight of them.¹⁸ When she came bearing Virginia, Garrick had to concede to the power of Crisp’s manoeuvring. He agreed to put the play on in the spring of 1754, although he insisted on cutting some scenes, by which, as even the author was prepared to admit, it was ‘rendered much more Dramatic than it was at first’.¹⁹ Garrick took the role of Virginius himself, with Mrs Cibber as his daughter, the tragic heroine; but despite their best efforts, the play lasted only ten nights – not a disaster, by any means, but a sharp disappointment to Crisp, who thought he had given birth to a classic.

Crisp spent the next year revising Virginia, and took mortal offence when Garrick, unsurprisingly, expressed no interest in a revival. Crisp complained of Garrick’s ill-will, his friends’ lack of enthusiasm, the fickleness of the public – anything but admit that there might be something wrong with the work. ‘The fatal delusion that he was a great dramatist, had taken firm possession of his mind’, Macaulay wrote. ‘He lost his temper and spirits, and became a cynic and hater of mankind.’²⁰ Crisp came to regret that he had ever allowed Garrick to alter a line of Virginia, and thirty years later was still smarting from the play’s failure, convinced that he had only missed out on literary glory through other people’s errors of judgement. Sending the surviving segments of the play to Fanny Burney after Crisp’s death, his sister, Sophia Gast, gave her own version of the affair: ‘The then manager [Garrick] would not suffer the too much approved, and greatly admired performance, to be acted as in its pristine state, but insisted on many alterations’. Garrick’s motivation was clear to Mrs Gast: simple jealousy. Fanny Burney, who had known both Garrick and Crisp very well, and was loyal to the memory of both, scored the word through.²¹

Crisp left England for Italy in 1755, not intending to return. However, after a few years’ self-imposed exile he came back to live a life of retirement ‘in one of the wildest tracts of Surrey’.²² This was the hamlet of Chesington,* about two miles north-west of Epsom (now a heavily-developed suburb just inside the London orbital motorway), where he took up residence as a long-term paying guest in a decaying country house belonging to one of his bachelor acquaintances, Christopher Hamilton.

Chesington Hall was falling into ruin when Christopher Hamilton took it over from the Hatton family in 1746. Fanny Burney calls him the ‘hereditary owner’, but she could have been wrong about this,† as she was about ‘the long dignity’ of the house’s name, which Hamilton himself had made up in the 1740s.²³ Fanny tended to romanticise everything about Chesington, the ‘long-loved rural abode [where] the Burneys and happiness seemed to make a stand’,²⁴ and it is easy to see how the Tudor house, with its old wood, old windows and curious passageways, would have appealed to an imaginative child. It was built of brick around 1520 and had retained most of its early features, including a long gallery on the first floor, tapestries, canopied beds, carved cupboards and a chimney-piece ‘cut in diamonds, squares and round nobs, surmounting another of blue and white tiles’.²⁵ The windowpanes were ‘hardly so wide as their clumsy frames’, and were ‘stuck in some angle close to the ceiling of a lofty slip of a room’, or looked out from the attics onto ‘long ridges of lead that entwined the motley spiral roofs of the multitude of separate cells’. A crumbling Elizabethan ‘cell’ was just what Samuel Crisp was looking for, and he was glad to adopt what Fanny later described as ‘some pic-nic plan’²⁶ with Hamilton, joining a number of other waning gentlemen at Chesington Hall ‘who had quitted the world, and who in this Chateau met only at meals, at Tea, and afterwards at a game of cards’.²⁷

Crisp’s retirement was not complete, and he came up to town every spring to visit the latest exhibitions and attend plays, concerts and the opera. It was on one of these trips that he re-met Charles Burney and quickly re-established their friendship. They had been out of touch during the period of the Virginia episode, when Burney had finally taken his friend’s advice and moved back to London from King’s Lynn – the period, too, during which Esther had died. The sight of the young music-master, as thin and overworked as ever, heroically trying to maintain his household in Poland Street, must have touched Crisp deeply. Burney was the only one of his friends to whom he divulged the secret of how to find Chesington Hall, and it soon became a refuge where the musician could retire to work, or simply stroll among the box-walks or the fruit trees, or admire a good view of Epsom from the summer-house on the ‘Mount’.

On the death of Christopher Hamilton, Chesington Hall passed to his sister Sarah, who, guided by Crisp’s advice, let half the house and most of the surrounding land to a farmer named Woodhatch, retaining the other part as ‘a competant establishment for receiving a certain number of boarders’.²⁸* Crisp became, in effect, the head of a household that consisted of himself, Mrs Hamilton,† her good-natured niece Kitty Cooke, and a shifting cast of lodgers. The Burneys were always welcome, and over the years Chesington Hall became a second home, especially when any of them needed a convalescent ‘change of air’. Crisp took great interest in all the children, but was particularly fond of Fanny, who returned his affection abundantly. She was an adolescent who sometimes behaved like an ‘old lady’; he an old gentleman who like to indulge youthful high spirits. Genial, cultivated and attentive, Crisp became a kind of ideal grandfather to the Burney children, a second ‘Daddy’ – the pet name he was more than happy to adopt.

In the year during which Hetty and Susan were away in Paris, Fanny had the house on Poland Street to herself for long stretches of time. She was twelve years old, had free access to her father’s growing library, and was keen to improve herself. She studied conscientiously, made notes, copied extracts and kept a catalogue raisonné, possibly in competition with her two sisters abroad. A long manuscript translation from the French of Fontanelle’s ‘Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes’ has survived³⁰ which may have been made during these years: it indicates the seriousness of Fanny’s studies, her ambition and also her characteristic self-consciousness – underneath the title appear the words ‘Murdered into English by Frances Burney’.

Her reading, as suggested by entries in her early diaries,³¹ was heavily weighted towards works of moral instruction, sermons, standard histories, poetry and the ‘female conduct books’ which were deemed an essential part of a young woman’s mental baggage. One of the most popular and influential of the conduct-book writers was James Fordyce, whose Sermons to Young Women Fanny knew well.* Fordyce asserted the authority of his sex with confidence: ‘Men […] are in general better judges than women, of the deportment of women’,³² while its moral inferiority was also acknowledged: ‘The world, I know not how, overlooks in our sex a thousand irregularities, which it never forgives in yours’.³³ The disturbing sexual power of women could only, in Fordyce’s view, be put to proper use as an inducement to and reward for good male behaviour. A roomful of riotous men, he asserted, could be ‘checked all at once into decency’ by the accidental entrance of a virtuous woman.³⁴ Restraint was the key to proper female conduct: wit, in women, ‘is commonly looked upon with a suspicious eye’, and ‘war, commerce, politics, exercises of strength & dexterity, abstract philosophy & all the abstruser sciences, are most properly the province of men’.³⁵ This left little for women to do (besides entering rooms virtuously) other than going astray, the irreparable personal disaster which opened the way to widespread social disintegration.

Because Fanny had no one with whom to discuss her reading or to guide it, and because her veneration for the written word was intense, the messages of authors such as Fordyce impressed her very strongly, reinforcing an already anxious and conservative nature. Their severity appealed to the neglected child, whose ‘straightforward morality’, in her father’s opinion, had ‘wanted no teaching’.³⁶ At this impressionable age, and unguided, she assumed a set of standards which proved a constant agitation to her natural morality. She assented to the conventional view, as articulated by Fordyce, of the superior authority of the male sex, although her common sense and sense of justice often told her otherwise. For example, reading the Iliad, aged sixteen, she found herself ‘provoked […] for the honour of the sex’:

Venus tempts Hellen with every delusion in favour of her Darling, – in vain – Riches – power – honour – Love – all in vain – the enraged Deity threatens to deprive her of her own beauty, & render her to the level with the most common of her sex – blushing & trembling – Hellen immediately yields her Hand.

Thus has Homer proved his opinion of our poor sex – that the Love of Beauty is our most prevailing passion. It really grieves me to think that there certainly must be reason for the insignificant opinion the greatest men have of Women – At least I fear there must. – But I don’t in fact believe it – thank God!³⁷

The poet – not just a man, but a truly ‘great man’ – had to be right: but wasn’t. ‘Fear’ and ‘belief’ contradicted one another, and the only way Fanny could resolve the problem was by sticking to the evidence of her own experience. She lost no opportunity in her books to expose the disadvantages under which her own sex laboured, but did so, characteristically, through realistic representation of women rather than by direct criticism of men. Modern readers can’t help interpreting her works as feminist, but Fanny Burney herself would have been shocked and distressed to have been associated with anything so subversive. In the fight between duty and justice, duty was always going to win. A person such as her father, who embodied her primary duty, thus became an idealised figure, incapable of doing wrong – even though she knew he did act wrongly sometimes. It was a paradox that affected her profoundly, creating tensions in her writing which provide much of her works’ interest, but which ultimately may have inhibited her from becoming a great artist.

Fanny Burney’s attitude to novels and novel-writing reflects the same anxieties. She never completely outgrew her poor opinion of the form, derived from the views of old-fashioned moralists such as Fordyce (who thought that novels ‘carry on their very forehead the mark of the beast’). She projected onto her father the same strict tastes. Novels were not banned in the liberal Burney household; as well as Richardson and Fielding, Fanny had read Sterne (although she pityingly called him ‘poor Sterne’) and many other works which Fordyce would have abominated. The house was full of reading-matter quite apart from the mostly musical and classical texts in Charles Burney’s library, and lack of supervision meant that while Fanny read much more demanding books than most ‘educated’ young ladies would have encountered, she also read a great deal more ‘low-grade’ literature, and knew many risqué works, such as Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, well enough to parody them.³⁸ The sort of literature she enjoyed and the sort of literature she felt ‘allowed’ to write were not the same thing at all.

When she tried to amalgamate entertainment with moral instruction in her own work, the results were patchy. In Evelina, which was published anonymously, the attempt was successful because Burney felt free to make her heroine mildly fallible, and open to moral improvement; in the later books, when she had to own authorship, her heroines represented pure virtue under attack – a very much less dramatic or entertaining formula. Clearly, the only way Fanny Burney could justify to herself her own persistent interest in writing fiction (and her last novel, The Wanderer, though her least satisfactory, is probably the most ambitious) was by stressing its moral purpose. ‘If many turn aside from all but mere entertainment presented under this form’, she wrote in the dedication to The Wanderer, ‘many, also, may, unconsciously, be allured by it into reading the severest truths, who would not even open any work of a graver denomination’.³⁹

Fanny’s juvenilia seems to have been mostly of a ‘grave denomination’: ‘Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces, – nay, Tragedies and Epic Poems, every scrap of white paper that could be seized upon without question or notice’.⁴⁰ It was an obsessive, absorbing pleasure which she kept secret, convinced ‘that what she scribbled, if seen, would but expose her to ridicule’.⁴¹ Her ‘writing passion’⁴² was partly a response to loneliness, partly, as is evident from the astonishing diversity of the forms she tried, a form of interaction with the authors she read and admired. The extent of that interaction was very unusual. As an old woman, Fanny described to her younger sister Charlotte how she got by heart one of William Mason’s poems by ‘repeating it, in the dead of sleepless Nights, so often, so collectedly, so all to myself, that I believe I must have caught every possible meaning of the Poet, not only in every sentiment, but in the appropriation of every word, so as to be able to pronounce as I conceive him to have thought, […] entering into the Poem as if it had been the production of my own brain’.⁴³ This describes something more akin to a form of ecstatic spiritual communion than to what we normally understand by reading. Her use of the word ‘appropriation’ seems particularly apt.

In her early teenage years, Fanny had plenty of time in which to indulge her ‘writing passion’, and a safe place, her ‘bureau’, in which to lock her works away. This was not a piece of furniture, but a closet in the Poland Street bedroom, the only part of the house which was inviolably hers. Even as a forty-year-old, Fanny was expected to share a bedroom with her half-sister, and it is unlikely that she ever had a room of her own before her marriage, except at Mrs Thrale’s in the late 1770s and at court in the late 1780s. It is clear from the early diaries that as an adolescent Fanny stayed up at night writing or reading until the candle ran out, with her sisters asleep nearby.⁴⁴ There was nothing casual about these secretive literary pursuits ‘in the dead of sleepless Nights’. By Fanny’s mid-teens, the stack of compositions in the ‘bureau’ included at least one full-length novel.

On her return from Paris,* eleven-year-old Susan was struck by the differences between her two elder sisters, one of whom had enjoyed the same opportunities for travel and education as herself, the other of whom had stayed at home:

The characteristics of Hetty seem to be wit, generosity, and openness of heart; – Fanny’s, – sense, sensibility, and bashfulness, and even a degree of prudery. Her understanding is superior, but her diffidence gives her a bashfulness before company with whom she is not intimate, which is a disadvantage to her. My eldest sister shines in conversation, because, though very modest, she is totally free from any mauvaise honte: were Fanny equally so, I am persuaded she would shine no less.⁴⁶

Observers who were less well-disposed than Susan might easily have dismissed Fanny as affected or dull. The superior intellect was not on public display (now or ever), while the bashfulness and ‘degree of prudery’ were marked. By the age of fourteen Fanny had adopted patterns of behaviour – all stemming from vigilant self-appraisal – that she would never be able to break completely.

But there was another side to Fanny’s character, of ‘wildness’ ‘friskyness’ and invention, which Susan’s company brought out. Only Susan was shown the precious writings, and ‘the stolen moments of their secret readings’ together were, in retrospect, ‘the happiest of their adolescent lives’.⁴⁷ Among the pieces Susan read was Fanny’s manuscript novel, ‘Caroline Evelyn’, a sad tale of abandonment and ill-usage, which ended with the young heroine dying in childbirth. Like the ‘Elegies, Odes, […] Tragedies and Epic Poems’ Fanny had been writing, it reflected the melancholy that had settled on her after her mother’s death. But with Susan re-established at home, such mournful ruminations had become obsolete. In that year,* Mr Crisp had been amused and surprised to see Fanny dancing a wild jig on the lawn at Chesington Hall, ‘with Your Cap on the Ground, & your long hair streaming down your Back, one shoe off, & throwing about your head like a mad thing’.⁵⁰ This was a far cry from the bashful, mumbling behaviour Fanny usually displayed in public. ‘[T]here is a nameless Grace & Charm in giving a loose to that Wildness & friskyness sometimes’, Crisp told her years later, acknowledging how much of this element there was in his young friend’s character, however seldom anyone outside the family circle got to see it.

Change was in the air in the Burney household. Unknown to his children, Charles Burney was once again courting Mrs Allen. The opportunity to renew acquaintance with the beautiful widow had come in 1765 when she placed her elder daughter, lively fourteen-year-old Maria, at school in London and rented a house in Great Russell Street as a winter base. Charles Burney was appointed to teach Maria music, and arranged for the lessons to take place at teatime, in order that ‘when he was liberated from the daughter, he might be engaged with the mother’.⁵¹ Chastened by his earlier failure, Burney adopted a gentler line of courtship over the next eighteen months or so, accompanying Mrs Allen to the opera and to concerts, both of which she loved, and sending her his prose version of Dante’s Inferno instead of poems like ‘The Witch’. In truth, there was nothing for Mrs Allen to gain materially from a remarriage: she would lose the £100 annual income under her first husband’s will and gain a low-earning husband with six children and a chaotic workload. Nevertheless, Burney kept up the campaign, contriving meetings when the widow’s ‘imperious’ mother was absent. He was clearly in love, as well as very keen to find a second mother for his family and a supporter (financially and morally) for his work. By the spring of 1767, his patience was in sight of paying off: ‘my beloved Mrs Allen […] began to be weaned from her fears’, he wrote, ‘by affection and consta[nt] importunity; and I flattered myself I was gaining ground’.⁵²

When Elizabeth Allen returned to Lynn for the summer in April 1767, Burney bombarded her with letters, sent under cover to Dolly Young or in a feigned hand to avoid the vigilant mother’s eye. Like his daughter Fanny, he seemed to relish a conspiracy: ‘our correspondence had all the Air of mystery and intrigue; in that we seemed 2 young lovers under age trying to out-wit our parents and guardians’.⁵³ Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s mother could not be outwitted forever, and her objections to the match were strong. Charles decided to try another approach through her son Edmund, and to this end arranged a trip to Bristol Hotwells, taking ‘my 2d daughter Fanny’ along with him.

This was Fanny’s first, and possibly only, visit to Bristol, and lasted only three days, but the impression made on the fifteen-year-old must have been extremely vivid, for she set a large part of her first published novel there. She had no idea of the real purpose of her father’s visit – to her it was a delightful privilege to be his sole companion, a pleasure possibly enhanced by the melancholy association of the Hotwells with her mother’s last illness. Any special marks of attention from her father must have been flattering, and one can imagine that Burney was in a particularly animated mood at the thought of gaining consent to his nuptials. He was also, presumably, keen to give Fanny a treat of some kind, knowing that if his plans went ahead, there would no longer be any question of her going abroad to school.

Burney took Fanny with him again, with one of her sisters (probably Susan), when he went to Lynn in June 1767 for a wild courtship holiday. It was the first time Fanny had been back to her native town since the family moved to London in 1760, and it was of course another place deeply associated with her mother. They stayed at Mrs Allen’s dower-house opposite St Margaret’s for a month, during which time Burney and Mrs Allen visited ‘almost every place and thing that is curious in Norfolk, making love chemin faisant’⁵⁴ (the way Burney did everything). Dolly Young acted as chaperone on this tour, but was possibly not very strict, nor always in attendance. Who else, after all, was there to attend to the girls while Burney was ‘making love’, if not Dolly?

By the end of their romantic holiday, the couple had come to an agreement. They were to marry, but secretly; only their closest friends, Dolly Young and Samuel Crisp, were to know about it. The ceremony took place on 2 October at St James’s Church, Westminster. Charles must have found some excuse of work to account for his three-day absence on honeymoon at a farmhouse near Chesington Hall – arranged by Crisp – after which he and his new wife returned to their separate houses in town as if nothing had happened. Several reasons for this strange deception suggest themselves. Old Mrs Allen, Elizabeth’s mother,* viewed Burney as a fortune-hunter, and continued to disapprove of the match. Perhaps Elizabeth’s brother Edmund also disapproved, since he took no part in the wedding. As it was, the bride was given away by her banker, Richard Fuller. Since the couple did not wait to gain the Allen family’s consent, either they had given up trying to win it as hopeless, or they had become lovers and wanted the cover of legitimacy (albeit secret) in case Elizabeth became pregnant. Charles Burney had, after all, got Esther pregnant before they were married, a fact that Elizabeth, as an intimate of both parties, would very probably have known.

The banker was a symbolic presence at the ceremony that October morning, since the disparity of wealth between the couple had threatened the match, and was still being argued over by the bride’s son and the groom’s daughter sixty-six years later. Mrs Allen had, at what date is unclear, invested a large part of her £5000 in the English Factory in Russia, which subsequently failed. In an overtly self-justifying letter to Dolly Young,⁵⁵ Charles Burney claimed that his second wife’s money was ‘almost all gone’ before the Russian bankruptcy, which itself was ‘many months before our marriage’. If this had been the case, his wife must have frittered away a fortune in the four years of her widowhood and come to the new marriage dependent on him. But by remarking ‘I never touched a penny from the wreck in Russia’, Burney acknowledges that something was salvaged from it; Stephen Allen, Elizabeth’s son, claimed this sum was as much as £1000 (again, the date at which it was recovered is unknown). Allen also reckoned that his mother was in possession of at least £600 at the time of her marriage, and was owed £900 by a family friend, James Simpson.* With her properties and the rent from them added, the whole amount his mother brought to her second marriage was ‘not actuated at less than £4000’.⁵⁶

Fanny’s rather jaundiced impression, expressed in her correspondence following the publication of her Memoirs of Doctor Burney, was that if the second Mrs Burney was wealthy at the time of her marriage, she did not spend the money on anyone but herself. Her father had, understandably, seen it more as a matter of pride to himself than blame to his wife that he continued to support his family by force of sheer hard work ‘without encroaching on the income of my wife’.⁵⁷ The notion that Elizabeth’s money made no difference to the household is disingenuous, however. The Burneys’ standard of living rose considerably (including the grand acquisition of their own coach), and Charles Burney, whether because of his reduced workload or increased well-being (or both), suddenly saw his career taking off in previously unthought-of ways. Within two years of his remarriage he had taken his doctorate at Oxford, written his first book, and was preparing for an extensive research tour on the Continent. Elizabeth was the enabling factor in all this.

The dispute in the 1830s between Stephen Allen and Fanny Burney confined itself to the matter of Elizabeth Allen Burney’s money, but there was a great deal more for a son to object to in Fanny’s Memoirs than the insinuation that his mother was ‘destitute of any provision when she consented to a second marriage’.⁵⁸ Fanny’s version of the growth of affection between Mrs Allen and her father clearly reflected her own difficulties in coming to terms with it, but it is almost breathtakingly unfair and inaccurate if we are to believe Dr Burney’s own account (and there is no reason why we should not) in the fragmentary memoirs on which Fanny herself purported to be basing her book.

In Fanny’s account, the affair was initiated by Mrs Allen (‘very handsome, but no longer in her bloom’⁵⁹) on her arrival in London with Maria. She was widowed, but not, Fanny suggests, very severely, unlike Charles Burney, whose ‘superior grief’ was ‘as deep as it was acute’.⁶⁰ Her father’s degree of grieving was a problem for Fanny, who was disturbed by the thought that he might have ‘got over’ Esther’s death. She makes his profound bereavement not only the cause of ‘feeling admiration’ in Mrs Allen, who ‘saw him with daily increasing interest’,⁶¹ but a way of clearing her father of any complicity in the affair: ‘insensibly he became solaced, while involuntarily she grew grateful, upon observing her rising influence over his spirits’. Pages of Fanny’s chapter on ‘Mrs Stephen Allen’ are taken up with eulogies of her own dead mother, put into the mind, if not the mouth, of Charles Burney:

If, by any exertion of which mortal man is capable, or any suffering which mortal man can sustain, Mr. Burney could have called back his vanished Esther to his ecstatic consciousness, labour, even to decrepitude, endurance even to torture, he would have borne, would have sought, would have blessed, for the most transient sight of her adored form.⁶²

In an attempt to rebut the idea that her father’s willingness to remarry might undermine the ‘pristine connubial tenderness’ of his first vows, Fanny came up with an ingenious interpretation of his behaviour, extremely unflattering to her stepmother:

The secret breast, alive to memory though deprived of sympathy, may still internally adhere to its own choice and fondness; notwithstanding the various and imperious calls of current existence may urge a second alliance: and urge it, from feelings and from affections as clear of inconstancy as of hypocrisy; urge it, from the best of motives, that of accommodating ourselves to our lot, with all its piercing privations; since our lot is dependent upon causes we have no means to either evade or fathom; and as remote from our direction as our wishes.⁶³

In other words, Charles Burney remarried, but stayed secretly, ‘internally’ faithful to ‘the angel whom [he] had lost’. He ‘recoiled from such an anodyne as demanded new vows to a new object’, but couldn’t help inflaming Mrs Allen all the more with the pathos of his vulnerability and ‘noble disinterestedness’ in her fortune when it was ‘completely lost’ in the Russian bankruptcy.⁶⁴ So much for the ‘not less than £4000’ Stephen Allen spoke of. So much, also, for any hint of Charles Burney’s ‘very impassioned’ feelings for Mrs Allen, his ‘constant importunity’ and pursuit of her to a hasty, secret marriage against her family’s wishes and her own best interests materially. If Fanny had got one thing right, it was that Elizabeth Allen must have felt unusually ‘impassioned’ about her new husband in return.

Fanny was writing her account, it must be remembered, more than sixty years later, and the intensity she ascribes to Charles Burney’s bereavement reflects her own intense losses by that date. But if the gulf of years makes it hard for her to untangle her own motives and feelings, it adds interest to the details which she considers significant with hindsight. There is no record of when the news of their father’s marriage was broken to the Burney children. Charles Burney simply relates that he and his new wife ‘kept our union as secret as possible for a time, inhabiting different houses’.⁶⁵ Fanny goes further, relating that though the secret was ‘faithfully preserved, for a certain time, by scrupulous discretion in the parties, and watchful circumspection in the witnesses’ (Crisp and Miss Young), something happened to force the hand of the clandestine couple:

as usual also, error and accident were soon at work to develop the transaction; and the loss of a letter, through some carelessness of conveyance, revealed suddenly but irrevocably the state of the connection.

This circumstance, however, though, at the time, cruelly distressing, served ultimately but to hasten their own views; as the discovery was necessarily followed by the personal union for which their hands had been joined.⁶⁶

What the miscarried letter contained is of less importance than at which address it was ‘lost’, Burney’s or his wife’s, and by whom ‘found’. ‘Some carelessness of conveyance’ – such a throwaway phrase – would have had to involve, in this case, either somebody wrongly opening a letter addressed to someone else, or reading a letter already opened by the addressee. The children had probably guessed that something was afoot between their father and Mrs Allen. Perhaps the discovery of the letter was an accident, perhaps not. If it was a deliberate act of snooping, it backfired nastily. We may wonder, but not wonder too long, given the authorship of that feeling phrase, who it was that found the incident so ‘cruelly distressing’.

Perhaps in order to give the children time to accustom themselves to the situation, Charles Burney and his new wife continued to live mostly apart. By July 1768 it was no longer possible to hide the fact that Elizabeth was pregnant, but she still retained her spacious dower-house in Lynn and spent most of her time there. Fortunately, the Burney girls loved their new stepsister Maria Allen, and took their cue from her generous and optimistic view of the prospects of the new arrangements. Their devotion to their father was such, too, that they would not openly have said anything to hurt him. Fanny’s wording is interesting when she describes how the sisters ‘were all earnest to contribute their small mites to the happiness of one of the most beloved of parents, by receiving, with the most respectful alacrity, the lady on whom he had cast his future hopes of regaining domestic comfort’.⁶⁷ One gets the impression that even if Elizabeth Allen had been an ogress, the children would have made an effort for their father’s sake. It does not mean that the shock of the news or their embarrassment was any the less.

For Fanny, writing in the 1820s as an old woman alone in her house in Mayfair, the recollection of this period provokes two strong associations: one the memory of her dead mother, abandoned, as it were, by the abrupt and unwanted change in the family’s life, and the other of her own lost last chance at being given an education. The Paris plans for herself and Charlotte, kept on hold for years, were given up entirely when the new household shook down. Seven-year-old Charlotte went away to school in Norfolk, young Charles went to Charterhouse, but at sixteen Fanny was too old for schooling. Her third-person account in her biography of her father fails to contain the resentful disappointment she felt:

The second [daughter], Frances, was the only one of Mr Burney’s family who never was placed in any seminary, and never was put under any governess or instructor whatsoever. Merely and literally self-educated, her sole emulation for improvement, and sole spur for exertion, were her unbounded veneration for the character, and unbounded affection for the person, of her father; who, nevertheless, had not, at the time, a moment to spare for giving her any personal lessons; or even for directing her pursuits.⁶⁸

Much has been made of the violent antipathy that grew up between the second Mrs Burney and her stepdaughters, but the relationship started out well enough. Fanny’s efforts to like her new stepmother, whom she immediately and without irony called ‘Mama’ or ‘my mother’, may not have been wholehearted (as is evidenced by the completeness with which she gave them up), but they were sincere. The new Mrs Burney recognised Fanny’s sensitivity and singled her out as a possible ally, though typically, she seemed to be giving with one hand and taking away with the other when she remarked in company in the very early days of the new household, ‘Here’s a Girl will never be happy! Never while she Lives! for she possesses perhaps as feeling a Heart as ever Girl had!’⁶⁹ The new Mrs Burney’s manner was emphatic, her opinions set and her voice loud. She was robustly unaware of getting on anyone’s nerves, and, seen in a good light, this passed for artlessness. Certainly, Charles Burney loved and admired her uncritically – referring to her as ‘my beloved’ and ‘the dear soul’ in his memoirs⁷⁰ – and the girls greatly appreciated how much happier she made him. Proof of her fondness and partiality for Fanny is shown by her pathetic appeal to the sixteen-year-old to look after her baby if she should die (as she feared she might) in childbirth. The ‘feeling’ teenager could not but have been moved, both by the appeal and also by the role allocated to her as substitute wife to her father:

Allow me my dear Fanny to take this moment (if there proves occasion) to recommend a helpless Infant to your Pity and Protection […] & you will, I do trust you will, for your same dear Father’s sake, cherish & support His innocent child – ’tho but half allied to you – My Weak Heart speaks in Tears to you my Love,⁷¹

The baby, a boy named Richard, was born safely in November 1768 and was much-loved by his half-sisters.

As late as 1773, Fanny was writing in her journal with genuine concern for her ‘poor mother’, whom she was nursing through a bilious fever: ‘this is the third Night that I have sit [sic] up with her – but I hope to Heaven that she is now in a way to recover. She has been most exceeding kind to us ever since her return to Town – which makes me the more sensibly feel her illness’.⁷²

This must make us treat with caution the suggestion first made by Charlotte Barrett in the introduction to Madame D’Arblay’s posthumously published Diary and Letters, and adjusted into fact by subsequent writers (including Thomas Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Austin Dobson and Emily Hahn), that Fanny’s stepmother disapproved so strongly of her ‘scribbling propensity’ that on her fifteenth birthday Fanny burned all her manuscripts and resolved to give up writing. The bonfire, which took place in the yard of the Poland Street house (with Susan, in tears, the only witness), seems to have been real enough, but the motives for it are cloudy. Fanny Burney first wrote about the incident in the dedication to The Wanderer, published in 1814, a piece of writing that seeks to justify the appearance of her latest novel by dramatising her vocation as in itself a kind of inextinguishable flame. Her motive for destroying the ‘enormous’ pile of early works was, she says, shame: ‘ideas that fastened degradation to this class of composition’ convinced her that novel-writing was a ‘propensity’ to be struggled against, an ‘inclination’ to be conquered only by drastic action: ‘I committed to the flames whatever, up to that moment, I had committed to paper’.⁷³ She tells the story again nearly twenty years later in the long third-person narrative in her Memoirs of Doctor Burney that deals with her own writing history: ‘she considered it her duty to combat this writing passion as illaudible, because fruitless. […] she made over to a bonfire […] her whole stock of prose goods and chattels; with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity’.⁷⁴ Neither of these accounts, the only ones left by Fanny herself, indicates the influence of a third party; the first of them is specifically concerned with making a much larger statement – as we shall see later – about the value of the novel as a form. Mrs Barrett introduced the wicked stepmother into the story in her introduction to the 1842 Diary, describing how Mrs Burney’s ‘vigilant eye […] was not long in discovering Fanny’s love of seclusion, her scraps of writing, and other tokens of her favourite employment, which excited no small alarm in her’. Alarm and, it is implied, resentment.

Hindsight and wishful thinking, as we have seen, are likely to have coloured anything Madame D’Arblay told her niece about this period of her youth. The second Mrs Burney was unlikely to have had any influence at all over Fanny at the time of the bonfire (variously placed ‘on my fifteenth birth-day’, i.e. 13 June 1767,⁷⁵ ‘from the time she attained her fifteenth year’⁷⁶ and ‘in the young authoress’s fifteenth year’,⁷⁷ i.e. some time between June 1766 and June 1767). At these times, Fanny was barely aware of Elizabeth Allen except as an old family friend. Mrs Allen was still Charles Burney’s secret amour; hardly in a position to ‘inveigh very frequently and seriously against the evil of a scribbling turn in young ladies – the loss of time, the waste of thought, in idle, crude inventions’.⁷⁸ These sentiments, if ever uttered by Mrs Burney to Fanny, seem to belong to a later and more intimate period.

From the many self-conscious references in the diaries she began to write several months after the bonfire, it is clear that Fanny was going through a phase of experiment, the results of which often dissatisfied her (and tempted her to commit the journal itself ‘to the Flames’⁷⁹). Destroying her juvenilia could thus have had more to do with a resolve to write differently, rather than not write at all. Having read the contents of her bureau through to Susan, perhaps Fanny realised that she had written herself into something of a dead end with ‘Elegies, Odes’ et cetera. ‘Caroline Evelyn’ was a gloomy novel, and she was not feeling gloomy any longer. The fact that she wrote a sequel to ‘Caroline Evelyn’ which used the same characters but transfigured the story into a comedy is surely of significance. As an attempt to ‘annihilate’ the passion to write,⁸⁰ the purging bonfire, with its overtones of amateur witchcraft and spellcasting, was spectacularly unsuccessful, and was not repeated.

The journal Fanny started in March 1768 was the ideal testing ground for a variety of rhetorical styles, from the sublime (usually curtailed with self-deflating irony) to the commonplace. The first entry, in which she sets up her alter-ego, the ‘romantick Girl’ Miss Nobody, is pure performance, executed with brio by the ‘backward’ fifteen-year old:

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved – to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody? No secret can I conceal from No—body, & to No—body can I be ever unreserved.⁸¹

‘I must imagion myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends’, Fanny had decided. The second entry attempts this ingeniously, with a send-up of ‘girl-talk’: ‘O my dear – such a charming Day! – & then last night – well, you shall have it all in order – – as well as I can recollect’.⁸² The diary allowed her to be skittish, serious, even dull: ‘Nobody’ was a tolerant audience, ‘the most complaisant friend in the world – ever ready to comply with my wishes – never hesitating to oblige, never averse to any concluding, yet never wearried [sic] with my beginning – charming Creature’.⁸³

The first years of the diary (patchily kept up) are the only part of Fanny Burney’s huge output as a journal-writer that can be thought of as secret or confidential. Interestingly, they show that the sensitive, ‘feeling’ teenager actually possessed quite a cold eye. Here she is describing the family’s cook’s wedding:

The Bride. A maiden of about fifty, short, thick, clumsy, vulgar; her complection the finest saffron, & her Features suited to it⁸⁴

and here a performance of Rowe’s Tamerlane by the schoolboys of the Soho Academy:

the young Gentleman who perform’d Selima, stopt short, & forgot himself – it was in a Love scene – between her – – him I mean & Axalla – who was very tender – She – he – soon recover’d tho – Andrew whisper’d us, that when it was over – ‘He’d lick her! –’ St[r]atocles amused himself with no other action at all, but beating, with one Hand, his Breast, & with the other, held his Hat.⁸⁵

She didn’t develop this mode of comic writing, but it clearly worked as a release valve for a highly intelligent teenager who was never allowed to utter a harsh word in public. ‘Participation or relief’⁸⁶ were the two reasons she gave for keeping her early diary. ‘I have known the Time’, she wrote in 1771, ‘when I could enjoy Nothing, without relating it’.

The creation of an imaginary confidante allowed Fanny to write the journal as if it were a series of letters; she went on to write letters to Samuel Crisp, in the avid correspondence that she started with him in 1773, as if she were writing a journal. To her sister Susan, she was to write journal-letters, blurring the distinctions further. The discovery of how fluid form could be was emancipating: Fanny Burney wrote a novel in letters that people said sounded like a play, and a play that ended up being partly reshaped into a novel. There were also tragic dramas that aspired to the condition of epic poetry and that weird hybrid, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, a biographical autobiography, using novel-writing techniques. It seems paradoxical that a writer who in her maturity was so anxious about the moral and intellectual acceptability of her works’ content should grant herself this licence with form (and with style and usage too). Perhaps both stemmed from her perception of what was appropriate to her sex; ‘lively freedoms’ in her works were unthinkable, just as too much elegance might have seemed pretentious.

Fanny Burney’s inventiveness with language is an aspect of her achievement that has been largely overlooked. Her work is so full of significant coinages, conversions, new compounds and new formulations that one commentator has felt moved to say that ‘she seems worthy to stand alongside Pope, Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Scott as one of Bradley’s “Makers of English”’.⁸⁷ Left to educate herself, Fanny had been inventing and adapting words from an early age, and grew up happy to adjust language to suit the requirements of the moment, as a sardonic journal entry from 1775 shows: ‘Making Words, now & then, in familiar Writing, is unavoidable, & saves the trouble of thinking, which, as Mr Adison observes, we Females are not much addicted to’.⁸⁸ Family usage encouraged the habit of coinage: the Burneys employed quantities of catchphrases, nonsense terms and nicknames, for fun (a very new word) and the sheer pleasure of invention but also as a form of private language, a family code that was impenetrable to outsiders. The critic R.B. Johnson has deplored Susan Burney’s ‘barbarisms’ and her father’s ‘passion for hybrid phrasing, and the pseudo-wit of made-up words’: the whole family, he complained, ‘was too impatient of solid culture to acquire sound literary taste’.⁸⁹ It may well be the case that this generation of Burneys was ‘impatient of solid culture’, though it is hard to see how the characteristic Burney letter style could have gained more than it would have lost from classical polish. Fanny’s success as a novelist owes a lot to the quirky, ‘unsound’ family register which she reproduced in her journals and letters and took, in modified but distinctive and expressive forms, into her published works.

Fanny Burney’s coinage of words, particularly evident in her early diaries, was mostly humorous and deliberately inelegant: ‘snugship’, ‘shockation’, ‘scribbleration’ – these words draw attention to themselves, and were meant to. More widespread, but less obvious to later readers – because her usages have been so well assimilated – are the examples in her work of parts of speech she has transposed or converted: ‘to fight shy’ is one such, ‘to shilly-shally’ (contracted from ‘to stand shilly-shally’), ’beautify’ (used intransitively), ‘to make something of’, and, going from verb to noun, ‘take-in’ and ‘break-up’. She might have invented these forms, and was certainly the first person to record them. The ‘common language of men’ was of perennial interest to Fanny, and the realism of her novels derives in great part from her use of contemporary slang and colloquialisms (such as ‘I’d do it as soon as say Jack Robinson,’ which first appeared in Evelina⁹⁰). Each of the novels relies heavily on the power of speech to reveal character and class, and contains long stretches of dialogue which are essentially satirical inventories of contemporary usage and abusage. In her ‘elevated’ style (usually reserved for the heroines’ crises, when common language is abandoned altogether) she is conspicuously at her least inventive.

To quantify her impact on English and American usage would be extremely difficult, but some idea of it can be gleaned from the list of ‘Additions to O.E.D. from the Writings of Fanny Burney’⁹¹ compiled by J.N. Waddell, included as an appendix to this book. It shows how frequently Fanny formed verbs with -ise or -ize endings (diarise, scribblerise, journalise) and negative adjectives and adverbs, twenty-eight of which are listed in the New English Dictionary as first appearing in her work, including ‘unobtrusively’, ‘unremittingly’ and ‘unamusing’. Waddell has also demonstrated the extent of her inventiveness,⁹² from the possible first use of compounds such as ‘school-girl’ and ‘dinner-party’, to her borrowings from French later in life (after her marriage), which include ‘maisonnette’ and ‘bon-bon’, and her anticipations of Americanisms in words such as ‘alphabetize’ and ‘tranquiliser’. The link between her personal register and forms that were emerging at the same time in eighteenth-century American English is particularly interesting. Many Americanisms deliberately subvert the mother tongue (or, some critics might say, distort it with ugly, overlong, philologically impure neologisms). It is a suggestive coincidence that Fanny Burney was writing her first novel during the early part of the American War of Independence, and that the infant nation was developing its characteristic language traits in the years when her novels, with their heavy reliance on slang, vogue and new words, had achieved cult status.

Fanny Burney’s freedom with language reflects her self-image as an ‘outsider’ in literature and her defiance of conventional limitations in a manner that could be seen as rebellious, even revolutionary; but, as with her natural and powerful feminism, her sense of propriety, personal prejudices and deep conservatism all militated against her acknowledging this. The more she did acknowledge it, the more inhibited her writing became. Any connection with anti-conventionality, however abstract, was problematic for her, as we shall see in numerous instances. She deplored disrespect to authority, and was such an arch-Tory in her youth that even her father (not a man noted for his liberal politics) teased her with the nickname ‘Fanny Bull’. But howevermuch her conservatism affected her behaviour socially, it never inhibited Fanny Burney from inventing words and phrases – ‘John Bullism’ itself is one of them.⁹³ As Waddell has remarked, her innovations ‘reveal a relaxed enjoyment of language for its own sake, and an unashamed pleasure in its flexibility’, and set her apart as a ‘transcriber of the ordinary, as well as a pioneer in the unusual’. Whatever other anxieties Fanny Burney developed as a writer, language remained an area where she felt perfectly free.

* The modern spelling is ‘Chessington’.

† The County History says that Hamilton paid for the property, but records in the Surrey History Centre state that he was ‘only son and heir’ of Rebecca Hatton of Chesington. Mrs Hatton was, presumably, widow or sister of Thomas Hatton, owner of Chesington Hall until his death in 1746. The different surname of Rebecca’s children indicates that they were the issue of an earlier marriage.

* Chesington Hall was pulled down in 1833–4 and rebuilt on the old foundations. It was this short-lived Victorian building (demolished a century later and now covered over by a residential estate) which Constance Hill and her sister Ellen visited when writing Juniper Hall (published in 1904). Neither Ellen Hill’s picture of the Hall in that book (p.147) nor an older amateur drawing in the archives of the Surrey History Centre gives much idea of the house as it was in Crisp’s day, but the records of leases and releases do. They itemise the rooms reserved by Sarah Hamilton after the property was divided: ‘on the ground floor, the Hall and the Brown and Best Parlours next the Garden with the closets therein, the small beer cellar, the under ground cellar communicating with the small beer cellar, and those rooms up a pair of stairs called the Best Chamber, the Brown Room, the Paper Room, the Wrought Room and the Green Room; the rooms up two pair of stairs (except the first room which communicates with the Back Stairs wherein the farmer’s men usually lie), Stable, Coachhouse, the Brewhouse with the Apple Chamber over it, the Pidgeon House, the Great Garden adjoining the sd. messuage and Brewhouse, the Necessary in the Garden, the Lower Garden adjoining the Necessary, the Pound Meadow, the Walk to the Church with trees on both sides of it and the fruit thereof, the use of the Pump and all other Courts, yards, ways and passages in and about the sd. messuage’.²⁹

† Like many spinsters of mature years, Sarah Hamilton had adopted the title ‘Mrs’.

* And which Jane Austen knew well too – it is the book Mr Collins insists on reading aloud to the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice.

* 1766 is the likely date: Susan’s miscellaneous writings show she was in London by the spring of 1767.⁴⁵

* The date – 1766–7 – is conjectural, based on Crisp’s estimate in 1779 that the incident took place ‘about a Dozen Years ago’⁴⁸ and Fanny’s statement in 1771 that she had not been to Chesington ‘for almost five years’.⁴⁹

* ‘Allen’ was Elizabeth’s maiden name as well as her first married name.

* Why she should have loaned such an enormous sum, apparently without interest, for a period of thirty years, is a mystery.

3 Female Caution

In 1768, the year when Fanny began to write her diary, Hetty Burney and Maria Allen, aged nineteen and seventeen respectively, were making their entrances into the world. Fanny observed their progress with profound interest and a degree of ironic detachment. Both the older girls had plenty of admirers and indulged to the full the drama of playing them off against each other. Subsequent to every evening out there would be a trail of young men calling at Poland Street, some dull, some rakish, some unsure which girl to court, some, like Hetty’s admirer Mr Seton, happy to talk to Fanny in her sister’s absence, and to discover, as the chosen few did, how well the sixteen-year-old could keep up a conversation:

[Mr Seton]: I vow, if I had gone into almost any other House, & talk’d at this rate to a young lady, she would have been sound a sleep by this Time; Or at least, she would have amused me with gaping & yawning, all the time, & certainly, she would not have understood a word I had utter’d.

F. ‘And so, this is your opinion of our sex? –’

Mr S. ‘Ay; – & of mine too.’¹

‘I scarse wish for any thing so truly, really & greatly, as to be in love’, Fanny confessed to patient ‘Nobody’, but she didn’t relish being the object of someone else’s adoration. A ‘mutual tendresse’ would be too much to ask for – ‘I carry not my wish so far’.²

Fanny was just reaching the age at which she was allowed to accompany the older girls to assemblies and dances, some of which went on all night. They would set off in the family coach and straggle home in hired sedan chairs at seven or eight in the morning. There were seldom any chaperones (sometimes because the girls had deceived their father into thinking there was no necessity for one, and he was too negligent to check). Fanny made her first serious conquest – a youth called Tomkin whom she didn’t want – at the most sophisticated and risqué of the entertainments on offer to young women at the time, a masquerade. Masquerade balls were notorious as places of assignation, and excited widespread disapproval. Henry Fielding’s brother, the famous magistrate Sir John Fielding, had been trying for years to close down the establishment run by Mrs Corneley, an ex-lover of Casanova. Contemporary engravings of her parties in Soho Square show some bizarre characters, including a man leading a live bear and a person dressed as (or rather, in) a coffin, with his feet protruding from the bottom and eyeholes cut in the lid. There is also a masquerader in the character of Adam, naked except for a shrubbery loincloth, which recalls the scandalous costume of Miss Chudleigh at the Venetian Ambassador’s masquerade, who went as ‘Iphigenia’, wearing nothing but a piece of gauze.³

Fanny Burney had nothing quite so challenging to deal with at Mr Lalauze’s masquerade in Leicester Square: there was a nun, a witch (who turned out to be a man), a Punch, an Indian Queen, several Dominoes and the predictable flock of shepherdesses. The Burney girls had spent the whole day dressing, Hetty in a Savoyard costume, complete with hurdy-gurdy, and Fanny (much less adventurously) in ‘meer fancy Dress’, a highly-decorated pink Persian gown with a rather badly home-made mask. Despite its flimsiness, the mask gave Fanny ‘a courage I never before had in the presence of strangers’⁴ and, as with Mr Seton, she ‘did not spare’ the company. According to the procedure at masquerades, everyone was obliged to support their character, passing from one person to another asking, ‘Do you know me? Who are you?’⁵ until partners had been chosen and the dramatic (or not) moment of unmasking arrived. Fanny’s partner was a ‘Dutchman’ (Mr Tomkin) who had spent the evening grunting at her and using sign language. ‘Nothing could be more droll than the first Dance we had after unmasking’, she told Nobody later:

to see the pleasure which appeared in some Countenances, & the disappointment pictured in others made the most singular contrast imaginable, & to see the Old turned Young, & the Young Old, – in short every Face appeared diferent [sic] from what we expected.⁶

The confusion of expectations and the burlesque aspects of the masquerade appealed strongly to Fanny’s imagination, and her use of masquerade in her second novel, Cecilia, shows how well she appreciated its symbolic potential. In the novel, the heroine is tormented by her frustrated admirer Monckton, who is indulging his fantasies by dressing as a demon with a red ‘wand’. She is forcibly detained by this supposed guardian, who never speaks, but uses his devilish character to intimidate the whole company. Cecilia describes this anarchic evening as one ‘from which she had received much pleasure’, and which ‘excited at once her curiosity and amazement’.⁷ The abdication of identity in the masquerade is seen as both exciting and dangerous.

Fanny Burney had a much less sheltered upbringing than most middle-class girls of her time, and the constant stream of musicians, writers, singers, actors and travellers that passed through the Burney household provided endless matter for amazement and speculation. It was a peculiarly worldly atmosphere for an unworldly, innocent-minded girl to observe, and she found it attractive without always being able to identify quite why. As a novelist, she developed a taste for drama and high colouring which some critics have seen as almost an obsession with the violence potential in genteel life.⁸ The heroines of Burney novels are beyond reproach morally, but are constantly exposed to bizarre and outlandish events that the author is not afraid to depict as stimulating. This indicates a relish for experience which the novel form allowed Fanny Burney to emphasise and exaggerate – the freedom that the mask at Mr Lalauze’s had given her not to hide her true colours, but to reveal them.

The habit of writing, whether it was her journal or creative ‘vagaries’, and the secretive solitude it required became such pleasures to Fanny that she resented other calls on her time. The social duties of adult life that obliged women to be forever receiving and returning visits and performing ‘constrained Civilities to Persons quite indifferent to us’⁹ left her cold. ‘Mama’ was very keen on these civilities (she no doubt saw them as essential in a household full of girls in the marriage market), and one of Fanny’s outbursts in her journal hints at the tensions that were arising from the new regime:

those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility, – breach of manners – love of originality, – & God knows what not – nevertheless, they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to Chains their reason disapproves, they shall I always honour – if that will be of any service to them!¹⁰

The cryptic references to ‘Chains’ and ‘defiance’ indicate the dramatic terms in which the teenaged Burney girls saw their struggle against ‘Mama’ and her set ideas about a woman’s destiny. At this point in her life, Fanny had no thought of her writings being published or even read by anyone other than ‘Nobody’, or Susan at the very most, but writing already defined her sense of autonomy, in terms both of what she wrote and the liberty she required to write it.

Fanny’s invention of the deliberately trivialising term ‘scribbleration’ for her writing was a sort of disclaimer, disassociating herself from authorship, which was the preserve of the venerated ‘class of authors’. Her father was about to join that class himself, in the same year (1769) that he finally took his doctorate in music at Oxford. When a friend called Steele suggested that Burney wasn’t making enough of his new academic title, and urged him to change his door-plate, the new doctor replied, self-consciously slipping into dialect, ‘I wants dayecity, I’m ashayum’d!’¹¹ Want of ‘dayecity’ – or the affectation of such – ran even stronger in his daughter. When her father was in Oxford for the performance of his examination piece, Fanny sent him some comic verses that she had composed to mark the occasion. He was so amused that he read them aloud to casual acquaintances in Oxford, and teased her when he got home by reciting them in front of the family. Fanny tried to snatch the verses from him, but he carried on, and all she felt she could do was run out of the room. Her delight that he was not angry at her ‘pert verses’¹² made her creep back again, though, to hear his praises surreptitiously. It was a premonition of all her later fears and ambivalence about the reception of her work and her father’s approval of it in particular.

Charles Burney’s doctorate (which was, of course, soon brazened – Steele’s pun – on the Poland Street door) conferred an authority which was helpful to his self-esteem and to the new turn he wanted his career to take. In October his first book, a short, businesslike Essay towards a history of the principal comets that have appeared since 1742, was published. The subject was timely and topical; astronomy was fashionable, and 1769 was the year in which Halley had predicted the return of his comet ‘in confirmation of the theory of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton’. But though Burney’s little book shows his commercial instincts at work (it sold well enough to be reprinted the following year), it had a personal significance as well, being a form of homage to the dead Esther. Years before, she had made a translation of the French scientist Maupertuis’s ‘Letter upon Comets’, purely from ‘love of improvement’, according to Fanny¹³ (rather like Fanny’s own youthful translation of Fontanelle). Esther’s interest in astronomy had fuelled her husband’s – she might well have been looking forward to the reappearance of the great comet herself. Charles Burney revised the translation and wrote his own essay as a companion piece, a gesture which was not lost on their daughter. In the Memoirs she describes the work as a joint project by her parents, and prefaces her remarks with the apparently irrelevant information that the second Mrs Burney was staying in Norfolk at the time of its production – as if the book constituted some kind of secret assignation between Burney and his dead wife. At the distance of more than fifty years, Fanny wrote portentously about her father’s first step into print, and was in no doubt who should take the credit: her mother’s pure ‘love of improvement’ had ‘unlocked […] the gates through which Doctor Burney first passed to that literary career which, ere long, greeted his more courageous entrance into a publicity that conducted him to celebrity’.¹⁴

The Essay was only a short work but it kept Dr Burney up late at night, and its completion was followed by an acute bout of rheumatic fever. The pattern of overwork, hurry and collapse during the composition of his books may have impressed the Doctor’s daughter with the idea that writing was something urgent, difficult and heroic. Burney had by this time formulated the plan for his General History of Music, the first scholarly attempt in English to cover the development of the subject from ancient times to his own day. To choose a project so massive and challenging suggests that Burney had tired of dabbling and wanted a surefire ticket to fame (and fortune, of course), to be the author of a work which would virtually put itself beyond criticism on account of its novelty, authority and sheer size, and which, like the Dictionary of his admired Johnson, would contribute substantially to knowledge, in an age when all the best minds of Europe seemed engaged on writing works of reference.

Burney felt that his book would only make the proper impact if it derived from original research in the great music libraries of Europe, also that ‘the present state of modern music’ was the most important part of his subject. Armed with letters of recommendation from his influential friends to British officials in France and Italy, he set off on a six-month Continental tour in June 1770. It was an arduous but extremely productive journey, and though Burney was in a state of collapse on his return, he had met many famous and learned people, including Padre G.B. Martini in Bologna, the foremost musicologist of the time, the castrato Farinelli in Venice, the seventy-five-year-old Voltaire at Ferney (by an engineered accident), and in Paris Denis Diderot and the great Rousseau himself. The ‘Man Mountain’ was sitting in a dark corner, wearing a woollen nightcap, greatcoat and slippers, an informal reception which perhaps encouraged Burney to show him his plan for the History, which to the budding author’s delight, and after a little initial resistance on Rousseau’s part, went down encouragingly well.

Burney kept a detailed journal of his tour, and soon after his return to London began to think of publishing it as a money-spinner and as an advertisement for the forthcoming History. With the help of the girls, he had a manuscript ready within four months which was published in May 1771 as The Present State of Music in France and Italy. The market for ‘tour’ books was saturated at the time, but Burney’s had the novelty of its focus on music and performers, as well as gripping passages about the difficulties of travel, such as this description of crossing the Apennines:

At every moment, I could only hear them cry out ‘Alla Montagna!’ which meant to say that the road was so broken and dangerous that it was necessary I should alight, give the Mule to the Pedino, and cling to the rock or precipice. I got three or four terrible blows on the face and head by boughs of trees I could not see. In mounting my Mule, which was vicious, I was kicked by the two hind legs on my left knee and right thigh, which knocked me down, and I thought at first, and the Muleteers thought my thigh was broken, and began to pull at it and add to the pain most violently.¹⁵

The reviews of the book would probably have been good anyway, but Burney, in his acute anxiety to succeed, fixed the two most influential ones, in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review.¹⁶ He described himself as a ‘diffident and timid author’,¹⁷ but he had a ruthless streak, especially when it came to nobbling the opposition (as he did shamelessly when a rival History of Music, by Sir John Hawkins, appeared before his own). His later anxieties about his daughter’s literary career centred on the possible critical reception of her books; he felt it better for her not to publish at all than to risk adverse reviews.

With their father’s absence abroad in 1770, followed by the rush to write his book, and another long trip to Europe in 1772 to gather material for a sequel, the Burney children were left even more than usual in the undiluted company of their stepmother. While the Doctor was in Italy, Mrs Burney found and purchased a new home for the amalgamated Burney-Allen household. It was a large, luxurious house on the south side of Queen Square, an area familiar to the children from their long association with Mrs Sheeles’s school (Burney’s appointment there lasted from 1760 to about 1775). Fanny liked the open view of the villages of Hampstead and Highgate to the north, and rooms that were ‘well fitted up, Convenient, large, & handsome’, but regretted leaving Poland Street, which represented the old days of her parents’ marriage.

One of the reasons for the move was to get away from the family’s former neighbour Mrs Pringle, at whose house the Burney girls had met Alexander Seton, the baronet’s son who had been so impressed with Fanny’s conversational powers. His flirtation with Hetty had been so on-and-off for the past two years that she felt forced to give up seeing him altogether for her own peace of mind, and Mr Crisp’s advice (backed up by ‘Mama’) was that the Burneys should end contact with Mrs Pringle too. Fanny was pained to cut her old friend, but did it all the same, and was ready with some lies when the puzzled matron asked what the matter was. In all ‘difficult’ dealings of this kind, the Burneys displayed unattractive qualities: panic, fudging and petty cruelty, such as in the case of their former friend Miss Lalauze, whom they treated with a species of horror after she was reputed to have ‘fallen’. Their own struggle to sustain their upward mobility seems to have prevented them from behaving more magnanimously to such people ‘however sincerely they may be objects of Pity’.¹⁸

Hetty recovered from her disappointment over Seton (and avoided having to join the new step-household) by marrying her cousin and fellow musician Charles Rousseau Burney in the autumn of 1770. Dr Burney was abroad at the time and unable to give his consent. He would not have approved the match; he was very fond of his nephew, a gentle, talented man, but knew as well as anyone how hard it was to make a decent living out of music. The marriage was happy, but never prosperous materially. Before long, Hetty was expecting the first of her eight children (the last of which was born as late as 1792). Her career as a harpsichordist was of course over. Fanny, as the eldest unmarried daughter, now acquired the title ‘Miss Burney’.

At about the same time, Maria Allen was jilted by a young man called Martin Rishton. To cheer her up after this disappointment, Fanny wrote her a poem called ‘Female Caution’, which contains these stanzas:

Ah why in faithless man repose

The peace & safety of your mind?

Why should ye seek a World of Woes,

To Prudence and to Wisdom blind?

Few of mankind confess your worth,

Fewer reward it with their own:

To Doubt and Terror Love gives birth;

To Fear and Anguish makes ye known.

[…] O, Wiser, learn to guard the heart,

Nor let it’s softness be its bane!

Teach it to act a nobler part;

What Love shall lose, let Friendship gain.

Hail, Friendship, hail! To Thee my soul

Shall undivided homage own;

No Time thy influence shall controll;

And Love and I – shall ne’er be known.¹⁹

This accomplished poem, which, strangely, has never found its way into any anthology of eighteenth-century verse, displays an advanced state of sexual cynicism in its eighteen-year-old author; men, she claims, do not have it in their nature to be constant, and are interested only in the process of conquest. Friendship (with women) is the only way to guarantee happiness; only among women can ‘sensibility’ and ‘softness’ survive undamaged. The fop and the cad were worrying social phenomena, coarse, worldly and unmarriageable. Fanny targeted such men in her novels and created heroes who presented a new ‘feminine’ ideal of masculinity, heroes who were (sometimes absurdly) super-sensitive, rational and gentle. Fanny admired, even idealised, older men such as Crisp, Garrick and the agriculturalist Arthur Young (who was married to Elizabeth Allen Burney’s sister Martha), appreciated male gallantry and wit, and yearned romantically for an ideal male companion – but she didn’t expect to find one. Her high standards were to cause her some trouble in an age when early marriage was the expected, and only really acceptable, fate of womankind.

Extrovert Maria Allen was the moving force behind several amateur theatrical productions in the Burney household and at Chesington in which Fanny was persuaded to take part, though few actors could ever have performed so consistently badly. Fanny was loath to perform in any way, being subject to terrible stage-fright that almost certainly originated in her stigmatisation as a ‘dunce’ in early childhood. Though at least one of the plays she took part in (Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband) was meant to be an exercise in overcoming stage-fright for the benefit of Dr Burney’s former singing pupil Jenny Barsanti, who was giving up her career as a singer to become an actress (she went on to be the first Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s The Rivals), nothing could distract Fanny from her own performance and its possible shortcomings. Howevermuch she wanted to join in with the gaiety and diversion of a family play-party, the moment when she had to appear, or speak, was one of disabling terror, as on this occasion at her uncle’s house in Worcester, where her cousins were putting on a production of Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him:

Next came my scene; I was discovered Drinking Tea; – to tell you how infinitely, how beyond measure I was terrified at my situation, I really cannot […] The few Words I had to speak before Muslin came to me, I know not whether I spoke or not, – niether [sic] does any body else: – so you need not enquire of others, for the matter is, to this moment, unknown.²⁰

Fanny had a ‘marking Face’²¹ and was a violent blusher. ‘Nobody, I believe, has so very little command of Countenance as myself!’ she complained to Susan on one of the many occasions when her ‘vile Colouring’ gave her acute embarrassment. The causes of her embarrassment varied enormously. It was knowingness, not innocence, that made her self-conscious in front of people such as Richard Twiss, a traveller who on his first visit to the Burney household in 1774 indulged in very ‘free’ conversation with Dr Burney about the prostitutes in Naples. Asked by Twiss whether she knew what he meant by a ragazza, Fanny records, ‘I stammered out something like niether [sic] yes or no, because the Question rather frightened me, lest he should conclude that in understanding that, I knew much more.’²² The inference of course is that she did know ‘much more’. She certainly knew enough about John Cleland’s erotic Dictionary of Love to be embarrassed by Twiss’s reference to it on the same occasion. ‘Questa signora ai troppo modesta’, he said to Charles Burney of the blushing young woman he had been goading all evening, demonstrating the truth of James Fordyce’s observation in his Sermons that many men find ‘shyness’ in women attractive sexually as well as morally. Fordyce implies that ‘the precious colouring of virtue’ on a girl’s cheeks is the equivalent of showing a red rag to a bull: ‘Men are so made,’ he sighs complacently.²³ But Fanny was much more likely to have agreed with Jonathan Swift’s acid judgement of female ‘colouring’: ‘They blush because they understand.’²⁴

Nevertheless she was highly resistant to sexual flattery, and too self-conscious to be vain. In her copious diary, she hardly ever mentions dress, although much of the needlework that the Burney girls, like all women of their class, were expected to do daily consisted in making and mending their own clothes. She disliked needlework and was not particularly good at it; if her clothes were ever eye-catching, it may not have been for the right reasons. Her best gown in 1777 was simply referred to as her ‘grey-Green’, presumably a silk or ‘tabby’, chosen to match the colour of her eyes.

Fanny Burney was quick to satirise the absurdities of fashion and personal vanity in her works: in Evelina the London modes provide plenty of humour, especially the mid-1770s fashion among women for high hair. In the novel, Miss Mirvan makes herself a cap, only to find that it won’t fit over her new coiffure, and Evelina herself, the country girl agog at the novelty of going ‘a-shopping, as Mrs Mirvan calls it’²⁵ (it was a very recently coined word), gives an insider’s account of being pomaded, powdered and pinned:

I have just had my hair dressed. You can’t think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe you would hardly know me, for my face looks quite different to what it did before my hair was dressed. When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell for my hair is so much entangled, frizzled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult.²⁶

In Fanny’s play The Witlings, the first scene is set in a milliner’s shop, among the ribbons and gee-gaws that recur in her works as symbols of luxury and waste. The shop girls are slaves to appearances: Miss Jenny has no appetite because ‘she Laces so tight, that she can’t Eat half her natural victuals,’ as one of the older women observes. ‘Ay, ay’, replies another, ‘that’s the way with all the Young Ladies; they pinch for their fine shapes’.²⁷ The unnaturalness of fashion struck Burney forcibly (as well it might in the age of hoops, stays, corsetry, high hair and silk shoes), but she also despised its triviality and the hold it had over so many women’s lives, confirming them in the eyes of unsympathetic men as inferior beings. In her play The Woman-Hater, misogynistic Sir Roderick describes womankind as ‘A poor sickly, mawkish set of Beings! What are they good for? What can they do? Ne’er a thing upon Earth they had not better let alone. […] what ought they to know? except to sew a gown, and make a Pudding?’²⁸

Each of Burney’s novels contains some insight into the extent to which women are unfairly judged by their appearance. She was never very pleased with hers. Like all the Burneys she was very short – Samuel Johnson described her affectionately as ‘Lilliputian’²⁹ – and slightly built, with very thick brown hair, lively, intelligent eyes and her father’s large nose. She had an inward-sloping upper lip inherited from her mother (Hetty and Susan had the same), small hands and narrow shoulders. The portrait painted by her cousin Edward Francesco Burney in 1782 shows a gentle, intelligent and attractive face. She thought he had flattered her horribly, but how many portrait painters do not idealise their sitters, especially when, like Edward, the artist is also an admirer? His second portrait of her, painted only two years later (it now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery), has her face partly shadowed by an enormous hat. Her look is more thoughtful, slightly uncomfortable, but the benignly intelligent expression is the same.

Fanny Burney’s short sight caused her trouble all her life and undoubtedly affected her behaviour. She became mildly paranoid about being scrutinised by other people because she couldn’t see their expressions clearly and only felt really comfortable with things which fell within the circle of her vision, such as books, writing and intimate friends. Short sight affected her writing too; the novels are remarkable for the avoidance of physical description and heavy reliance on dialogue to delineate character. Fanny owned an eye-glass, but was often inhibited from using it; at Lady Spencer’s in 1791 she ‘did not choose to Glass’ the company ‘& without, could not distinguish them’.³⁰ At court in the 1780s, the use of the eye-glass was, presumably, limited by protocol and many embarrassing incidents ensued when Fanny did not identify the King or Queen in time to respond correctly. She doesn’t seem to have owned a glass in 1773 when she went to a performance at Drury Lane by the singer Elizabeth Linley one month before that siren’s marriage to Richard Brinsley Sheridan; she could only make out Miss Linley’s figure […] & the form of her Face’.³¹ By 1780, however, she could be pointed out at the theatre as ‘the lady that used the glass’.³² Understandably, she hated to have attention drawn to her disability, and scorned one of Mrs Thrale’s acquaintance for suggesting that she could not see as far as the fire two yards away by answering his question ‘How far can you see?’ with a comical put-down; ‘O – I don’t know – as far as other people, but not distinctly’.³³

Fanny’s constitution was basically strong, but easily affected by nervous ailments and stress. ‘[H]er Frame is certainly delicate & feeble’, Susan noted in her journal. ‘She is quickly sensible of fatigue & cannot long resist it & still more quickly touched by any anxiety or distress of mind’.³⁴ Fanny endured remarkable pain, both physical and mental, in the course of her long life, and survived the appalling mutilation of the mastectomy she underwent for cancer in 1811 with astonishing tenacity and powers of recuperation, yet she appears to have been something of a hypochondriac in her youth, impressed with a belief in her own fragility and half-expecting to die young, like her mother. When Mrs Thrale once exclaimed against the idea of Fanny marrying a man old enough to be her father, Fanny replied, ‘I dare say he will Live full as long as I shall, however much older he may be’.³⁵ The character of being frail, insubstantial, almost No-body, was oddly compelling, and she recorded with evident satisfaction the playwright Dr John Delap’s remark in 1779 that she was ‘the charmingest Girl in the World for a Girl who was so near being nothing, & they all agreed nobody ever had so little a shape before, & that a Gust of Wind would blow you quite away’.³⁶ The ‘Girl’ was, at this date, twenty-seven years old, unmarried, unhappy at being exposed to the public as a writer and not eating well.

Fanny’s attitude to food and eating immediately suggests some sort of disorder. References to food in her journals and works are infrequent, and never enthusiastic or appreciative. She knew, as we have seen from The Witlings, about young women starving themselves to get into smallsized clothes; she also knew about bingeing. In The Woman-Hater, Miss Wilmot’s unabashed relish for food is seen as a mark of her lack of feminine delicacy, and she characterises her old life of restraint and decorum as ‘sitting with my hands before me; and making courtsies; and never eating half as much as I like, – except in the Pantry!’³⁷ Whether the Burney girls, singly or in gangs, raided the pantry in Poland Street or Queen Square is a matter for speculation, but in public Fanny was a very small eater. ‘I seldom Eat much supper’, she said to Twiss when he remarked on her pickiness.³⁸ The diaries show her at various times satisfied with one potato,³⁹ overpowered by the thought of a rasher⁴⁰ and alert to the grotesque aspects of ingestion, as a letter to Susan in March 1777 reveals:

Our method is as follows; We have certain substances, of various sorts, consisting chiefly of Beasts, Birds, & vegetables, which, being first Roasted, Boiled or Baked […] are put upon Dishes, either of Pewter, or Earthern ware, or China; – & then, being cut into small Divisions, every plate receives a part: after this, with the aid of a knife & fork, the Divisions are made still smaller; they are then (care being taken not to maim the mouth by the above offensive weapons) put between the Lips, where, by the aid of the Teeth, the Divisions are made yet more delicate, till, diminishing almost insensibly they form a general mash, or wad & are then swallowed.⁴¹

This exercise in comic detachment is in part a send-up of the congenial dullness of life at Chesington Hall, intended to make Susan laugh, but it is revealing in other ways. While reducing the act of eating to its constituent parts, chewing over the very idea of eating, Fanny never touches on the sensual aspects – the smell, sight or taste of food. Food is simply matter to be made into smaller and smaller divisions ‘almost insensibly’, then swallowed in a ‘mash’ or ‘wad’. She writes about eating as if it were a merely mechanical process, pointless and therefore slightly disgusting.

Fanny’s small appetite (and her appetite for being small) was a form of self-neglect which had several other symptoms. Samuel Crisp complained about her unbecoming stoop and habit of sitting with her face short-sightedly close to the page when she was reading or writing. She was also criticised for mumbling, pitching her voice too low and being silent in company. Clearly, people felt she wasn’t making enough of an effort, wasn’t ‘doing herself justice’; and they were right.

Fanny Burney was in no hurry to get married – in fact the idea filled her with dread. ‘[H]ow short a time does it take to put an eternal end to a Woman’s liberty!’ she had exclaimed, watching a wedding party emerge from the church in Lynn.⁴² Her father was her idol, and she had no intention of quitting him. ‘Every Virtue under the sun – is His!’ she wrote unequivocally.⁴³

Many men in the Burneys’ wide and constantly shifting circle of acquaintance were attracted to Fanny, and she made several conquests despite her reputation for prudery and refusal to play the coquette, an activity she found degrading to both sexes. Like the heroines of her novels, she was confident that virtue was at the very least its own reward. Her ‘quickness of parts’ and sense of humour were only revealed to those men she felt worthy to appreciate them, such as Alexander Seton; others were shown the ‘prude’ front. This was as much a matter of propriety and fairness as anything else. ‘I would not for the World be thought to trifle with any man’, she once wrote to Crisp, and her lifelong behaviour bore out the sincerity of the remark.

The first proposal of marriage Fanny received, in the summer of 1775, provoked a crisis. The hopeful suitor, a Mr Thomas Barlow, was a decent, honest twenty-four-year-old, good-looking and reasonably well-off, who became earnestly enamoured of Fanny after one cup of tea in the company of some friends of Grandmother Burney. Fanny’s aunts, sister and grandmother, in sudden, ominous collusion, strongly approved of the match, but Fanny was unmoved. She thought her polite rejection of Barlow marked the end of the story, but the opposition was marshalling its forces. Hetty had written to Crisp about the affair, and he wrote Fanny a long letter, blatantly working on what he imagined might be her worst fears. Did she, he asked, want to be

left in shallows, fast aground, & struggling in Vain for the remainder of your life to get on – doom’d to pass it in Obscurity & regret – look around You Fany [sic] – look at yr Aunts – Fanny Burney wont always be what she is now! […] Suppose You to lose yr Father – take in all Chances. Consider the situation of an unprotected, unprovided Woman.⁴⁴

Fanny replied to this harangue with courage. Pointing out how unwise Crisp was ‘so earnestly to espouse the Cause of a person you never saw’, she told him that she had resolved never to marry except ‘with my whole Heart’, be the consequences what they may. She was not so afraid of becoming an old maid that she could accept ‘marriage from prudence & Convenience’, and gently deflected Crisp’s fears for her future provision by saying, ‘Don’t be uneasy about my welfare, my dear Daddy, I dare say I shall do very well’.⁴⁵ Did she think that her writing, still secret to all but Susan, might one day earn her money? Or was this an expression of confidence in her father, in whose career she had such a close interest? ‘[S]o long as I live to be of some comfort (as I flatter myself I am) to my Father’, she grandly told Crisp, ‘I can have no motive to wish to sign myself other than his & your […] Frances Burney’.

Fanny’s confidence collapsed, though, when her father suddenly added his voice to those urging her to reconsider Barlow’s proposal. The suggestion that Charles Burney could live without her was a body-blow:

I was terrified to Death – I felt the utter impossibility of resisting not merely my Father’s persuasion but even his Advice. […] I wept like an Infant – Eat nothing – seemed as if already married – & passed the whole Day in more misery than, merely on my own account, I ever did before in my life[.]⁴⁶

The crisis resolved itself the next day in a tearful scene between father and daughter, during which Fanny declared that she wanted nothing but to live with him. ‘My life!’ the Doctor exclaimed, kissing her kindly, ‘I wish not to part with my Girls! – they are my greatest Comfort!’ Fanny left the room ‘as light, happy & thankful as if Escaped from Destruction’.⁴⁷

To Mrs Burney, the matter must have presented itself rather differently. The girls were not her greatest comfort, and seemed perversely determined not to marry well. Esther had made an impoverished love-match; in 1772 both Maria Allen and her seventeen-year-old brother Stephen shocked and offended their mother by runaway marriages – Maria with Martin Rishton, her former jilt, and Stephen with a girl called Susanna Sharpin. Now Fanny was declaring she would probably never marry, but wanted only to live with her father. With Fanny hunkering down after the Barlow episode as a possibly permanent fixture at home, relations between her and ‘Mama’ began to stiffen.

Progress with the History of Music was much slower than Dr Burney had anticipated, and although he was working at it obsessively and making as much use as possible of his daughters as secretaries and his new friend the cleric and scholar Thomas Twining as an adviser, it began to look as if he had taken on too much. He had other disappointments and difficulties at the same time, including the failure of his plans to found a school of music with the violinist Giardini and, a few weeks later, the publication of a raucous parody of his two books of travels (The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Provinces had been published the previous year), satirising the credulity and affectation of earnest fact-gatherers such as the Doctor in a succession of absurd and often quite amusing ‘musical’ encounters around England. Burney was deeply alarmed and offended by the pamphlet, and is believed to have tried to suppress it by buying up the entire stock,⁴⁸ a drastic measure which (if he took it) did not prevent the work going through four editions in the next two years. In the Memoirs Fanny made as light of the incident as she could, though she betrays her strong feelings in metaphors of ‘vipers’ and ‘venom’. According to her, the pamphlet ‘was never reprinted; and obtained but the laugh of a moment’,⁴⁹ but there was a great deal in the squib to touch her own feelings as nearly as it had the Doctor’s. If he, with his Oxford doctorate, could attract a lurid parody of his books about music, what treatment might not an uneducated female would-be novelist expect?

In the autumn of 1774 the Burneys were forced to leave Queen Square because of ‘difficulties respecting its title’.⁵⁰ The house they moved to was right in the centre of town, on the corner of Long’s Court and St Martin’s Street, which runs south out of Leicester Square. Although the air was not so balmy as in Queen Square, with its ‘beautiful prospect’, and though St Martin’s Street was, in Fanny’s blunt words, ‘dirty, ill built, and vulgarly peopled’,*⁵¹ there were many things to recommend the new address. It was convenient for the opera house and the theatres, the aunts in Covent Garden, Hetty and her young family in Charles Street and many of Dr Burney’s fashionable friends (Sir Joshua Reynolds lived just round the corner in Leicester Square). It also had the distinction of having been Sir Isaac Newton’s house, which alone would have recommended it to the astrophile Burneys. Newton lived there from 1711 to his death in 1727, and built a small wooden observatory right at the top of the property, glazed on three sides and commanding a good view of the city as well as the sky. ‘[W]e shew it to all our Visitors, as our principal Lyon’, Fanny wrote in her journal ten days after moving in.

The Burneys were so proud of the connection with the great scientist that they thought of calling their new home ‘Newton House’ or ‘The Observatory’ as a boast. Charles Burney was particularly fond of dropping Sir Isaac’s name into conversation, and displayed a certain ingenuity at creating occasions to do so. Once when a visitor broke his sword on the stairs Burney protested that they ‘were not of my constructing – they were Sir Isaac Newton’s’;⁵³ and on Mrs Thrale’s first visit to the house he said he was unable to ‘divine’ the answer to a query about a concert, ‘not having had Time to consult the stars, though in the House of Sir Isaac Newton’.⁵⁴ As a sort of homage to their illustrious precursor, Burney spent a considerable sum having the observatory renovated. He did not, however, choose the chilly rooftop perch for his study (a small room adjoining the library on the first floor performed that function much more comfortably), and it was soon colonised by the children, Fanny adopting it as her ‘favorite sitting place, where I can retire to read or write any of my private fancies or vagaries’ – a substitute for her closet or ‘bureau’ of former days.

Of all the Burneys’ homes, number 1 St Martin’s Street is the most famous.* Dr Burney and his wife lived there for thirteen years, by the end of which the children, with the exception of their younger child, Sarah Harriet (born in 1772), had all left home. The house had a basement and three storeys each consisting of a front and back room, with a projecting wing to the rear on each floor. On the ground floor at the front was the panelled parlour where the family took their meals,† and behind it was another parlour (the kitchen, presumably, was in the basement). Above it, up the fine oak staircase, was the drawing room, with three tall windows looking onto St Martin’s Street. This room was the most splendid in the house, and had an ‘amazingly ornamented’ painted ceiling, probably depicting nudes, since it seems to have been something of an embarrassment to the Doctor: ‘I hope you don’t think that I did it?’ he said to one curious visitor, ‘for I swear I did not!’⁵⁶ Sir Isaac’s name was not invoked on this occasion. There had been three other owners since the scientist, one of them French.

The drawing room was separated from the library by folding doors which, when opened, provided a large and elegant space for the many parties and concerts which the Burneys soon began to hold at St Martin’s Street. Dr Burney’s library was extensive and highly specialised: when Samuel Johnson visited for the first time and abandoned the company to inspect the books, he would have found few volumes on any subject other than music (although he still preferred looking into books on music to attending the Burneys’ informal concert which was the alternative entertainment). The library, also known as the music room, had a window looking down onto the small, overshadowed garden at the back and contained the Doctor’s two harpsichords. Beyond it, in the part of the building which projected out at the back, was Burney’s narrow workroom, grandly named ‘Sir Isaak Newton’s Study’ (on hearsay), but commonly known as ‘the Spidery’ or ‘Chaos’ and habitually so untidy with Burney’s sprawl of papers that no guests were invited to look in.

On the top floor at the front was the main bedroom, used by Dr and Mrs Burney, with a powdering closet adjoining. The girls’ bedroom was beyond it at the back, above the library. The three attic rooms, from which one gained entrance to the observatory, were probably servants’ bedrooms and the nursery, with a poky stairway leading from the top floor. James was scarcely ever at home, but still had a room on the ground floor kept for him that opened onto the little garden; Charles junior probably slept there when he was home in the holidays from Charterhouse. Beyond ‘Jem’s room’, opening onto Long’s Court, was a small workshop, which Dr Burney rented to a silversmith. It is likely that the workshop created some noise and smell around the back of the house, a reminder of trade going on only just out of sight and earshot of the elegant drawing room. The back of the workshop and its yard would have been visible though from the girls’ bedroom window and the eastfacing side of the observatory.

The household in the autumn of 1774 consisted of the Doctor and his wife, both approaching fifty, Fanny (who, aged twenty-two, might not have been expected to be at home for much longer), Susan, aged nineteen, thirteen-year-old Charlotte, the lively six-year-old Richard and toddler Sally, then as always a rather neglected little girl. Small children were never going to be a novelty in the Burney household. When the family moved into St Martin’s Street, Esther was only a few weeks away from giving birth to her third child, Charles Crisp Burney, having had Hannah Maria in 1772 and Richard in 1773, the first three of Dr Burney’s eventual total of thirty-six grandchildren.

The move to St Martin’s Street took place while Charles Burney was recuperating from another bout of rheumatic fever. He was confined to bed for weeks, but carried on work on the History by dictating to Fanny and Susan. The family did not hold a large party at the new house until March 1775 on account of this indisposition, but the publication of The Present State of Music in Germany […] in 1773 had significantly increased Burney’s standing as a writer as well as a historian of music, and there was no stopping the flow of illustrious visitors passing through London who wanted an introduction to him. Fanny’s letters to Crisp in 1774 and 1775 contain many highly entertaining set-pieces describing some of these callers. The first was the most exotic, a young native of the Society Islands called Omai who had come to England on board the Adventure with James Burney. James, who had finished his training as an able seaman in 1771, had joined Captain Cook’s second voyage to the Antarctic Circle the following year, returning to England in July 1774. He had mastered some Tahitian on the voyage home and was able to act as interpreter to ‘lyon of lyons’ Omai, who was fêted all round London, received by the King and invited to the houses of aristocrats keen to observe and display a living emblem of the nation’s South Sea discoveries. Omai arrived at the Burneys’ house in the company of Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, the botanists who had accompanied Cook on his first circumnavigation of the globe. His manners impressed Fanny extremely favourably; even though he had very little English, the Polynesian ‘paid his Compliments with great politeness […] which he has found a method of doing without words’.⁵⁷ Fanny sat next to him at dinner and noticed how unostentatiously alert Omai was to the feelings of others, glossing over the servant’s mistakes and assuring Mrs Burney that the (tough) beef was actually ‘very dood’. He ‘committed not the slightest blunder at Table’, and didn’t fuss over his new suit of Manchester velvet with lace ruffles, although it was totally unlike his native costume (or the fantasy burnous in which he was painted by Reynolds during his visit). ‘Indeed’, wrote Fanny to Crisp, ‘he appears to be a perfectly rational & intelligent man, with an understanding far superiour to the common race of us cultivated gentry: he could not else have borne so well the way of Life into which he is thrown’. With his spotless manners and spotless ruffles, Omai could not have been a more perfect example of Noble Savagery, showing up the gracelessness of the expensively educated ‘Boobys’ around him in a way that the future satirist found highly gratifying. ‘I think this shews’, she concluded grandly, ‘how much more Nature can do without art than art with all her refinement, unassisted by Nature.’⁵⁸

Their next notable visitor was one of the most famous singers of the day, the Italian soprano Lucrezia Agujari, known rather blatantly as ‘La Bastardina’. Mozart had met her in 1768 and marvelled at her astonishingly high range: she had, in his presence, reached three octaves above middle C – a barely credible achievement. She was virtuosa di camera to the court of the Duke of Parma, whose master of music, Giuseppe Colla, ‘a Tall, thin, spirited Italian, full of fire, & not wanting in Grimace’,⁵⁹ was her constant companion. Susan Burney had got the impression – not unreasonably – that the couple were married, and that La Bastardina retained her maiden name for professional purposes. This led Hetty to cause the singer some consternation by enquiring if she had any children: ‘Moi!’ she exclaimed disingenuously, ‘je ne suis pas mariée, moi!’⁶⁰

The Burneys were of course all craving to hear Agujari sing, but Signor Colla explained that a slight sore throat prevented it. ‘The singer is really a slave to her voice’, Fanny noted in her journal; ‘she fears the least Breath of air – she is equally apprehensive of Any heat – she seems to have a perpetual anxiety lest she should take Cold; & I do believe she neither Eats, Drinks, sleeps or Talks, without considering in what manner she may perform those vulgar duties of Life so as to be the most beneficial to her Voice.’ Agujari was contracted at huge cost to sing at the Pantheon on Oxford Road (a new venue for concerts and assemblies that was proving immensely popular and in which Charles Burney had shares), and though she promised to return and sing for the Burneys at some later date, the possibility seemed remote. Months passed and they heard nothing of her, only jokes based on the story that she had been mauled by a pig when young and had had her side repaired with a silver plate. Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, showed Charles Burney a satirical song he had written on the subject and wanted to have set to music. It was a dialogue between Agujari and the pig, ‘beginning Caro Mio Porco – the Pig answers by a Grunt; – & it Ends by his exclaiming ah che bel mangiare!’⁶¹ It is interesting to note that although the parody of her father’s book had struck Fanny as scandalous, she was quite happy to join in and pass on jokes about Agujari’s ‘silver side’. It presented ‘too fair a subject for Ridicule to have been suffered to pass untouched’.

It wasn’t until June that Agujari did sing for the Burneys, and then all jokes about her person and criticism of her affectations were forgotten. ‘We wished for you! I cannot tell you how much we wished for you!’ Fanny wrote ecstatically to Crisp:

I could compare her to nothing I ever heard but only to what I have heard of – Your Carestino – Farinelli – Senesino – alone are worthy to be ranked with the Bastardini. Such a powerful voice! – so astonishing a Compass – reaching from C in the middle of the Harpsichord, to 2 notes above the Harpsichord! Every note so clear, so full – so charming! Then her shake – so plump – so true, so open! it is [as] strong & distinct as Mr Burney’s upon the Harpsichord.⁶²

Agujari certainly did not stint her hosts. She stayed for five hours, singing ‘almost all the Time’, arias, plain chant, recitative: ‘whether she most astonished, or most delighted us, I cannot say – but she is really a sublime singer’. There was no more talk of their exotic visitor being ‘conceitedly incurious’ about her rivals: ‘her Talents are so very superior that she cannot chuse but hold all other performers cheap’.⁶³ The generous free recital, the sublime voice, the plump shake had all done their work. Fanny and her sisters became Agujari’s besotted devotees.

In his Surrey retreat, Crisp hung on these bulletins, especially the accounts of musical evenings. On one memorable occasion in 1773 recorded by Fanny, the party consisted of the violinist Celestini, the singer Millico and the composer Antonio Sacchini, ‘the first men of their Profession in the World’.⁶⁴ Fanny could describe in detail evenings out, say at the opera, where they had gone to hear Agujari’s rival Gabrielli, and reproduce the long discussions about the performances afterwards, with what seems to be remarkable accuracy. The guests at one of the Doctor’s musical evenings that summer and autumn included Viscount Barrington, then Secretary at War, the Dutch Ambassador and Lord Sandwich, whom Charles Burney was no doubt trying to cultivate on James’s behalf. This was exciting company for the Burney girls, and the fact that Fanny relished these evenings shows that her shyness was less potent than her curiosity. Some of their guests were outlandish, such as Prince Orloff, the lover of Catherine the Great, who arrived at St Martin’s Street late on the appointed evening and squatted on a bench next to Susan, almost squashing her. His appearances in London had been the subject of much gossip, and here he was, dwarfing his hosts and dripping with diamonds, a portrait of the Empress indiscreetly flashing on his breast. Not that it was easy to see it – when the Burney girls were shown it the glare of the surrounding jewels was almost blinding; ‘one of them, I am sure, was as big as a Nutmeg at least’ Fanny wrote.⁶⁵

Fanny’s early diaries describe a life of seemingly uninterrupted gaiety in the company of her loving sisters, adored father and some of the greatest artists of the day. The ‘abominably handsome’ Garrick continued to be a frequent visitor, loved by the whole family; on one occasion he picked Charlotte out of her bed and ran with her as far as the corner of the street. When he threatened to abduct the other girls ‘we all longed to say, Pray do!’⁶⁶ But as the editors of Fanny’s diaries have pointed out, the consistently cheerful portrait of life in St Martin’s Street is deceptive, since most of the material relating to Fanny’s stepmother was destroyed. From other sources, such as a letter to Fanny from Maria Rishton in September 1776, a different picture emerges:

I knew you could never live all together or be a happy society but still bad as things used to be when I was amongst you they were meer children falling out to what they seem to be now … You know the force of her expression. And indeed I believe she writes from the heart when she says she is the most miserable woman that breathes.⁶⁷

When Mrs Burney was nervous and dictatorial, the girls responded with outward deference and private ill-will. She was perceived by them as grossly insensitive; perversely, this led them to treat her with gross insensitivity, almost as if they were testing her, trying to prove their worst apprehensions. A cabal formed against ‘the Lady’, and to his shame ‘Daddy’ Crisp joined it gleefully, going so far as to be ‘excessively impudent’ to her face and satirical behind her back, ‘taking her off! – putting his hands behind him, & kicking his heels about!’⁶⁸

The portrait of Mrs Ireton in Fanny Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer, seems to draw on many of the second Mrs Burney’s supposed attributes (as well as those of Fanny’s later bête noire at Court, Mrs Schwellenberg, whom she called Mama’s double). The heroine of The Wanderer, Juliet, whom Mrs Ireton oppresses from sheer bloody-mindedness and sadism, is forced to act as ‘humble companion’, a symbolic representation of Fanny’s subordination to her stepmother. An explanation for Elizabeth Burney’s ‘love of tyranny’ is suggested in the story by Mrs Ireton’s brother-in-law, who knew the old harpy in youth as ‘eminently fair, gay, and charming!’⁶⁹ Perhaps the inextinguishable spleen of the Burney ‘Family Scourge’ was, like Mrs Ireton’s, a kind of shock reaction to the withdrawal of sexual attention:

without stores to amuse, or powers to instruct, though with a full persuasion that she is endowed with wit, because she cuts, wounds, and slashes from unbridled, though pent-up resentment, at her loss of adorers; and from a certain perverseness, rather than quickness of parts, that gifts her with the sublime art of ingeniously tormenting.⁷⁰

Mrs Burney had plenty of fuel for sexual jealousy, not just at home among her stepdaughters (whom William Bewley had once described as Charles Burney’s ‘seraglio’) but among the Doctor’s pupils too. No doubt his male friends teased Charles Burney about his access to an endless supply of nubile young women, and perhaps not without cause: he appears in James Barry’s 1783 allegorical painting The Triumph of the Thames surrounded by naked Nereids, and in C.L. Smith’s caricature ‘A Sunday Concert’ in an obscenely suggestive pose in front of John Wilkes’s daughter Mary. Burney was clearly susceptible to female charms: he became openly infatuated with the lovely Sophy Streatfield after her lover Henry Thrale was dead, to the extent that Mrs Thrale felt he was making a fool of himself.⁷¹ Even Fanny noticed and joked about her father’s ability to make ‘conquests’, though she saw it mostly as proof of his charm. But a wife would be likely to view such persistent ‘charm’ rather differently. Elizabeth Burney may have had much more to put up with in her marriage than we know.

* Fanny’s impression differs radically from John Strype’s description of St Martin’s Street in 1720 as ‘a handsome, open Place, with very good Buildings for the Generality, and well inhabited’.⁵²

* It was later renumbered 35. The house was condemned in 1913 and the site is now occupied by the Westminster Reference Library.

† This room in the Burneys’ house has been reconstructed at Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, using the original panelling and mantelpiece.⁵⁵

4 An Accidental Author

From the origin of her first literary attempt, [she] might almost be called an accidental author.

Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney¹

Fanny’s diary was not addressed to ‘Nobody’ for long. Craving news from town and the company of his dear Burney girls, Samuel Crisp had developed an apparently insatiable appetite for their letters, and singled out Fanny’s as the best. His attention was extremely gratifying to the ‘little dunce’ and encouraged her to invest time and effort in the correspondence. Her diary gradually modulated into a series of journal-letters to the hermit of Chesington which Crisp felt free to circulate to his sister and her friends.

While it stimulated Fanny to have a discerning and appreciative audience (in a way that addressing passive ‘Nobody’ could never do), there was of course a danger that these semi-public letters might become self-conscious. Fortunately, Crisp was not only a forthright man but astute, and foresaw the kind of inhibitions to which Fanny might be prey. ‘I profess there is not a single word or expression, or thought in your whole letter,’ he wrote in the winter of 1773, when their correspondence was just taking root, ‘that I do not relish’:

– not that in our Correspondence, I shall set up for a Critic, or schoolmaster, or Observer of Composition – Damn it all! – I hate it if once You set about framing studied letters, that are to be correct, nicely grammatical & run in smooth Periods, I shall mind them as no others than newspapers of intelligence; I make this preface because You have needlessly enjoin’d me to deal sincerely, & to tell You of your faults; & so let this declaration serve once for all, that there is no fault in an Epistolary Correspondence, like stiffness, & study – Dash away, whatever comes uppermost – the sudden sallies of imagination, clap’d down on paper, just as they arise, are worth Folios, & have all the warmth & merit of that sort of Nonsense, that is Eloquent in Love – never think of being correct, when You write to me.²

Crisp granted Fanny a licence to be natural, and the benefits were enormous. He encouraged her to entertain him, not with anything fanciful or affected, but with the events of her everyday life, written in her everyday language, really as if she were talking to him. It was in their degree of deviation from ‘nicely grammatical’ writing that he would judge the vitality of her letters. Uneducated Fanny had appealed to the family monitor to correct her faults, and he had replied that she wasn’t to give her style a moment’s notice.

‘Dash away, whatever comes uppermost’: Fanny’s letters to Crisp became studiedly informal, making use of character sketches and long passages of dialogue as a substitute for straightforward chronicling. The success of the formula must have influenced her decision to cast the latest of her ‘writings’ in epistolary form, and the sheer familiarity of writing to Crisp suggested the story’s central correspondence between a young lady in the city (Evelina) and an old mentor in the sticks. Writing a novel as a series of letters suited the author’s circumstances, too. In a household where there was little privacy, the excuse of ‘writing a letter’ would have helped keep her compositions secret.

The epistolary novel was the most popular form of the day, and the trademark of Fanny’s literary hero, Richardson, though in Evelina she uses it more cleverly than he. Having, like Richardson, presented herself as the editor of the letters (thereby setting up the mild pretence of them being real), she ‘edits out’ parts of the correspondence, plants references in the text to ‘missing’ letters, has letters cross in the post, get diverted, forged, delayed (notably in the case of the one from the heroine’s dead mother, pivotal to the resolution of the plot). The model of Fanny’s real correspondence with Crisp was most valuable, though, in discouraging her from attempting too ‘literary’ a style. Evelina’s breathless note to her guardian on her arrival in London, for instance, has an irresistible realism:

This moment arrived. Just going to Drury-Lane Theatre. The celebrated Mr. Garrick performs Ranger. I am quite in extacy. So is Miss Mirvan. How fortunate, that he should happen to play! We would not let Mrs. Mirvan rest till she had consented to go; her chief objection was to our dress, for we have had no time to Londonize ourselves; but we teazed her into compliance, and so we are to sit in some obscure place, that she may not be seen.³

Evelina bears none of the marks of having been worked on for up to ten years, though in the Memoirs the author asserts that much of the story had been ‘pent up’ in her head since the time of the composition of ‘Caroline Evelyn’, the manuscript novel destroyed in Poland Street in 1766 or 1767.⁴ A document in Charlotte Barrett’s hand⁵ (but presumably written under the supervision of her aunt) adds that the earlier story had featured several characters who reappear in the ‘daughter’ novel: Lady Howard, Mr Villars, Miss Mirvan, Sir John Belmont and Madame Duval. These characters were so real to Fanny that she couldn’t help revolving their circumstances and personalities long after the manuscript containing their history had ceased to exist. ‘My bureau was cleared,’ she wrote, many years later, ‘but my head was not emptied.’⁶

It is likely that Evelina was one of the ‘writings’ Fanny Burney mentions in her diaries of 1770, 1771 and 1772. The two following years were burdened with copying as Dr Burney hurried to finish the first volume of his History, and it was probably only after the publication of that book in 1775 that Fanny had much time for her own work. In the early stages, there was little motivation to write the story down, except perhaps a desire to circulate a readable manuscript among her siblings and the Chesington Hall set. ‘Writing, indeed,’ as Madame d’Arblay confessed later, ‘was far more difficult to her than composing.’⁷ Writing down also meant pinning down, and an end to the pleasurable composing process.

Nevertheless, in the summer of 1776, when Dr and Mrs Burney had gone to Bristol and Fanny was left to her own devices with only the toddler Sally and the servants for company, she settled down with a hitherto unknown single-mindedness and wrote most of what is now Evelina’s second volume. By the end of the year she was beginning to negotiate with publishers.

The step from indulging in private ‘vagaries’ to producing two volumes of a full-length novel and soliciting its publication is so momentous that we may well wonder what prompted Fanny Burney to take it, or even think of it. The reason given in the Memoirs does not sound like the whole truth:

When the little narrative, however slowly, from the impediments that always annoy what requires secrecy, began to assume a ‘questionable shape;’ a wish – as vague, at first, as it was fantastic – crossed the brain of the writer, to ‘see her work in print.’⁸

This makes it sound as if Burney was simply indulging ‘a taste for quaint sports’⁹ in a frivolous and ladylike fashion. She certainly could not have thought of openly adopting a career as a novelist in 1776 – for a middle-class woman it was simply not respectable – but anonymous publication was a possibility. Her knowledge of the printing trade made the business of soliciting publication less intimidating than it might otherwise have been, but when Joyce Hemlow says that ‘the practice (almost the habit) of book-making that she had known for the last five years in her father’s study must have been sufficient by the momentum of its progress to carry her on to the press’,¹⁰ she makes the publication of Evelina sound rather too much like a demonstration of Newton’s second law. Fanny’s sudden decision to finish and publish her novel seems to have been triggered by something more urgent and personal.

It is possible that something happened in the Burney family in 1776 that made it desirable or even necessary for Fanny to make some money quickly by hurrying into print. We are unlikely to find out what this might have been; Fanny burned her whole diary and most of her correspondence for that year and the next, noting in her papers that the material was ‘upon Family matters or anecdotes’ – as if that was sufficient to justify it being ‘destroyed […] in totality’.¹¹ But two years later, when she was accused by Mrs Thrale of having courted the attention she seemed to despise by soliciting publication, she said, ‘My printing it, indeed […] tells terribly against me, to all who are unacquainted with the circumstances that belonged to it.’¹² This reveals that there were ‘circumstances’ that forced Fanny to act against her inclination and publish.

Neither of the two family scandals that took place in the autumn of 1777 can completely account for the move. The first was the elopement of Mrs Burney’s third child, Bessy Allen, who had been sent to Paris in 1775 for the improvement of her manners. Charlotte Burney, who was the same age as Bessy, was not sent with her as a companion; presumably they did not get on well. Mrs Burney was proud of her daughter and had intended, in Samuel Johnson’s opinion, ‘to enjoy the triumph of her superiority’ over the Burney girls.¹³ In August 1777 she had gone to Paris to bring Bessy home when the girl, sensing an end to her freedom, eloped with an adventurer called Samuel Meeke, a man reputed to be ‘Bankrupt in fame as well as Fortune’.¹⁴ The couple were married two months later in exactly the same place, Ypres, where Maria had married Martin Rishton. Mrs Burney had to return home on her own, shocked, anxious, ashamed and chagrined to the quick.*

The family had hardly recovered from this first shock when another disgrace hit the Burney household. Charles Burney junior had gone up to Caius College, Cambridge, in January 1777. Though he was fond of pranks, and lighthearted to the point of being feckless, Charles had a zeal for scholarship and an intellectual ability that outshone that of anyone else in the family. At Cambridge he was admitted to the University Library as a special privilege (it was not normally used by undergraduates at this date), but when a surprising number of classical texts began to go missing soon after his arrival, suspicion fell on him. The Under-Librarian decided to search his rooms secretly, an operation which had to be attempted during dinner since, as the College Bedmaker said, that was the only time Burney could be relied on not to be studying.¹⁶ ‘In a dark Corner’ they found about thirty-five of the missing volumes, mostly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of the standard classical authors, which had had the university arms removed from them and the Burney bookplate substituted. Other volumes, as it turned out, had been sold on, and when young Burney fled Cambridge after the discovery of his crime, a further box of stolen books was sent back to the library from London. In his few months at the university, he must have been stealing books almost all the time.

The shock at home was seismic, and none felt it more violently than the Doctor, who refused to see his son. Fanny’s diary from this painful period has not survived, nor has Charles Burney’s correspondence on the subject with his friend Thomas Twining, though Twining’s replies indicate how much comforting and bringing to reason the bitterly disappointed father required.¹⁷ At one point Charles seems to have considered disowning his son altogether, and he certainly thought of making him change his surname. Fortunately, when the first shock subsided, he dropped these drastic ideas. The problem of what to do with the reprobate remained, however. Charles junior was sent into exile to the village of Shinfield in Berkshire, presumably to a private tutor, from where he communicated forlornly with his sisters in St Martin’s Street.

But young Charles’s was not a brooding nature, and he recovered far quicker from this shameful episode than did the rest of his family. By the following spring he had been found a place at King’s College, Old Aberdeen – a far cry from Caius, and in a Presbyterian country (which his father thought might be a further hindrance to his taking Holy Orders, as they still hoped he would some day). He was writing verses, such as ‘Farewell to Shinfield’, which indicate that his spirits were pretty well restored:

Let me shake off the rustic – & once more

The gayer joys of college life explore.¹⁸

The ‘gayer joys’ in question may well have been what got him into trouble in his short Cambridge career, where any kind of high living would have very rapidly used up young Charles’s small allowance. Ralph S. Walker, in his article on the thefts,¹⁹ points out that when Charles junior’s own son, Charles Parr Burney, was going up to Oxford, he warned him feelingly of ‘three stumbling blocks: Gaming, Drinking and the Fair Sex’, the greatest being gaming: ‘Its fascinations are matchless and when they once influence the mind, their power is uncontrollable’.²⁰ This is surely the voice of experience, and perhaps young Charles did steal and sell the books in order to avoid owning up to debt at home.

Fanny puts a different slant on the matter in a letter written many years later to Charles Parr Burney (who had only just found out about the episode), in which she states ‘the origin of that fatal deed to have been a MAD RAGE for possessing a library, and that the subsequent sale only occurred from the fear of discovery’.²¹ Charles’s bibliomania, which far surpassed his father’s, resulted in him possessing at the time of his death in 1817 one of the most splendid private libraries of the age, which, along with his magpie hoards of old newspaper cuttings (ninety-four volumes) and an extensive archive of material relating to the history of the stage, formed a core collection of the new British Library. Fanny’s suggestion that her brother suffered a pathological ‘rage for possessing a library’ seems psychologically convincing. In the days of his prosperity, he acquired books conventionally; when he was a student from the lower bourgeoisie, let loose in the treasure-house of a university library, he just acquired them anyway.

If Fanny was trying to make enough money from Evelina to bail out her brother, she failed, even though the twenty guineas she received from the publisher for the copyright seemed ‘a sum enormous’ to her at the time. She said later that she had given the proceeds of her first novel to her brother Charles, but his disgrace at university post-dates her rush to finish Evelina. Perhaps even at Charterhouse, where he stayed until the late age of nineteen, Charles had run into the kind of debt that seems to have burdened him as a student. It is even possible that he might have been desperate (from whatever cause) to the point of attempting suicide. There is a cryptic reference in Fanny’s diary to a conversation with the writer Giuseppe Baretti in 1788, when Baretti used the image of ‘running a dagger into your own breast’. This made Fanny shudder, ‘because the dagger was a word of unfortunate recollection’.²²* Is it possible, as Mrs Thrale heard on the grapevine the same year,²⁴ that Charles Burney junior was the model for the suicidal Macartney in Evelina, whom the heroine (later revealed to be his half-sister) discovers preparing to use a pistol on himself? The heroines of Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer undergo traumatic encounters with potential suicides too, and in each case the desperado is brandishing a weapon. There may have been something more painful behind her ‘decision to print’ than Fanny Burney was prepared to let anyone know.

By the winter of 1776, Fanny had completed the first two volumes of her novel and had copied out at least one volume in the feigned, upright hand she developed to prevent recognition of the author of the manuscript. This was not as neurotic as it might seem. Fanny’s handwriting was well known in the London printing shops from her extensive copying of her father’s works, and as she would have no control over the production of her novel – should a publisher take it up – there was a real risk that her cover would be blown, or worse, that her father might be disgraced by association with the book.

The task of transcribing her text into the unnatural handwriting was irksome, and by Christmas 1776 she was losing patience with it. In conspiracy with Susan, Charlotte and Charles she had already approached the bookseller James Dodsley, but he had refused to consider an anonymous work. The next bookseller she fixed on was Thomas Lowndes, whose premises were in Fleet Street. Fanny felt she couldn’t approach him directly, so using the Orange Coffee House in the Haymarket as a decoy address, she sent Charles as go-between, weirdly dressed up by his sisters to look as adult as possible and melodramatically concealed behind the pseudonym ‘Mr King’. Fanny herself became the work’s anonymous and genderless ‘editor’, writing to Lowndes, ‘I have in my possession a M:S. novel, which has never yet been seen but by myself.’²⁵ She hoped to have the first two volumes ‘printed immediately’, with two more appearing later if they were successful. This might have been desirable to the young author, fed up with the slog of transcribing her half-completed manuscript and keen for cash; but Lowndes, unsurprisingly, wanted the thing complete. He returned volume one via ‘Mr King’, hoping to see the rest by the summer of 1777, but Fanny did not complete the book until November, staying up ‘the greatest part of many Nights, in order to get it ready’,²⁶ and it was not published until January of the following year. For one who claims to have had a ‘vague’ desire ‘to see her works in print’, it was an arduous process, requiring hard work, determination, patience and concentration.

The manuscript that finally found its way to Lowndes’s shop late in 1777 was prefaced with three layers of anxious authorial disclaimer: first there was an ode dedicating the work to the ‘author of my being’ (Dr Burney) and explaining that anonymity was the only course open to one who ‘cannot raise, but would not sink’ the fame of a matchless parent; then there was a petition for clemency ‘to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’, entreating them to remember that ‘you were all young writers once’. Lastly there was a preface from ‘the editor’ of the book, admitting that though novels (with a few notable exceptions) were held in low regard, ‘surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, might rather be encouraged than contemned’. Apparently forgetting the role of ‘editor’, she declared an intention not to copy the style of ‘the great writers’ (Johnson, Rousseau, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Marivaux) or to deal with ‘the same ground which they have tracked’. She is of ‘the vulgar herd’, and they ‘great’. Another reason why Fanny Burney’s novel was unlikely to fit into the existing ‘great’ tradition was that she was female, but since the title page did not even feature the conventional anonymous credit ‘By a Lady’, that fact was hidden.

The novel tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl, beautiful – of course – virtuous and naive, whose sheltered upbringing in Dorset under the protection of an elderly cleric, Mr Villars, is brought to an abrupt end by her entrance into London society in the company of aristocratic acquaintance. Villars is an anxious guardian: Evelina’s grandfather, his former pupil, met an early death after a disastrous marriage to a ‘lowbred and illiberal’ serving-woman, having bequeathed the care of his baby daughter, Caroline Evelyn, to the old tutor. When the girl grew up, her reprobate mother, remarried and called Madame Duval, reclaimed her, but their subsequent life together in Paris was miserable. Caroline escaped into a hasty marriage to a profligate Englishman, Sir John Belmont, who abandoned his pregnant wife, destroying their marriage certificate and denying any connection with her. She died giving birth to a daughter, Evelina Anville, a surname invented by Mr Villars to cover the baby’s unacknowledged parentage.

The eventual restoration of Evelina to her rightful name and identity, and the parallel story of her troubled courtship by courtly Lord Orville, provide the double framework within which Fanny Burney creates a vivid satire of eighteenth-century manners, told, for the first time, from a feminine viewpoint. The love story of Evelina is entertainingly perverse: as in Pride and Prejudice (which owes a great deal – possibly including its title* – to Burney’s work), the couple start out by meeting at an assembly and getting on very badly. Endless accidents and misconceptions make Orville’s poor opinion of Evelina, ‘a poor weak girl!’,²⁸ fall even further, and only through the passage of time, painfully good behaviour and the couple’s persistent sexual attraction to each other are they eventually united.

Burney packed her ‘little narrative’ with matter, rather in the way that Dickens was to do a century later. There are sentimental scenes, ‘sublime’ scenes (notably the tear-jerking reconciliation between Evelina and her repentant father, Sir John Belmont), high drama, low comedy and a large cast of characters catering for all tastes. A great deal of the book’s novelty and charm, however, comes from the sympathetic way in which Burney depicts the heroine’s youth and inexperience. The scene at Evelina’s first assembly is both funny and painful, for she is concentrating too hard on the formalities to behave any way other than idiotically. Her letters home to Dorset chart this frustrating ‘entrance into the world’ with an endearing candour that also performs an important ironic function: the reader sees (almost) all Evelina’s troubles coming long before she does, from the manoeuvrings of her intemperate grandmother Madame Duval, to the dangerously plausible Sir Clement Willoughby’s persistent attempts at seduction.

Evelina is at the mercy of appearances in every way, judged to be as vulgar as the company she is forced to keep, that of her meddling and exploitative grandmother and her self-seeking cousins, the Branghtons. Burney’s portrayals of mean-spirited, selfish and socially ambitious characters immediately show where her genius lies. Years of studying the manners of the aspirant middle class (most notably, of course, her own father) had given her ample material to work on; her traditionally limited female upbringing added a claustrophobic intensity and weight of disgust to her observations. The Branghtons come in for particularly stinging satire. They are silversmiths (like the Burneys’ own tenant in Long’s Court), with premises on Snow Hill, near Smithfield. Their alertness to class signals is extreme – even the disposition of their accommodation reflects it like a three-dimensional model. The Branghtons themselves live on the second floor, with a poor Scotch poet, Macartney, lodging in the garret and ‘classy’ Mr Smith in the former reception rooms on the first floor. The stratification is relative, of course. Only to a Branghton could Mr Smith be a model of gentility, and the poet, needless to say, turns out to be a man of sensibility and noble blood. Fanny Burney revels in exposing the small-mindedness of her vulgar characters, and Smith is the best of them all. ‘Such a fine varnish of low politeness!’ said Dr Johnson of his favourite, ‘– such a struggle to appear a Gentleman!’²⁹ Smith is constantly on his guard, yet every word and action betrays him. He doesn’t, for instance, like to lend his rooms to the grubby Branghton girls (who guilelessly admit how seldom they put on clean clothes). ‘The truth is,’ he explains, expecting to impress Evelina,

Miss Biddy and Polly take no care of any thing, else, I’m sure, they should always be welcome to my room; for I’m never so happy as in obliging the ladies, – that’s my character, Ma’am; – but, really, the last time they had it, everything was made so greasy and so nasty, that upon my word, to a man who wishes to have things a little genteel, it was quite cruel. Now, as to you, Ma’am, it’s quite another thing; for I should not mind if every thing I had was spoilt, for the sake of having the pleasure to oblige you; and, I assure you, Ma’am, it makes me quite happy, that I have a room good enough to receive you.³⁰

The Branghtons’ ineradicable vulgarity provides much of the humour of the book. Forced to take a party to the opera, Mr Branghton is totally unprepared for the expense of the tickets and makes a scene at the booth, thinking he can haggle over the prices as he might with a fellow tradesman. His purchase of the cheapest possible seats, still in his view extortionately expensive, pleases no one in the party, for they have neither the satisfaction of hearing or seeing the performance properly, nor of being seen by the ‘quality’ in the pit. When the opera begins, their disappointment is intensified: ‘Why there’s nothing but singing!’ Mr Branghton exclaims, and is disgusted by the realisation that it is all in a foreign language too. ‘Pray what’s the reason they can’t as well sing in English?’ he asks; ‘but I suppose the fine folks would not like it, if they could understand it.’³¹

‘The fine folks’ come off rather worse than the vulgarians, although Burney’s depiction of them is necessarily less convincingly observed. Lord Merton and his friends are all (except for super-virtuous Orville) as stupid as the Holborn crowd, and more culpable. Their affectations and excessive language are evidence of moral malaise; while they should be leading society (Lovel is a Member of Parliament and all the others landowners), their time is wasted in gaming, dangerous sports and dalliance. Evelina’s blue-stocking chaperone, Mrs Selwyn, is the scourge of this set, endlessly showing up their ignorance and folly. When she suggests that they have a competition to see who can quote longest from Horace, none of the fops can join in, despite their expensive ‘classical’ educations: ‘what with riding, – and – and – and so forth’, says one of them, ‘really, one has not much time, even at the university, for mere reading.’³² But while Mrs Selwyn’s ‘masculine’ learning and wit is the vehicle for many of the novel’s home truths, the author makes clear that she finds it ultimately sterile. Mrs Selwyn is too busy ‘reserving herself for the gentlemen’ to function as the sympathetic mother-figure the orphaned heroine needs.

There is no doubt that Evelina’s worth is only recognised at all by Lord Orville because she is also beautiful, but in this profoundly feminist novel Burney gives an original view of the conventional heroine – the view from the pedestal. Evelina’s instant physical impact on other people – of which she is imperfectly aware – is shown as something of a liability (inflaming lustful men and making enemies of jealous women). It is her guarantee of attention, but at the same time an impediment to being truly seen. Evelina exposes – in a way undreamed of by earlier novelists – the double standards applied towards women, in whom everything but beauty and goodness are ‘either impertinent or unnatural’.³³ The wit, Mrs Selwyn, is seen as unnaturally intellectual (‘oddish’), and Evelina’s grotesque grandmother, Madame Duval, as impertinently immodest; both commit the cardinal sin of being old. ‘I don’t know what the devil a woman lives for after thirty,’ says dissolute Lord Merton, in one of the novel’s bleakest remarks; ‘she is only in other folks’ way.’³⁴ The lovely young heroine’s hold on her admirers will soon, it is implied, be turned to just such withering scorn, for women past their bloom are not just negligible but irritating – ‘in other folks’ way’ – and a resented financial liability on some man or other.

The scene in Evelina in which the gambling-mad fops organise a race between two very old women is a graphic example of the point. Like the episode in which a dressed-up monkey attacks Lovel, it has been criticised for being excessive and unlikely, but this is not the case: gambling was the mania of the period and the occasions for it bizarre. There was one contemporary case of a gambler hiring a desperado to prove that people could live under water (the desperado drowned, so the gambler tried again with another), and another in which some members of Brooks’s Club laid bets on whether or not a passer-by who had collapsed in the street was dead (no attempts were allowed to help him, which might have affected the outcome).³⁵

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