I dont know even how far my friendship to you would lead me on such an occasion, because you don’t know how to write stupid letters; and such as you send me it requires no sisterly affection, no effort of friendship, no exercise of good-humour to render delightfully entertaining and charming.
* * * * * *
Your letter is all I could wish. Your account of your visit at Sir Joshua’s so compleat that the entertainment it has afforded me has been almost equal to that I should have received in being present at it. I hope to be at home when Mrs. Cholmondeley makes her first appearance at our house. She is a comical woman, and I long to hear her spout Made Duval But, dear girl, let me have MORE, MORE, MORE. You leave off, as if you did it on purpose, in the style of the last page of the first volume of a novel, — at the most interesting place possible. Oh, Dr. Johnson! How I do love, honour — reverence you! But you are a dear, good girl and mean to let me have the end of your Streatham visit, as you say you have another paquet began. Do, sweet girl, fill it speedily, let me hear of all your abundant adventures and that as soon as possible; — for ere long I trust we shall meet — next Thursday se’nnight is the day at present designed for our journey — but if you will send me a paquet and let me have another frank before that time I will write again partic’lars. how I long to know if Mr. Huddisford is known to him, or if he knew the epithets bestowed on you by this great man from second, or perhaps third-rate, intelligence? Pray let me hear. I have no sort of adventures to write; — or indeed anything else. I only wish I had got a pen which would write larger, that my letter might look more consequential, without becoming tedious.
[The rest of the letter is wanting.]
[After reading Susan’s letters, it may be that many will agree with Dr. Johnson, “I think one should love you, too, if one did but know you.”
We, who have learned to know this “peculiar darling of the whole house of Dr. Burney, as well as of his heart,” confess to placing this slight notice of her after, not before, her letters, lest we should take from their brightness by telling of her decline and death. Two of her severe illnesses have already been described; one, when on her way to school in Paris, in 1764; another in 1769, when Dr. Armstrong was called to attend her. They were presages of the last.
She was well and happy when, in the beginning of 1781, she married Molesworth, son of John Phillips, Esquire, of Dublin, lieutenant of the party of marines sent with Captain Cook on his last voyage. Phillips saw Cook and four of the marines slaughtered. With the rest who were there, Phillips “swum for his life, helped by a smart fire on the savages from the ships’ boats, which were only twenty yards from the shore.” He had got into a boat, when he saw one of his men, who was a good swimmer, in danger of being taken by the savages. Although Phillips had been stabbed between the shoulders with a long iron spike, (called a pahooa,) he leapt into the sea. He was struck by a stone on his head, but brought off the marine by his hair. Courage like this, and comradeship with Jem Burney, with love of music, and some skill in it, won Susan to consent to an engagement until the means of living were inherited from an uncle of Phillips. He was promoted in due time to a lieutenant-colonelcy. After the break of a residence in Boulogne for Susan’s failing health, the married couple lived chiefly at Mickleham, in great intimacy with the accomplished family of Lock, of Norbury Park. In Mrs. Lock, Fanny, through Susan, gained a more stable friend than Mrs. Thrale; through Susan, also, she learnt to know the Chevalier D’Arblay, who became her husband.
During the Irish Rebellion, while a French force was on Irish soil, Susan’s husband felt bound to live on his property for three years. Susan’s family were keenly distressed at this necessity. As if it were with a presentiment that her absence would be final, Dr. Burney wrote some lines which sound like an epitaph.
“ON THE DEPARTURE OF MY DAUGHTER SUSAN TO IRELAND.
“My gentle Susan! who, in early state,
Each pain or care could soothe or mitigate;
And who in adolescence could impart
Delight to every eye and feeling heart;
Whose mind, expanding with increase of years,
Precluded all anxiety and fears
Which parents feel for inexperienced youth
Unguided in the ways of moral truth.
* * * * *
On her kind Nature, genially her friend,
A heart bestowed instruction could not mend;
Intuitive, each virtue she possessed,
And learned their foes to shun and to detest.
“Nor did her intellectual powers require
The usual aid of labour to inspire
Her soul with prudence, wisdom, and a taste,
Unerring in refinement; sound and chaste.
“Yet of her merits this the smallest part —
Far more endeared by virtues of the heart,
Which constantly excite her to embrace
Each duty of her state with active grace.”
* * * * *
Susan was weak when she went to Ireland, where her health further declined. Before her second year there was over, her doctors could do no more than recommend a trial of her native English air. Her own feeling, as expressed in her own words, was that “to behold her father again, to meet his commiserating eyes, and to be under his roof and in his arms, would make him give her a second life.”
With such feelings, Bishop Atterbury’s daughter crossed the channel to die in his arms; but less happy than Mrs. Morrice, Susan was too much exhausted ever to reach her father. She lay ill in Dublin, after a slow journey from Belcotton; afterwards, she lay ill for a week at the old sailing and landing place for Irish ships, Parkgate, near Chester, where she was met by her brother Charles. There she passed gently away on the 6th of January, 1800, a day which, with the 12th of January, (the anniversary of her funeral,) Fanny kept as one of religious seclusion for thirteen years; she gave up this custom at last, in obedience to the wish of her father, who held with Dr. Johnson, that “sorrow was the mere rust of the soul.” It is noteworthy that Fanny was taken to Susan on the 6th of January, 1840.
Susan left two sons, Norbury, (so called because he was unexpectedly born while his mother was on a visit at Norbury Park,) and William. Her only daughter, Fanny, for some time kept the house of her grandfather, Dr. Burney, who wrote of her to Madame D’Arblay, with affectionate praise. She married Mr. C. C. Raper. Mrs. Raper was very pretty, but we are told that her daughter, Mrs. Minet Kingston, was more like Susan.
A descendant of Charlotte says of this grand-daughter, Mrs. Kingston, that she had more life, and fun, and esprity than any of them, though she was not so clever and well-read as the grand-daughter of Charlotte, nor so brilliant in society as “Sally Payne,” the daughter of Admiral Burney.
There exist in the keeping of her kin, “a very pretty miniature of ‘ sweet Susan,’” and a portrait of her by Edward Burney, a companion picture to his likeness of Fanny. We know nothing of Susan’s sons. Colonel Phillips married again, and had other children. We find him in J. T. Smith’s “Life of Nollekens,” and in Charles Lamb’s Letters. Charles Lamb reminds Southey of Phillips, as being among “the little knot of whist-players, that used to assemble weekly for so many years at the Queen’s Gate, and called Admiral Burney friend.” Lamb calls Phillips “the high-minded associate of Cook; the veteran Colonel, with his lusty heart still sending cartels of defiance to old Time.” When Smith wrote, in 1828, Phillips was one of the two survivors of Cook’s last expedition. “His venerable age” (says Smith, somewhat quaintly) “is not beyond his politeness.” Some of Smith’s anecdotes he owed to Phillips, who, he says, “often relates anecdotes of his youth, and the distinguished characters he has known.”
We pass from Susan to her youngest sister Charlotte, who could barely walk when her mother died in 1761.
On her father’s second marriage, six years afterwards, she was sent to a school in Norfolk. She appears to have been little in London during the years of these early diaries. We find
, from one of Mrs. Rishton’s letters, that Charlotte was much more with Maria’s sister, Bessy (who was nearly of Charlotte’s age), under Mrs. Burney’s roof at Lynn (during those frequent absences to which Mrs. Burney was bound by duty to her mother, Mrs. Allen, and by other family ties), than with Hetty, Fanny, or Susy, her own sisters. One may see this by a turn of fancy, quite her own, as well as by her way of writing, which is, in part, an exaggeration of the family habit of quoting the odd things said in their hearing, especially by foreigners; in part, a slang of her own, which she wrote to herself, for herself, never thinking it would be read a hundred years later.
By a grotesque chance, a few of Charlotte’s letters to Fanny and Susan, and the mutilated fragments spared by some hand from her diary, are now in a wrapper on which Madame D’Arblay has written “Some brief letters from the truly pious W. Wilberforce to F. D’Arblay — one... of 1817, 1818, 1820, 1822, 1823.” Charlotte’s anecdotes— “Nanny goats? as she called them — now replace those weightier words!
In a letter from Fanny to Susan, there are a few words of affectionate regret at the impression which Charlotte’s manner might make upon strangers. We think that her gaiety, love of fun, innocent self-complacency when praised or even noticed, her manifest and hearty enjoyment of a little flirtation, will win our readers to condone some flippancy and “slang,” which was mainly written to herself alone. She had been (it is said) a little neglected, and not a little repressed. Some checking she apparently needed; subdued her spirits could not be for long, as they were of her father’s kind. Comparing her accounts of people with Fanny’s, we find hers correct, nay exact, in spite of her random style of writing. She sees people in her own way, not in that of Fanny, who was a born and skilled observer of character. Sometimes she sees more, or otherwise, than Fanny did; “the futile fellow” story, with Garrick’s mimicry of Dr. Johnson, is better told by Charlotte than by Boswell. Indeed, nothing in any book has given us so strong an impression of Garrick’s great powers of pleasing and winning, as these flights of the pen of a girl who was about sixteen when he was sixty. Mrs. Paradise’s ball, and the evenings at Mr. Hoole’s and at the Dean of Winchester’s, are also capital examples of Charlotte’s power of bringing a scene before our eyes. Her flirtations we may fancy, from the passages concerning Mr. Vincent Mathias. Of her marriage we copy a family account: “Clement Francis had been secretary to Warren Hastings in India, and while there he read, and was so charmed with ‘Evelina,’ that he was seized with a desire to make the authoress his wife, and, with that intent, came home from India, and obtained an introduction to Dr. Burney and his family; but the result was that he married the younger sister — Charlotte.” Not long after the publication of “Evelina,” Mr. Beresford, a gentleman who visited the Thrale family, expressed his intention to see more of Fanny with a view of marrying her. She heard of this, and shunned him. We know not what was the case with Mr. Francis, but the “Gentleman’s Magazine” chronicles among the marriages of 1786: “Feb. 11. Clement Francis, Esq., to Miss Charlotte Burney, daughter of Dr. Burney, and younger sister to the celebrated author of ‘Cecilia.’” Mr. Francis is found on the official list of medical officers of the East India Company, in the Bombay Presidency, as “Surgeon, September 6, 1778, resigned January 17, 1785.” He probably returned to England with Hastings, in 1785. After his marriage he practised as a surgeon at Aylsham in Norfolk, where he died suddenly, towards the end of 1792, while Fanny (after her release from Windsor) was staying in his house.
Charlotte was left with two daughters and a son. Early in 1798, she married Captain Ralph Broome, of the Bengal Army, author of some political verses named “Letters of Simpkin the Second, Poetic Recorder of all the Proceedings upon the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., in Westminster Hall.” There was a son of this marriage, who died young.
Charlotte’s daughters, Marianne and Charlotte Francis, were (from their own bent) what Charlotte might have called “bluestockings.” In a letter written by Dr. Burney to Fanny, in 1808, he describes the manifold attainments of his grand-daughter, Marianne, but ends with his private expression of feeling that she is “a monster” — of knowledge only, of course. Charlotte Francis (Mrs. Barrett), the editor of the later diaries of her aunt, Madame D’Arblay? is still affectionately and respectfully remembered. “A very little old lady (writes one of her granddaughters), with bright blue eyes, and soft brown hair, and the neatest, trimmest, little figure imaginable. She never grew old, though she lived so long. On Sunday evenings, she always spelt out her Hebrew psalm, and Dr. Greenhill (of Hastings) remarked that she was the only woman he knew who could ‘read Hebrew, and make jelly.’ Her devoted care of her invalid daughter was most beautiful. All her later life seemed to be spent in nursing first one and then another of her dear ones. She married when she was about sixteen. It was said that she had not the least intention, or wish, to do so, but Mr. Barrett would take no refusal. He was much her senior. She was so simple and humble-minded with all her learning that no one could accuse her of pedantry. Her most laborious work was the catalogue of the Fitzwilliam Museum, but I think she took nearly as much pride in,’ Charades, Enigmas, and Riddles, by a Cantab,’ which she collected, and published, with a characteristic preface.”
The children of Mrs. Barrett were worthy of their descent. Her eldest son, the Reverend Richard Arthur Francis Barrett, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and Rector of Stower Provost, Dorsetshire, was the author of “A Synopsis of Criticisms on Passages in the Old Testament,” &c. When at college his eyes failed him from overwork. His sister, Julia Charlotte, learned enough of Hebrew to help him to carry on his studies. Her daughter writes: “I have seen sheets of her transcribing of Hebrew on blue paper which he could see to read when printed books drove him wild. I think this was a creditable act for a young girl universally admired, extremely pretty, witty, and lively. Later in life, she materially helped her [second] husband with his books.” Julia Charlotte Barrett married first, James Thomas, E.I.C.S.; secondly, Dr. Charles Maitland, author of “The Church in the Catacombs,” and “The Apostles’ School of Prophetic Interpretation.” She herself wrote “Letters from Madras, by A Lady,” a book which was highly praised at the time of its publication in 1843. It was reprinted by Mr. Murray in his Home and Colonial Library, in 1846, with renewed success.
The editor has seen a pocket-book which belonged to Charlotte Ann Burney; it has evidently been a “fairing,” from the famous fair of St. Edmund’s-Bury. It is bound with soft red leather stamped with a silver pattern. It has never been used but for memoranda such as a young woman might make who had left a brilliant society for a tiny town near the Norfolk coast. There is a list of the “singers and players on musical instruments” whom she had (once upon a time) heard; also, of the authors and celebrities whom she had met; then of the “deaths of friends”; among whom (without a date), there is “Cousin Richard.” One entry is joyous: “St. Andrew’s Day, 1786, my dear Dad was chosen of the Council of the Royal Society, together with Rt. Hon. Ch. Greville, W. Herschall, L.D. (sic), astronomer, Nevil Maskelyne, D.D.” Lastly comes a short list of “Norfolk Provincialisms.” The title-page explains the reason why it belonged to Charlotte; — the frontispiece was designed by her cousin Edward, from a scene in the “Cecilia” of her sister Fanny. Edward has also succeeded in making six ladies, in as many frightful head-dresses, look lovely, notwithstanding fashion.
The title runs thus: —
“The/ Norfolk Ladies/ Memorandum Book/ or/ Fashionable Pocket Repository/ for the year 1787/ Embellished with a/ Beautiful descriptive Plate/ representing an/ interesting scene from Cecilia/ likewise/ Six of the most Fashionable Ladies/ Head Dresses/ Designed by Burney and masterly engraved by Walker/ — Bury St. Edmund’s:/ Printed and sold by John Rackham/ and may be had of/ All the Booksellers & Stationers in the County of Norfolk/ To be continued annually/ (price one Shilling).”]
SOME LETTERS AND FRAGMENTS OF THE JOURNAL OF CHARLOTTE ANN BURNEY. 1777 — 1787.
FRAGMEN
T I. [1777].
[Garrick after his withdrawal from the Stage.]
... had been settled a quarter of an hour, he was looking and prying about with his opera glass, to the right and to the left, before and behind him, and everywhere but over his right shoulder — at last however in the middle of one of Henderson’s most interesting speeches, one of the box-keepers luckily made a most comfortably horrid noise with the door — Garrick turnd round, and in turning his head back to its usual position, “help me or else I die, on us he cast an eye,” most earnestly; “Ha! what is it you!” and so saying he shook hands with us. L — d, how consequencial I felt just then! “Well, but you an’t alone?”
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 506
