Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  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 17
26, 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.