Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  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 sincere
ly 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 Bu
rney 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.