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 weighte
d 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 disad
vantage 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.
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