Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  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 co
mplicity 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.

  A
s 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.