Hindsight and wishful thinking, as we have seen, are likely to have coloured anything Madame D’Arblay told her niece about this period of her youth. The second Mrs Burney was unlikely to have had any influence at all over Fanny at the time of the bonfire (variously placed ‘on my fifteenth birth-day’, i.e. 13 June 1767,75 ‘from the time she attained her fifteenth year’76 and ‘in the young authoress’s fifteenth year’,77 i.e. some time between June 1766 and June 1767). At these times, Fanny was barely aware of Elizabeth Allen except as an old family friend. Mrs Allen was still Charles Burney’s secret amour; hardly in a position to ‘inveigh very frequently and seriously against the evil of a scribbling turn in young ladies – the loss of time, the waste of thought, in idle, crude inventions’.78 These sentiments, if ever uttered by Mrs Burney to Fanny, seem to belong to a later and more intimate period.
From the many self-conscious references in the diaries she began to write several months after the bonfire, it is clear that Fanny was going through a phase of experiment, the results of which often dissatisfied her (and tempted her to commit the journal itself ‘to the Flames’79). Destroying her juvenilia could thus have had more to do with a resolve to write differently, rather than not write at all. Having read the contents of her bureau through to Susan, perhaps Fanny realised that she had written herself into something of a dead end with ‘Elegies, Odes’ et cetera. ‘Caroline Evelyn’ was a gloomy novel, and she was not feeling gloomy any longer. The fact that she wrote a sequel to ‘Caroline Evelyn’ which used the same characters but transfigured the story into a comedy is surely of significance. As an attempt to ‘annihilate’ the passion to write,80 the purging bonfire, with its overtones of amateur witchcraft and spellcasting, was spectacularly unsuccessful, and was not repeated.
The journal Fanny started in March 1768 was the ideal testing ground for a variety of rhetorical styles, from the sublime (usually curtailed with self-deflating irony) to the commonplace. The first entry, in which she sets up her alter-ego, the ‘romantick Girl’ Miss Nobody, is pure performance, executed with brio by the ‘backward’ fifteen-year old:
To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved – to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody? No secret can I conceal from No—body, & to No—body can I be ever unreserved.81
‘I must imagion myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends’, Fanny had decided. The second entry attempts this ingeniously, with a send-up of ‘girl-talk’: ‘O my dear – such a charming Day! – & then last night – well, you shall have it all in order – – as well as I can recollect’.82 The diary allowed her to be skittish, serious, even dull: ‘Nobody’ was a tolerant audience, ‘the most complaisant friend in the world – ever ready to comply with my wishes – never hesitating to oblige, never averse to any concluding, yet never wearried [sic] with my beginning – charming Creature’.83
The first years of the diary (patchily kept up) are the only part of Fanny Burney’s huge output as a journal-writer that can be thought of as secret or confidential. Interestingly, they show that the sensitive, ‘feeling’ teenager actually possessed quite a cold eye. Here she is describing the family’s cook’s wedding:
The Bride. A maiden of about fifty, short, thick, clumsy, vulgar; her complection the finest saffron, & her Features suited to it84
and here a performance of Rowe’s Tamerlane by the schoolboys of the Soho Academy:
the young Gentleman who perform’d Selima, stopt short, & forgot himself – it was in a Love scene – between her – – him I mean & Axalla – who was very tender – She – he – soon recover’d tho – Andrew whisper’d us, that when it was over – ‘He’d lick her! –’ St[r]atocles amused himself with no other action at all, but beating, with one Hand, his Breast, & with the other, held his Hat.85
She didn’t develop this mode of comic writing, but it clearly worked as a release valve for a highly intelligent teenager who was never allowed to utter a harsh word in public. ‘Participation or relief’86 were the two reasons she gave for keeping her early diary. ‘I have known the Time’, she wrote in 1771, ‘when I could enjoy Nothing, without relating it’.
The creation of an imaginary confidante allowed Fanny to write the journal as if it were a series of letters; she went on to write letters to Samuel Crisp, in the avid correspondence that she started with him in 1773, as if she were writing a journal. To her sister Susan, she was to write journal-letters, blurring the distinctions further. The discovery of how fluid form could be was emancipating: Fanny Burney wrote a novel in letters that people said sounded like a play, and a play that ended up being partly reshaped into a novel. There were also tragic dramas that aspired to the condition of epic poetry and that weird hybrid, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, a biographical autobiography, using novel-writing techniques. It seems paradoxical that a writer who in her maturity was so anxious about the moral and intellectual acceptability of her works’ content should grant herself this licence with form (and with style and usage too). Perhaps both stemmed from her perception of what was appropriate to her sex; ‘lively freedoms’ in her works were unthinkable, just as too much elegance might have seemed pretentious.
Fanny Burney’s inventiveness with language is an aspect of her achievement that has been largely overlooked. Her work is so full of significant coinages, conversions, new compounds and new formulations that one commentator has felt moved to say that ‘she seems worthy to stand alongside Pope, Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Scott as one of Bradley’s “Makers of English”’.87 Left to educate herself, Fanny had been inventing and adapting words from an early age, and grew up happy to adjust language to suit the requirements of the moment, as a sardonic journal entry from 1775 shows: ‘Making Words, now & then, in familiar Writing, is unavoidable, & saves the trouble of thinking, which, as Mr Adison observes, we Females are not much addicted to’.88 Family usage encouraged the habit of coinage: the Burneys employed quantities of catchphrases, nonsense terms and nicknames, for fun (a very new word) and the sheer pleasure of invention but also as a form of private language, a family code that was impenetrable to outsiders. The critic R.B. Johnson has deplored Susan Burney’s ‘barbarisms’ and her father’s ‘passion for hybrid phrasing, and the pseudo-wit of made-up words’: the whole family, he complained, ‘was too impatient of solid culture to acquire sound literary taste’.89 It may well be the case that this generation of Burneys was ‘impatient of solid culture’, though it is hard to see how the characteristic Burney letter style could have gained more than it would have lost from classical polish. Fanny’s success as a novelist owes a lot to the quirky, ‘unsound’ family register which she reproduced in her journals and letters and took, in modified but distinctive and expressive forms, into her published works.
Fanny Burney’s coinage of words, particularly evident in her early diaries, was mostly humorous and deliberately inelegant: ‘snugship’, ‘shockation’, ‘scribbleration’ – these words draw attention to themselves, and were meant to. More widespread, but less obvious to later readers – because her usages have been so well assimilated – are the examples in her work of parts of speech she has transposed or converted: ‘to fight shy’ is one such, ‘to shilly-shally’ (contracted from ‘to stand shilly-shally’), ’beautify’ (used intransitively), ‘to make something of’, and, going from verb to noun, ‘take-in’ and ‘break-up’. She might have invented these forms, and was certainly the first person to record them. The ‘common language of men’ was of perennial interest to Fanny, and the realism of her novels derives in great part from her use of contemporary slang and colloquialisms (such as ‘I’d do it as soon as say Jack Robinson,’ which first appeared in Evelina90). Each of the novels relies heavily on the power of speech to reveal character and class, and contains long stretches of dialogue which are essentially sat
irical inventories of contemporary usage and abusage. In her ‘elevated’ style (usually reserved for the heroines’ crises, when common language is abandoned altogether) she is conspicuously at her least inventive.
To quantify her impact on English and American usage would be extremely difficult, but some idea of it can be gleaned from the list of ‘Additions to O.E.D. from the Writings of Fanny Burney’91 compiled by J.N. Waddell, included as an appendix to this book. It shows how frequently Fanny formed verbs with -ise or -ize endings (diarise, scribblerise, journalise) and negative adjectives and adverbs, twenty-eight of which are listed in the New English Dictionary as first appearing in her work, including ‘unobtrusively’, ‘unremittingly’ and ‘unamusing’. Waddell has also demonstrated the extent of her inventiveness,92 from the possible first use of compounds such as ‘school-girl’ and ‘dinner-party’, to her borrowings from French later in life (after her marriage), which include ‘maisonnette’ and ‘bon-bon’, and her anticipations of Americanisms in words such as ‘alphabetize’ and ‘tranquiliser’. The link between her personal register and forms that were emerging at the same time in eighteenth-century American English is particularly interesting. Many Americanisms deliberately subvert the mother tongue (or, some critics might say, distort it with ugly, overlong, philologically impure neologisms). It is a suggestive coincidence that Fanny Burney was writing her first novel during the early part of the American War of Independence, and that the infant nation was developing its characteristic language traits in the years when her novels, with their heavy reliance on slang, vogue and new words, had achieved cult status.
Fanny Burney’s freedom with language reflects her self-image as an ‘outsider’ in literature and her defiance of conventional limitations in a manner that could be seen as rebellious, even revolutionary; but, as with her natural and powerful feminism, her sense of propriety, personal prejudices and deep conservatism all militated against her acknowledging this. The more she did acknowledge it, the more inhibited her writing became. Any connection with anti-conventionality, however abstract, was problematic for her, as we shall see in numerous instances. She deplored disrespect to authority, and was such an arch-Tory in her youth that even her father (not a man noted for his liberal politics) teased her with the nickname ‘Fanny Bull’. But howevermuch her conservatism affected her behaviour socially, it never inhibited Fanny Burney from inventing words and phrases – ‘John Bullism’ itself is one of them.93 As Waddell has remarked, her innovations ‘reveal a relaxed enjoyment of language for its own sake, and an unashamed pleasure in its flexibility’, and set her apart as a ‘transcriber of the ordinary, as well as a pioneer in the unusual’. Whatever other anxieties Fanny Burney developed as a writer, language remained an area where she felt perfectly free.
* * *
* The modern spelling is ‘Chessington’.
† The County History says that Hamilton paid for the property, but records in the Surrey History Centre state that he was ‘only son and heir’ of Rebecca Hatton of Chesington. Mrs Hatton was, presumably, widow or sister of Thomas Hatton, owner of Chesington Hall until his death in 1746. The different surname of Rebecca’s children indicates that they were the issue of an earlier marriage.
* Chesington Hall was pulled down in 1833–4 and rebuilt on the old foundations. It was this short-lived Victorian building (demolished a century later and now covered over by a residential estate) which Constance Hill and her sister Ellen visited when writing Juniper Hall (published in 1904). Neither Ellen Hill’s picture of the Hall in that book (p.147) nor an older amateur drawing in the archives of the Surrey History Centre gives much idea of the house as it was in Crisp’s day, but the records of leases and releases do. They itemise the rooms reserved by Sarah Hamilton after the property was divided: ‘on the ground floor, the Hall and the Brown and Best Parlours next the Garden with the closets therein, the small beer cellar, the under ground cellar communicating with the small beer cellar, and those rooms up a pair of stairs called the Best Chamber, the Brown Room, the Paper Room, the Wrought Room and the Green Room; the rooms up two pair of stairs (except the first room which communicates with the Back Stairs wherein the farmer’s men usually lie), Stable, Coachhouse, the Brewhouse with the Apple Chamber over it, the Pidgeon House, the Great Garden adjoining the sd. messuage and Brewhouse, the Necessary in the Garden, the Lower Garden adjoining the Necessary, the Pound Meadow, the Walk to the Church with trees on both sides of it and the fruit thereof, the use of the Pump and all other Courts, yards, ways and passages in and about the sd. messuage’.29
† Like many spinsters of mature years, Sarah Hamilton had adopted the title ‘Mrs’.
* And which Jane Austen knew well too – it is the book Mr Collins insists on reading aloud to the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice.
* 1766 is the likely date: Susan’s miscellaneous writings show she was in London by the spring of 1767.45
* The date – 1766–7 – is conjectural, based on Crisp’s estimate in 1779 that the incident took place ‘about a Dozen Years ago’48 and Fanny’s statement in 1771 that she had not been to Chesington ‘for almost five years’.49
* ‘Allen’ was Elizabeth’s maiden name as well as her first married name.
* Why she should have loaned such an enormous sum, apparently without interest, for a period of thirty years, is a mystery.
3
Female Caution
In 1768, the year when Fanny began to write her diary, Hetty Burney and Maria Allen, aged nineteen and seventeen respectively, were making their entrances into the world. Fanny observed their progress with profound interest and a degree of ironic detachment. Both the older girls had plenty of admirers and indulged to the full the drama of playing them off against each other. Subsequent to every evening out there would be a trail of young men calling at Poland Street, some dull, some rakish, some unsure which girl to court, some, like Hetty’s admirer Mr Seton, happy to talk to Fanny in her sister’s absence, and to discover, as the chosen few did, how well the sixteen-year-old could keep up a conversation:
[Mr Seton]: I vow, if I had gone into almost any other House, & talk’d at this rate to a young lady, she would have been sound a sleep by this Time; Or at least, she would have amused me with gaping & yawning, all the time, & certainly, she would not have understood a word I had utter’d.
F. ‘And so, this is your opinion of our sex? –’
Mr S. ‘Ay; – & of mine too.’1
‘I scarse wish for any thing so truly, really & greatly, as to be in love’, Fanny confessed to patient ‘Nobody’, but she didn’t relish being the object of someone else’s adoration. A ‘mutual tendresse’ would be too much to ask for – ‘I carry not my wish so far’.2
Fanny was just reaching the age at which she was allowed to accompany the older girls to assemblies and dances, some of which went on all night. They would set off in the family coach and straggle home in hired sedan chairs at seven or eight in the morning. There were seldom any chaperones (sometimes because the girls had deceived their father into thinking there was no necessity for one, and he was too negligent to check). Fanny made her first serious conquest – a youth called Tomkin whom she didn’t want – at the most sophisticated and risqué of the entertainments on offer to young women at the time, a masquerade. Masquerade balls were notorious as places of assignation, and excited widespread disapproval. Henry Fielding’s brother, the famous magistrate Sir John Fielding, had been trying for years to close down the establishment run by Mrs Corneley, an ex-lover of Casanova. Contemporary engravings of her parties in Soho Square show some bizarre characters, including a man leading a live bear and a person dressed as (or rather, in) a coffin, with his feet protruding from the bottom and eyeholes cut in the lid. There is also a masquerader in the character of Adam, naked except for a shrubbery loincloth, which recalls the scandalous costume of Miss Chudleigh at the Venetian Ambassador’s masquerade, who went as ‘Iphigenia’, wearing nothing but a piece of gauze.3
; Fanny Burney had nothing quite so challenging to deal with at Mr Lalauze’s masquerade in Leicester Square: there was a nun, a witch (who turned out to be a man), a Punch, an Indian Queen, several Dominoes and the predictable flock of shepherdesses. The Burney girls had spent the whole day dressing, Hetty in a Savoyard costume, complete with hurdy-gurdy, and Fanny (much less adventurously) in ‘meer fancy Dress’, a highly-decorated pink Persian gown with a rather badly home-made mask. Despite its flimsiness, the mask gave Fanny ‘a courage I never before had in the presence of strangers’4 and, as with Mr Seton, she ‘did not spare’ the company. According to the procedure at masquerades, everyone was obliged to support their character, passing from one person to another asking, ‘Do you know me? Who are you?’5 until partners had been chosen and the dramatic (or not) moment of unmasking arrived. Fanny’s partner was a ‘Dutchman’ (Mr Tomkin) who had spent the evening grunting at her and using sign language. ‘Nothing could be more droll than the first Dance we had after unmasking’, she told Nobody later:
to see the pleasure which appeared in some Countenances, & the disappointment pictured in others made the most singular contrast imaginable, & to see the Old turned Young, & the Young Old, – in short every Face appeared diferent [sic] from what we expected.6
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