Burney had been appointed as a music-master, but was soon asked to Streatham as a guest. Mrs Thrale had taken to him with characteristically wholehearted enthusiasm. ‘Such was the fertility of his Mind, and the extent of his Knowledge; such the Goodness of his Heart and Suavity of his Manners’, she wrote in her journal Thraliana, ‘that we began in good earnest to sollicit his Company, and gain his Friendship.’5 Burney was just as eager to cement the connection, and within weeks of his first invitation to Streatham he had invited Johnson and Mrs Thrale to St Martin’s Street for the visit which, as we have seen, so impressed his daughter. Mrs Thrale went to the considerable expense of buying a new harpsichord for Burney’s use at Streatham, and was delighted with his capacity to fit in with the unpredictable Dr Johnson, whom he flattered with his attentiveness and sincere admiration. In Mrs Thrale’s private classification system (in which Mrs Burney had come off so poorly), Johnson’s 19 out of 20 for ‘Scholarship’ far outshone the historian of music’s 8; but Burney was awarded 19 for ‘Good humor’, where Johnson scored o. ‘[F]ew People possess such Talents for general Conversation’, she wrote of her new friend in the autumn of 1777.6 Her journals show occasional annoyance at Burney’s over-anxiety to please, but also bear witness to the depth of her affection for him: ‘My Heart […] runs forward a Mile to meet my dear Doctor Burney’, she wrote. ‘If ever the – Suaviter in Modo, fortiter in Re – resided in mortal Man, tis surely in Doctor Burney’.7
By the summer of 1778 the friendship had already survived one tricky episode. After the fiasco of Bessy Allen’s elopement the previous October, Mrs Burney had come straight from France to the Thrales, who were on holiday in Brighton, expecting to find her husband there. But Dr Burney had already gone home to London, and when the distraught Mrs Burney arrived it was impossible for her to conceal the cause of her anguish from Mrs Thrale, despite the risk of public humiliation. Mrs Thrale could not resist passing on the scandalous news in a letter to Johnson the next day, but however much she played sarcastically on Mrs Burney’s former pride in her ‘fine daughter’, the woman’s genuine unhappiness – ‘greater & more real Distress have I seldom seen’8 – not only prevented Mrs Thrale from really exploiting the information, but rather drew out her sympathy. Dr Burney’s own letter to Mrs Thrale on the subject a few weeks later displays a scorn for the hypocritical condolences he and his wife had received from some of their acquaintances that suggests Mrs Thrale had treated him and his wife much better:
[Mrs Burney] is now in Town, but invisible; ’tis humiliating to tell melancholy Stories abt one’s Self, & more so to hear People pretend to pity one, when we know they have no more Feeling than Punch. I hate to think of the Trick that has been played her, & still more to talk about it.9
The even more melancholy story of young Charles’s disgrace at Cambridge remained a closely guarded secret from Mrs Thrale, although she noticed that the whole Burney family ‘colour and fret at the mention of him’.10 Mrs Thrale’s heart might be running out to meet ‘dear Doctor Burney’ all the time, but the music-master remained cautious underneath his charm, always aware, as were his children, of the precariousness of his favoured position.
Fanny, more alert than anyone to her father’s social standing, was never more anxious about it than at this point in her life, when she had the power to affect his reputation dramatically one way or the other. ‘I, as myself, am nobody’, she wrote once he knew about her authorship, ‘but as your spawn, I could easily make myself known & have power to disgrace’.11 When father and daughter met at Chesington for the first time after ‘the Fact’12 was acknowledged between them, her tearful relief at his approbation had been so violent he thought she was going to collapse. She threw herself into his arms and ‘cried à chaudes larmes till she sobbed’, Burney recollected in his unpublished fragmentary memoir. ‘The poor humble author I believe never was happier in her life’.13 It is hard to square this scene of near-prostration with happiness. It seems more like nervous exhaustion, bordering on hysterics. Fanny herself, recounting the same incident in her journal of 23 June 1778, admits that there was more than mere relief to her response: ‘the length of my illness, joined to severe mental suffering from a Family calamity which had occurred at that period, had really made me too weak for a joy mixt with such excess of amazement’. The editors of the Early Journals footnote this entry with the speculation that the ‘Family calamity’ might have been ‘some aftershock of Bessy Meeke’s elopement’, though nine months had passed since then – time enough for a half-sister to recover from a clandestine marriage, one would think. Charles junior’s disgrace and possible suicide attempt seem more likely causes of ‘severe mental suffering’, but the only clue is that it concerned ‘Family’.
Charles Burney was longing to get some credit at Streatham from the family’s only benign secret, the authorship of Evelina, and as the only one of the cognoscenti who had not been bound with solemn oaths ‘by all they hold most sacred […] never to reveal it, without my consent’,14 he was the weakest link in the chain (though we know that the oath had also been broken by Susan). Even with Fanny’s reluctant permission to use his judgement over the matter, Burney realised that it would be extremely risky to introduce the subject of Evelina at the Thrales’ himself, but also that among that novel-devouring crew he probably wouldn’t have to wait long before someone else mentioned it.
The exact sequence of events here becomes difficult to unpick from the neatened version handed down to posterity in the Memoirs by Madame d’Arblay, whose ‘entrance into the world’ in the summer of 1778 became, retrospectively, the cornerstone of her fame – ‘more like a romance’ as she was to say, ‘than anything in the book that was the cause’.15 Fifty pages of her biography of her father are devoted to the publication of her own novel Evelina (compared with three pages on the Doctor’s General History of Music); they form in effect a book-within-a-book, with a disingenuous preamble about the ‘devoir due to the singleness of truth’ and a separate dedication to Sir Walter Scott and Samuel Rogers, whose visit to her in 1826, as we shall see, alerted the elderly Madame d’Arblay to some of the variant stories going around by that date. The fact that it was clearly important to her to ‘correct’ the version that Scott and Rogers had heard (recorded by Scott in his diary16) didn’t prevent her from changing it again for publication in the Memoirs on the grounds that she had spoken to Scott and Rogers ‘incoherently, from the embarrassment of the subject, and its long absence from her thoughts’.17 This admission that she was not, aged seventy-four, a reliable witness to her own life story does not sit easily among the surrounding protestations that she is about to set the record straight once and for all.
The version that Madame d’Arblay wanted to authorise placed heavy emphasis on the involvement of Samuel Johnson, the affability and sentimental pride of her father, her own youth, modesty and reticence, the apparently miraculous qualities of her book to elicit praise in high places and the relative unimportance of Hester Thrale except in confirming the opinions of others. In it she tells how her father came home to St Martin’s Street one evening during her long stay at Chesington with the news that while they were at tea in Streatham, Dr Johnson, ‘see-sawing on his chair’, had suddenly come out with the remark that Mrs Cholmondeley ‘was talking to me last night of a new novel, which she says has a very uncommon share of merit; Evelina. She says she has not been so entertained this great while as in reading it; and that she shall go all over London to discover the author’.18 In this version, Mrs Thrale replied that she too had heard the book recommended, and, at Johnson’s further insistence on Mrs Cholmondeley’s good opinion, made it clear she would get herself a copy. Charles Burney, scarcely able to contain his pleasure, added archly that he had heard of the book and ‘read a little of it – which, indeed – seemed to be above the commonplace works of this kind’.19 As he said later to Susan (who immediately wrote an account of their conversation to Fanny), this mentioning of his daughter’s book was ‘just what I wish
ed but could not expect!’ and, far from being something to hide from his grand friends, owning authorship ‘would be a credit to [Fanny] – and to me! – and to you! – and to all her family!’20
Since the original letter from Susan (existing in fragmentary form in the Berg Collection) includes the detail of Dr Burney saying to Mrs Thrale that the book ‘will do […] for your time of confinement’, this incident must have taken place before the birth of Henrietta Thrale on 21 June. The editors of the Early Journals and Letters place the following letter from Fanny to Susan (dated 5 July) as a response to it:
meeting Mr Crisp ere I had composed myself, I tipt him such a touch of the Heroicks, as he has not seen since the Time when I was so much celebrated for Dancing Nancy Dawson […] He would fain have discovered the reason of my skittishness[.]21
The reference is to the hornpipe tune made popular in The Beggar’s Opera in 1759 by the dancer Nancy Dawson, and which is better known now as the nursery song ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’. It is the tune to which Fanny used to dance her wild jigs ‘on the Grass plot’ at Chesington in her youth, as Crisp fondly recalled,22 although there is nothing to suggest that she actually danced on this occasion, let alone around a tree. According to the two sources, Susan’s letter and Fanny’s account in the Memoirs, no one at Streatham had actually read Evelina yet (apart from Dr Burney), and though the young author might well have felt elated by her work having come to Johnson’s notice, it doesn’t explain the reference further on in the same letter to Mrs Thrale’s ‘eloge […] that not only delights at first, but that proves more & more flattering every Time it is considered’. No éloge (praise) of any sort is recorded in the Memoirs, where Mrs Thrale, barely aware of the existence of Evelina, is cast in the unlikely role of slowcoach, or in the existing copy of Susan’s letter. The only éloge likely to have provoked Fanny’s excited response is included in a letter from Susan wrongly dated 7 instead of 4 July by Annie Raine Ellis in her 1898 edition of the Early Diary which records a conversation between Mrs Thrale and Charles Burney when Dr Johnson was not present. Mrs Thrale is recommending a new novel, Evelina, to her friend and his wife which Queeney read to her during her last confinement (i.e. around the end of June): she liked it ‘VASTLY – is EXTREMELY pleas’d with it […] ’tis very clever I assure you […] there’s a vast deal of humour & entertainment in it’, adding, more thoughtfully, ‘there’s a great deal of human Life in this Book, & of the Manners of the present time. It’s writ by somebody that knows the top & the bottom – the highest & lowest of Mankind.’ The demonstrative pronoun could indicate that Mrs Thrale had fetched her copy to pass round; certainly she pressed Mrs Burney to take the book home to St Martin’s Street, neither woman realising, as Fanny observed in her journal, that the original manuscript of the novel had been there some time.
Although the Memoirs version of the story makes it look as if Johnson was the prime mover in publicising Evelina, Mrs Thrale was the first of her circle actually to read the book, and Johnson only did so after she had virtually forced him to by putting a copy in his coach in late July. The incident of Johnson ‘see-sawing’ on his chair could have taken place quite some time before 21 June, as Charles Burney admitted to knowing Fanny’s authorship by 4 June, but he could have been told earlier. This would leave several weeks between the book being mentioned casually by Johnson and Mrs Thrale’s ‘éloge’ to Dr and Mrs Burney, rather than both these things having happened at once, as their juxtaposition in Fanny’s letter can be read to imply,23 or Mrs Thrale’s éloge not having happened at all, as in the Memoirs.*
The wonderful news that Johnson had read and liked the book only reached Fanny on 3 August (along with the infuriating information that Anna Williams, the blind poet who lived with Dr Johnson at Bolt Court, also knew her ‘poor mauled to pieces secret’). He was full of praise for Evelina, saying to Mrs Thrale that there were ‘passages in it that might do honour to Richardson’. The letter ‘almost Crazed’ the author ‘with agreeable surprise’:
it gave me such a flight of spirits, that I Danced a Jigg to Mr Crisp, without any preparation, music, or explanation, to his no small amazement & diversion. I left him, however, to make his own comments, upon my friskiness, without affording him the least assistance.24
This little account of her second ‘touch of the Heroicks’ within the month is the basis for the best-known anecdote about Fanny Burney, the story (told for the first time in the Memoirs) that she danced for joy around a mulberry tree when she heard Johnson’s praise of her first book. It is a charming picture; the impromptu ecstatic dance seems to illustrate perfectly Burney’s sense of elation at her achievement, and her release from the anxieties and inhibitions that constrained so much of her behaviour. There are a number of things about the story, though, that indicate it isn’t strictly true. The mulberry tree only appears in the Memoirs; one assumes there was such a tree at Chesington and that it was much more important to Fanny than to Crisp, who never mentions one. Six months after the Evelina revelations, in a letter about the difficulties Fanny might face in trying to avoid grossness in her writing (specifically in the comedy she was then planning), he wrote: ‘Do You remember about a Dozen Years ago, how You Used to dance Nancy Dawson on the Grass plot[?]’.25 If she had repeated this performance only six months before on receipt of the news about Johnson, why did Crisp not mention that occasion rather than harking back a dozen years?
Dancing ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ was clearly something Fanny did ‘in her days of adolescence’26 in fits of strong animal spirits, and Johnson’s approbation revived just such a surge of wild energy. ‘She was very young at this time’, Walter Scott recorded in his journal in 1826, having just been told the story on his first visit to Madame d’Arblay. In 1778 Fanny wasn’t ‘very young’, she was twenty-six, but there is a poetic truth in her story. The composition of Evelina could be said to have begun when Fanny Burney was very young indeed, with the composition of the destroyed ‘mother’ novel, ‘Caroline Evelyn’, and to be the result of youthful spirits urgently requiring expression. If the mulberry tree story shows signs of having been tampered with to make it neater and more expressive of this gratifying moment in her life, one is disinclined to criticise its author too roundly. Perhaps it is more important to remark on this occasion what a talent she had for story-telling, rather than lamenting too much her shortcomings as a historian.
Although Fanny Burney wrote it out of the Memoirs, Mrs Thrale’s opinion of Evelina was of enormous moment to the new author. It was the most important notice she felt it possible for her book to attract from the literary world (not really believing Johnson would ever read it), and her response, in the same letter to Susan, was a queer mixture of elation and anxiety:
I am now at the summit of a high Hill, – my prospects, on one side, are bright, glowing, & invitingly beautiful; – but when I turn round, I perceive, on the other side, sundry Caverns, Gulphs, pits & precipices, that to look at, make my Head giddy, & my Heart sick! – I see about me, indeed, many Hills of far greater height & sublimity; – but I have not the strength to attempt climbing them; – if I move, it must be in descending!27
‘Caverns, Gulphs, pits & precipices’, ‘sublimity’ – Burney is employing the language of the picturesque twenty years before the Romantics, and might be suspected of a romantic self-indulgence here too, if she did not go on to a fairly shrewd anticipation of the possible consequences of such startling early success:
[W]ould a future attempt be treated with the same mercy? – No, my dear Susy, quite the contrary, – there would not, indeed, be the same plea to save it, – it would no longer be a Young Lady’s first appearance in public; – those who have met with less indulgence, would all peck at any new Book, – & even those who most encouraged the 1st offspring, might prove Enemies to the 2d, by receiving it with Expectations which it could not answer [.]
The reception of this putative second attempt was what concerned her, not its composition. Fanny too
k for granted that she would keep on writing, and there is evidence that she was already engaged on another work at this point, as she mentions ‘Letters, Italian’ and ‘some of my own vagaries’28 as the occupations which made Crisp refer to her ironically that summer as ‘the scribe’ and ‘the authoress’. Writing was already a way of life for her, however unpleasant the thought of public exposure might be and however many objections her anxious mind might present:
I have already, I fear, reached the pinnacle of my Abilities, & therefore to stand still will be my best policy: – but there is nothing under Heaven so difficult to do! – Creatures who are formed for motion, must move, however great their inducements to forbear.29
Charles Burney had intended to flatter and please his daughter when he passed on, through Susan, his opinion that Mrs Thrale and Mrs Cholmondeley ‘were d – d severe, & d – d knowing, & afraid of praising à tort & à travers as their opinions are liable to be quoted, which makes them extremely shy of speaking favourably’.30 Fanny was more likely to interpret these remarks as threatening, an indication of how high the stakes were being raised. She anticipated the shock Mrs Thrale might feel at the discrepancy between mousy Miss Burney’s behaviour and the riotously satirical nature of her novel. Having a thieving brother or an eloping stepsister was nothing compared to being identified as the only begetter of Madame Duval or Captain Mirvan. ‘[I]f you do tell Mrs Thrale’, she wrote to her father on 8 July in a letter clearly meant as gentle warning to him, ‘won’t she think it very strange where I can have kept Company, to draw such a family as the Branghtons, Mr Brown & some others? […] I am afraid she will conclude I must have an innate vulgarity of ideas to assist me with such coarse colouring for the objects of my Imagination’.
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