Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  It seems likely that Fanny herself, as much as anyone, was troubled by this discrepancy. The ‘old lady’ had kept her public behaviour under strict control her whole life, while letting her powers of observation and imagination develop as they would. It was unnerving – subversive – to be a prude and a satirist at one and the same time. Her imagination could easily produce ideas that were innately vulgar, shocking and grotesque – indeed, as she acknowledged in the same letter, her writing would have been anodyne otherwise: ‘Not that I suppose the Book would be better received by [Mrs Thrale], for having Characters very pretty & all alike: […] I should build my defence upon Swift’s maxim, that a Nice man is a man of Nasty ideas.’

  Only two days before this Fanny had been deliberately teasing Daddy Crisp at Chesington, saying that her father had divulged to her profoundly secret news about the authorship of Evelina. Crisp demanded to be told immediately, at which Fanny insisted upon his guessing.

  ‘I can’t guess, said he – may be it’s You.’

  Oddso! thought I, what do you mean by that? – ‘Pho, nonsense! cried I, what should make you think of me?’

  ‘Why You look guilty.’ answered he.31

  This ‘horrible Home stroke’ was laughed off by Fanny, with some difficulty. Crisp could read her face like a book – ‘deuce take my looks! […] I shall owe them a grudge for this!’ – and would have found her out instantly, she imagined, had he witnessed her reading her recent letters from home. But she determined to spin out the game with him a little longer – at least until he had finished reading the book – and clearly enjoyed the ‘ridiculous’ scenes in which she was ‘almost perpetually engaged’ with him.

  Elsewhere the machinery of publicity that Charles Burney had set in motion rolled on. He wanted to tell Lady Hales, and Mrs Cholmondeley, and of course all the Streathamites. Susan reported hearing Mrs Burney’s bursts of laughter through the door as the book was read aloud to her in bed by her husband. The kind and praising letter that arrived soon after from Fanny’s erratic stepmother made up for the preceding anxiety: ‘Good God! – to receive such a panygeric [sic] from the quarter from which I most dreaded satire!’ Fanny wrote in her journal when this new hurdle had been cleared.32

  When Mrs Thrale was told about the book’s authorship she must have felt slightly foolish at first, for her Thraliana entry is reserved by comparison with the former éloge:

  I was shewed a little Novel t’other Day which I thought pretty enough & set Burney to read it, little dreaming it was written by his second Daughter Fanny, who certainly must be a Girl of good Parts & some knowledge of the World too, or She could not be the Author of Evelina – flimzy as it is, compar’d with the Books I’ve just mentioned [Richardson, Rousseau, Charlotte Lennox, Smollett and Fielding].33

  She warmed to the book again, though, when Johnson’s approval was certain. She had left the first volume in his coach for him to read on the way back to London, and he borrowed the second by return, saying later that ‘Harry Fielding never did anything equal’ to it.34 This was Mrs Thrale’s cue to promote the book further, and her newly-discovered connection with the author through ‘her’ Dr Burney seemed to proffer a stake in its success. She read the funny bits aloud to ‘whoever came near her’,35 and was happy to pass on the quaint news about the book’s authorship.

  It was only a matter of weeks before Mrs Thrale invited the new lioness to dine at Streatham Park on one of the Thursdays when her father would be there to teach Queeney. To the ‘accidental author’, this was ‘the most Consequential Day I have spent since my Birth’.36 She spent an unpleasant journey in the coach from Chesington along the dry and dusty summer roads to Streatham, ‘really in the Fidgets’ about her reception. It was a fair guess that Dr Johnson would be there, living as he did ‘almost wholly’37 with the Thrales. She was so nervous that she hardly noticed what handsome Streatham Park looked like on this first visit, apart from the fact that it was white.

  Mrs Thrale, who emerged from the paddock, dressed informally in a muslin jacket, said nothing of Evelina, for which Fanny was extremely grateful. Even when the subject was broached later, while she and Fanny were alone in the library together, Mrs Thrale only reported Johnson’s conversation the night before, and no one, surely, could take exception to that? ‘Mr Johnson repeated whole scenes by Heart!’ Mrs Thrale told her almost silent young guest, who was studying the bookshelves to hide her embarrassment. ‘O you can’t imagine how much he is pleased with the Book.’38 There was little Fanny could say in reply to this, even if she had been able to raise her voice above a whisper.

  It was a relief when Mr Thrale came in from his ride and Fanny was left with the magnificent library to herself for a few minutes. She had ‘just fixed upon a new Translation of Cicero’s Laelius’ when the library door opened and the Thrales’ other guest, William Seward, walked in. ‘I instantly put away my Book’, Fanny recorded in her journal, ‘because I dreaded being thought studious and affected’. It would have been provoking to be taken for a blue-stocking, like Elizabeth Montagu and her associates.

  William Seward was part of the inner circle at Streatham, handsome, rich and slightly eccentric. He was only five years older than Fanny, and unmarried, but if there had been any idea of matchmaking in Mrs Thrale’s mind that day, nothing was to come of it. Beside the fact that he had prevented Fanny from enjoying a quiet hour or so poking about the Thrales’ library, Seward made the mistake of launching straight into conversation about Evelina, the book with which Miss Burney had ‘favoured the World’ (and which just happened to have been left lying about on the library table). Compared with Mrs Thrale’s sidelong approach and delicate address, this seemed grossly ill-mannered, but for once Fanny’s response was more irritated than ashamed. Seward must have been puzzled when she sat firmly turned away from him in disgust, answering him curtly, if at all.

  What made this day at Streatham ‘the most Consequential’ for Fanny was dinner, which began fashionably late in the afternoon. When the small party went in, she was disappointed that Dr Johnson had still not appeared. Mrs Thrale put Fanny and her father on either side of her, with a place left empty on Fanny’s other side, saying graciously that she was sure it would give Johnson great pleasure to sit there. Fanny had been given the seat of honour.

  When Johnson finally arrived, her anxieties were forgotten in the rush of ‘delight & reverence’ she felt towards him. She was determined to listen as avidly as possible – as avidly as she had heard his disciple Mr Boswell did to every word that fell from the great man’s lips. She could then report back faithfully to her sisters and Daddy Crisp, who all, like her, venerated Johnson as ‘the acknowledged Head of Literature in this kingdom’.39 She had seen him twice before, and was prepared for ‘the cruel infirmities to which he is subject; for he has almost perpetual convulsive motions, either of his Hands, lips, Feet, knees, & sometimes of all together’. When Johnson took his place beside her, the short-sighted Fanny was not put off, although it was the first time she had got such a close view of ‘a Face the most ugly, a Person the most awkward, & manners the most singular, that ever were or ever can be seen’. She did not put this in her diary in order to denigrate Johnson, but to wonder at it. That this unlikely vessel should house such a great mind seemed highly interesting to her, in a world full of people far too ready to judge everything by appearances.

  Johnson and Mrs Thrale dominated the conversation, each spurring the other on in a way that Fanny’s subsequent diary entries show to be typical – Mrs Thrale often starting up a subject, Johnson pronouncing upon it and Mrs Thrale capping his aphorisms with some light or witty rejoinder. They were both very fond of quoting, and they were both very fond of each other. The ease and relaxation of the relationship gave the Streatham table-talk its peculiar sparkle, and if other guests seldom got a word in edgeways, it may be because they were far too busy being entertained. ‘How we laughed!’, ‘We all laughed’, Fanny writes continually.

  Johnson made his fir
st acknowledgement of Fanny’s authorship when refusing one of Mrs Thrale’s mutton pies (which he never ate anyway) with the gently absurd remark, ‘“I am too proud now to Eat of it; – sitting by Miss Burney makes me very proud to Day!”’40 Mrs Thrale was quick to tease him over this by warning Fanny to ‘“take great care of your Heart if Dr. Johnson attacks it!”’ ‘“What’s that you say, Madam?”’ he replied. ‘“Are you making mischief between the young lady & me already?”’ It seemed like a conspiracy to delight their guest, especially since they were just as quick to drop the subject and take up another instead. Now Dr Johnson was half-recalling an epitaph, now Mrs Thrale quoting a French poem, and Johnson retaliating in Latin. Sitting between these two indefatigable wits, Fanny must have had to turn her head to and fro continually, like a spectator at a particularly fast game of tennis.

  For all one’s doubts about Fanny’s veracity, especially in the Memoirs, the conversation she records in her journal of Johnson and Thrale does at least have the virtue of being sharply and consistently characterised; even if what she writes is not word-for-word what they said, either because of failure of memory or deliberate doctoring, at least it is very convincingly reconstructed. The speeches attributed to Johnson in her journal are the least tinkered with of any material appearing subsequently in the Memoirs. That is not to say that she doesn’t make mystifyingly trivial adjustments to his words in the later publication, but it does suggest that she feels some sense of obligation to keep her original record of his speech fairly intact.

  The ‘Consequential’ dinner gave rise to some delightful table-talk. Of Garrick, Johnson said that he ‘looks much older than he is: for his Face has had double the Business of any other man’s, – it is never at rest, – when he speaks one minute, he has quite a different Countenance to what he assumes the next.’ ‘O yes,’ Mrs Thrale replied, ‘we must certainly make some allowance for such wear & Tear of a man’s Face.’ Sir John Hawkins, who was to be Johnson’s first biographer (much to Boswell’s irritation), was next under discussion. As the author of a rival History of Music, Hawkins was a sore subject with Charles Burney, who no doubt laughed as loud as anyone at Johnson’s illustration of Hawkins’s meanness. On the first night of his admission to the same club as Johnson,* Hawkins, quite against the spirit of the institution, begged off paying his share of the supper, as he had not eaten any of it. ‘And was he excused?’ someone asked. ‘O yes’, replied Johnson, ‘for no man is angry at another for being inferior to himself! we all scorned him, – & admitted his plea. For my part, I was such a fool as to pay my share for the Wine though I never tasted any. But Sir John was a most unclubable man!’41 Johnson’s coinage particularly pleased Fanny: ‘How delighted was I to hear this master of Languages so unaffectedly & sociably & good naturedly make Words, for the promotion of sport & humour!’ The same journal entry contains one of Fanny’s own notable coinages, ‘agreeability’; the OED cites her diary as the first use of the word since Chaucer. ‘Surely I may make words, when at a loss’, she observed with evident satisfaction, ‘if Dr. Johnson does.’42

  The two surviving accounts of this first Streatham evening have some interesting dissimilarities, with plenty of extra commentary of all kinds inserted in the Memoirs account to substantiate Fanny’s early impressions of the great man.* In this version, Dr Burney manages to interject a couple of aphoristic speeches which his daughter omitted to notice the first time around in the journal; but the most glaring difference is in the number and quality of Johnson’s supposed references to Evelina. In the journal, he makes only one. Relating how he witnessed a lady at an inn quarrelling with a waiter over a measure of ale, Johnson comments, ‘Now Madame Duval could not have done a grosser thing!’ Everyone laughed at this, and, miraculously, Fanny experienced none of her usual symptoms of embarrassment: ‘I did not glow at all! nor munch fast, – nor look on my plate, – nor lose any part of my usual composure!’43 She was grateful to Johnson for his delicacy at keeping her work in mind without explicitly mentioning her authorship; indeed she was so impressed by the gentle flattery of everyone at the table that she was even prepared to think she might have judged Seward too harshly.

  In the Memoirs, Johnson mentions the book far more frequently and knowingly. The guests seem conspiratorial with their ‘sympathetic simper’s and ‘resistless’ laughter, which is far from the delicacy Burney remarked in her journal, and she laughs with them, but inwardly feels ‘embarrassment’, ‘shame’ and ‘unwillingness to demonstrate my consciousness’.44 One of Johnson’s reported remarks about the book has been relocated from a dinner conversation which the journal records two weeks later, another appears nowhere but in the Memoirs. Madame d’Arblay clearly thought it would make a better story to amalgamate these incidents; in the process she inadvertently exposes the sham form of the whole Memoirs version, trying to pass it off as another of her inexhaustible supply of ‘letters to Crisp’.

  When the sexes were segregated at the end of the meal, Mrs Thrale took the opportunity to press Fanny to come for a much longer visit, and as William Seward handed her into the chaise later, he too expressed a desire to see her at Streatham again. ‘I was loaded with civilities from them all’, Fanny wrote in her journal. She may not have spoken much or attempted to impress herself on the company, but she had shown herself to be as appreciative and good-humoured as her father; Mrs Thrale and her friends could take Fanny Burney’s other qualities quite literally as read.

  Charles Burney was in high spirits on the journey back to London, and could talk of nothing but his daughter’s success: ‘he told me that, after passing through such a House as that, I could have nothing to fear. Meaning for my Book.’ On her delighted return to St Martin’ s Street after months away, and her reunion with all three sisters, Fanny heard even more good news: Sir Joshua Reynolds had sat up all night to finish Evelina. He and his sister – along with half of London, it seemed – were very keen to know who the author was.

  This news about Reynolds prompted Fanny to go to Lowndes’s bookshop herself at the first opportunity (with her stepmother as accomplice) to see what sort of gossip it was possible for a curious reader to pick up. The results were encouraging: despite Mrs Burney’s formidable powers of persistence, Mr Lowndes could tell them nothing about the author of Evelina. ‘“I have no honour in keeping the secret”’, Fanny records him saying,

  ‘for I have never been trusted. All I know of the matter is, that it is a Gentleman of the other End of the Town.’

  And that, thought I, is more than even the Author knows!45

  Fanny spent most of her time in the shop pretending to read, much as she had done on her visit to Bell’s with Edward and her sisters, but she was fascinated to see her publisher at last, if not exactly meet him (which she never did). He had an ‘air of consequence & authority’, and was now busy telling Mrs Burney how he had for a time suspected Evelina to be the work of Horace Walpole (who published The Castle of Otranto anonymously), and had tried to find out the author himself many times, without success: ‘“to tell You the truth, Madam,”’ he said ‘with a most important Face’, ‘“I have been informed that it is a piece of secret History: &, in that case, it will never be known!” This was too much for me’, Fanny recalled in her journal. ‘I grinned irresistably; & was obliged to look out at the shop Door till we came away.’46 She seemed to have pulled off an impossible trick, ‘entering the world’ to the sound of trumpets, while remaining snugly incognito. No wonder she grinned.

  Daddy Crisp, who had eventually heard the astonishing news about the novel from Charles Burney, felt, like many others, that since the reception of Evelina had been so favourable, Fanny ought to be taking possession of her fame. ‘[Y]our perturbation ought to be in a great Measure at an end’, he wrote when he heard of her success at Streatham. ‘When You went into the Sea at Tinmouth, did not You shiver & shrink at first, & almost lose your breath when the Water came up to your Chest? – I suppose You afterwards learn’d to plunge in boldly overhead &
Ears at once, & then Your pain was over – You must do the like now; & as the Public have thought proper to put You on a Cork Jacket, your Fears of drowning would be unpardonable.’47 What he says would seem very reasonable – if Fanny had merely been shy. What it does not take into account is why she really valued her anonymity, which was because it gave her the freedom to write as she wanted to, without inhibitions.

  No one seemed prepared to believe that Fanny’s reticence was anything more than affectation. On her first long visit to Streatham, which took place in late August, Mrs Thrale followed her up to her room one night after an uncomfortable scene when one of the dinner guests, the antiquarian Michael Lort, had started up a conversation about Evelina. Fanny begged Mrs Thrale not to reveal to him or anyone further her secret – thinking she still had a secret worth the name. Mrs Thrale laughed at this naivety:

  ‘Poor Miss Burney! – so you thought just to have played & sported with your sisters & Cousins, & had it all your own way! – but now you are in for it!—but if you will be an Author & a Wit, – you must take the Consequence!’48

  Fanny protested her sincere desire to remain anonymous. But if this wasn’t affectation, Mrs Thrale said astutely, it had to be ‘something worse’:

  ‘an over-delicacy that may make you unhappy all your Life! – Indeed you must check it, – you must get the better of it: – for why should you write a Book, Print a Book, & have every Body Read & like your Book, – & then sneak in a Corner & disown it!’49

  Mrs Thrale had made another ‘horrible home stroke’, and they both knew it. Fanny spent a miserable night ‘worked by the certainty of being blown so much more than I had apprehended, & by seeing that, in spite of all my efforts at snugship, I was in so foul, I won’t say fair, a way of becoming a downright & known scribler’.50 However kind and supportive Mrs Thrale was – ‘had I been the Child of this delightful woman; she could not have taken more pains [to] reconcile me to my situation’51 – Fanny was beyond reconciliation. Snugship was what she needed and wanted. Whatever social advantages were to accrue from her entrance into the world, nothing could compensate for the powerful inhibitions any publicity was going to impose on her creative life.