Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  * * *

  * Bewley was later referred to by the Streathamites as the ‘Broom man’ on account of this story, which was one of Boswell’s favourites, perhaps because it showed someone in an even more advanced stage of Johnson-mania than himself.

  * There remain the references to Dr Johnson and Mrs Cholmondeley in Fanny’s delighted reply from Chesington, which seem to have no basis in the preceding letter from Susan; but as this letter has a defaced first page and seven lines deleted at the end, it isn’t impossible that there was some reference hidden there to their earlier remarks about the book.

  * It could have been the Ivy Lane Club or ‘The Club’; they were members of both.

  * The account in the Memoirs is passed off as a quoted letter to Crisp, though none such survives. One suspects that Madame d’Arblay chose to redraft the journal as a ‘letter’ in order to retain the more dramatic first-person narrative and present tense.

  6

  Downright Scribler

  Mrs Thrale set about cultivating Fanny Burney as her protégée with remarkable rapidity. Fanny’s first long stay at Streatham began at the end of August 1778 and lasted a fortnight, with a break of just over a week at St Martin’s Street before she returned to the Thrales. All winter she came and went between Streatham and London – Chesington was ignored completely. At Streatham Park, which Mrs Thrale soon began to refer to as her new friend’s ‘home’, they spent as much time as possible in each other’s company, walked the grounds, visited neighbours, gathered exotic fruits from the glasshouses and vegetables from the kitchen garden, dressed and undressed together, ‘confabing’1 all the time. Fanny, with her good sense and appreciative laughter, her modesty and her unthreatening appearance, was the perfect foil to the lively older woman. Being exactly between the ages of Mrs Thrale and her daughter Queeney, who had turned fourteen that September, Fanny performed the useful function of buffer zone: surrogate daughter to the one, and sister to the other. Queeney’s chilly manner with everyone (including her music-teacher) was a source of sadness and irritation to her demonstrative mother. Perhaps Mrs Thrale thought that Fanny’s company would melt her a little. Certainly she thought she was gaining an ally in the household.

  A decisive factor in Fanny’s instant adoption as a member of the Streatham coterie was the way she got on with Samuel Johnson. There was a romantic susceptibility in Johnson which Boswell found difficult to recognise, but which emerged quickly in sympathetic female company. His gallantry was reserved for those women he perceived as good-hearted and unaffected. Where he found these qualities he could be extraordinarily tender and affectionate (just as his rebukes to ‘silly’ women were notoriously harsh); the whore Bet Flint (much to Fanny Burney’s surprise) had impressed Johnson as much as any woman for her ‘stock of Honesty’ and ‘high notions of Honour’.2 Johnson had suffered several unrequited passions in his early life and a troubled marriage to Elizabeth Porter, his senior by twenty years, who had died in 1752. The wistfulness in his later friendships with women (especially young women) suggests long practice in the suppression of his sexual feelings and a resigned awareness of how repellent his strange manner and twitching, scrofula-scarred face might be to those of tender sensibilities. By the time Fanny Burney met him in 1778, Johnson seems to have given up making love to women, but sometimes made pets of them instead.

  When Fanny paid her first long visit to Streatham, Johnson seemed to have decided in advance that he was going to like her. He and Mrs Thrale treated her with flattering lack of ceremony, assuming their wonted familiarity with each other, quite as if she had been part of the household for years. Neither of them raised the subject of Evelina at all on the first day, or forced conversation out of their guest on any topic. It is interesting that Johnson’s initial remarks to Fanny were about food; her thinness and frail appetite must have struck him. At tea he ‘made’ her eat a piece of cake by holding it out ‘with an odd, or absent complaissance’ [sic]3 until she took it, and at supper insisted that she have a couple of eggs and a rasher, although she protested her lack of hunger (the Streatham dinners were so lavish this is easily believable). The next morning, Johnson was all apology, saying he had passed a poor night, ‘restless & uneasy, & thinking all the Time of Miss Burney! – Perhaps I have offended her, thought I, perhaps she is angry; – I have seen her but once, & I talked to her of a Rasher! – Were You angry?’4 His humour cloaked a genuine unease, for Johnson hated to give offence where none was due. ‘[Y]ou must not mind me, Madam’, he said by way of explanation. ‘I say strange things, but I mean no harm.’

  Johnson’s manner towards Fanny was almost immediately demonstrative, sometimes abruptly so. The same morning, he snatched her hand and kissed it, calling her a Tartar, then put his hand on her arm as he spoke to her. After only a couple of days’ acquaintance, he was asking ‘Evelina’ to cuddle up to him on the library sofa: ‘he took me almost in his arms, – that is, one of his arms, for one would go 3 times round me, – &, half laughing, half serious, he charged me to be a good Girl!’5 His embracing of Fanny, his insistence on feeding her up, his mode of address – calling her ‘my little Burney’ and ‘my dear love’ – may strike the modern reader as patronising, even slightly distasteful. But where Johnson’s behaviour was most demonstrative, it was least open to doubt. One can’t imagine him behaving in a similar fashion towards Hester Thrale, with whom his relations were much more complex and adult, and to whom he had confessed disturbing masochistic fantasies of which he was painfully ashamed.6 For Johnson to pat or stroke Mrs Thrale in public would have been out of the question, virtually obscene.

  Johnson’s famous description to Boswell of an ideal pastime as ‘driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman’ is a comically displaced sexual fantasy of an intense but self-mocking kind. He and the ‘pretty woman’ never arrive at their destination (to travel hopefully, after all, is better than to arrive); and yet, being Johnson’s, the fantasy requires more of the woman than mere ‘prettiness’: ‘she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation’.7 He found these qualities immediately in Dr Burney’s daughter, so well self-taught in ‘the art of pleasing’, so ready to laugh till she was ‘sore’8 at his stories, and also, once the ice had broken between them, full of stories of her own, told with relish and an unmistakable talent for mimicry.

  So much of Johnson’s conversation with (or around) Fanny is recorded in the journals that while she is busy setting down an accurate picture of him, much of what he says reflects on her, especially her moral character – of which, naturally, she is scarcely conscious herself. Johnson was a severe judge, and having heard some of his cutting remarks about the young poet Hannah More’s flattery and the flustered, silly sayings of a Miss Brown, Fanny decided that the best way to avoid making a fool of herself was to evade answering any of his questions about books or reading. This was partly cowardice and partly modesty, as she genuinely felt unworthy to voice her opinions in the presence of one whose erudition, intellect and phenomenal memory had made him the most venerated man of letters of his day in England. Puzzled by never seeing her with a book in her hand, Johnson solemnly asked Fanny one day if she did actually love reading, as he had been led to believe. ‘I have taken Notice’, he said, ‘that she never has been reading whenever I have come into the Room.’

  Sir, quoth I, courageously, I am always afraid of being caught Reading, lest I should pass for being studious, or affected, & therefore, instead of making a Display of Books, I always try to hide them, – as is the case at this very Time, for I have now your Life of Waller under my Gloves, behind me!9

  Johnson’s later description of Fanny as ‘a spy’10 shows that he came to understand that her reserve was neither affectation nor ineptitude. When he teased her about the prospect of meeting Elizabeth Montagu, the ‘Queen of the Blues’ – ‘Down with her, Burney! – down with her! – spare her not! attack her, fight her, & down with her at once!’11 – his battle metaphor was not enti
rely facetious. Nothing was less likely than Miss Burney giving the famously scholarly blue-stocking a rough time over the teacups, but as Johnson knew, Fanny had the critical acumen to identify Mrs Montagu’s pretensions, and the humility and manners not to expose them socially. She would never be a ‘wit’ in the true sense (quite apart from the fact that, then as now, conspicuous wittiness was considered profoundly unfeminine), but could bring a wit’s destructive energy to bear in her work. As Mrs Thrale remarked, ‘Miss Burney looks so meek, & so quiet – nobody would suspect what a comical Girl she is: – but I believe she has a great deal of malice at Heart.’ ‘Oh she’s a Toad! – cried the Doctor, Laughing, – a sly Young Rogue! with her Smiths & her Branghtons!’ Once Johnson had begun on the theme of Evelina, apparently, there was no stopping him, much to the delight and astonishment of its author, who noted down every word (and possibly more) in her diary. ‘O Mr Smith, Mr Smith is the Man! cried he, Laughing violently, Harry Fielding never drew so good a Character! – such a fine varnish of low politeness! – such a struggle to appear a Gentleman! – Madam, there is no Character better drawn any where – in any Book, or by any Author.’12

  When Fanny heard Sir Joshua Reynolds’s niece Mary Palmer say that both Mrs Cholmondeley and Sir Joshua ‘should be frightened to Death to be in her Company, because she must be such a very nice observer, that there would be no escaping her with safety’,13 she commented to Susan, ‘what strange ideas are taken from mere Book-reading!’ This was disingenuous, for although the idea of being feared personally on account of her novel’s satirical power had not occurred to Fanny (secure as she had been in the expectation of a permanent anonymity), she understood the nature and possible extent of that power perfectly well. She wanted everything her own way: she wanted to be studious without appearing so (as with the concealment under her gloves of Johnson’s Life of Waller); she wanted to pass judgement on society without incurring its reciprocal scrutiny; and she wanted to be able to write exactly as she pleased without having to alter her cautious, prudish personality to fit the products of her imagination. When things slipped out of her control, her reaction bordered on hysteria. On 7 December 1778 (about six weeks after Evelina had gone into a second edition) a pamphlet appeared, the second part of a verse satire called Warley, addressed to Sir Joshua Reynolds and containing the lines (spoken as if by Reynolds):

  Will your metre a Council engage or Attorney

  Or gain approbation from dear little Burney?14

  This flat-footed couplet could hardly have been tamer, but because a footnote identified ‘dear little Burney’ as ‘The Authoress of Evelina’, Fanny treated it as if the nameless fate she had been dreading all year had finally come upon her. She suspected, probably rightly, that Johnson himself had unconsciously had a hand in her exposure, fond as he was of passing on Reynolds’s remark ‘that if he was conscious to himself of any trick, or any affectation, there is Nobody he should so much fear as this little Burney!’15 The bearer of the bad news was, appropriately, Elizabeth Burney, who, with her usual disregard for finer feelings, brought a copy of the pamphlet into the house and showed it to her stepdaughter ‘with a loud & violent laugh’.16 ‘I can never express how extremely I was shocked’, Fanny wrote to Susan, admitting in the same sentence that she had been too agitated to read the lines of the satire in question. She hardly needed to read them; she was inwardly convinced Warley was a ‘vile poem’. She couldn’t eat, drink or sleep, she claimed, for more than a week ‘for vehemence of vexation’.17 Her father tried to comfort her, as did Johnson, who called specially at St Martin’s Street. Mrs Thrale’s letter on the subject, which Fanny preserved and marked with the words ‘A spirited, charming & rational Remonstrance on the unavailing disturbance of F.B. at being proclaimed an Author’,18 betrays considerable impatience with Fanny’s over-nice sensibilities: ‘I pity your Pain, but do not mean to soothe it […] I have lost seven Children and been cheated out of two thousand a Year [by the remarriage of an uncle to whom she had been heir], & I cannot, indeed I cannot, sigh & sorrow over Pamphlets & Paragraphs.’

  Though it looked as if Fanny was being missish about this incident, her agitation was genuine, and came from a deep source. There were now so many people in the know about her authorship (the latest batch included Lord Palmerston and all Mrs Cholmondeley’s set, Dolly Young in King’s Lynn, the Worcester Burneys and everyone at Howletts, Lady Hales’s home) that Fanny had begun to refer to them as ‘the Evelina Committee’.19 Everywhere she went, she was treated to impersonations of Madame Duval and the Branghtons, jokes about monkeys, absurd gossip linking her with Samuel Johnson and earnest quizzings about her method: ‘But where, Miss Burney, where can, or could You pick up such Characters? – where find such variety of incidents, yet all so natural?’20 A journal entry of this period acknowledges that her response to celebrity was likely to be misinterpreted: ‘I part with this my dear, long loved, long cherished snugship with more regret than any body will believe, except my dear sisters who Live with me, & know me too well & too closely to doubt me’. Snugship meant freedom of choice and freedom of movement. She hadn’t needed to look at the Warley satire because what it represented was more important than what it actually said. Within a few short months she had had to acclimatise to every variety of impertinence, from being cross-examined at parties by people to whom she had had no formal introduction, to being publicly exposed in a lampoon and even credited (if that is the word) with the authorship of a salacious novel, The Sylph (generally thought to be the work of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire), which Lowndes was craftily advertising alongside Evelina. On the whole, though, she was coping with celebrity very well and was glad to hear, after a fashionable party at Mrs Cholmondeley’s, that society’s general verdict on her was positive. This was a relief, but not at all how she had intended things to work out.

  Mrs Thrale had two schemes in mind for her new friend: to marry her off well and to persuade her to write for the stage. The first of these projects must have seemed more pressing, and in fact Mrs Thrale already had a candidate lined up, her husband’s wealthy and profligate nephew Sir John Lade. Charles Burney’s negligence over finding husbands for his daughters was rather glaring. By 1778, Hetty was the only one of the Burney girls to be married, and that was a love-match to her impecunious cousin – hardly an ambitious move. But when Mrs Thrale reported her husband’s approval for ‘giving Miss Burney to Sir John Lade’, Fanny’s exclamation of horror could have been heard, she imagined, all the way back to St Martin’s Street. Sir John Lade would have been purgatory; even William Seward, who had taken advantage of the candleless darkness after one Streatham dinner to take hold of Fanny, and who was becoming a regular caller at St Martin’s Street, was not a very serious contender. Marriage was still far from Fanny’s thoughts. It would have broken up the intimacy of the sisters at home (which Hetty’s marriage to another Burney had only minimally disrupted), and seemed worse than unnecessary. In her next journal-letter to Susan, Fanny remarks on her own ‘indifference to all things but good society’, and says nothing would make her marry except for love, if that: ‘O if [Mr Thrale] knew how little I require with regard to money, how much to even bear with a Companion!’21

  Mrs Thrale’s second plan was much more to Fanny’s mind. ‘Have you begun your Comedy?’ she asked at every opportunity, promising ‘to ensure […] success’ through her contacts and patronage. Johnson’s opinion was sought too, but Fanny hardly needed such encouragement. The rapidity with which she got to work on her play The Witlings in the winter of 1778 suggests that she had been giving such a project serious thought for a long time. It was almost a year since she had finished Evelina, and during the long months of convalescence at Chesington she had had plenty of time to revolve ideas for a drama. When she met Arthur Murphy at Streatham in February 1779 (he was Mrs Thrale’s favourite and a highly respected dramatist of the day) he offered to give her ‘any advice or assistance in my power’22 should she think of writing a comedy. She had alrea
dy had the ‘decisive’ encouragement of Richard Brinsley Sheridan himself, who astonished her when he turned up unexpectedly at the Reynoldses’ in January and said he would be ‘very glad to be accessory’23 to any comedy Fanny might write:

  Sir Joshua. She has, certainly, something of a knack at Characters; – where she got it, I don’t know, – & how she got it, I can’t imagine, – but she certainly has it. And to throw it away is – – –

  Mr. Sheridan. O she won’t – she will write a Comedy, – she has promised me she will!

  F:B. O Good God! – if you both run on in this manner, I shall – –

  I was going to say get under the Chair, but Mr. Sheridan, interrupting me with a Laugh, said ‘Set about one? – very well, that’s right!’24

  Sheridan, Murphy, Reynolds, Johnson, Mrs Thrale, Samuel Crisp and her father were all of the same mind, and it was a powerful cabal. ‘[H]ow amazing, that this idea of a Comedy should strike so many!’ Fanny wrote to Susan, not needing to mention to her beloved sister and confidante how long she might have been harbouring the idea herself. When Johnson teasingly suggested as far back as August 1778 that Fanny had already started to write a play – ‘What a rout is here, indeed! – She is writing one up stairs all the Time’ – she privately acknowledged that this was another home stroke: ‘“True, true Oh King!” thought I.’25 Although she didn’t admit to composing The Witlings until the beginning of 1779, she was probably writing in secrecy well before then. As Johnson remarked astutely, ‘“Who ever knew when she began Evelina?”’