There are other reasons to think that The Witlings was actually quite well-formed already by this point, in the author’s mind if not on paper, and they are detectable in the play itself, particularly in the crudity of its satire surrounding the ‘female wits’ – ‘a formidable Body’, as Mrs Thrale noted in her diary, ‘& called by those who ridicule them, the Blue Stocking Club’.26 Mrs Thrale herself was often a guest of the blue-stocking hostesses Mrs Vesey, Mrs Chapone and Mrs Montagu, the wealthy and cultured author of Essay on Shakespeare and Dialogues and the acknowledged ‘Queen of the Blues’. Hester Thrale recognised any invitation from these ladies as an intended honour, but stayed on the periphery of their acquaintance, happy with her own very different kind of entertaining at Streatham. The Blues’ rather priggish insistence on intellectually and morally ‘improving’ conversation made their meetings stilted and pretentious by comparison with those of ‘The Club’ and the Streathamites, or with Dr Burney’s soirées at St Martin’s Street. Even Fanny Burney, for all her interest in propriety and regulation, was not to enjoy the high-minded, teetotal evenings she spent chez Montagu with more than a rather abstract happiness.
But howevermuch Mrs Thrale and Dr Johnson joked about the pompous wording of their invitations to ‘Blue’ events, they recognised Mrs Montagu’s status and respectability, and wanted to introduce Fanny to her at the first opportunity. Johnson joked with Fanny that he and she would have to ‘study our parts against Mrs Montagu comes’.27 The visit, when it happened, was only a qualified success. Mrs Thrale’s motivation in the business was partly selfish, for she was keen to promote her own protégée against Mrs Montagu’s, Hannah More. She also wanted to defend her own puffing of Evelina, and told for the umpteenth time the story of how Edmund Burke, the great politician, had started reading the book at seven one morning, and stayed up all the next night to finish it. Next thing, Mrs Thrale, carried away by her own rhetoric, was blurting out that the author of this highly-honoured volume was none other than Miss Burney herself, causing Fanny to run out of the room.
One can imagine that this kerfuffle did not impress Mrs Montagu, and neither, when she got round to reading it, did Evelina: ‘Mrs Montagu cannot bear Evelina – let that not be published’, Mrs Thrale wrote to Johnson on 19 October; ‘her Silver Smiths are Pewterers She says, & her Captains Boatswains’.28 If this dismissive remark (with its emphasis on the book’s vulgarity) had been relayed to Fanny at the time, she would never have had the courage to enter the same room as its esteemed author. She felt humble enough at the prospect, remarking in her journal that ‘a woman of such celebrity in the Literary world, would be the last I should covet to converse with, though one of the first I should wish to listen to.’29
The portrait of ‘female wits’ in The Witlings is far from this respectful, even reverential tone. Lady Smatter and Mrs Sapient are shown as mean, hypocritical, shallow, unfeeling and stupid, the former ‘a Woman whose utmost natural capacity will hardly enable her to understand the History of Tom Thumb’, the latter characterised by speeches beginning ‘for in my opinion’, followed by a truism or banality. The Club itself is described by the play’s hero, Beaufort, in a passage cancelled from the first scene, as
the most fantastic absurdity under Heaven. My good aunt has established a kind of Club at her House, professedly for the discussion of literary Subjects; and the Set who compose it are about as well qualified for the Purpose, as so many dirty Cabbin Boys would be to find out the Longitude. To a very little reading, they join less Understanding, and no Judgement, yet they decide upon Books and Authors with the most confirmed confidence in their abilities for the Task.30
This is not the kind of representation one would expect from a young writer who was on the edges of such a group herself. It is an unsympathetic, satirical, lively outsider’s view (this was one of the strong objections to it later), and by the winter of 1778 Fanny Burney was an outsider no longer. Dr Burney had been a sporadic attendant at ‘Blue’ parties since 1773, when the second volume of The Present State of Music prompted Mrs Vesey to cultivate his acquaintance. The robustness of the satire in The Witlings probably derives more from Dr Burney’s impressions of the Blues than from Fanny’s own. The only surviving copy of the play is an ‘exceptionally neat’31 fair copy, presumably post-dating May 1779, which was when Fanny finished writing the earliest version, and the deletion of Beaufort’s speech suggests that second thoughts about the satire had already set in.
There is no doubt that writing for the stage was one of Fanny Burney’s longest-held ambitions, and that success as a playwright would have been far more gratifying to her, and probably more lucrative too, than success as a novelist. The composition of The Witlings was not, as it might seem from the perspective of an age that values the novel so highly, a step down from Evelina, but a progression towards solid literary fame. Many people had remarked on the dramatic qualities of Evelina, and it is odd to think that Fanny Burney may have considered her most famous work as an apprentice piece for a career as a dramatist.
The Witlings has not yet been produced, and was published for the first time in 1995, 216 years after its composition. Fanny wrote at least eight other plays, only one of which, Edwy and Elgiva, was performed in her lifetime, and that, as we shall see, was a one-night fiasco. She can hardly be said to have fulfilled her ambition to be a playwright. But her sheer persistence (trying to alter The Witlings for half a year in the hope of salvaging something from the project) and her sensitivity to failure in this field (she, not the theatre management, withdrew Edwy and Elgiva after its first performance) indicate how much she wanted to succeed.
The failure of The Witlings is a sorry story, since the play has many virtues. The plot turns on the loss of fortune, and subsequent collapse of marriage prospects, of an orphan heiress called Cecilia, whose fiancé, Beaumont, is under the guardianship of the head ‘witling’, his aunt, Lady Smatter. Other members of her ‘Esprit Club’ include Mrs Sapient, the peddler of truisms, Codger, a man so pedantic he has to retire to work out the order in which he is going to relate his sister’s news, and a would-be poet called Dabler, whose works include ‘On a young lady blinded by Lightning’:
Fair Cloris, now depriv’d of Sight,
To Error ow’d her fate uneven;
Her Eyes were so refulgent bright
The blundering Lightning thought them Heaven.32
Lady Smatter wants her nephew to abandon Cecilia once she is (apparently) bankrupted, but he staunchly refuses; a series of accidents, however, leads Cecilia to think he has renounced her, and she sinks into despair and the lodging-house of vulgar Mrs Voluble, where she contemplates her future as companion to a gentlewoman. The plot concludes lamely with the arrival of a letter informing Cecilia ‘that my affairs are in a less desperate situation than I had apprehended’, and the lovers are reunited, partly because of the machinations of Beaumont’s friend Censor (a role crying out for Garrick, though the great Roscius was ailing, and died before the play was finished).
The limp ending is just forgivable because the rest of the play is so stuffed with jokes and absurd comic scenes, such as one in which Mrs Sapient has to hide in a cupboard containing all the household clutter Mrs Voluble threw out of sight before her arrival. In the scene where the Esprit Club meets, the ladies stand up one at a time in exasperation with Codger, producing some dance-like comic business and showing Burney’s well-developed sense of stagecraft. There are several inventive elements too, such as ending the first scene mid-sentence and having Codger often begin but never quite finish the story of his Aunt Deborah’s poultry. Domestic messiness and housewifely hypocrisy had never been shown on stage before; nor had any dramatist opened a play in a milliner’s shop, a particularly female environment and ‘a ridiculous and unmanly situation’33 for a gentleman like Censor to be forced to enter. As in Evelina, Fanny was being inventive and uncompromisingly woman-centred.
In this she was fulfilling the criteria set down in two letters of advice that
Samuel Crisp wrote her in November and December 1778. Crisp, clearly pleased at Fanny’s success among the Streatham lions but sensitive to his loss of influence over her, adjured her to grasp the moment and ‘act vigorously (what I really believe is in your power) a distinguish’d part in the present [scene]’. Her friends would not always be around her, nor so influential: ‘You will then be no longer the same Fanny of 1778, feasted, caress’d, admir’d […] When You come to know the World half so well as I do’, warned the Hermit of Chesington, ‘& what Yahoos Mankind are –, you will then be convinc’d, that a State of Independence is the only Basis –, on which to rest your future Ease & Comfort.’ This very sensible advice is perhaps surprising to hear from an elderly man to a young woman, whose traditional expectations of ‘future Ease & Comfort’ would have rested in marriage or an inheritance. He is basically telling her that since she has the talent to be a writer, she should make the most of it and reap all the advantages, material and personal. His words are echoed in the concluding speech of The Witlings, in which Beaumont eulogises ‘self-dependence’ as ‘the first of Earthly Blessings’:
since those who rely on others for support and protection are not only liable to the common vicissitudes of Human Life, but exposed to the partial caprices and infirmities of Human Nature.34
Beaumont’s words are all the more noteworthy for being somewhat at odds with the outcome of the play, in which, after all, the heroine fares very badly on her own and is only saved ex machina by a cheque for £5000 and marriage to the hero. But as an ending it is far more thoughtful, one might say daring, than the conventions required.
Crisp’s second letter seemed to retract much of the encouragement he had offered earlier. He was alarmed that Fanny wanted to try a Comedy, for he couldn’t see how it was properly achievable by a woman. ‘I need not Observe to You’, he wrote,
that in most of Our successful comedies, there are frequent lively Freedoms (& waggeries that cannot be called licentious, neither) that give a strange animation, & Vigour to the same, & of which, if it were to be depriv’d, it would lose wonderfully of its Salt, & Spirit – I mean such Freedoms as Ladies of the strictest Character would make no scruple, openly, to laugh at, but at the same time, especially if they were Prudes, (And You know You are one) perhaps would Shy at being known to be the Authors of.35
Crisp was voicing the common prejudice that ‘Salt & Spirit’ were ‘natural & expected’ in men’s writing (and guaranteed to amuse even ‘Ladies of the strictest Character’), whereas the only kind of writing suitable for a woman to put her name to was something ‘very fine-Spun, all-delicate’, like the bloodless sentimental comedies of French theatre. The latter were respectable, but deadly dull, as Crisp acknowledged by quoting from Pope: ‘We cannot blame, indeed, – but we may Sleep!’ To steer a path between the two would be virtually impossible, and Crisp’s advice was that Fanny should think of writing another novel instead, a form in which he could see great potential:
In these little entertaining, elegant Histories, the writer has his full Scope; as large a Range as he pleases to hunt in – to pick, cull, select, whatever he likes: – he takes his own time; he may be as minute as he pleases, & the more minute the better; provided, that Taste, a deep & penetrating knowledge of human nature, & the World, accompany that minuteness. – When this is the Case, the very Soul, & all it’s most secret recesses & workings, are develop’d, & laid as open to the View, as the blood Globules circulating in a frog’s foot, when seen thro’ a Microscope. – The exquisite touches such a Work is capable of (of which, Evelina is, without flattery, a glaring instance) are truly charming. – But of these great advantages, these resources, YOU are strangely curtailed, the Moment You begin a Comedy[.]36
Fanny valued his advice, but didn’t act on it (another reason to suppose she had already gone past the stage of deciding whether or not to write a play). Her reply comes close to a manifesto:
Every word you have urged concerning the salt & spirit of gay, unrestrained freedom in Comedies, carries conviction along with it, – a conviction which I feel in trembling! should I ever venture in that walk publicly, perhaps the want of it might prove fatal to me: I do, indeed, think it most likely that such would be the Event, & my poor piece, though it might escape Cat calls & riots, would be fairly slept off the stage. I cannot, however, attempt to avoid this danger, though I see it, for I would a thousand Times rather forfeit my character as a Writer, than risk ridicule or censure as a Female. I have never set my Heart on Fame, & therefore would not if I could purchase it at the expence of all my own ideas of propriety. You who know me for a Prude will not be surprised, & I hope not offended at this avowal, – for I should deceive you were I not to make it. If I should try, I must e’en take my chance, & all my own expectations may be pretty easily answered!37
At first glance this looks like an admission that Fanny is prepared to surrender her artistic integrity to her sense of propriety in a sacrificial act of daughterly deference; whereas she is actually making a distinction between the traditional kind of comedy that Crisp was thinking of and the kind she intended to write herself, which was, indeed, also the only kind that she felt able to write naturally. Her distinction between ‘Writer’ and ‘Female’ in herself is interesting. His assumption that ‘unrestrained’ in dramatic writing equals ‘unfeminine’ equals ‘successful’ is challenged by her hope that what is natural to herself could also be successful. If her play were to be ‘slept off the stage’, so be it; her inner confidence must have been strong enough to override this consideration.
The Witlings was completed by the beginning of May 1779. Fanny showed it first to her father and next to Mrs Thrale, who could not have failed to recognise a rough caricature of herself in Mrs Sapient, and whose private comments on the play in the Thraliana are subdued:
one has no Guess what will do on a Stage, at least I have none; Murphy must read an Act tomorrow, I wonder what he’ll say to’t. I like it very well for my own part, though none of the scribbling Ladies have a right to admire its general Tendency.38
Murphy apparently liked the parts of the play that he saw (although he didn’t ask after the rest of it until December). Charles Burney, according to Mrs Thrale, liked the play ‘vastly’,39 but his comments about it must have led Fanny to believe it would benefit from improvement, for she began revising the text immediately. On 2 August, Dr Burney read the play in front of a party at Chesington that consisted of Crisp, Mrs Gast, Susan, Charlotte, Mrs Hamilton and Kitty Cooke, a real gathering of the old ‘homely home’. Fanny was not present (she had to stay in London to nurse Hetty), but awaited their verdict eagerly. The note her father sent the same evening ought to have alerted her to a poor reception: he told her that they weren’t yet ready to comment. Kind Susan, seeing the storm ahead, wrote as soon as she could, describing the reading. The fourth act (that is, the Esprit Club scene) was, she said ‘upon the whole that wch seemed least to exhilarate or interest the Audience’.
The letter that the ‘Daddies’ sent together several days later has not survived, but from her reply it is clear that it advised Fanny in the strongest possible terms to abandon The Witlings. This was an appalling shock; she ‘expected many Objections to be raised, a thousand errors to be pointed out, & a million of alterations to be proposed; – but – the suppression of the piece were words I did not expect’.40 The disapproval of Crisp, who was as much a figure of authority to Charles Burney as to the Burney children, had clearly swayed the Doctor’s own opinion from liking The Witlings ‘vastly’ to collaborating in the ‘Hissing, groaning, catcalling Epistle’41 he and Crisp sent to persuade Fanny of the play’s faults. Their main objection was to the depiction of the Blues, although they also said that The Witlings too closely resembled Molière’s Les Femmes savantes (a play Fanny was quick to point out she had never read, and couldn’t even spell correctly42), that people expected better of the author of Evelina, even that the political situation was so fraught that the play-going public might not
be in the mood or in sufficient funds to indulge a new playwright that year.
But the satire of the Blues was the sticking point, and Crisp was justified in objecting to its crudity. He felt Fanny had at her disposal ‘an inexhaustible Fund of Matter’ from which to compose ‘a most spirited, witty, Moral, Useful Comedy without descending to the invidious, & cruel Practice of pointing out Individual Characters, & holding them up to public Ridicule’.43 Nobody had admitted until then that, whatever the author’s intentions, the ‘female wits’ in Fanny’s play would be identified instantly as Mrs Montagu (who, like Lady Smatter, was wealthy and had a nephew for heir) and Mrs Thrale. ‘As it is,’ Charles Burney wrote to his daughter at the end of August, ‘not only the Whole Piece, but the plot had best be kept secret, from every body.’44
Fanny’s response indicates that she hadn’t really wanted or expected Crisp and her father to criticise her work minutely, but simply to give her an impression of ‘the general effect of the Whole’.45 Now that they had picked it to pieces, however, she had no option but to abandon the project – or at least, that was what duty dictated. The terms in which she submitted to the Daddies’ judgement betray a determination to prove them wrong, one way or another: ‘the best way I can take of shewing that I have a true & just sense of the spirit of your condemnation, is not to sink, sulky & dejected, under it, but to exert myself to the utmost of my power in endeavours to produce something less reprehensible.’46
Back at Streatham, Mrs Thrale was impressed and no doubt relieved by the sacrificial gesture, noting in the Thraliana (with her characteristic quirk of writing as if she had not mentioned it before): ‘Fanny Burney […] resolves to give up a Play likely to succeed; for fear it may bear hard upon some Respectable Characters’.47 But Fanny had clearly invested so much in the play that it was impossible to let it drop entirely. Her letters to Crisp and to her father were full of quotations from and references to her rejected characters, and within weeks she was ‘new modelling’ the play,48 presumably to exclude the Esprit Club and elaborate the love story. She wrote to Crisp, trying to pre-empt his disapproval, that a new version of The Witlings was her only chance of bringing anything out that year, and that with ‘hard fagging’ she might just manage it. His response was almost explosive:
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