my dear Fanny, for God’s sake, don’t talk of hard Fagging! It was not hard Fagging that produced such a Work as Evelina! – – – it was the Ebullition of true Sterling Genius! you wrote it, because you could not help it! – it came, & so You put it down on Paper! […] Tis not sitting down to a Desk with Pen, Ink & Paper, that will command Inspiration.49
For all the robust tone and good intention of Crisp’s argument, Fanny must have recognised the flaws in it immediately. It was all very well for him to hold up Evelina as an example of ‘true Sterling Genius’, but she was never going to be able to replicate the conditions under which that book had been composed. Crisp himself had encouraged her not to sigh after the old anonymity but exploit her celebrity; left to her own devices, she would have gone ahead with her play and not been reduced to ‘hard fagging’ at all. On one hand, he adjured her to be professional – but what could be more professional than ‘sitting down to a Desk with Pen, Ink & Paper’, as Dr Johnson did so doggedly almost every day of his adult life? And as for having written Evelina in some kind of mystic haze – ‘you wrote it, because you could not help it!’ – only Fanny could ever be the judge of that.
In the past, Crisp had urged Fanny to trust her own judgement, and make sure her work was ‘all your own – all of a Piece’,50 but now he wasn’t just expecting her to act on other people’s (i.e. his) criticism, but to accept their (also his) ideas for her next work. Why didn’t she write a play about Mrs Thrale’s neighbours, the Pitches family? he asked. The descriptions of them in her letters had left him ‘quite animated’.51 He could imagine a ‘Moral, Useful Comedy’ being made out of such material, and even rather heavy-handedly fed her a title: ‘their whole Conduct might be term’d, the Right Road to go wrong’.52 Wisely, Fanny did absolutely nothing with this suggestion. Instead she worked on at The Witlings while she tried to come to terms with its rejection, then gradually gave it up.
Fanny had been so sure of success that she had made no secret of writing her play, and by the new season in the autumn of 1779, people began to expect to see it advertised. On her visit with the Thrales to Brighton in the summer, she had talked about the work to the Reverend Dr John Delap, whom she now called her ‘Brother Dramatist’, and was surprised to find herself already treated like a rival by another playwright, the prolific and highly successful Richard Cumberland.* When Fanny returned to Brighton in October, Delap asked how her play was going, and she had to say she ‘had determined not to risk it’.53 Guessing that he would deduce from this that Sheridan had seen it and disapproved, Fanny reflected gloomily that everyone would jump to the same conclusion. Delap’s own play, The Royal Suppliants, had been worked over and over for the past five years and only reached the stage in the spring of 1781, favoured with an epilogue by Murphy and a prologue by Hester Thrale. This must have rubbed salt in the wound rather for Fanny, who had been promised even better – a prologue by Johnson! – and who, on account of her superior knowledge of the theatre and stagecraft, was frequently asked to advise Delap on his work.
The general expectation that Miss Burney was preparing a play persisted some time, and led to at least one wrong attribution of an anonymous play to her – The East Indian,* which ran for ten nights at the Haymarket in the 1781–2 season.54 But the potential for public embarrassment was something that the Daddies don’t seem to have thought of when they passed the death sentence on The Witlings. To Fanny, who bore her disappointment over the affair very secretly, it must have been clear that her father and Crisp might not always be the best brokers of her literary reputation in future; especially not Crisp, whose own attempt at drama, after all, had been such a flop.
In the short term, Fanny found a way to use some of the rejected material, though in a very different form. If you subtract from The Witlings the blue-stocking plot, what is left is the story of an heiress called Cecilia who loses and then regains her fortune and marries a man who has been true to her through all vicissitudes: in short, the plot of Fanny Burney’s second novel, Cecilia. The triumph of this novel was still to come, however. For the moment there was only the bitterness of seeing an excellent piece of work miscarry, and her living, breathing characters being locked back into the bureau, perhaps only destined for another bonfire: ‘good Night Mr. Dabler! – good Night Lady Smatter, – Mrs. Sapient, Mrs. Voluble, – Mrs. Wheedle – Censor – Cecilia – Beaufort, – & you, you great Oaf Bobby! good Night! good Night! –’.55
The relationship between Fanny and Mrs Thrale did not develop into a true intimacy, though each of them habitually pretended that it had. Fanny had been in awe of Mrs Thrale for years, and seems to have found the older woman’s sudden adoption of her alarming and intemperate. There is nothing so likely to kill admiration in someone who is chronically self-deprecating as to be ‘taken up’ by the object of their idolatry. To this perverse brand of disappointment was added Fanny’s uncomfortable awareness of her inferior education and class. The literary talents of the two women were so divergent that neither feared comparison on that score, but literary taste was another thing, and made Fanny anxious. Her manners too, she knew, would be constantly monitored by Mrs Thrale for evidence both of her ‘low race’ origins and of any attempts to cover them up. Her nervousness on all these counts often caused Fanny to behave in a way that did seem studied and affected, very like Queeney, in fact, who in Fanny’s eyes was a misunderstood girl towards whom she began to feel increasingly friendly.
The two writers confided more candidly in their diaries than in each other. Mrs Thrale, whose remarks in Thraliana almost always sound harsher than reports of her public speech and opinions, made a dismissive judgement of Fanny in February 1779:
[Dr Burney’s] Daughter is a graceful looking Girl, but ’tis the Grace of an Actress not a Woman of Fashion – how should it? her Conversation would be more pleasing if She thought less of herself; but her early Reputation embarrasses her Talk, & clouds her Mind with scruples about Elegancies which either come uncalled for or will not come at all.56
This sounds like a chilly first impression, but it was written after the two women had spent the better part of the previous five months in each other’s company, laughing and joking and going about everywhere together. The tone is horribly at variance with that of Fanny’s wholeheartedly admiring journal entries after the first Streatham visit:
I fear to say all I think at present of Mrs. Thrale, – lest some flaws should appear by & by, that may make me think differently: – & yet, why should I not indulge the now, as well as the then, since it will be with so much more pleasure? – In short, my dear Susy, I do think her delightful: she has Talents to create admiration, – Good humour to excite Love, Understanding to give Entertainment, – & a Heart which, like my dear Father’s, seems already fitted for another World!57
It is odd that Fanny felt such reckless admiration for Mrs Thrale, yet in her company gave the impression of being tiresomely self-obsessed. Fanny’s love for Mrs Thrale modulated over the years into appreciation, but she remained convinced of her erstwhile patroness’s essentially good nature. Fanny’s analysis of her character in Memoirs of Doctor Burney (written almost fifty years later) helps explain her diffidence towards Mrs Thrale if, as seems likely, she had formed these impressions quite early on:
[Mrs Thrale] had a sweetness of manner, and an activity of service for those she loved, that could ill be appreciated by others; for though copiously flattering in her ordinary address to strangers, because always desirous of universal suffrage, she spoke of individuals in general with sarcasm; and of the world at large with sovereign contempt.
Flighty, however, not malignant, was her sarcasm; […] her epigram once pronounced, she thought neither of that nor of its object any more[.]58
Fanny intended the Memoirs to be a final account, with all that implies of both Last Judgement and score-settling. In them, she applies to her early friendships the analytical and critical powers which she rarely displayed at the time. In conversation she never attempted
to outshine the great figures around her, whereas Mrs Thrale was a true Wit and extravagantly devoted to making brilliant talk. Both women’s public behaviour was deceptive, and deceived the other. The Thraliana are powered by a cynicism that few of Mrs Thrale’s acquaintance would have recognised from the ‘sweet’, ‘flattering’ hostess of Streatham Park, but one should not deduce from this that she was a hypocrite. Her journal (more of a commonplace book, really, with flights into controlled confession) is an extraordinary testimony to her struggle to extract as much pleasure as possible from a difficult life. Henry Thrale was two-faced in a malign way, unaccountably cruel and negligent towards Hester, but solid and admirable to outsiders. Mrs Thrale’s loveless marriage, almost yearly pregnancies, the mortal dangers these put her in and the tragic deaths of so many of her children made her impatient of people like Fanny who over-dramatised small problems, and by the summer of 1779 the strains in their friendship were beginning to show. ‘Fanny Burney has been a long time from me, I was glad to see her again’, Mrs Thrale wrote when recovering from the stillbirth of a son in August,
yet She makes me miserable too in many Respects – so restlessly & apparently anxious lest I should give myself Airs of Patronage, or load her with the Shackles of Dependance – I live with her always in a Degree of Pain that precludes Friendship – dare not ask her to buy me a Ribbon, dare not desire her to touch the Bell, lest She should think herself injured.59
Mrs Thrale was so charming and adept socially that Fanny never seemed to detect this strain of disapproval, which amounts at times to scorn. When on their return from Brighton in November Mr Thrale was taken ill (with another of the apoplectic fits he had been suffering for a year or two), Mrs Thrale felt Fanny’s response of going into mild hysterics at an inn in Reigate was less than helpful. When the party got back to Streatham Park, Fanny took to her bed for a week with ‘something that She called a Fever’, as Mrs Thrale put it.60 ‘Mrs Thrale Nursed me most tenderly, letting me take nothing but from herself’, Fanny recorded gratefully in a letter to Susan, though the exclusive treatment had not actually been intended to flatter. The Thraliana reveal the uncomfortable fact that by acting as ‘Doctor & Nurse, & Maid’ Mrs Thrale was actually trying to placate the servants – all flat out with the crisis over her husband’s stroke – lest they should resent the little hypochondriac upstairs. ‘[A]nd now –’ Hester noted sarcastically, ‘with the true Gratitude of a Wit, She tells me, that the World thinks the better of me for my Civilities to her. It does! does it?’
To the outside world, nevertheless, Fanny was presented more and more as Mrs Thrale’s pet and protégée, and when she accompanied the Thrale family on their long visit to Tunbridge and Brighton in October 1779, Mrs Thrale took every opportunity to show off the new authoress and repeat the stories, now smooth with telling, of her ‘discovery’. Evelina, which had now been out for eighteen months and was into a third edition, had a massive following among the socialites gathered in Brighton, and Fanny couldn’t hide her pleasure at it: ‘I am prodigiously in Fashion’, she wrote home to Susan, who must have felt increasingly left out of her sister’s success. One young lady was ‘Dying with impatience to see me, because she idolizes Evelina […] – she looks at me as if it was an heaven to see me, Addresses me as if it was an Honour to speak to me, & listens to me as if it was an improvement to hear me! […] In short, she has just such a youthful & mad enthusiasm about me as you & I, at her Age, should have had about Richardson’.61 It is interesting that Fanny felt companionship with the girl, as a fellow reader, rather than with Richardson, as a fellow novelist. The young fan, incidentally, was Augusta Byron, future aunt of the poet. Another girl Fanny met on this trip was Elizabeth Pilfold, who thirteen years later gave birth to Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The most interesting news about Evelina was how well it was selling. As soon as they arrived in Brighton, Mrs Thrale had called at Thomas’s bookshop on the Steyne to register the names of her party – the accepted method of ‘checking in’ to the social life of the town, as the Brighton Master of Ceremonies consulted these lists in order to draw up invitations to the assemblies and balls. Mr Thomas’s rival bookseller, Bowen, told Mrs Thrale that ‘trade’ gossip considered Evelina ‘a Book thrown away […]! – all the Trade cry shame on Lowneds [sic], – not, Ma’am, that I expected he could have known its worth, because that’s out of the question, – but when it’s profits told him what it was, it’s quite scandalous that he should have done nothing! – quite ungentlemanlike indeed!’62 If Lowndes had sold all his copies of the three editions of Evelina already published (which, judging by the scarcity of the book in the shops, is not unlikely), and if he had kept the price at the nine shillings per set he was charging for the first edition, he would already have netted £810 from the manuscript for which he had given ‘Mr Grafton’ twenty pounds. Perhaps bookseller Bowen was hoping that Miss Burney might allow him to print her next novel. Fanny was remarkably stoical about the lost income from her book, probably because she was so relieved at the magnificent reception it had met with. Direct sale of the copyright had been the only option when she wished to remain anonymous, but she knew that if she ever used this method again, she would drive a much harder bargain.
On this trip to Brighton Fanny went sea-bathing ‘almost Daily’.63 It was an increasingly popular pastime for young women, at once bracing and voluptuous. The bathers were taken to the water in ‘machines’ pulled along by professional female attendants and either soused with water or lowered into the sea to splash about. Fanny had first submitted to sea-bathing in Teignmouth in 1773 ‘to harden me’,64 and it seems to have worked; on this trip to Brighton with Mrs Thrale she relished the bathing, and in 1782 at the same resort said that the operation ‘now gives me nothing but animation and vigour’.65
There are signs that she was becoming ‘hardened off’ in other ways too. She was constantly pointed out by passers-by on the Steyne and ogled at routs and balls, especially by Cumberland’s daughters, whom Queeney gamely volunteered to stare back at. Fanny chose not to dance on any of these occasions, not wishing to be ‘Watched & commented upon’,66 but though she protested about this first exposure to real celebrity, there are touches of complacency about her new-found fame.
The holiday mood in Brighton was subdued by the persistent fears of an imminent invasion by the French and Spanish, whose combined fleets had been in the Channel since August. The American war had dragged on with no sign of a victory, and with France and Spain at war with Britain and the League of Armed Neutrality about to range Russia, Sweden and Denmark against Britain too, times were beginning to feel dangerous as well as difficult. The Thrales had had two poor years with the brewery business, and a tax bill in 1778 of £2000 (although this hadn’t prevented them going on their extended tour or planning an even more ambitious one for the next year). Dr Burney found his own work harder to come by, and like Crisp, arch prophet of doom, thought that the country was gradually sliding into ruin.
One of Mrs Thrale’s Streatham neighbours, a gentleman named Rose Fuller, whose quirky manner of speech always amused Fanny,* had lamented the worsening political situation thus: ‘Why very bad! very bad, indeed! quite what we call poor old England! – I was told, in Town, – Fact! – Fact, I assure you! – that these Dons intend us an Invasion this month! – they & the Monsieurs intend us the respectable salute this very month, – the powder system, in that sort of way! – Give me leave to tell you, Miss Burney, this is what we call a disagreeable visit, in that sort of way!’67 It was more to Fanny’s taste to lampoon Rose Fuller than to worry about what he was saying. She was beginning to enjoy her position in the Thrale entourage and the insights it gave her into a different social set, whose absurdities were endlessly entertaining. Here is her account of a Mr Blakeney, reading the newspaper:
Now he would cry ‘Strange! strange! that!’ presently – ‘What stuff! I don’t believe a Word of it!’ – a little after ‘O Mr. Bate! I wish your Ears were Cropt!’ – then, ‘Ha! Ha!
Ha! – Funnibus! Funnibus, indeed!’ And at last, in a great rage he exclaimed ‘What a fellow is this! to presume to arraign the conduct of persons of Quality!’ […]
Soon after, he began to rage about some Baronet whose title began Sir Carnaby – ‘Jesus! he cried, what names people do think of! – here’s another, now, – Sir Oenesiphorus Paul! – why now what a Name is that! – poor human Beings here inventing such a Name as that: – I can’t imagine where they met with it! – it is not in the Bible.’68
Of course there is no telling how much or how little the conversations in her journals were tinkered with or sent up in the writing (remembering Fanny’s skill as a mimic), but whichever way, they are impressive as works of art even if not as feats of memory. Much of this ‘eavesdropping’ writing was for Susan’s benefit, and sought to reproduce scenes Fanny wished she and her sister could have experienced together. To Dr Johnson, however, whom she (wrongly) felt required more formal correspondence, Fanny wrote a pitifully false-sounding note about how she had nothing to report worth his attention. She had already earned his displeasure by writing a postscript to one of Queeney’s letters, ‘a silly short note, in such a silly white hand, that I was glad it was no longer’, as Johnson complained to Mrs Thrale.69 There was quite a rift opening up between her gay, intimate private writing and the very unnatural style she was beginning to adopt for ‘serious’ audiences.
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