Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  * * *

  * Cumberland’s jealousy towards any rival, real or imagined, earned him the scorn of, among others, Sheridan, who caricatured him as Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic, first performed on 30 October 1779.

  * The title, and possibly the content, of this play could not have pleased ‘Sir Fretful Plagiary’ Cumberland much; his own most famous work was The West Indian.

  * It found its way into several of her works – see especially the character of Litchburn in ‘Love and Fashion’.

  7

  Cecilia

  All through the autumn of 1779 Fanny was worrying about the letter she had sent to Sheridan earlier in the year promising him a play for the winter season. By Christmas she could not put the matter off any longer and persuaded her father to call on the playwright and pass on the message that ‘what I had written had entirely dissatisfied me, and that I desired to decline for the present all attempts of that sort’.1 When Dr Burney did this, however, Sheridan’s response was to insist on seeing what had already been done; it suited him far better, he argued, to work with an author on an unfinished manuscript than to battle over revisions to a supposedly complete text. Dr Burney’s resolve vaporised immediately and he came home telling Fanny he had changed his mind and thought she should take up the playwright’s tempting offer at once.

  This reversal, just when Fanny had managed to quash all her former ambitions, could scarcely have been more disturbing. Sheridan had asked Charles Burney’s permission to call on Fanny to discuss the play, and in anticipation of his visit she began hurriedly revising The Witlings one more time. She felt ‘violently fidgeted’ about it, and wrote to Crisp in something of a panic, probably hoping he would command her to stop. But the magic of Sheridan’s name worked powerfully on Crisp, too, and though he admitted that his young friend’s brutal cuts to the play had left little to work on, he suggested she might be able to scrounge some decent new plot-lines out of Colley Cibber’s memoirs. Thus Fanny’s two mentors showed again the limitations of their usefulness, or even common sense. Her disappointment in them was evident; she even went as far as making an overt criticism of her father’s part in the matter, saying he was ‘ever easy to be worked upon’.2 Fortunately, Sheridan never made his call, and the mutilated play to which Fanny had taken a disgust was left to rest in peace.

  With the long death of The Witlings, Fanny’s career as a ‘scribler’ seemed in danger of coming to an end. Though her father was keen for her to consolidate the success of Evelina with another book as soon as possible, Fanny had never had so little time to herself. All her leisure was taken up compiling long accounts of celebrity social life in letters to Samuel Crisp and her sister. She had never before been so busy doing nothing, having to think about clothes, hair and caps, visiting and jaunts.

  In April 1780 she accompanied the Thrales on another long trip, this time to Bath. They travelled in style, in a coach and four with a post chaise behind for Mrs Thrale’s two maids, and two menservants on horseback, and took a house at the end of South Parade, overlooking the River Avon. Everything about the arrangements was luxurious, and Henry Thrale, his pocketbook permanently open, insisted that Fanny order anything she wanted from the Bath milliners and dressmakers, as freely as Queeney and Hester did. Fanny was flattered, but exhibited her usual scruples, only accepting Mr Thrale’s largesse when he ‘absolutely insisted’ on it.3 Perversely, the idea that Fanny was freeloading struck Mrs Thrale most forcibly whenever their gifts were refused, but a letter from Fanny to Queeney on the subject, written almost twenty years later, hints at the difficulty of being on the receiving end of the Thrale beneficence:

  my pride was dearer to me than her [Mrs Thrale’s] gifts, which were forced upon me whether I would or not, & which hurt me inexpressibly, frequently with a raillery that showed she discredited the sincerity of my resistance. But I valued our friendship too much for any serious dispute – & all other she overpowered.4

  The two months in Bath were mostly spent visiting; Mrs Montagu and another famous ‘Blue’, Mrs Elizabeth Carter, were in town, as well as a host of fashionable ladies, retired bishops and elderly beaux taking the waters. It was the kind of company that Mrs Thrale had correctly judged would have bored Dr Johnson, but not Fanny. As in Brighton, Fanny stayed with the card-playing matrons much of the time, and refused to dance at the dances. She joked that she was becoming ‘old-cattish’,5 and it was true: at almost twenty-eight she was taking up position on the outskirts of middle age. The next generation of young society girls (who admired Miss Burney’s book to distraction) had some surprising new preoccupations. One, a ‘Miss W—’, was an atheist, whose views (by Hume out of Bolingbroke) profoundly shocked the pious novelist; another was Augusta Byron, Fanny’s romantic young fan from Brighton. She observed these two young women of the coming age with attention, keeping their traits, manners, even dialogue in mind for almost thirty years, when they reappear recognisably in the characters of Eleanor Jodrell and Aurora Granville in her last novel The Wanderer, published in 1814.

  ‘Miss Burney was much admired at Bath’, Mrs Thrale wrote in her journal a few weeks later; ‘the puppy Men said She had such a drooping Air, & such a timid Intelligence; or a timid Air I think it was, and a drooping Intelligence.’6 Mrs Thrale’s flashes of malice towards her young friend were understandable; she was having a strenuous year travelling to and from health resorts with her ailing and moody husband, entertaining his friends at Streatham and campaigning on his behalf in Southwark for the coming parliamentary election ‘like a Tigress seizing upon every thing that she found in her way’, as Johnson wrote to Queeney.7 Her efforts went unrewarded by any tenderness from ‘Master’, who openly said his only comfort was his beautiful young mistress, Sophy Streatfield. Relations with Queeney were as bad as ever – ‘Miss despises me’, her mother wrote dramatically – and Fanny Burney, who had been drafted in to leaven the spirits of this company, was not proving quite grateful or useful enough. Though Fanny half-convinced herself that she was now almost one of the family (she had begun to refer to Mr Thrale as her ‘dear Master’ in imitation of Hester), she seems not to have appreciated how ill and unhappy the Thrales were. Mrs Thrale noted with a strange kind of satisfaction how ‘disgusted’ one of her friends was ‘at Miss Burney’s Carriage to me’ in Bath. ‘I love her dearly for all that’, she conceded in Thraliana, ‘& I fancy She has a real regard for me, if She did not think it beneath the Dignity of a Wit, or of what She values more – the Dignity of Doctor Burney’s Daughter to indulge it. Such Dignity!!’8

  The rather uncomfortable holiday came to an abrupt end in the second week of June when reports reached Bath of serious disturbances in London. Stage-coaches arriving from the capital had ‘No Popery’ chalked on them, and shocking reports followed that riots had been going on for almost a week, aimed primarily at Roman Catholic targets and ostensibly in protest at the Catholic Relief Act, a relatively mild piece of legislation that had been passed the previous year. Next day in Bath the same ‘No Popery’ message was appearing around the city, and within hours bets were being laid on whether the new Roman Catholic chapel would be attacked, which it was overnight.

  The Thrale party had already decided to leave, but speeded up their preparations when Mr Thrale was identified in a local paper (wrongly, of course) as a Catholic. Clearly there was some connection in the public mind between the brewing trade and Catholicism which Thrale’s political rivals sought to exploit. A distiller in Holborn (a known Catholic) had been one of the prime targets of the riots in town; when his property was burned, it exploded and sent rivers of liquor into the streets, which some of the mob drank themselves to death on. Free drink was not the main motive for the violence, though, since brewers’ homes were as vulnerable as their premises (one non-Catholic brewer had his house in Turnstile Alley fired because the mob said he brewed ‘popish beer’). The Thrales’ brewery in Southwark, worth an astonishing £150,000,9 was already under threat, they heard in Bath; the rumour about Th
rale being a papist seemed to doom it to destruction. The family decided to make their way across country towards Brighton, whence, if necessary, Mr Thrale could embark for the Continent.

  Though Fanny had to flee Bath with the Thrales, her thoughts were of course with her own family, from whom she had no news until she reached Brighton. The letters from Susan which awaited her there contained astonishing accounts of the riots, the most violent civil disturbance of the century in London. More damage was done in one week of mob rule than in Paris during the whole of the French Revolution; hundreds of properties were destroyed and 290 citizens died. The initial protest, led by the fanatical Lord George Gordon, took place on 2 June, but the Burneys in St Martin’s Street only got wind of the trouble on the evening of the fifth when Charlotte came back from the Reynolds’s in a fright, saying that a mob was out breaking the windows of suspected Catholics. Soon after, they heard an affray nearby; it was Sir George Saville’s house on the north side of Leicester Square being attacked (Saville had introduced the Catholic Relief Bill into the House of Commons). The family watched in fear from the observatory at the top of their house as the huge bonfire of Sir George’s household effects lit up the whole square.

  The next evening the rioting came even closer. The coach in which Susan was returning from Lady Hales’s was surrounded by a mob in Leicester Square that was blocking the narrow entrance to St Martin’s Street. She was taken the long way round and got home to find Mrs Burney and Charlotte both almost hysterical; only half an hour before ‘many hundred people’ had charged past the house on their way to the house of Justice Hyde at the bottom of the road. Susan counted six fires made of Hyde’s belongings, reaching as far as the junction with Orange Street – only a stone’s throw away:

  When Hyde’s house was emptied of all its furniture, the mob tore away the windows and window-frames and began to pull up the floors and the pannels of the rooms [… At last] the Ringleaders gave the word and away they all ran past our windows to the bottom of Leicester Fields with lighted fire-brands in their hands like so many Furies, [where] they made one great bonfire. [They continued their work of destruction] till between two and three in the morning.10

  Susan, Hetty and her husband Charles Rousseau Burney were watching from the drawing-room windows. The crowd dispersed, but a gaggle of men and women remained in St Martin’s Street shouting ‘No Popery!’ Next thing, the crowd was pointing towards the little group in the window and shouting ‘They are all three papists!’:

  ‘For God’s sake’, cried poor Hetty, ‘Mr Burney, call out No Popery or anything!’ Mr Burney accordingly got his hat and huzza’d from the window. It went against me to hear him, though it seemed no joke in the present situation of things to be marked out by such wretches as papists. ‘God bless your Honour’, they then cried, and went away very well satisfied.11

  This sort of intimidation was widespread. All over London, people were wearing the Protestant blue ribbon as a passport through the crowds. Horace Walpole, who had come up from Strawberry Hill to observe the riots, said he was ‘decking myself with blue ribbons like a May-day garland’12 before going out onto the streets. City merchants lit up their houses at night as a supposed gesture of sympathy with the rioters, and the words ‘No Popery’ were on everyone’s lips, however unenthusiastically. Money was being extorted from householders on a grand scale, and after the storming of Newgate Prison, then the King’s Bench and the Fleet, the streets were full of criminals ready to take advantage of the complete breakdown of law and order.

  Mrs Burney, terror-stricken, wanted the whole family to decamp at once to Chesington, but the others worried that the house on St Martin’s Street would be lost if they left it. The threat of fire from nearby properties was their greatest anxiety (the premises at the back of the house were rented at this date to a Roman Catholic china-dealer), and after the complete destruction of Lord Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square, with its priceless library and manuscript collection, Charles Burney naturally began to fear for his papers and books (Fanny presumably feared for hers too). When they tried to move their valuables to Hetty’s, however, they found that the rioting had spread to Covent Garden, and the two old aunts in York Street were cowering in the coffee house, having had an ominous symbol chalked on their door by accident. The Burneys’ Italian friends had taken down their door-plates for fear of being victimised, and such was the mindless momentum of the riot that the French Protestant chapel next door to the Burneys’ house was also under threat for a time, from the simple association of France with Catholicism. Every evening Susan went up to the observatory, saw fires on all sides and heard ‘huzzas, shouts and firing, and shrieks from some of these terrible scenes of fury and riot’.13 Charlotte had made a parcel of all her most important possessions, ready to evacuate the house at a moment’s notice, but Susan put the job off – it was too depressing.

  By 9 June, when troops arrived in the city, order began to be restored. George Gordon was arrested and sent to the Tower,* fresh earth was laid on the road to Blackfriars Bridge and the bloodstains were obliterated from the walls of the Bank of England with a quick coat of whitewash.

  The Thrale party reached Brighton and heard all this news on 18 June, by which time London was quiet again. Fanny was desperate to rejoin her family and left for the capital as soon as possible with Mrs Thrale, who went up to survey the damage to the brewery and to reward a servant who had quick-wittedly diverted the mob. She expected Fanny to return with her to Brighton and was disappointed when her offer was declined. The violence of the riots and the danger her family had suffered in her absence made Fanny begin to think that she had let Mrs Thrale ‘overpower’ her life too long. She had missed Susan terribly, and the lively social life of home (which was, frankly, much more interesting than Brighton or Bath); she also missed reading and writing in peace and being of practical help to her father. Living as Mrs Thrale’s handmaid had been unproductive and ultimately unrewarding. With eyes newly opened to what she valued most, Fanny’s instinct was to re-establish herself at home.

  On 10 January 1780 a letter from Captain Charles Clerke of the Resolution reached London. It had been written the previous June in Kamchatka and travelled overland to St Petersburg, thence to Berlin. By the time it reached its destination, Clerke himself was dead, a fact that was rather overshadowed by the news his letter carried. It told how Captain Cook and four of his Marines had been killed ‘on the 14th of February last at the island of O’Why’he [Hawaii], one of a group of new discovered Islands in the 22nd Degree of North Latitude, in an affray with a numerous and tumultuous Body of the Natives’.14

  It was only when James Burney returned home, nine months after this news had been received and twenty months after the event, that his family heard the details of Cook’s death. The Resolution and Discovery had made a long stay at Hawaii from November 1778 to early February 1779, revictualling prior to another trip north in search of a north-west passage through the Arctic Circle. During this stay, Cook had been involved in ‘strange ceremonies’ on the sacred platform known as the Morai, which are thought to have identified Cook with a native deity. The British party did not take the local religion very seriously, however, and heedlessly desecrated the Morai when removing for firewood both its wooden paling (which Cook had bargained for) and some of its idols (by mistake). Nevertheless, they set sail peacefully at the end of their furlough. A couple of days out, the Resolution sprang her mast and the two boats had to return to Kealakekua Bay on 11 February, where they met with an inexplicably hostile reception. Neither James Burney nor his colleagues understood the malign significance to the Hawaiians of any unscheduled return of the ‘god’.

  The Discovery’s cutter went missing overnight, and suspecting the natives of theft (they were as shameless a set of pilferers as the British were ‘bargainers’), Cook decided to blockade the bay and go on shore to demand its return with a sergeant, nine Marines and his Lieutenant of Marines, Molesworth Phillips. The atmosphere on board the
British ships was tense. The sight of armed native warriors assembling on the clifftops and the sound of conch shells being blown were unambiguously warlike, and at the instigation of a trigger-happy young officer, William Bligh (later captain of the Bounty), the sailors began sporadically firing at native canoes, which led to a chief being killed. Other native leaders, finding that Cook was not on board either British ship to receive their complaints about this, set off to find him, and half an hour later Burney and his companions heard firing on shore. The Resolution fired in response, and looking through a telescope from the deck of the Discovery, Charles Clerke could see the fracas that broke out on the shore as Cook and his party attempted to bring the King, Terreeoboo, back with them as a hostage. In the confusion and bloodshed, several of the Marines decided it would be better to flee to the launches than to risk trying to defend themselves with muskets (which took at least twenty seconds to reload). Phillips stood his ground longer than any of his men, though stabbed in the shoulder with a spear and pelted with stones. He was a strong swimmer, and helped his colleague Jackson into the pinnace before making for a more distant cutter himself.

  Lieutenant John Williamson had long since left in the launch, saying later that he had interpreted Cook’s hand signal from the rocks as an order to retreat. Burney and the others on the Discovery saw, aghast, that Cook was left unprotected and reeling from the attack of the crowd, in which four Marines were killed. Cook received a blow from a club and fell into the water, where he struggled (like most sailors, he could not swim) and was struck again. He was probably already dead when the natives pulled him out of the water, but they finished him off extravagantly, in what turned quickly into a ritual mob killing.