The reprisals that followed this shocking event were swift and bloody, but the main concern of Clerke, who took over command of the expedition, was to mend the Resolution’s mast and get away as soon as possible, having recovered what they could of their colleagues’ remains. Lieutenants Burney and King were sent on this dangerous and gruesome mission, but found nothing on shore. The next day a parcel containing some of Cook’s remains was delivered to the Resolution, provoking disgust and further retaliation. Another parcel, containing Cook’s hands, scalp, skull and some bones was delivered later, and on 23 February, having given what burial honours they could to their murdered captain, the deeply dispirited British party set sail from Kealakekua Bay.
Of the officers involved in Cook’s fatal mission, Phillips came off by far the best, and assumed the role of hero. Somehow he became known as the man who had shot Cook’s main assailant, though by the time Cook was attacked, slipping on the rocks at the edge of the water, Phillips would have already been in the water, his musket abandoned and sword drawn. Phillips consolidated his reputation as the dead leader’s champion by challenging Williamson – who was universally regarded as the villain of the piece for failing to stand his ground – to a duel. This ended unsatisfactorily, and they gave the matter up (through the intervention of a fellow-officer, whom G.E. Manwaring suggests was Burney15), though another fight broke out between the two men when they were provisioning at the Cape on the way home.*
When the two ships finally came up the Thames in October 1780, they were besieged by sightseers and well-wishers. Henry Thrale went to visit James on board the Discovery, and invited him to Streatham next time Fanny was going there. Dr Johnson also intended to visit James and see the celebrated ship.17 James was soon home in St Martin’s Street, telling his astonishing stories over and over. A kind of ‘South Sea fever’ gripped London; John Webber’s pictures from the voyage were on display, as were curiosities from the South Seas, New Zealand and China. Mrs Thrale had an extremely expensive and elaborate court dress made, based on a native Hawaiian garment that James had brought back – the grebe-skin and gold trimmings alone cost £65 (compared with a manservant’s annual wage of about seven guineas18). Fanny went to see Webber’s pictures, and was even more impressed by her brother’s colleague Lieutenant King, ‘one of the most natural, gay, honest and pleasant characters I ever met with’;19 but the ‘lyon of lyons’ was Molesworth Phillips, proudly bearing the scar on his shoulder where the native spear had struck. He had become a close friend of James on the voyage, and was introduced to the Burney family at the earliest opportunity. It was a fateful step. The twenty-five-year-old Irishman, whom Samuel Crisp, with his eye for male beauty, approvingly declared ‘fine made, tall, stout, active, manly-looking’,20 made a bee-line for Susan. Within two months she and Phillips were engaged to be married.
‘Bone idle, slack and amiable’ is how one writer has described Phillips,21 but at the time of his marriage to Susan Burney in January 1782 no one had any doubts about him (it would have seemed almost unpatriotic). Mr Crisp was impressed by Phillips’s odd talent for making models ‘with a degree of neatness and accuracy that cannot be surpassed’,22 and later in life the ex-Marine was often to be seen at the British Museum, ‘lounging and offering advice’, in the words of his former shipmate Rickman’s daughter Mrs Lefroy: ‘He had a turning machine and made small vases after the antique, using perhaps a dozen different kinds of wood, relics of his distant voyages’.23 Phillips’s attraction to Susan was undoubtedly fuelled – and possibly even suggested – by his deep feelings for her brother James, a friendship which lasted for life and which transcended family ties, even surviving the seemingly unforgivable events preceding Susan’s death. When James died in 1821, Phillips, ostracised by the rest of the Burneys because of his treatment of Susan, commissioned a bust of his old friend and shipmate that he kept with him always, and his last request was to be buried in the same grave as Burney.*
Faced with evidence of such devotion in friendship, it is difficult not to suspect that there was perhaps some sexual attraction between Burney and Phillips, albeit the eighteenth-century taboo on acknowledging or discussing sexual relations allowed a latitude to feeling that we find difficult to appreciate and are prone to misinterpret. As with the later problem of whether James Burney and his half-sister Sarah Harriet committed incest, we can only substitute caution for certainty. Sibling and pseudosibling love was strong in an age when parent-child relationships were always at risk of being cut short by early death; it was often intense and exclusive, especially between members of the same sex, who were thrown so much in each other’s company. The bosom-friendship of Fanny and Susan is a case in point: there was ‘but one soul – but one mind between you; – you are two in one’,24 and they shared everything, ‘the same House, Room – Bed – confidence & life’.25 We tend to view such relationships, and the heightened language used to describe them, as either quaint or suspicious – (vide, to take one example of many, the recent controversy over Jane Austen’s relationship with her sister Cassandra26) – transposing them into the mores of our own day with significant distortion. And of course the distorting effect works both ways. Most covert sexual relationships in the eighteenth century would have been too carefully disguised for us ever to recognise them as such, though the prevalence and popularity of, for instance, the incest theme in novels of the period (including Fanny Burney’s27) is just one indicator of how the collective unconscious of the day was working.
The strength and durability of the bond between James Burney and Molesworth Phillips is of more relevance to us than its precise nature. Life at sea, which for men like James Burney began very early in life, ended early too, leaving decades of retirement on half-pay in domestic situations that could only strike the former mariners as insipid and unreal. It is hardly surprising, given the traumatic and peculiar nature of their shared experiences in the South Seas, that Burney and Phillips stuck together self-protectively afterwards. They had seen first hand, and been threatened with, violent death; they had endured extremes of weather and the privations of long sea voyages (where fricassee of rat was a delicacy only the officers were allowed); they had been among the first Europeans to set eyes on the other-worldly ice-scapes of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, had met and consorted with exotic and utterly foreign people, and had doubtless seen, perhaps joined in, countless scenes of coarseness and brutality as well as of heroism and comradeship. From the 1780s onward, James Burney showed signs of disturbance, restlessness with his home life and an inability to further his career; Phillips metamorphosed into a gambler, drinker and philanderer.
Dr Burney displayed caution about his favourite daughter’s engagement in 1780, despite Phillips’s hero status. Phillips was confident of a large income when his uncle died, but he didn’t have it yet, and Dr Burney, always realistic on matters of household economy, withheld his consent to the marriage all through 1781, not convinced that there would be ‘de quoi manger very plentifully’, as Fanny put it to Mrs Thrale. ‘For my own part, I think they could do very well. […] there is not any part of our family that cannot live upon very little as cheerfully as most folks upon very much’.28 It was not perhaps the height of tact to say this to a woman who had just spent a small fortune on a ridiculous dress and even more on the set of Reynolds portraits that now adorned the walls of the library at Streatham Park, but Fanny took pride in the family self-sufficiency and Susan’s choice, like Hetty’s, of love over materialism.
The news of Susan’s engagement made Mrs Thrale think that she would ‘slip pretty readily into the Susannuccia’s place’ in Fanny’s affections,29 but no one was ever going to do that. Fanny genuinely liked Phillips (as they all did at that date), and was confident that Susan would be happy with this man who was to succeed her as ‘closest friend and companion’.30 But privately, the prospect of losing her sister was traumatic. Fanny naturally feared for Susan’s future well-being. A woman of such a small frame and frail health would ru
n a high risk of dying as a result of childbirth, or from a consumption, as their mother had done. Was not Hetty, a much more robustly healthy person, already looking ‘like the Edge of a wornout knife’, according to Crisp,31 after ten years of marriage and six children? How could Susan survive the inevitable pregnancies and confinements?
Fanny had selfish reasons, too, of course, for dreading the forthcoming separation. Charlotte, who was almost ten years her junior, was an eccentric, delightful girl, but not yet a suitable substitute for Susan: ‘our likings and dislikings, are often dissimilar’, Fanny wrote sadly to Susan; ‘with you all seemed the same as myself’.32 Sarah Harriet was still only a child, and not delightful at all: her early nickname ‘Queerness’ seemed likely to stick. In the shrinking Burney household there would be no one with whom Fanny could conspire against Mrs Burney’s malign presence, no one to complain to or take comfort from.
Elizabeth Burney was ‘grown more sour than ever’ according to Crisp,33 and a great deal of treason was being talked about her at Chesington. ‘Nothing is said that she does not fly in a Passion at and Contradict!’ complained Charlotte, the object of her stepmother’s ‘extremest hatred’; ‘Whatever is, is Wrong! that’s her Maxim. I think she ought to be indicted for Living: for she is a Nuisance to Society’.34 Susan had no intention of living at St Martin’s Street ever again. As wife of a Captain of Marines, she faced an itinerant life, expected ‘to pack up her bundles, and trudge along with him, except he should be commanded abroad’.35 During Phillips’s foreign postings she had arranged to live at Chesington.
Perhaps as an escape from the gloomy prospect ahead, Fanny threw herself into work on another novel. The composition of the first draft of Cecilia lasted almost exactly the duration of Susan’s engagement, and was executed with manic bursts of overwork and collapse. For weeks at a time during the winter of 1780–1, Fanny shut herself up to write, overseen with oppressive attention by the two ‘Daddies’. Charles Burney was an especially hard taskmaster. He imagined that his daughter could work the same way he did himself – night and day – without the advantage of amanuenses to take dictation at midnight or relieve the drudgery and discomfort of quill writing. Crisp on the other hand, having little experience of writing professionally, failed to perceive any difficulties at all. As far as he was concerned, it was tantamount to a paid holiday
to sit by a warm Fire, and in 3 or 4 months (for the real time she has stuck to it closely, putting it all together, will not amount to more, tho’ there have been long Intervals, between) gain £250 by scribbling the Inventions of her own Brain – only putting down in black and white whatever comes into her own head, without labour drawing from her own Fountain.36
By the end of February, however, Fanny was half-dead from ‘the eternal fagging of my mind & Brains’. ‘[M]y hand scarce rests an Hour in the whole Day’, she wrote to Susan from Chesington,37 yet she was still only at the end of the first volume. When Mrs Thrale made an impulse visit and saw how ill and exhausted her friend had become, she scolded Dr Burney for putting too much pressure on his daughter, and made him let her come home for a rest. The plan filled Fanny with dread, as she explained to Susan:
I am afraid of seeing my father. Think of a whole volume not yet settled, not yet begun! […] I cannot sleep half the night for planning what to write next Day, & then next day am half dead for want of rest!38
Work was suspended for much of the spring, and there was another illness in September, brought on, as even Crisp understood, by overwork. After the frivolity and socialising of the previous two years, 1781 was proving arduous and unhappy for Fanny. Hetty’s latest baby, Henry, died in August, and the fortunes of James and Charles were thwarted. James was appointed Captain of the Latona, but got no prize on his first commission; reprobate young Charles, despite his degree from Aberdeen, was refused ordination by the Bishop of London. In April Henry Thrale suddenly dropped dead in the house he had rented for the season in Grosvenor Square, on a day when half of fashionable London was invited there for a party. His widow was required to sell up the brewery business almost immediately; a complex and dispiriting task. She retired exhausted to Streatham, with Johnson, Fanny and others of the old circle in attendance, but it must have been clear to all of them that the great days of entertaining there were over. Apart from generating the huge wealth that had allowed the Thrales’ magnificent hospitality, ‘Master’ had been the perfect foil to his wife, sincerely admired by their friends, and missed.
By the second winter, Fanny’s novel did not seem near completion, and Crisp was threatening to keep her at Chesington until it was done. She joked with Susan that she might have to elope from Chesington Hall – as Susan was perhaps beginning to think she would have to do from St Martin’s Street. Dr Burney was still dithering about consenting to her marriage, but Phillips, promoted to Captain that autumn, had waited long enough. The long engagement ended in a rapidly-arranged wedding, sending Fanny into a panic that she wouldn’t be home in time for it. Still her main fear was of displeasing her father. She dreaded his ‘cold looks’ if she went back without the book done. ‘I will scrawl Night & Day, if I can’, she wrote to Susan,39 and after another burst of unremitting labour, managed to finish enough of the novel to get permission to be home for Christmas. She had been made to feel incompetent, though working at remarkable speed: at about 300,000 words in five volumes, Cecilia was almost twice the length of Evelina, and was completed in only a year and a half.
The hurry in which Fanny wrote Cecilia meant that she had to abandon some of her more ambitious plans for the novel. From a letter of Crisp of 27 April 1780, it is clear that she had been thinking of writing about an ‘unbeautiful clever heroine, beset all round for the sake of her great fortune’. It is not possible to determine whether this radically different idea was one of the desperate late revisions to The Witlings or an early sketch of the new novel; as we have seen, the two projects melted into one another, and though the heroine of the novel was originally called Albina, her name was later changed to that of the play’s heroine, Cecilia. In the surviving early drafts, Albina is rather sharper-tongued than Cecilia, but nothing indicates whether or not she was conceived as ‘unbeautiful’. By the final draft, Fanny had defaulted to convention, and Cecilia emerges on the page radiantly lovely outside and in. The fate of an ‘unbeautiful clever’ woman had to wait until the next novel to be attempted, and even then the character in question was a secondary one.
The orphaned Cecilia’s intelligence, virtue and maturity (far greater, at twenty, than any of her supposed guardians) puts her in a class above the naive heroine of Burney’s first novel and emphasises the deliberate break she strove to make between the two books. If the Daddies thought they would get another Evelina by sitting Fanny down in front of the fire for a couple of months, they were wrong: Cecilia is a novel about complex moral problems and perverse practical ones, lacking both Evelina’s light-heartedness and tendency towards farce. Cecilia was more concerned with humours than humour, and when Johnson praised ‘the grand merit’ of the book being ‘in the general Power of the whole’,* he acknowledged its quite different ambitions and achievements from her first attempt at the form.40
Cecilia is about birth and wealth, symbolised in the heroine’s inheritance, which depends on her retaining the family name (Beverley) after marriage. Unfortunately, the man she falls in love with is the last in line of an etiolated aristocratic family who retire behind a pulled-up drawbridge every night and would rather see their son dead than lose their own ancient name. Out of this rather unpromising framework for a thwarted romance Burney creates a series of situations that show the limitations of virtue in a world actively ranged against it. Cecilia consistently behaves not just ‘correctly’ but well, yet is subject to numerous vicissitudes (mostly arising from the combined attractions of her person and her fortune) on her way to securing the affections of the hero, Delvile. He is a much more complicated and attractive character than Evelina’s flawless Orville, and to
wards the end of the novel his conflicting thoughts are represented almost as thoroughly as those of the heroine – a highly unusual development. Also very unusually, the plot is not ‘resolved’ but horribly complicated by the lovers’ union. Delvile has to choose between two evils: losing his parents’ approbation or losing Cecilia. His suggested compromise of making a secret marriage renders both bride and groom profoundly uneasy, and when the wedding is dramatically stopped midway, it is almost a relief that their better judgement has prevailed, however frustrating to the romantic plot. Their second (successful) attempt at getting married is not a scene of triumph but of disabling anxiety. Cecilia listens ‘mechanically’ to the words of the service and looks round the church ‘with a sort of steady dismay in her countenance’.41 This was certainly not what the average reader of romantic fiction would have expected; weddings in that genre are proof that the plot has reached its happy ending.
Burney defended the realism of the love story in the following terms: ‘the hero and heroine are neither plunged in the depths of misery, nor exalted to UNhuman happiness. Is not such a middle state more natural, more according to real life, and less resembling every other book of fiction?’42 Her concern to create probable plot and character was somewhat at variance with the necessity of filling such a long book with sufficient drama. Cecilia, like both of Burney’s subsequent novels, would have appealed far more to later audiences if it had been shorter; its five volumes were a gesture towards a waning convention, the monumental novels of Richardson in particular. Evelina had only three volumes, and it was that book’s relative concision which the next generation of novelists sought to emulate.*
The advantage of length was that it allowed a mass of characters and a multiplicity of action that Mrs Thrale likened to ‘a Camera Obscura in the Window of a London parlour’.44 Few eighteenth-century novels have such historical interest as Cecilia, with its absorbing attention to the detail of London social life, contemporary fashions, attitudes and talk. Sex and money are the main targets of the satire; with the exception of the hero, the men in Cecilia are seen in a poor light as useless guardians, selfish sons and brothers, sexual predators, fortune-hunters, wastrels, hysterics and cheats. Their misogyny is presented more subtly than in Evelina, but Mr Monckton’s cynical marriage to an ageing rich widow is arguably an act of far greater aggression than Captain Mirvan throwing Madame Duval into the ditch. Madame Duval was a straightforward grotesque, but Lady Monckton is shown to have once been just as the heroine now is, and her sour dislike of Cecilia, incomprehensible to the younger woman, is a premonition of what’s to come at the hands of a man such as Monckton. ‘An old woman’, the baronet Sir Robert Floyer opines, in terms redolent of the fops in Evelina, ‘is a person who has no sense of decency; if once she takes to living, the devil himself can’t get rid of her.’45
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