Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  Money and the movement of money between different levels of society is viewed with profound cynicism: the £20 owed to indigent Mrs Hill by the supposedly rich but spendthrift Harrels comes to symbolise the inequity in fact and in law between the various classes. The sum is too small to register in the minds of the Harrels; they depend on credit for everything and live at the expense of people like the Hills, too poor to be able to be bankrupt (a theme Burney returned to on a grand scale in The Wanderer). The Harrels are essentially money-addicts, constantly extorting cash from their ward and spending it in absurdly extravagant ways, such as the masquerade,* a triumph of surface over substance. Harrel’s repeated threats to commit suicide tire even the susceptible heroine after a time, but his dramatic death at Vauxhall Gardens comes as all the more of a shock because of it. Mr Briggs (supposedly a portrait of the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, a friend of the Burneys whose parsimony was legendary), another of Cecilia’s guardians, shows the same pathological attitude to money, but with very different symptoms: he is so mean that he loves even his own dirt as a kind of crop (it indicates how much he has saved on soap), and is commodity-minded about everything, from the chances of getting Cecilia a husband – ‘Not very easy, neither; hard times! men scarce! wars and tumults! stocks low! women chargeable!’46 – to the very language he uses, pared down to its miserliest forms.

  Cecilia’s awareness of class, money and birth is acute, as it was for the author: she understands exactly her position relative to genteel but poor Henrietta Belfield and proud Mrs Delvile (a strong character based fairly obviously on Hester Thrale). When Cecilia finally takes possession of her estate, which has been eroded and threatened by her guardians during her minority, Burney has a chance to suggest how virtuous people with access to money (specifically, women) might affect society at large for the good. Cecilia coming into her inheritance is a protracted feminist fantasy of self-determination; all a woman needs, Burney seems to be saying, is several thousand a year and an estate of one’s own.

  Cecilia, which is set in the year of its composition, 1780, and contains many up-to-the-minute fashion and artistic references (including a homage to the singer Pacchierotti, a friend of the Burneys), draws on aspects of haut-bourgeois life observed by Fanny since her rise to fame. The kinds of conversation she had been recording in her Brighton and Bath journals appear in sharper focus here, coming from the mouths of a wide cast of society women, wits and misanthropes, such as the worldly Monckton, garrulous Miss Larolles (a favourite of Jane Austen) and spirited, sardonic Lady Honoria Pemberton. However, the middle-class characters proved again to be Burney’s forte: Mrs Belfield is a wonderful study in misplaced ambition, Simkins in Uriah Heep-like cringing and Hobson the acme of a successful tradesman’s complacent vulgarity:

  I take every morning a large bowl of water, and souse my whole head in it; and then when I’ve rubbed it dry, on goes my wig, and I am quite fresh and agreeable: and then I take a walk in Tottenham Court Road as far as the Tabernacle, or thereabouts, and snuff in a little fresh country air, and then I come back, with a good wholesome appetite, and in a fine breathing heat, asking the young lady’s pardon; and I enjoy my pot of fresh tea, and my round of hot toast and butter, with as good a relish as if I was a Prince.47

  Burney’s dealings with booksellers produced some gentle satire on the trade; she was obviously thinking of Lowndes and his twenty guineas when a bookseller in Cecilia says, ‘we pay very handsomely for things of any merit, especially if they deal smartly in a few touches of the times’,48 and of her own career when she observes that authors ‘must feel our way, with some little smart jeu d’esprit before we undertake a great work’.49

  The range of characters, themes and incidents in Cecilia makes one suspect that Dickens as well as Thackeray (who admitted his debt to Burney) learned something from this remarkable novel, unjustly considered in our own day the inferior of its predecessor. Apart from having a thoroughly absorbing story, Cecilia contains touches of psychological realism that were truly novel. In the following passage, the lovers have just been parted after Delvile’s duel with Monckton:

  Grief and horror for what was past, apprehension and suspense for what was to come, so disordered her whole frame, so confused even her intellects, that when not all the assistance of fancy could persuade her she still heard the footsteps of Delvile, she went to the chair upon which he had been seated, and taking possession of it, sat with her arms crossed, silent, quiet and erect, almost vacant of all thought, yet with a secret idea she was doing something right.50

  This brilliant description of the kind of torpor brought on by shock, with Cecilia straining to hear the lost footsteps and instinctively taking shelter in the chair where Delvile last sat, shows Burney’s imagination and worldly knowledge in perfect unison. That the set-piece scenes of violence and dramatic action in Cecilia (such as Harrel’s suicide, Mrs Delvile bloodily bursting with emotion and Cecilia running mad through the streets of London) develop from realistic beginnings such as this explains why Cecilia is such a powerful book, never being overset by its own melodrama (of which there is plenty towards the end) and only once, in the tableau of weeping children around the heroine’s sickbed, seriously lapsing into sentimentality.

  The excessive speed at which Fanny composed this monumental work increased her fears for its reception, and as with Evelina, she sought to deflect criticism in an introduction, cast as a fable of Genius and Vanity. Possibly because it went much further than a conventional ‘curtseying preface’, Fanny eventually decided not to publish the piece; significantly, it shows her awareness of what a modern psychologist would call the problem of self-appointment. She identifies herself with the ranks of authors who have Inclination (to the point of excess) rather than Ability, which is an ‘unconscious’ gift to few, who ‘possess [it] without effort, & […] without trouble’.51 To authors like herself, writing is far from trouble-free – it is a kind of drug which both agitates and dissatisfies the addict/writer: ‘his accustomed occupations become irksome, his former pleasures, insipid; the smallest praise has powers to enchant, the slightest criticism to distract him’. This was admitting too much for comfort. Begun as a pre-emptive strike against the Critical, the Monthly and the Gentleman’s Reviews, Fanny’s introduction to Cecilia had somehow turned into a statement of her own vulnerability: ‘all [the youthful author’s] ideas of Happiness & of Misery are centred in Fame & Disgrace, & in the Author, the Man is lost’.

  Fame and disgrace haunted Fanny as much as ever, though she had, fortunately, developed some tolerance of publicity since the publication of Evelina. She could now hear out strangers’ praise with polite resignation, be ‘attacked and catechised’ by the curious without running out of the room, and sounded almost pleased to be ‘poked […] in with all the belles esprits’ in some verses about contemporary women writers that appeared anonymously in the Morning Herald. Perhaps she knew, or suspected, that the author was in fact her own father.* He was almost bursting with pride and had bragged to half of London about his daughter’s forthcoming book (Mrs Thrale dealt with the other half): ‘he is fond of [Cecilia] to enthusiasm, and does not forsee the danger of raising such general expectation’, Fanny wrote anxiously to Susan.53 Though she was not named on the title-page, Fanny’s authorship of Cecilia was known to everyone well before publication. But Charles Burney was enjoying the advantages of Fanny’s success too much to be discreet about it. He had been invited to Court (where he hoped to be appointed soon as Master of the King’s Band) and, as Crisp reported, was ‘now at the Top of the Ton. He is continually invited to all the great Tables, and parties, to meet the Wits and Grandees, without the least reference to Music.’54

  Dr Burney had sold the copyright of the novel to the bookseller Thomas Payne while Fanny, as bridesmaid, was accompanying Susan and her husband on their honeymoon at Chesington in January 1782. The Burneys and Paynes were already on friendly terms. James was paying court to Payne’s younger daughter, Sally, and married her three
years later. Perhaps this introduced too great an element of goodwill into the sale of Cecilia. Payne paid £250 for the copyright, a sum Crisp marvelled at, but which was once again underselling Fanny’s work considerably. Dr Burney and his daughter were naively surprised to discover later that Payne’s first edition of Cecilia was of two thousand copies, four times that of Evelina, and that his profits from that edition alone would have been in the region of £500 (as calculated by Dr Johnson).

  Fanny rushed to copy and revise her manuscript during the first half of the year, and Payne printed up each volume hot from her hands. ‘I would it were in my power to defer the whole publication to another spring’, Fanny wrote to Crisp, frustrated at the lack of time she had to polish the work, ‘but I am sure my father would run crazy if I made such a proposal’.55 The book was published in June 1782 and sold out almost immediately. Cecilia seemed to please everyone, the reviewers, the ton and the intellectuals – Edward Gibbon purportedly read it in one sitting and Burke, the foremost orator of the day, thought so highly of it that he wrote the novelist a fan letter, offering his ‘best thanks for the very great instruction and entertainment I have received from the new present you have bestowed on the public’.56 The morality of the book also won the approval of Mrs Delany, a highly respectable elderly authoress who was close to the Royal Family, and probably through her recommendation Cecilia came to the notice of the Queen, who, after having it vetted by a bishop, allowed her daughters to read it – the first novel ever to penetrate that far into the Royal Household.

  Crisp was impressed not just by the very favourable critical reception of Cecilia, but by its material success, noting with approval that the publishers Payne and Cadell were intending to present the author with a ‘handsome pair of Gloves’ over and above the ‘bare price stipulated’ of £250.57 Two months after the publication of the novel, Crisp arranged his own treat for Fanny. He commissioned a portrait of her by her talented cousin Edward, who arrived at Chesington Hall in August with a carriage-load of materials and produced the charming, ‘horribly flattering’ portrait in Van Dyke dress which now hangs in the gallery at Parham Park, Sussex. Crisp also sat to Edward Burney that summer, his portrait finding its way into Fanny’s possession in 1792 on the death of Kitty Cooke. Perhaps he commissioned it because he suspected he hadn’t much longer to live. He had been a martyr to gout and rheumatism for years (he and his sister Mrs Gast were even thinking of trying out the new-fangled electrification treatment for the latter), but in the early months of 1783 he went into decline. When he died in April the whole Burney family was plunged into grief for the loss of their kind, cultured and benevolent friend. ‘That all but matchless man’ continued to haunt Fanny’s works in various guises, but the old retreat of Chesington Hall was never the same again.

  * * *

  * Astonishingly he was not executed for his incitement of the mob, but lived long enough to become a convert to Judaism.

  * Phillips and Burney must have viewed with amazement and anger the relative ease with which Williamson found subsequent promotion in the Navy. While Burney’s petitions for work in the 1790s fell on deaf ears, Williamson was honoured with the command of the Agincourt in the action later known as the battle of Camperdown in October 1797. In strange repetition of his abandonment of the shore party at Kealakekua Bay, Williamson removed the Agincourt from the action, leaving the Ardent, on which many died, unsupported. At his court martial in December that year, charges of ‘cowardice and disaffection’ were not proved, but negligence was ‘proved in part’ and Williamson was rendered incapable of ever serving again.16

  * James Burney was buried at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in 1821 and Molesworth Phillips in 1832, but there is no record of the gravestone positions or memorial inscriptions of either. The churchyard was grassed over in 1881.

  * Johnson’s remark could be seen as a rather slovenly generalisation; he had only read one volume of Cecilia at the time and, as with Evelina, there is no proof he ever finished reading the novel. Macaulay’s conviction, expressed in his famous review of Madame D’Arblay’s Diary and Letters and repeated by many later commentators, that Johnson helped revise the manuscript, even wrote parts of it, is wholly untenable.

  * George Austen, sending his daughter Jane’s first novel to the publisher Cadell, specifically described it as ‘about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina’.43

  * See Chapter 3.

  * This was proved by the discovery of the manuscript, with corrections and additions, among his posthumous papers. Fanny noted at the time of their publication that her father ‘carries them constantly in his pocket, and reads them to every body!’,52 but imagined that his pride derived from seeing ‘Little Burney’s quick discerning’ lauded in print.

  8

  Change and Decay

  Since the death of her husband, Mrs Thrale’s future had been the subject of speculation in London society. She was still only forty, witty, famous and presumed very rich (though her finances in fact took a sharp downward turn in 1782 because of the resolution of an old family lawsuit). Although nothing was less likely, many outsiders were convinced that she and Dr Johnson would marry; Boswell was mischievously suggesting it as soon as Henry Thrale’s funeral was over,* and her name had been linked with Johnson’s in the newspapers, as well as with William Seward, the brewer Samuel Whitbread and Queeney’s admirer Jeremiah Crutchley. ‘Deluged with proposals’ as she was,2 Mrs Thrale declared firmly that she had no intention of marrying again except for love; and love was something she claimed never to have experienced.3 To the members of her coterie, however, the prospects of Mrs Thrale remarrying or Mrs Thrale staying single were equally alarming. Either way the charmed circle at Streatham Park was doomed to break up.

  All through 1782 it was clear that Johnson’s dependence on Mrs Thrale was beginning to grate on her nerves. Age and infirmity were turning the venerable Doctor into something of a liability, and the difficulties of looking after him, overseeing Thrale’s estate, dealing with the executors (of whom Johnson was one) and her continuing lawsuit made Hester restless and unhappy. In the autumn she took the dramatic decision to go and live in Italy for three years with her daughters, to give up the London house they had been renting and to let Streatham Park to Lord Shelburne.

  The news stunned her friends. Fanny Burney, like most of them, had come to look on Streatham as ‘my other home, and the place where I have long thought my residence dependent only upon my own pleasure’, as she told Susan. ‘If I was to begin with talking of my loss, my strangeness, […] I should never have done.’4 And if Fanny, who had known the family such a short time, felt this strongly, how much more devastating a loss it was for Samuel Johnson, who had been protected by the Thrales for more than fifteen years.

  Johnson’s bitterness at his abrupt abandonment increased his irascibility and caused some painful scenes when Mrs Thrale, Fanny Burney and he were visiting Brighton together that autumn. He humiliated one old acquaintance in company and snapped at another; ‘[he] has really frightened all the people, till they almost ran from him’, Fanny reported in November,5 noting that ‘Mrs Thrale fares worse than any body.’ Johnson was pointedly excluded from almost all the party’s evening invitations and got so tired of being left on his own at the lodgings that he even attended a ball one evening, saying pathetically, ‘it cannot be worse than being alone’6 (a sentiment with which Fanny heartily disagreed). He was still benevolent towards his ‘little Burney’ and planted noisy kisses on her cheeks, but it is not to her credit that in return she was beginning to feel embarrassed to be seen in the sick old man’s company, and disloyally tried to avoid sitting next to him on one occasion because of ‘the staring attention he attracts both for himself and all with whom he talks’.7

  Mrs Thrale’s restlessness and her choice of Italy as destination were due to her increasing regard for the singer Gabriel Piozzi, who had become a regular visitor to Streatham in 1780 when he was appointed Queeney’s singing-master. Since their u
npropitious introduction at the Burneys’ house two years before, Mrs Thrale had radically changed her view of the elegant Italian, whose company had helped cheer and divert her through the difficult last months of Henry Thrale’s life. For his part, Piozzi was grateful to Mrs Thrale for her respectful (if rather ignorant) appreciation of his talents, having been treated as little better than a mountebank by aristocratic patrons in the past. Piozzi’s protracted absence in 1781 during the early months of Mrs Thrale’s widowhood only served to confirm her admiration of him. She had developed a strange fantasy, based on his supposed resemblance to her father, that Piozzi was her secret half-brother. It was a way to displace and perhaps diffuse the strong feelings Piozzi’s company aroused in her, ‘emotions one would not be without’, as she put it rather forensically, ‘though inconvenient enough sometimes’.8 Just how ‘inconvenient’ remained to be seen. Mrs Thrale soon came to perceive Piozzi as the man who could transform her life, her ideal companion. She foresaw with clarity all the objections that would be raised at the suggestion of a match with someone so far below her in class, ‘parts’ and wealth, and listed the drawbacks carefully in Thraliana, but concluded: