Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  I live a quiet Life, but not a pleasant one: My Children govern without loving me, my Servants devour & despise me, my Friends caress and censure me, my Money wastes in Expences I do not enjoy, and my Time in Trifles I do not approve. [E]very one is made Insolent, & no one Comfortable.9

  Essentially, she had already fixed on marrying Piozzi.

  Fanny Burney was the first to guess that Mrs Thrale had fallen in love, and was keen to appear sympathetic when the news was broken to her in Brighton. Queeney, however, made no attempt to conceal her disgust. Almost eighteen and in the marriage market herself, it is not surprising that she found her mother’s behaviour inappropriate. ‘[M]ade an Eldest son of’10 in her father’s will, with a fortune of about £50,000 (far more than her mother’s), she had taken on the role of guardian of the family honour. No doubt she felt that her mother would have been more suitably employed brokering marriages for her heiress daughters than indulging herself in a profoundly embarrassing liaison with the music-master. Fanny, too, was horrified at the prospect of scandal ahead. When Mrs Thrale, ‘in a Transport of Passion’ showed her the outpourings about Piozzi in her journal, Fanny’s response – when she had finished crying herself ‘half blind’ over them – was harsh behind its cajolery, as Mrs Thrale recorded:

  [Miss Burney] said there was no resisting such pathetic Eloquence, & that if she was the Daughter instead of the Friend, She should even be tempted to attend me to the Altar. [B]ut that while she possessed her Reason, nothing should seduce her to approve what Reason itself would condemn: that Children, Religion, Situation, Country & Character – besides the diminution of Fortune by the certain loss of 800£ a Year were too much to Sacrifice to any One Man.11

  Perhaps Fanny thought this little lecture (with its prudent parenthesis about income) would sway her friend, but as the months passed, Mrs Thrale’s ardour for Piozzi only increased, as did Queeney’s antipathy. Once rumours began to go round, the Thrale family friends and trustees marshalled their forces against the proposed Italian journey (on which Piozzi was to be guide), backing Queeney vigorously. The atmosphere in the household became extremely tense, Queeney coldly asserting that her mother was deluded, Mrs Thrale responding with impassioned pleadings, tears and fainting fits.

  Fanny, who was intimate with both parties and had heard all the gossip and slander going about, counselled Mrs Thrale to marry Piozzi immediately rather than damage her reputation – a very Burneyan solution – but the affair dragged on unresolved all year, Mrs Thrale torn between powerful self-interest and her sense of duty to her ‘unfeeling’ daughters. A terrible crisis seemed to have settled the matter by force majeure when in the spring of 1783 Mrs Thrale’s youngest child, four-year-old Harriet, died of measles and Cecilia, two years older, was stricken with whooping-cough. Piozzi, anxious to avoid the emotional fall-out, refused to see the distraught mother and left the country soon after, much to Mrs Thrale’s friends’ relief. But Hester sank into a stasis of unhappiness so alarming that Fanny feared a complete breakdown. Mrs Thrale had retreated to Bath, where she expected and craved Fanny’s company, but Dr Burney, anxious as ever to disassociate himself from anything ‘improper’, refused to let his daughter go to her.

  Fanny could not condone her friend’s passion for Piozzi, but defended her good nature. ‘Though her failings are unaccountable and most unhappy’, she wrote to Susan,12 ‘her virtues and good qualities […] would counterbalance a thousand more’. Privately, Fanny was shocked by the letters she was receiving almost daily from Bath: ‘Dear, lost, infatuated Soul! […] how can she suffer herself, noble-minded as she is, to be thus duped by ungovernable passions!’13 Indeed the spectacle of a mature woman giving vent to passionate feelings – even publicising them – sent a general shudder round polite society: ‘there must be really some degree of Insanity in that case’, Mrs Chapone wrote to William Weller Pepys, echoing Mrs Montagu’s verdict of ‘lunacy’, ‘for such mighty overbearing Passions are not natural in a “Matron’s bones”’.14

  In November Mrs Thrale collapsed after nursing her twelve-year-old daughter Sophia through a dangerous illness, and Queeney began to fear for her sanity as well as for her life. In the epic ego-struggle she had been playing out with Queeney, Mrs Thrale’s threat-cum-battle-cry, ‘Death or Piozzi!’, seemed about to come true. Before the end of the year, the family had agreed a compromise: Mrs Thrale could marry Piozzi as long as the four surviving children, now wards of court, did not have to live with her.

  What Piozzi thought about the matter is difficult to ascertain. Mrs Thrale was convinced of his regard for her, but to the outside world he seemed a cold and oddly undemonstrative lover (rather like Henry Thrale, in fact). Having heard at the end of 1783 that the marriage could go ahead, he waited months before setting out from Italy, and only arrived in England to claim his bride the following June. ‘The excuse of Roads, &c, makes me sad, – little as is my haste for his arrival’, Fanny wrote to Queeney in February 1784, ‘yet it seems to me such coolness; – did not my Father travel home through Italy in December?’15 The delay was profoundly humiliating to Mrs Thrale, and probably did more to disgust her friends than any of the former objections to Piozzi’s nationality, religion or profession.

  Though her behaviour was later vilified by Mrs Thrale, Fanny showed what seems sincere concern for her friend all through this emotionally charged and well-publicised affair. She was a consistent adviser and trustworthy confidante, refusing to tell even Susan about the details of the case until July 1784. She made no secret of her misgivings (which were, after all, no more than the obvious objections which Mrs Thrale herself had enumerated) yet withheld judgement on Piozzi, whom she admitted she hardly knew, leaving Mrs Thrale the benefit of the doubt about the reluctant bridegroom’s actual intentions. Right up to Mrs Thrale’s marriage to Piozzi at the end of July 1784, Fanny was her ‘sweet’ friend and mainstay, writing in the warmest terms to Susan about their ‘incurable affection’.16 A shocking reversal was in store, as Fanny described in a letter to Queeney written fourteen years later:

  [Mrs Thrale] bore all my opposition – which was regularly the strongest the utmost efforts of my stretched faculties could give – with a gentleness, nay a deference the most touching to me – till the marriage was over – And then – to my never ending astonishment, in return to the constrained & painful letter I forced myself to write of my good wishes – she sent me a cold, frigid, reproachful answer, in entirely a new style to any I had ever received from her, to upbraid me that my congratulations were not hearty! As if I could write congratulations at all! or meant to write! How gross must have been such hypocrisy!17

  Dr Johnson had ranted against the remarriage, Dr Burney had cringed at it, but though they and some of Mrs Thrale’s other male friends did far less to accommodate the match than did Fanny, Fanny’s inability to write a sufficiently artificial note that could be read with complacency by both Mr and Mrs Piozzi was judged so ungenerous that it cost her the whole friendship. After one more exchange of letters, she was dropped, abruptly and completely. ‘I am convinced from the moment of the nuptials she shewed him [Piozzi] all my Letters, & probably attributed to me every obstacle that he had found in his way’, Fanny wrote to Queeney in 1798, trying to account for it.18

  The very fact that Fanny was entering into explanations like this so long after the event rather scotches the idea that she and Queeney had been in cahoots at the time. Her friendship with Queeney lasted a lifetime and in many ways suited Fanny better than the friendship with Hester, though it lacked the alluring ardour and aggravation of the latter. It was based on mutual esteem and shared remembrance of the old days at Streatham, but there was a cause for real sympathy too. Mrs Thrale’s alliance with Piozzi (rich middle-aged widow marries badly-off middle-aged professional musician) was almost a replica of the match between Mrs Elizabeth Allen and Charles Burney. Dr Burney could not have failed to make the connection himself, though his condemnation of the Piozzi marriage seems particularly hypocritical i
n this context.

  Fanny too was aware of the parallels, and they stretched her sympathies all ways. Given her professed view of Mrs Allen having made the running with the widower Charles Burney, Piozzi must have seemed in many ways like her father; Mrs Thrale, her admired friend, was, on the other hand, taking up the disgraceful role of impassioned matron. Ultimately, Fanny could not condemn or condone either of them. The only person for whom she could feel unreservedly sorry was Queeney, who like Fanny herself had been forced to contemplate not simply the existence but the power of a parent’s sexuality. She had had to witness the apparent betrayal of a beloved dead parent by the living one, and accept changes which she thoroughly disapproved. Fanny and her sisters seem to have suffered their stepmother as a kind of purgatory which proved how much they loved their father, but theirs was a muddled kind of moralism compared with Queeney’s unequivocal denunciation of her mother. Fanny more than forgave her father’s faults, she glorified them – as we shall see in the history of her biography of him – but the fact that she never criticised Queeney’s treatment of Mrs Thrale is interesting. In Queeney’s abusive resistance to the changes foisted on her by her mother’s remarriage, Fanny might possibly have found something to admire.

  In the way of such things, it took some months for Fanny to realise that she was not going to hear from Mrs Piozzi again. The loss of her friend came at a particularly difficult time (as her reference to her ‘stretched faculties’ hints), when Fanny was still mourning for Crisp, anxious about Susan and sadly witnessing the decline of Dr Johnson. The great Lexophanes never completely recovered from a stroke in 1783, and on his return to London from Lichfield in the summer of 1784 sank steadily. Fanny had visited him at his home in Bolt Court several times the previous autumn, but Johnson still felt neglected. Her prim excuse (in her diary) for staying away was that the house was usually too full of male visitors for her to call on Johnson in comfort now that old Anna Williams was dead and could not act as chaperone. It is just as likely that she shrank from the prospect of hearing Johnson’s views of the Piozzi scandal. William Seward (whom Fanny might also have been trying to avoid) was always attempting to sound her on this subject, and other old acquaintances of Mrs Thrale, such as Lady Frances Burgoyne, seemed to think that Fanny, as proxy to the errant widow, deserved ‘painful conferences’19 of recrimination. In the last ever interview she had alone with Samuel Johnson, Fanny tentatively introduced the subject of Mrs Thrale, presumably hoping that her two old friends could make peace before Johnson died. She got a dusty answer.

  I had seen Miss T. the day before.

  ‘So,’ said he, ‘did I.’

  I then said, ‘Do you ever, sir, hear from her mother?’

  ‘No,’ cried he, ‘nor write to her. I drive her quite from my mind. If I meet with one of her letters, I burn it instantly. I have burnt all I can find. I never speak of her, and I desire never to hear of her more. I drive her, as I said, wholly from my mind.’20

  This was on 28 November 1784. Fanny made several more attempts to see Johnson, but he was by then too ill to see her. Bolt Court was full of people trying to pay their last respects or catch the great man’s dying words. On one occasion, Fanny waited alone in a cold parlour rather than have to talk to anyone else, and hovered on the stairs for reports from the sick-room from Johnson’s manservant Frank Barber.

  Johnson’s obvious fear of death troubled Fanny profoundly: ‘Good and excellent as he is, how can he so fear death?’ she wrote, revealing – along with great unworldliness – her own powerful if narrow-minded piety; ‘Alas, my Susy, how awful is that idea!’21 Three days before Johnson died on 13 December, she was relieved to hear reports of his apparent change of mind ‘from its dark horror’. ‘Good, and pious, and excellent Christian – who shall feel [hope] if not he?’22 Despite this professed confidence in the afterlife, Fanny rather proudly noted that on the day of the funeral ‘I could not keep my eyes dry all day’. As with many of her contemporaries in that sentimental era, Fanny’s capacity for ‘feeling’ overrode strictly pious behaviour, a tendency that was to be heartily condemned by the coming generation of evangelically-minded Burneys.

  Ten days after Johnson’s funeral, Fanny went to a party at Mrs Chapone’s, the first she had attended in months, but she felt very subdued. ‘How melancholy will all these circumstances render these once so pleasant meetings’, she wrote in her diary, referring to the deaths and losses of the past year. Something else was weighing on her spirits, though, which was all the worse for having, in its beginnings, held out the promise of better days to come. All the time during which Mrs Thrale had been agonising over Piozzi, Fanny herself had been suffering the long-drawn-out agonies of an unrequited love that left her depressed, embittered and, probably for the first time in her life, feeling bleak about the future.

  The man she had fallen in love with was a twenty-eight-year-old cleric called George Owen Cambridge, whom she had met among the Blue-stockings. In the early 1780s the Blue-stocking ‘Club’ – deliberately not a men’s-style, exclusive club at all – was at the height of its modishness, and Fanny was a regular at ‘Blue’ parties held by Elizabeth Vesey, eccentric wife of the MP Agmondesham Vesey. Mrs Vesey’s set included Mrs Garrick, Burke, Reynolds and Horace Walpole, the most flamboyant literary figure of the day, whom Fanny described as ‘gay, though caustic; polite, though sneering; and entertainingly epigrammatical’.23 Mrs Vesey fancied herself less stuffy than her rivals Mrs Montagu and Mrs Boscawen. At her soirées, the chairs were placed in odd groupings round the room to break the convention of sitting in a circle, as Hannah More described in her comic poem ‘The Bas Bleu’, dedicated to the hostess:

  See VESEY’s plastic genius make

  A Circle every figure take,

  Nay, shapes and forms, which wou’d defy

  All Science of Geometry.24

  As a result, ‘Away dull Ceremony flew’: a dozen different conversations could be going on simultaneously, generating a sense of vivacity and plenty of noise. Horace Walpole called Mrs Vesey’s overcrowded parties ‘Babels’ or ‘Chaos’,25 and Fanny records evenings of ‘almost riotous gaiety’ at Mrs Vesey’s house. It was not in the least like Streatham: the hostess was more an object of amusement than a wit in her own right, artlessly trying on Lady Spencer’s strange new hearing aids – ear-shapes in silver – which dropped out whenever she moved, or lamenting the death of a new friend in absurd terms: ‘“It’s a very disagreeable thing, I think,” said she, “when one has just made acquaintance with anybody, and likes them, to have them die.”’ As Fanny recorded, ‘This speech set me grinning so irresistibly, that I was forced to begin filliping off the crumbs of the macaroon cake from my muff, for an excuse for looking down.’26

  That ‘Blue’ parties had lost something of their original intensity and pretentiousness shows how much more relaxed women writers had become about their status during the preceding decade. Hannah More’s ‘The Bas Bleu’, which was circulating in manuscript at the end of 1783, emphasises the pleasure that female ‘kindred souls’ were beginning to find in ‘alliance’; a slightly surprising tribute to sisterhood from the woman who was later one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s loudest and most persistent critics. The poem mentions many of the ‘Blues’ by name, and ends with a description of a Blue party’s vital ingredient, ‘Attention’, which William Weller Pepys thought was a portrait of Fanny Burney:

  Mute Angel, yes: thy looks dispense

  The silence of intelligence;

  Thy graceful form I well discern,

  In act to listen and to learn:

  ’Tis Thou for talents shalt obtain

  That pardon Wit would hope in vain.27

  ‘The compliment is preposterous, because the description is the most flattering’, Fanny wrote in her journal,28 though it is easy to see how Pepys made his guess – Fanny had always been a good watcher and listener, absorbed by the minutiae of her own and other people’s behaviour. Observation had been the basis of her art as well as t
he source of her neuroses – she was all ‘Attention’. This habit of observing was to cause her great pain in the affair with George Cambridge. She would have been much happier both during and after the whole business if she had been less consciously alert.

  The first thing that Fanny did not fail to notice about Cambridge was that he and his father, the wit Richard Owen Cambridge, always seemed to be present at Mrs Vesey’s when she herself was invited, and she soon began to believe they were seeking her out on purpose. Richard Owen Cambridge, well-known in his day as the author of a satirical poem, ‘The Scribleriad’, and editor of a magazine called The World, was rich, cultivated and owned a large house by the river at Twickenham; his son George, later Rector of Elme and Archdeacon of Middlesex, was three years younger than Fanny, handsome, intelligent and modest. What attracted Fanny to him were his extremely good manners and his apparent sensitivity, though in the light of what happened – or rather, didn’t happen – later, perhaps she was misreading even these early signs. Young Cambridge forbore to talk about her novels, so Fanny imagined he understood her better than anyone else:

  He neither looks at me with any curiosity, nor speaks to me with any air of expectation; two most insufferable honours, which I am continually receiving. […] If I met with more folks who would talk to me upon such rational terms, – […] with how infinitely more ease and pleasure should I make one in those conversations!29