Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  Nothing could have been more likely to win Fanny’s admiration than delicacy about her authorship. George Cambridge was present one evening in January 1783 at the house of Tory hostess Anna Ord when the writer Soame Jenyns set about Fanny with ‘an eulogy unrivalled’ of Cecilia that ‘would have drawn blushes into the cheeks of Agujari or Garrick’.30 Mr Cambridge senior protested that she should not feel embarrassed by such attention from a man of judgement and sense like Jenyns, but this was no comfort to Fanny. His son, however, came over to her as the party was breaking up and said how sorry he had been on her behalf. The next morning he called at St Martin’s Street and engaged her in charming, but general, conversation – all of which she noted down word for word in her journal. It was perfect conduct-book behaviour.

  In the circles Fanny and George frequented, any possible romance was sure to be anticipated, encouraged (or deplored), commented upon and generally overseen by their friends. George Cambridge’s admiration for Miss Burney, and hers for him, were obvious to most observers very early on. He seemed to follow her everywhere; they laughed at the same things, finished each other’s sentences, had ‘the same expression, & same smile!’31 It was no surprise to their friends (though a dreadful shock to Fanny) when their names were linked in a newspaper gossip item in the spring of 1783.32 Casting round to guess which of the ‘Blues’ could have betrayed them to the papers so disloyally, Fanny suspected William Weller Pepys again, the man to whom she had attributed some satirical verses about learned ladies in the Morning Herald the previous year which mentioned her.33 But the critic Margaret Anne Doody has suggested the paragraph could, like the poem, quite easily have been the work of Charles Burney, perhaps hoping to spur young Mr Cambridge into action.* Whoever published the gossip about Fanny and George, it had no effect on the young cleric’s behaviour, which was as pleasant, partial and as provokingly non-committal as before.

  In the meantime, George’s father had become such an ardent admirer of Fanny that many of her friends began to suspect he was in love with her. When the Cambridges invited Fanny and her parents to Twickenham Meadows for a day in the summer of 1783, the whole family must have thought of it as the start of pre-nuptial socialising; but what Mr Cambridge had in mind was a tête-à-tête with the authoress of Cecilia, whom he monopolised shamelessly the whole time. All his conversation came round to her book. All the felicity of his life, he said, consisted in female society. What a pity she could not stay a month, he said, rather than just a day. Her sister, Mrs Phillips … now there was another very attractive woman.

  The slowness with which the ‘romance’ between Fanny and George Cambridge progressed puzzled everyone, Fanny most of all. Even her published diaries, carefully pruned of embarrassing revelations, show how soon in the friendship she began to note down signs of ‘Mr G.C.’s preference for her. Her unpublished journals go much further, revealing how ‘tremblingly alive’ she was to his every word and gesture, and what elaborate feats of interpretation she could perform in order to corroborate her inner conviction that he was as much in love with her as she was with him. Susan, the recipient of dozens of tormented letters on the subject of ‘G.C.’, surely found it as painful as we do to read page after page of feverish wishful-thinking such as this: ‘I am greatly mistaken if he was pleased at seeing me […] decamping. […] If you had seen with how irresolute an air he followed me in my retreat with his Eye, & turned entirely round to look after me, you must have concluded he was provoked at my departing in such a manner’;34 or this: ‘His smile, indeed, had as much of pain as of pleasure in its expression; – what it meant, I can not tell, but it was a look of so much unaccountable consciousness as I cannot easily, if ever, forget.’35

  Over the months of their acquaintance – spreading alarmingly into years – Fanny became convinced that it could only be a matter of time until George Cambridge declared himself. Pathetically and humiliatingly, she hung on in the belief that only delicacy and sensitivity (which she imagined he had in great store) were holding him back. No proposal ever took place, though Fanny thought he ‘seemed irrepressibly attached to me, – and has been deemed honourably serious by all our mutual acquaintance’.36 Seemed, deemed – her disbelief is palpable, added to which was the shame of ‘all our mutual acquaintance’ thinking likewise. Fanny became more puzzled when she tried to analyse his behaviour, which she considered ‘long past all mere impeachment of trifling’, but George Cambridge’s manners must have been smooth and plausible enough to conceal anything:

  He loves me? I said internally, else he would not return in less than a week. No, he means nothing. Yet so interested his air & look, so gay, animated, & undisguised the pleasure he received in our conversation […] How astonishingly does he deceive me, if he went not from the House impressed with the most flattering sensations towards me … Yet firmly I believe I am deceived.37

  Of course the last thing Fanny could do to bring matters to a head was act: the courtship process required real or affected passivity from women until some sort of declaration had come from the man. And yet in the situation she found herself relative to George Cambridge, he was the effeminately passive party, she the ardent, watchful lover. It is interesting that in her next novel, Camilla, which is in effect a lengthy dramatisation of the difficulties of interpreting love-signals, it is the hero Edgar, not the heroine, who experiences the kind of bewilderment that Fanny herself experienced over George Cambridge.

  In January 1784, George’s sister Kitty was mortally ill, and Mr Cambridge broke the news to Fanny with a warning for her to ‘bear up against this misfortune as he did’.38 Fanny had but one fault, Mr Cambridge declared, ‘and that is too much feeling. You must repress that, therefore, as much as you can’. Though this was primarily advice about how to brace herself for the death of his daughter, it is possible to see in Mr Cambridge’s words a veiled caution about ‘too much feeling’ with respect to his son, too. But Fanny was by this time in the grip of an obsession which no amount of advice or rationalising could ameliorate. She had tried snubbing George – he looked hurt; she tried avoiding him – he turned up uninvited; she tried to banish all thought of him from her mind – and found her mind filling up again with anxious fourth and fifth thoughts. Truly, hope deferred maketh the heart sick. While Mrs Thrale waited for her tardy lover to join her in Bath, Fanny Burney was in just as fervid and unhappy a state of mind, though instead of coolness, poor Fanny had to suffer ‘torturing uncertainties’ from George Cambridge’s unremitting but ultimately meaningless attentions. Though she congratulated herself that her behaviour towards him had been exemplary, the passions he had secretly aroused in her were hardly less strong than the passion she had so loudly criticised in Mrs Thrale.

  At several times during those three years she felt intensely bitter about the insensitivity of the ‘sensitive’ young cleric, yet guilty that her own assumptions had possibly been too forward, too ‘knowing’ and indecorous, inviting cynical interpretation, like Swift’s of the apparently coy female blush. She vacillated between thinking that the whole affair had been a dreadful delusion on her part and that Cambridge had in fact practised ‘endless deceit & treachery’ on her.39 In the spring of 1784, her nosy and prudish friend Anna Ord had heard definite rumours that the couple were about to marry, which provoked this outburst from Fanny to her sister, full of angry emphases:

  some thing must have been very wrong in somebody’s management, & I will not think it my own! – Neither, indeed, could it be my own; – were the rumour the effect of my behaviour, it could only be called a flirtation, – a coqueting, – &c., – a Marriage is never settled but in consequence of conclusions from the Man’s behaviour.40

  Cambridge’s ‘behaviour’ seems to have been made up of gestures rather than words. If – as is highly unlikely – he and Fanny ever discussed their feelings for each other, no record remains of it. The wordlessness of the affair was its most torturing aspect for Fanny, endlessly keeping the interpretation of ‘G.C.’ open to question. Ther
e was a neurotic element to this that seeped into her work in a particularly damaging way. Her later novels are clogged with details of physical gestures, as if ‘conduct’ in its most literal, physical forms was of more interest to her than action, and could provide a satisfactory substitute for plot and character. Camilla can be read as a dictionary of body-language, much of it casual or meaningless, The Wanderer as the ultimate novel of inaction, a book in which the heroine’s ideas of propriety induce a wordless, sighing, glancing, blushing stasis.

  Despite several attempts to forget all about George Cambridge, Fanny kept meeting him in company, and the wounds of the affair did not heal for years. In the meantime, her siblings were moving on, and with the prospect of marriage and Twickenham Meadows receding, Fanny was in danger of being stranded for ever at St Martin’s Street with only her father, stepmother and unsympathetic half-sister Sarah for company. Charles Burney junior had married in 1783. Having failed to get accepted for ordination, he had become a schoolmaster in Chiswick, where he fell in love with the headmaster’s daughter, Sarah Rose (known in the family as ‘Rosette’). On his father-in-law’s death three years later, Charles took over the school, moved it from Chiswick to Hammersmith, and at last began to build up his career as a schoolmaster and classical scholar.

  James’s career, on the other hand, had been going downhill since his voyages with Cook and his uninspiring stint as Captain of the Latona. In 1782 he had been appointed Captain of the Bristol, head of a convoy of East India Company supply ships bound for India via the Cape of Good Hope. This was his last commission; James was brought home in June 1785, ostensibly on grounds of ill-health (a ‘chronic liver obstruction’, according to the log41) and was retired on half-pay the same year, aged thirty-five. Dr Burney was still angry about this more than twenty years later, blaming James’s liberal politics (and possibly loud mouth) for his inability to rise in the navy: ‘Painism & politics had been his ruin’, the Doctor wrote warningly to Charles junior in 1808, ‘instead of being an admiral to wch his standing entitled him […] he was upbraided for his political principles – & laid on the shelf for the rest of his life.’42

  Certainly, James’s humanitarianism cannot have endeared him to the authorities during the naval mutinies of the mid-1790s, when he sent a defence of the seamen’s position (unsolicited, of course) to the First Lord of the Admiralty. Justice demanded a more equitable distribution of prize money between officers and men, he wrote, more liberty on shore and a closer check on punishments, the misapplication of which ‘is too well known to require proof. I served in a ship where every one of the maintopmen were stripped and flogged at the gangway for no other cause than that another ship in company got her topgallant yards up first, and not for any wilful negligence on the part of our men’.43 This kind of outspokenness must have infuriated cautious Dr Burney, but, as Joyce Hemlow points out in her edition of Fanny Burney’s Journals and Letters, he probably never knew that James had given the Admiralty far more solid grounds to dismiss him, since he had been guilty of disobeying orders.44 How is not entirely clear, but the Bristol’s movements around the Indian coast seem more erratic than were strictly necessary to avoid the French forces under Suffren which were patrolling the waters around Ceylon. Unlike the soldierly Molesworth Phillips, James Burney was not anxious to get advancement through military glory (he played a very minor part in the action off Cuddalore in June 1783), but kept his eye on the main chance. Fanny artlessly mentions in her 1771 diary the fact that James had taken private ‘merchandise’ with him on his first trip to India.45 Perhaps he was indulging again in a spot of private trading in the 1780s, and perhaps there was more of the would-be wheeler-dealer in ‘Admiral Jem’ than has survived in the family records.

  Whatever his actual insubordination,* James’s naval career was over by 1785, and he seems to have known it – the huge travel expenses he claimed for his home journey from Weymouth to London have the look of an act of spite against the Admiralty. As soon as he got back, he retreated to Chesington, which even without Crisp was where he felt most at home. His wedding with Sally Payne took place at Chesington Church in September. Bride and groom were both described in the register as being ‘of this parish’; Sally had in fact moved out to Chesington Hall the month before, which is perhaps why neither Dr Burney nor Fanny attended the wedding. James and Sally’s first baby, Catherine (known as Kitty) was christened in the same church ten months later; her date of birth is unknown. The couple settled at Chesington Hall for several years, much to the pleasure of the ageing Mrs Hamilton and Kitty Cooke, after whom, presumably, the baby was named.

  The week before James returned to England in 1785, another ship from India had landed, carrying the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, fetched home to stand trial for fraud in what was to become the most famous and long-running legal battle of the period. With Hastings was his personal surgeon and confidant, forty-one-year-old Dr Clement Francis, who nursed an interesting secret ambition. He had read a novel called Evelina while he was in India, and admired it so much he had resolved to marry its authoress. He had probably met James Burney at some time in the previous three years; it is hard to see how he could otherwise have gained an introduction to the household in St Martin’s Street as quickly as he did. It was not the authoress of the family, however, with whom he forged a rapport, but her younger sister Charlotte. Clement Francis was sixteen or seventeen years her senior, but this didn’t seem to put Charlotte off, and his income must have been enough to satisfy Dr Burney because, unlike in Hetty’s and Susan’s cases, no objections were made to the match. The couple married in February 1786 and settled in Norfolk. Recalling the wedding day, Susan wrote to Charlotte of Fanny’s unenviable fate, returning to ‘that solitary Newton House!’48 Without cheerful Charlotte, it would be solitary indeed.

  With the new marriages came children: Charles’s wife gave birth to their only child, Charles Parr Burney, in 1785, and Charlotte’s first baby, a girl with her own name (who grew up to be the first editor of her aunt’s diaries), was born, like her cousin Kitty, in 1786. Hetty had five surviving children by this date and Susan two, a daughter called Frances and a son called Norbury.

  Susan’s little boy was so named because his mother had gone into labour unexpectedly while visiting Norbury Park, the home of her friends and neighbours in Mickleham, the Locke family. William Locke, a direct descendant of the philosopher John Locke, and his beautiful German wife Frederica, were to play an important part in the Burney sisters’ lives. Almost as soon as they met in 1784, Mrs Locke, who was two years older than Fanny, five older than Susan, developed an intense sentimental friendship with both sisters which Charles Burney, for one, found rather cloying. Highly-strung to the point of being almost unstable, Mrs Locke caused her husband some anxiety, but Fanny and Susan, both women of feeling, could hardly get enough of ‘Fredy’s ‘soft & insinuating manners’,49 and the three women spent much of the summer of 1784 very happily together in and around Norbury.

  The Lockes’ house at Norbury Park was brand new and had been decorated in the height of avant-garde elegance. Its situation on top of a hill above the Dorking gap gave long views down the Mole Valley in one direction and as far as London the other. It had been built by Thomas Sandby in the mid-1770s, but was only really finished in 1783 with the completion of its famous Painted Room, a drawing room whose walls were decorated with full-scale landscapes in trompe l’oeuil fashion to blend with the real landscape (fashionably ‘improved’) visible through the bay windows. The illusion was meant to be of sitting entirely in the open air. The corners of the room were painted to resemble the trellising of a summer-house or belvedere, the doors concealed in the design and even the carpet chosen in green, to imitate grass. It was an elegant, elaborate fantasy room which provided an ironic twist to great-grandfather Locke’s empiricism, his belief that knowledge comes initially only through the senses and that no art is superior to nature. Though Pevsner says of the Painted Room ‘[i]t would be difficult to find a
better example anywhere of the late C18 Englishman’s delight in nature’,50 it surely showed a yet stronger delight in artifice and nature tamed.

  Fanny thought Norbury Park ‘paradise’ and the Lockes the ideal family, with their beautiful house, grounds, children, and their intelligent and sensitive conversation. Dr Burney had long admired John Locke as England’s foremost metaphysician, an equal to Newton in his personal pantheon, so he had no objection to the friendship, despite some sarcastic references in a letter to Thomas Twining to ‘Paradise Regained’.51 William Locke represented the acceptable face of liberalism, enlightened and mannerly, whose views began to work on Fanny whether she realised it or not at the time. ‘The serenity of a life like this smoothes the whole internal surface of the mind’, she wrote while staying at Norbury in the autumn of 1784. ‘My own, I assure you, begins to feel quite glossy.’52

  The Lockes’ kind hospitality was particularly welcome to Fanny because of an imminent separation from Susan which in fact lasted less than a year, but which at its start threatened to be permanent. Fanny’s emotional dependence on her sister was greater than ever during and after the Cambridge affair, as is evident in a plangent letter of 3 October 1783:

  I seem dissatisfied with myself, and as if I had not made the most of being with you. Yet I am sure I cannot tell how I could have made more. Were I but certain of meeting you again in any decent time – but I have a thousand fears that something will interfere and prevent that happiness; and there is nothing like being with you, my Susy – to me, nothing in the world.53

  Susan’s frail health broke down in 1784, and on the doctors’ recommendation of a warmer climate the Phillipses decided to move to Boulogne. Fanny had some difficulty understanding the necessity for her going so far: even if Susan got better, there was no guarantee of her return, and if she worsened, it would be difficult for any of the family to reach her quickly. The slowness of the post was a torment, and Fanny became preoccupied by Susan’s absence in ways more usually felt for a lover. ‘My heart was very full […your] image seemed before me upon the spot where we had so lately been together’,54 she wrote on the first day of the separation, as if she had prematurely seen her sister’s ghost.