Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  An important new friendship Fanny made in these years was with Mary Delany, widow of Swift’s friend Dr Patrick Delany. Mrs Delany had been born in 1700, married twice, and had gained a reputation in her second widowhood as one of the ‘Old Wits’ – an indication that to be ‘Blue’ was not entirely new. She was also an amateur artist, specialising in découpage, embroidery and shell-work, the decorative fad of the period. With her accomplishments, intelligence and refinement Mrs Delany was, according to Edmund Burke, ‘a pattern of a perfect fine lady, a real fine lady, of other days’,55 and she reminded Fanny forcibly of her grandmother, Frances Sleepe. In the person of this benign and cultured woman, Fanny at last re-established a truly maternal figure in her life. When Mrs Delany’s bosom friend the Duchess of Portland died in the summer of 1785 and the old lady sank under the weight of her grief, it was Fanny’s ‘feeling’ solicitude that helped her through the bereavement and set the seal on their own friendship. They spent long afternoons together, talking about the past or looking through Mrs Delany’s boxes of old letters from Swift and the poet Edward Young. Soon, Fanny was spending so much time at Mrs Delany’s house in St James’s Place that a bedroom was set up for her there.

  Like Fanny, Mrs Delany had been ‘bashful to an extreme’ in her youth, ‘even blameably so’, to quote her husband’s judgement in 1757.56 Despite being a superior harpsichordist and dancer, nothing would induce her to display her talents in public. ‘She could not bear the attention of others to her’, Dr Delany continued, but ‘blushed and fluttered herself into a confusion.’57 Mrs Delany was the personification of eighteenth-century female propriety, described by Burke as ‘the highest bred woman in the world, and the woman of fashion of all ages’,58 but there was nothing vapid or anodyne in her character. She had ‘bottom’ as well as refinement, and her autobiography is full of surprises, from her frank description of her first husband’s vices to outbursts such as this against modern men in general:

  Would it were so, that I went ravaging and slaying all odious men, as that would go near to clear the world of that sort of animal […] moneyed men are most of them covetous, disagreeable wretches; fine men, with titles and estates, are coxcombs; those of real merit are seldom to be found.59

  This from the ‘highest bred woman in the world’, ultra-conservative friend of the Royal Family, model of propriety, gives us, like Fanny Burney’s own vituperativeness on the same subject, pause for thought. It serves to remind us that the bounds of propriety in the eighteenth century were ‘wider than historians have been apt to admit’, as Amanda Vickery amply demonstrates in her study of the subject.60 It also indicates that a system which upheld ‘separate spheres’ for the sexes left many women feeling frustrated by the behaviour of the opposite ‘sphere’ and powerless to influence it. Novel-writing provided a rare opportunity for women to contribute to the debate in a really active way, albeit the examples of feminine excellence their books posit strike us now as passive and somewhat insipid. ‘Prim’ is the word we now link with ‘proper’, but for eighteenth-century women, propriety was a hotly contentious issue. A novelist like Fanny Burney was in the front line of an ongoing battle to defend and extend ‘polite’ values, a consideration which should cast a slightly different light on her gentility, politeness and even prudery.

  Mrs Delany’s illness in 1785 following the Duchess of Portland’s death had been drawn to the attention of the Queen, whose regard for the old lady was such that she offered her a pension of £300 a year and a grace-and-favour house in St Alban’s Street, Windsor, opposite the main gate of the castle. The King himself oversaw the decoration and fitting up of the house, even to laying in a supply of pickles – an amusingly frugal choice, perhaps intended for use on royal visits, since their Majesties were well-known as being plain eaters. As soon as Mrs Delany was settled in Windsor with her teenaged great-niece Mary Ann Port, the Queen became a regular visitor. Fanny was excited to be moving at the edges of such exalted society; through Mrs Delany she had met the late Duchess of Portland, Horace Walpole, Lady Weymouth (the Queen’s lady-in-waiting) and a host of other titled people. Now she shared a friend with the Queen.

  Fanny was impressed by the marks of royal condescension and the Queen’s generosity towards Mrs Delany, however oddly conceived it was at times. When the weaver-bird that was Mrs Delany’s only memento of the Duchess died, the Queen sent one of her own birds as a substitute, thinking that Mrs Delany might never notice the difference. Fanny, who had been the person who discovered the bird dead in its cage, had to state outright to the Queen’s messenger that there was no point trying to deceive the old lady, however poor her sight, and that the Queen’s bird might be accepted as a replacement, but not palmed off as a substitute. The fact that the Queen didn’t think anyone could tell the difference between one caged bird and another was, in view of what was about to befall Fanny, somewhat ironic.

  During the frequent royal visits to her house in Windsor, Mrs Delany puffed her young friend’s talents assiduously, knowing how well Cecilia had gone down with the princesses, and she spoke highly of Miss Burney’s delicacy and taste, clearly signalling to the Queen that she might grant her an audience. The royal interview seemed about to happen by default when the Queen called unexpectedly on a day when Fanny was also visiting, but the prospect of being introduced was simply too much for the ardent royalist ‘Fanny Bull’, who fled to her room, ‘quite breathless between the race I ran with Miss Port and the joy of escaping’.61 Two days later, when Miss Port, Mr Dewes (a nephew of Mrs Delany), and his young daughter were all assembled very casually in the drawing room of the house, a ‘large man, in deep mourning’ walked in without ceremony and shut the door behind him. Fanny was the first to see him, Miss Port the first to recognise him as the King.

  The whole party, apart from Mrs Delany and the King himself, became extremely self-conscious, trying so hard to be inconspicuous that they didn’t dare move from the positions in which he had surprised them. Fanny’s first impression was that they were behaving like people playing a children’s ‘statue’ game, her next, interestingly, that they were as artificially disposed as actors:

  It seemed to me we were acting a play. There is something so little like common and real life, in everybody’s standing, while talking, in a room full of chairs, and standing, too, so aloof from each other, that I almost thought myself upon a stage, assisting in the representation of a tragedy, – in which the King played his own part, of the king; Mrs Delany that of a venerable confidante; Mr Dewes, his respectful attendant; Miss P[ort], a suppliant virgin, waiting encouragement to bring forward some petition; Miss Dewes, a young orphan, intended to move the royal compassion; and myself, – a very solemn, sober, and decent mute.62

  The burlesque tone of this was typical of Fanny’s first reports back to her family about meetings with the King and Queen, which became more frequent as the months went by. The informality of their visits to Mrs Delany allowed Fanny an intimate view of the monarch and his wife. The King’s simplicity, forthright manner and earnestness implied ‘a character the most open and sincere’:

  He speaks his opinions without reserve, and seems to trust them intuitively to his hearers, from a belief they will make no ill use of them. His countenance is full of inquiry, to gain information without asking it, probably from believing that to be the nearest road to truth.63

  Fanny’s description of this artlessness, and the King’s attentive expression, inviting the spontaneous revelation of ‘truths’, make him sound childlike in conversation with her. His characteristically quick and disjointed speech reminded her so forcibly of how it was represented in contemporary lampoons that she had trouble keeping a straight face during their first conversation, which was on the subject of Evelina:

  [C]oming up close to me, he said,

  ‘But what? – what? – how was it?’

  ‘Sir?’ – cried I, not well understanding him.

  ‘How came you – how happened it – what? – what?’

>   ‘I – I only wrote, sir, for my own amusement, – only in some odd, idle hours.’

  ‘But your publishing – your printing – how was that?’

  ‘That was only, sir, – only because –’

  […] The What! was then repeated, with so earnest a look, that, forced to say something, I stammeringly answered –

  ‘I thought – sir – it would look very well in print!’

  I do really flatter myself this is the silliest speech I ever made!64

  Fanny’s new familiarity with the nation’s first family was more a matter of amazement even than pride. Her guide to Court etiquette, written to Hetty in December 1785, was designed to reassure her own family that her head had not been turned:

  Directions for coughing, sneezing, or moving, before the King and Queen.

  In the first place, you must not cough. If you find a cough tickling in your throat, you must arrest it from making any sound; if you find yourself choking with the forbearance, you must choke – but not cough.

  In the second place, you must not sneeze. If you have a vehement cold, you must take no notice of it; if your nose-membranes feel a great irritation, you must hold your breath; if a sneeze still insists upon making its way, you must oppose it, by keeping your teeth grinding together; if the violence of the repulse breaks some blood-vessel, you must break the blood-vessel – but not sneeze.

  In the third place, you must not, upon any account, stir either hand or foot. If, by chance, a black pin runs into your head, you must not take it out. […] If […] the agony is very great, you may, privately, bite the inside of your cheek, or of your lips, for a little relief; taking care, meanwhile, to do it so cautiously as to make no apparent dent outwardly. And, with that precaution, if you even gnaw a piece out, it will not be minded, only be sure either to swallow it, or commit it to a corner of the inside of your mouth till they are gone – for you must not spit.65

  In short, all normal life, all natural behaviour is suspended in the royal presence. Critics have made much of the aggression of this letter; in its highly indulgent grotesquerie they see signs of Fanny’s inner anger at a life of self-repression. Julia Epstein thinks it displays ‘Burney’s deep resentment of her powerlessness’ in the face of her father’s social ambitions for her at Court,66 though it pre-dates the first signs of those ambitions by half a year. It is important to note that the letter was written before Fanny had any personal knowledge of Court life at all; her information about protocol at this date came solely from Mary Delany. Fanny could indulge this violent satire because she did not in any way feel personally implicated in it.

  In the same letter, she had mentioned jokily to Hetty how pleasant it would be to gain ‘preferment’ if that meant getting ‘a handsome pension for nothing at all’.67 No doubt, the spectacle of Mrs Delany being showered with gifts, money and a house full of pickles had given Fanny a rosy image of royal patronage, but it was an uncharacteristic act on the part of the royal couple, so noteworthy as to be mentioned in the King’s obituary.68 On the whole, the King and Queen liked to get value for money, whether from things, like the hard-wearing, no-nonsense uniform which was de rigueur for the men at Windsor, or from people, like Mrs Delany (a cynic might, after all, question the generosity of granting a lifetime annuity to an eighty-five-year-old). Fanny’s ‘blossom of an idea’ of sudden wealth, being released from dependence on her father and stepmother and allowed all the time in the world in which to write or please herself, was an engaging fantasy, but unlikely to be satisfied by ‘Mr and Mrs King’ – who, it might be remembered, are seated in Gillray’s satirical cartoon ‘Temperance enjoying a Frugal Meal’ below an empty picture-frame bearing the title ‘The Triumph of Benevolence’. Far from offering a way out of ‘attendance and dependence’, Fanny’s association with the Royal Family condemned her to even more of both.

  Susan and Fredy Locke had seen what was coming, though Fanny dismissed their speculations as absurd. When in May 1786 Charles Burney was called to Windsor by Lemuel Smelt, a former deputy-governor to the royal princes, and told to bring Fanny with him, the Doctor and his daughter both imagined that it was he and not she who was in line for ‘preferment’. Aged sixty, Burney was showing no signs of ambition-fatigue. Through the intervention of Burke in the dying days of the Fox-North coalition, he had been appointed organist of Chelsea College, a post offering a very small salary but with the possibility of providing free accommodation in the future within the college – a valuable perk.

  The post Burney coveted most, though, was to be Master of the King’s Band. He had been passed over before (unfairly, in his view, of course) but when the latest holder of the office, John Stanley, died in 1785, Burney was convinced that the job was his for the asking. He had presented the King with an elaborately bound copy of his account of the 1784 Commemoration of Handel (the monarch’s favourite composer) as a reminder of his musical and literary worth, and began to make enquiries about the succession as soon as Stanley was dead. Mr Smelt advised him to appear on the Terrace at Windsor – the long walk on which the Royal Family promenaded in public – as a ‘hint’ to the King, but when the royal party appeared they passed by the Doctor without speaking to him. It was Fanny who was honoured with a conversation, even though she had been trying to hide behind her hat. She was embarrassed by her consciousness of her ‘real errand’, to promote her father’s career: ‘The very idea of a design, however far from illaudable, is always distressing and uncomfortable’,69 she wrote, indicating once again how often she acted against her own judgement and instincts to please ‘il Padre’. When the King and Queen had spoken to her and moved on, the Doctor hung around for some time, chagrined by the evident failure of his expectations. Fanny hoped that the marks of favour shown to herself might be something ‘to build upon’, but was distressed by how ‘conscious and depressed’ her father was. ‘There is nothing that I know so very dejecting as solicitation’, she wrote in her journal. ‘I am sure I could never, I believe, go through a task of that sort.’70 Charles Burney had been soliciting all his life, and it was degrading. Only his adoring daughter could have seen his constant efforts towards advancement in the light of heroic endurance. Elsewhere, the Doctor was known as ‘The Hare with Many Friends’, an unflattering reference to John Gay’s poem in which the Hare’s popularity is of no practical use at all in a crisis (‘Her care was never to offend;/ And every creature was her friend’71).

  A few weeks later the bombshell dropped when Mr Smelt requested a private interview with Fanny on behalf of ‘a great personage’ – the Queen – ‘who had conceived so favourable an opinion of me as to be desirous of undoubted information, whether or not there was a probability she might permanently attach me to herself and her family’.72 In other words, Fanny was being offered a place at Court, with apartments in the castle, a salary of £200 a year and a footman. Fanny’s face must have fallen so much at this speech that Smelt immediately made it clear that it was (just) possible to refuse. He himself was extremely surprised at her reaction: ‘I saw in his own face the utmost astonishment and disappointment’, Fanny wrote to Charlotte Cambridge, desperately asking advice on how to proceed (and at the same time obliquely communicating her predicament to George Cambridge). No wonder Mr Smelt was astonished. As people kept reminding Fanny over the coming weeks and months, places at Court were coveted by ‘thousands’ of candidates, and rarely if ever offered to someone of her low rank in life and negligible birth. Smelt would have expected her to be overcome with pleasure, self-satisfaction and gratitude rather than dread and repugnance.

  Fanny was fully sensible of the honour being done her (or rather her father, as the appointment was clearly a form of compensation to him), but she saw with lightning clarity that life as a courtier would mean the end of ‘all possibility of happiness’. The word ‘permanent’ made it sound like a life sentence; attendance on the Queen was to be ‘incessant’, and confinement to the Court ‘continual’. For someone like Fanny, ‘to whom friendship is th
e balm, the comfort, the very support of existence!’73 it would be hell on earth, a world away from her ‘blossom of an idea’ of getting an obligation-free pension. Smelt’s suggestion that he could send back a respectful excuse to Her Majesty and keep the whole matter secret, even from her father, would have been jumped at by anyone less duty-bound and less strictly honourable than Fanny. But the mention of her father, and Smelt’s insinuation that she could further his interests by accepting the invitation (i.e. she could damage them by refusing), removed any real power of choice. By the next morning, she was already speaking in the passive tense of when the affair would ‘be decided’, and by the evening, when she received a summons from the Queen at Windsor, the future began to close in on her. ‘I now see the end’, she wrote to Miss Cambridge in despairing tones; ‘I see it next to inevitable.’74

  Fanny’s appointment as Second Keeper of the Robes was settled with brutal speed. Within a month of the invitation, she was in residence at Windsor, at just the time she had been expecting to go to Norbury to spend the summer with the Lockes and Susan. In her new position, she would be able to invite close friends and family to the castle, but not go out herself, and her panic as the last days of freedom ticked by is evident in a letter to her father: ‘I shall want to decamp the very instant I have it in my power’, she told him, waiting for the castle business to be settled.75 Part of the preliminaries involved a visit to her future apartments in the Queen’s Lodge and a pep-talk from the retiring robe-keeper, Mrs Haggerdorn, who had come to England in 1761 with Queen Charlotte’s entourage from Strelitz. German was still the main language spoken around the Queen; Fanny’s superior, Juliana Schwellenberg, only spoke English on sufferance, and then badly.