Though there are plenty of parent and pseudo-parent figures in this book, Burney’s obsession with unguided or badly-guided youth remains as strong as in Evelina and Cecilia. Here the Tyrold parents, like Burney’s own, are seen as perfect – yet oddly disabled. Their marriage is described thus in the opening pages (in language typical of Fanny’s newly-reformed style):
distinctness of disposition stifled not reciprocity of affection – that magnetic concentration of all marriage felicity; – Mr Tyrold revered while he softened the rigid virtues of his wife, who adored while she fortified the melting humanity of her husband.29
But even this exemplary couple (whose ‘distinctness of disposition’ is of exactly the kind Burney recommended in Brief Reflections) expose their family to danger for no good reason, and are so intimidatingly virtuous that their children feel incapable of turning to them for help when it is needed. Mrs Tyrold is an especially interesting authority-figure, ‘unaffectedly beloved’ yet ‘deeply feared by all her children’,30 in the same way that Dr Burney was. Her moral superiority to every other character is of so harsh a nature, the precepts by which she lives so chillingly severe, that she seems inhuman and unsympathetic, almost as if she were, like Burney’s own mother, dead. It is a parallel emphasised by the fact that Mrs Tyrold is absent for a large part of the story, ‘taken from them’ to nurse her brother abroad, and that Camilla’s first contact with her on her return is as a disembodied voice in an inn and later as a ghostly ‘vision’ hovering by her daughter’s sick-bed. Natural mothers are conspicuously absent from all Fanny Burney’s works, and here, on the only occasion she attempts to depict one, impossibly other-worldly.
Mrs Tyrold’s submission to her husband’s will, and through him to the irresponsible whims of Sir Hugh, seems perverse and irrational, but her moral perfection includes the virtue of knowing her place:
she never resisted a remonstrance of her husband; and as her sense of duty impelled her also never to murmur, she retired to her own room, to conceal with how ill a will she complied.
Had this lady been united to a man whom she despised, she would yet have obeyed him, and as scrupulously, though not as happily, as she obeyed her honoured partner. She considered the vow taken at the altar to her husband, as a voluntary vestal would have held one taken to her Maker; and no dissent in opinion exculpated, in her mind, the least deviation from his will.31
If this obeisance were not a major cause of the Tyrold family’s misfortunes, one might be able to admire its rigour; as it is, Mrs Tyrold’s submission weakens the moral force of the work beyond repair in the eyes of modern readers at least (and of some contemporaries – Horace Walpole hated this novel), for what use is superior judgement if it is wilfully not exercised?
Though Camilla is nominally heroine of the story, the most truly heroic character is her deformed sister, Eugenia. Here at last we see Burney tackling the idea she had first broached to Crisp in the early 1780s of a ‘clever unbeautiful heroine, beset all around for her great fortune’, though she still didn’t quite dare place this excellent subject centre-stage. Through Eugenia’s ‘extraordinary personal defects’32* and their violent contrast with her cousin Indiana’s perfect beauty, Burney explores the demoralising effects on women generally of society’s obsession with good looks and their irrational, irresistible ‘magnetic effect’. Both girls are ‘stunning’, for different reasons; the scene in which Clermont Lynmere comes home from abroad to meet his intended bride, not knowing of her deformities but only of her accomplishments, is brilliantly handled. He is stunned into an unbelieving silence, which silences Eugenia’s loving family, too, who realise for the first time the power of outward appearances. Inwardly, Indiana is shallow and selfish while Eugenia is not just refined and pure-minded but highly educated too; part of her special treatment has been a ‘masculine’ education at the hands of Dr Orkbourne, the absent-minded and obsessive scholar employed by her uncle (purportedly a joke portrait of Dr Burney). She has all the ‘feeling’ feminine qualities and yet is a trained philosopher, the perfect mate for a truly sensitive and worthy man. It is another of the book’s moral anomalies that Edgar, who is set up as a masculine ideal of virtue, recognises Eugenia’s superior worth but chooses to marry bubbly, pretty Camilla instead. Melmond, the emotional young romantic who is at first bewitched by Indiana but finds true happiness with Eugenia, therefore rather confuses the ending by beating the hero at his own game.
The most imaginative part of the story is the depiction of Eugenia’s pained recognition that, contrary to the moral thrust of the book, which lauds patience and fortitude, she would do anything to change her looks. No amount of philosophy can compensate the fifteen-year-old girl for the disgust and abuse she excites everywhere she goes. The depression she falls into because of this doesn’t last long because she is ‘brought to her senses’ by her father lecturing her on the subject (the chapter is called, uninvitingly, ‘Strictures on Deformity’), but though Mr Tyrold ostensibly wins the argument, the reader’s sympathy remains entirely with the girl.
When Fanny referred to her manuscript as ‘4 Udolphoish volumes’,33 she didn’t simply mean to compare its size with that of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic bestseller, published in 1794, which she had admired greatly. Fanny’s previous novels had revealed a taste for violence and grotesquerie, but Camilla was the first to contain deliberate elements of horror. As Margaret Anne Doody points out, the Gothic climax of the novel shares the intensity of Burney’s tragic dramas and also something of their emotional excesses; Camilla is isolated from her family by her shame at running into debt and, in a sequence of nightmarish episodes that emphasise her ostracism (including an eerie return to her uncle’s empty, abandoned mansion), she finally collapses at a significantly named ‘half-way house’. Here she teeters on the brink of death, unrecognised and unclaimed until an accident alerts Edgar to her identity. Fanny had already toyed with a sort of false Gothic earlier in the novel (notably in the moonlight scene where Mrs Berlinton appears like a ghost, and Camilla’s visit to the absurd Gothic garden created by Mr Dubster for his roadside villa), but in the final chapters she decided to pull out all the stops. Camilla not only witnesses a hushed procession bringing a murdered man into the inn (he turns out to be her wicked brother-in-law, Bellamy), but in this house of the dead enters a state of morbid delirium, in which, having prayed for death, she has a vision of impending judgement:
another voice assailed her, so near, so loud, so terrible … she shrieked at its horrible sound. ‘Prematurely’, it cried, ‘thou art come, uncalled, unbidden; thy task unfulfilled, thy peace unearned. Follow, follow me! the Records of Eternity are opened. Come! write with thy own hand thy claims, thy merits to mercy!
Camilla is required to write down her ‘deserts’ and her ‘claims’, after which her eternal doom will be rapidly revealed.
A force unseen, yet irresistible, impelled her forward. She saw the immense volumes of Eternity, and her own hand involuntarily grasped a pen of iron, and with a velocity uncontroulable wrote these words: ‘Without resignation, I have prayed for death: from impatience of displeasure, I have desired annihilation: to dry my own eyes, I have left … pitiless, selfish, unnatural! … a father the most indulgent, a Mother almost idolizing, to weep out their’s!’34
Wherever she looks, these words are before her eyes, but when she comes to write down her claims to mercy, the pen makes no impression – in other words, there are no mitigations to her ‘crimes’.* She is urged on by the voices to turn over the page and read her doom, but wakes up from this nightmare, ‘labouring under the adamantine pressure of the inflexibly cold grasp of death’, just in time not to read the inevitable judgement – eternal damnation. The fantastic elements of the vision should not blind us to the fact that Fanny was trying to convey what to her was a plain and incontrovertible truth (in a form she knew would be more powerful than another ‘sermon’): that despair is a mortal sin which will wipe out any claims to divine mercy. In this climax to her ‘
Picture of Youth’, as the novel is subtitled, she was earnestly attempting to warn the younger generation, so bombarded with impious and revolutionary ideologies, that the consequences of their actions were of the utmost seriousness.
In order to raise as much money as possible from Camilla, Fanny agreed to publish it by subscription, which necessitated publicity and a businesslike attitude towards the book’s commercial value. Her friends Mrs Boscawen, Mrs Locke and Mrs Crewe managed the list for her (and gathered three hundred names before publication, including those of Hannah More, Mrs Montagu, Burke, Hastings, Mrs Piozzi and a whole regiment of dukes and duchesses); the Burney men busied themselves with the business side, negotiating with printers and publishers. Fanny needed these agents, but showed more true nous than all of them put together; her remark to her brother, that she considered her ‘Brain work as much fair & individual property, as any other possession in either art or nature’36 shows an appreciation of the value of ‘intellectual property’ long before copyright law had even been thought of. Almost twenty years after the appearance of Evelina and fourteen years after Cecilia, the family were all too aware of the huge profits that were still being made for other people by those books, and were determined to maximise the benefits for the d’Arblays this time. As her brother Charles said to Fanny, ‘What Evelina […] does now for the Son of Lowndes, & what Cecilia does for the Son of payne, let your third work do for the Son of its Authour.’37
Fanny heard via Mrs Schwellenberg (who had become very friendly since Fanny’s retirement from Court) that the Queen had enjoyed the book, but in the outside world responses were mixed. Dr Burney had indulged his usual practice of trying to fix at least one good review, writing anxiously to his son Charles, ‘The work […] must do credit, not only to Fanny, but to us all’.38 As it turned out, the worst review was the one he had tried to influence in the Monthly, co-written by his close friend Ralph Griffiths, which freely criticised the book’s length, structure, faulty grammar, Gallicisms and crank vocabulary (such as ‘stroamed’, ‘flagitious’ and ‘fogramity’). ‘M’ (Mary Wollstonecraft) in the Analytical Review thought the book contained ‘parts superior to any thing [the author] has yet produced’,39 but that overall it was not a success; elsewhere critics praised the usefulness of such a work to young people but withheld any very loud or strenuous praise. ‘This novel is not such as we expected,’ the Critical said reservedly. Privately, Dr Burney had heard much harsher judgements, to his fury. The printer Robinson had told him ‘there was but one opinion about [Camilla] – Mme d’Arblay was determined to fill 5 Volumes – & had done it in such a manner as wd do her no credit’.40
Though Fanny admitted she was ‘a good deal chagrined’ by the reception of her book (and took the criticisms to heart, continuing to revise Camilla well into the 1830s), she comforted herself with the knowledge that ‘Camilla will live and die by more general means’.41 She had raised about a thousand pounds through subscription and sold the copyright to Payne, Cadell and Davies for another thousand soon after publication (the book went on to sell four thousand copies by November). The thousand pounds for the copyright was a record sum at the time (though it must be pointed out that the author did not receive all the money at once), and the profits from Camilla kept the d’Arblays afloat for some years. To her father, who was much more piqued by the reviews than she, Fanny sent on Charles junior’s consolatory couplet,
Now heed no more what Critics thought ’em
Since this you know – All people bought ’em.42
Among the list of subscribers were Fanny Burney’s fellow-novelists Ann Radcliffe and Maria Edgeworth and a ‘Miss J. Austen’ of Steventon in Hampshire. Austen was only twenty when Camilla was published, and four months later she began writing her own first adult work, a novel called ‘First Impressions’ (later Pride and Prejudice), the manuscript of which was circulating among the Austen family by August 1797. In her famous defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey (which, as we shall see later, was almost certainly addressed specifically to Madame d’Arblay), Austen singled out Camilla, along with Cecilia and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, as examples of works in which ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’.43 Austen was a devoted fan of Burney, and seems to have particularly admired Camilla (along with Sir Charles Grandison, it is the novel most frequently mentioned in her letters), reusing several situations and jokes from it in her own much more famous work. Any close reader of Camilla who is familiar with Pride and Prejudice will get a feeling of déjà lu from the similarity of Sir Sedley Clarendel’s haughty behaviour at the provincial ball to that of Darcy at Meryton; Camilla’s detention at Mrs Arlbery’s house because of the rain to that of Elizabeth Bennet and her sister at Netherfield; and the musical ineptitude of Indiana, who ‘with the utmost difficulty, played some very easy lessons’ on the piano-forte,44 to that of Mary Bennet, who so famously ‘delighted us long enough’. The fate of Mr Bennet is foreshadowed in Mrs Arlbery’s warning to Macdersey that the man who chooses a pretty, silly wife to gratify his own sense of superiority will end up ‘looking like a fool himself, when youth and beauty take flight, and when his ugly old wife exposes her ignorance or folly at every word’.45 Even the famous first sentence of Austen’s book finds an echo in Burney’s: ‘[It is] received wisdom among match-makers, that a young lady without fortune has a less and less chance of getting off upon every public appearance’,46 and the main narrative of both books – couple get engaged but then break off and struggle back together – is of course identical.
There are connections from Camilla to other Austen novels too: to Emma, which like Camilla features a charming, imperfect heroine and a disapproving monitor/lover, and to Persuasion, in which the famous Lyme Cobb accident recalls Indiana Lynmere coquettishly insisting on jumping into the yacht without assistance. The very title of Pride and Prejudice is thought to derive from Burney’s repeated use of the phrase in the closing pages of Cecilia.47 These evidences of influence are easily traced through Austen’s reading, but there are other, more enigmatic echoes in Austen of Burney which are more difficult to account for, notably the strange similarity of Fanny Price’s experience in the famous ‘Lovers’ Vows’ episode in Mansfield Park with the account in Burney’s early diary of her own terrifying amateur debut in The Way to Keep Him in Worcester back in the 1770s. There is, more particularly, what looks like a pastiche of Madame d’Arblay’s frequent use of the terms ‘caro sposo’ and ‘cara sposa’ in Mrs Elton’s affected talk in Emma. In a fascinating article tracing the ‘in-group language’ common to the Burney and Austen families, ‘Sposi in Surrey’,48 the critic Pat Rogers elucidates the connection between the two writers through the d’Arblays’ friends and neighbours at Bookham, the Reverend and Mrs Samuel Cooke. Mrs Cooke was a first cousin of Mrs Austen, Jane’s mother, and the reverend gentleman was Jane’s godfather. Jane Austen knew Bookham and its environs well (Emma is set in this part of Surrey), and kept in touch with the Cookes all her life. Rogers’s conclusion that she might have got to hear ‘more about the Burney household than we have recognized’49 through her friendly relations with the Cookes’ daughter Mary, a teenager in the 1790s, is certainly suggestive. Fanny d’Arblay was a frequent visitor to the Cookes’ rectory (The Hermitage is just across the road from Bookham Church), and while she was particularly fond of Mrs Cooke, she found Mary ‘stiff and cold’. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Mary was passing on her impressions of their famous literary neighbour to her Hampshire relations, all of whom, it might be remembered were ‘great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so’,50 and that her reports might have concentrated on the more embarrassing or ridiculous titbits that she heard drop from the novelist’s mouth.
The happy community of Lockes, Phillipses and d’Arblays in Mickleham and Bookham was short-lived. Though Susan loyally kept from her family her husband’s worst
‘eccentricities’ of temper, debt and fidelity, it was clear as early as 1794 that there were serious problems in the marriage. Ever since inheriting the Belcotton farm, Major Phillips had harboured plans to move back to Ireland, and got near to doing it several times. Susan was, of course, averse to the scheme, and though Fanny hoped the matter would blow over, she had seen enough of the Major at close quarters by this time to begin to be wary of him. His behaviour was dangerously unpredictable, she wrote to her father, ‘hovering, though in forms so frequently contradictory that it is impossible to fully fix any stable judgement, either upon the real intent, or the internal causes. Sometimes the aspect is that of a terrible break up, at others the wilfulness of a restless mind that loves to spread confusion, cause wonder, & displace tranquility.’51
In the autumn of 1794 Phillips removed his elder son, nine-year-old Norbury, from Charles Burney junior’s school in Greenwich and later in the year took him to Dublin and placed him with a private tutor. It was the first stage in a staggered removal of the whole family. In June 1795, amid tearful scenes, Susan and her other two children, Frances and William, left their cottage in Mickleham for good and moved to London, where they lodged with James and Charles in turn. The makeshift arrangements suggest that they were expecting to have to leave for Ireland any minute; the fact that the arrangements lasted over a year suggests that Susan was doing everything possible to postpone that evil hour.
In October 1795, Phillips took the rash step of resigning his commission as a Major of Marines, ostensibly because of ‘insuperable avocations in Ireland’, though Fanny was convinced that was a pretence.52 His friend James Burney tried to talk him out of it (having lived for twelve years on half-pay himself he knew the difficulties), but Phillips had made up his mind, and what’s more, seemed unconcerned about the consequences. He spent much of the winter and spring of 1795–6 in County Louth, supposedly preparing Belcotton for his family’s reception, and came back to collect them in August, having promised Susan that he would bring Norbury with him. Had he done so, it seems very likely that Susan would have tried to effect a separation from her husband at this point, but Phillips knew that the boy was his only real bargaining counter, and so left him behind in Ireland.
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