Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  Susan’s distress was extreme when she realised the choice facing her: to stay in England against her husband’s wishes and possibly never see her son again, or to remove to unknown, distant Belcotton with the ‘half-mad & unfeeling M[ajor]’, as Dr Burney was now calling his son-in-law,53 who, incidentally, had extracted a massive £2000 loan from the Doctor the previous year and showed no signs of paying it back.

  Fanny and Charlotte met their sister in secret at Charlotte’s lodgings in Downing Street on 11 September, after which Susan wrote:

  the terrible struggle is over – I think I shall be capable of submitting as you would have me – not from mere despondence – but from something better – that despondence may not at times seize me I do presume to hope … but I intend to subdue it when I can, & to make such efforts as I am able to support myself.54

  It seems, amazingly, that Fanny and Charlotte had advised their sister to obey her husband’s wishes, even though she was clearly frightened of him and wanted a separation. Nothing could override a wife’s and mother’s duty in Fanny’s eyes, even the happiness of her beloved Susan. She gave similarly ‘rigidly Virtuous advice’ to Maria Rishton the following year, saying that ‘the only Indispensible Cause of Marriage Seperation’ was death.55 However ‘Justifiable’ the complaint, a wife ‘forfeited, by her marriage vow, the right of positively quitting [her husband], if she could not obtain his consent’. These harsh pronouncements, worthy of Mrs Tyrold, were all very well coming from one who had married so happily and knew nothing of domestic tyranny or abuse. One might have thought that her own experience of duty-bound incarceration at Court would have made Fanny more sympathetic to her sisters’ distresses, except that she had (sensibly) not felt obliged to test her own principles quite so far in her own case. The sermonising of Brief Reflections and Camilla (which, ironically, she was only able to indulge because of her own separation from a tyrannical ‘spouse’, the Queen) seems to have made Fanny think of herself as a moral oracle who could not be heard condoning anything other than the most rigidly correct behaviour. The only comfort she could offer Susan were images of the sentimental reunion awaiting in Ireland with her adored son Norbury, and the prospect of a speedy return.

  None of Susan’s family was prepared to stand up to Phillips, especially not Dr Burney, who though enraged at the treatment of his favourite daughter, let the ‘half-mad’ Irishman bear her away to a country on the verge of a violent rebellion. ‘I had no hope of working upon his wrong-headed & tyrannical spirit by anything I cd say or do,’ he said limply, ‘& there was great reason to fear the making bad worse, by putting him out of humour, since we must, circumstanced as we are, submit.’56 Susan and the children left London with Phillips on 14 October 1796, having said goodbye to the Lockes and Fanny at Norbury Park a week earlier. Fanny had run up to the gallery alone to watch from the window until the chaise was out of sight.

  Susan had not yet reached Dublin before the Burneys had to face another family crisis at home. Elizabeth Allen Burney, who had been ailing for some time, suffered a lung haemorrhage in the summer of 1796 and by September was bedridden and dosing heavily on laudanum. She died, aged seventy-one, on 20 October, and was buried in the grounds of Chelsea College six days later. Charles Burney was devastated by his loss and entered a state of stupefaction very similar to that he had suffered in 1762 after the death of Esther: ‘I sit whole hours with my hands before me, without the least inclination or power to have recourse either to such business, or amusemts as I used to fly to with the greatest eagerness’, he wrote to his friend Christian Latrobe, and to Thomas Twining, ‘who can calculate my loss?’57

  Fanny, who went up to Chelsea as soon as she heard the news and spent a fortnight with her grieving father, was anxious about his weak, miserable condition and protracted mourning. Her long jealousy of Elizabeth Burney, kept sharp by loyalty to her own mother’s memory, had always prevented her from acknowledging her father’s true admiration and love of his second wife; now it prevented her from sympathising with the Doctor’s profound bereavement. In her view, his misery was due to the superior ‘tenderness of his pitying nature’, not ‘penetrated affections’. Deep sorrow, she stated categorically, was ‘impossible’ in the case.58 Indeed, she was insensitive enough to suggest that ‘La Dama’ had been such a malign influence on the household at Chelsea College that her death was more a matter for rejoicing than tears; Sarah, she thought, was showing marked signs of improvement already, and her father’s better nature, suppressed since the days of his first marriage, would soon reassert itself. The prospect was elating, and she wrote to d’Arblay, who had been left holding the baby in Bookham, that he would soon ‘know that Father’ for the first time:

  He evidently wishes to call all his Children about him, to receive & bestow the affections long pent or restrained, rather than manifested & indulged. His Heart has never been shut, but his ARMS now are opened again[.]59

  Fanny harped on these views at length to various members of the family, and developed other theories, including the shamefully self-aggrandising notion that her own departure from Chelsea in 1793 had left Charles Burney unprotected from his wife’s temper, and that ‘from that period, our so long-enduring Father became more clear sighted to her frailties, &, indulgently as he continued to bear them, ceased to persuade himself that he had nothing to bear.’60 There is a note of sour triumph in this that is particularly distasteful. It is unlikely that Fanny ever read such testimonies as Dr Burney sent to Twining and his other friends during these months, describing Elizabeth as ‘bosom friend & rational companion of 30 years, who had virtues, cultivation, & intellectual powers, sufficient to make home not only desirable, but also preferable to places where amusement is sought & promised’61 (if she had read them in her father’s posthumous papers, they probably wouldn’t still exist). That she and her father held radically different views of Elizabeth Burney was something Fanny would rather deny than confront. She simply could not believe that he had ever been in love with this woman, just as he couldn’t see (or chose to ignore) the very strong antipathy his second wife aroused in his first wife’s children. Fanny’s readiness to shape the past to obliterate these uncomfortable differences and re-imagine her father’s feelings for him is ample warning of how she was to behave as his biographer.

  Fanny suggested various projects to distract her father from his grief, one of which was to collect and revise his poems. This kept ‘the monster’ of depression at bay for a while, though Dr Burney later destroyed the ambitious long poem he began at this time, a versified history of astronomy. Fanny also attempted to cheer him with letters about her happy family life at Bookham, where everything to do with the ‘Bambino’ seemed newsworthy: his teeth, his toddling, his ‘gibberish lingo’.62 She was the archetypally doting mother, and described the antics of Alex with minute attention. She wrote at length and with pride of the three-year-old boy’s presentation at Court in the spring of 1798, unwittingly revealing how unused the child was to discipline (the Queen, on that occasion, seemed far from amused with ‘My little Rebel’ and his restlessness.) However, Fanny could also laugh at her own maternal fondness and send up ‘the wonderful wonders with which [the baby] makes even his own parents astonished by his wit & vivacity’.63

  The d’Arblays were finding The Hermitage unsuitable as a permanent home and decided to go back to their plan to build a house on the land offered by the Lockes. It was not the most auspicious time to do so; with the war going so badly for Britain in 1797, goods and services were extremely expensive and there were serious fears of invasion as troops massed on the northern French coast. The establishment of the Directory had turned the tide of the Revolution, and Bonaparte’s spectacular military success in Italy, along with his conquest of Belgium and Holland, made France the most powerful country in the world. It must have been strange for d’Arblay to witness this from the position of an exile. It was clear that his cause – constitutional monarchy – was becoming obsolete, and that he was in dang
er of having nowhere to return in his changed country. In August 1796 he received news of his younger brother’s death in action in Spain two years before, fighting for the Republic of which he had been an ardent opponent. D’Arblay ruminated on the irony of this, and the hard choices which those left behind in France during the Revolution had had to face. Uncle Bazille in Joigny was now his last surviving relation in his native land, and little Alex in Bookham the last of the d’Arblay line.

  D’Arblay threw himself with ardour into overseeing the construction of their new house in West Humble, which was only about a mile and a half’s walk from Norbury Park. ‘My Chevalier almost lives in his Field’, Fanny reported to her father. ‘[H]e dreams now of Cabbage Walks – potatoe Beds – Bean perfumes & peas’ blossoms.’64 D’Arblay took responsibility for the grounds (the builders don’t seem to have encouraged him to help them), digging a ha-ha to keep the cow off the cabbages and a well that had to be taken to a depth of a hundred feet before they struck water.

  ‘Camilla Cottage’, the name Dr Burney gave the new house, had a kitchen and three small, high-ceilinged reception rooms on the ground floor, a cellar beneath and four bedrooms and a ‘chambre des livres’ on the first floor (though they still didn’t own many books). D’Arblay had included in his plans a bedroom to be used ‘dans la cas où l’un ou l’autre seraiant indisposés’,65 which as at The Hermitage allowed Fanny a room of her own if required: ‘such a dear refuge – so uncommon & so consolatory’.66 He also gave the little house (which was tall and thin, like himself) ‘Rumford-style’ improved-efficiency fireplaces, a skylight in the roof and plenty of ‘large fenêtres’, though they had barely moved in before Pitt’s window-tax forced them to block up four. Nevertheless, the d’Arblays were extremely proud of their first home, paid for entirely from Fanny’s ‘Brain work’.

  On moving day in October 1797, d’Arblay went ahead on foot and had a fire burning in the grate to welcome his wife and child, who arrived by chaise. Alex was delighted to play in the empty rooms, still damp from being freshly plastered, and his parents were equally happy with their first meal of bread, cut with a garden knife, and eggs boiled in the only saucepan. They ate this sitting on the only piece of furniture in the house, a bench left by the carpenters. ‘We dined, therefore, exquisitely’, Fanny wrote in triumph, ‘& drank to our new possession from a Glass of clear water out of our new Well.’67

  Camilla Cottage might have been ‘lilliputian’, in Fanny’s description,68 but it had not been cheap to build. D’Arblay estimated the cost at £1,300 – for which sum they could have bought a much larger property freehold. D’Arblay had overspent, thinking that he was likely to get some money from France soon, either from the change in government (subsequently overturned by coup d’état in September 1798) or his brother’s estate (which ended up being confiscated by the state). Fanny was always anxious about her husband’s poor money-sense and tendency to be led astray by ‘bargains & temptations’.69 Despite the Camilla savings, she was dreading the builders’ final accounts, and in January 1798 had begun on another ‘scribbling business’ to meet their rising debts. She had decided to try writing for the stage again (much quicker than another five-volume novel), and the result was a comedy called Love and Fashion.

  The plot of Love and Fashion centres around the choice facing the heroine, Hilaria Dalton, of marriage to wealthy old Lord Ardville or young, not-so-wealthy Valentine, the son of Ardville’s elder brother, Lord Exbury (who has been forced to retrench to pay the debts of his other son, Mordaunt). The outcome is obvious from the start, so it is hardly a dramatic play, but Burney enjoyed returning to the Camilla themes of materialism and marriage in what is essentially a comic sermon about the importance of conjugal compatibility. The temptations of mercenary marriage for young girls are strong: ‘to be made mistress in a moment of mansions, carriages, domestics – To have Time, Power and Pleasure cast at once at their disposal’, but as Valentine points out baldly, such ties are ‘radically dishonest’.70 Hilaria, who begins as a frivolous, greedy girl whose idea of poverty is a ‘pitiful’ eleven thousand a year, has a comic solution to the choice between Love and Fashion (i.e. Money): ‘If the regard of Lord Ardville be sincere – why can he not settle half his wealth upon me at once, without making me a prisoner for life in return?’ She loses this flippancy through forced exposure to country life and Valentine’s virtues, which make her ‘attend to Nature’ for the first time, and is rewarded by getting not just the young, good husband, but a fortune too, since Ardville repents his sins and makes Valentine his heir.

  Love and Fashion is a much less inventive and amusing comedy than its predecessor, The Witlings. The secondary characters, which include a trio of domestics who open the play, each have traits which are established quickly and stuck to doggedly – a crude form of comic writing. There is a send-up of Gothic in the ‘ghost’ scene and the appearances of the ‘Strange Man’, who turns out to be a bailiff, but this sort of joke is too subtle for the rest of the play, which includes John-Bullish speeches from Lord Exbury directed straight at the gallery: ‘Is This a Land where spirit and Virtue shall want Protection?’ with the heartfelt coda, which could be called The Burney Principle, ‘What is there of Fortune or distinction unattainable in Britain by Talents, probity, and Courage?’71 Overall, Love and Fashion would have needed quite a bit of rewriting before being staged, as Thomas Harris, manager of Covent Garden, suggested in his generally enthusiastic correspondence with Burney about the play in 1798 and 1799. The weakest scene, which may well be among the ones Harris wanted to revise, is a sentimental episode between two rustics, a Hay-Maker and a Wood-Cutter, who are looking forward to married life together in virtuous poverty. ‘How will I rub, and clean, and brighten my platters, and my pans, and my nice red bricks, to make them all shine, and look sightly, to welcome thee!’ the young girl says to her manly but lust-free boyfriend. Hannah More herself couldn’t have written with more patronising sentimentality of the rural poor.

  While Fanny Burney was composing this hymn to companionate marriage, more marital disruptions were taking place within her family. Charlotte displeased their father profoundly by marrying again without his approval. Her first husband, Clement Francis, had left her independent and well-provided-for – so much so that Ralph Broome, her new suitor, seemed suspiciously like a fortune-hunter to Dr Burney and James. They were still trying to find out about his finances when Charlotte went ahead with a secret marriage in March 1798. Broome, an ex-Captain in the Bengal Army, was a left-wing political pamphleteer, author of a successful satire on the Hastings Trial known as Simpkin’s Letters (properly Letters of Simpkin the Second, Poetic Recorder, of all the Proceedings upon the Trial of Warren Hastings, 1789). He had been married before and was the father of an illegitimate daughter by an Indian woman, a fact which both Hetty Burney and Maria Rishton thought ‘disgusting’. Fanny was torn between doubts about her younger sister’s judgement, which she thought at best rather romantic, and a pragmatic hope that all would turn out well now that the unbreakable knot had been tied.

  Elsewhere in the family there were worse disruptions to come. In the spring of 1798 Maria Rishton finally got her husband’s agreement to an amicable separation, under the terms of which she received enough money to set up her own house eventually at Bury St Edmunds. The example of this (relatively) easy solution to an unhappy marriage (the Rishtons had no children to complicate the matter), and Charles Burney’s readiness to give Maria temporary refuge in his apartments at the College, must have helped precipitate James Burney’s decision in the autumn of 1798 to leave his wife and family for good. He had been spending more and more time away from home in the preceding years, often going about with his half-sister, Sarah Harriet, now twenty-six. While Elizabeth Burney had been alive, James had not been welcome at the College. Mrs Burney harboured dark suspicions of the special friendship that was emerging between the superannuated tar and her wilful, independent-minded daughter, ideas that lodged in Dr Burney’s mind,
but which he could not credit at the time. After ‘La Dama’s death, James appeared at his father’s home frequently and seemed happily re-established as ‘the best good fellow & kindest Brother imaginable’, to use Fanny’s phrase.72 But it is clear that as the months went by, the Doctor began to wonder if his late wife had not perhaps been right to suspect that something highly inappropriate was going on.

  James’s suggestion, in September 1798, that he might leave his own home and come and board with his father, met with an immediate and disgusted response from the Doctor, who flatly refused to agree, not so much because of James’s intended abandonment of his wife and children (the younger of whom was not yet two), but because the move would indicate ‘an improper Attachment’ to Sarah Harriet.73 James’s response to this was to go home and pack. The following day, 2 September, he and Sarah Harriet ran away together.

  Controversy surrounds the nature of this elopement, which sent shock-waves through the Burney family – all of whom, interestingly, initially assumed that the couple were committing incest, and all of whom eventually came round to thinking they hadn’t. The secretive quality of James and Sarah’s departure, Sarah’s ‘happy & flighty’ state on the day and her sinisterly satisfied smiles when quizzed by her half-sisters in the following months all helped convince the family of the worst. Biographers and editors of the Burneys have followed suit ever since with the assumption of incest, except for the editor of Sarah Harriet’s letters, Lorna J. Clark, who has put the case for a less sensational alternative: that Sarah and James, who were both independent-minded and rebellious people, simply found they had common cause in wanting to run away (James from his family responsibilities, which had oppressed him for years, Sarah from her dead-end life at Chelsea), and chose to do so together. Clark’s argument includes the facts that James and Sarah both denied any love-involvement; the family began to dismiss their own worst fears as soon as they had contact again with the runaways; the suspicion of incest had originated with ‘La Dama’; and – the strongest point in Clark’s view – James’s wife Sally welcomed her husband back in 1804 and got on very well with Sarah Harriet afterwards.