Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  When hostilities ceased between England and France in October of the following year, Monsieur d’Arblay was overjoyed. By a strange twist of fate the French plenipotentiary who came to London to begin negotiations for the peace was an old army comrade of d’Arblay, Jacques-Alexandre-Bernard Lauriston, who was now a General and in high favour with Napoleon. Lauriston promised to put in a word with the First Consul over the matter of d’Arblay’s pension and status, and the erstwhile Chevalier (now referred to officially as ‘Citoyen d’Arblay’) began planning a return to France with his wife and child immediately. All through October he went up and down to London, arranging passports and tickets, while Fanny, ‘much hurried, & much perplexed’,15 tried to adjust to the idea of spending the winter in France. She understood that d’Arblay had to make the journey ‘as a thing of course’, but found it hard to share his excitement: ‘on my side, many are the drawbacks – but I ought not, & must not listen to them’.16 When Alex, now six years old, became ill with ‘worm-fever’ the same month, Fanny had a rock-solid reason to stay at home. Though she hated to be parted from her husband, there was no question of moving Alex during his illness, and d’Arblay made the journey to Paris alone in early November.

  The return to France after almost ten years was exciting, surprising and stimulating to d’Arblay. In Joigny he was received with rejoicing as a long-lost son; there was ‘beaucoup de gaieté et surtout de bruit’ in his uncle’s household. The youngest generation of cousins were about the same age as Alex, and d’Arblay longed to bring his son ‘home’ and settle in the beautiful valley of the Yonne. In Paris he met many of his old friends, all of whom had spent a far more active and profitable decade than he: Lafayette, imprisoned for years in Olmütz, was now being sought after by First Consul Bonaparte, and another former army friend, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, later Prince de Wagram, had made a spectacular rise to Minister of War. Berthier, like Lauriston, was a General, while d’Arblay was a shelved Maréchal du Camp, scrabbling after old pension rights. Even to an unambitious man like the Citoyen, these examples of success among his peers were a spur to action.

  Restoration of the Bourbons, it seemed, was a lost cause, and most of the old Constitutionalists had transferred allegiance to Bonaparte. Madame de Staël and Narbonne were both thriving under the new regime; less successful, but surviving, were Lally-Tolendal, Montmorency and the former Princesse d’Hénin, last seen driving round Mickleham in a clapped-out cabriolet, now living in a small but elegant hôtel on the rue Miroménil.

  As Fanny read her husband’s excited letters from Paris, she realised that his visit was likely to make him discontented with their life of quiet retirement in England. She wrote him long replies full of advice, pointing out that there was no need to ‘change our system’, since the peace would make it easy to travel to and from France. She also insinuated that it would be difficult for her to earn money abroad from her writing (which was all too true), and that their immediate future depended on the success of the plans she had for the new comedy she had been writing during d’Arblay’s absence (she was also revising Camilla in the hope of a new edition and trying to revive Harris’s interest in Love and Fashion). Always more of a realist than her husband, she saw little chance of him regaining his ‘many lost rights’: ‘What business, in which Money has any part, is ever executed as speedily as hoped?’ she wrote to her father; ‘I am the less philosophic in this delay [to d’Arblay’s return], as I have myself, no expectations of ultimate success.’17

  Her letters to her husband had a resigned tone, however. Fanny intuited that change was in the air, and sincerely wanted d’Arblay to do whatever he thought best: ‘the more I reflect, the more I feel I can know no happiness but yours! – misery I may taste in many shapes; but Happiness & you are linked, for me, inseparably.’18 His patience and selflessness through his long exile deserved reward, whatever her personal fears and misgivings about a ‘renewed public sort of life’:

  Do as you JUDGE best, & FEEL happiest, & I shall be best content. Yes, my dearest best loved Friend, your long forbearance – your waiting my wishes for the PEACE, call for my liveliest gratitude, & shall ever meet it, by an entire concurrence with your own decision for our future life.19

  The comedy Fanny had been writing in the winter of 1801 was A Busy Day, but The Woman-Hater also belongs to this period. Far from being ‘years of quiet’ during which ‘Mme d’Arblay [was] happily occupied with her maternal responsibilities and, when time permitted, with her literary career’, as the editor of the Journals and Letters describes the period 1793–1801,20 it was a time of almost non-stop literary composition: Brief Reflections, revisions to Edwy and Elgiva and the other Court dramas, Camilla, three comedies and the tentative beginnings of a new novel. The Woman-Hater, written between 1796 and 1802, incorporates some themes from The Witlings, updated to take in the contemporary debate on the role of women in society and embellished with elements of sentimental drama. Two characters from The Witlings reappear, Bob Sapling and Lady Smatter, misquoting and showing off her little learning as before, but in The Woman-Hater she is an isolated figure of fun. The focus of this satire is Sir Roderick, the sour old misogynist who, like Dr Marchmont in Camilla, is smarting from being jilted in the distant past (in Sir Roderick’s case, by Lady Smatter*. Sir Roderick will not suffer women on his property at all, but his desire to avoid them has become such an obsession that he talks of little else. He has a wildly exaggerated idea of female helplessness (and conversely of male power) – ‘if they fall into a ditch, they are drowned, – and if you don’t put the meat into their mouths, they are starved!’21 – and sees women as useless whether they are educated or not:

  Either you [women] know nothing, and a poor fellow, when noosed, might as well have the charge of a baby, or you know something, and he must pay for it with the peace of his life: for if you once take to a Book, or a Pen – his House may go to rack and ruin; his children may have the rickets; his dinners won’t be half dressed, and his servants may dance rigadoons.22

  Sir Roderick’s attitudes are infectious. Old Waverley, his obsequious friend, lives in such fear of any dealings with women that when by accident he meets the virtuous Sophia Wilmot and her mother Eleanora, wronged wife of Lady Smatter’s brother, he interprets their actions as soliciting for sex. He subsequently tries to ‘rescue’ Sophia from vice, which occasions some slightly risqué scenes and double entendres about prostitution and ‘paupau women’ (something of a departure for the prude playwright, who presumably intended this play, too, to be staged anonymously).

  Young Waverley, Sir Roderick’s heir, is so desperate to break free from the woman-hating zone in which he has grown up that he plans to marry the only gentlewoman he has ever met, Lady Smatter, even though he doesn’t love her and is certain to be disinherited because of the match. Fortunately, he meets Sophia before he can carry out his elopement. She and her mother have come in search of Sophia’s father, Wilmot, who is about to depart for the West Indies. Wilmot is another jealous misogynist whose misinterpretation of his wife’s ‘feeling’ behaviour many years ago made him cast her off. But unknown to him, Eleanora took their daughter with her and substituted the nurse’s child, a raucous, sensual, unintelligent girl who has been brought up as ‘Miss Wilmot’. The untangling of this family romance, the reuniting of a chastened Wilmot with his noble wife and lovely daughter, and the capitulation of Sir Roderick to the charms of Lady Smatter (comically effected with very little difficulty in the closing minutes), make an undemanding, entertaining play that shows the author perfectly at ease ‘doing what I have all my life been urged to, & all my life intended, writing a Comedy’.23

  A Busy Day, which Fanny was writing during her separation from d’Arblay in 1801, has the distinction of being the only one of Fanny Burney’s comedies to have been staged – albeit 192 years after composition. When the Show of Strength company put it on in a pub theatre in Bristol in 1993 (with a revival in London the year after), a reviewer in The Stage described
the play as ‘at least as scathing as anything from Goldsmith – and considerably funnier’.24 The only surviving manuscript is in d’Arblay’s hand, so presumably Fanny did not finish the play until she was reunited with him in France. That she intended to present it to Harris is clear from the draft cast-list she drew up, all members of the Covent Garden company. But circumstances intervened again to thwart her career as a dramatist: A Busy Day must have been among the ‘unprinted works’ that she was forced to leave behind in Paris until their final removal in 1815, since the only manuscript she is known to have taken out of France in the period 1802–15 was that of her novel The Wanderer. By then, the play was dated and Harris was dead.

  The action of this splendid comedy takes place in London on the day when both the hero, Cleveland, and heroine, Eliza Watts, are returning from the East Indies. Unknown to either of their families, they have already met, fallen in love and become engaged. Eliza, the daughter of a self-made City trader, comes from an uneducated low-class background (her father was originally an errand boy and her mother a housemaid), but she has been adopted and brought up in India by a wealthy and cultivated elderly gentleman, Mr Alderson (a distant bachelor-monitor, rather like Crisp), whose recent death is the cause of her return to England. Cleveland, an aristocrat, has been sent out to India to make his own fortune, though by rights he should inherit one from his selfish uncle Marmaduke, who has mortgaged the family estates due to bad management. The reason for Cleveland’s recall (which he only hears on arrival) is for him to be married off by the uncle (his guardian) to a skittish heiress, Miss Percival.

  Since Sir Marmaduke and his wife Lady Wilhelmina Tylney are monumental snobs and the Watts family are vulgar ‘Cits’, it soon becomes clear that there is going to be a violent clash between the families. Anticipation of this moment keeps the hero and heroine in suspense until Act 5, when Miss Percival, piqued by Cleveland’s rejection of her, manoeuvres the disparate parties into the same room. ‘Bless me! what people are these?’ Lady Wilhelmina exclaims:

  Sir Marmaduke. I can’t imagine: unless those – (pointing to Mr Watts and Mr Tibbs) are two new men out of livery.

  Lady Wilhelmina. Impossible she can have chosen two such grotesque figures. Besides, what do they stand there for? And look at those strange Women! how extraordinary! I can’t turn my head round, but that odd body made me a courtsie!25

  The Wattses retaliate by talking loudly of their showy new coach:

  Miss Watts (aloud). I wonder if our Coach stops at the Door.

  Mrs Watts. I hope never a Cart, nor nothing, will drive against it, for the paint’s but just new put on, and it cost sich a deal!

  Miss Watts (whispering). La, Ma’, you’re always talking so saving! Can’t you speak about our servants? I dare say (aloud) Robert’s forgot to tell Thomas to order Richard to stop.

  Mrs Watts. Yes, I dares to say Robert’s forgot to tell Thomas to order Richard to stop.26

  The Wattses are lovingly satirised: Mr Watts in his scruffy scratch wig clings to recollections of how much more controllable his wife and daughter were when they were poor; his wife, on the other hand, is obsessed with maintaining the visible signs of wealth. Peggy, their daughter, has seen just enough of the grand world to intuit how vulgar her family appears, but unlike her sister she doesn’t have the taste or refinement to rise above it. Her adoption of pretentiously romantic names for herself and Eliza, ‘Margerella’ and ‘Eliziana’, is comically thwarted by her parents’ inability to remember them correctly; her embarrassment over this and her family’s many other shortcomings recalls the Miss Branghtons’ similar concern with impressing ‘the quality’ in Evelina, a work that has many echoes in the play.

  ‘The Quality’, as represented by the Tylneys, frivolous Miss Percival, Cleveland’s dissipated younger brother Frank and his goofy boon-companion, Lord John Dervis, are a hopeless, enervated set; the constant references in their conversation to debts, tenures and mortgages emphasise that they are members of a class living on borrowed time as well as borrowed money. Money, and only money, matters in this cynical world; Cleveland’s and Eliza’s virtues would count for nothing if Eliza did not happen to be heiress to Mr Alderson’s £80,000 and therefore, ultimately, acceptable to the Tylneys.

  Only money can control the anarchic effects of class fluidity that the play depicts in a rather surprisingly radical way. The compact between the serving class and those who pay them is precariously maintained: when Mr Watts (who looks like a gentleman, but isn’t) fails to tip the porter in Act 1, the porter immediately drops his deferential manner. Only the intervention of good-natured Joel Tibbs, who has neither got ‘so high up in the World’ as his ‘Cit’ cousin nor come from ‘so low down’,27 prevents the disgruntled porter from becoming violent. The waiters at the gaming-house in Act 1 are insolent and unhelpful (their stage directions include ‘exit sneering’, ‘exit yawning’ and ‘exit loiteringly’), and the gentleman’s valet in Act 3 is so elegant that he is mistaken by the Wattses for his master; both have taken on the affectations of their employees. But none of their behaviour is seen as culpable insubordination because their ‘betters’ are so lax.

  The servants of the late Mr Alderson are correspondingly loyal and devoted, particularly the Indian Mungo, a fascinating character who does not appear at all (probably because of the restrictions of the all-white Georgian stage). At the waiters’ incredulity that they should have to help him or even talk to him – ‘What, the Black?’ – Eliza resolves to ‘treble’ her care of him in future ‘for the little kindness you seem likely to meet with here’. Her (white) female servant Deborah, who has been in India many years, makes the depressing reply:

  Why that’s very good of you, my dear young lady, to be so kind to him, being my late master’s wish: but, for all that, these gentlemen mean no harm, I dare say; for after all, a Black’s but a Black; and let him hurt himself never so much, it won’t shew. It in’t like hurting us whites, with our fine skins, all over alabaster.28

  Deborah’s dismissal of Mungo’s sensitivity hides another interpretation: perhaps his hurts ‘won’t shew’ because he is already black with them, like an all-over bruise. The treatment of natives in the colonies and at home would have been a sensitive point to press with a contemporary audience just waking up to the horrors of the slave trade and the responsibilities of a would-be empire. Burney was brave to dwell on it at some length in A Busy Day and to return to it in The Wanderer.

  A Busy Day looks like a typical eighteenth-century comedy in the tradition of Murphy or Sheridan, but its concern with social conscience as well as social consciousness marks it out as a much more modern play. Aristocratic Cleveland’s move downwards into the trading class has not just filled his purse but broadened his mind. He knows the value of money and understands the means of production and has picked up a set of unimpeachably humanitarian principles on the way. Nurture must perfect nature; Cleveland is both cultured and practical, Eliza refined, unaffected and sensitive, unlike her newly-wealthy family, who have the trappings of ‘class’ with none of its agrémens. Both hero and heroine are moving into an idealised ‘middle’ class from opposite directions. Burney’s premise, as expressed by Cleveland almost exactly halfway through the play, is a restatement of the Burney Principle that ‘Elegance, as well as talents and Virtue, may be grafted upon every stock, and can flourish from every soil!’29 There is no swapped-cradle dénouement (as in The Woman-Hater) that will expose Eliza’s superior birth and save us from having to include the Wattses in the imagined aftermath of the play: she is a Watts and Cleveland is (almost) a Tylney – a disturbing and very effective resolution to this clever satire on social mobility.

  Back in Paris, d’Arblay was hoping that his influential friends would help him get a job in London as commissioner of French commercial relations in England, but first he needed to sort out his pension and retraite. When he wrote to the First Consul, however, he was told that he would have to serve on at least one campaign for the Republic
before he could expect to be paid for ci-devant services, and Bonaparte suggested he join an expeditionary force setting out for the colony of Santo Domingo (Haiti) to put down the rebellion of the Negro slave leader Touissant-L’Ouverture. D’Arblay agreed, glad to have the chance of promotion to Brigade Commander and an honourable exit from the army. He came home to England in January 1802 to fit himself up for the campaign, spending a small fortune – 220 guineas – on his new uniform and equipment and securing the correct passports and papers for an absence of over a year. Fanny of course was terrified at the prospect of her husband risking his life in the ‘pestilential’ climate of the Caribbean, not to mention the fact that she had little sympathy with the French cause, and thought the rebellious slaves had very likely been ‘ill-used’.30 She felt strongly enough about the issue to include a footnote in the Memoirs exculpating her husband from any insensitivity to it: ‘The Culpability, or the Rights of the insurgents [in Santo Domingo], could make no part of the business of the soldier; whose services, when once he is enlisted, as unequivocally demand personal subordination as personal bravery’.31

  The same argument about ‘personal subordination’ did not, however occur to the d’Arblays in relation to action against the British, from which they naively imagined Monsieur d’Arblay might be excused. Before setting out for France again, d’Arblay took the precaution of writing to the First Consul to make it clear that though he was happy to accept the Santo Domingo commission, he would never fight against England. Bonaparte was not impressed. When d’Arblay arrived in Paris, with his hundreds of guineas’-worth of equipment in tow, he found that his commission had been cancelled.