Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  D’Arblay left among his papers a neat sketch-plan of the battlefield of Waterloo which oddly substantiates the impression that he was present at the battle. ‘These sketches of the field were taken on the spot from the Summit of a perpendicular bank immediately above the high road from Brussells to Genappe in the front of the British position’, he wrote by way of explanation on ‘Plate B’. Who was ‘on the spot’, and when, is not stated. If on one of his trips to France in 1816 or 1817 d’Arblay made the tourist pilgrimage to Waterloo that was so popular in those years, he never mentioned it in his surviving letters or wrote home from any location on that route. The only other way that he could claim his picture was made ‘on the spot’ would be if it was a copy of one so made. Charles Parr Burney had been among the first deliberate tourists, arriving in Brussels in July 1815 while his aunt was still there. It is possible that d’Arblay derived his information from someone like Charles Parr who had seen the field and perhaps made sketches of his own, or from an ‘official’ representation, such as appeared in illustrated magazines and public exhibitions, ‘dioramas’ and ‘panoramas’.13 The two-part structure of his sketch, which is meant to represent a 360-degree all-round view, and the description of the parts as ‘plates’ rather support the latter suggestion.

  When d’Arblay went back to France in the summer of 1817 on what was intended to be his annual visit, Fanny decided once again to stay home to monitor Alex, who was approaching his finals, yet, ‘unwatched, un-urged, does NOTHING!’14 They joined a group of his Cambridge associates on a ‘reading party’ that summer in Ilfracombe, North Devon, where Fanny gradually learned from Alex’s young tutor, Edward Jacob, the extent of her son’s laziness at the university. Alex was no longer in a position to achieve high honours, Mr Jacob admitted. His habits were obsessive and his lifestyle alarmingly unhealthy, almost neurasthenic, as Fanny reported anxiously to her husband:

  [He would] never partake of any meal; but go on with whatever he is about till he feels gnawn with hunger […] never go to Bed, till his burnt out candles leave him suddenly in the dark! & then, his clothes hardly taken off, & no night cap on his head, he rolls himself between the Bedcloaths, falls into a quick sleep of fatigue; but quickly awakens from it, cold, shivering, or feverish.15

  Even allowing some latitude for maternal hyperbole, Alex’s behaviour was clearly abnormal and unhealthy. ‘Morbid’ was again the word that suggested itself to the anxious parent: ‘There is something, I firmly believe, in his obstinate feelings more morbid than wilful bad habits’.16 It cannot be ignored that Alex’s symptoms have similarities to those of a drug or alcohol addiction, specifically opium addiction, so commonplace at the time (when opium was the main ingredient in patent remedies for anything from teething pain to cholera). Most households had opium in some form among their medicines, and its widespread use as an analgesic makes it highly likely that Monsieur d’Arblay was taking some form of opiate for his bad leg and his recent chronic bowel pain, just as Fanny had been dosed up with laudanum at various times in her life, notably at Court and during and after her mastectomy. She had been encouraging Alex to take his analeptic pills and ‘a black one if Nature is coy’ – the colour is associated with many opium preparations such as the Black Drop (a favourite tipple of Lord Byron) and the Black Draught. Alex’s listlessness, which was to become more marked as the years went by, bears a resemblance to certain side-effects of opiates – ‘A dull, mopish and heavy Disposition […] Anxieties and Depressions of Spirits’.17 That he was melancholic and depressive is certain, but the exact causes – and how he coped with them – remain obscure.

  It is perhaps not surprising that during their holiday in Ilfracombe, Fanny ended up putting her own life in danger through sheer inattention. She had gone with her dog Diane to a part of the shore known as the Wildersmouth, a steep-sided bay at Capstone Point to which there was access only at low tide. She was so absorbed in picking up pebbles for d’Arblay’s mineral collection, thinking of him far away in France and of their problematic child, that she failed to notice when the exit to the cove was cut off by the incoming tide. According to her own lengthy account, written up six years later as her ‘Ilfracombe Journal’, Fanny took refuge from the sea on a small, steep island with a grassy top, which she assumed would lie above the high-water mark. As the sea boomed into the bay, however, she found it more difficult than she had anticipated to reach the safety of the grass, even going on all fours. The steep and slaty rock cut her hands and feet and bruised her knees, she said, and her long dress must have been a handicap, too. She reached a point very near the top, where her head was on a level with the grass, but could go no further and had to haul the dog up by the collar (ingeniously using the handle of her parasol). They were forced to stay put, balanced precariously on a ledge, unable to move. Using her eyeglass, Fanny tried to see whether the tide had turned, but to her horror realised it was still rising, and that there was no vessel anywhere in sight: ‘All was vacant and Vast! – I was wholly alone, wholly isolated.’18

  The dramatic colouring in Madame d’Arblay’s account heavily emphasises the picturesque and romantic potential of the scene and turns it into a mortal struggle with the forces of Nature – she might have been Manfred on the Jüngfrau rather than an old lady on a rock:

  The next Waves reached to the Upper end of my Chamber, which was now ALL SEA, save the small Rock upon which I was mounted! […] The Wind roared around me, Pushing on the Waves with a frothy velocity that, to a bye-stander, – not to an inmate amidst them! – would have been beautiful […] A Wave, at length, more stupendous in height, in breadth, in foam, & in roaring noise than any which had preceded it, dashed against my Rock as if enraged at an interception of its progress, & rushed on to the extremity of this savage chamber, with a foaming impetuosity from which I felt myself splashed. This Moment I believed to be my last of Mortality!19

  The tide was on the turn, however, and Fanny was saved by hanging on to the rock for ten hours20 until she heard voices from the clifftop, Alex’s among them.

  That was her story. Another very different (and much shorter) version of the incident exists, in a letter solicited by the collector F. Leverton Harris from the son of John Le Fevre, a student friend of Alex’s who was one of their party. According to Le Fevre, Alex had come to him in some distress when he began to worry about his mother’s absence. Le Fevre suggested that Madame d’Arblay might have got caught by the tide in some bay or other (exactly what had happened), and the two young men set out along the cliffs to search. Eventually they spotted the old lady on the sand in a bay below, returned to Ilfracombe and rescued her by boat. Le Fevre’s son Baron Eversley dispenses with the rest in a few sentences: ‘My father said that the lady’s account of her adventure was greatly exaggerated. She was in no real danger. The sea had not come up to her. She was not clinging to the rocks – She was seated on the sand – The incident of the little dog Fidèle was an invention so far as my Father recollected.’21

  Le Fevre’s downbeat account of the day, though it has obvious slips such as calling the dog Fidèle rather than Diane (he was thinking perhaps of Fidel, the dog in Cecilia), sounds the alarm about Madame d’Arblay’s veracity again. On investigation, the presence of the dog seems highly unlikely. According to Madame d’Arblay’s note-form diary Diane whelped (one puppy only) on or just before 24 September,22 the same day that she records her ‘Adventure terrific on A Rock at Ilfracomb!’ The bitch’s unplanned pregnancy had been the source of a rather cruel joke between the d’Arblays against their old friend Madame de Staël, who had a child by a ‘secret husband’ in 1812. Fanny had noted going to ‘Capston with Diane’ twice before this date – on 16 and 17 September – but it is highly improbable that the dog would have been out on a long excursion so soon after having a puppy. If, as Le Fevre said, the dog’s involvement was ‘an invention’, it is a pretty shameless one, full of guilefully particular detail such as the use of the parasol handle as a hoist. And if Madame d’Arblay was ‘invent
ing’ the presence of Diane, it is all too likely, as Le Fevre claimed, that the rest was ‘greatly exaggerated’.

  Madame d’Arblay’s account seems to bear as much upon the time when it was composed (1823) as the time it describes. In the mid-1820s the dog Diane was a constant companion and solace to her widowed owner, more reliable and attentive than Alex, as Madame d’Arblay overtly stated (‘I have always a delighted Companion in Diane, though I have not always my Minister’23). She wrote up her Ilfracombe adventure as a devoir to her late husband, who, as we shall see, asked Fanny during his final illness to make a record of such events for their friends and for posterity. The Ilfracombe Journal can be seen therefore as a piece of retrospective prophecy, the Germanic-sounding ‘Wildersmouth’ representing the jaws of death and the inrushing flood-waters Madame d’Arblay’s uncontrollable fears about separation from her husband and son. The imminent ‘death’ she foresees for herself in this nightmarish fantasy is survival, her intense and wholly justifiable terror of being alone, cut off from the familiar world, looking out on nothing but the blank sea of extinction. In a letter to her sister Hetty in 1825, Fanny declined to return to Ilfracombe not because it reminded her of being caught by the tide in Capstone Bay (an incident she never mentions in her many retrospective references to Ilfracombe in her letters of the 1820s) but because the landscape was too strongly associated with the solitary walks on which she read letters from her absent husband ‘such as scarcely any one ever received, & as no one breathing ever more tenderly more devoutly valued’.24 Well might she look back on those letters with a pang once the absence had become permanent and reunion after death was all she had to look forward to. D’Arblay had written to her from Calais at the beginning of their separation in the summer of 1817:

  The sea lies between us, my darling Fanny, but I trust that soon we will be reunited, and anyway nothing can ever come between our hearts – I swear it on mine.25

  1817 saw the beginning of the wave of family deaths which blighted the last twenty years of Fanny Burney’s life. In April of that year she witnessed the death of fifteen-year-old Ralph Broome, Charlotte’s only child by her second husband, when Charlotte and her family came to Bath in their latest attempt to find a cure for her consumptive son. Charlotte bore the death with apparent fortitude: ‘she scarcely permits herself to deem it a misfortune,’ Fanny wrote with admiration, ‘so deeply religious is her sense of his own eternal advantage from the change’.26 Such piety was certainly a useful specific against bereavement; Fanny seems not to have had it in as great a degree as her sister, who in turn was regarded by her Evangelically-minded daughters, Charlotte Barrett and Marianne Francis, as falling short of the Christian ideal. Many of their older relations, worldly uncle Charles, for example (though a cleric), were judged by both the nieces to be hopelessly materialistic and sensual.

  These differences were highlighted in the winter of 1816 when Fanny was composing the epitaph for her father’s memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey. Her fulsome tribute to the Doctor’s personal and professional virtues met with a mixed response among the family, many of whom (Marianne Francis most strongly) felt it inappropriate to stress his worldly achievements on a sacred memorial. Fanny defended the wording of her tribute vigorously, but had never met with so much opposition before. It was a surprise to her that no one else in the family seemed to share her view of their father as ‘Unrivalled Chief and Scientific HISTORIAN of his Tuneful Art’, whose ‘High Principles’ and ‘Conscience without Reproach’ had ‘Prepared, through the whole tenor of his Earthly Life, with the mediation of our Blessed Saviour, his Soul for Heaven’.27 The relegation of the deity to a parenthesis did not strike her as inappropriate, nor the superlative adjectives describing her father’s principles and achievements, which clearly irritated her brother James and embarrassed Charles junior. He cavilled at references to Dr Burney’s powers of conversation and ‘self-acquired accomplishments’, a misleading term, in Charles’s opinion, given the Doctor’s years at Chester Free School and his apprenticeship under Arne. The phrase did not finally appear on the memorial stone when it was laid in the North Choir of the Abbey in the summer of 1817, but Fanny made it clear that she would return to the subject in the biography of her father she intended to write. In her view, Dr Burney’s ‘indefatigable self-directed industry’ was not simply admirable in itself, but the key to his character.

  Hard-drinking, kind-hearted Charles had been complaining for some time of pains in the head, and died of a stroke at the age of sixty just after Christmas 1817. He left behind a treasure-house of books and manuscripts, which was assessed by a committee of experts (including Thomas Payne’s son, also a bookseller called Thomas) on behalf of the British Museum and subsequently bought for the nation. Charles’s library included the earliest printed editions of every Greek classic ‘and several of the scarcest among the Latins’, and almost four hundred manuscripts, including two Greek gospels (tenth and twelfth century), fifteenth-century copies of Callimachus and of Ptolemy’s Geography, and, the star item, a late-thirteenth-century copy of the Iliad, formerly belonging to the antiquarian Townley. The whole collection was valued at £14,500 – truly ‘a sum enormous’ – and was bought by negotiation with the heir, Charles Parr Burney, for the bargain price of £13,500. It was at this date that Charles Parr found out about his father’s youthful theft of books at Cambridge and decided not to write the memoir he had been planning, for fear of dragging the story into public notice. The question remains, though, how his father, on a clerical schoolmaster’s income and within forty years, had managed to acquire ‘probably the most complete [classical library] ever assembled by any man’.28

  D’Arblay had returned from France in October 1817 ‘altered – thin – weak – depressed – full of pain’.29 In Paris he had consulted Baron Larrey, who said there was no need for an operation, but he was being prescribed treatments conventional for a stricture of the rectum, which suggests that he may have been suffering from cancer.30 Whatever the cause, the symptoms were extremely painful, and by the winter of 1817 d’Arblay must have suspected that he was mortally ill.

  The Lieutenant-General cut a nobly pathetic figure that December when he was presented to the elderly Queen Charlotte at the Pump Room in Bath on her first ever Royal Progress without the failing, blind King from whom she had been separated for several years. D’Arblay was having so much trouble merely standing that some ladies offered him their seats, but of course he felt unable to accept and endured the torture of the morning as well as he could, speechless with pain. He was clearly trying his best for Fanny’s sake; she had been looking forward to this mark of favour with an ardour reminiscent of her father’s for all things royal. One would think that she had never known the inside of a palace or cavilled at the fatuity of Court life. The details of the morning were lovingly recalled in her journal, written retrospectively after d’Arblay’s death. Old, ugly, unexciting Queen Charlotte is described in terms fit for a deity:

  she rose to make her round, & with a Grace indescribable, &, to those who never witnessed it, inconceivable; for it was such as to carry off Age, Infirmity, sickness, diminuitive & disproportioned stature, & Ugliness! – & to give to her, in defiance of such disadvantages, a power of charming & delighting that rarely had been equalled.31

  It was d’Arblay’s first presentation to the Queen – a long-awaited public acknowledgement – and it was also his last public appearance. Fanny was bursting with pride, so much so that in her account she dwells on the Queen’s inconceivable graciousness at greater length than on poor d’Arblay’s heroic endurance of it. She records with delight that the Queen had so much small-talk with d’Arblay that only ‘a word sufficed for those who remained’; she also notes that d’Arblay’s exertions were such that he had to retreat and collapse on a bench as soon as the Queen had finished with him, and that the rest of the day was spent ‘in bodily misery’. There is something monstrous in this valuation of royal attention unless you happen to believe fervent
ly, as Fanny did, in the Divine Right of Kings. When, subsequent to this Bath meeting, the Queen sent her a gift of some rather dull books and a pair of candlesticks, Fanny wrote in thanks: ‘the honoured signature of my beloved Royal Mistress – my venerated Queen, I have pressed to my lips & my Heart, & shall prize as my first possession to the end of my life’.32 (However, neither the books nor the autograph appears on the list of treasures in her will.)

  Fanny was not able to accept the seriousness of d’Arblay’s condition, and even chose to think that he might be exaggerating, though this was far from the truth. The private diary he kept between February and April 181833 reveals the extent of his physical sufferings, his anxieties for his wife and son and his intuition that he was dying. D’Arblay’s love for Fanny and understanding of her character shows itself more clearly than ever in his concern to prepare her for the inevitable, just as her refusal to acknowledge what he was trying to tell her in the latter half of 1817 is testimony to her equally strong feelings for him. She was so sure she could not possibly outlive her ‘meilleur ami’s death that there was really no point in anticipating it.

  The result of her denial was, however, to impede his recovery. In January 1818 d’Arblay demanded a consultation with a surgeon, but by then he was far gone in his disease. ‘My Invalid was right!’ Fanny wrote in distress to Mrs Locke; ‘measures were required that had far more happily been employed sooner! – alas alas.’34 Still she maintained a false optimism in front of her sister Hetty (who was living at this date near Bath with her daughters Maria and Sophia) and in front of the invalid himself, whom she continually tried to rally. It was only when d’Arblay had received the last rites from the local Roman Catholic priest and began to tell Fanny his dying wishes that she ‘dared no longer oppose to him my hopes of his recovery’. She heard his counsel ‘with deluges of long restrained tears’, at last ‘awakened to a sense of his danger’.35