Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  D’Arblay was of course deeply concerned about his wife’s likely reaction to his fast-approaching death. He adjured her to seek support from her sisters and friends, to solidify her friendships with the Queen and princesses, to keep as much as she could in the world and not to clam up as she had done so damagingly after Susan’s death in 1800: ‘Parle de moi!’ he urged her, as Fanny recalled in her long ‘Narrative of the Illness & Death of General d’Arblay’, ‘Parle – et souvant. Surtout à Alexandre; qu’il ne m’oublie pas!’36 He also instructed her to write up some of the critical episodes of their later life together, guessing that the process would have some therapeutic benefit for her.

  Alex, who had graduated from Christ’s as tenth Wrangler in January 1818 and had been elected a Fellow of the college in March, was called back from Cambridge at the end of April to see his father once more. The Lieutenant-General was still in possession of his faculties and able to give his son a blessing, but Fanny was by this time in a state bordering on distraction and so desperate to see symptoms of recovery that she was even prepared to wake her husband up with sal volatile when he fell into unconsciousness. The doctor, unsurprisingly, took a dim view of such behaviour. On 3 May d’Arblay leant forward, took Fanny’s hand between both of his and said, ‘I don’t know if these are my last words, but this will be my last thought – Our Reunion!’37 He did speak again, even attempting a pleasantry about the way Alex plumped up his pillow, but these were his last words to his wife, chosen with great care and sincere feeling. Thoughtful and selfless to the last, d’Arblay provided Fanny with the only possible comfort with which to face her coming bereavement.

  D’Arblay died in his sleep later that day while his wife and son were in the room, watching, though neither of them realised when the actual moment of death came. Ironically, Fanny had mistaken his calm for ‘a favourable crisis’ that might turn the course of her husband’s illness. Hours passed, during which she noticed ‘a universal stillness in the whole frame such as seemed to stagnate – if I so can be understood – all around’.38 She called for their servant Payne, convinced that ‘this sleep was important’ (as indeed it was), and was astonished when the woman slipped off during the next hour of waiting, telling Alex she ‘would go and take her tea!’ Fanny did not dare look for her husband’s pulse or touch his lips, but felt that his hands were turning cold, so covered them with new flannel. Payne – and presumably Alex, too, since he did not stop the servant leaving – saw what Fanny simply could not bear to see, that d’Arblay was already dead.

  Confirmation of the death was made by the doctor, Mr Tudor, soon after. ‘How I bore this is still marvellous to me!’ Fanny wrote later, in an extraordinary reconstruction of the effects of the shock; ‘I had always believed such a sentence would at once have killed me’:

  I had certainly a partial derangement – for I cannot to this moment recollect any thing that now succeeded with Truth or Consistency; my Memory paints things that were necessarily real, joined to others that could not possibly have happened, yet amalgamates the whole so together, as to render it impossible for me to separate Truth from indefinable, unaccountable Fiction. Even to this instant, I always see the Room itself changed into an Octagon, with a medley of silent & strange figures grouped against the Wall just opposite to me. Mr Tudor, methought, was come to drag me by force away; & in this persuasion, which was false I remember supplicating him, with fervent humility, to grant me but one hour, telling him I had solemnly engaged myself to pass it by his side.39

  This hallucinatory experience, more peculiar in its details than any of the ‘visions’ she had written in her fiction, marked Fanny Burney’s passage into a long declining widowhood. Her marriage to d’Arblay had lasted twenty-five years, and despite all the vicissitudes of their separations, illnesses and privations during that period, they had remained utterly devoted to and dependent on each other. Back in 1793 Fanny had praised her lover’s ‘nobleness of character – his sweetness of disposition – his Honour, truth, integrity with so much of softness, delicacy, & tender humanity’.40 Remarkably, she spoke of him in almost exactly the same terms a quarter of a century later, with an apparently unquenchable freshness of appreciation and love. Even the wording of the memorial tablet which she paid to have erected in Walcot Church expressed a persistent sense of incredulity at her good fortune:

  But who shall delineate his noble Character?

  The Spirit of his Valour, or the Softness of his Heart?

  […] The PURITY of his INTEGRITY: the TRANSPARENCY of his HONOUR;

  or the indescribable charm of his Social Virtues!

  Madame d’Arblay only remained in Bath a few months following the death of her husband. She gave Alex the choice of where they should live, and he decided on London, a good choice, since Fanny had never lived in the capital with d’Arblay; her loss, ‘though Internally forever the same’ would not be ‘so acutely goaded on by All that is external also’ there.41 She was too distraught to be able to tolerate any avoidable distress, and shunned Bath after she left it in September 1818. As much as ten years later she could still be overset by the unexpected sight of one of their old friends, and could never mention her husband’s name in letters without breaking down into exclamation marks and silence.

  The house she found in the capital was at 11 Bolton Street, a quiet, narrow road off Piccadilly to the north, handy for the greenery and fresh air of Green Park and within easy reach of her brother’s household in James Street, Westminster. The first weeks there were ‘the most forlorn that can be conceived even by the darkest Imagination!’, as she described them to her sister:

  a seclusion complete from all but sorrow – save, my dear Hetty, Prayer & Future Hope. Without those, I think I had surely sunk. And with them, this solitary affliction was so nearly heart-breaking, that I seemed to myself living in a Hearse! – – Yet I did all I could – & walked out daily with Diane – & made short visits to James street very frequently – but the long – dreary afternoons & Evenings were always alone.42

  Fanny remained very ‘nervous and low’, as her niece Charlotte observed,43 for the whole of the first year of her widowhood and hid herself from public as much as possible. For the first time in her life, writing had become ‘a great toil to me – it is ungenial – recollective – laborious – recollective!’44 She could not bear to listen to music, nor did she want to be in the company of small children. The organ at church ‘dissolved’ her. ‘Oh my dear Charlotte!’ she wrote to her sister in the spring of 1819, ‘What havock in all my existence has that dread dread blow occasioned!’45

  Fanny’s life came to revolve around the small group of family and friends within easy reach; she did travel to see her sisters Hetty and Charlotte, but these outings were rare, long-planned and postponed if the slightest illness or difficulty presented itself. James and his wife Sally were only a short walk away, and she had frequent visits from Susan’s daughter, Fanny Raper, who lived in Chelsea (and was by now the author of a novel, Laura Valcheret, and a pamphlet, Pastoral Duties, published in 1814 and 1818 respectively). Her cousin Edward Francesco Burney, now almost sixty, niece Fanny Burney (Hetty’s daughter), Mrs Locke, Amelia Angerstein (née Locke) and the Cambridges were also faithful visitors. George Owen Cambridge was now Archdeacon of Middlesex and one of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, a useful patron for Alex, who had taken Holy Orders in the year of his father’s death. The Cambridges’ semi-adoption of the fatherless youth probably had something to do with the fact that they had no children of their own, but may also have reflected residual feelings of guilt on the part of George Cambridge for the pain he had caused Fanny back in the 1780s. Remarkably, she had become one of their most admiring friends.

  Fanny was more grateful than ever for the support of her affectionate family and friends: ‘I am very glad of your correspondences’, she wrote to Hetty. ‘They keep Life alive.’46 One of the few solid comforts of these years when Fanny was living in discreet retirement in Mayfair was that her friends
hips with the princesses blossomed. Since the death of their mother in 1818 the princesses were enjoying a modest amount of freedom for the first time. Their father was still alive, but incapacitated and kept in confinement at Windsor; their brother, the Prince Regent (after 1820 King), had proved a much more generous and liberal head of the family. The princesses were all middle-aged by now: the eldest, Charlotte, was married to the King of Württemburg; her sister Elizabeth (with whom Fanny was in correspondence) to the Prince of Hesse-Homburg; and Mary to the Duke of Gloucester. None of these was a love-match, unlike the secret relationships, possibly secret marriages, which are thought to have been going on between Princess Augusta and an Irish officer, Brent Spencer, and Princess Sophia and one of the King’s equerries. Princess Sophia was even rumoured to have borne an illegitimate child to her beau in 1800, an item of gossip that didn’t become widespread until 1829. It is unlikely that Fanny knew or heard much about any of these scandalous suggestions in the early 1820s, or credited them if she did. She accepted the princesses’ friendship gratefully and was treated with flattering familiarity by them in return. ‘I received not only consent, but command to come forth in that Form where it had never before made its entrée’, she wrote amusedly to her sister and niece,

  & Mobbled, & Muffled, & Hooded, & Bas Chapeaued, I presented myself at Kensington Palace – to the no small wonder, no doubt, – & probably Horror, of the Heralds preceding my ushering into Presence, – who, having received orders to take care I caught no cold, came forward as the royal vehicle drove up to the Gates, Two pages with a large umbrella in front, & two footmen to each touch an elbow in the rear, – & two underlings spreading a long carpet from the Coach steps onward to the Hall, – – & all, no doubt, inwardly, sniggering when they saw it was for such a Figure of Fun!47

  Fanny’s main occupation in the years following d’Arblay’s death was to fulfil her promise to make a comprehensive record of certain episodes for posterity. The retrospective ‘journals’ she composed as a result – covering her experiences in Dunkirk and Brussels and the journey to Trèves in the years 1812–15, her presentations to Louis XVIII in London in 1814 and to his sister the Duchesse d’Angoulême in Paris the same year and her ‘Ilfracombe Adventure’ – run to several hundred pages. It must have struck her when she had completed this task that she was halfway to having finished an autobiography. In the same period, she was at last getting down to the job of sorting her father’s voluminous manuscripts. She had originally imagined that it would be a relatively easy task to select from his correspondence a book’s-worth of material and to write an accompanying memoir. However, when she first inspected the papers closely (on the ill-fated Ilfracombe holiday in 1817) she was severely disappointed by (as she said) the poor quality of the letters both to and from Charles Burney’s many famous friends. She reported back to Hetty that there were ‘Few […] not fit to light Candles’, and that it simply wouldn’t be worth the effort of ‘about 3 years hard reading’ to provide ‘about 3 quarter’s of a hour’s reading’ for others.48 She persuaded Hetty that they should abandon the project, though Hetty had been hoping to derive some income from the manuscripts, a matter of importance to her since the death of her husband, faithful Charles Rousseau Burney, in 1819.

  Whether or not Madame d’Arblay genuinely felt disgusted at the literary shortcomings of Dr Burney’s papers or not is impossible to say, but it seems likely that her strong revulsion at her father’s letters and memoirs (of which there were some twelve ‘cahiers’) was complicated by the portrait which emerged from them, which was very much at variance with her own idealised view. She had hoped that the Doctor’s memoirs would show him ‘the Carressed, sought, honoured & admired Friend’ of the greatest men of his age, ‘as much loved & esteemed as if he had been the Universal Patron of them all’.49 It is not surprising, therefore, that she was disappointed. The 165 fragments of original memoir that remain show Charles Burney at his most unassuming, relaxed and self-mocking about his early efforts to make a name for himself in the professional music world. Fanny judged his reminiscences of merely ‘local interests of the day, now sunk from every memory, & containing Nothing that could either benefit or amuse a single Reader by remaining on record’. She stressed to Hetty how thoroughly she had scoured the material, twice, for anything ‘that may be usefully, or ornamentally, Biographical’, but that all the rest, which she considered ‘utterly irrelevant, or any way mischievous’,50 she had destroyed.

  ‘Mischievousness’ seems to have been the real sticking point. Fanny was surprised that her father had not taken more care with the disposal of his papers, ‘an omission that has often astonished me, considering the unexamined state of his private memorandums, & the various papers that could not have been spread, even in a general Family review, without causing pain, or Confusion’.51 Clearly there were things in them that gave her cause for ‘pain, or Confusion’.52 It is unlikely that Charles Burney would have revealed specific secrets such as his cohabitation with Fanny’s mother before their marriage, but there may have been clues to rouse his daughter’s suspicions (she was very reticent about letting Hetty see the material for herself), and there would certainly have been matter relating to the Doctor’s second wife which contradicted Fanny’s ideas about her. When Fanny reported to her sister that she had ‘dissected this multifarious Work’ and ‘removed all that appeared to me peccant parts’,53 it was no coincidence that she was employing the same adjective she had used to describe the life-threatening ‘atoms’ of her cancer. In their mutilated state, the Doctor’s memoirs were left, for the time being, to rest in peace.

  In the summer of 1821 James Burney was finally promoted to the rank of Rear-Admiral on the retired list. He had reached the top of the retired Captains list through seniority many years before this without promotion, but no one in the Burney family was in the mood to view the long delay as a humiliation. Her brother’s new rank afforded Fanny more solid pleasure than anything had for years, far more than she ever derived from her own title of Comtesse (which she seems only to have used to spare the princesses’ servants’ feelings). She began to call herself ‘the Admiral’s sister’, and to fill her letters to James and his wife with arch references to his new status.

  The family’s pleasure was short-lived, however. James dropped dead in November of the same year, aged seventy-one, and the three widowed sisters, Hetty, Fanny and Charlotte and their half-sister Sarah were left as the only remnant of the old Burney family. James’s death brought back into view an unwelcome survivor of the old days, Molesworth Phillips. Phillips had married again in 1800, scandalously soon after Susan’s death, but abandoned his second wife, Ann Maturin, and their children and had been openly keeping a mistress in London for some years. James had stayed loyal to him despite his sisters’ disgust towards the ‘unfeeling wretch’. Phillips was often to be seen at James Street, and was followed there on one occasion by bailiffs and arrested for the non-payment of his wife’s house-rent (which kind James stumped up, unsurprisingly).54 It was Phillips who assumed the role of chief mourner after James’s death, helping to organise the funeral (which the sisters did not attend) and arranging – but not paying – for a bust to be made of the dead man.55

  Alex did not get an appointment in the Church until he was almost thirty years old, despite the active support of friends such as George Cambridge. Because of the Peace, the Church was flooded with young clergymen all competing for a relatively small number of livings, and it was necessary to gain a name as a preacher in order to advance. Alex’s preaching style was not to everyone’s taste – certainly not his mother’s, who confined her praise to his clear delivery (something that would have concerned her, since Alex was prone to ‘stuttering and hesitation’ in his ordinary speech56). She was alarmed to hear from her sister Hetty that Alex was thought by some observers to be deliberately affecting a style of theatrical declamation, perhaps in direct imitation of ‘a particular actor’57 (Alex was a great admirer of Edmund Kean and of Talma
). Addicts of pulpit ‘enthusiasm’ were less difficult to please. When Charlotte Barrett went to hear Alex preach at Ely Cathedral in 1823, some of the ladies in the congregation were ‘in raptures’. Whether this was actually because of the sermon, or the sermoniser’s expensive French clothes, slim figure and meticulously curled hair is impossible to tell.

  Alex’s long wait for a curacy was as much a matter of indolence on his part as anything else, and suggests that he had misgivings about his chosen career. In 1821 he had travelled to Switzerland with his Cambridge mathematician friends Charles Babbage (later the inventor of an analytical machine now thought of as the forerunner of the computer) and John Herschel, son of the astronomer. The trip, which was meant to last only a few weeks, extended to nine months when Alex left his friends and went on an impromptu solitary walking tour around Lake Geneva and to Mont Blanc. The mountain impressed him forcibly – as it had most romantic and poetical young travellers of the time, Coleridge and Shelley among them – and he gave himself over to writing an ‘Ode on Mont Blanc’ (in English) and later a ‘Dithyrambe’ (in French) on the same subject.* Unlike his interesting translations of Lamartine into English and Byron into French, Alex’s own poetry tended to swell uncontrollably: