Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  Hetty Burney did not live to see the Memoirs published, nor did Frederica Locke. 1832 was a terrible year for Fanny, which also saw the deaths of her nephew William Phillips and her forty-two-year-old niece Marianne Francis. Clement Francis junior had died three years before, and two of Hetty’s daughters, Cecilia and Fanny, were also dead. Charlotte Barrett, now in her forties, was the only one of Charlotte Burney’s four children left alive. With the next generation disappearing before their eyes, the two elderly sisters, Fanny and Charlotte, drew together for comfort.

  One final and irreparable heartbreak lay in store for Fanny – the death of her son and heir. In the sad story of Alex d’Arblay’s wasted and apparently unhappy life, it is hard not to conclude that he suffered from the very ‘Wertherism’ that his mother had identified in her novels as the greatest evil of the age. In the mid-1830s, when he had just turned forty, a crisis was brewing in Alex’s affairs. His long absences from duty at Camden Chapel had so tested the patience of some of the parishioners that as early as 1832 they were getting up a petition to have the curate dismissed. But still Alex spent months away, often in hotels, a circumstance which the editors of the Journals and Letters think ‘a symptom perhaps of nervous weariness or some deviation’.91 At home at 1 Half Moon Street (where she had moved in 1829),* Madame d’Arblay had got into the habit of reading the ‘epistolary litters’ on her son’s desk, ostensibly to prevent important business being overlooked by him. Perhaps she discovered more than she bargained for. She professed to believe that her son was indulging in solitary recreation during his unscheduled absences, but clearly feared that there was some more dangerous ‘manie’ being pursued: ‘O be careful for watch is the word!’ she wrote to him mysteriously when he was staying in Brighton in 1834; ‘Let nothing strange occur’.93

  A long poem which Alex composed in 1833, ‘Urania, or The Spirit of Poetry’, suggests that one of the things that was depressing the clergymanpoet was the failure of his literary ambitions. The poem ends with the lines:

  Grant but one flash of heavenly light,

  One hour of inspiration’s might,

  Then plunge him in the shades of night,

  To be forever free.94

  The willingness to bargain eternity against ‘one hour of inspiration’ and the equation of death with freedom are unexpectedly bleak ideas for a pious man to entertain. The poem shows that Alex was subject to strong passions, which are expressed almost exclusively in negative images: ‘Shame veiled her conscience-clouded brow/For whom was spread the lure’; ‘… on the havoc she had made/I saw false beauty smile’, and so on. At the beginning of 1835 Sarah Harriet Burney had heard gossip that a Mrs Clara Bolton, wife of a society doctor, had ‘conceived a mad fancy’ for Alex d’Arblay. ‘She is reported to be very handsome, immoderately clever, an Astrologer, even […] She is very entertaining, & has something of the look of a handsome Witch’.95 ‘The Sibyl’, whose husband had a house very near the d’Arblays in St James’s Square and another in Dover, had been the mistress of Benjamin Disraeli a few years before, and was now soliciting her former lover on Alex d’Arblay’s behalf to get him promoted to a better job than his one at Camden. Even Alex’s mother was drawn into a correspondence with Disraeli on the subject, though at this point she had no idea what role ‘Mrs George Buckley Bolton’ played in the lives of either man.

  That Mrs Bolton had a powerful hold over Alex is indisputable. A copy of part of a letter to Alex ‘of Mrs B’ (whom I take to be Clara Bolton), received on 4 April 1835, shows a manipulative woman at work:

  My friend M.A.S is very good & we often talk of you – I am convinced if you liked her & popped, you would be accepted […] if I held out to you she was a genius, I should lie – nor is she enthusiastic – her nature is formed in a different mould […] – there now – do you not intend giving us a look ere we leave – we may never meet again under such happy circumstances – the steamboat runs regularly to Dover & comes in one hour less than the coach – do come next week if possible – contrive & give the boobys the slip.96

  Alex was peculiarly vulnerable to such a call from ‘the Sibyl’ at that time; a day or two earlier he had received from his mother the harshest letter she had ever written him, betraying exasperation and disgust with her incurably negligent son:

  What is all this conduct, Alex? & What does it mean? if a Joke – does it not go too far […]

  If it be from worn-out affection – helas! – then, it is from mere, though perhaps unconscious Indifference –

  What a Change! – And why did you say write the other day ‘My Nature is so very affectionate – ’

  To whom, Alex?97

  Alex was stirred by this to take the only sort of action that would guarantee to placate his mother. Astonishingly, within three weeks, he not only let Mrs Bolton introduce him to her pliable friend ‘M.A.S.’, but had proposed and was accepted.

  Madame d’Arblay’s reaction was all he could have hoped. ‘Take my tenderest – & delighted Benediction, my dearest – dearest Alex!’ she wrote ecstatically from London.98 Though alarmed by ‘the precipitancy with which you have hurried into so solemn an engagement’, she was prepared to swallow all her misgivings at the prospect of at last seeing him settled. Oddly, though, Alex seemed in no hurry to show off his fiancee. Madame d’Arblay had to wait until July to meet her.

  ‘M.A.S.’ was a Miss Mary Ann Smith, of Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, who may have been a teacher at a private school in Dover.99 When Charlotte Barrett met her she described Mary Ann as ‘very kind, gentle & pleasing – not really pretty, but nothing unpretty’.100 Sensible, pious, modest and – as it turned out – endlessly patient, Mary Ann won her prospective mother-in-law’s affection immediately: ‘my beloved Charlotte I have seen the young lady – & she has put me in Heaven!’ Fanny wrote excitedly to her sister.101 Alex himself did not seem to feel the same degree of enthusiasm about his bride-elect, however, and it is impossible not to suspect that the whole matter of his engagement was one of convenience, to win a reprieve from disappointing his mother. By the end of the year her pleasure at the betrothal had worn away and she was more than ever distressed by Alex’s continued unexplained absences and neglect of both herself and Miss Smith. An undated letter, thought by the editors of the Journals to be a reply to a frantic one from his mother on 15 December 1835, shows the depths of depression to which Alex was sinking. It seems to be addressed to his mother, but is more like a confessional effusion written under the influence of drink, drugs or desperation:

  A deep deep gloom has laid hold of me & God knows if I shall ever shake it off –

  The more I pine in solitude the worse it grows

  Poor generous noble May! Her fresh heart her happiness ought not to be put at stake upon one whose spirit is broken whose soul is fled – […]

  O my dear dear Mammy how – – beautiful your patience your forbearance has been – How unworthy I feel of it – how it cuts me to the Soul

  Why have I fled from you who alone can even attempt to console me –

  O it is a madness – a delirium without a name –102

  While Alex had absconded into his romantic nightmare of dejection and melancholy, Mary Ann and Madame d’Arblay became closer by the day. Mary Ann was long-suffering, but no fool, and wrote candidly to Fanny in January 1836 about her fears for Alex and ‘the influence’ (presumably that of Mrs Bolton) ‘that has sunk into apathy so fine, so noble a mind – but he will recover dearest Madme D’Arblay & be again the comfort to you he has been & to me he will ever be all & every thing’.103 Charlotte Barrett had heard rumours that led her to guess that Alex ‘had some Chère Amie – many people suspect as much from his conduct’, as she wrote to her mother. ‘It would be far best to marry Miss Smith directly’.104

  But Alex did not marry Miss Smith. In March 1836, he resigned at last from his post at Camden and the search began again for a suitable living or lectureship. Through the good offices of George Cambridge, he was appointed minister of Ely Ch
apel, a thirteenth-century church (originally, and latterly, known as St Etheldreda’s) in a neglected backwater of Holborn. The chapel had been out of use for some years, and when it was reopened in the late autumn of 1836 it was still damp, cold and unwelcoming. The Reverend d’Arblay came down with a violent form of ‘flu after the Christmas services which turned to a high fever. By the middle of January he was sinking, and when Archdeacon Cambridge called at Half Moon Street to see Alex, he was not invited in. Madame d’Arblay’s message was that she felt her son’s case was ‘hopeless’, and that ‘by poor Alexander’s express wish she did not go to his Bedside’.105 Alex did not want a repetition of the scenes at his father’s and grandfather’s deathbeds.

  It seems appropriate that the only surviving portrait of Alex d’Arblay as an adult is a shadowy silhouette. Mysteriously solitary to the end, he died alone in his room on 19 January 1837, with his poor rejected mother alone in another part of the same house.

  ‘I cannot describe the chasm of my present existence – so lost in grief – so awake to Resignation – so inert to all that is proffered – so ever & ever retrograding to all that is desolate! – I am a non-entity!’106 Fanny Burney was eighty-four when her son died, a cruelly advanced age at which to lose her only child. Among her friends and relations she appeared to be ‘a pattern of Resignation to the Divine Will’,107 but from her diaries and notebooks of the time she seems to have been more numbed than resigned. 1837 was ‘the most mournful – most earthly hopeless, of any and of all the years yet commenced of my long career!’108 Alex’s expensive library, his papers, his chattels and his debts were now all her responsibility, and she was at a loss to know what to do with ‘this killing mass of constant recurrence to my calamity’.109 The papers, adding to her vast archives of unsorted manuscripts that had belonged to her sister, her father and her husband, presented a huge problem to the bereaved old lady. She was unwilling to destroy so much material ‘that may be amusing & even instructive […] for future times’ – and which was now her only posterity – but the task of examining it was by this time simply beyond her powers. Not only was she tormented by ‘all that was recollective’, but her eyesight, which had been deteriorating steadily throughout the 1830s, was now near ‘total Eclipse’.110

  Worst of all, she was plagued by bitter misgivings and self-reproaches about her son. Even a cursory examination of his poems and letters would have shown her (if she had not already understood it) the extent of his melancholia. A remark in one of Charlotte’s condoling letters had arrested her and provoked some miserable self-examinations. Charlotte had said that Alex was ‘no match for the World’, and that it seemed ‘a mercy for him to be taken to Heaven’.111 ‘You thought it a mercy he was taken while yet watched & cherished in This world of which he so little knew how to combat the ways & arts’, Fanny replied in distress. ‘I could read no more! – I had often, transiently admitted that idea – but recoiled from it with shuddering & anguish’.112

  Mary Ann Smith, probably realising that her fiancé’s heartbroken parent would not have long to live, offered to come and live with Madame d’Arblay. After some resistance (Fanny was worried that it was too self-sacrificial a gesture on Mary Ann’s part) an arrangement was agreed, and in August 1837 (a month after the young Queen Victoria had acceded to the throne) Madame d’Arblay moved to a new address in Mount Street, which she and Miss Smith intended to share. When Mary Ann moved in the following year, the two women soon evolved a modus vivendi that ensured they both remained independent – ‘that each may have time for our separate business or fancies’ – yet had the comfort of each other’s company if need be. This mitigated the pain of Fanny’s evenings previously spent alone in ‘lassitude & weariness’ and long days spent trying ‘to persecute myself into a new existence that might somewhat repair the havoc of calamity upon the worn-out old one’.113

  Fanny was fated to endure one more bereavement. Her sister Charlotte, having travelled from Brighton to visit her in the summer of 1838, took ill and died in lodgings in Mount Street on 12 September at the age of seventy-six. At the beginning of 1839 Fanny wrote in her diary, ‘One more melancholy year let me try – since for some hidden mercy it seems granted me – hidden – for all Life’s happiness is flown with my Alexander.’ Though feeble, depressed, almost blind and still sporadically subject to ‘breast attacks’ that required blistering and bleeding of the old wound, Madame d’Arblay soldiered on through her last year. Despite her fondness for Mary Ann Smith, she did not adopt her as heir – that role was taken by Charlotte Barrett, her tender, clever and sympathetic niece. In the new will Fanny drew up that year, Charlotte was entrusted with ‘my […] immense Mass of Manuscripts collected from my fifteenth year […] with full and free permission according to her unbiassed taste and judgment to keep or destroy them’.114 Generous annuities were bequeathed to Sarah Harriet and to James’s eccentric son Martin, smaller bequests to a host of nephews, nieces and friends. Charles Parr Burney was left the residue of Dr Burney’s papers and Charlotte’s son, Richard Barrett, was made residuary legatee of the estate and of Madame d’Arblay’s manuscripts.

  In the summer of 1839 Madame d’Arblay’s health relapsed and she took to her bed. In November Charlotte Barrett came from Brighton to nurse her and the family gathered round, expecting the old lady to die at any moment. Fanny rallied and held on, though her attention was wandering, and when her nieces tried to read to her she said to them, ‘My dear, I cannot understand a word – not a syllable – but I thank God, my mind has not waited till this time.’ ‘Her kindness remained as ever,’ Fanny Raper recalled, ‘though it became more and more distasteful to her to receive us – she could not endure the exertion of speaking.’

  By an odd coincidence, or – perhaps – a strange effort of will, Fanny Burney held on to life until 6 January 1840, the day upon which Susan had died exactly forty years before, and which she had kept as a solemn memorial day of prayer and meditation ever since. Her last recorded words to her nieces were, ‘I know I am dying, but I am willing to die; I commit my soul to God, in reliance on the mercy & merit of my redeemer’;115 but these were not her only thoughts. Among the kind words for the nieces and pious hopes for herself, there were still instructions, directions and matters of business about where to find the keys to unlock her boxes of papers. Part of her mind was on posterity to the last.

  * * *

  * Charles Burney junior reported the progress of the Streatham Park sale in a series of letters to Fanny (in the Comyn collection). His observations must have given her pain, for included in the sale were the copies of Evelina and Cecilia which the author had presented to Mrs Thrale. The first leaf of the latter (on which Fanny would have written an inscription) had been torn out; in the former, ‘From the Scribler’ was annotated by Mrs Thrale, ‘N.B. Scribler with one B, Madame Dab!’

  * It is not clear when this portrait was begun, but it was probably during d’Arblay’s 1816 trip. His comment in late June 1817 that ‘poor Vernet has not yet finished my portrait’ betrays a certain impatience, and Fanny’s response, ‘let me not pass another Winter without it,’ shows it was begun at least a year before.11

  * William Hazlitt made a sardonic observation on the banality of the subject in 1825: ‘The Crossing of the Alps has, I believe, given some of our fashionables a shivering-fit of morality; as the sight of Mont Blanc convinced our author [Tom Moore] of the Being of God – they are seized with an amiable horror and remorse for the vices of others.’58

  * S.S. Wesley, the famous organist and composer.

  * Lally-Tolendal had asked her to promote the cause of the refugee Constantine Sevastopulo – he visited Bolton Street three times in 1826.73

  * Macaulay and Croker were both, at this date, Members of the House of Commons and involved in parliamentary controversy over the 1832 Reform Bill. They also had a number of long-running literary feuds, notably over Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. ‘I detest him more than cold veal,’ Macaulay once said
of his rival.90

  * An interesting reference to these premises survives in P. Cunningham’s Handbook of London (1850): ‘I remember Madame D’Arblay (Fanny Burney) living on the east side of the street, in the last house overlooking Piccadilly. Her sitting-room was the front room over the shop, then a linendraper’s, now a turner’s, shop.’92

  Post Mortem

  Charlotte Barrett was nervous about the publication of her late aunt’s Diary and Letters in 1842, and it seemed with good reason. Croker continued his campaign against the author with a stinging attack in the Quarterly on her ‘extravagant egotism’, and many other reviewers followed suit. Madame d’Arblay’s vanity, according to the Eclectic Review, ‘obtrudes itself in almost every page, and frequently leads to prolixity, and minuteness of detail, which is wearisome in the extreme’. Within the family, Sarah Payne, James Burney’s daughter, was ‘very sensitive’ about the publication, and told her friend Henry Crabb Robinson that it was ‘a great reproach to Mad d’Arblay that she should record nothing but the conversation that respected herself, be it praise or blame – and that nothing else even of Johnson’s or Burke’s conversation made any impression on her’.1 Like the accusations of self-absorption (an odd criticism to level at a diarist), this was hardly fair. What really seems to have upset the readers and reviewers of 1842 was not so much that Madame d’Arblay’s diaries were self-centred as that they were relatively artless and unpolished, that they revealed ‘the conversations of eminent people’ like Johnson and Burke to be sometimes conversations of ‘ordinary mediocssrity’.2 No one wanted to know what Dr Johnson had said about rashers and mutton pies.

  Of the ‘tautology and vanity’ of the diaries Sarah Harriet Burney had this to say to Robinson: ‘In her life, [Madame d’Arblay] bottled it all up, & looked and generally spoke with the most refined modesty, & seemed ready to drop if ever her works were alluded to. But what was kept back, and scarcely suspected in society, wanting a safety valve, found its way to her private journal. Thence, had Mrs Barrett been judicious, she would have trundled it out, by half quires, and even whole quires at a time’.3 Sarah Harriet implies that her half-sister was only able to appear ‘unoffending and unenvious’ in public because in private she was self-regarding. Though it is unpleasantly put, there is some truth in this: labouring under the belief that authorship and gentility, performance and sincerity, were not compatible, Fanny Burney’s public behaviour and private writing did not intersect very much at all.