Fanny Burney: A biography

Fanny Burney’s freedom with language reflects her self-image as an ‘outsider’ in literature and her defiance of conventional limitations in a manner that could be seen as rebellious, even revolutionary; but, as with her natural and powerful feminism, her sense of propriety, personal prejudices and deep conservatism all militated against her acknowledging this. The more she did acknowledge it, the more inhibited her writing became. Any connection with anti-conventionality, however abstract, was problematic for her, as we shall see in numerous instances. She deplored disrespect to authority, and was such an arch-Tory in her youth that even her father (not a man noted for his liberal politics) teased her with the nickname ‘Fanny Bull’. But howevermuch her conservatism affected her behaviour socially, it never inhibited Fanny Burney from inventing words and phrases – ‘John Bullism’ itself is one of them.

(#litres_trial_promo) As Waddell has remarked, her innovations ‘reveal a relaxed enjoyment of language for its own sake, and an unashamed pleasure in its flexibility’, and set her apart as a ‘transcriber of the ordinary, as well as a pioneer in the unusual’. Whatever other anxieties Fanny Burney developed as a writer, language remained an area where she felt perfectly free.

* (#ulink_36ac4851-f4ae-5ce0-bf93-8fa512fb96f0) The modern spelling is ‘Chessington’.

† (#ulink_5cae3617-7ebd-5204-b4fa-aca1e387f285) The County History says that Hamilton paid for the property, but records in the Surrey History Centre state that he was ‘only son and heir’ of Rebecca Hatton of Chesington. Mrs Hatton was, presumably, widow or sister of Thomas Hatton, owner of Chesington Hall until his death in 1746. The different surname of Rebecca’s children indicates that they were the issue of an earlier marriage.

* (#ulink_aec44d19-95eb-5e54-a97f-f1525cba17ec) Chesington Hall was pulled down in 1833–4 and rebuilt on the old foundations. It was this short-lived Victorian building (demolished a century later and now covered over by a residential estate) which Constance Hill and her sister Ellen visited when writing Juniper Hall (published in 1904). Neither Ellen Hill’s picture of the Hall in that book (p.147) nor an older amateur drawing in the archives of the Surrey History Centre gives much idea of the house as it was in Crisp’s day, but the records of leases and releases do. They itemise the rooms reserved by Sarah Hamilton after the property was divided: ‘on the ground floor, the Hall and the Brown and Best Parlours next the Garden with the closets therein, the small beer cellar, the under ground cellar communicating with the small beer cellar, and those rooms up a pair of stairs called the Best Chamber, the Brown Room, the Paper Room, the Wrought Room and the Green Room; the rooms up two pair of stairs (except the first room which communicates with the Back Stairs wherein the farmer’s men usually lie), Stable, Coachhouse, the Brewhouse with the Apple Chamber over it, the Pidgeon House, the Great Garden adjoining the sd. messuage and Brewhouse, the Necessary in the Garden, the Lower Garden adjoining the Necessary, the Pound Meadow, the Walk to the Church with trees on both sides of it and the fruit thereof, the use of the Pump and all other Courts, yards, ways and passages in and about the sd. messuage’.

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† (#ulink_aec44d19-95eb-5e54-a97f-f1525cba17ec) Like many spinsters of mature years, Sarah Hamilton had adopted the title ‘Mrs’.

* (#ulink_cb139cc0-b090-5ad3-8947-06d1955a66c0) And which Jane Austen knew well too – it is the book Mr Collins insists on reading aloud to the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice.

* (#ulink_6b1c976e-249c-56a9-b5d3-e88bc6e0ff93) 1766 is the likely date: Susan’s miscellaneous writings show she was in London by the spring of 1767.

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* (#ulink_733a2fa3-702d-54c7-9182-756c645623fd) The date – 1766–7 – is conjectural, based on Crisp’s estimate in 1779 that the incident took place ‘about a Dozen Years ago’

(#litres_trial_promo) and Fanny’s statement in 1771 that she had not been to Chesington ‘for almost five years’.

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* (#ulink_04fbc481-831f-595a-a9ab-cf4b615574c6) ‘Allen’ was Elizabeth’s maiden name as well as her first married name.

* (#ulink_9145e646-e8af-54cd-a0d2-b59a9b8f7a2e) Why she should have loaned such an enormous sum, apparently without interest, for a period of thirty years, is a mystery.

3 Female Caution (#ulink_8533f562-fecc-5128-894b-f5ed7de26f37)

In 1768, the year when Fanny began to write her diary, Hetty Burney and Maria Allen, aged nineteen and seventeen respectively, were making their entrances into the world. Fanny observed their progress with profound interest and a degree of ironic detachment. Both the older girls had plenty of admirers and indulged to the full the drama of playing them off against each other. Subsequent to every evening out there would be a trail of young men calling at Poland Street, some dull, some rakish, some unsure which girl to court, some, like Hetty’s admirer Mr Seton, happy to talk to Fanny in her sister’s absence, and to discover, as the chosen few did, how well the sixteen-year-old could keep up a conversation:

[Mr Seton]: I vow, if I had gone into almost any other House, & talk’d at this rate to a young lady, she would have been sound a sleep by this Time; Or at least, she would have amused me with gaping & yawning, all the time, & certainly, she would not have understood a word I had utter’d.

F. ‘And so, this is your opinion of our sex? –’

Mr S. ‘Ay; – & of mine too.’

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‘I scarse wish for any thing so truly, really & greatly, as to be in love’, Fanny confessed to patient ‘Nobody’, but she didn’t relish being the object of someone else’s adoration. A ‘mutual tendresse’ would be too much to ask for – ‘I carry not my wish so far’.

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Fanny was just reaching the age at which she was allowed to accompany the older girls to assemblies and dances, some of which went on all night. They would set off in the family coach and straggle home in hired sedan chairs at seven or eight in the morning. There were seldom any chaperones (sometimes because the girls had deceived their father into thinking there was no necessity for one, and he was too negligent to check). Fanny made her first serious conquest – a youth called Tomkin whom she didn’t want – at the most sophisticated and risqué of the entertainments on offer to young women at the time, a masquerade. Masquerade balls were notorious as places of assignation, and excited widespread disapproval. Henry Fielding’s brother, the famous magistrate Sir John Fielding, had been trying for years to close down the establishment run by Mrs Corneley, an ex-lover of Casanova. Contemporary engravings of her parties in Soho Square show some bizarre characters, including a man leading a live bear and a person dressed as (or rather, in) a coffin, with his feet protruding from the bottom and eyeholes cut in the lid. There is also a masquerader in the character of Adam, naked except for a shrubbery loincloth, which recalls the scandalous costume of Miss Chudleigh at the Venetian Ambassador’s masquerade, who went as ‘Iphigenia’, wearing nothing but a piece of gauze.

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Fanny Burney had nothing quite so challenging to deal with at Mr Lalauze’s masquerade in Leicester Square: there was a nun, a witch (who turned out to be a man), a Punch, an Indian Queen, several Dominoes and the predictable flock of shepherdesses. The Burney girls had spent the whole day dressing, Hetty in a Savoyard costume, complete with hurdy-gurdy, and Fanny (much less adventurously) in ‘meer fancy Dress’, a highly-decorated pink Persian gown with a rather badly home-made mask. Despite its flimsiness, the mask gave Fanny ‘a courage I never before had in the presence of strangers’

(#litres_trial_promo) and, as with Mr Seton, she ‘did not spare’ the company. According to the procedure at masquerades, everyone was obliged to support their character, passing from one person to another asking, ‘Do you know me? Who are you?’

(#litres_trial_promo) until partners had been chosen and the dramatic (or not) moment of unmasking arrived. Fanny’s partner was a ‘Dutchman’ (Mr Tomkin) who had spent the evening grunting at her and using sign language. ‘Nothing could be more droll than the first Dance we had after unmasking’, she told Nobody later:

to see the pleasure which appeared in some Countenances, & the disappointment pictured in others made the most singular contrast imaginable, & to see the Old turned Young, & the Young Old, – in short every Face appeared diferent [sic] from what we expected.

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The confusion of expectations and the burlesque aspects of the masquerade appealed strongly to Fanny’s imagination, and her use of masquerade in her second novel, Cecilia, shows how well she appreciated its symbolic potential. In the novel, the heroine is tormented by her frustrated admirer Monckton, who is indulging his fantasies by dressing as a demon with a red ‘wand’. She is forcibly detained by this supposed guardian, who never speaks, but uses his devilish character to intimidate the whole company. Cecilia describes this anarchic evening as one ‘from which she had received much pleasure’, and which ‘excited at once her curiosity and amazement’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The abdication of identity in the masquerade is seen as both exciting and dangerous.

Fanny Burney had a much less sheltered upbringing than most middle-class girls of her time, and the constant stream of musicians, writers, singers, actors and travellers that passed through the Burney household provided endless matter for amazement and speculation. It was a peculiarly worldly atmosphere for an unworldly, innocent-minded girl to observe, and she found it attractive without always being able to identify quite why. As a novelist, she developed a taste for drama and high colouring which some critics have seen as almost an obsession with the violence potential in genteel life.

(#litres_trial_promo) The heroines of Burney novels are beyond reproach morally, but are constantly exposed to bizarre and outlandish events that the author is not afraid to depict as stimulating. This indicates a relish for experience which the novel form allowed Fanny Burney to emphasise and exaggerate – the freedom that the mask at Mr Lalauze’s had given her not to hide her true colours, but to reveal them.

The habit of writing, whether it was her journal or creative ‘vagaries’, and the secretive solitude it required became such pleasures to Fanny that she resented other calls on her time. The social duties of adult life that obliged women to be forever receiving and returning visits and performing ‘constrained Civilities to Persons quite indifferent to us’

(#litres_trial_promo) left her cold. ‘Mama’ was very keen on these civilities (she no doubt saw them as essential in a household full of girls in the marriage market), and one of Fanny’s outbursts in her journal hints at the tensions that were arising from the new regime:

those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility, – breach of manners – love of originality, – & God knows what not – nevertheless, they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to Chains their reason disapproves, they shall I always honour – if that will be of any service to them!

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The cryptic references to ‘Chains’ and ‘defiance’ indicate the dramatic terms in which the teenaged Burney girls saw their struggle against ‘Mama’ and her set ideas about a woman’s destiny. At this point in her life, Fanny had no thought of her writings being published or even read by anyone other than ‘Nobody’, or Susan at the very most, but writing already defined her sense of autonomy, in terms both of what she wrote and the liberty she required to write it.

Fanny’s invention of the deliberately trivialising term ‘scribbleration’ for her writing was a sort of disclaimer, disassociating herself from authorship, which was the preserve of the venerated ‘class of authors’. Her father was about to join that class himself, in the same year (1769) that he finally took his doctorate in music at Oxford. When a friend called Steele suggested that Burney wasn’t making enough of his new academic title, and urged him to change his door-plate, the new doctor replied, self-consciously slipping into dialect, ‘I wants dayecity, I’m ashayum’d!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Want of ‘dayecity’ – or the affectation of such – ran even stronger in his daughter. When her father was in Oxford for the performance of his examination piece, Fanny sent him some comic verses that she had composed to mark the occasion. He was so amused that he read them aloud to casual acquaintances in Oxford, and teased her when he got home by reciting them in front of the family. Fanny tried to snatch the verses from him, but he carried on, and all she felt she could do was run out of the room. Her delight that he was not angry at her ‘pert verses’

(#litres_trial_promo) made her creep back again, though, to hear his praises surreptitiously. It was a premonition of all her later fears and ambivalence about the reception of her work and her father’s approval of it in particular.

Charles Burney’s doctorate (which was, of course, soon brazened – Steele’s pun – on the Poland Street door) conferred an authority which was helpful to his self-esteem and to the new turn he wanted his career to take. In October his first book, a short, businesslike Essay towards a history of the principal comets that have appeared since 1742, was published. The subject was timely and topical; astronomy was fashionable, and 1769 was the year in which Halley had predicted the return of his comet ‘in confirmation of the theory of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton’. But though Burney’s little book shows his commercial instincts at work (it sold well enough to be reprinted the following year), it had a personal significance as well, being a form of homage to the dead Esther. Years before, she had made a translation of the French scientist Maupertuis’s ‘Letter upon Comets’, purely from ‘love of improvement’, according to Fanny

(#litres_trial_promo) (rather like Fanny’s own youthful translation of Fontanelle). Esther’s interest in astronomy had fuelled her husband’s – she might well have been looking forward to the reappearance of the great comet herself. Charles Burney revised the translation and wrote his own essay as a companion piece, a gesture which was not lost on their daughter. In the Memoirs she describes the work as a joint project by her parents, and prefaces her remarks with the apparently irrelevant information that the second Mrs Burney was staying in Norfolk at the time of its production – as if the book constituted some kind of secret assignation between Burney and his dead wife. At the distance of more than fifty years, Fanny wrote portentously about her father’s first step into print, and was in no doubt who should take the credit: her mother’s pure ‘love of improvement’ had ‘unlocked […] the gates through which Doctor Burney first passed to that literary career which, ere long, greeted his more courageous entrance into a publicity that conducted him to celebrity’.

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The Essay was only a short work but it kept Dr Burney up late at night, and its completion was followed by an acute bout of rheumatic fever. The pattern of overwork, hurry and collapse during the composition of his books may have impressed the Doctor’s daughter with the idea that writing was something urgent, difficult and heroic. Burney had by this time formulated the plan for his General History of Music, the first scholarly attempt in English to cover the development of the subject from ancient times to his own day. To choose a project so massive and challenging suggests that Burney had tired of dabbling and wanted a surefire ticket to fame (and fortune, of course), to be the author of a work which would virtually put itself beyond criticism on account of its novelty, authority and sheer size, and which, like the Dictionary of his admired Johnson, would contribute substantially to knowledge, in an age when all the best minds of Europe seemed engaged on writing works of reference.

Burney felt that his book would only make the proper impact if it derived from original research in the great music libraries of Europe, also that ‘the present state of modern music’ was the most important part of his subject. Armed with letters of recommendation from his influential friends to British officials in France and Italy, he set off on a six-month Continental tour in June 1770. It was an arduous but extremely productive journey, and though Burney was in a state of collapse on his return, he had met many famous and learned people, including Padre G.B. Martini in Bologna, the foremost musicologist of the time, the castrato Farinelli in Venice, the seventy-five-year-old Voltaire at Ferney (by an engineered accident), and in Paris Denis Diderot and the great Rousseau himself. The ‘Man Mountain’ was sitting in a dark corner, wearing a woollen nightcap, greatcoat and slippers, an informal reception which perhaps encouraged Burney to show him his plan for the History, which to the budding author’s delight, and after a little initial resistance on Rousseau’s part, went down encouragingly well.

Burney kept a detailed journal of his tour, and soon after his return to London began to think of publishing it as a money-spinner and as an advertisement for the forthcoming History. With the help of the girls, he had a manuscript ready within four months which was published in May 1771 as The Present State of Music in France and Italy. The market for ‘tour’ books was saturated at the time, but Burney’s had the novelty of its focus on music and performers, as well as gripping passages about the difficulties of travel, such as this description of crossing the Apennines:

At every moment, I could only hear them cry out ‘Alla Montagna!’ which meant to say that the road was so broken and dangerous that it was necessary I should alight, give the Mule to the Pedino, and cling to the rock or precipice. I got three or four terrible blows on the face and head by boughs of trees I could not see. In mounting my Mule, which was vicious, I was kicked by the two hind legs on my left knee and right thigh, which knocked me down, and I thought at first, and the Muleteers thought my thigh was broken, and began to pull at it and add to the pain most violently.

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