Fanny Burney: A biography

This makes it sound as if Burney was simply indulging ‘a taste for quaint sports’

(#litres_trial_promo) in a frivolous and ladylike fashion. She certainly could not have thought of openly adopting a career as a novelist in 1776 – for a middle-class woman it was simply not respectable – but anonymous publication was a possibility. Her knowledge of the printing trade made the business of soliciting publication less intimidating than it might otherwise have been, but when Joyce Hemlow says that ‘the practice (almost the habit) of book-making that she had known for the last five years in her father’s study must have been sufficient by the momentum of its progress to carry her on to the press’,

(#litres_trial_promo) she makes the publication of Evelina sound rather too much like a demonstration of Newton’s second law. Fanny’s sudden decision to finish and publish her novel seems to have been triggered by something more urgent and personal.

It is possible that something happened in the Burney family in 1776 that made it desirable or even necessary for Fanny to make some money quickly by hurrying into print. We are unlikely to find out what this might have been; Fanny burned her whole diary and most of her correspondence for that year and the next, noting in her papers that the material was ‘upon Family matters or anecdotes’ – as if that was sufficient to justify it being ‘destroyed […] in totality’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But two years later, when she was accused by Mrs Thrale of having courted the attention she seemed to despise by soliciting publication, she said, ‘My printing it, indeed […] tells terribly against me, to all who are unacquainted with the circumstances that belonged to it.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This reveals that there were ‘circumstances’ that forced Fanny to act against her inclination and publish.

Neither of the two family scandals that took place in the autumn of 1777 can completely account for the move. The first was the elopement of Mrs Burney’s third child, Bessy Allen, who had been sent to Paris in 1775 for the improvement of her manners. Charlotte Burney, who was the same age as Bessy, was not sent with her as a companion; presumably they did not get on well. Mrs Burney was proud of her daughter and had intended, in Samuel Johnson’s opinion, ‘to enjoy the triumph of her superiority’ over the Burney girls.

(#litres_trial_promo) In August 1777 she had gone to Paris to bring Bessy home when the girl, sensing an end to her freedom, eloped with an adventurer called Samuel Meeke, a man reputed to be ‘Bankrupt in fame as well as Fortune’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The couple were married two months later in exactly the same place, Ypres, where Maria had married Martin Rishton. Mrs Burney had to return home on her own, shocked, anxious, ashamed and chagrined to the quick.

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The family had hardly recovered from this first shock when another disgrace hit the Burney household. Charles Burney junior had gone up to Caius College, Cambridge, in January 1777. Though he was fond of pranks, and lighthearted to the point of being feckless, Charles had a zeal for scholarship and an intellectual ability that outshone that of anyone else in the family. At Cambridge he was admitted to the University Library as a special privilege (it was not normally used by undergraduates at this date), but when a surprising number of classical texts began to go missing soon after his arrival, suspicion fell on him. The Under-Librarian decided to search his rooms secretly, an operation which had to be attempted during dinner since, as the College Bedmaker said, that was the only time Burney could be relied on not to be studying.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘In a dark Corner’ they found about thirty-five of the missing volumes, mostly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of the standard classical authors, which had had the university arms removed from them and the Burney bookplate substituted. Other volumes, as it turned out, had been sold on, and when young Burney fled Cambridge after the discovery of his crime, a further box of stolen books was sent back to the library from London. In his few months at the university, he must have been stealing books almost all the time.

The shock at home was seismic, and none felt it more violently than the Doctor, who refused to see his son. Fanny’s diary from this painful period has not survived, nor has Charles Burney’s correspondence on the subject with his friend Thomas Twining, though Twining’s replies indicate how much comforting and bringing to reason the bitterly disappointed father required.

(#litres_trial_promo) At one point Charles seems to have considered disowning his son altogether, and he certainly thought of making him change his surname. Fortunately, when the first shock subsided, he dropped these drastic ideas. The problem of what to do with the reprobate remained, however. Charles junior was sent into exile to the village of Shinfield in Berkshire, presumably to a private tutor, from where he communicated forlornly with his sisters in St Martin’s Street.

But young Charles’s was not a brooding nature, and he recovered far quicker from this shameful episode than did the rest of his family. By the following spring he had been found a place at King’s College, Old Aberdeen – a far cry from Caius, and in a Presbyterian country (which his father thought might be a further hindrance to his taking Holy Orders, as they still hoped he would some day). He was writing verses, such as ‘Farewell to Shinfield’, which indicate that his spirits were pretty well restored:

Let me shake off the rustic – & once more

The gayer joys of college life explore.

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The ‘gayer joys’ in question may well have been what got him into trouble in his short Cambridge career, where any kind of high living would have very rapidly used up young Charles’s small allowance. Ralph S. Walker, in his article on the thefts,

(#litres_trial_promo) points out that when Charles junior’s own son, Charles Parr Burney, was going up to Oxford, he warned him feelingly of ‘three stumbling blocks: Gaming, Drinking and the Fair Sex’, the greatest being gaming: ‘Its fascinations are matchless and when they once influence the mind, their power is uncontrollable’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This is surely the voice of experience, and perhaps young Charles did steal and sell the books in order to avoid owning up to debt at home.

Fanny puts a different slant on the matter in a letter written many years later to Charles Parr Burney (who had only just found out about the episode), in which she states ‘the origin of that fatal deed to have been a MAD RAGE for possessing a library, and that the subsequent sale only occurred from the fear of discovery’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Charles’s bibliomania, which far surpassed his father’s, resulted in him possessing at the time of his death in 1817 one of the most splendid private libraries of the age, which, along with his magpie hoards of old newspaper cuttings (ninety-four volumes) and an extensive archive of material relating to the history of the stage, formed a core collection of the new British Library. Fanny’s suggestion that her brother suffered a pathological ‘rage for possessing a library’ seems psychologically convincing. In the days of his prosperity, he acquired books conventionally; when he was a student from the lower bourgeoisie, let loose in the treasure-house of a university library, he just acquired them anyway.

If Fanny was trying to make enough money from Evelina to bail out her brother, she failed, even though the twenty guineas she received from the publisher for the copyright seemed ‘a sum enormous’ to her at the time. She said later that she had given the proceeds of her first novel to her brother Charles, but his disgrace at university post-dates her rush to finish Evelina. Perhaps even at Charterhouse, where he stayed until the late age of nineteen, Charles had run into the kind of debt that seems to have burdened him as a student. It is even possible that he might have been desperate (from whatever cause) to the point of attempting suicide. There is a cryptic reference in Fanny’s diary to a conversation with the writer Giuseppe Baretti in 1788, when Baretti used the image of ‘running a dagger into your own breast’. This made Fanny shudder, ‘because the dagger was a word of unfortunate recollection’.

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(#litres_trial_promo) Is it possible, as Mrs Thrale heard on the grapevine the same year,

(#litres_trial_promo) that Charles Burney junior was the model for the suicidal Macartney in Evelina, whom the heroine (later revealed to be his half-sister) discovers preparing to use a pistol on himself? The heroines of Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer undergo traumatic encounters with potential suicides too, and in each case the desperado is brandishing a weapon. There may have been something more painful behind her ‘decision to print’ than Fanny Burney was prepared to let anyone know.

By the winter of 1776, Fanny had completed the first two volumes of her novel and had copied out at least one volume in the feigned, upright hand she developed to prevent recognition of the author of the manuscript. This was not as neurotic as it might seem. Fanny’s handwriting was well known in the London printing shops from her extensive copying of her father’s works, and as she would have no control over the production of her novel – should a publisher take it up – there was a real risk that her cover would be blown, or worse, that her father might be disgraced by association with the book.

The task of transcribing her text into the unnatural handwriting was irksome, and by Christmas 1776 she was losing patience with it. In conspiracy with Susan, Charlotte and Charles she had already approached the bookseller James Dodsley, but he had refused to consider an anonymous work. The next bookseller she fixed on was Thomas Lowndes, whose premises were in Fleet Street. Fanny felt she couldn’t approach him directly, so using the Orange Coffee House in the Haymarket as a decoy address, she sent Charles as go-between, weirdly dressed up by his sisters to look as adult as possible and melodramatically concealed behind the pseudonym ‘Mr King’. Fanny herself became the work’s anonymous and genderless ‘editor’, writing to Lowndes, ‘I have in my possession a M:S. novel, which has never yet been seen but by myself.’

(#litres_trial_promo) She hoped to have the first two volumes ‘printed immediately’, with two more appearing later if they were successful. This might have been desirable to the young author, fed up with the slog of transcribing her half-completed manuscript and keen for cash; but Lowndes, unsurprisingly, wanted the thing complete. He returned volume one via ‘Mr King’, hoping to see the rest by the summer of 1777, but Fanny did not complete the book until November, staying up ‘the greatest part of many Nights, in order to get it ready’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and it was not published until January of the following year. For one who claims to have had a ‘vague’ desire ‘to see her works in print’, it was an arduous process, requiring hard work, determination, patience and concentration.

The manuscript that finally found its way to Lowndes’s shop late in 1777 was prefaced with three layers of anxious authorial disclaimer: first there was an ode dedicating the work to the ‘author of my being’ (Dr Burney) and explaining that anonymity was the only course open to one who ‘cannot raise, but would not sink’ the fame of a matchless parent; then there was a petition for clemency ‘to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’, entreating them to remember that ‘you were all young writers once’. Lastly there was a preface from ‘the editor’ of the book, admitting that though novels (with a few notable exceptions) were held in low regard, ‘surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, might rather be encouraged than contemned’. Apparently forgetting the role of ‘editor’, she declared an intention not to copy the style of ‘the great writers’ (Johnson, Rousseau, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Marivaux) or to deal with ‘the same ground which they have tracked’. She is of ‘the vulgar herd’, and they ‘great’. Another reason why Fanny Burney’s novel was unlikely to fit into the existing ‘great’ tradition was that she was female, but since the title page did not even feature the conventional anonymous credit ‘By a Lady’, that fact was hidden.

The novel tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl, beautiful – of course – virtuous and naive, whose sheltered upbringing in Dorset under the protection of an elderly cleric, Mr Villars, is brought to an abrupt end by her entrance into London society in the company of aristocratic acquaintance. Villars is an anxious guardian: Evelina’s grandfather, his former pupil, met an early death after a disastrous marriage to a ‘lowbred and illiberal’ serving-woman, having bequeathed the care of his baby daughter, Caroline Evelyn, to the old tutor. When the girl grew up, her reprobate mother, remarried and called Madame Duval, reclaimed her, but their subsequent life together in Paris was miserable. Caroline escaped into a hasty marriage to a profligate Englishman, Sir John Belmont, who abandoned his pregnant wife, destroying their marriage certificate and denying any connection with her. She died giving birth to a daughter, Evelina Anville, a surname invented by Mr Villars to cover the baby’s unacknowledged parentage.

The eventual restoration of Evelina to her rightful name and identity, and the parallel story of her troubled courtship by courtly Lord Orville, provide the double framework within which Fanny Burney creates a vivid satire of eighteenth-century manners, told, for the first time, from a feminine viewpoint. The love story of Evelina is entertainingly perverse: as in Pride and Prejudice (which owes a great deal – possibly including its title

(#litres_trial_promo) – to Burney’s work), the couple start out by meeting at an assembly and getting on very badly. Endless accidents and misconceptions make Orville’s poor opinion of Evelina, ‘a poor weak girl!’,

(#litres_trial_promo) fall even further, and only through the passage of time, painfully good behaviour and the couple’s persistent sexual attraction to each other are they eventually united.

Burney packed her ‘little narrative’ with matter, rather in the way that Dickens was to do a century later. There are sentimental scenes, ‘sublime’ scenes (notably the tear-jerking reconciliation between Evelina and her repentant father, Sir John Belmont), high drama, low comedy and a large cast of characters catering for all tastes. A great deal of the book’s novelty and charm, however, comes from the sympathetic way in which Burney depicts the heroine’s youth and inexperience. The scene at Evelina’s first assembly is both funny and painful, for she is concentrating too hard on the formalities to behave any way other than idiotically. Her letters home to Dorset chart this frustrating ‘entrance into the world’ with an endearing candour that also performs an important ironic function: the reader sees (almost) all Evelina’s troubles coming long before she does, from the manoeuvrings of her intemperate grandmother Madame Duval, to the dangerously plausible Sir Clement Willoughby’s persistent attempts at seduction.

Evelina is at the mercy of appearances in every way, judged to be as vulgar as the company she is forced to keep, that of her meddling and exploitative grandmother and her self-seeking cousins, the Branghtons. Burney’s portrayals of mean-spirited, selfish and socially ambitious characters immediately show where her genius lies. Years of studying the manners of the aspirant middle class (most notably, of course, her own father) had given her ample material to work on; her traditionally limited female upbringing added a claustrophobic intensity and weight of disgust to her observations. The Branghtons come in for particularly stinging satire. They are silversmiths (like the Burneys’ own tenant in Long’s Court), with premises on Snow Hill, near Smithfield. Their alertness to class signals is extreme – even the disposition of their accommodation reflects it like a three-dimensional model. The Branghtons themselves live on the second floor, with a poor Scotch poet, Macartney, lodging in the garret and ‘classy’ Mr Smith in the former reception rooms on the first floor. The stratification is relative, of course. Only to a Branghton could Mr Smith be a model of gentility, and the poet, needless to say, turns out to be a man of sensibility and noble blood. Fanny Burney revels in exposing the small-mindedness of her vulgar characters, and Smith is the best of them all. ‘Such a fine varnish of low politeness!’ said Dr Johnson of his favourite, ‘– such a struggle to appear a Gentleman!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Smith is constantly on his guard, yet every word and action betrays him. He doesn’t, for instance, like to lend his rooms to the grubby Branghton girls (who guilelessly admit how seldom they put on clean clothes). ‘The truth is,’ he explains, expecting to impress Evelina,

Miss Biddy and Polly take no care of any thing, else, I’m sure, they should always be welcome to my room; for I’m never so happy as in obliging the ladies, – that’s my character, Ma’am; – but, really, the last time they had it, everything was made so greasy and so nasty, that upon my word, to a man who wishes to have things a little genteel, it was quite cruel. Now, as to you, Ma’am, it’s quite another thing; for I should not mind if every thing I had was spoilt, for the sake of having the pleasure to oblige you; and, I assure you, Ma’am, it makes me quite happy, that I have a room good enough to receive you.

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The Branghtons’ ineradicable vulgarity provides much of the humour of the book. Forced to take a party to the opera, Mr Branghton is totally unprepared for the expense of the tickets and makes a scene at the booth, thinking he can haggle over the prices as he might with a fellow tradesman. His purchase of the cheapest possible seats, still in his view extortionately expensive, pleases no one in the party, for they have neither the satisfaction of hearing or seeing the performance properly, nor of being seen by the ‘quality’ in the pit. When the opera begins, their disappointment is intensified: ‘Why there’s nothing but singing!’ Mr Branghton exclaims, and is disgusted by the realisation that it is all in a foreign language too. ‘Pray what’s the reason they can’t as well sing in English?’ he asks; ‘but I suppose the fine folks would not like it, if they could understand it.’

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‘The fine folks’ come off rather worse than the vulgarians, although Burney’s depiction of them is necessarily less convincingly observed. Lord Merton and his friends are all (except for super-virtuous Orville) as stupid as the Holborn crowd, and more culpable. Their affectations and excessive language are evidence of moral malaise; while they should be leading society (Lovel is a Member of Parliament and all the others landowners), their time is wasted in gaming, dangerous sports and dalliance. Evelina’s blue-stocking chaperone, Mrs Selwyn, is the scourge of this set, endlessly showing up their ignorance and folly. When she suggests that they have a competition to see who can quote longest from Horace, none of the fops can join in, despite their expensive ‘classical’ educations: ‘what with riding, – and – and – and so forth’, says one of them, ‘really, one has not much time, even at the university, for mere reading.’

(#litres_trial_promo) But while Mrs Selwyn’s ‘masculine’ learning and wit is the vehicle for many of the novel’s home truths, the author makes clear that she finds it ultimately sterile. Mrs Selwyn is too busy ‘reserving herself for the gentlemen’ to function as the sympathetic mother-figure the orphaned heroine needs.

There is no doubt that Evelina’s worth is only recognised at all by Lord Orville because she is also beautiful, but in this profoundly feminist novel Burney gives an original view of the conventional heroine – the view from the pedestal. Evelina’s instant physical impact on other people – of which she is imperfectly aware – is shown as something of a liability (inflaming lustful men and making enemies of jealous women). It is her guarantee of attention, but at the same time an impediment to being truly seen. Evelina exposes – in a way undreamed of by earlier novelists – the double standards applied towards women, in whom everything but beauty and goodness are ‘either impertinent or unnatural’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The wit, Mrs Selwyn, is seen as unnaturally intellectual (‘oddish’), and Evelina’s grotesque grandmother, Madame Duval, as impertinently immodest; both commit the cardinal sin of being old. ‘I don’t know what the devil a woman lives for after thirty,’ says dissolute Lord Merton, in one of the novel’s bleakest remarks; ‘she is only in other folks’ way.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The lovely young heroine’s hold on her admirers will soon, it is implied, be turned to just such withering scorn, for women past their bloom are not just negligible but irritating – ‘in other folks’ way’ – and a resented financial liability on some man or other.

The scene in Evelina in which the gambling-mad fops organise a race between two very old women is a graphic example of the point. Like the episode in which a dressed-up monkey attacks Lovel, it has been criticised for being excessive and unlikely, but this is not the case: gambling was the mania of the period and the occasions for it bizarre. There was one contemporary case of a gambler hiring a desperado to prove that people could live under water (the desperado drowned, so the gambler tried again with another), and another in which some members of Brooks’s Club laid bets on whether or not a passer-by who had collapsed in the street was dead (no attempts were allowed to help him, which might have affected the outcome).

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