Fanny Burney: A biography

The outcast older brother James and his teenaged bride Rebecca had their first child in 1699 and went on to have fourteen more over the next twenty years, of whom at least nine survived. James had been expensively educated at Westminster School and had had some training in portrait painting under Michael Dahl, a fashionable Swedish portraitist who had painted the Swedish royal family as well as Queen Anne and members of the English aristocracy. James’s character was not, however, one to capitalise on these advantages, being ‘volatile, & improvident’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was more concerned with keeping up his reputation as a convivial dinner-guest and bon-viveur (an activity which presumably got him away from his home full of babies) than with establishing himself in any one place or profession long enough to make anything of his talents as a painter, dancer, copyist or fiddler. As one of his children recorded later, the inevitable consequence of his fecklessness was that ‘his family was left to lament, that his talent for pleasantry, & love of sociability, overcame his prudential care, either for himself or them’.

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Poor Rebecca MacBurney, the mother of fifteen children and still only in her thirties, died, it is assumed, some time before 1720. That was the date at which James made his second marriage, to Ann Cooper of Shrewsbury, the daughter of a herald painter. A painting said to be of Ann Cooper shows a very handsome and assured young woman. She is reputed to have had a small fortune and to have turned down an offer of marriage from the poet William Wycherley;

(#ulink_56ba376b-90a5-5a00-98f0-1da75bef2ebb) both these things make it the more mysterious that she accepted the proposal of James MacBurney, unemployed forty-two-year-old father of nine. But MacBurney’s charm was legendary, and perhaps Ann’s age made a difference – she was about thirty at the time. They had six children, four of whom, Ann, Richard, Rebecca and Charles, lived to great ages. The youngest child died in infancy and Charles’s twin, Susanna, at the age of about seven.

How much of a wrench the death of his twin was to the little Charles Burney is hard to tell, since he was ejected from the family at the age of three and sent with his older brother Richard to live with a woman called Ball in Condover, four miles outside Shrewsbury. He was left in the care of Nurse Ball nine years – his whole childhood – a fact which shocked his daughter Fanny when she discovered it almost ninety years later. Fanny was particularly appalled by the mother’s behaviour, which she thought ‘nearly unnatural’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and she destroyed what evidence there was of the ‘niggardly unfeelingness’ and neglect she felt her father had suffered. By editing the episode out of her father’s papers, Fanny hoped to conceal ‘a species of Family degradation’ from public view; but no member of the public could have been more upset by it than she. She had known her grandmother Burney all her childhood, when the widow was living in Covent Garden with her two unmarried daughters. It must have seemed astonishing that this same grandmother, so much part of the family background, had, for whatever reason, opted out of caring for her own sons all those years before. Fanny’s novels are full of orphaned or abandoned children laid open to peril through lack of parental care; in them, bad parents are punished or vilified and made to repent, but Ann Burney seemed to have committed the cardinal sin of unfeeling and got off scot-free.

Charles Burney himself did not seem embittered by the long separation from his parents, although his intense affection for his own children (especially when they were little) and his apparent desire to establish a solid, admirable and outstanding Burney dynasty within one generation may have been reactions against it. The splitting up of the MacBurney family in the late 1720s was probably necessitated by lack of money. James went back to London temporarily to take up work as an actor at the new Goodman’s Fields Theatre at about this time; perhaps he and his wife felt that the boys would be better off out of the way, getting some education at Condover village school. The fact that Ann Burney’s later relations with her sons were detached could of course have been the effect as much as the cause of her not bringing them up herself, but Fanny seems not to have considered the kind of harsh compromises that might have to be made when a couple with five children of their own (and nine older semi-dependants) find themselves close to destitution. The threat of poverty is the most potent danger that faces the heroines of Fanny Burney’s novels; all other evils stem from it. But it is also something that never really overcomes any of them. Poverty brings out the best in her heroines: they act with dignity, expand their sensitivities, and support themselves by plain sewing, teaching, governessing or becoming ladies’ companions. The charting of a gentlewoman’s descent into wage-earning carries a sort of illicit thrill for author and reader alike (one can say quite clearly a sexual thrill, because of the unspoken threat of prostitution, the obvious last-ditch job-opportunity for women), but class always ultimately protects Burney’s heroines from crossing the line into ‘degradation’.

In the 1740s, the MacBurneys were struggling to cross that line in the other direction. The family name was changed, soon after Charles’s birth, from MacBurney (or ‘Mackburny’ as the twins were christened) to plain Burney. This was probably done to facilitate James’s revived stage career, for as the scholar Roger Lonsdale points out, Charles Burney himself suggested the reason for another actor’s name-change from McLaughlin to Macklin might have been ‘to get rid not only of its Paddy appearance but of its harshness’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The new name had an added significance for Charles: it marked a fresh start. Burney’s later success, riding under the banner of an (as he thought) untraceable family name, became a source of profound pride to himself and his children, so important to Fanny that her stated reason for destroying most of her father’s early memoirs was to protect ‘the Name of Burney’, even if it was only a few decades old and had started life as a professional convenience.

Charles Burney was assimilated back into his re-christened family when they moved to Chester in 1739. He had led what seems a truly happy, country-boy’s life at Condover with Nurse Ball, and left her with an ‘agony of grief’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the city offered obvious advantages, and at the Free School in Chester he began the musical training, as choirboy and then organist, which was to shape his life. The cathedral organist suffered from gout, and recruited the fourteen-year-old Burney as an assistant while the boy was still hardly able to read music. His success was such, both as a singer and player, that his half-brother James, who was organist of St Mary’s Church in Shrewsbury, asked to have him as an assistant. Charles ‘ran away’ back to his native town for a couple of years, despite his parents’ disapproval, but by 1744 was back in Chester, on the persuasion of his father ‘who I believe, loved me very affectionately’, as Charles wrote later.

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However fragmented their family life was at times, James MacBurney’s strong paternal love and good nature held the clan together, and there were evenings of great gaiety in the household. Charles Burney inspired similar affection among his own children, recalling after one family party in later years,

we were as merry, & laughed as loud as the Burneys always do, when they get together and open their hearts; tell their old stories, & have no fear of being Quizzed by interlopers. It was so in my poor dear old father’s time, & my boyish days – when my brother Thomas from London – or James from Shrewsbury came on a visit to Chester, we used, young & old, Male & female, to sit up all night – not to drink, but to laugh à gorge deployée.

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Charles Burney’s important career break came the same year (1744), when the composer Thomas Arne was passing through Chester on his way from Dublin to take up the post of composer at the Drury Lane Theatre. Arne got to hear of the diligent and talented young musician, who was already composing as well as able to play the violin, harpsichord and organ, and suggested to James Burney that the boy ought to be apprenticed to ‘an eminent Master in London’. On a subsequent meeting, Arne said that he himself would take Charles for £100 down, with no further liabilities, and at a third attempt said he would take him for nothing, realising he was still getting a good deal. Delighted and grateful, the Burneys of course agreed, though Charles was to look back on the bargain with mixed feelings.

Once in London, Arne got as much out of his apprentice as possible, making him transcribe quantities of music, teach junior pupils, run errands, play in the Drury Lane band and sometimes sing in the chorus there, any payment always going straight into the master’s pocket. Arne himself was passing the peak of his fame; the revival of his Masque of Alfred in 1745, containing the popular patriotic song ‘Rule, Britannia!’, was not successful, but his close connections with the capital’s best musicians and actors were very valuable to young Burney, who lived with the curmudgeonly composer and his wife in Great Queen Street and attended parties with them at the house of Arne’s sister, the actress Susannah Cibber. The charismatic David Garrick, who was to become a close friend of Burney, was the star of this coterie, which included Drury Lane and Covent Garden’s other leading men and ladies James Quin, Peg Woffington and Kitty Clive. Burney met literary men too, through his friendship with ‘the Scottish Orpheus’ James Oswald, James Thomson, Tobias Smollett and Christopher Smart among them. His career as an arch-networker among London’s bohemians was off to an excellent start.

As time went on, Burney became disillusioned with his apprenticeship to Arne. He was a hard worker, but his master’s regime did not reward his zeal. In fact, he came to think that Arne was deliberately holding him back. He felt he was wasted and wasting almost ‘into a consumption’ as an amanuensis, a chore which he hated (but which, years later, he was happy to impose on his own daughters). Arne was immoral, unfriendly and unprincipled, and after two years Burney’s loyalty to him had evaporated. When Fulke Greville, direct descendant of the Elizabethan poet, and ‘then generally looked up to as the finest gentleman in town’,

(#litres_trial_promo) expressed a desire to take Burney into his employ – not as an apprentice, of course, but as a gentleman’s companion and music-maker – an escape route opened. It was not possible to leave Arne immediately, but Burney began to be patronised by Greville, invited to his grand country seat, Wilbury House in Wiltshire, and taken about when Greville was in town.

Greville’s style of life was lavish, ‘even princely’, as Fanny Burney learned from her father; he spent a great deal of time at the races or gambling clubs, at country houses or city mansions, with his outriders and entourage always on show, and two French-horn players hanging around waiting to perform ‘marches and warlike movements’

(#litres_trial_promo) during mealtimes. Charles Burney’s position in this splendid circus was a privileged one, based as much on his affability and intelligence as on his undoubted musical skills.

(#ulink_39fb7365-f0b9-533b-af48-602bfb57163a) Burney was treated with respect and entrusted with Greville’s confidences, taking an active part in his master’s dramatic elopement with the beautiful heiress and poet Frances Macartney in 1748. It was a marriage to which no one actually objected, so the secrecy was unnecessary, but it was typical of Greville that he turned his nuptials into something of an amusement, and his twenty-two-year-old companion, enjoined to give the bride away, was only too happy to act as accomplice.

Though Burney was sampling high life through his increasing involvement with Greville – who finally bought the young musician out of his articles in 1748 for a down payment to Arne of three hundred pounds – he had developed his own social circle independent of either master. He had made the acquaintance of a gentleman called William Thompson, and spent three months of 1745 at Thompson’s home in Elsham, Lincolnshire, in ‘one continued series of mirth, amusement & festivity’. Miss Molly Carter, with whom he was still corresponding in the year of her death, 1812, was one of the ‘young ladies of the neighbourhood’ with whom Burney was probably in love. She was ‘very young, intelligent and handsome’, as he recorded in his memoirs;

(#litres_trial_promo) adding meaningly, ‘[I] never passed my time more pleasantly in my life’. In London, he attached himself to the household of his brother Richard, who was earning a living as a dancing-master in Hatton Garden. Both young men had fond memories of their uninhibited village upbringing, and probably tried to reproduce something of its freedom and jollity in the regular private dances held in Richard’s house. Writing in 1806, Burney recalled ‘the familiar manner in which the sexes treated each other in the hops I had seen in my early youth, in a village, where those ballets were literally Country dances, not Contre-danse, as the French pretend’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps the same ‘familiar manner’ animated the Hatton Garden parties too. Certainly it was at one of them that Charles Burney met Esther Sleepe, an attractive young woman of about twenty-three. He had ‘an ardent passion for her person […] from the first moment I saw her to the last’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and Esther seems to have reciprocated his strong feelings. By the autumn of 1748 he had got her pregnant.

Esther Sleepe was an intelligent and accomplished young woman, a professional musician (at the time when she met Burney she was, unusually for her sex, a freeman of the Company of Musicians) of respectable but humble background.

(#ulink_aa98984d-2781-53dd-8f26-565913b08e08) Her father appears to have been Richard Sleepe, a jobbing musician and leader of the Lord Mayor’s band, which performed at civic functions, parades and other occasions which required ‘City musick’, such as the laying of the foundation stone of the Mansion House.

(#litres_trial_promo) Esther’s mother was the daughter of a M. Dubois, probably Pierre Dubois, of an immigrant Huguenot family who kept ‘a Fan Shop in Cheapside’ at 43, The Poultry. The type of shop indicates some connection with musical instrument-making, since Parisian instrument-makers had no guild of their own in London at the time and ‘often became members of the company of Fan-makers’.

(#litres_trial_promo) No doubt it was through music-making that Richard Sleepe and Frances Dubois (who had anglicised her name to Wood) met. They were married in 1705.

In Memoirs of Doctor Burney, Fanny Burney gives portraits of her mother and maternal grandmother which are so idealised as to be positively irritating. Her maternal grandfather, however, comes off very badly. ‘Old Sleepe’ was, she roundly asserts, ‘wanting in goodness, probity and conduct’, leaving his daughter ‘nothing to boast from parental dignity, parental opulence, nor – strange, and stranger yet to tell – parental worth’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He lived until 1758, by which time he must have been at least in his seventies, and yet he does not feature in any of Fanny Burney’s personal reminiscences, nor in those of her father, and he did not have anything to do with his daughter’s marriage to Charles Burney in 1749. Taken with Fanny’s dark hints about his reprobate nature, Sleepe’s absenteeism suggests either that he had abandoned his wife and family, which was numerous, or perhaps spent time in prison. Thirteen children of the couple are recorded in the baptismal registers of three separate city parishes;

(#ulink_dd17e64f-3636-52b8-9519-84b5d88af103) considering the extent of Blitz damage to parish records in the City, this has to be taken as a minimum number. At least six of the children must have died in infancy, because of the re-use of their Christian names; the seven possible survivors range in age from a brother eighteen years older than Esther to another brother five years her junior. The only siblings of hers known to survive into the latter half of the century were a sister called Mary, born in 1715, and a brother called James, born the following year, who was maintained as a poor relation and part-time handyman by the Burneys, much-loved but referred to as if slightly simple.

Another factor that suggests that Richard Sleepe may have absconded from family life is that Esther is said to have been brought up in her maternal grandfather’s household, the ‘Fan Shop in Cheapside’. French was the language spoken most often there; the little girl, we read in the Memoirs, did not learn that language so much as ‘imbibe’ it.

(#litres_trial_promo) Esther’s grandfather Dubois was a Huguenot whose family had come to London in the great Protestant exodus following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, but his daughter Frances, very oddly, had been brought up as a Roman Catholic and continued to practise that religion devoutly all her life. In the Memoirs, Fanny Burney can only account for her grandmother’s religion by guessing that it was a matter of ‘maternal education’,

(#litres_trial_promo) but if so, Frances Dubois Sleepe practised Catholicism in isolation and did not seek to pass it down to further generations.

Her influence and example were probably all the stronger for this, and, as we shall see, Charles Burney later feared Fanny might succumb to Roman Catholicism. The child of a mixed marriage in an age of bigotry, grandmother Sleepe represented a kind of ecumenical ideal: in her granddaughter’s opinion, ‘the inborn religion of her mind […] counteracted all that was hostile to her fellow-creatures, in the doctrine of the religion of her ancestors’. She had, in Fanny’s words, a nature ‘so free from stain, so elementally white, that it would scarcely seem an hyperbole to denominate her an angel upon earth’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Little wonder that pious Fanny tried to copy such a paragon. ‘If praying for the Dead make a Roman Catholic’, she wrote to her sister many years later, ‘I have been one all my life’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Esther Sleepe, too, believed in the power of prayer and in communion with the dead. Fanny was at pains to point out that her mother ‘adhered steadily and piously through life’ to the Anglican faith, but the truth is that they had both inherited a religious intensity and a degree of superstitiousness from their admired and beloved relative: they were both proud English Protestants, but said their prayers, as it were, with a pronounced French Catholic accent.

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Charles Burney’s fondness for his mother-in-law, whom he loved ‘as sincerely as if she had been his mother-in-blood’,

(#litres_trial_promo) clearly owes something to the failure of warmth from his actual ‘mother-in-blood’, but also reflects gratitude for Mrs Sleepe’s support of her daughter through the shameful illegitimate pregnancy and beyond. Burney neither abandoned his mistress nor felt free to marry her in 1748, because of his arrangement with Greville, which had been in operation less than a year and had two more years to run. Not only would there be legal penalties applicable (in theory) if he married before 1751, but in a wider sense, Burney’s hopes of promotion in life depended on staying with Greville, to whom he felt he owed a debt of gratitude for buying him out of the articles with Arne. The prospect of waiting two years to marry must have been hard for Esther and her mother to bear; the pregnancy became daily more obvious, and Burney increasingly anxious about how to broach the subject with his patron.

The Grevilles themselves had their first child, a daughter called Frances (later the famous beauty Mrs Crewe, a friend and patron of Charles Burney) in November 1748, and by the next spring were ready to depart on an elaborate foreign tour, intended to last ‘some years’. They expected Burney to accompany them, and it seems, for a time at least, he felt he would have to go. He had a miniature portrait of Esther painted by the well-known artist Gervase Spencer ‘just before our marriage’ (though it is unlikely that Esther would have sat to any artist in the last months of her pregnancy or during the four weeks after the birth), ostensibly to take with him on the trip. Perhaps he thought she would see the expenditure of about three pounds on this memento as a gesture of commitment. It was an uncomfortable juncture; she could not have been anything other than alarmed at the prospect of her baby’s father leaving the country for so long, and in such grand company.

Boldness was not one of Charles Burney’s virtues. He dithered childishly about how to get out of the projected Italian tour, dropping hints to the Grevilles that he was in love, and looking gloomy. His child, a girl they named Esther, was born on 24 May 1749. Burney always doted on children, and perhaps the sight of his first-born and his vulnerable, patient mistress had a catalysing effect. He knew he couldn’t really leave them, and to introduce the subject in conversation with the Grevilles, he showed them the portrait of his sweetheart (not mentioning the baby, of course). There are indications that the aristocratic young couple found his melancholic behaviour a bit of a joke. Their light-hearted dismissal of his problem when it finally got an airing was to ask why he didn’t marry her. ‘May I?’ Burney asked, delighted at getting permission so easily. He and Esther were married the very next day, at St George’s Chapel, Hyde Park Corner, a popular venue for shotgun nuptials.

The critic Margaret Anne Doody has pointed out how significant this incident is in terms of Burney’s later example to his children, all of whom preferred devious or passive means of problem-solving to direct action. The idea of gaining permission and not offending one’s superiors became ingrained in the family ethos; as Doody says: ‘Charles was to inculcate in his children the pervasive dread of offending someone whose permission should be asked, and he indicates some unwitting enjoyment of being the person who had power to give or withhold permission from his children, the only group to whom he could give it and to whom he need not apply for it.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This ‘pervasive dread’ was felt most sharply and most destructively by his second daughter, Fanny. Even when she was sixty-two years old, Fanny did not dare address her father ‘contrary to orders’ as he lay dying: ‘[t]he long habits of obedience of olden times robbed me of any courage for trying so dangerous an experiment’.

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When the Grevilles went off to Italy in the summer of 1749, Burney was left to fend for himself and his young family. He had not lost Greville’s goodwill, but the patronage had gone, and from the splendours of Wilbury House Burney had to adjust to life as organist of St Dionis’s Backchurch in Fenchurch Street. He had taken over payment of the rent on Mrs Sleepe’s fan shop at Easter 1749, and may have been living there with Esther as man and wife some time before their wedding in June. His father died around the same time, and it was perhaps as early as this year that his mother and sisters Ann and Rebecca came from Shropshire to live over the shop at Gregg’s Coffee House in York Street,

(#ulink_c2f252ec-8bb7-55c7-a698-535dfafefc51) run by a kinswoman, Elizabeth Gregg. Female dependants became, from this period onwards, a given of Charles Burney’s life. He was earning a tiny salary of £30 per annum from St Dionis’s and had to supplement it with odd jobs of teaching and composing (his first published song was to words by his friend the poet Christopher Smart).