Fanny Burney: A biography

Though her father was to say that his second daughter ‘was wholly unnoticed in the nursery for any talents, or quickness of study’,

(#litres_trial_promo) he admits that in her ‘childish sports’ she was unusually inventive. When she was with her siblings or playmates she displayed a marked talent for mimicry and spontaneous invention, repeating scenes they had seen together at the theatre (where the Burneys often had the use of Mrs Garrick’s box) and happy, before an uncritical audience, to ‘take the actors off, and compose speeches for their characters’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In a memorandum book for 1806 Fanny included the reminiscence of one of her childhood acquaintances, a Miss Betty Folcher: ‘You were so merry, so gay, so droll, & had such imagination in making plays, always something new, something of your own contrivance’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In front of adults, though, the young girl clammed up. When a family friend dubbed Fanny ‘the little dunce’, her mother stood up for her, saying she ‘had no fear about Fanny’; but privately Esther and Charles had begun to worry about their third child’s ‘backwardness’.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Today’, the psychoanalyst Kathryn Kris has noted in a study of Fanny’s case, ‘such visual perceptive difficulty, in sharp contrast to auditory fluency, would be recognised as a form of dyslexia’.

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When Fanny did eventually learn to read it happened, according to her father, ‘all at once […] as if by intuition, nor did any of the family ever know how the talent was acquired’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The miraculous style of this turnaround sounds suspicious, and one is tempted to see it as a symptom of Charles Burney’s curious inattentiveness to the details of his children’s lives. If the children did not display conspicuous ‘talent or quickness of parts’, he was unlikely to notice them, being, in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s opinion, ‘as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet-tempered man can well be’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Fanny wrote later of the ‘conscious intellectual disgrace’ she had felt about her illiteracy, indicating the degree of shame she experienced as well as the harshness with which she was apt to judge herself. Like many dyslexic people, she had developed complex and often arduous methods to get round the problem, and had learned a great deal of poetry, especially that of Pope, by committing Hetty’s overheard lessons to memory.

(#ulink_861e20a3-e3c7-571c-99af-766d2c1ca94a) Her powers of recalling things, and of making up what she could not recall, were indeed very strong, although her parents didn’t seem to realise it. But the shame was strong, too. Later in life she habitually denied having any talents at all: if she wasn’t perfect in a subject, she would say she had no knowledge of it. On the question of her struggle into literacy, it is likely that she learned to read gradually, certainly with difficulty and mostly on her own, but waited to reveal her learning until it was substantial enough to impress her father.

Fanny claimed to have begun writing her own compositions as soon as she could read, using a scrawling form of handwriting, like ‘scrambling pot-hooks’,

(#litres_trial_promo) that was ‘illegible, save to herself’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This too sounds odd, more like the sort of scribble-writing most pre-literate children experiment with than the real thing. The earliest surviving examples of Fanny’s handwriting are remarkably neat and eminently legible. The ‘pot-hooks’ claim of a private, unreadable hand also suggests a childish stratagem to deflect the kind of jeering criticism she had experienced from her brother. It is worth bearing in mind that Fanny’s eyesight was poor, and that her short sight can only have hindered her progress with letters. Though apparently reading and writing by the age of ten, it is likely that she was still relying heavily on her memory and composing, as she had done for years, mostly in her head.

Charles Burney was often absent from the house because of his long teaching hours, both at Mrs Sheeles’s school in Queen Square, where he had an annual salary of £100, and at the many private houses he attended. He loved his family strongly and sentimentally, and if, as Macaulay rather acidly put it, ‘it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them’,

(#litres_trial_promo) there are worse things he could have done. The affection he inspired in his family, and in Fanny particularly, was deep and sincere, and was often remarked on with envy by outsiders. He was a volatile man, highly strung and sometimes manically energetic. Family life was a balm to him, a source of entertainment and relaxation, and the more sensitive of the children must have intuited that it was important not to disturb this state of things. The girls strove all their lives to please and placate him, and the boys, oppressed by the struggle to be sources of pride to their father, each dropped out in rather spectacular ways.

Charles Burney had more than his usual preoccupations of work and money and self-advancement to deal with at this time. Not long after the move to Poland Street, Esther’s health began to decline. She was pregnant for the ninth time in twelve years, and had developed a cough which was thought to be consumptive. In the summer of 1761 she was ordered to Bath and Bristol Hotwells, leaving her husband tied to his teaching at Queen Square until the end of the term. At first, there seemed to be some improvement as a result of the curative waters, but back in London Esther grew weaker. The baby, Charlotte Ann, was born on 3 November and put out to nurse. All through 1762 Esther’s condition deteriorated, and she died on 29 September, after a week or more of ‘a most violent bilious complaint, wch terminated, after extreme torture, in an inflammation of the bowels’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Of the children, only Hetty was at home to witness this dreadful calamity. Fanny, Susan and Charles had been sent to Mrs Sheeles’ ‘to be out of the way’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and James, who had been discharged from duty on the Magnanime at his father’s request eleven days earlier, does not seem to have got home in time.

Mrs Sheeles said later that of the many children she had known, none had displayed so much grief over anything as Fanny Burney did at the death of her mother. She ‘would take no Comfort – & was almost killed with Crying’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Fanny must have been dreading the blow for some time, for in a letter to her father many years later she described how one of the girls at the school (where the little Burneys seem to have been parked fairly often) had complained of her sullenness ‘when I had been dejected by some hints of the illness of my dear mother’.

(#litres_trial_promo) When the ‘hints’ became sad reality, despite weeks, perhaps months, of desperate praying, Fanny was inconsolable. Stuck in Queen Square among strangers, she had not even been able to say goodbye to her mother, and must have heard with a pang of the melancholy deathbed intimacies with which Hetty had been honoured.

Charles Burney was prostrated by the death of his wife, catapulted into an impenetrable world of private grief:

I shut myself up inadmissable & invisible [to] all but relations, without a thought on anything else till after the funeral, and then for a fortnight did nothing but meditate on my misery. I wrote elegyac Verses on her Virtues & Perfection. […] It was painful to me to see any one who knew & admired her as all my acquaintance did. But having my mind occupied by business was a useful dissipation of my sorrow; as it forced me to a temporary inattention to myself and the irreparable loss I had sustained.

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The younger Burneys, aged ten, seven and four, were not brought home immediately, but had to suffer the exposure of their bereavement among the rich young ladies boarded in Queen Square, one of whom, Lucy Fox-Strangways (the older sister of the girl who had complained about her dullness), compassionately took Fanny under her wing, ‘called me her Child, & took the office of School Mother upon her for me’.

(#litres_trial_promo) When they did go back to Poland Street, the children were neglected by their grief-stricken father. None of them, as Fanny wrote sadly, was ‘of an age to be companionable’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and he was writing to his old friend Dolly Young in desperate terms: ‘From an ambitious, active, enterprizing Being, I am become a torpid drone, a listless, desponding wretch!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Fanny found this letter (she claimed) when going through her father’s posthumous papers: it was ‘so ill-written and so blotted by his tears, that he must have felt himself obliged to re-write it for the post’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It contains a long and highly emotional account of Esther’s death and his subsequent distress. Perhaps Charles Burney thought better of sending it, or, as Fanny claimed to think, wept so much writing the letter that in order to send it, he had to make a fair copy.

The tears, conversely, might have been those of tender-hearted Dolly Young herself, who died in 1805 and might well have left this memorial of former times to her former friend. But it is odd that the document seems to have been unknown to Fanny when she was weeding her father’s papers in the 1820s and wrote to Hetty complaining how little material she had found ‘relative to our dear & lovely own Mother; […] from whatsoever Cause, he is here laconic almost to silence. 3 or 4 lines include all the history of his admiration & its effects’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Roger Lonsdale has pointed out the inaccuracy of this statement – at least two pages of Dr Burney’s surviving memoirs deal with his first wife – but Fanny’s hyperbole indicates her disappointment at her father’s omission. The letter to Dolly Young only exists in Fanny’s printed version of 1832, but would seem to answer all the shortcomings she noted in Charles Burney’s memoirs, and bears witness to the perfect union which she believed her parents’ marriage to have been. She quotes the whole of it (131 lines rather than ‘3 or 4 lines’), with the prefatory remark that ‘a more touching description of happiness in conjugal life, or of wretchedness in its dissolution, is rarely, perhaps, with equal simplicity of truth, to be found upon record.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Could she possibly have made this letter up, from the accounts of her mother’s death which she had heard her father and Hetty relate, in order to fill what she felt was a yawning gulf in the record? Could this long and gushing tribute to Esther, suspiciously materialising in her father’s archive and then disappearing again, have’ been another of Fanny’s attempts at impressionistic truth?

According to the letter, the dying Esther had attempted to comfort her eldest daughter by assuring her that they would meet again in the next world:

She told poor Hetty how sweet it would be if she could see her constantly from whence she was going, and begged she would invariably suppose that that would be the case. What a lesson to leave a daughter! – She exhorted her to remember how much her example might influence the poor younger ones; and bid her write little letters, and fancies, to her in the other world, to say how they all went on; adding, that she felt she should surely know something of them.

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The role that was being passed on to Hetty was a heavy one; Charles Burney, in ‘an unrestrained agony of grief’ at his wife’s bedside, was incapable of giving consolation to anyone. Esther’s concern for Hetty and ‘the poor younger ones’, and her businesslike last day full of instructions and advice to her husband (including her recommendation to him that he marry Dolly Young), indicate how much Charles needed ‘mothering’ too. Mothering their father was what all the Burney daughters ended up doing to a greater or lesser extent all their lives – none more assiduously than Fanny.

But at the time, what must have affected the children most strongly in their mother’s dying words was the comforting assurance that she would be looking down on them ‘from whence she was going’, and the fantastical suggestion that she would be able to receive letters after she was dead. It was a fancy that had been given wide currency by Mrs Elizabeth Rowe’s bestselling book Friendship in Death: Twenty letters from the Dead to the Living, published in 1729 and kept more or less constantly in print until the late nineteenth century, a book which Fanny had certainly read

(#ulink_fa961266-a345-597c-b2fa-763c957c93bb) and which is highly likely to have been introduced into the household by her mother. Mrs Rowe’s book discouraged excessive mourning (which is of course, strictly speaking, an impiety): ‘If you could conceive my Happiness instead of the mournful Solemnity with which you interr’d me’, she imagines a two-year-old boy writing to his bereaved mother, ‘you would have celebrated my Funeral Rites with Songs, and Festivals’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Esther Burney no doubt wanted to blunt her children’s grief in the same way, with the assurance of an afterlife that is suggested by her advice to Hetty to ‘write little letters […] to her in the other world’. But to Fanny, this must have made her unliterary status seem even more of a deprivation than ever, not simply ‘conscious intellectual disgrace’ but a barrier to communion with her dead parent. The ‘angelic’ mother on her ‘sublime’ deathbed had emphasised the value she set on literariness not just by quoting from favourite works (including parts of Gray’s ‘Elegy’) and suggesting poetry-writing as a form of therapy to her husband, but by endorsing the death-defying, almost magical properties of the written word.

After the death of his wife, Charles Burney threw himself into his teaching and often left the children to their own devices. The girls never had a governess; Hetty, who was busy at the harpsichord much of the time, was expected to undertake that function more or less. (It was no accident that both Fanny and Susan became extremely discriminating and appreciative listeners to music.) A succession of housekeepers must have been employed, but none stayed long enough or impressed herself on the children strongly enough to have been kept in the family records, apart from ‘an old Welsh woman’ whose accent amused Mr Burney.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a melancholy and lonely time for Fanny, who went to bed every night praying ‘for my dear Mamma, & that I might be good enough to join her’.

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The children had always been close, but they drew closer, Fanny and Susan especially. Two anecdotes about them in their father’s fragmentary memoirs illustrate both his pleasure in their childish charms and the girls’ characteristics of sense and sensibility respectively. The story about Susan, the tender-hearted darling of the family, dates from before Esther’s death. At the age of five, she was so overcome by the acting in a performance of the melodrama Jane Shore that she cried out from the box to the apparently starving heroine of the piece, ‘Ma’am, will you have my ollange?’ which, her father recalls, ‘the audience applauded much more than the artificial complaints of the actress’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The story about Fanny illustrates her ‘natural simplicity and probity’, which in Charles Burney’s view had ‘wanted no teaching’. She and her sisters were playing with the wigmaker’s children next door:

[T]he door of the wig magazine being left open, they each of them put on one of those dignified ornaments of the head, and danced and jumped about in a thousand antics, laughing till they screamed at their own ridiculous figures. Unfortunately, in their vagaries, one of the flaxen wigs, said by the proprietor to be worth upwards of ten guineas – in those days a price enormous – fell into a tub of water, placed for the shrubs in the little garden, and lost all its gorgon buckle, and was declared by the owner to be totally spoilt. He was extremely angry, and chid very severely his own children; when my little daughter, the old lady, then ten years of age, advancing to him, as I was informed, with great gravity and composure, sedately says; ‘What signifies talking so much about an accident? The wig is wet, to be sure; and the wig was a good wig, to be sure; but its of no use to speak of it any more; because what’s done can’t be undone’.

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This story is made to sound comical in the Memoirs,

(#ulink_1fd88a6f-bd1c-5cac-bad3-177f6e6c1278) and the thought of the little girls running round in judges’ and advocates’ wigs, screaming with laughter – until the accident, and probably then still sniggering – is a charming one. But it has a melancholy undertow. What’s done can’t be undone. If the statement of Fanny’s age is accurate, the incident took place in the year when Esther was dying or dead. The coining of such a fatalistic apothegm by a ten-year-old (‘the wig is wet’ became family shorthand for any situation that had got beyond their control) suggests an unusual degree of reflectiveness. It must have served to remind the wigmaker quite sharply that the ruination of a hair-piece was a relatively paltry loss.

Fanny was referred to in that story as ‘the old lady’, a nickname which settled on her ‘from the time she had reached her eleventh year’. In a passage from the Memoirs apparently ‘Copied from a Memorandum-book of Dr. Burney’s’,

(#ulink_d0ea8134-8ec7-5a21-a8d0-3399b581a065) she has her father recall: