Fanny Burney: A biography

in company, or before strangers, [Fanny] was silent, backward, timid, even to sheepishness: and, from her shyness, had such profound gravity and composure of features, that those of my friends who came often to my house, and entered into the different humours of the children, never called Fanny by any other name, from the time she had reached her eleventh year, than The Old Lady.

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Fanny would not have left this in the record if she had not thought it to her credit. Behaving like an old lady, decorously, soberly and with ‘gravity and composure of features’, was for her the only proper way. ‘From the time she had reached her eleventh year’ clearly aligns the onset of ‘profound gravity’ with her mother’s death, after which it may have seemed to Fanny irreverent and inappropriate to be gay in public – in her novels, only the heartless characters ‘get over’ a death. People often described Fanny Burney as ‘shy’, but ‘reserved’ seems a much more accurate word. From her diaries and letters, which exist from her sixteenth year, we know that, privately, she was sharp, witty, devastatingly observant, judgemental, romantic and prone to ‘fits’ of irrepressible high spirits. Her sobersides public persona was clearly a form of camouflage, developed through the long habit of not wanting to have attention drawn to herself, with the criticism she imagined would inevitably follow of her looks, her melancholy, her ‘backwardness’, her lack of polish. To be reserved was also to be preserved.

* (#ulink_a36ed8c0-6a80-55fb-9443-17d24088b201) According to the ‘Worcester Memoirs’. Wycherley died in 1716, aged about seventy-six, and Ann Cooper was born in 1690, but although it sounds an unlikely courtship, Wycherley in fact married a woman even younger than Ann a fortnight before his death.

* (#ulink_42159557-210c-55e0-ae87-3a61ba8d7fbb) Margaret Anne Doody’s suggestion that a homosexual attraction between Greville and Burney ‘does not seem impossible’

(#litres_trial_promo) seems to me too far-fetched to be helpful in this connection.

* (#ulink_ff78d8aa-9ae1-5737-b522-f4e1672087e9) Esther Sleepe’s parentage and date of birth are difficult to ascertain, and scholars disagree over them. She is either the ‘Esther ye Daugh’ of Mr Sleepe by – his Wife’ born 19 May 1723 and baptised on 9 June at St Vedast, Foster Lane (Joyce Hemlow’s choice), or the Hester, daughter of Richard and Frances Sleepe baptised at St Michael le Quern on 1 August 1725 (the choice of the editors of Dr Burney’s memoirs). Professor Hemlow bases her decision on the information given by Esther’s great-grandson, Richard Allen Burney, in his application to the College of Arms in 1807, where he names her father as ‘James Sleepe of Foster Lane’. The Memoir editors cite the passage by Dr Burney that describes his first wife thus: ‘the daughter of old Sleepe, the head of the City waits and furnisher of bands for municipal festivities, and Mrs Sleepe, the daughter of a M. Dubois, who kept a Fan Shop in Cheapside’. This encourages the identification of Esther’s father as Richard Sleepe, a freeman of the Company of Musicians (as was she) and leader of the City waits (the Lord Mayor’s band), who died in 1758. He married a Frances Wood in 1705, whom the Memoir editors reasonably assume was the daughter of the M. Dubois mentioned in Dr Burney’s account, with her surname anglicised, as were those of many exiled Huguenots.

(#litres_trial_promo) The two ‘Mr Sleepe’s could, of course, have been one and the same person (there is no mention of the name ‘James’ except in the 1807 document), or they could have been brothers. It also strikes me as a strong possibility that the two registered births – of ‘Esther Sleepe’ (1723) and ‘Hester Sleepe’ (1725) respectively – were those of sisters, and that the second girl was given, as was very often the case, the name of a sibling who had died in infancy. The likelihood of ‘Mr Sleepe’ and ‘Richard Sleepe’ being the same man and Esther and Hester sisters is increased by the fact that after the Great Fire of 1666, the parish of St Michael le Quern was amalgamated with that of its neighbour, St Vedast, Foster Lane (both churches having been destroyed, and only St Vedast rebuilt – by Wren). The two girl babies were therefore baptised at the same font, two years apart, and not at two different churches, as scholars have hitherto assumed. This would favour the identification of Esther as the daughter of Richard Sleepe, d.1758, and Frances Wood (Dubois), d. before 1776, who was baptised on 1 August 1725, which I take to be correct.

(#litres_trial_promo) Professor Hemlow’s alternative identification is further weakened by the uncertain reliability of Richard Allen Burney’s information. Known in the family as a snob (an accusation which seems borne out by his desire to acquire a coat of arms), Richard Allen Burney was trying to present his genealogy to the College of Arms in the best possible light. As I discuss elsewhere (see Preface), he may not have known of his own mother’s illegitimacy; or if he did, he concealed it from the College. His apparent knowledge of a ‘James Sleepe of Foster Lane’ may have been handed down in the family (though it is odd that it disagrees with Dr Burney’s version), or perhaps extrapolated, for purposes of establishing some presentable facts, from the very records which Professor Hemlow used to corroborate his evidence.

* (#ulink_c8037557-0550-5af7-bd4e-9566f54a34ce) St Ann’s Blackfriars, Christ Church Greyfriars, and St Vedast and St Michael le Quern.

* (#ulink_a4731675-7953-5143-b980-ce9dfc594184) The date at which Fanny’s maternal grandmother died is uncertain, and the paucity of references to her in Charles Burney’s memoirs and Fanny’s early diaries slightly puzzling. She was alive in 1764, when Charles Burney wrote to his daughter from Paris to ‘tell your grandmothers’ he had arrived safely, and dead by May 1775, when Fanny recalls in her diary how deeply she mourned for her.

(#litres_trial_promo) The reference to ‘writing a Letter to my Grand mama Sleepe’ in July 1768

(#litres_trial_promo) may be misleading, since the word ‘Sleepe’ has been recovered from Madame d’Arblay’s emendations to her manuscript, and is possibly a simple error. Fanny was in correspondence with her other grandmother, Ann Burney (who died in October 1775), in August 1768.

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* (#ulink_90f34884-b4e8-52a8-b194-f05d3b60839b) Now part of Tavistock Street, Covent Garden.

* (#ulink_e1b2c289-d10e-5e2a-8ad0-737d34215f9b) Which was demolished by the 1690s, but is still commemorated in the name of Great Windmill Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue.

* (#ulink_02b388a6-8ba0-5299-a5a1-c42b0f6a6f00) Pope remained her favourite poet, with Shakespeare, for life.

* (#ulink_d71d6d5c-1965-59b5-8f14-4d71a4321ab9) It appears in her third novel, Camilla, when one of the characters, overheard reciting from it, is thought to be reading an illicit love-letter.

* (#ulink_d4ede2b5-b37c-5d1d-83e4-ed756ca9d945) I have used the Memoirs version rather than the slightly different one in Dr Burney’s fragmentary memoirs, which does not, for instance, include the detail of the tub of water being there for the shrubs. The story did, after all, happen to Fanny; Charles Burney only knew it second-hand.

* (#ulink_68a89c3a-0e23-5a74-825e-a9da8f4eba4d) But actually a reworking of his memoirs, or a piece of autobiography written in the third person – compare the fragment in Memoirs of Doctor Charles Burney, pp.141–2, with the ‘same’ passage in Fanny’s Memoirs vol. 2, pp.168–71.

2 A Romantick Girl (#ulink_ff509be5-7ebd-5984-8d2e-865b4bc836ce)

In the two years following his wife’s death, Charles Burney was too preoccupied with work and his own sorrows to realise how badly his household was being run; but the concern of his friends became clear. David Garrick and his wife Eva, whom Burney had known since the 1740s, began to take a special interest in the young family and found excuses to be kind to them. When the Garricks were going abroad in the winter of 1763, they asked the Burney children to take care of their spaniel, Phill, and on their return insisted the dog stay on at Poland Street permanently, claiming he preferred it. They also gave the Burneys free run of Mrs Garrick’s private box at Drury Lane, and Fanny and her siblings saw the great ‘Roscius’ perform there as often as they could, accompanied by a chaperone (not, one notices, by their father himself). In the early 1770s Fanny recorded seeing Garrick in some of his most famous roles, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III (‘sublimely horrible!’

(#litres_trial_promo)), Bayes in George Buckingham’s The Rehearsal and Abel Drugger in Jonson’s The Alchemist:

Never could I have imagined such a metamorphose as I saw! the extreme meanness – the vulgarity – the low wit – the vacancy of Countenance – the appearance of unlicked Nature in all his motions.

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Garrick, who loved children and had none of his own, called in at Poland Street whether he expected the master of the house to be present or not. The children idolised him, and he couldn’t resist the pleasure of entertaining them with ‘an endless variety of comic badinage, – now exhibited in lofty bombast; now in ludicrous obsequiousness; now by a sarcasm skilfully implying a compliment; now by a compliment archly conveying a sarcasm’:

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he used to take off the old puppet-show Punch, placing himself against a wall, seeming to speak through a comb, & to be moved by wires. Nobody talked such pretty nonsense, as our great Roscius, to children and lap-dogs.

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Charles Burney became a frequent guest at the Garricks’ house by the Thames at Hampton, being taken down there on Saturdays when Garrick was not acting, and delivered home on Monday mornings. He was often absent for long periods, or sealed in his study when at home. On such occasions the children were left with each other and the servants.

Burney’s thoughts were running on remarriage, but not to Dolly Young, despite Esther’s deathbed instructions and the children’s strong predilections. Dolly was the obvious choice as a second mother, but not as second wife; her ‘peculiarly unfortunate personal defects’ were clearly too much of an obstacle for Charles Burney. His eye was on Esther’s other close friend from Lynn, the handsome and spirited Mrs Allen, who had been widowed in 1763, only months after Burney’s own loss. Elizabeth Allen was thirty-eight and had three young children: Maria, aged twelve, Stephen, eight, and Bessy, who was only two. Her husband Stephen had left them a fortune of £40,000 from his business as a corn merchant: £5000 went directly to his wife (with a supplementary income of £100 per year until she remarried), and Allen’s two properties in Lynn were entailed on the children until their majorities (bringing in rent meanwhile to support them).

(#litres_trial_promo) By any reckoning, Elizabeth Allen was a wealthy woman, added to which she was clever and beautiful and familiar to the family from their happy days in Lynn and her friendship with Esther. Charles Burney must have found the prospect of an alliance with her almost irresistible.

In the fragments of his manuscript memoirs, Burney recalls how he pursued the attractive widow, who had kept in touch by letter and saw him regularly when she came to London every winter. He began to feel ‘very seriously impassioned’, and clearly believed he stood a good chance of success, but his advances were premature. The unambiguous verses he was writing to her offended rather than seduced ‘The Witch’:

Her image by night & by day

Still haunts me, both sleeping & waking,

Steals my peace & spirits away

And my heart keeps incessantly aching.

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Mrs Allen found this poem presumptuous, and refused to see the music master for over a year. He had to retreat with his tail between his legs, admitting later that, ‘After this rebuff I had very little hopes that our acquaintance wd ever be renewed’.

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With the failure of his attempt to restart some kind of home life, Burney began to wonder what to do with his children. He decided to send two of the girls to France to be educated on the cheap by boarding with a respectable Protestant woman in Paris, where they would pick up what they could of the language and culture. The two he chose were not the eldest girls, Esther and Fanny, but Esther and Susan. Burney’s anxiety about finding a suitably Protestant governess was such that he was prepared to pay over the odds: ‘I thought it best’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘whatever might be the expence, to avoid putting them in the way to be prejudiced in favour of any religion except our own, as it might distract their minds, &, if opposed, render them miserable for the rest of their lives.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Was this a reasonable fear on his children’s behalfs? Were they really made of such flammable stuff as to be ‘rendered miserable for the rest of their lives’ by a change of ideology? Fanny, certainly, became such a person, fiercely clinging to what she knew, but she, more than any other of the Burney children, had spent a lifetime trying to anticipate her father’s wishes.

There was another consideration in Charles Burney’s decision not to send Fanny abroad – her ‘backwardness’. Although Fanny had managed to learn to read and write, Susan was the quicker and more advanced student, and her education a more worthwhile use of funds. Burney was clearly thinking in terms of efficiency. He knew he couldn’t subsidise his children indefinitely (especially now that he had been spurned by the rich widow), and he sought to launch his family at the earliest opportunity ‘to shift for themselves as I had done’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Young Charles, aged only six in the summer of 1764, would cost money to educate (he went to Charterhouse in 1768 and on to Cambridge); James, fortunately, was already established in his naval career – he had joined the Niger as Captain’s Servant in 1763 and was made a midshipman as soon as he turned sixteen three years later. For the girls, however, ‘shifting for themselves’ could only mean marrying as well as they could, and for Fanny, the ‘dunce’, staying at home and acting as secretary-cum-housekeeper to her father was probably thought (by him, at any rate) more than sufficient preparation.

Charles Burney returned from depositing Hetty and Susan in Paris in the summer of 1764 in a mood of renewed optimism. He had bought a great many books and indulged one of his favourite pastimes, introducing himself to famous men (in this case the philosopher David Hume, then secretary to the English Ambassador). Burney’s ambitions were still unfocused. He couldn’t work out how to insert himself into the literary world except through the theatre, where his friendship with Garrick – who consistently encouraged his work as a composer for the stage – gave him a foothold. A nice opportunity opened up in 1765 when Garrick suggested that Burney should translate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s operetta Le Devin du village for production at Drury Lane. Burney happened to have made an English version of this piece some years before, and its transition to the stage was swift, though not as successful as the translator probably hoped. The first night of The Cunning-Man, in November 1766, was watched from Mrs Garrick’s box by the Burney children Hetty (who had stayed in Paris only a year), Fanny, Charles and possibly even little Charlotte, all sitting forward to monitor the audience’s reactions to their beloved father’s debut as a writer. They themselves were being watched from the orchestra by Garrick, who seems to have been more interested by the spectacle in the box than the one on the stage, and described to Charles Burney later,

the innocent confidence of success with which [the children] all openly bent forward, to look exultingly at the audience, when a loud clapping followed the overture: and their smiles, or nods; or chuckling and laughter, according to their more or less advanced years, during the unmingled approbation that was bestowed upon about half the piece – contrasted with, first the amazement, next, the indignation; and lastly, the disappointment, that were brought forth by the beginning buzz of hissing, and followed by the shrill horrors of the catcall: and then the return – joyous, but no longer dauntless! – of hope when again the applause prevailed.

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The possibility of hissing and catcalls had clearly not crossed the children’s minds. It was a rude awakening to the fact that though their father seemed a demi-god at home, he had yet to prove himself to the rest of the world. The children were not ignorant of theatre audiences’ rough manners. Noisy commentary, free criticism, missile-hurling and occasional fisticuffs were part and parcel of a night out at either of London’s licensed playhouses. The attention of the crowd was hard to attract and, once gained, fickle and demanding, and though the segregation of the crowd into gallery, pit and boxes afforded some protection to members of the audience from each other, no part of it felt any obligation to respect what was going on on the stage. Fanny Burney satirised the situation memorably in the Drury Lane episode in Evelina, where the fop Lovel says of theatre-going, ‘one merely comes to meet one’s friends, and shew that one’s alive. […] I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about, and finding out one’s acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage […] pray – what was the play tonight?’

(#litres_trial_promo) The onus was on the manager and players, but most of all on the author, to entertain an essentially indifferent rabble. The unharmonious ‘buzz of hissing’ and ‘shrill horrors of the catcall’ that greeted their musician father’s first literary performance was, to the Burney children, a startling demonstration of that audience’s power.

With hindsight, Fanny Burney was in no doubt that her father’s ultimate aim in life had been to achieve fame as an author, and that The Cunning-Man marked a turning point for him. Her remarks in the Memoirs about the vocation they shared are revealing: