Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay)

That Fanny’s detailed despatches delighted her correspondent at Chessington, is only to be expected. “You have produc’d such an illustrious assembly of Princes, and generals, and lords, and ladies, and wits, and pictures, and diamonds, and shoulder-knots, that I feel myself shrink into nothing at the idea of them, – nay, you yourself that made one among them, seem to be a little dazzled at their glare.” And then Mr. Crisp rallies her upon her evident admiration of the “beautiful Rauzzini.” In another letter there is a significant sentence. “You have learned from that R[ogue] your father (by so long serving as amanuensis, I suppose) to make your descriptions alive” – an utterance which, while it throws some light on the vexed question of Miss Burney’s style, also recalls us to the progress of that History of Music, in which she bore so laborious a part. In March 1775 it had come to a “dead stop” owing to Dr. Burney’s rheumatism, which prevented him from writing; and in April it was scarcely moving. “My father’s History goes on very slowly indeed at present… He teaches from nine to nine almost every day, and has scarce time to write a page a week.” Still, it gradually progresses, and in October, Fanny is able to report that the first volume is ready. “The History has been this very day, for the first time since its long cessation, put into the press[?]. It is now rough written to the end of the first volume, Preface and Dedication inclusive. When it is actually published, we intend to keep the Carnival.” A few days before, the Dedication to the Queen had been read by Dr. Burney to an admiring friend; and in 1776 the first volume was issued, when, we may conclude, the Carnival was duly kept.

But of this, unhappily, no record has been preserved; and it was some years before a second volume gave the busy Doctor opportunity for a further jubilation.23 Beyond the fact that the Burneys, and Fanny in particular, made friends (through the Stranges) with the Miss Paynes, daughters of the famous old bookseller in Castle Street, “next the Upper Mews-Gate,” whose L-shaped shop was so well known to Eighteenth Century bibliomaniacs,24– little remains of interest from the records of 1775. For 1776 there is no journal at all, what had been written having been “destroyed in totality,” as consisting wholly of family matters or anecdotes; and save for a very graphic picture of the slatternly Duchess of Devonshire in St. James’s Park, no very attractive correspondence, although Mr. Crisp refers to a “conversation piece” which Fanny drew of the fine company at the house of Sir James Lake, the great portrait collector, which should have been good to read. “If specimens of this kind had been preserved of the different Tons that have succeeded one another for twenty centuries last past,” he writes, “how interesting would they have been! infinitely more so, than antique statues, bas-reliefs, and intaglios.” In a fragment dated 2 December there is a vignette of Nollekens the sculptor, “a jolly, fat, lisping, laughing, underbred, good-humoured man as lives: his merit seems pretty much confined to his profession, and his language is as vulgar as his works are elegant.” Mrs. Nollekens (the very handsome daughter of Fielding’s friend Justice Welch), his wife, is also mentioned: “a civil, obliging, gentle sort of woman; rather too complaisant.” Then there is a costume-piece of “Miss B – something, a sister-in-law of Mr. Hayes of the Pantheon,” and not entirely unsuggestive of Lady Louisa Larpent in Evelina; “a young lady quite à-la-mode, – every part of her dress, the very pink and extreme of the fashion; – her [head] erect and stiff as any statue; – her voice low, and delicate, and mincing; – her hair higher than twelve wigs stuck one on the other; – her waist taper, and pinched evidently; – her eyes cast languishingly from one object to another, and her conversation very much the thing.” Decidedly “Daddy” Crisp was right in saying: “To do you justice, Fanny, you paint well!”

For the next year, 1777, there is only one letter to Mr. Crisp; but it is an important one, since it gives Miss Burney’s account of her first meeting with Dr. Johnson, to which accident, indeed, it owes its preservation. Dr. Burney had for some time known Johnson slightly, – he had written to him from Lynn with regard to the Dictionary; he had also met him at intervals; and, as we have seen, Johnson, notwithstanding his insensibility to music, had read and appreciated the Musical Tours. Writing Dr. Burney’s Memoirs in extreme old age, his daughter seems to have thought that Johnson had already accompanied her father to Winchester to put his youngest son, Richard, under the care of the then Head Master of that day, Joseph Warton; and that he had also, before this date, interested himself to procure Dr. Burney access to the libraries at Oxford. But her memory must have led her astray, for both these things, as is plain from Boswell, belong to 1778, while Miss Burney’s “first sight” of the great man demonstrably took place on the 20th March, 1777,25 and came about in this wise. Dr. Burney had been invited by Mr. and Mrs. Thrale to give lessons in music to their eldest daughter, Queenie, afterwards Viscountess Keith. Report says that the lessons were not a great success, since Mrs. Thrale was in the habit of interrupting them sadly in order to talk politics and literature with the clever Historian of Music. But, as usual, Dr. Burney speedily became a favourite with all the household; and, as Johnson was then staying at Streatham, one of the results was a joint visit by the Doctor and Mrs. Thrale to St. Martin’s Street, which visit was promptly reported by Fanny for consumption at Chessington. It took place fourteen years before Boswell’s book, and as printed in the Early Diary of 1889, exhibits a fresher version than that put forward later by the writer herself in the Memoirs of her father. No excuse therefore is needed for giving it the preference here.

“Mrs. and Miss Thrale, Miss Owen, and Mr. Seward came long before Lexiphanes. [This was a name given to Johnson in 1767, in a little book written to burlesque his style by a Scotch purser named Campbell.] Mrs. Thrale is a very pretty woman still; she is extremely lively and chatty; has no supercilious or pedantic airs, and is really gay and agreeable. Her daughter [Queenie] is about twelve years old, stiff and proud, I believe, or else shy and reserved: I don’t yet know which.”.. “My sister Burney [Esther] was invited to meet and play to them. The conversation was supported with a good deal of vivacity (N.B. my father being at home) for about half an hour, and then Hetty and Susette, for the first time in public, played a duet; and in the midst of this performance Dr. Johnson was announced. He is, indeed, very ill-favoured; is tall and stout; but stoops terribly; he is almost bent double. His mouth is almost constantly opening and shutting, as if he was chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers, and twisting his hands. His body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down; his feet are never a moment quiet; and, in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion. His dress, too, considering the times, and that he had meant to put on his best becomes, being engaged to dine in a large company [at Mrs. Montagu’s], was as much out of the common road as his figure; he had a large wig, snuff-colour coat, and gold buttons, but no ruffles to his shirt, doughty fists,26 and black worsted stockings. He is shockingly near-sighted, and did not, till she held out her hand to him, even know Mrs. Thrale. He poked his nose over the keys of the harpsichord, till the duet was finished, and then my father introduced Hetty to him as an old acquaintance, and he cordially kissed her! When she was a little girl, he had made her a present of The Idler.

“His attention, however, was not to be diverted five minutes from the books, as we were in the library; he pored over them, shelf by shelf, almost touching the backs of them with his eye-lashes, as he read their titles. At last, having fixed upon one, he began, without further ceremony, to read to himself, all the time standing at a distance from the company. We were all very much provoked, as we perfectly languished to hear him talk; but it seems he is the most silent creature, when not particularly drawn out, in the world.

“My sister then played another duet with my father; but Dr. Johnson was so deep in the Encyclopédie that, as he is very deaf, I question if he even knew what was going forward. When this was over, Mrs. Thrale, in a laughing manner, said, ‘Pray, Dr. Burney, can you tell me what that song was and whose, which Savoi sung last night at Bach’s concert, and which you did not hear?’ My father confessed himself by no means so good a diviner, not having had time to consult the stars, though in the house of Sir Isaac Newton. However, wishing to draw Dr. Johnson into some conversation, he told him the question. The Doctor, seeing his drift, good-naturedly put away his book, and said very drolly, ‘And pray, Sir, who is Bach? is he a piper?’ Many exclamations of surprise you will believe followed this question. ‘Why, you have read his name often in the papers,’ said Mrs. Thrale; and then she gave him some account of his Concert, and the number of fine performances she had heard at it.27

“ ‘Pray,’ said he, gravely, ‘Madam, what is the expense?’

“ ‘Oh,’ answered she, ‘much trouble and solicitation to get a Subscriber’s Ticket; – or else half a Guinea.’

“ ‘Trouble and solicitation,’ said he, ‘I will have nothing to do with; but I would be willing to give eighteen pence.’

“Ha! ha!

“Chocolate being then brought, we adjourned to the drawing-room. And here, Dr. Johnson being taken from the books, entered freely and most cleverly into conversation; though it is remarkable he never speaks at all, but when spoken to; nor does he ever start, though he so admirably supports, any subject.

“The whole party were engaged to dine at Mrs. Montague’s. Dr. Johnson said he had received the most flattering note he had ever read, or that anybody had ever read, by way of invitation. ‘Well! so have I too,’ cried Mrs. Thrale; ‘so if a note from Mrs. Montague is to be boasted of, I beg mine may not be forgot.’

“ ‘Your note,’ cried Dr. Johnson, ‘can bear no comparison with mine; I am at the head of the Philosophers, she says.’

“ ‘And I,’ cried Mrs. Thrale, ‘have all the Muses in my train!’

“ ‘A fair battle,’ said my father. ‘Come, compliment for compliment, and see who will hold out longest!’

“ ‘Oh, I am afraid for Mrs. Thrale,’ cried Mr. Seward, ‘for I know Mrs. Montague exerts all her forces, when she attacks Dr. Johnson.’

“ ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs. Thrale, ‘she has often, I know, flattered him, till he has been ready to faint.’

“ ‘Well, ladies,’ said my father, ‘you must get him between you to-day, and see which can lay on the paint thickest, Mrs. Thrale or Mrs. Montague.’

“ ‘I had rather,’ cried the Doctor, drily, ‘go to Bach’s Concert.’ ”

The talk then shifted to Garrick, who, having retired from the stage in the previous year, had been recently reading his farce of Lethe to the King and Queen. Dr. Johnson spoke of his old friend and pupil with his wonted candour, and not without touches of critical humour which must have been highly relished by that still-sore author of Virginia to whom Miss Burney’s budget was addressed. Of Garrick’s popular faults Johnson said – “Garrick is accused of vanity; but few men would have borne such unremitting prosperity with greater, if with equal moderation. He is accused, too, of avarice; but, were he not, he would be accused of just the contrary; for he now lives rather as a prince than an actor; but the frugality he practised, when he first appeared in the world, and which, even then, was perhaps beyond his necessity, has marked his character ever since; and now, though his table, his equipage and manner of living, are all the most expensive, and equal to those of a nobleman, yet the original stain still blots his name! Though, had he not fixed upon himself the charge of avarice, he would long since have been reproached with luxury and with living beyond his station in magnificence and splendour.” Another of the Doctor’s animadversions serves to explain an aspect of the actor’s character which has already been illustrated in this chapter.28 “Garrick never enters a room,” he said, “but he regards himself as the object of general attention, from whom the entertainment of the company is expected; and true it is, that he seldom disappoints them; for he has infinite humour, a very just proportion of wit, and more convivial pleasantry, than almost any other man. But then off as well as on the Stage, he is always an Actor; for he thinks it so incumbent on him to be sportive, that his gaiety becomes mechanical from being habitual, and he can exert his spirits at all times alike, without consulting his real disposition to hilarity.”29

Previous to Dr. Johnson’s visit to St. Martin’s Street, Miss Burney had been staying at Chessington, whence, to the disgust of Mr. Crisp, she had been hastily recalled to meet her uncle, Mr. Richard Burney of Worcester, whose son Charles her sister Hetty had married. She then went on a visit to her uncle at Barborne (familiarly “Barebones”) Lodge, a little out of Worcester; and here she took part in some private theatricals, playing Mrs. Lovemore in what was apparently the first three-act form of Murphy’s Way to Keep Him, a comedy in which there are manifest traces of that pioneer sentimental drama, La Chaussée’s Préjugé à-la-mode– the prejudice in question being, that it is a mistake to love one’s wife. She seems, by her own account, to have been terribly nervous (in green and gray); but to have acquitted herself creditably in the crucial third Act. She afterwards appeared as Huncamunca in Fielding’s burlesque of Tom Thumb, the rival character of Glumdalca being taken by her cousin James, and that of Lord Grizzle by Edward Burney the artist. The Tom Thumb of the piece was the youngest of the family, Ann or Nancy, a child of seven, the daughter of Charles Burney and Hetty. By this time Miss Burney had entirely got over her stage fright, and entered thoroughly into her part of Tom Thumb’s fiancée.

One of the things Huncamunca has to do in Tom Thumb is to express her anxiety to be married. It is not, however, this unbecoming aspiration (upon which Miss Burney was of course afterwards sufficiently rallied) that prompts the “Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh!” of Fielding’s parody of Thomson. But the point serves to remind us that, in this chapter, nothing has been said of Miss Burney’s admirers. Scattered through her Journal are various fugitive references to different gentlemen, old and young, who were evidently attracted by her vivacity and charm, shy and demure as she professed to be. But she had not yet realised her own ambition, and fallen seriously in love. “I am too much spoilt,” she says, “by such men as my father and Mr. Crisp to content myself with a character merely inoffensive.” These words were written of an importunate suitor, with the unpromising name of Thomas Barlow, who made his appearance early in May, 1775. He seems to have been very much in earnest, indeed, – to use the expression of Mr. Toots, of whom he somehow contrives to remind us, – to have been “perfectly sore” with devotion. His ardent, or (as he terms it) “ardurous” Pen addresses to Miss Burney several long-winded and very alembicate epistles, but she will have none of him, although, strange to say, nearly all her family, including the paternal Crisp, – who was particularly urgent that she should not lose a chance of establishing herself, – favour Mr. Barlow’s pretensions. But, as she very sensibly tells Mr. Crisp, she is “determined never to marry without having the very highest value and esteem for the man who should be her lord.” And Mr. Barlow, besides that he is “extremely precipitate,” does not “hit her fancy.” So there is no more to say.

Upon the whole, when it is remembered that this retiring but observant young lady of five-and-twenty had a travelled sailor brother, and two sisters who had been educated at Paris; – that she had seen the town and country both in London and King’s Lynn; – that she had read Richardson and Marivaux and Sterne, if not Fielding; – that she knew Sir Joshua and Nollekens, and was familiar with the acting of Garrick, both on and off the stage; – that she had heard Agujari at her best, and the Gabrielli at her worst; – that she had been introduced to Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale; – that she had conversed with Otaheitan Omai, eaten roast apples with Abyssinian Bruce, and been allowed to inspect what Horace Walpole calls the “infamous diamonds” of the veneered barbarian, Alexis Orloff, – it will, we think, be admitted that her experience of things in general had been of a very varied kind. If to this be added that she was a copious and diligent diarist; – the sworn “anecdote-monger” of a distant correspondent; – and the faithful secretary of a scribbling father – it must also be granted that she was by no means ill-equipped for the production of that work of fiction to the story of which the ensuing chapter is devoted.

CHAPTER III

THE STORY OF EVELINA

At the beginning of 1778, English Literature, and especially that branch of it which consists of fiction, seems to have been suffering from a kind of sleeping sickness. The great masters who had followed upon Richardson’s success with Pamela, were gone, – as was Richardson himself. Fielding, whose last novel of Amelia had appeared in 1751, was dead; and his far younger rival, Smollett, whose Humphry Clinker came twenty years later, was also dead. Sterne was dead; Goldsmith was dead; and both Tristram Shandy and the Vicar of Wakefield had been a considerable time before the public. Johnson, whose Rasselas dated from 1759, and Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto dated from 1764, were the only living writers of fiction of any eminence, for it is impossible to give a very high place to the Julia de Roubigné of Sterne’s tearful imitator, Henry Mackenzie, or to the Champion of Virtue, which Walpole’s disciple, Miss Clara Reeve, afterwards re-named The Old English Baron. Both of these, however, belong to 1777. Apart from them, there is nothing that rises above the average level of the

          “books in marble coversAbout smart girls and dapper lovers,”

which formed the staple product of the Circulating Library, – those “Ventures of Jack this, and the History of Betsy t’other, and Sir Humphrys, and women with hard Christian names,” which exercised the Nurse in Colman’s Polly Honeycombe. “And then” – says the Author in his Prologue —

“And then so sentimental is the Stile,So chaste, yet so bewitching all the while!Plot, and elopement, passion, rape, and rapture,The total sum of ev’ry dear – dear – Chapter.”

Of these latter and minor performances, perhaps the only one which – for the moment – deserves a passing mention is the Excursion of Mrs. Frances Brooke, already referred to in Chapter i. as the popular author of Lady Julia Mandeville. The Excursion has a certain faint interest from the fact that, preceding Evelina only by a few months, it deals, to some extent, with a similar theme, since the heroine is described as “a young lady of family but small fortune, with a mind sensible and improved, but totally ignorant of the world,” who “launches out from the country, steering, without a pilot or compass, through the rocks and shelves of a London life.” One of her perils is, of course, a heartless young nobleman, educated by his father “upon the detestable plan” of my Lord Chesterfield, whose Miscellaneous Works had then just been issued by Dr. Maty. Fanny Burney knew Mrs. Brooke’s books, and had indeed made her personal acquaintance, both in the studio of Miss Catherine Reid, the “English Rosalba,” and at the Opera House in the Haymarket, of which Mrs. Brooke was co-lessee with the actress, Mary Ann Yates. “Mrs. Brooke is very short and fat, and squints” – writes Fanny of their first interview, “but has the art of showing agreeable ugliness. She is very well bred, and expresses herself with much modesty upon all subjects; which in an authoress, a woman of known understanding, is extremely pleasing.” But save and except the very superficial resemblance referred to above, there is no trace of any connection between the Excursion and Evelina. Indeed, as for the Excursion, although Sylvanus Urban contrives to give it a review of two or three columns, – a far longer notice than he afterwards, and very tardily, accorded to Evelina, – it is not more readable to-day than the same author’s Lady Julia Mandeville, or her translations from the French, – that is to say, it is not readable at all.

It has already been stated in Chapter i., that, amid the fuel of Miss Burney’s Poland Street holocaust, was “an entire work of fiction.” This was The History of Caroline Evelyn, of which we know no more than is told us in the Preface to The Wanderer and the Memoirs of Dr. Burney. It was “the last of the little works that was immolated,” and contained the history of Evelina’s mother, who, as appears from the later novel dealing with her daughter’s entrance into the world, was the only child of a gentleman of birth and education named Evelyn. Mr. Evelyn having been unwise enough to marry a good-looking waitress at a tavern, had in consequence migrated to France, where he died. His daughter Caroline, after being brought up carefully by his old tutor, the Rev. Mr. Villars, was sent for to Paris by her vulgar mother, who, by this time had married again, her second husband being a Frenchman named Duval. Oppressed by Mme. Duval, and menaced with an unsuitable partner, Miss Evelyn rashly consented to marry, without witnesses, a profligate young baronet, Sir John Belmont, who brought her back to England. Here after the approved fashion of profligate young baronets in novels, he, in due time, destroyed the marriage certificate, denying that the ceremony had ever taken place. His broken-hearted wife sought an asylum with her old guardian, Mr. Villars, and subsequently died in giving birth to Evelina.

Such is the History of Caroline Evelyn, as it is summarised in the opening letters of her daughter’s story; and such, we may imagine, in expanded form, must have been the matter of the manuscript which was burnt. Whatever was the precise date of its destruction, it must obviously have been a very juvenile performance. It was certainly written before its author had begun her Journal – in other words, before she had begun, not only to record her thoughts and feelings, but to take intelligent stock of the variations of humanity; and it must also have been written before she had been subjected to the discipline of acting as private secretary to her father. As to the plot, there was nothing in that beyond the ability of an imaginative schoolgirl. Unfortunate heroine, heartless parent, profligate baronet, private marriage, burnt certificate, – these were the conventional material of contemporary fiction, if indeed they did not come direct from Grandison or Clarissa. What would be interesting to know is, whether the History of Caroline Evelyn contained any promise of character-drawing, still more of social satire and humourous incident. We suspect it did not. In all likelihood, it was merely a sentimental exercise in the taste which then represented the degradation of the Richardsonian method, as modified by French imitators; and perhaps aimed at nothing more than mild rivalry of the existing biographies of Miss Polly Willis, Miss Lucy Wellers, Miss Charlotte Villars, and the rest of the ingenious works enumerated at the end of the Preface to Polly Honeycombe.

There is no doubt that when Fanny Burney made dutiful sacrifice of the History of Caroline Evelyn, she sincerely intended, in her own words, “to extinguish for ever in its ashes her scribbling propensity.” But qui a bu, boira. As we have seen, the checked impulse almost immediately found its outlet in keeping a journal; and to keep a journal was but, in another form, to exercise the prohibited gift and to gratify the old ambition. The fire which “consumed her productions, extirpated neither the invention nor the inclination that had given them birth”; and, as time went on, she felt herself more and more disposed to revert to her first conception, and to brood over the singular situation in which Miss Evelyn’s daughter must find herself “between the elegant connections of her mother, and the vulgar ones of her grandmother.” Irresistibly and almost insensibly, she felt the whole story forming itself gradually in her mind, and calling urgently to be written down, long before a syllable was committed to paper. When she actually began to write, is not clear. It was in 1768 that the diary opened; but there are no hints of the composition of Evelina for some time to come. Probably it was written by fits and starts; and grew but very gradually into shape, making its greatest progress during its writer’s visits to Chessington, or in the leisure procured during her father’s two absences on the continent. And much of it was no doubt penned in Newton’s old observatory, remote from her step-mother’s watchful eye.