Fanny Burney: A biography

* St Ann’s Blackfriars, Christ Church Greyfriars, and St Vedast and St Michael le Quern.

* 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.27 The reference to ‘writing a Letter to my Grand mama Sleepe’ in July 176828 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 1768.29

* Now part of Tavistock Street, Covent Garden.

* Which was demolished by the 1690s, but is still commemorated in the name of Great Windmill Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue.

* Pope remained her favourite poet, with Shakespeare, for life.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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

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!’1), 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.2

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’:3

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.4

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).5 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.6

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’.7

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.’8 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’.9 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.10

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?’11 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:

it was now that, vaguely, yet powerfully, he first fell into that stream of ideas, or visions, that seemed to hail him to that class indefinable, from its mingled elevation and abjectness, which, by joining the publicity of the press to the secret intercourse of the mind with the pen, insensibly allures its adventurous votaries to make the world at large the judge of their abilities, or their deficiencies – namely, the class of authors.12

Fanny was writing this (in the 1820s) at the end of her own long career as a writer, which makes her persistent anxieties about the ‘mingled elevation and abjectness’ of authorship all the more interesting. When her own first book came to be published she was impressed, with traumatic intensity, by the fact that the author’s initial ‘intercourse of the mind with the pen’ (secretive and confidential) led to the total exposure of him or herself to an unknowably large and critical audience. As a novelist, Fanny Burney became both audience and performer, watching and anatomising the world around her which then, in the form of her readers, was free to read and anatomise her.

The example of the careless crowd at Drury Lane hissing her father’s work is likely to have intensified her fears of the judgemental ‘world at large’, but also demonstrated the mutually exploitative nature of the compact between artist and audience and the complexity of the traffic between doing, looking, speaking, writing and reading. The passage in the Memoirs about the first performance of The Cunning-Man both describes and demonstrates this. It records Garrick’s observations, but was actually written up by Fanny, one of the children he was observing, when she was composing her father’s Memoirs sixty years later. The passage seems to be a recollection by Garrick of watching the Burney children watching the audience that was watching their father’s translation of Rousseau’s operetta. It is actually a recollection by the elderly Madame d’Arblay of what her father reported that Garrick had acted out for him after the performance. The ‘incident’ when unpicked is seen to be not one but many, the different parts relating to each other in casual or even chaotic ways. Madame d’Arblay’s objective as a biographer and autobiographer was to obfuscate such complexities. Consciously or not, she was aware that observation and recollection are dynamic processes that can be arrested by the act of writing. Writing things down became her way of taking possession of the past and attempting to impose on it shape and meaning.

In the same year that Hetty and Susan went away to Paris, Charles Burney accidentally met and renewed his friendship with Samuel Crisp, his old acquaintance from Wilbury days. This was to be of great significance to Fanny, for Crisp became, after her father, the most respected and influential person in her early life. Crisp had first met Burney in 1747, when he was forty and the young musician only twenty-one. He was in an enviable position – handsome, highly cultured, uncumbered by wife or family and possessed of a private income. He spent his life in the improvement of his mind and the refinement of his taste: he read a great deal, travelled, listened to music, studied paintings and sculpture and was regarded as a true connoisseur of the arts by his friends, many of whom were aristocratic and most, like him, rich. Charles Burney was grateful for a really well-informed mentor who could educate him in ‘almost every species of improvement’ and for whom ‘the love of music […] amounted to passion’.13 Thomas Arne had made the profession of music seem like drudgery, Crisp was the first person to show Charles that it could aspire to the highest aesthetic ideals.

Crisp, a collector of musical instruments and objets d’art, had brought back from one of his visits to Italy the first large pianoforte, or ‘harpsichord with hammers’,14 that was ever constructed. Burney had ample opportunity to play this remarkable instrument and appreciate the ‘magnificent and new effect’ of the sound it produced when Crisp sold it to Fulke Greville. Crisp could play several musical instruments and had a tenor voice which Charles Burney thought better than that of many professional singers. But he never took part in the Burneys’ later musical evenings, preferring to keep his accomplishments to himself. He was a true dilettante, in Fanny’s words in the Memoirs, ‘a scholar of the highest order; a critic of the clearest acumen; possessing, with equal delicacy of discrimination, a taste for literature and for the arts’.15

Unfortunately, there was one area where Crisp’s clear acumen and delicate discrimination failed him, and where he was not content with the status of gifted amateur. He was convinced that he was a dramatic poet, and by 1754 had finished his magnum opus, a tragedy in verse called Virginia (based on the story in Livy, retold by Chaucer in The Physician’s Tale) which he had been writing for at least five years. He offered it to his friend David Garrick for production at Drury Lane, and season after season expected it to be put on, but Garrick prevaricated. Sure of his play’s merits, Crisp decided to put pressure on Garrick through his influential friends. He got the Earl of Coventry to give a copy of it to the Prime Minister, Pitt the Elder, who said it was ‘excellent’16 and persuaded the Earl’s wife, Lady Coventry, to take the manuscript back to Garrick personally. This was ‘a machinery such as none could long resist’, as Lord Macaulay wrote of the incident.17 Lady Coventry (née Gunning) was one of the famous beauties of the day, idolised like a latter-day film star; she and her sister were followed by crowds of admirers, seven hundred of whom, reportedly, once waited outside an inn just to catch sight of them.18 When she came bearing Virginia, Garrick had to concede to the power of Crisp’s manoeuvring. He agreed to put the play on in the spring of 1754, although he insisted on cutting some scenes, by which, as even the author was prepared to admit, it was ‘rendered much more Dramatic than it was at first’.19 Garrick took the role of Virginius himself, with Mrs Cibber as his daughter, the tragic heroine; but despite their best efforts, the play lasted only ten nights – not a disaster, by any means, but a sharp disappointment to Crisp, who thought he had given birth to a classic.

Crisp spent the next year revising Virginia, and took mortal offence when Garrick, unsurprisingly, expressed no interest in a revival. Crisp complained of Garrick’s ill-will, his friends’ lack of enthusiasm, the fickleness of the public – anything but admit that there might be something wrong with the work. ‘The fatal delusion that he was a great dramatist, had taken firm possession of his mind’, Macaulay wrote. ‘He lost his temper and spirits, and became a cynic and hater of mankind.’20 Crisp came to regret that he had ever allowed Garrick to alter a line of Virginia, and thirty years later was still smarting from the play’s failure, convinced that he had only missed out on literary glory through other people’s errors of judgement. Sending the surviving segments of the play to Fanny Burney after Crisp’s death, his sister, Sophia Gast, gave her own version of the affair: ‘The then manager [Garrick] would not suffer the too much approved, and greatly admired performance, to be acted as in its pristine state, but insisted on many alterations’. Garrick’s motivation was clear to Mrs Gast: simple jealousy. Fanny Burney, who had known both Garrick and Crisp very well, and was loyal to the memory of both, scored the word through.21

Crisp left England for Italy in 1755, not intending to return. However, after a few years’ self-imposed exile he came back to live a life of retirement ‘in one of the wildest tracts of Surrey’.22 This was the hamlet of Chesington,* about two miles north-west of Epsom (now a heavily-developed suburb just inside the London orbital motorway), where he took up residence as a long-term paying guest in a decaying country house belonging to one of his bachelor acquaintances, Christopher Hamilton.

Chesington Hall was falling into ruin when Christopher Hamilton took it over from the Hatton family in 1746. Fanny Burney calls him the ‘hereditary owner’, but she could have been wrong about this,† as she was about ‘the long dignity’ of the house’s name, which Hamilton himself had made up in the 1740s.23 Fanny tended to romanticise everything about Chesington, the ‘long-loved rural abode [where] the Burneys and happiness seemed to make a stand’,24 and it is easy to see how the Tudor house, with its old wood, old windows and curious passageways, would have appealed to an imaginative child. It was built of brick around 1520 and had retained most of its early features, including a long gallery on the first floor, tapestries, canopied beds, carved cupboards and a chimney-piece ‘cut in diamonds, squares and round nobs, surmounting another of blue and white tiles’.25 The windowpanes were ‘hardly so wide as their clumsy frames’, and were ‘stuck in some angle close to the ceiling of a lofty slip of a room’, or looked out from the attics onto ‘long ridges of lead that entwined the motley spiral roofs of the multitude of separate cells’. A crumbling Elizabethan ‘cell’ was just what Samuel Crisp was looking for, and he was glad to adopt what Fanny later described as ‘some pic-nic plan’26 with Hamilton, joining a number of other waning gentlemen at Chesington Hall ‘who had quitted the world, and who in this Chateau met only at meals, at Tea, and afterwards at a game of cards’.27

Crisp’s retirement was not complete, and he came up to town every spring to visit the latest exhibitions and attend plays, concerts and the opera. It was on one of these trips that he re-met Charles Burney and quickly re-established their friendship. They had been out of touch during the period of the Virginia episode, when Burney had finally taken his friend’s advice and moved back to London from King’s Lynn – the period, too, during which Esther had died. The sight of the young music-master, as thin and overworked as ever, heroically trying to maintain his household in Poland Street, must have touched Crisp deeply. Burney was the only one of his friends to whom he divulged the secret of how to find Chesington Hall, and it soon became a refuge where the musician could retire to work, or simply stroll among the box-walks or the fruit trees, or admire a good view of Epsom from the summer-house on the ‘Mount’.

On the death of Christopher Hamilton, Chesington Hall passed to his sister Sarah, who, guided by Crisp’s advice, let half the house and most of the surrounding land to a farmer named Woodhatch, retaining the other part as ‘a competant establishment for receiving a certain number of boarders’.28* Crisp became, in effect, the head of a household that consisted of himself, Mrs Hamilton,† her good-natured niece Kitty Cooke, and a shifting cast of lodgers. The Burneys were always welcome, and over the years Chesington Hall became a second home, especially when any of them needed a convalescent ‘change of air’. Crisp took great interest in all the children, but was particularly fond of Fanny, who returned his affection abundantly. She was an adolescent who sometimes behaved like an ‘old lady’; he an old gentleman who like to indulge youthful high spirits. Genial, cultivated and attentive, Crisp became a kind of ideal grandfather to the Burney children, a second ‘Daddy’ – the pet name he was more than happy to adopt.

In the year during which Hetty and Susan were away in Paris, Fanny had the house on Poland Street to herself for long stretches of time. She was twelve years old, had free access to her father’s growing library, and was keen to improve herself. She studied conscientiously, made notes, copied extracts and kept a catalogue raisonné, possibly in competition with her two sisters abroad. A long manuscript translation from the French of Fontanelle’s ‘Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes’ has survived30 which may have been made during these years: it indicates the seriousness of Fanny’s studies, her ambition and also her characteristic self-consciousness – underneath the title appear the words ‘Murdered into English by Frances Burney’.