Читать книгу Fanny Burney: A biography - Claire Harman, Claire Harman - Страница 8

‘The Burneys are I believe a very low Race of Mortals’, wrote Dr Johnson’s confidante Hester Thrale in February 1779 of her daughter’s music master and his family. The remark was scribbled in the margin of her journal as a gloss on her opinion that Dr Burney’s second daughter, Fanny, was ‘not a Woman of Fashion’.¹ This was such an obvious thing to say about twenty-six-year-old Fanny Burney that it hardly bore mentioning, unless from mild spite. The Burneys were indeed not ‘people of Fashion’; they were representative of the coming class, the intelligentsia; self-made, self-educated, self-conscious people in uneasy amity with their wealthy and well-born patrons. No doubt those patrons found it obliquely threatening that a ‘low race’ could produce so many high achievers: in 1779 Dr Burney, author, composer and teacher, was halfway through publishing his ground-breaking General History of Music; Fanny had shot to fame the previous year with her first novel, Evelina; another of the Burney daughters was a famous harpsichordist; and one of the sons had circumnavigated the world with Captain Cook. The Burneys, and people like them, had every reason to think they were being admired rather than sneered at.

There had been no patrimony, titles or property to smooth Dr Burney’s path in life; he had achieved his position through a combination of natural genius and unstinting hard work, his eye forever on the main chance, his ‘spare person’ worn to a ravelling. Mrs Thrale claimed not to understand the devotion Burney inspired in his children – ’tis very seldom that a person’s own family will give him Credit for Talents which bring in no money to make them fine or considerable’,² she wrote in her diary; but what was ‘no money’ to Mrs Thrale was riches to the Burneys, just as their reception among the ‘Great folks’ – at her own house, Streatham Park, for instance – was more than enough to make them feel ‘considerable’. Fanny Burney’s pride in the insignificant-looking man who had effected these miracles was boundless, and she saw no absurdity in describing her father as the powerful ‘trunk’ of the Burney tree.³ Charles Burney had so successfully overcome his humble background that he really did seem to have sprung up from nowhere and to have started his family history afresh.

One of the Doctor’s other harpsichord pupils in 1779 (they were all young ladies ‘of Fashion’) had told Mrs Thrale that ‘these Burney’s are Irish people I’m sure; Mac Burneys they used to be called’.⁴ Where the girl picked up this information one can hardly imagine, unless through class instinct; the Doctor did not advertise his changed name. Charles MacBurney, as he was first known, was born in Shrewsbury in 1726, the twin to a sister called Susanna and the youngest son of his father’s second family. His grandfather, James, who was of Scottish or Irish descent (accounts differ), had had an estate in Shropshire and a house in Whitehall in the late seventeenth century, but by the time of Charles’s birth the family money had all but disappeared. The story goes that the grandfather MacBurney was so disgusted by his son James running off with a young actress, Rebecca Ellis, that he disinherited him. The old gentleman rather perversely followed up this gesture of affronted rectitude by marrying his own cook and starting a second family, of whom the eldest son, Joseph, inherited most of the property. This son frittered his inheritance away, was imprisoned for debt and supported himself later by becoming a dancing-master; but despite his fall from grace and wealth, he seemed happy with his lot (or so Charles Burney, his half-nephew, thought when they met in the 1750s), and that branch of the family was noted for its cheerfulness and striking good looks.

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’.⁵ 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’.⁶

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;^* 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’,⁷ 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’.⁸ 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’.⁹ 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.¹⁰

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.¹¹

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’,¹² 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’¹³ 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.^* 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;¹⁵ 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’.¹⁶ 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’,¹⁷ 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.^* 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.²⁰ 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’.²¹ 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’.²² 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;^* 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.²³ 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’,²⁴ 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’.²⁵ 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’.²⁶ 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.^*

Charles Burney’s fondness for his mother-in-law, whom he loved ‘as sincerely as if she had been his mother-in-blood’,³⁰ 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.’³¹ 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’.³²

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,^* 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).

One of his pupils was the Italian opera singer Giulia Frasi, at whose house and at the Cibbers’ Burney used to meet George Friedric Handel. Burney revered Handel’s music and, starstruck, had shadowed the great man round Chester once in his youth. On closer acquaintance, some of the glamour necessarily faded. Handel was short-tempered and extremely impatient of mistakes, bawling at Burney for singing a wrong note in one of Frasi’s lessons, as Burney recalled in his memoirs:

[…] unfortunately, something went wrong, and HANDEL, with his usual impetuosity, grew violent: a circumstance very terrific to a young musician. – At length, however, recovering from my fright, I ventured to say, that I fancied there was a mistake in the writing; which, upon examining, HANDEL discovered to be the case: and then, instantly, with the greatest good humour and humility, said, ‘I pec your barton – I am a very odd tog: – maishter Schmitt is to plame.’³³

Burney was to meet a great many famous men on his way to becoming one himself, and had stories about most of them. Like his father before him, he knew the value of a good stock of anecdotes and told them well – comic voices included. He intuited that the ability to converse, to tell stories and (perhaps most importantly for his later connection with Dr Johnson) to listen was going to be his surest way to earn and keep a place in the influential company he craved. Fanny Burney thought her father’s written reminiscences did no justice to his anecdotal powers, or the charm and wit of his conversation, that they constituted ‘little more than Copying the minutes of engagements from his Pocket Books’.³⁴ She was clearly disappointed that he hadn’t left anything more solid for posterity to marvel at, but for Charles Burney the primary function of his stories (which drip with dropped names) was to make an immediate impression on a live audience.

With his patrons abroad and his responsibilities multiplying, the better life that Burney wanted for himself and his family seemed to be receding from his grasp in the early 1750s. Esther had given birth to two more children, James in June 1750 and Charles the year after. In order to keep the household going Burney pushed himself to do extra teaching, as well as playing in the theatre band almost every evening and composing. His rewriting of Arne’s Masque of Alfred had its first performance in February 1751 at Drury Lane, a momentous occasion for the twenty-four-year-old musician, but one he couldn’t attend because of a prior engagement at a subscription concert. ‘I fear my performance there was not meliorated by my anxiety for the fate of my Offspring at Drury Lane’, he wrote:

I hardly staid to play the final Chord of the last piece on the Organ, ere I flew out of the concert-room into a Hackney coach, in hopes of hearing some of my stuff performed (if suffered to go on) before it was finished; but neither the coachman nor his horses being in so great a hurry as myself, before I reached Temple bar, I took my leave of them, & ‘ran like a Lamp-lighter’, the rest of the way to the Theatre; and in a most violent perspiration, clambered into the Shilling Gallery, where scarcely I cd obtain admission, the rest of the House being extremely crowded, wch did not diminish the sudorific state of my person. I entered luckily, at the close of an Air of Spirit, sung by Beard, which was much applauded – This was such a cordial to my anxiety & agitated spirits, as none but a diffident and timid author, like myself, can have the least conception.³⁵

The impatience with the hackney coach, the muck sweat, the obscurity of the Shilling Gallery and the sense of eavesdropping on his own work’s first performance all seem to typify the urgency, anxiety and effort with which Burney strove to establish himself in the world. His work habits became almost manic; he pushed himself to the point of collapse, and then sank into protracted illnesses. In the winter before the debut of Alfred, he spent thirteen weeks in bed, a disastrously long time for a breadwinner, and certain to have agitated his restless mind. He was a small, very thin man, whose constitution was in fact as strong as an ox but who looked as if he might turn consumptive with every passing chill. In this, as well as in frame and feature, his second daughter was to resemble him closely.

The illness of 1751 must have alarmed Burney considerably. A short convalescence in Islington (then a balmy village) made him begin to credit his doctor’s insistence that he seek a permanent change of air. Reluctantly, he began to think of leaving the capital. When the offer of the post of organist at St Margaret’s Church in Lynn Regis, Norfolk, came up, combining sea air, light duties, a much larger salary and, since 1750, a regular coach service to London (splendidly horsed and armed to the teeth with muskets and bludgeons), it would have been folly to refuse. Burney moved there alone in September 1751 ‘to feel his way, & know the humours of the place’.³⁶

Lynn Regis (now known as King’s Lynn) was a thriving mercantile centre in the mid-eighteenth century, with valuable wine, beer and coal trade and corn exports worth more than a quarter of a million pounds a year. It supplied six counties with goods, and sent river freight as far inland as Cambridge. The wealthy aldermen of Lynn were keen to improve the cultural life of the town and to acquire a good music-teacher for their daughters; to this end they had increased the organist’s salary by subscription to £100 a year in order to attract Burney (clearly some influential friend or friends had a hand in setting this up), and were prepared to raise the pay even further when they feared they might lose him.

Burney at first resented his provincial exile: the organ in St Margaret’s was ‘Execrably bad’ and the audiences as unresponsive as ‘Stocks & Trees’,³⁷ but over the months his attitude changed. He began to be patronised by some of the ‘great folks’ of north Norfolk – the Townshends at Raynham, the Cokes at Holkham Hall, the Earl of Buckinghamshire at Blickling, Lord Orford (Horace Walpole’s nephew) at Houghton – and his spirits rose. All these grandees had large estates, beautiful grounds, art collections and libraries. Burney found that in Norfolk there might be, if anything, even more influential patrons at his disposal than in London, and that the burghers of Lynn were prepared to treat him as the ultimate authority on his subject. Soon he was writing to Esther in encouraging tones. Pregnant for the fourth time, she and the three children joined him in the spring of 1752, and it was probably at their first address in Lynn, Chapel Street, that their daughter Frances was born on 13 June. The new baby was baptised on 7 July in St Nicholas’s, the fishermen’s chapel just a few yards away, with Frances Greville, returned from the Continent, named as godmother.

The choice of Mrs Greville helped re-establish Charles Burney’s connection with his former patrons, but it also had a literary significance, since Mrs Greville was not just a formidable intellectual but an accomplished poet, whose ‘Prayer for Indifference’ – published in 1759 – became one of the most famous poems of its day. The Burneys must have expected something substantial to come of the connection, for Fanny’s sharp judgements of her godmother both personally – she thought Mrs Greville ‘pedantic, sarcastic and supercilious’³⁸ – and as a godparent – ‘she does not do her duty and answer for me’³⁹ – betray more than pique.

The modest provincial household into which Mrs Greville’s namesake, Frances, was born was bent on intellectual improvement; Charles and Esther Burney had set themselves a course of reading in the evenings which included ‘history, voyages, poetry, and science, as far as Chambers’s Dicty, the French Encyclopédie, & the Philosophical transactions’.⁴⁰ Not many young couples went to the expense of subscribing to the first edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and not many Lynn housewives would have relished reading it of an evening, but Esther Burney was an earnest autodidact, ‘greatly above the generality of Lynn ladies’,⁴¹ whose card-playing evenings bored her, and whom she was soon making excuses to avoid. Esther was a city girl, born and bred, and was probably keener even than her husband to get back to London. He had his teaching and the great houses to visit; she had four young children to look after in an unfamiliar provincial community. As their daughter was to observe later: ‘That men, when equally removed from the busy turmoils of cities, or the meditative studies of retirement, to such circumscribed spheres, should manifest more vigour of mind, may not always be owing to possessing it; but rather to their escaping, through the calls of business, that inertness which casts the females upon themselves’.⁴²

Esther found two like-minded women in Lynn during her nine years’ residence there, Elizabeth Allen and Dolly Young, with whom she formed a sort of miniature literary salon. They met regularly at the house of the richest, most beautiful and most voluble of the three, Mrs Allen, a corn merchant’s wife, who had a ‘passionate fondness for reading’ and ‘spirits the most vivacious and entertaining’.⁴³ Dolly Young was nearer to Esther in temperament; studious and sensitive, she became Esther’s particular friend, and a sort of aunt to the children, several of whom, including Fanny, she helped deliver. Unlike her two married friends, Dolly Young was not at all beautiful; her face had ‘various unhappy defects’ and her body was ‘extremely deformed’⁴⁴ (almost certainly through smallpox) – an odd companion for Mrs Allen, who was widely regarded as the town’s great beauty. Charles Burney admired all three: ‘I thought no three such females could be found on our Island’, he wrote later, noting with approval, ‘They read everything they cd procure’.⁴⁵

Only a few months after baby Frances was born, her year-old brother Charles died and was buried on the north side of St Nicholas’s. Esther was soon pregnant again, but this child, also named Charles, did not survive infancy. Her sixth child, a daughter christened Susanna Elizabeth, was born in January 1755, a frail baby who was lucky to escape the smallpox outbreak that lasted in Lynn from 1754 to 1756. There were so many deaths during this period that St Margaret’s churchyard was closed due to overcrowding, and the hours of burial had to be extended from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day to cope with the demand. Typhus outbreaks were also common in Lynn, and Charles Burney must sometimes have wondered if the ‘change of air’ for which he had left London was going to cure him or kill him.

By the mid-1750s the Burneys had moved to a house on the High Street, near to stately old St Margaret’s Church and in sight of the masts of the ships docked on the Great Ouse. It was a just a few minutes’ walk to the foreshore, where the children could watch the traffic on the river. The waterfront was full of warehouses with watergates to let small boats in at high tide, and the quays were always busy, with coal and wine and beer being loaded, or the fishing fleet bringing cod and herring in. Salters and curers’, shipbuilders’, sail and ropemakers’ premises lined the docks, with their noise and smell of industry. Once a year, in July or August, the whaling fleet came in from its far journey to Greenland, the decks laden with monstrous Leviathan bones. The bells of St Margaret’s would peal in celebration and the town enjoy a general holiday, for Lynn was proud of its mercantile nature, never mind the reek from the blubber houses as the rendering process got under way, or the stench of the Purfleet drain at low tide.

Fanny Burney, like her mother, was essentially a city-lover, and spent most of her adult life living right in the middle of London or Paris. Her childhood in Lynn was happy because she was constantly in the company of her ‘very domestic’ mother⁴⁶ (who nursed the children herself) and adored father, but country-town life does not seem to have appealed to her imaginatively, and she avoided writing about it. Spa-towns, seaside towns, rural retreats and, most of all, London, appear in her novels time and again, but workaday places like Lynn get short shrift. ‘I am sick of the ceremony & fuss of these fall lall people!’ she wrote when visiting Lynn Regis as a young woman. ‘So much dressing – chit chat – complimentary nonsence. In short, a Country Town is my detestation. All the conversation is scandal, all the Attention, Dress, and almost all the Heart, folly, envy, & censoriousness. A City or a village are the only places which, I think, can be comfortable, for a Country Town has but the bad qualities, without one of the good ones, of both’.⁴⁷

The Burneys’ was a self-contained and self-sufficient household. Charles Burney had stools placed in the organ loft of St Margaret’s for his family, from which they could look down on the rest of the town during services. Esther did not mix much with the local women and educated her children at home, except for James, who had a couple of years at the grammar school on grounds of his gender. Hetty was the child who showed greatest promise, both intellectually and musically. Even as a small girl, it was clear she had the makings of a first-class harpsichordist, and attention was lavished on her by both parents. Fanny, who showed no special ability at anything and no inclination to learn to read, was left to develop in her own time. There was always a baby to play with: another son christened Charles was born in December 1757, when Fanny was five and Susan almost three. An eighth child was born in late 1758 or early 1759, and christened Henry, but he died in 1760. Fanny had been too young to remember the death of the second baby Charles, but was turning eight when Henry died.⁴⁸ It must have affected her sadly, she was known as a ‘feeling’ child, of the most delicate sensibilities towards all living creatures.

Fanny Burney’s intense admiration for her father had its roots in these early years in Lynn. In such a community, a talented, energetic and ambitious man like Charles Burney was treated with enormous respect. He persuaded the corporation to have St Margaret’s ‘execrable’ organ cleaned, and when it fell apart in the process, got them to have a brand new one built, on which he performed dazzlingly various pieces of exciting contemporary music, such as Handel’s Coronation Anthem. Charles Burney’s playing in church, Charles Burney’s subscription concerts and Charles Burney’s evening parties were the best by far (there was no competition) in a town Fanny described as culturally in ‘the dark ages’.⁴⁹

But however popular he was in Lynn, Charles Burney never intended to stay there very long, and the children must have got used to their parents talking about London as if it were their real home. Burney made a couple of attempts to leave during the 1750s, but his obligations (and some strategic salary hikes) kept him in place. His noble patrons made him feel valued and full of potential; Lord Orford was particularly generous, and allowed the musician the run of his library at Houghton. Burney would get the key from the housekeeper and wander around when the master was absent, no doubt fostering fantasies of one day possessing such a library and such a lifestyle himself. Early on in his Norfolk days, Burney had bought a mare called Peggy on which to travel the long distances from Lynn to his aristocratic and county clients, and typically he made use of the time spent on horseback (she was obviously a very trustworthy animal) teaching himself Italian from the classic authors, with a home-made Italian dictionary in his pocket. He bore all the marks of a man in training for something greater. His mind was turning to literary schemes, and perhaps it was as early as in these years that Burney first conceived his plan to write a history of music, something monumental in the style of Diderot’s Encyclopédie or Samuel Johnson’s new Dictionary of the English Language, to which he was also a subscriber. He kept himself in touch with the musical and intellectual life of London by going to town every winter. He hardly needed the urgent advice of his friend Samuel Crisp, whom he had met through the Grevilles:

is not settling at Lynn, planting your youth, genius, hopes, fortunes, &c., against a north wall? […] In all professions, do you not see every thing that has the least pretence to genius, fly up to the capital – the centre of riches, luxury, taste, pride, extravagance, – all that ingenuity is to fatten upon? Take, then, your spare person, your pretty mate, and your brats, to that propitious mart, and, ‘Seize the glorious, golden opportunity,’ while yet you have youth, spirits, and vigour to give fair play to your abilities, for placing them and yourself in a proper point of view.⁵⁰

By 1760, Burney felt he had fulfilled his obligations to the ‘foggy aldermen’ of Lynn Regis. He decided to move his growing family back to London, ostensibly to further their chances in life, but more immediately to further his own. James, an easy-going boy who had not shone at school, was not to accompany them. It was agreed that he should join the navy, and he was signed up as Captain’s Servant on board the Princess Amelia. This was a recognised way for poorer boys to get some rudimentary officers’ training, but it was also an abrupt and dangerous introduction to adult life for a ten-year-old, and one wonders why his parents submitted him to it. Perhaps their ignorance of seafaring was as great as their backgrounds suggest. The Princess Amelia was a man-of-war, a huge floating artillery, with eighty cannon and 750 men on board, a far cry from the fishing boats and merchantmen James might have watched sailing up the Great Ouse. The Seven Years’ War was at its height, and the Princess Amelia was on active service: the year James joined the crew, it formed part of Hawke’s squadron in the Bay of Biscay and was almost blown up by French fireships in the Basque Roads the following year. News from the war took a long time to reach England, and the Burneys would have had little idea of the danger their son was in until it was well past. James’s career would keep him out of family life all through his formative years, and, not surprisingly, his own later behaviour as a family man was eccentric, to say the least. The violent contrasts between home life and the sea must have made the former seem vaguely surreal to him; he didn’t let one impinge on the other, and it is doubtful that his family ever understood the privations or excitements of his day-to-day existence.

The Burney family made their momentous move to London in September or early October 1760, to a house on Poland Street in Soho, a significantly better address than Charles Burney’s last one in the City. Soho, which had been very sparsely inhabited up to the sixteenth century but heavily developed by speculators after the Great Fire, was new and fashionable. The elegant squares and streets that spread their gridwork across the fields, the former military yard and around the old windmill^* contained rows of houses quite different from the ‘Cottages … Shedds or meane habitacons’ that had straggled there as recently as 1650.⁵¹ Poland Street had been begun in 1689 and named, topically, in honour of John Sobieski’s intervention against the Turks at the siege of Vienna. It wasn’t one of the best addresses in the area – Leicester Fields, Golden Square and King’s (later Soho) Square had far more aristocratic associations – but it was a very respectable one for an ambitious music-teacher. Soho was full of middle-class families providing services to the rich: Huguenot craftsmen and jewellers, German instrument-makers, gun-makers, portrait-painters, wine merchants, watchmakers, architects and medical men. Next door to the Burneys was a hair-merchant who made wigs for the legal profession, a specialised business with dignified associations. The children of the two households played together in the little paved yards behind the properties.

By the time Fanny Burney was writing the Memoirs in the late 1820s, she was aware that her readers might be unimpressed by the family’s former address, ‘which was not then, as it is now, a sort of street that, like the rest of its neighbourhood, appears to be left in the lurch’.⁵² She stressed how genteel Poland Street had been in the 1760s, when the Burneys had lords, knights and even a disinherited Scottish Earl for neighbours, and exotic visitors such as a Red Indian Cherokee chief who was staying in a building almost opposite number 50 and whom the Burney children watched come and go with awed delight.

The contrast with Lynn was dramatic, the scope for entertainment and amazement seemingly endless. Though there were still fields and allotments a stone’s throw away in the undeveloped land to the north of Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), London was full of shows and spectacles guaranteed to impress young children straight from the provinces. The theatre at Drury Lane was well known to them through their father’s long association there with Arne and his friendship with Garrick; they also knew the rival theatre at Covent Garden and the splendid opera house in the Haymarket, which had room for three thousand spectators (about a third of the population of Lynn Regis). London was filling up with teahouses, coffee houses, strange miniature spas, assembly rooms, puppet shows and curiosity museums to cater for the leisure hours of the rapidly expanding metropolitan population.

The Burney children were too young to attend the famous pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, Bagnigge Wells or Marylebone, but they could admire the fashion-conscious crowds strutting and posing in Pall Mall and St James’s Park, or the guests, magnificently dressed for masquerades and balls, arriving by carriage or chair outside Mrs Corneley’s assembly rooms in Soho Square. When Fanny was writing her novel Evelina a decade and a half later, the remembered excitement of her own arrival in London made all the difference to her treatment of a familiar fictional device. The first impressions of a fresh-faced country heroine had been used by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, even Cleland (unlikely though it is that Fanny Burney ever read Fanny Hill), to provide a sardonic commentary on the London social scene, but Burney knew it from life as well as from fiction. Evelina’s breathless letters to her guardian, Mr Villars, catch the childish beguilement of the author herself experiencing the bustling, brightly-coloured, noisy, smelly and dangerous life of the capital for the first time when she arrived there in 1760, an open-minded, open-eyed and open-mouthed eight-year-old.

Charles Burney admitted that a great deal of his success as a music teacher on his return to London in 1760 derived from ‘the powers of my little girl’, eleven-year-old Hetty. Musical child prodigies were fashionable, and even before the family’s move to London, Hetty had performed on the harpsichord at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket⁵³ and attracted the praise of the king’s brother by her mastery of ‘some of the most wild and difficult lessons of Scarlatti’.⁵⁴ Burney wrote showy exercises for her and for his brother Richard’s eldest son, Charles Rousseau Burney, a precociously talented violinist and keyboard player. The next generation of musical Wunderkinder to hit London would be Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1764, but for the time being the Burneys held the laurels. The proud Charles published a volume of harpsichord lessons to cash in on the method he had used to teach these two celebrated young performers, and was overcome with requests for new pupils, especially from among the ‘great folks’ in whose drawing rooms and music rooms his ingratiating charm went down particularly well.

Compared with her high-achieving older sister, her lively brother James and ‘angelic’ little Susan, Fanny must have seemed dull. She did play the harpsichord, but unsurprisingly chose not to be heard doing so in a household full of virtuosi, restricting herself to ‘thrumming’ occasionally on the keyboard when she thought she was alone. Hetty not only got intensive music tuition from her father; she was also her mother’s ‘chief attention’.⁵⁵ Together mother and eldest daughter were reading all of Pope’s works and the Aeneid in translation, heavy fare by the standards of the day for female education, while at eight, Fanny couldn’t even make out the letters of the alphabet. Susan was more advanced than Fanny, though three years younger. The struggle to teach Fanny to read had been going on some time. In Lynn, she had been ‘taught’ by her older brother, who teased her by holding the book she was meant to be reading from upside-down. The letters were so incomprehensible to her that she didn’t notice any difference either way, but the real pathos of this story is in the fact that she had been relegated to the tutorship of James at all.

Though her father was to say that his second daughter ‘was wholly unnoticed in the nursery for any talents, or quickness of study’,⁵⁶ 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’.⁵⁷ 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’.⁵⁸ 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’.⁵⁹ ‘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’.⁶⁰

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’.⁶¹ 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’.⁶² 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.^* 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’,⁶³ that was ‘illegible, save to herself’.⁶⁴ 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’,⁶⁵ 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’.⁶⁶ 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’,⁶⁷ 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’.⁶⁸ 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’.⁶⁹ 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.⁷⁰

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’.⁷¹ 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’,⁷² 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!’⁷³ 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’.⁷⁴ 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’.⁷⁵ 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.’⁷⁶ 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.⁷⁷

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^* 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’.⁷⁸ 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.⁷⁹ 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’.⁸⁰

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’.⁸¹ 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’.⁸²

This story is made to sound comical in the Memoirs,^* 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’,^* she has her father recall:

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.⁸³

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.

* 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.

* Margaret Anne Doody’s suggestion that a homosexual attraction between Greville and Burney ‘does not seem impossible’¹⁴ seems to me too far-fetched to be helpful in this connection.

* 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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.

* 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.