Читать книгу Fanny Burney: A biography - Claire Harman, Claire Harman - Страница 9

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’.

Her reading, as suggested by entries in her early diaries,³¹ was heavily weighted towards works of moral instruction, sermons, standard histories, poetry and the ‘female conduct books’ which were deemed an essential part of a young woman’s mental baggage. One of the most popular and influential of the conduct-book writers was James Fordyce, whose Sermons to Young Women Fanny knew well.^* Fordyce asserted the authority of his sex with confidence: ‘Men […] are in general better judges than women, of the deportment of women’,³² while its moral inferiority was also acknowledged: ‘The world, I know not how, overlooks in our sex a thousand irregularities, which it never forgives in yours’.³³ The disturbing sexual power of women could only, in Fordyce’s view, be put to proper use as an inducement to and reward for good male behaviour. A roomful of riotous men, he asserted, could be ‘checked all at once into decency’ by the accidental entrance of a virtuous woman.³⁴ Restraint was the key to proper female conduct: wit, in women, ‘is commonly looked upon with a suspicious eye’, and ‘war, commerce, politics, exercises of strength & dexterity, abstract philosophy & all the abstruser sciences, are most properly the province of men’.³⁵ This left little for women to do (besides entering rooms virtuously) other than going astray, the irreparable personal disaster which opened the way to widespread social disintegration.

Because Fanny had no one with whom to discuss her reading or to guide it, and because her veneration for the written word was intense, the messages of authors such as Fordyce impressed her very strongly, reinforcing an already anxious and conservative nature. Their severity appealed to the neglected child, whose ‘straightforward morality’, in her father’s opinion, had ‘wanted no teaching’.³⁶ At this impressionable age, and unguided, she assumed a set of standards which proved a constant agitation to her natural morality. She assented to the conventional view, as articulated by Fordyce, of the superior authority of the male sex, although her common sense and sense of justice often told her otherwise. For example, reading the Iliad, aged sixteen, she found herself ‘provoked […] for the honour of the sex’:

Venus tempts Hellen with every delusion in favour of her Darling, – in vain – Riches – power – honour – Love – all in vain – the enraged Deity threatens to deprive her of her own beauty, & render her to the level with the most common of her sex – blushing & trembling – Hellen immediately yields her Hand.

Thus has Homer proved his opinion of our poor sex – that the Love of Beauty is our most prevailing passion. It really grieves me to think that there certainly must be reason for the insignificant opinion the greatest men have of Women – At least I fear there must. – But I don’t in fact believe it – thank God!³⁷

The poet – not just a man, but a truly ‘great man’ – had to be right: but wasn’t. ‘Fear’ and ‘belief’ contradicted one another, and the only way Fanny could resolve the problem was by sticking to the evidence of her own experience. She lost no opportunity in her books to expose the disadvantages under which her own sex laboured, but did so, characteristically, through realistic representation of women rather than by direct criticism of men. Modern readers can’t help interpreting her works as feminist, but Fanny Burney herself would have been shocked and distressed to have been associated with anything so subversive. In the fight between duty and justice, duty was always going to win. A person such as her father, who embodied her primary duty, thus became an idealised figure, incapable of doing wrong – even though she knew he did act wrongly sometimes. It was a paradox that affected her profoundly, creating tensions in her writing which provide much of her works’ interest, but which ultimately may have inhibited her from becoming a great artist.

Fanny Burney’s attitude to novels and novel-writing reflects the same anxieties. She never completely outgrew her poor opinion of the form, derived from the views of old-fashioned moralists such as Fordyce (who thought that novels ‘carry on their very forehead the mark of the beast’). She projected onto her father the same strict tastes. Novels were not banned in the liberal Burney household; as well as Richardson and Fielding, Fanny had read Sterne (although she pityingly called him ‘poor Sterne’) and many other works which Fordyce would have abominated. The house was full of reading-matter quite apart from the mostly musical and classical texts in Charles Burney’s library, and lack of supervision meant that while Fanny read much more demanding books than most ‘educated’ young ladies would have encountered, she also read a great deal more ‘low-grade’ literature, and knew many risqué works, such as Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, well enough to parody them.³⁸ The sort of literature she enjoyed and the sort of literature she felt ‘allowed’ to write were not the same thing at all.

When she tried to amalgamate entertainment with moral instruction in her own work, the results were patchy. In Evelina, which was published anonymously, the attempt was successful because Burney felt free to make her heroine mildly fallible, and open to moral improvement; in the later books, when she had to own authorship, her heroines represented pure virtue under attack – a very much less dramatic or entertaining formula. Clearly, the only way Fanny Burney could justify to herself her own persistent interest in writing fiction (and her last novel, The Wanderer, though her least satisfactory, is probably the most ambitious) was by stressing its moral purpose. ‘If many turn aside from all but mere entertainment presented under this form’, she wrote in the dedication to The Wanderer, ‘many, also, may, unconsciously, be allured by it into reading the severest truths, who would not even open any work of a graver denomination’.³⁹

Fanny’s juvenilia seems to have been mostly of a ‘grave denomination’: ‘Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces, – nay, Tragedies and Epic Poems, every scrap of white paper that could be seized upon without question or notice’.⁴⁰ It was an obsessive, absorbing pleasure which she kept secret, convinced ‘that what she scribbled, if seen, would but expose her to ridicule’.⁴¹ Her ‘writing passion’⁴² was partly a response to loneliness, partly, as is evident from the astonishing diversity of the forms she tried, a form of interaction with the authors she read and admired. The extent of that interaction was very unusual. As an old woman, Fanny described to her younger sister Charlotte how she got by heart one of William Mason’s poems by ‘repeating it, in the dead of sleepless Nights, so often, so collectedly, so all to myself, that I believe I must have caught every possible meaning of the Poet, not only in every sentiment, but in the appropriation of every word, so as to be able to pronounce as I conceive him to have thought, […] entering into the Poem as if it had been the production of my own brain’.⁴³ This describes something more akin to a form of ecstatic spiritual communion than to what we normally understand by reading. Her use of the word ‘appropriation’ seems particularly apt.

In her early teenage years, Fanny had plenty of time in which to indulge her ‘writing passion’, and a safe place, her ‘bureau’, in which to lock her works away. This was not a piece of furniture, but a closet in the Poland Street bedroom, the only part of the house which was inviolably hers. Even as a forty-year-old, Fanny was expected to share a bedroom with her half-sister, and it is unlikely that she ever had a room of her own before her marriage, except at Mrs Thrale’s in the late 1770s and at court in the late 1780s. It is clear from the early diaries that as an adolescent Fanny stayed up at night writing or reading until the candle ran out, with her sisters asleep nearby.⁴⁴ There was nothing casual about these secretive literary pursuits ‘in the dead of sleepless Nights’. By Fanny’s mid-teens, the stack of compositions in the ‘bureau’ included at least one full-length novel.

On her return from Paris,^* eleven-year-old Susan was struck by the differences between her two elder sisters, one of whom had enjoyed the same opportunities for travel and education as herself, the other of whom had stayed at home:

The characteristics of Hetty seem to be wit, generosity, and openness of heart; – Fanny’s, – sense, sensibility, and bashfulness, and even a degree of prudery. Her understanding is superior, but her diffidence gives her a bashfulness before company with whom she is not intimate, which is a disadvantage to her. My eldest sister shines in conversation, because, though very modest, she is totally free from any mauvaise honte: were Fanny equally so, I am persuaded she would shine no less.⁴⁶

Observers who were less well-disposed than Susan might easily have dismissed Fanny as affected or dull. The superior intellect was not on public display (now or ever), while the bashfulness and ‘degree of prudery’ were marked. By the age of fourteen Fanny had adopted patterns of behaviour – all stemming from vigilant self-appraisal – that she would never be able to break completely.

But there was another side to Fanny’s character, of ‘wildness’ ‘friskyness’ and invention, which Susan’s company brought out. Only Susan was shown the precious writings, and ‘the stolen moments of their secret readings’ together were, in retrospect, ‘the happiest of their adolescent lives’.⁴⁷ Among the pieces Susan read was Fanny’s manuscript novel, ‘Caroline Evelyn’, a sad tale of abandonment and ill-usage, which ended with the young heroine dying in childbirth. Like the ‘Elegies, Odes, […] Tragedies and Epic Poems’ Fanny had been writing, it reflected the melancholy that had settled on her after her mother’s death. But with Susan re-established at home, such mournful ruminations had become obsolete. In that year,^* Mr Crisp had been amused and surprised to see Fanny dancing a wild jig on the lawn at Chesington Hall, ‘with Your Cap on the Ground, & your long hair streaming down your Back, one shoe off, & throwing about your head like a mad thing’.⁵⁰ This was a far cry from the bashful, mumbling behaviour Fanny usually displayed in public. ‘[T]here is a nameless Grace & Charm in giving a loose to that Wildness & friskyness sometimes’, Crisp told her years later, acknowledging how much of this element there was in his young friend’s character, however seldom anyone outside the family circle got to see it.

Change was in the air in the Burney household. Unknown to his children, Charles Burney was once again courting Mrs Allen. The opportunity to renew acquaintance with the beautiful widow had come in 1765 when she placed her elder daughter, lively fourteen-year-old Maria, at school in London and rented a house in Great Russell Street as a winter base. Charles Burney was appointed to teach Maria music, and arranged for the lessons to take place at teatime, in order that ‘when he was liberated from the daughter, he might be engaged with the mother’.⁵¹ Chastened by his earlier failure, Burney adopted a gentler line of courtship over the next eighteen months or so, accompanying Mrs Allen to the opera and to concerts, both of which she loved, and sending her his prose version of Dante’s Inferno instead of poems like ‘The Witch’. In truth, there was nothing for Mrs Allen to gain materially from a remarriage: she would lose the £100 annual income under her first husband’s will and gain a low-earning husband with six children and a chaotic workload. Nevertheless, Burney kept up the campaign, contriving meetings when the widow’s ‘imperious’ mother was absent. He was clearly in love, as well as very keen to find a second mother for his family and a supporter (financially and morally) for his work. By the spring of 1767, his patience was in sight of paying off: ‘my beloved Mrs Allen […] began to be weaned from her fears’, he wrote, ‘by affection and consta[nt] importunity; and I flattered myself I was gaining ground’.⁵²

When Elizabeth Allen returned to Lynn for the summer in April 1767, Burney bombarded her with letters, sent under cover to Dolly Young or in a feigned hand to avoid the vigilant mother’s eye. Like his daughter Fanny, he seemed to relish a conspiracy: ‘our correspondence had all the Air of mystery and intrigue; in that we seemed 2 young lovers under age trying to out-wit our parents and guardians’.⁵³ Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s mother could not be outwitted forever, and her objections to the match were strong. Charles decided to try another approach through her son Edmund, and to this end arranged a trip to Bristol Hotwells, taking ‘my 2d daughter Fanny’ along with him.

This was Fanny’s first, and possibly only, visit to Bristol, and lasted only three days, but the impression made on the fifteen-year-old must have been extremely vivid, for she set a large part of her first published novel there. She had no idea of the real purpose of her father’s visit – to her it was a delightful privilege to be his sole companion, a pleasure possibly enhanced by the melancholy association of the Hotwells with her mother’s last illness. Any special marks of attention from her father must have been flattering, and one can imagine that Burney was in a particularly animated mood at the thought of gaining consent to his nuptials. He was also, presumably, keen to give Fanny a treat of some kind, knowing that if his plans went ahead, there would no longer be any question of her going abroad to school.

Burney took Fanny with him again, with one of her sisters (probably Susan), when he went to Lynn in June 1767 for a wild courtship holiday. It was the first time Fanny had been back to her native town since the family moved to London in 1760, and it was of course another place deeply associated with her mother. They stayed at Mrs Allen’s dower-house opposite St Margaret’s for a month, during which time Burney and Mrs Allen visited ‘almost every place and thing that is curious in Norfolk, making love chemin faisant’⁵⁴ (the way Burney did everything). Dolly Young acted as chaperone on this tour, but was possibly not very strict, nor always in attendance. Who else, after all, was there to attend to the girls while Burney was ‘making love’, if not Dolly?

By the end of their romantic holiday, the couple had come to an agreement. They were to marry, but secretly; only their closest friends, Dolly Young and Samuel Crisp, were to know about it. The ceremony took place on 2 October at St James’s Church, Westminster. Charles must have found some excuse of work to account for his three-day absence on honeymoon at a farmhouse near Chesington Hall – arranged by Crisp – after which he and his new wife returned to their separate houses in town as if nothing had happened. Several reasons for this strange deception suggest themselves. Old Mrs Allen, Elizabeth’s mother,^* viewed Burney as a fortune-hunter, and continued to disapprove of the match. Perhaps Elizabeth’s brother Edmund also disapproved, since he took no part in the wedding. As it was, the bride was given away by her banker, Richard Fuller. Since the couple did not wait to gain the Allen family’s consent, either they had given up trying to win it as hopeless, or they had become lovers and wanted the cover of legitimacy (albeit secret) in case Elizabeth became pregnant. Charles Burney had, after all, got Esther pregnant before they were married, a fact that Elizabeth, as an intimate of both parties, would very probably have known.

The banker was a symbolic presence at the ceremony that October morning, since the disparity of wealth between the couple had threatened the match, and was still being argued over by the bride’s son and the groom’s daughter sixty-six years later. Mrs Allen had, at what date is unclear, invested a large part of her £5000 in the English Factory in Russia, which subsequently failed. In an overtly self-justifying letter to Dolly Young,⁵⁵ Charles Burney claimed that his second wife’s money was ‘almost all gone’ before the Russian bankruptcy, which itself was ‘many months before our marriage’. If this had been the case, his wife must have frittered away a fortune in the four years of her widowhood and come to the new marriage dependent on him. But by remarking ‘I never touched a penny from the wreck in Russia’, Burney acknowledges that something was salvaged from it; Stephen Allen, Elizabeth’s son, claimed this sum was as much as £1000 (again, the date at which it was recovered is unknown). Allen also reckoned that his mother was in possession of at least £600 at the time of her marriage, and was owed £900 by a family friend, James Simpson.^* With her properties and the rent from them added, the whole amount his mother brought to her second marriage was ‘not actuated at less than £4000’.⁵⁶

Fanny’s rather jaundiced impression, expressed in her correspondence following the publication of her Memoirs of Doctor Burney, was that if the second Mrs Burney was wealthy at the time of her marriage, she did not spend the money on anyone but herself. Her father had, understandably, seen it more as a matter of pride to himself than blame to his wife that he continued to support his family by force of sheer hard work ‘without encroaching on the income of my wife’.⁵⁷ The notion that Elizabeth’s money made no difference to the household is disingenuous, however. The Burneys’ standard of living rose considerably (including the grand acquisition of their own coach), and Charles Burney, whether because of his reduced workload or increased well-being (or both), suddenly saw his career taking off in previously unthought-of ways. Within two years of his remarriage he had taken his doctorate at Oxford, written his first book, and was preparing for an extensive research tour on the Continent. Elizabeth was the enabling factor in all this.

The dispute in the 1830s between Stephen Allen and Fanny Burney confined itself to the matter of Elizabeth Allen Burney’s money, but there was a great deal more for a son to object to in Fanny’s Memoirs than the insinuation that his mother was ‘destitute of any provision when she consented to a second marriage’.⁵⁸ Fanny’s version of the growth of affection between Mrs Allen and her father clearly reflected her own difficulties in coming to terms with it, but it is almost breathtakingly unfair and inaccurate if we are to believe Dr Burney’s own account (and there is no reason why we should not) in the fragmentary memoirs on which Fanny herself purported to be basing her book.

In Fanny’s account, the affair was initiated by Mrs Allen (‘very handsome, but no longer in her bloom’⁵⁹) on her arrival in London with Maria. She was widowed, but not, Fanny suggests, very severely, unlike Charles Burney, whose ‘superior grief’ was ‘as deep as it was acute’.⁶⁰ Her father’s degree of grieving was a problem for Fanny, who was disturbed by the thought that he might have ‘got over’ Esther’s death. She makes his profound bereavement not only the cause of ‘feeling admiration’ in Mrs Allen, who ‘saw him with daily increasing interest’,⁶¹ but a way of clearing her father of any complicity in the affair: ‘insensibly he became solaced, while involuntarily she grew grateful, upon observing her rising influence over his spirits’. Pages of Fanny’s chapter on ‘Mrs Stephen Allen’ are taken up with eulogies of her own dead mother, put into the mind, if not the mouth, of Charles Burney:

If, by any exertion of which mortal man is capable, or any suffering which mortal man can sustain, Mr. Burney could have called back his vanished Esther to his ecstatic consciousness, labour, even to decrepitude, endurance even to torture, he would have borne, would have sought, would have blessed, for the most transient sight of her adored form.⁶²

In an attempt to rebut the idea that her father’s willingness to remarry might undermine the ‘pristine connubial tenderness’ of his first vows, Fanny came up with an ingenious interpretation of his behaviour, extremely unflattering to her stepmother:

The secret breast, alive to memory though deprived of sympathy, may still internally adhere to its own choice and fondness; notwithstanding the various and imperious calls of current existence may urge a second alliance: and urge it, from feelings and from affections as clear of inconstancy as of hypocrisy; urge it, from the best of motives, that of accommodating ourselves to our lot, with all its piercing privations; since our lot is dependent upon causes we have no means to either evade or fathom; and as remote from our direction as our wishes.⁶³

In other words, Charles Burney remarried, but stayed secretly, ‘internally’ faithful to ‘the angel whom [he] had lost’. He ‘recoiled from such an anodyne as demanded new vows to a new object’, but couldn’t help inflaming Mrs Allen all the more with the pathos of his vulnerability and ‘noble disinterestedness’ in her fortune when it was ‘completely lost’ in the Russian bankruptcy.⁶⁴ So much for the ‘not less than £4000’ Stephen Allen spoke of. So much, also, for any hint of Charles Burney’s ‘very impassioned’ feelings for Mrs Allen, his ‘constant importunity’ and pursuit of her to a hasty, secret marriage against her family’s wishes and her own best interests materially. If Fanny had got one thing right, it was that Elizabeth Allen must have felt unusually ‘impassioned’ about her new husband in return.

Fanny was writing her account, it must be remembered, more than sixty years later, and the intensity she ascribes to Charles Burney’s bereavement reflects her own intense losses by that date. But if the gulf of years makes it hard for her to untangle her own motives and feelings, it adds interest to the details which she considers significant with hindsight. There is no record of when the news of their father’s marriage was broken to the Burney children. Charles Burney simply relates that he and his new wife ‘kept our union as secret as possible for a time, inhabiting different houses’.⁶⁵ Fanny goes further, relating that though the secret was ‘faithfully preserved, for a certain time, by scrupulous discretion in the parties, and watchful circumspection in the witnesses’ (Crisp and Miss Young), something happened to force the hand of the clandestine couple:

as usual also, error and accident were soon at work to develop the transaction; and the loss of a letter, through some carelessness of conveyance, revealed suddenly but irrevocably the state of the connection.

This circumstance, however, though, at the time, cruelly distressing, served ultimately but to hasten their own views; as the discovery was necessarily followed by the personal union for which their hands had been joined.⁶⁶

What the miscarried letter contained is of less importance than at which address it was ‘lost’, Burney’s or his wife’s, and by whom ‘found’. ‘Some carelessness of conveyance’ – such a throwaway phrase – would have had to involve, in this case, either somebody wrongly opening a letter addressed to someone else, or reading a letter already opened by the addressee. The children had probably guessed that something was afoot between their father and Mrs Allen. Perhaps the discovery of the letter was an accident, perhaps not. If it was a deliberate act of snooping, it backfired nastily. We may wonder, but not wonder too long, given the authorship of that feeling phrase, who it was that found the incident so ‘cruelly distressing’.

Perhaps in order to give the children time to accustom themselves to the situation, Charles Burney and his new wife continued to live mostly apart. By July 1768 it was no longer possible to hide the fact that Elizabeth was pregnant, but she still retained her spacious dower-house in Lynn and spent most of her time there. Fortunately, the Burney girls loved their new stepsister Maria Allen, and took their cue from her generous and optimistic view of the prospects of the new arrangements. Their devotion to their father was such, too, that they would not openly have said anything to hurt him. Fanny’s wording is interesting when she describes how the sisters ‘were all earnest to contribute their small mites to the happiness of one of the most beloved of parents, by receiving, with the most respectful alacrity, the lady on whom he had cast his future hopes of regaining domestic comfort’.⁶⁷ One gets the impression that even if Elizabeth Allen had been an ogress, the children would have made an effort for their father’s sake. It does not mean that the shock of the news or their embarrassment was any the less.

For Fanny, writing in the 1820s as an old woman alone in her house in Mayfair, the recollection of this period provokes two strong associations: one the memory of her dead mother, abandoned, as it were, by the abrupt and unwanted change in the family’s life, and the other of her own lost last chance at being given an education. The Paris plans for herself and Charlotte, kept on hold for years, were given up entirely when the new household shook down. Seven-year-old Charlotte went away to school in Norfolk, young Charles went to Charterhouse, but at sixteen Fanny was too old for schooling. Her third-person account in her biography of her father fails to contain the resentful disappointment she felt:

The second [daughter], Frances, was the only one of Mr Burney’s family who never was placed in any seminary, and never was put under any governess or instructor whatsoever. Merely and literally self-educated, her sole emulation for improvement, and sole spur for exertion, were her unbounded veneration for the character, and unbounded affection for the person, of her father; who, nevertheless, had not, at the time, a moment to spare for giving her any personal lessons; or even for directing her pursuits.⁶⁸

Much has been made of the violent antipathy that grew up between the second Mrs Burney and her stepdaughters, but the relationship started out well enough. Fanny’s efforts to like her new stepmother, whom she immediately and without irony called ‘Mama’ or ‘my mother’, may not have been wholehearted (as is evidenced by the completeness with which she gave them up), but they were sincere. The new Mrs Burney recognised Fanny’s sensitivity and singled her out as a possible ally, though typically, she seemed to be giving with one hand and taking away with the other when she remarked in company in the very early days of the new household, ‘Here’s a Girl will never be happy! Never while she Lives! for she possesses perhaps as feeling a Heart as ever Girl had!’⁶⁹ The new Mrs Burney’s manner was emphatic, her opinions set and her voice loud. She was robustly unaware of getting on anyone’s nerves, and, seen in a good light, this passed for artlessness. Certainly, Charles Burney loved and admired her uncritically – referring to her as ‘my beloved’ and ‘the dear soul’ in his memoirs⁷⁰ – and the girls greatly appreciated how much happier she made him. Proof of her fondness and partiality for Fanny is shown by her pathetic appeal to the sixteen-year-old to look after her baby if she should die (as she feared she might) in childbirth. The ‘feeling’ teenager could not but have been moved, both by the appeal and also by the role allocated to her as substitute wife to her father:

Allow me my dear Fanny to take this moment (if there proves occasion) to recommend a helpless Infant to your Pity and Protection […] & you will, I do trust you will, for your same dear Father’s sake, cherish & support His innocent child – ’tho but half allied to you – My Weak Heart speaks in Tears to you my Love,⁷¹

The baby, a boy named Richard, was born safely in November 1768 and was much-loved by his half-sisters.

As late as 1773, Fanny was writing in her journal with genuine concern for her ‘poor mother’, whom she was nursing through a bilious fever: ‘this is the third Night that I have sit [sic] up with her – but I hope to Heaven that she is now in a way to recover. She has been most exceeding kind to us ever since her return to Town – which makes me the more sensibly feel her illness’.⁷²

This must make us treat with caution the suggestion first made by Charlotte Barrett in the introduction to Madame D’Arblay’s posthumously published Diary and Letters, and adjusted into fact by subsequent writers (including Thomas Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Austin Dobson and Emily Hahn), that Fanny’s stepmother disapproved so strongly of her ‘scribbling propensity’ that on her fifteenth birthday Fanny burned all her manuscripts and resolved to give up writing. The bonfire, which took place in the yard of the Poland Street house (with Susan, in tears, the only witness), seems to have been real enough, but the motives for it are cloudy. Fanny Burney first wrote about the incident in the dedication to The Wanderer, published in 1814, a piece of writing that seeks to justify the appearance of her latest novel by dramatising her vocation as in itself a kind of inextinguishable flame. Her motive for destroying the ‘enormous’ pile of early works was, she says, shame: ‘ideas that fastened degradation to this class of composition’ convinced her that novel-writing was a ‘propensity’ to be struggled against, an ‘inclination’ to be conquered only by drastic action: ‘I committed to the flames whatever, up to that moment, I had committed to paper’.⁷³ She tells the story again nearly twenty years later in the long third-person narrative in her Memoirs of Doctor Burney that deals with her own writing history: ‘she considered it her duty to combat this writing passion as illaudible, because fruitless. […] she made over to a bonfire […] her whole stock of prose goods and chattels; with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity’.⁷⁴ Neither of these accounts, the only ones left by Fanny herself, indicates the influence of a third party; the first of them is specifically concerned with making a much larger statement – as we shall see later – about the value of the novel as a form. Mrs Barrett introduced the wicked stepmother into the story in her introduction to the 1842 Diary, describing how Mrs Burney’s ‘vigilant eye […] was not long in discovering Fanny’s love of seclusion, her scraps of writing, and other tokens of her favourite employment, which excited no small alarm in her’. Alarm and, it is implied, resentment.

Hindsight and wishful thinking, as we have seen, are likely to have coloured anything Madame D’Arblay told her niece about this period of her youth. The second Mrs Burney was unlikely to have had any influence at all over Fanny at the time of the bonfire (variously placed ‘on my fifteenth birth-day’, i.e. 13 June 1767,⁷⁵ ‘from the time she attained her fifteenth year’⁷⁶ and ‘in the young authoress’s fifteenth year’,⁷⁷ i.e. some time between June 1766 and June 1767). At these times, Fanny was barely aware of Elizabeth Allen except as an old family friend. Mrs Allen was still Charles Burney’s secret amour; hardly in a position to ‘inveigh very frequently and seriously against the evil of a scribbling turn in young ladies – the loss of time, the waste of thought, in idle, crude inventions’.⁷⁸ These sentiments, if ever uttered by Mrs Burney to Fanny, seem to belong to a later and more intimate period.

From the many self-conscious references in the diaries she began to write several months after the bonfire, it is clear that Fanny was going through a phase of experiment, the results of which often dissatisfied her (and tempted her to commit the journal itself ‘to the Flames’⁷⁹). Destroying her juvenilia could thus have had more to do with a resolve to write differently, rather than not write at all. Having read the contents of her bureau through to Susan, perhaps Fanny realised that she had written herself into something of a dead end with ‘Elegies, Odes’ et cetera. ‘Caroline Evelyn’ was a gloomy novel, and she was not feeling gloomy any longer. The fact that she wrote a sequel to ‘Caroline Evelyn’ which used the same characters but transfigured the story into a comedy is surely of significance. As an attempt to ‘annihilate’ the passion to write,⁸⁰ the purging bonfire, with its overtones of amateur witchcraft and spellcasting, was spectacularly unsuccessful, and was not repeated.

The journal Fanny started in March 1768 was the ideal testing ground for a variety of rhetorical styles, from the sublime (usually curtailed with self-deflating irony) to the commonplace. The first entry, in which she sets up her alter-ego, the ‘romantick Girl’ Miss Nobody, is pure performance, executed with brio by the ‘backward’ fifteen-year old:

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved – to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody? No secret can I conceal from No—body, & to No—body can I be ever unreserved.⁸¹

‘I must imagion myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends’, Fanny had decided. The second entry attempts this ingeniously, with a send-up of ‘girl-talk’: ‘O my dear – such a charming Day! – & then last night – well, you shall have it all in order – – as well as I can recollect’.⁸² The diary allowed her to be skittish, serious, even dull: ‘Nobody’ was a tolerant audience, ‘the most complaisant friend in the world – ever ready to comply with my wishes – never hesitating to oblige, never averse to any concluding, yet never wearried [sic] with my beginning – charming Creature’.⁸³

The first years of the diary (patchily kept up) are the only part of Fanny Burney’s huge output as a journal-writer that can be thought of as secret or confidential. Interestingly, they show that the sensitive, ‘feeling’ teenager actually possessed quite a cold eye. Here she is describing the family’s cook’s wedding:

The Bride. A maiden of about fifty, short, thick, clumsy, vulgar; her complection the finest saffron, & her Features suited to it⁸⁴

and here a performance of Rowe’s Tamerlane by the schoolboys of the Soho Academy:

the young Gentleman who perform’d Selima, stopt short, & forgot himself – it was in a Love scene – between her – – him I mean & Axalla – who was very tender – She – he – soon recover’d tho – Andrew whisper’d us, that when it was over – ‘He’d lick her! –’ St[r]atocles amused himself with no other action at all, but beating, with one Hand, his Breast, & with the other, held his Hat.⁸⁵

She didn’t develop this mode of comic writing, but it clearly worked as a release valve for a highly intelligent teenager who was never allowed to utter a harsh word in public. ‘Participation or relief’⁸⁶ were the two reasons she gave for keeping her early diary. ‘I have known the Time’, she wrote in 1771, ‘when I could enjoy Nothing, without relating it’.

The creation of an imaginary confidante allowed Fanny to write the journal as if it were a series of letters; she went on to write letters to Samuel Crisp, in the avid correspondence that she started with him in 1773, as if she were writing a journal. To her sister Susan, she was to write journal-letters, blurring the distinctions further. The discovery of how fluid form could be was emancipating: Fanny Burney wrote a novel in letters that people said sounded like a play, and a play that ended up being partly reshaped into a novel. There were also tragic dramas that aspired to the condition of epic poetry and that weird hybrid, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, a biographical autobiography, using novel-writing techniques. It seems paradoxical that a writer who in her maturity was so anxious about the moral and intellectual acceptability of her works’ content should grant herself this licence with form (and with style and usage too). Perhaps both stemmed from her perception of what was appropriate to her sex; ‘lively freedoms’ in her works were unthinkable, just as too much elegance might have seemed pretentious.

Fanny Burney’s inventiveness with language is an aspect of her achievement that has been largely overlooked. Her work is so full of significant coinages, conversions, new compounds and new formulations that one commentator has felt moved to say that ‘she seems worthy to stand alongside Pope, Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Scott as one of Bradley’s “Makers of English”’.⁸⁷ Left to educate herself, Fanny had been inventing and adapting words from an early age, and grew up happy to adjust language to suit the requirements of the moment, as a sardonic journal entry from 1775 shows: ‘Making Words, now & then, in familiar Writing, is unavoidable, & saves the trouble of thinking, which, as Mr Adison observes, we Females are not much addicted to’.⁸⁸ Family usage encouraged the habit of coinage: the Burneys employed quantities of catchphrases, nonsense terms and nicknames, for fun (a very new word) and the sheer pleasure of invention but also as a form of private language, a family code that was impenetrable to outsiders. The critic R.B. Johnson has deplored Susan Burney’s ‘barbarisms’ and her father’s ‘passion for hybrid phrasing, and the pseudo-wit of made-up words’: the whole family, he complained, ‘was too impatient of solid culture to acquire sound literary taste’.⁸⁹ It may well be the case that this generation of Burneys was ‘impatient of solid culture’, though it is hard to see how the characteristic Burney letter style could have gained more than it would have lost from classical polish. Fanny’s success as a novelist owes a lot to the quirky, ‘unsound’ family register which she reproduced in her journals and letters and took, in modified but distinctive and expressive forms, into her published works.

Fanny Burney’s coinage of words, particularly evident in her early diaries, was mostly humorous and deliberately inelegant: ‘snugship’, ‘shockation’, ‘scribbleration’ – these words draw attention to themselves, and were meant to. More widespread, but less obvious to later readers – because her usages have been so well assimilated – are the examples in her work of parts of speech she has transposed or converted: ‘to fight shy’ is one such, ‘to shilly-shally’ (contracted from ‘to stand shilly-shally’), ’beautify’ (used intransitively), ‘to make something of’, and, going from verb to noun, ‘take-in’ and ‘break-up’. She might have invented these forms, and was certainly the first person to record them. The ‘common language of men’ was of perennial interest to Fanny, and the realism of her novels derives in great part from her use of contemporary slang and colloquialisms (such as ‘I’d do it as soon as say Jack Robinson,’ which first appeared in Evelina⁹⁰). Each of the novels relies heavily on the power of speech to reveal character and class, and contains long stretches of dialogue which are essentially satirical inventories of contemporary usage and abusage. In her ‘elevated’ style (usually reserved for the heroines’ crises, when common language is abandoned altogether) she is conspicuously at her least inventive.

To quantify her impact on English and American usage would be extremely difficult, but some idea of it can be gleaned from the list of ‘Additions to O.E.D. from the Writings of Fanny Burney’⁹¹ compiled by J.N. Waddell, included as an appendix to this book. It shows how frequently Fanny formed verbs with -ise or -ize endings (diarise, scribblerise, journalise) and negative adjectives and adverbs, twenty-eight of which are listed in the New English Dictionary as first appearing in her work, including ‘unobtrusively’, ‘unremittingly’ and ‘unamusing’. Waddell has also demonstrated the extent of her inventiveness,⁹² from the possible first use of compounds such as ‘school-girl’ and ‘dinner-party’, to her borrowings from French later in life (after her marriage), which include ‘maisonnette’ and ‘bon-bon’, and her anticipations of Americanisms in words such as ‘alphabetize’ and ‘tranquiliser’. The link between her personal register and forms that were emerging at the same time in eighteenth-century American English is particularly interesting. Many Americanisms deliberately subvert the mother tongue (or, some critics might say, distort it with ugly, overlong, philologically impure neologisms). It is a suggestive coincidence that Fanny Burney was writing her first novel during the early part of the American War of Independence, and that the infant nation was developing its characteristic language traits in the years when her novels, with their heavy reliance on slang, vogue and new words, had achieved cult status.

Fanny Burney’s freedom with language reflects her self-image as an ‘outsider’ in literature and her defiance of conventional limitations in a manner that could be seen as rebellious, even revolutionary; but, as with her natural and powerful feminism, her sense of propriety, personal prejudices and deep conservatism all militated against her acknowledging this. The more she did acknowledge it, the more inhibited her writing became. Any connection with anti-conventionality, however abstract, was problematic for her, as we shall see in numerous instances. She deplored disrespect to authority, and was such an arch-Tory in her youth that even her father (not a man noted for his liberal politics) teased her with the nickname ‘Fanny Bull’. But howevermuch her conservatism affected her behaviour socially, it never inhibited Fanny Burney from inventing words and phrases – ‘John Bullism’ itself is one of them.⁹³ As Waddell has remarked, her innovations ‘reveal a relaxed enjoyment of language for its own sake, and an unashamed pleasure in its flexibility’, and set her apart as a ‘transcriber of the ordinary, as well as a pioneer in the unusual’. Whatever other anxieties Fanny Burney developed as a writer, language remained an area where she felt perfectly free.

* The modern spelling is ‘Chessington’.

† The County History says that Hamilton paid for the property, but records in the Surrey History Centre state that he was ‘only son and heir’ of Rebecca Hatton of Chesington. Mrs Hatton was, presumably, widow or sister of Thomas Hatton, owner of Chesington Hall until his death in 1746. The different surname of Rebecca’s children indicates that they were the issue of an earlier marriage.

* Chesington Hall was pulled down in 1833–4 and rebuilt on the old foundations. It was this short-lived Victorian building (demolished a century later and now covered over by a residential estate) which Constance Hill and her sister Ellen visited when writing Juniper Hall (published in 1904). Neither Ellen Hill’s picture of the Hall in that book (p.147) nor an older amateur drawing in the archives of the Surrey History Centre gives much idea of the house as it was in Crisp’s day, but the records of leases and releases do. They itemise the rooms reserved by Sarah Hamilton after the property was divided: ‘on the ground floor, the Hall and the Brown and Best Parlours next the Garden with the closets therein, the small beer cellar, the under ground cellar communicating with the small beer cellar, and those rooms up a pair of stairs called the Best Chamber, the Brown Room, the Paper Room, the Wrought Room and the Green Room; the rooms up two pair of stairs (except the first room which communicates with the Back Stairs wherein the farmer’s men usually lie), Stable, Coachhouse, the Brewhouse with the Apple Chamber over it, the Pidgeon House, the Great Garden adjoining the sd. messuage and Brewhouse, the Necessary in the Garden, the Lower Garden adjoining the Necessary, the Pound Meadow, the Walk to the Church with trees on both sides of it and the fruit thereof, the use of the Pump and all other Courts, yards, ways and passages in and about the sd. messuage’.²⁹

† Like many spinsters of mature years, Sarah Hamilton had adopted the title ‘Mrs’.

* And which Jane Austen knew well too – it is the book Mr Collins insists on reading aloud to the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice.

* 1766 is the likely date: Susan’s miscellaneous writings show she was in London by the spring of 1767.⁴⁵

* The date – 1766–7 – is conjectural, based on Crisp’s estimate in 1779 that the incident took place ‘about a Dozen Years ago’⁴⁸ and Fanny’s statement in 1771 that she had not been to Chesington ‘for almost five years’.⁴⁹

* ‘Allen’ was Elizabeth’s maiden name as well as her first married name.

* Why she should have loaned such an enormous sum, apparently without interest, for a period of thirty years, is a mystery.