In the summer of 1778, Hester Lynch Thrale was thirty-eight years old and expecting her twelfth child. She had already had to endure the deaths of seven children, and this last baby, Henrietta Sophia, was also destined to die very young. Mrs Thrale had been married for fifteen years to the brewer and Member of Parliament for Southwark, Henry Thrale. Though the marriage was outwardly successful, it was not happy: ‘it would have been difficult to find a bride and groom who were more temperamentally unsuited to each other’, James Clifford has written of the alliance between Thrale, the taciturn businessman, and his cultured, high-spirited Welsh heiress. Thrale displayed towards his wife few of the qualities that endeared him to his friends, one of whom, the playwright Arthur Murphy, praised his ‘goodness of heart’ and ‘amiable temper’.1 Mrs Thrale saw another side of him, coldness and neglect, and had to tolerate his many infidelities and bouts of venereal disease. In the early years of the marriage, which had been arranged by the couple’s families with no regard to the personal preferences of either party, there was little opportunity for Hester to cultivate her interest in literature, or exercise her skills as a poet and wit. Dr Johnson was to say to her later that she had lived at this period ‘like My Husband’s kept Mistress, – shut from the World, its pleasures, or its Cares’.2
After the Thrales’ introduction to Dr Johnson in 1765, via their mutual acquaintance Murphy, an easy friendship was established. Johnson was soon a regular visitor at the brewer’s house in Southwark and comfortable estate at Streatham Park, Surrey. The Thrales were a godsend to ‘the Great Cham’, whose bluntness and acerbity did not go down well in polite society any more than did his lumbering form and unrefined, erratic manners. Howevermuch he was revered for his literary achievements, Johnson often cut a lonely and vulnerable figure. The wealthy and broad-minded Thrales, though, accommodated his oddities with ease, and a particular friendship soon grew up between the Doctor and Mrs Thrale. Something of an outsider herself, Hester Thrale provided Johnson not only with the free run of her household and ideal conditions in which he could work, but also with a degree of protection against his chronic melancholy. Shrewd and good-humoured, she was not intimidated by the great man’s ex-cathedra manner, and no doubt played on his sensibility ‘to the influence of female charms’, as Boswell rather grudgingly put it,3 once saying that she felt her power over Johnson’s spirits and his readiness to confide ‘such Secrets as [he has] entrusted to me’4 derived from her sex. Johnson needed equally a confidante and a protectress; Mrs Thrale required an outlet for her strong affections, good sense and intellect.
The coterie of ‘Streathamites’ that grew up around Johnson’s almost permanent residence at the Thrales’ home included Garrick, Murphy, Joshua Reynolds, William Seward and James Boswell. Charles Burney had been mixing in this exalted society for about a year and a half by the time Evelina was published, but his veneration for Johnson went back much further. He had written some rather obsequious fan mail to the great lexicographer when the Dictionary of the English Language was about to appear in the early 1750s, and visited him at the Temple in 1760, where the star-struck music-teacher surreptitiously removed some bristles from Johnson’s hearthbrush as a souvenir to take back to Norfolk, ostensibly on behalf of his friend William Bewley.* The connection was kept alive by Burney with some difficulty: Johnson’s scorn for music was well known – ‘it excites in my mind no ideas, and hinders me from contemplating my own’. Though Johnson received Burney’s books with grace and, after the publication of the second one, increasing interest, music was not a subject ever likely to elicit his full attention.
Charles Burney’s introduction to Henry Thrale in 1776, and his subsequent engagement to teach music to the Thrales’ eldest child, Hester (always known as Queeney), created a marvellous opportunity for him to meet Johnson regularly at Streatham Park on far less unequal terms than before. The Thrales, who were generous hosts, were enjoying their most affluent period; they had already added an impressive new library wing to the house, and in 1777 they had a small lake with an island built in the grounds and reconstructed a two-mile gravel walk around the property. The household’s prospects seemed fair in every way (although the unpredictability of Thrale’s profits from his brewery in fact made their finances quite volatile), and Burney was intensely gratified by the chance to share something of their luxurious and easy lifestyle.
Burney had been appointed as a music-master, but was soon asked to Streatham as a guest. Mrs Thrale had taken to him with characteristically wholehearted enthusiasm. ‘Such was the fertility of his Mind, and the extent of his Knowledge; such the Goodness of his Heart and Suavity of his Manners’, she wrote in her journal Thraliana, ‘that we began in good earnest to sollicit his Company, and gain his Friendship.’5 Burney was just as eager to cement the connection, and within weeks of his first invitation to Streatham he had invited Johnson and Mrs Thrale to St Martin’s Street for the visit which, as we have seen, so impressed his daughter. Mrs Thrale went to the considerable expense of buying a new harpsichord for Burney’s use at Streatham, and was delighted with his capacity to fit in with the unpredictable Dr Johnson, whom he flattered with his attentiveness and sincere admiration. In Mrs Thrale’s private classification system (in which Mrs Burney had come off so poorly), Johnson’s 19 out of 20 for ‘Scholarship’ far outshone the historian of music’s 8; but Burney was awarded 19 for ‘Good humor’, where Johnson scored o. ‘[F]ew People possess such Talents for general Conversation’, she wrote of her new friend in the autumn of 1777.6 Her journals show occasional annoyance at Burney’s over-anxiety to please, but also bear witness to the depth of her affection for him: ‘My Heart […] runs forward a Mile to meet my dear Doctor Burney’, she wrote. ‘If ever the – Suaviter in Modo, fortiter in Re – resided in mortal Man, tis surely in Doctor Burney’.7
By the summer of 1778 the friendship had already survived one tricky episode. After the fiasco of Bessy Allen’s elopement the previous October, Mrs Burney had come straight from France to the Thrales, who were on holiday in Brighton, expecting to find her husband there. But Dr Burney had already gone home to London, and when the distraught Mrs Burney arrived it was impossible for her to conceal the cause of her anguish from Mrs Thrale, despite the risk of public humiliation. Mrs Thrale could not resist passing on the scandalous news in a letter to Johnson the next day, but however much she played sarcastically on Mrs Burney’s former pride in her ‘fine daughter’, the woman’s genuine unhappiness – ‘greater & more real Distress have I seldom seen’8 – not only prevented Mrs Thrale from really exploiting the information, but rather drew out her sympathy. Dr Burney’s own letter to Mrs Thrale on the subject a few weeks later displays a scorn for the hypocritical condolences he and his wife had received from some of their acquaintances that suggests Mrs Thrale had treated him and his wife much better:
[Mrs Burney] is now in Town, but invisible; ’tis humiliating to tell melancholy Stories abt one’s Self, & more so to hear People pretend to pity one, when we know they have no more Feeling than Punch. I hate to think of the Trick that has been played her, & still more to talk about it.9
The even more melancholy story of young Charles’s disgrace at Cambridge remained a closely guarded secret from Mrs Thrale, although she noticed that the whole Burney family ‘colour and fret at the mention of him’.10 Mrs Thrale’s heart might be running out to meet ‘dear Doctor Burney’ all the time, but the music-master remained cautious underneath his charm, always aware, as were his children, of the precariousness of his favoured position.
Fanny, more alert than anyone to her father’s social standing, was never more anxious about it than at this point in her life, when she had the power to affect his reputation dramatically one way or the other. ‘I, as myself, am nobody’, she wrote once he knew about her authorship, ‘but as your spawn, I could easily make myself known & have power to disgrace’.11 When father and daughter met at Chesington for the first time after ‘the Fact’12 was acknowledged between them, her tearful relief at his approbation had been so violent he thought she was going to collapse. She threw herself into his arms and ‘cried à chaudes larmes till she sobbed’, Burney recollected in his unpublished fragmentary memoir. ‘The poor humble author I believe never was happier in her life’.13 It is hard to square this scene of near-prostration with happiness. It seems more like nervous exhaustion, bordering on hysterics. Fanny herself, recounting the same incident in her journal of 23 June 1778, admits that there was more than mere relief to her response: ‘the length of my illness, joined to severe mental suffering from a Family calamity which had occurred at that period, had really made me too weak for a joy mixt with such excess of amazement’. The editors of the Early Journals footnote this entry with the speculation that the ‘Family calamity’ might have been ‘some aftershock of Bessy Meeke’s elopement’, though nine months had passed since then – time enough for a half-sister to recover from a clandestine marriage, one would think. Charles junior’s disgrace and possible suicide attempt seem more likely causes of ‘severe mental suffering’, but the only clue is that it concerned ‘Family’.
Charles Burney was longing to get some credit at Streatham from the family’s only benign secret, the authorship of Evelina, and as the only one of the cognoscenti who had not been bound with solemn oaths ‘by all they hold most sacred […] never to reveal it, without my consent’,14 he was the weakest link in the chain (though we know that the oath had also been broken by Susan). Even with Fanny’s reluctant permission to use his judgement over the matter, Burney realised that it would be extremely risky to introduce the subject of Evelina at the Thrales’ himself, but also that among that novel-devouring crew he probably wouldn’t have to wait long before someone else mentioned it.
The exact sequence of events here becomes difficult to unpick from the neatened version handed down to posterity in the Memoirs by Madame d’Arblay, whose ‘entrance into the world’ in the summer of 1778 became, retrospectively, the cornerstone of her fame – ‘more like a romance’ as she was to say, ‘than anything in the book that was the cause’.15 Fifty pages of her biography of her father are devoted to the publication of her own novel Evelina (compared with three pages on the Doctor’s General History of Music); they form in effect a book-within-a-book, with a disingenuous preamble about the ‘devoir due to the singleness of truth’ and a separate dedication to Sir Walter Scott and Samuel Rogers, whose visit to her in 1826, as we shall see, alerted the elderly Madame d’Arblay to some of the variant stories going around by that date. The fact that it was clearly important to her to ‘correct’ the version that Scott and Rogers had heard (recorded by Scott in his diary16) didn’t prevent her from changing it again for publication in the Memoirs on the grounds that she had spoken to Scott and Rogers ‘incoherently, from the embarrassment of the subject, and its long absence from her thoughts’.17 This admission that she was not, aged seventy-four, a reliable witness to her own life story does not sit easily among the surrounding protestations that she is about to set the record straight once and for all.
The version that Madame d’Arblay wanted to authorise placed heavy emphasis on the involvement of Samuel Johnson, the affability and sentimental pride of her father, her own youth, modesty and reticence, the apparently miraculous qualities of her book to elicit praise in high places and the relative unimportance of Hester Thrale except in confirming the opinions of others. In it she tells how her father came home to St Martin’s Street one evening during her long stay at Chesington with the news that while they were at tea in Streatham, Dr Johnson, ‘see-sawing on his chair’, had suddenly come out with the remark that Mrs Cholmondeley ‘was talking to me last night of a new novel, which she says has a very uncommon share of merit; Evelina. She says she has not been so entertained this great while as in reading it; and that she shall go all over London to discover the author’.18 In this version, Mrs Thrale replied that she too had heard the book recommended, and, at Johnson’s further insistence on Mrs Cholmondeley’s good opinion, made it clear she would get herself a copy. Charles Burney, scarcely able to contain his pleasure, added archly that he had heard of the book and ‘read a little of it – which, indeed – seemed to be above the commonplace works of this kind’.19 As he said later to Susan (who immediately wrote an account of their conversation to Fanny), this mentioning of his daughter’s book was ‘just what I wished but could not expect!’ and, far from being something to hide from his grand friends, owning authorship ‘would be a credit to [Fanny] – and to me! – and to you! – and to all her family!’20
Since the original letter from Susan (existing in fragmentary form in the Berg Collection) includes the detail of Dr Burney saying to Mrs Thrale that the book ‘will do […] for your time of confinement’, this incident must have taken place before the birth of Henrietta Thrale on 21 June. The editors of the Early Journals and Letters place the following letter from Fanny to Susan (dated 5 July) as a response to it:
meeting Mr Crisp ere I had composed myself, I tipt him such a touch of the Heroicks, as he has not seen since the Time when I was so much celebrated for Dancing Nancy Dawson […] He would fain have discovered the reason of my skittishness[.]21
The reference is to the hornpipe tune made popular in The Beggar’s Opera in 1759 by the dancer Nancy Dawson, and which is better known now as the nursery song ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’. It is the tune to which Fanny used to dance her wild jigs ‘on the Grass plot’ at Chesington in her youth, as Crisp fondly recalled,22 although there is nothing to suggest that she actually danced on this occasion, let alone around a tree. According to the two sources, Susan’s letter and Fanny’s account in the Memoirs, no one at Streatham had actually read Evelina yet (apart from Dr Burney), and though the young author might well have felt elated by her work having come to Johnson’s notice, it doesn’t explain the reference further on in the same letter to Mrs Thrale’s ‘eloge […] that not only delights at first, but that proves more & more flattering every Time it is considered’. No éloge (praise) of any sort is recorded in the Memoirs, where Mrs Thrale, barely aware of the existence of Evelina, is cast in the unlikely role of slowcoach, or in the existing copy of Susan’s letter. The only éloge likely to have provoked Fanny’s excited response is included in a letter from Susan wrongly dated 7 instead of 4 July by Annie Raine Ellis in her 1898 edition of the Early Diary which records a conversation between Mrs Thrale and Charles Burney when Dr Johnson was not present. Mrs Thrale is recommending a new novel, Evelina, to her friend and his wife which Queeney read to her during her last confinement (i.e. around the end of June): she liked it ‘VASTLY – is EXTREMELY pleas’d with it […] ’tis very clever I assure you […] there’s a vast deal of humour & entertainment in it’, adding, more thoughtfully, ‘there’s a great deal of human Life in this Book, & of the Manners of the present time. It’s writ by somebody that knows the top & the bottom – the highest & lowest of Mankind.’ The demonstrative pronoun could indicate that Mrs Thrale had fetched her copy to pass round; certainly she pressed Mrs Burney to take the book home to St Martin’s Street, neither woman realising, as Fanny observed in her journal, that the original manuscript of the novel had been there some time.
Although the Memoirs version of the story makes it look as if Johnson was the prime mover in publicising Evelina, Mrs Thrale was the first of her circle actually to read the book, and Johnson only did so after she had virtually forced him to by putting a copy in his coach in late July. The incident of Johnson ‘see-sawing’ on his chair could have taken place quite some time before 21 June, as Charles Burney admitted to knowing Fanny’s authorship by 4 June, but he could have been told earlier. This would leave several weeks between the book being mentioned casually by Johnson and Mrs Thrale’s ‘éloge’ to Dr and Mrs Burney, rather than both these things having happened at once, as their juxtaposition in Fanny’s letter can be read to imply,23 or Mrs Thrale’s éloge not having happened at all, as in the Memoirs.*
The wonderful news that Johnson had read and liked the book only reached Fanny on 3 August (along with the infuriating information that Anna Williams, the blind poet who lived with Dr Johnson at Bolt Court, also knew her ‘poor mauled to pieces secret’). He was full of praise for Evelina, saying to Mrs Thrale that there were ‘passages in it that might do honour to Richardson’. The letter ‘almost Crazed’ the author ‘with agreeable surprise’:
it gave me such a flight of spirits, that I Danced a Jigg to Mr Crisp, without any preparation, music, or explanation, to his no small amazement & diversion. I left him, however, to make his own comments, upon my friskiness, without affording him the least assistance.24
This little account of her second ‘touch of the Heroicks’ within the month is the basis for the best-known anecdote about Fanny Burney, the story (told for the first time in the Memoirs) that she danced for joy around a mulberry tree when she heard Johnson’s praise of her first book. It is a charming picture; the impromptu ecstatic dance seems to illustrate perfectly Burney’s sense of elation at her achievement, and her release from the anxieties and inhibitions that constrained so much of her behaviour. There are a number of things about the story, though, that indicate it isn’t strictly true. The mulberry tree only appears in the Memoirs; one assumes there was such a tree at Chesington and that it was much more important to Fanny than to Crisp, who never mentions one. Six months after the Evelina revelations, in a letter about the difficulties Fanny might face in trying to avoid grossness in her writing (specifically in the comedy she was then planning), he wrote: ‘Do You remember about a Dozen Years ago, how You Used to dance Nancy Dawson on the Grass plot[?]’.25 If she had repeated this performance only six months before on receipt of the news about Johnson, why did Crisp not mention that occasion rather than harking back a dozen years?
Dancing ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ was clearly something Fanny did ‘in her days of adolescence’26 in fits of strong animal spirits, and Johnson’s approbation revived just such a surge of wild energy. ‘She was very young at this time’, Walter Scott recorded in his journal in 1826, having just been told the story on his first visit to Madame d’Arblay. In 1778 Fanny wasn’t ‘very young’, she was twenty-six, but there is a poetic truth in her story. The composition of Evelina could be said to have begun when Fanny Burney was very young indeed, with the composition of the destroyed ‘mother’ novel, ‘Caroline Evelyn’, and to be the result of youthful spirits urgently requiring expression. If the mulberry tree story shows signs of having been tampered with to make it neater and more expressive of this gratifying moment in her life, one is disinclined to criticise its author too roundly. Perhaps it is more important to remark on this occasion what a talent she had for story-telling, rather than lamenting too much her shortcomings as a historian.
Although Fanny Burney wrote it out of the Memoirs, Mrs Thrale’s opinion of Evelina was of enormous moment to the new author. It was the most important notice she felt it possible for her book to attract from the literary world (not really believing Johnson would ever read it), and her response, in the same letter to Susan, was a queer mixture of elation and anxiety:
I am now at the summit of a high Hill, – my prospects, on one side, are bright, glowing, & invitingly beautiful; – but when I turn round, I perceive, on the other side, sundry Caverns, Gulphs, pits & precipices, that to look at, make my Head giddy, & my Heart sick! – I see about me, indeed, many Hills of far greater height & sublimity; – but I have not the strength to attempt climbing them; – if I move, it must be in descending!27
‘Caverns, Gulphs, pits & precipices’, ‘sublimity’ – Burney is employing the language of the picturesque twenty years before the Romantics, and might be suspected of a romantic self-indulgence here too, if she did not go on to a fairly shrewd anticipation of the possible consequences of such startling early success:
[W]ould a future attempt be treated with the same mercy? – No, my dear Susy, quite the contrary, – there would not, indeed, be the same plea to save it, – it would no longer be a Young Lady’s first appearance in public; – those who have met with less indulgence, would all peck at any new Book, – & even those who most encouraged the 1st offspring, might prove Enemies to the 2d, by receiving it with Expectations which it could not answer [.]
The reception of this putative second attempt was what concerned her, not its composition. Fanny took for granted that she would keep on writing, and there is evidence that she was already engaged on another work at this point, as she mentions ‘Letters, Italian’ and ‘some of my own vagaries’28 as the occupations which made Crisp refer to her ironically that summer as ‘the scribe’ and ‘the authoress’. Writing was already a way of life for her, however unpleasant the thought of public exposure might be and however many objections her anxious mind might present:
I have already, I fear, reached the pinnacle of my Abilities, & therefore to stand still will be my best policy: – but there is nothing under Heaven so difficult to do! – Creatures who are formed for motion, must move, however great their inducements to forbear.29
Charles Burney had intended to flatter and please his daughter when he passed on, through Susan, his opinion that Mrs Thrale and Mrs Cholmondeley ‘were d – d severe, & d – d knowing, & afraid of praising à tort & à travers as their opinions are liable to be quoted, which makes them extremely shy of speaking favourably’.30 Fanny was more likely to interpret these remarks as threatening, an indication of how high the stakes were being raised. She anticipated the shock Mrs Thrale might feel at the discrepancy between mousy Miss Burney’s behaviour and the riotously satirical nature of her novel. Having a thieving brother or an eloping stepsister was nothing compared to being identified as the only begetter of Madame Duval or Captain Mirvan. ‘[I]f you do tell Mrs Thrale’, she wrote to her father on 8 July in a letter clearly meant as gentle warning to him, ‘won’t she think it very strange where I can have kept Company, to draw such a family as the Branghtons, Mr Brown & some others? […] I am afraid she will conclude I must have an innate vulgarity of ideas to assist me with such coarse colouring for the objects of my Imagination’.
It seems likely that Fanny herself, as much as anyone, was troubled by this discrepancy. The ‘old lady’ had kept her public behaviour under strict control her whole life, while letting her powers of observation and imagination develop as they would. It was unnerving – subversive – to be a prude and a satirist at one and the same time. Her imagination could easily produce ideas that were innately vulgar, shocking and grotesque – indeed, as she acknowledged in the same letter, her writing would have been anodyne otherwise: ‘Not that I suppose the Book would be better received by [Mrs Thrale], for having Characters very pretty & all alike: […] I should build my defence upon Swift’s maxim, that a Nice man is a man of Nasty ideas.’
Only two days before this Fanny had been deliberately teasing Daddy Crisp at Chesington, saying that her father had divulged to her profoundly secret news about the authorship of Evelina. Crisp demanded to be told immediately, at which Fanny insisted upon his guessing.
‘I can’t guess, said he – may be it’s You.’
Oddso! thought I, what do you mean by that? – ‘Pho, nonsense! cried I, what should make you think of me?’
‘Why You look guilty.’ answered he.31
This ‘horrible Home stroke’ was laughed off by Fanny, with some difficulty. Crisp could read her face like a book – ‘deuce take my looks! […] I shall owe them a grudge for this!’ – and would have found her out instantly, she imagined, had he witnessed her reading her recent letters from home. But she determined to spin out the game with him a little longer – at least until he had finished reading the book – and clearly enjoyed the ‘ridiculous’ scenes in which she was ‘almost perpetually engaged’ with him.
Elsewhere the machinery of publicity that Charles Burney had set in motion rolled on. He wanted to tell Lady Hales, and Mrs Cholmondeley, and of course all the Streathamites. Susan reported hearing Mrs Burney’s bursts of laughter through the door as the book was read aloud to her in bed by her husband. The kind and praising letter that arrived soon after from Fanny’s erratic stepmother made up for the preceding anxiety: ‘Good God! – to receive such a panygeric [sic] from the quarter from which I most dreaded satire!’ Fanny wrote in her journal when this new hurdle had been cleared.32
When Mrs Thrale was told about the book’s authorship she must have felt slightly foolish at first, for her Thraliana entry is reserved by comparison with the former éloge:
I was shewed a little Novel t’other Day which I thought pretty enough & set Burney to read it, little dreaming it was written by his second Daughter Fanny, who certainly must be a Girl of good Parts & some knowledge of the World too, or She could not be the Author of Evelina – flimzy as it is, compar’d with the Books I’ve just mentioned [Richardson, Rousseau, Charlotte Lennox, Smollett and Fielding].33
She warmed to the book again, though, when Johnson’s approval was certain. She had left the first volume in his coach for him to read on the way back to London, and he borrowed the second by return, saying later that ‘Harry Fielding never did anything equal’ to it.34 This was Mrs Thrale’s cue to promote the book further, and her newly-discovered connection with the author through ‘her’ Dr Burney seemed to proffer a stake in its success. She read the funny bits aloud to ‘whoever came near her’,35 and was happy to pass on the quaint news about the book’s authorship.
It was only a matter of weeks before Mrs Thrale invited the new lioness to dine at Streatham Park on one of the Thursdays when her father would be there to teach Queeney. To the ‘accidental author’, this was ‘the most Consequential Day I have spent since my Birth’.36 She spent an unpleasant journey in the coach from Chesington along the dry and dusty summer roads to Streatham, ‘really in the Fidgets’ about her reception. It was a fair guess that Dr Johnson would be there, living as he did ‘almost wholly’37 with the Thrales. She was so nervous that she hardly noticed what handsome Streatham Park looked like on this first visit, apart from the fact that it was white.
Mrs Thrale, who emerged from the paddock, dressed informally in a muslin jacket, said nothing of Evelina, for which Fanny was extremely grateful. Even when the subject was broached later, while she and Fanny were alone in the library together, Mrs Thrale only reported Johnson’s conversation the night before, and no one, surely, could take exception to that? ‘Mr Johnson repeated whole scenes by Heart!’ Mrs Thrale told her almost silent young guest, who was studying the bookshelves to hide her embarrassment. ‘O you can’t imagine how much he is pleased with the Book.’38 There was little Fanny could say in reply to this, even if she had been able to raise her voice above a whisper.
It was a relief when Mr Thrale came in from his ride and Fanny was left with the magnificent library to herself for a few minutes. She had ‘just fixed upon a new Translation of Cicero’s Laelius’ when the library door opened and the Thrales’ other guest, William Seward, walked in. ‘I instantly put away my Book’, Fanny recorded in her journal, ‘because I dreaded being thought studious and affected’. It would have been provoking to be taken for a blue-stocking, like Elizabeth Montagu and her associates.
William Seward was part of the inner circle at Streatham, handsome, rich and slightly eccentric. He was only five years older than Fanny, and unmarried, but if there had been any idea of matchmaking in Mrs Thrale’s mind that day, nothing was to come of it. Beside the fact that he had prevented Fanny from enjoying a quiet hour or so poking about the Thrales’ library, Seward made the mistake of launching straight into conversation about Evelina, the book with which Miss Burney had ‘favoured the World’ (and which just happened to have been left lying about on the library table). Compared with Mrs Thrale’s sidelong approach and delicate address, this seemed grossly ill-mannered, but for once Fanny’s response was more irritated than ashamed. Seward must have been puzzled when she sat firmly turned away from him in disgust, answering him curtly, if at all.
What made this day at Streatham ‘the most Consequential’ for Fanny was dinner, which began fashionably late in the afternoon. When the small party went in, she was disappointed that Dr Johnson had still not appeared. Mrs Thrale put Fanny and her father on either side of her, with a place left empty on Fanny’s other side, saying graciously that she was sure it would give Johnson great pleasure to sit there. Fanny had been given the seat of honour.
When Johnson finally arrived, her anxieties were forgotten in the rush of ‘delight & reverence’ she felt towards him. She was determined to listen as avidly as possible – as avidly as she had heard his disciple Mr Boswell did to every word that fell from the great man’s lips. She could then report back faithfully to her sisters and Daddy Crisp, who all, like her, venerated Johnson as ‘the acknowledged Head of Literature in this kingdom’.39 She had seen him twice before, and was prepared for ‘the cruel infirmities to which he is subject; for he has almost perpetual convulsive motions, either of his Hands, lips, Feet, knees, & sometimes of all together’. When Johnson took his place beside her, the short-sighted Fanny was not put off, although it was the first time she had got such a close view of ‘a Face the most ugly, a Person the most awkward, & manners the most singular, that ever were or ever can be seen’. She did not put this in her diary in order to denigrate Johnson, but to wonder at it. That this unlikely vessel should house such a great mind seemed highly interesting to her, in a world full of people far too ready to judge everything by appearances.
Johnson and Mrs Thrale dominated the conversation, each spurring the other on in a way that Fanny’s subsequent diary entries show to be typical – Mrs Thrale often starting up a subject, Johnson pronouncing upon it and Mrs Thrale capping his aphorisms with some light or witty rejoinder. They were both very fond of quoting, and they were both very fond of each other. The ease and relaxation of the relationship gave the Streatham table-talk its peculiar sparkle, and if other guests seldom got a word in edgeways, it may be because they were far too busy being entertained. ‘How we laughed!’, ‘We all laughed’, Fanny writes continually.
Johnson made his first acknowledgement of Fanny’s authorship when refusing one of Mrs Thrale’s mutton pies (which he never ate anyway) with the gently absurd remark, ‘“I am too proud now to Eat of it; – sitting by Miss Burney makes me very proud to Day!”’40 Mrs Thrale was quick to tease him over this by warning Fanny to ‘“take great care of your Heart if Dr. Johnson attacks it!”’ ‘“What’s that you say, Madam?”’ he replied. ‘“Are you making mischief between the young lady & me already?”’ It seemed like a conspiracy to delight their guest, especially since they were just as quick to drop the subject and take up another instead. Now Dr Johnson was half-recalling an epitaph, now Mrs Thrale quoting a French poem, and Johnson retaliating in Latin. Sitting between these two indefatigable wits, Fanny must have had to turn her head to and fro continually, like a spectator at a particularly fast game of tennis.
For all one’s doubts about Fanny’s veracity, especially in the Memoirs, the conversation she records in her journal of Johnson and Thrale does at least have the virtue of being sharply and consistently characterised; even if what she writes is not word-for-word what they said, either because of failure of memory or deliberate doctoring, at least it is very convincingly reconstructed. The speeches attributed to Johnson in her journal are the least tinkered with of any material appearing subsequently in the Memoirs. That is not to say that she doesn’t make mystifyingly trivial adjustments to his words in the later publication, but it does suggest that she feels some sense of obligation to keep her original record of his speech fairly intact.
The ‘Consequential’ dinner gave rise to some delightful table-talk. Of Garrick, Johnson said that he ‘looks much older than he is: for his Face has had double the Business of any other man’s, – it is never at rest, – when he speaks one minute, he has quite a different Countenance to what he assumes the next.’ ‘O yes,’ Mrs Thrale replied, ‘we must certainly make some allowance for such wear & Tear of a man’s Face.’ Sir John Hawkins, who was to be Johnson’s first biographer (much to Boswell’s irritation), was next under discussion. As the author of a rival History of Music, Hawkins was a sore subject with Charles Burney, who no doubt laughed as loud as anyone at Johnson’s illustration of Hawkins’s meanness. On the first night of his admission to the same club as Johnson,* Hawkins, quite against the spirit of the institution, begged off paying his share of the supper, as he had not eaten any of it. ‘And was he excused?’ someone asked. ‘O yes’, replied Johnson, ‘for no man is angry at another for being inferior to himself! we all scorned him, – & admitted his plea. For my part, I was such a fool as to pay my share for the Wine though I never tasted any. But Sir John was a most unclubable man!’41 Johnson’s coinage particularly pleased Fanny: ‘How delighted was I to hear this master of Languages so unaffectedly & sociably & good naturedly make Words, for the promotion of sport & humour!’ The same journal entry contains one of Fanny’s own notable coinages, ‘agreeability’; the OED cites her diary as the first use of the word since Chaucer. ‘Surely I may make words, when at a loss’, she observed with evident satisfaction, ‘if Dr. Johnson does.’42
The two surviving accounts of this first Streatham evening have some interesting dissimilarities, with plenty of extra commentary of all kinds inserted in the Memoirs account to substantiate Fanny’s early impressions of the great man.* In this version, Dr Burney manages to interject a couple of aphoristic speeches which his daughter omitted to notice the first time around in the journal; but the most glaring difference is in the number and quality of Johnson’s supposed references to Evelina. In the journal, he makes only one. Relating how he witnessed a lady at an inn quarrelling with a waiter over a measure of ale, Johnson comments, ‘Now Madame Duval could not have done a grosser thing!’ Everyone laughed at this, and, miraculously, Fanny experienced none of her usual symptoms of embarrassment: ‘I did not glow at all! nor munch fast, – nor look on my plate, – nor lose any part of my usual composure!’43 She was grateful to Johnson for his delicacy at keeping her work in mind without explicitly mentioning her authorship; indeed she was so impressed by the gentle flattery of everyone at the table that she was even prepared to think she might have judged Seward too harshly.
In the Memoirs, Johnson mentions the book far more frequently and knowingly. The guests seem conspiratorial with their ‘sympathetic simper’s and ‘resistless’ laughter, which is far from the delicacy Burney remarked in her journal, and she laughs with them, but inwardly feels ‘embarrassment’, ‘shame’ and ‘unwillingness to demonstrate my consciousness’.44 One of Johnson’s reported remarks about the book has been relocated from a dinner conversation which the journal records two weeks later, another appears nowhere but in the Memoirs. Madame d’Arblay clearly thought it would make a better story to amalgamate these incidents; in the process she inadvertently exposes the sham form of the whole Memoirs version, trying to pass it off as another of her inexhaustible supply of ‘letters to Crisp’.
When the sexes were segregated at the end of the meal, Mrs Thrale took the opportunity to press Fanny to come for a much longer visit, and as William Seward handed her into the chaise later, he too expressed a desire to see her at Streatham again. ‘I was loaded with civilities from them all’, Fanny wrote in her journal. She may not have spoken much or attempted to impress herself on the company, but she had shown herself to be as appreciative and good-humoured as her father; Mrs Thrale and her friends could take Fanny Burney’s other qualities quite literally as read.
Charles Burney was in high spirits on the journey back to London, and could talk of nothing but his daughter’s success: ‘he told me that, after passing through such a House as that, I could have nothing to fear. Meaning for my Book.’ On her delighted return to St Martin’ s Street after months away, and her reunion with all three sisters, Fanny heard even more good news: Sir Joshua Reynolds had sat up all night to finish Evelina. He and his sister – along with half of London, it seemed – were very keen to know who the author was.
This news about Reynolds prompted Fanny to go to Lowndes’s bookshop herself at the first opportunity (with her stepmother as accomplice) to see what sort of gossip it was possible for a curious reader to pick up. The results were encouraging: despite Mrs Burney’s formidable powers of persistence, Mr Lowndes could tell them nothing about the author of Evelina. ‘“I have no honour in keeping the secret”’, Fanny records him saying,
‘for I have never been trusted. All I know of the matter is, that it is a Gentleman of the other End of the Town.’
And that, thought I, is more than even the Author knows!45
Fanny spent most of her time in the shop pretending to read, much as she had done on her visit to Bell’s with Edward and her sisters, but she was fascinated to see her publisher at last, if not exactly meet him (which she never did). He had an ‘air of consequence & authority’, and was now busy telling Mrs Burney how he had for a time suspected Evelina to be the work of Horace Walpole (who published The Castle of Otranto anonymously), and had tried to find out the author himself many times, without success: ‘“to tell You the truth, Madam,”’ he said ‘with a most important Face’, ‘“I have been informed that it is a piece of secret History: &, in that case, it will never be known!” This was too much for me’, Fanny recalled in her journal. ‘I grinned irresistably; & was obliged to look out at the shop Door till we came away.’46 She seemed to have pulled off an impossible trick, ‘entering the world’ to the sound of trumpets, while remaining snugly incognito. No wonder she grinned.
Daddy Crisp, who had eventually heard the astonishing news about the novel from Charles Burney, felt, like many others, that since the reception of Evelina had been so favourable, Fanny ought to be taking possession of her fame. ‘[Y]our perturbation ought to be in a great Measure at an end’, he wrote when he heard of her success at Streatham. ‘When You went into the Sea at Tinmouth, did not You shiver & shrink at first, & almost lose your breath when the Water came up to your Chest? – I suppose You afterwards learn’d to plunge in boldly overhead & Ears at once, & then Your pain was over – You must do the like now; & as the Public have thought proper to put You on a Cork Jacket, your Fears of drowning would be unpardonable.’47 What he says would seem very reasonable – if Fanny had merely been shy. What it does not take into account is why she really valued her anonymity, which was because it gave her the freedom to write as she wanted to, without inhibitions.
No one seemed prepared to believe that Fanny’s reticence was anything more than affectation. On her first long visit to Streatham, which took place in late August, Mrs Thrale followed her up to her room one night after an uncomfortable scene when one of the dinner guests, the antiquarian Michael Lort, had started up a conversation about Evelina. Fanny begged Mrs Thrale not to reveal to him or anyone further her secret – thinking she still had a secret worth the name. Mrs Thrale laughed at this naivety:
‘Poor Miss Burney! – so you thought just to have played & sported with your sisters & Cousins, & had it all your own way! – but now you are in for it!—but if you will be an Author & a Wit, – you must take the Consequence!’48
Fanny protested her sincere desire to remain anonymous. But if this wasn’t affectation, Mrs Thrale said astutely, it had to be ‘something worse’:
‘an over-delicacy that may make you unhappy all your Life! – Indeed you must check it, – you must get the better of it: – for why should you write a Book, Print a Book, & have every Body Read & like your Book, – & then sneak in a Corner & disown it!’49
Mrs Thrale had made another ‘horrible home stroke’, and they both knew it. Fanny spent a miserable night ‘worked by the certainty of being blown so much more than I had apprehended, & by seeing that, in spite of all my efforts at snugship, I was in so foul, I won’t say fair, a way of becoming a downright & known scribler’.50 However kind and supportive Mrs Thrale was – ‘had I been the Child of this delightful woman; she could not have taken more pains [to] reconcile me to my situation’51 – Fanny was beyond reconciliation. Snugship was what she needed and wanted. Whatever social advantages were to accrue from her entrance into the world, nothing could compensate for the powerful inhibitions any publicity was going to impose on her creative life.
* Bewley was later referred to by the Streathamites as the ‘Broom man’ on account of this story, which was one of Boswell’s favourites, perhaps because it showed someone in an even more advanced stage of Johnson-mania than himself.
* There remain the references to Dr Johnson and Mrs Cholmondeley in Fanny’s delighted reply from Chesington, which seem to have no basis in the preceding letter from Susan; but as this letter has a defaced first page and seven lines deleted at the end, it isn’t impossible that there was some reference hidden there to their earlier remarks about the book.
* It could have been the Ivy Lane Club or ‘The Club’; they were members of both.
* The account in the Memoirs is passed off as a quoted letter to Crisp, though none such survives. One suspects that Madame d’Arblay chose to redraft the journal as a ‘letter’ in order to retain the more dramatic first-person narrative and present tense.