All through the autumn of 1779 Fanny was worrying about the letter she had sent to Sheridan earlier in the year promising him a play for the winter season. By Christmas she could not put the matter off any longer and persuaded her father to call on the playwright and pass on the message that ‘what I had written had entirely dissatisfied me, and that I desired to decline for the present all attempts of that sort’.1 When Dr Burney did this, however, Sheridan’s response was to insist on seeing what had already been done; it suited him far better, he argued, to work with an author on an unfinished manuscript than to battle over revisions to a supposedly complete text. Dr Burney’s resolve vaporised immediately and he came home telling Fanny he had changed his mind and thought she should take up the playwright’s tempting offer at once.
This reversal, just when Fanny had managed to quash all her former ambitions, could scarcely have been more disturbing. Sheridan had asked Charles Burney’s permission to call on Fanny to discuss the play, and in anticipation of his visit she began hurriedly revising The Witlings one more time. She felt ‘violently fidgeted’ about it, and wrote to Crisp in something of a panic, probably hoping he would command her to stop. But the magic of Sheridan’s name worked powerfully on Crisp, too, and though he admitted that his young friend’s brutal cuts to the play had left little to work on, he suggested she might be able to scrounge some decent new plot-lines out of Colley Cibber’s memoirs. Thus Fanny’s two mentors showed again the limitations of their usefulness, or even common sense. Her disappointment in them was evident; she even went as far as making an overt criticism of her father’s part in the matter, saying he was ‘ever easy to be worked upon’.2 Fortunately, Sheridan never made his call, and the mutilated play to which Fanny had taken a disgust was left to rest in peace.
With the long death of The Witlings, Fanny’s career as a ‘scribler’ seemed in danger of coming to an end. Though her father was keen for her to consolidate the success of Evelina with another book as soon as possible, Fanny had never had so little time to herself. All her leisure was taken up compiling long accounts of celebrity social life in letters to Samuel Crisp and her sister. She had never before been so busy doing nothing, having to think about clothes, hair and caps, visiting and jaunts.
In April 1780 she accompanied the Thrales on another long trip, this time to Bath. They travelled in style, in a coach and four with a post chaise behind for Mrs Thrale’s two maids, and two menservants on horseback, and took a house at the end of South Parade, overlooking the River Avon. Everything about the arrangements was luxurious, and Henry Thrale, his pocketbook permanently open, insisted that Fanny order anything she wanted from the Bath milliners and dressmakers, as freely as Queeney and Hester did. Fanny was flattered, but exhibited her usual scruples, only accepting Mr Thrale’s largesse when he ‘absolutely insisted’ on it.3 Perversely, the idea that Fanny was freeloading struck Mrs Thrale most forcibly whenever their gifts were refused, but a letter from Fanny to Queeney on the subject, written almost twenty years later, hints at the difficulty of being on the receiving end of the Thrale beneficence:
my pride was dearer to me than her [Mrs Thrale’s] gifts, which were forced upon me whether I would or not, & which hurt me inexpressibly, frequently with a raillery that showed she discredited the sincerity of my resistance. But I valued our friendship too much for any serious dispute – & all other she overpowered.4
The two months in Bath were mostly spent visiting; Mrs Montagu and another famous ‘Blue’, Mrs Elizabeth Carter, were in town, as well as a host of fashionable ladies, retired bishops and elderly beaux taking the waters. It was the kind of company that Mrs Thrale had correctly judged would have bored Dr Johnson, but not Fanny. As in Brighton, Fanny stayed with the card-playing matrons much of the time, and refused to dance at the dances. She joked that she was becoming ‘old-cattish’,5 and it was true: at almost twenty-eight she was taking up position on the outskirts of middle age. The next generation of young society girls (who admired Miss Burney’s book to distraction) had some surprising new preoccupations. One, a ‘Miss W—’, was an atheist, whose views (by Hume out of Bolingbroke) profoundly shocked the pious novelist; another was Augusta Byron, Fanny’s romantic young fan from Brighton. She observed these two young women of the coming age with attention, keeping their traits, manners, even dialogue in mind for almost thirty years, when they reappear recognisably in the characters of Eleanor Jodrell and Aurora Granville in her last novel The Wanderer, published in 1814.
‘Miss Burney was much admired at Bath’, Mrs Thrale wrote in her journal a few weeks later; ‘the puppy Men said She had such a drooping Air, & such a timid Intelligence; or a timid Air I think it was, and a drooping Intelligence.’6 Mrs Thrale’s flashes of malice towards her young friend were understandable; she was having a strenuous year travelling to and from health resorts with her ailing and moody husband, entertaining his friends at Streatham and campaigning on his behalf in Southwark for the coming parliamentary election ‘like a Tigress seizing upon every thing that she found in her way’, as Johnson wrote to Queeney.7 Her efforts went unrewarded by any tenderness from ‘Master’, who openly said his only comfort was his beautiful young mistress, Sophy Streatfield. Relations with Queeney were as bad as ever – ‘Miss despises me’, her mother wrote dramatically – and Fanny Burney, who had been drafted in to leaven the spirits of this company, was not proving quite grateful or useful enough. Though Fanny half-convinced herself that she was now almost one of the family (she had begun to refer to Mr Thrale as her ‘dear Master’ in imitation of Hester), she seems not to have appreciated how ill and unhappy the Thrales were. Mrs Thrale noted with a strange kind of satisfaction how ‘disgusted’ one of her friends was ‘at Miss Burney’s Carriage to me’ in Bath. ‘I love her dearly for all that’, she conceded in Thraliana, ‘& I fancy She has a real regard for me, if She did not think it beneath the Dignity of a Wit, or of what She values more – the Dignity of Doctor Burney’s Daughter to indulge it. Such Dignity!!’8
The rather uncomfortable holiday came to an abrupt end in the second week of June when reports reached Bath of serious disturbances in London. Stage-coaches arriving from the capital had ‘No Popery’ chalked on them, and shocking reports followed that riots had been going on for almost a week, aimed primarily at Roman Catholic targets and ostensibly in protest at the Catholic Relief Act, a relatively mild piece of legislation that had been passed the previous year. Next day in Bath the same ‘No Popery’ message was appearing around the city, and within hours bets were being laid on whether the new Roman Catholic chapel would be attacked, which it was overnight.
The Thrale party had already decided to leave, but speeded up their preparations when Mr Thrale was identified in a local paper (wrongly, of course) as a Catholic. Clearly there was some connection in the public mind between the brewing trade and Catholicism which Thrale’s political rivals sought to exploit. A distiller in Holborn (a known Catholic) had been one of the prime targets of the riots in town; when his property was burned, it exploded and sent rivers of liquor into the streets, which some of the mob drank themselves to death on. Free drink was not the main motive for the violence, though, since brewers’ homes were as vulnerable as their premises (one non-Catholic brewer had his house in Turnstile Alley fired because the mob said he brewed ‘popish beer’). The Thrales’ brewery in Southwark, worth an astonishing £150,000,9 was already under threat, they heard in Bath; the rumour about Thrale being a papist seemed to doom it to destruction. The family decided to make their way across country towards Brighton, whence, if necessary, Mr Thrale could embark for the Continent.
Though Fanny had to flee Bath with the Thrales, her thoughts were of course with her own family, from whom she had no news until she reached Brighton. The letters from Susan which awaited her there contained astonishing accounts of the riots, the most violent civil disturbance of the century in London. More damage was done in one week of mob rule than in Paris during the whole of the French Revolution; hundreds of properties were destroyed and 290 citizens died. The initial protest, led by the fanatical Lord George Gordon, took place on 2 June, but the Burneys in St Martin’s Street only got wind of the trouble on the evening of the fifth when Charlotte came back from the Reynolds’s in a fright, saying that a mob was out breaking the windows of suspected Catholics. Soon after, they heard an affray nearby; it was Sir George Saville’s house on the north side of Leicester Square being attacked (Saville had introduced the Catholic Relief Bill into the House of Commons). The family watched in fear from the observatory at the top of their house as the huge bonfire of Sir George’s household effects lit up the whole square.
The next evening the rioting came even closer. The coach in which Susan was returning from Lady Hales’s was surrounded by a mob in Leicester Square that was blocking the narrow entrance to St Martin’s Street. She was taken the long way round and got home to find Mrs Burney and Charlotte both almost hysterical; only half an hour before ‘many hundred people’ had charged past the house on their way to the house of Justice Hyde at the bottom of the road. Susan counted six fires made of Hyde’s belongings, reaching as far as the junction with Orange Street – only a stone’s throw away:
When Hyde’s house was emptied of all its furniture, the mob tore away the windows and window-frames and began to pull up the floors and the pannels of the rooms [… At last] the Ringleaders gave the word and away they all ran past our windows to the bottom of Leicester Fields with lighted fire-brands in their hands like so many Furies, [where] they made one great bonfire. [They continued their work of destruction] till between two and three in the morning.10
Susan, Hetty and her husband Charles Rousseau Burney were watching from the drawing-room windows. The crowd dispersed, but a gaggle of men and women remained in St Martin’s Street shouting ‘No Popery!’ Next thing, the crowd was pointing towards the little group in the window and shouting ‘They are all three papists!’:
‘For God’s sake’, cried poor Hetty, ‘Mr Burney, call out No Popery or anything!’ Mr Burney accordingly got his hat and huzza’d from the window. It went against me to hear him, though it seemed no joke in the present situation of things to be marked out by such wretches as papists. ‘God bless your Honour’, they then cried, and went away very well satisfied.11
This sort of intimidation was widespread. All over London, people were wearing the Protestant blue ribbon as a passport through the crowds. Horace Walpole, who had come up from Strawberry Hill to observe the riots, said he was ‘decking myself with blue ribbons like a May-day garland’12 before going out onto the streets. City merchants lit up their houses at night as a supposed gesture of sympathy with the rioters, and the words ‘No Popery’ were on everyone’s lips, however unenthusiastically. Money was being extorted from householders on a grand scale, and after the storming of Newgate Prison, then the King’s Bench and the Fleet, the streets were full of criminals ready to take advantage of the complete breakdown of law and order.
Mrs Burney, terror-stricken, wanted the whole family to decamp at once to Chesington, but the others worried that the house on St Martin’s Street would be lost if they left it. The threat of fire from nearby properties was their greatest anxiety (the premises at the back of the house were rented at this date to a Roman Catholic china-dealer), and after the complete destruction of Lord Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square, with its priceless library and manuscript collection, Charles Burney naturally began to fear for his papers and books (Fanny presumably feared for hers too). When they tried to move their valuables to Hetty’s, however, they found that the rioting had spread to Covent Garden, and the two old aunts in York Street were cowering in the coffee house, having had an ominous symbol chalked on their door by accident. The Burneys’ Italian friends had taken down their door-plates for fear of being victimised, and such was the mindless momentum of the riot that the French Protestant chapel next door to the Burneys’ house was also under threat for a time, from the simple association of France with Catholicism. Every evening Susan went up to the observatory, saw fires on all sides and heard ‘huzzas, shouts and firing, and shrieks from some of these terrible scenes of fury and riot’.13 Charlotte had made a parcel of all her most important possessions, ready to evacuate the house at a moment’s notice, but Susan put the job off – it was too depressing.
By 9 June, when troops arrived in the city, order began to be restored. George Gordon was arrested and sent to the Tower,* fresh earth was laid on the road to Blackfriars Bridge and the bloodstains were obliterated from the walls of the Bank of England with a quick coat of whitewash.
The Thrale party reached Brighton and heard all this news on 18 June, by which time London was quiet again. Fanny was desperate to rejoin her family and left for the capital as soon as possible with Mrs Thrale, who went up to survey the damage to the brewery and to reward a servant who had quick-wittedly diverted the mob. She expected Fanny to return with her to Brighton and was disappointed when her offer was declined. The violence of the riots and the danger her family had suffered in her absence made Fanny begin to think that she had let Mrs Thrale ‘overpower’ her life too long. She had missed Susan terribly, and the lively social life of home (which was, frankly, much more interesting than Brighton or Bath); she also missed reading and writing in peace and being of practical help to her father. Living as Mrs Thrale’s handmaid had been unproductive and ultimately unrewarding. With eyes newly opened to what she valued most, Fanny’s instinct was to re-establish herself at home.
On 10 January 1780 a letter from Captain Charles Clerke of the Resolution reached London. It had been written the previous June in Kamchatka and travelled overland to St Petersburg, thence to Berlin. By the time it reached its destination, Clerke himself was dead, a fact that was rather overshadowed by the news his letter carried. It told how Captain Cook and four of his Marines had been killed ‘on the 14th of February last at the island of O’Why’he [Hawaii], one of a group of new discovered Islands in the 22nd Degree of North Latitude, in an affray with a numerous and tumultuous Body of the Natives’.14
It was only when James Burney returned home, nine months after this news had been received and twenty months after the event, that his family heard the details of Cook’s death. The Resolution and Discovery had made a long stay at Hawaii from November 1778 to early February 1779, revictualling prior to another trip north in search of a north-west passage through the Arctic Circle. During this stay, Cook had been involved in ‘strange ceremonies’ on the sacred platform known as the Morai, which are thought to have identified Cook with a native deity. The British party did not take the local religion very seriously, however, and heedlessly desecrated the Morai when removing for firewood both its wooden paling (which Cook had bargained for) and some of its idols (by mistake). Nevertheless, they set sail peacefully at the end of their furlough. A couple of days out, the Resolution sprang her mast and the two boats had to return to Kealakekua Bay on 11 February, where they met with an inexplicably hostile reception. Neither James Burney nor his colleagues understood the malign significance to the Hawaiians of any unscheduled return of the ‘god’.
The Discovery’s cutter went missing overnight, and suspecting the natives of theft (they were as shameless a set of pilferers as the British were ‘bargainers’), Cook decided to blockade the bay and go on shore to demand its return with a sergeant, nine Marines and his Lieutenant of Marines, Molesworth Phillips. The atmosphere on board the British ships was tense. The sight of armed native warriors assembling on the clifftops and the sound of conch shells being blown were unambiguously warlike, and at the instigation of a trigger-happy young officer, William Bligh (later captain of the Bounty), the sailors began sporadically firing at native canoes, which led to a chief being killed. Other native leaders, finding that Cook was not on board either British ship to receive their complaints about this, set off to find him, and half an hour later Burney and his companions heard firing on shore. The Resolution fired in response, and looking through a telescope from the deck of the Discovery, Charles Clerke could see the fracas that broke out on the shore as Cook and his party attempted to bring the King, Terreeoboo, back with them as a hostage. In the confusion and bloodshed, several of the Marines decided it would be better to flee to the launches than to risk trying to defend themselves with muskets (which took at least twenty seconds to reload). Phillips stood his ground longer than any of his men, though stabbed in the shoulder with a spear and pelted with stones. He was a strong swimmer, and helped his colleague Jackson into the pinnace before making for a more distant cutter himself.
Lieutenant John Williamson had long since left in the launch, saying later that he had interpreted Cook’s hand signal from the rocks as an order to retreat. Burney and the others on the Discovery saw, aghast, that Cook was left unprotected and reeling from the attack of the crowd, in which four Marines were killed. Cook received a blow from a club and fell into the water, where he struggled (like most sailors, he could not swim) and was struck again. He was probably already dead when the natives pulled him out of the water, but they finished him off extravagantly, in what turned quickly into a ritual mob killing.
The reprisals that followed this shocking event were swift and bloody, but the main concern of Clerke, who took over command of the expedition, was to mend the Resolution’s mast and get away as soon as possible, having recovered what they could of their colleagues’ remains. Lieutenants Burney and King were sent on this dangerous and gruesome mission, but found nothing on shore. The next day a parcel containing some of Cook’s remains was delivered to the Resolution, provoking disgust and further retaliation. Another parcel, containing Cook’s hands, scalp, skull and some bones was delivered later, and on 23 February, having given what burial honours they could to their murdered captain, the deeply dispirited British party set sail from Kealakekua Bay.
Of the officers involved in Cook’s fatal mission, Phillips came off by far the best, and assumed the role of hero. Somehow he became known as the man who had shot Cook’s main assailant, though by the time Cook was attacked, slipping on the rocks at the edge of the water, Phillips would have already been in the water, his musket abandoned and sword drawn. Phillips consolidated his reputation as the dead leader’s champion by challenging Williamson – who was universally regarded as the villain of the piece for failing to stand his ground – to a duel. This ended unsatisfactorily, and they gave the matter up (through the intervention of a fellow-officer, whom G.E. Manwaring suggests was Burney15), though another fight broke out between the two men when they were provisioning at the Cape on the way home.*
When the two ships finally came up the Thames in October 1780, they were besieged by sightseers and well-wishers. Henry Thrale went to visit James on board the Discovery, and invited him to Streatham next time Fanny was going there. Dr Johnson also intended to visit James and see the celebrated ship.17 James was soon home in St Martin’s Street, telling his astonishing stories over and over. A kind of ‘South Sea fever’ gripped London; John Webber’s pictures from the voyage were on display, as were curiosities from the South Seas, New Zealand and China. Mrs Thrale had an extremely expensive and elaborate court dress made, based on a native Hawaiian garment that James had brought back – the grebe-skin and gold trimmings alone cost £65 (compared with a manservant’s annual wage of about seven guineas18). Fanny went to see Webber’s pictures, and was even more impressed by her brother’s colleague Lieutenant King, ‘one of the most natural, gay, honest and pleasant characters I ever met with’;19 but the ‘lyon of lyons’ was Molesworth Phillips, proudly bearing the scar on his shoulder where the native spear had struck. He had become a close friend of James on the voyage, and was introduced to the Burney family at the earliest opportunity. It was a fateful step. The twenty-five-year-old Irishman, whom Samuel Crisp, with his eye for male beauty, approvingly declared ‘fine made, tall, stout, active, manly-looking’,20 made a bee-line for Susan. Within two months she and Phillips were engaged to be married.
‘Bone idle, slack and amiable’ is how one writer has described Phillips,21 but at the time of his marriage to Susan Burney in January 1782 no one had any doubts about him (it would have seemed almost unpatriotic). Mr Crisp was impressed by Phillips’s odd talent for making models ‘with a degree of neatness and accuracy that cannot be surpassed’,22 and later in life the ex-Marine was often to be seen at the British Museum, ‘lounging and offering advice’, in the words of his former shipmate Rickman’s daughter Mrs Lefroy: ‘He had a turning machine and made small vases after the antique, using perhaps a dozen different kinds of wood, relics of his distant voyages’.23 Phillips’s attraction to Susan was undoubtedly fuelled – and possibly even suggested – by his deep feelings for her brother James, a friendship which lasted for life and which transcended family ties, even surviving the seemingly unforgivable events preceding Susan’s death. When James died in 1821, Phillips, ostracised by the rest of the Burneys because of his treatment of Susan, commissioned a bust of his old friend and shipmate that he kept with him always, and his last request was to be buried in the same grave as Burney.*
Faced with evidence of such devotion in friendship, it is difficult not to suspect that there was perhaps some sexual attraction between Burney and Phillips, albeit the eighteenth-century taboo on acknowledging or discussing sexual relations allowed a latitude to feeling that we find difficult to appreciate and are prone to misinterpret. As with the later problem of whether James Burney and his half-sister Sarah Harriet committed incest, we can only substitute caution for certainty. Sibling and pseudosibling love was strong in an age when parent-child relationships were always at risk of being cut short by early death; it was often intense and exclusive, especially between members of the same sex, who were thrown so much in each other’s company. The bosom-friendship of Fanny and Susan is a case in point: there was ‘but one soul – but one mind between you; – you are two in one’,24 and they shared everything, ‘the same House, Room – Bed – confidence & life’.25 We tend to view such relationships, and the heightened language used to describe them, as either quaint or suspicious – (vide, to take one example of many, the recent controversy over Jane Austen’s relationship with her sister Cassandra26) – transposing them into the mores of our own day with significant distortion. And of course the distorting effect works both ways. Most covert sexual relationships in the eighteenth century would have been too carefully disguised for us ever to recognise them as such, though the prevalence and popularity of, for instance, the incest theme in novels of the period (including Fanny Burney’s27) is just one indicator of how the collective unconscious of the day was working.
The strength and durability of the bond between James Burney and Molesworth Phillips is of more relevance to us than its precise nature. Life at sea, which for men like James Burney began very early in life, ended early too, leaving decades of retirement on half-pay in domestic situations that could only strike the former mariners as insipid and unreal. It is hardly surprising, given the traumatic and peculiar nature of their shared experiences in the South Seas, that Burney and Phillips stuck together self-protectively afterwards. They had seen first hand, and been threatened with, violent death; they had endured extremes of weather and the privations of long sea voyages (where fricassee of rat was a delicacy only the officers were allowed); they had been among the first Europeans to set eyes on the other-worldly ice-scapes of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, had met and consorted with exotic and utterly foreign people, and had doubtless seen, perhaps joined in, countless scenes of coarseness and brutality as well as of heroism and comradeship. From the 1780s onward, James Burney showed signs of disturbance, restlessness with his home life and an inability to further his career; Phillips metamorphosed into a gambler, drinker and philanderer.
Dr Burney displayed caution about his favourite daughter’s engagement in 1780, despite Phillips’s hero status. Phillips was confident of a large income when his uncle died, but he didn’t have it yet, and Dr Burney, always realistic on matters of household economy, withheld his consent to the marriage all through 1781, not convinced that there would be ‘de quoi manger very plentifully’, as Fanny put it to Mrs Thrale. ‘For my own part, I think they could do very well. […] there is not any part of our family that cannot live upon very little as cheerfully as most folks upon very much’.28 It was not perhaps the height of tact to say this to a woman who had just spent a small fortune on a ridiculous dress and even more on the set of Reynolds portraits that now adorned the walls of the library at Streatham Park, but Fanny took pride in the family self-sufficiency and Susan’s choice, like Hetty’s, of love over materialism.
The news of Susan’s engagement made Mrs Thrale think that she would ‘slip pretty readily into the Susannuccia’s place’ in Fanny’s affections,29 but no one was ever going to do that. Fanny genuinely liked Phillips (as they all did at that date), and was confident that Susan would be happy with this man who was to succeed her as ‘closest friend and companion’.30 But privately, the prospect of losing her sister was traumatic. Fanny naturally feared for Susan’s future well-being. A woman of such a small frame and frail health would run a high risk of dying as a result of childbirth, or from a consumption, as their mother had done. Was not Hetty, a much more robustly healthy person, already looking ‘like the Edge of a wornout knife’, according to Crisp,31 after ten years of marriage and six children? How could Susan survive the inevitable pregnancies and confinements?
Fanny had selfish reasons, too, of course, for dreading the forthcoming separation. Charlotte, who was almost ten years her junior, was an eccentric, delightful girl, but not yet a suitable substitute for Susan: ‘our likings and dislikings, are often dissimilar’, Fanny wrote sadly to Susan; ‘with you all seemed the same as myself’.32 Sarah Harriet was still only a child, and not delightful at all: her early nickname ‘Queerness’ seemed likely to stick. In the shrinking Burney household there would be no one with whom Fanny could conspire against Mrs Burney’s malign presence, no one to complain to or take comfort from.
Elizabeth Burney was ‘grown more sour than ever’ according to Crisp,33 and a great deal of treason was being talked about her at Chesington. ‘Nothing is said that she does not fly in a Passion at and Contradict!’ complained Charlotte, the object of her stepmother’s ‘extremest hatred’; ‘Whatever is, is Wrong! that’s her Maxim. I think she ought to be indicted for Living: for she is a Nuisance to Society’.34 Susan had no intention of living at St Martin’s Street ever again. As wife of a Captain of Marines, she faced an itinerant life, expected ‘to pack up her bundles, and trudge along with him, except he should be commanded abroad’.35 During Phillips’s foreign postings she had arranged to live at Chesington.
Perhaps as an escape from the gloomy prospect ahead, Fanny threw herself into work on another novel. The composition of the first draft of Cecilia lasted almost exactly the duration of Susan’s engagement, and was executed with manic bursts of overwork and collapse. For weeks at a time during the winter of 1780–1, Fanny shut herself up to write, overseen with oppressive attention by the two ‘Daddies’. Charles Burney was an especially hard taskmaster. He imagined that his daughter could work the same way he did himself – night and day – without the advantage of amanuenses to take dictation at midnight or relieve the drudgery and discomfort of quill writing. Crisp on the other hand, having little experience of writing professionally, failed to perceive any difficulties at all. As far as he was concerned, it was tantamount to a paid holiday
to sit by a warm Fire, and in 3 or 4 months (for the real time she has stuck to it closely, putting it all together, will not amount to more, tho’ there have been long Intervals, between) gain £250 by scribbling the Inventions of her own Brain – only putting down in black and white whatever comes into her own head, without labour drawing from her own Fountain.36
By the end of February, however, Fanny was half-dead from ‘the eternal fagging of my mind & Brains’. ‘[M]y hand scarce rests an Hour in the whole Day’, she wrote to Susan from Chesington,37 yet she was still only at the end of the first volume. When Mrs Thrale made an impulse visit and saw how ill and exhausted her friend had become, she scolded Dr Burney for putting too much pressure on his daughter, and made him let her come home for a rest. The plan filled Fanny with dread, as she explained to Susan:
I am afraid of seeing my father. Think of a whole volume not yet settled, not yet begun! […] I cannot sleep half the night for planning what to write next Day, & then next day am half dead for want of rest!38
Work was suspended for much of the spring, and there was another illness in September, brought on, as even Crisp understood, by overwork. After the frivolity and socialising of the previous two years, 1781 was proving arduous and unhappy for Fanny. Hetty’s latest baby, Henry, died in August, and the fortunes of James and Charles were thwarted. James was appointed Captain of the Latona, but got no prize on his first commission; reprobate young Charles, despite his degree from Aberdeen, was refused ordination by the Bishop of London. In April Henry Thrale suddenly dropped dead in the house he had rented for the season in Grosvenor Square, on a day when half of fashionable London was invited there for a party. His widow was required to sell up the brewery business almost immediately; a complex and dispiriting task. She retired exhausted to Streatham, with Johnson, Fanny and others of the old circle in attendance, but it must have been clear to all of them that the great days of entertaining there were over. Apart from generating the huge wealth that had allowed the Thrales’ magnificent hospitality, ‘Master’ had been the perfect foil to his wife, sincerely admired by their friends, and missed.
By the second winter, Fanny’s novel did not seem near completion, and Crisp was threatening to keep her at Chesington until it was done. She joked with Susan that she might have to elope from Chesington Hall – as Susan was perhaps beginning to think she would have to do from St Martin’s Street. Dr Burney was still dithering about consenting to her marriage, but Phillips, promoted to Captain that autumn, had waited long enough. The long engagement ended in a rapidly-arranged wedding, sending Fanny into a panic that she wouldn’t be home in time for it. Still her main fear was of displeasing her father. She dreaded his ‘cold looks’ if she went back without the book done. ‘I will scrawl Night & Day, if I can’, she wrote to Susan,39 and after another burst of unremitting labour, managed to finish enough of the novel to get permission to be home for Christmas. She had been made to feel incompetent, though working at remarkable speed: at about 300,000 words in five volumes, Cecilia was almost twice the length of Evelina, and was completed in only a year and a half.
The hurry in which Fanny wrote Cecilia meant that she had to abandon some of her more ambitious plans for the novel. From a letter of Crisp of 27 April 1780, it is clear that she had been thinking of writing about an ‘unbeautiful clever heroine, beset all round for the sake of her great fortune’. It is not possible to determine whether this radically different idea was one of the desperate late revisions to The Witlings or an early sketch of the new novel; as we have seen, the two projects melted into one another, and though the heroine of the novel was originally called Albina, her name was later changed to that of the play’s heroine, Cecilia. In the surviving early drafts, Albina is rather sharper-tongued than Cecilia, but nothing indicates whether or not she was conceived as ‘unbeautiful’. By the final draft, Fanny had defaulted to convention, and Cecilia emerges on the page radiantly lovely outside and in. The fate of an ‘unbeautiful clever’ woman had to wait until the next novel to be attempted, and even then the character in question was a secondary one.
The orphaned Cecilia’s intelligence, virtue and maturity (far greater, at twenty, than any of her supposed guardians) puts her in a class above the naive heroine of Burney’s first novel and emphasises the deliberate break she strove to make between the two books. If the Daddies thought they would get another Evelina by sitting Fanny down in front of the fire for a couple of months, they were wrong: Cecilia is a novel about complex moral problems and perverse practical ones, lacking both Evelina’s light-heartedness and tendency towards farce. Cecilia was more concerned with humours than humour, and when Johnson praised ‘the grand merit’ of the book being ‘in the general Power of the whole’,* he acknowledged its quite different ambitions and achievements from her first attempt at the form.40
Cecilia is about birth and wealth, symbolised in the heroine’s inheritance, which depends on her retaining the family name (Beverley) after marriage. Unfortunately, the man she falls in love with is the last in line of an etiolated aristocratic family who retire behind a pulled-up drawbridge every night and would rather see their son dead than lose their own ancient name. Out of this rather unpromising framework for a thwarted romance Burney creates a series of situations that show the limitations of virtue in a world actively ranged against it. Cecilia consistently behaves not just ‘correctly’ but well, yet is subject to numerous vicissitudes (mostly arising from the combined attractions of her person and her fortune) on her way to securing the affections of the hero, Delvile. He is a much more complicated and attractive character than Evelina’s flawless Orville, and towards the end of the novel his conflicting thoughts are represented almost as thoroughly as those of the heroine – a highly unusual development. Also very unusually, the plot is not ‘resolved’ but horribly complicated by the lovers’ union. Delvile has to choose between two evils: losing his parents’ approbation or losing Cecilia. His suggested compromise of making a secret marriage renders both bride and groom profoundly uneasy, and when the wedding is dramatically stopped midway, it is almost a relief that their better judgement has prevailed, however frustrating to the romantic plot. Their second (successful) attempt at getting married is not a scene of triumph but of disabling anxiety. Cecilia listens ‘mechanically’ to the words of the service and looks round the church ‘with a sort of steady dismay in her countenance’.41 This was certainly not what the average reader of romantic fiction would have expected; weddings in that genre are proof that the plot has reached its happy ending.
Burney defended the realism of the love story in the following terms: ‘the hero and heroine are neither plunged in the depths of misery, nor exalted to UNhuman happiness. Is not such a middle state more natural, more according to real life, and less resembling every other book of fiction?’42 Her concern to create probable plot and character was somewhat at variance with the necessity of filling such a long book with sufficient drama. Cecilia, like both of Burney’s subsequent novels, would have appealed far more to later audiences if it had been shorter; its five volumes were a gesture towards a waning convention, the monumental novels of Richardson in particular. Evelina had only three volumes, and it was that book’s relative concision which the next generation of novelists sought to emulate.*
The advantage of length was that it allowed a mass of characters and a multiplicity of action that Mrs Thrale likened to ‘a Camera Obscura in the Window of a London parlour’.44 Few eighteenth-century novels have such historical interest as Cecilia, with its absorbing attention to the detail of London social life, contemporary fashions, attitudes and talk. Sex and money are the main targets of the satire; with the exception of the hero, the men in Cecilia are seen in a poor light as useless guardians, selfish sons and brothers, sexual predators, fortune-hunters, wastrels, hysterics and cheats. Their misogyny is presented more subtly than in Evelina, but Mr Monckton’s cynical marriage to an ageing rich widow is arguably an act of far greater aggression than Captain Mirvan throwing Madame Duval into the ditch. Madame Duval was a straightforward grotesque, but Lady Monckton is shown to have once been just as the heroine now is, and her sour dislike of Cecilia, incomprehensible to the younger woman, is a premonition of what’s to come at the hands of a man such as Monckton. ‘An old woman’, the baronet Sir Robert Floyer opines, in terms redolent of the fops in Evelina, ‘is a person who has no sense of decency; if once she takes to living, the devil himself can’t get rid of her.’45
Money and the movement of money between different levels of society is viewed with profound cynicism: the £20 owed to indigent Mrs Hill by the supposedly rich but spendthrift Harrels comes to symbolise the inequity in fact and in law between the various classes. The sum is too small to register in the minds of the Harrels; they depend on credit for everything and live at the expense of people like the Hills, too poor to be able to be bankrupt (a theme Burney returned to on a grand scale in The Wanderer). The Harrels are essentially money-addicts, constantly extorting cash from their ward and spending it in absurdly extravagant ways, such as the masquerade,* a triumph of surface over substance. Harrel’s repeated threats to commit suicide tire even the susceptible heroine after a time, but his dramatic death at Vauxhall Gardens comes as all the more of a shock because of it. Mr Briggs (supposedly a portrait of the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, a friend of the Burneys whose parsimony was legendary), another of Cecilia’s guardians, shows the same pathological attitude to money, but with very different symptoms: he is so mean that he loves even his own dirt as a kind of crop (it indicates how much he has saved on soap), and is commodity-minded about everything, from the chances of getting Cecilia a husband – ‘Not very easy, neither; hard times! men scarce! wars and tumults! stocks low! women chargeable!’46 – to the very language he uses, pared down to its miserliest forms.
Cecilia’s awareness of class, money and birth is acute, as it was for the author: she understands exactly her position relative to genteel but poor Henrietta Belfield and proud Mrs Delvile (a strong character based fairly obviously on Hester Thrale). When Cecilia finally takes possession of her estate, which has been eroded and threatened by her guardians during her minority, Burney has a chance to suggest how virtuous people with access to money (specifically, women) might affect society at large for the good. Cecilia coming into her inheritance is a protracted feminist fantasy of self-determination; all a woman needs, Burney seems to be saying, is several thousand a year and an estate of one’s own.
Cecilia, which is set in the year of its composition, 1780, and contains many up-to-the-minute fashion and artistic references (including a homage to the singer Pacchierotti, a friend of the Burneys), draws on aspects of haut-bourgeois life observed by Fanny since her rise to fame. The kinds of conversation she had been recording in her Brighton and Bath journals appear in sharper focus here, coming from the mouths of a wide cast of society women, wits and misanthropes, such as the worldly Monckton, garrulous Miss Larolles (a favourite of Jane Austen) and spirited, sardonic Lady Honoria Pemberton. However, the middle-class characters proved again to be Burney’s forte: Mrs Belfield is a wonderful study in misplaced ambition, Simkins in Uriah Heep-like cringing and Hobson the acme of a successful tradesman’s complacent vulgarity:
I take every morning a large bowl of water, and souse my whole head in it; and then when I’ve rubbed it dry, on goes my wig, and I am quite fresh and agreeable: and then I take a walk in Tottenham Court Road as far as the Tabernacle, or thereabouts, and snuff in a little fresh country air, and then I come back, with a good wholesome appetite, and in a fine breathing heat, asking the young lady’s pardon; and I enjoy my pot of fresh tea, and my round of hot toast and butter, with as good a relish as if I was a Prince.47
Burney’s dealings with booksellers produced some gentle satire on the trade; she was obviously thinking of Lowndes and his twenty guineas when a bookseller in Cecilia says, ‘we pay very handsomely for things of any merit, especially if they deal smartly in a few touches of the times’,48 and of her own career when she observes that authors ‘must feel our way, with some little smart jeu d’esprit before we undertake a great work’.49
The range of characters, themes and incidents in Cecilia makes one suspect that Dickens as well as Thackeray (who admitted his debt to Burney) learned something from this remarkable novel, unjustly considered in our own day the inferior of its predecessor. Apart from having a thoroughly absorbing story, Cecilia contains touches of psychological realism that were truly novel. In the following passage, the lovers have just been parted after Delvile’s duel with Monckton:
Grief and horror for what was past, apprehension and suspense for what was to come, so disordered her whole frame, so confused even her intellects, that when not all the assistance of fancy could persuade her she still heard the footsteps of Delvile, she went to the chair upon which he had been seated, and taking possession of it, sat with her arms crossed, silent, quiet and erect, almost vacant of all thought, yet with a secret idea she was doing something right.50
This brilliant description of the kind of torpor brought on by shock, with Cecilia straining to hear the lost footsteps and instinctively taking shelter in the chair where Delvile last sat, shows Burney’s imagination and worldly knowledge in perfect unison. That the set-piece scenes of violence and dramatic action in Cecilia (such as Harrel’s suicide, Mrs Delvile bloodily bursting with emotion and Cecilia running mad through the streets of London) develop from realistic beginnings such as this explains why Cecilia is such a powerful book, never being overset by its own melodrama (of which there is plenty towards the end) and only once, in the tableau of weeping children around the heroine’s sickbed, seriously lapsing into sentimentality.
The excessive speed at which Fanny composed this monumental work increased her fears for its reception, and as with Evelina, she sought to deflect criticism in an introduction, cast as a fable of Genius and Vanity. Possibly because it went much further than a conventional ‘curtseying preface’, Fanny eventually decided not to publish the piece; significantly, it shows her awareness of what a modern psychologist would call the problem of self-appointment. She identifies herself with the ranks of authors who have Inclination (to the point of excess) rather than Ability, which is an ‘unconscious’ gift to few, who ‘possess [it] without effort, & […] without trouble’.51 To authors like herself, writing is far from trouble-free – it is a kind of drug which both agitates and dissatisfies the addict/writer: ‘his accustomed occupations become irksome, his former pleasures, insipid; the smallest praise has powers to enchant, the slightest criticism to distract him’. This was admitting too much for comfort. Begun as a pre-emptive strike against the Critical, the Monthly and the Gentleman’s Reviews, Fanny’s introduction to Cecilia had somehow turned into a statement of her own vulnerability: ‘all [the youthful author’s] ideas of Happiness & of Misery are centred in Fame & Disgrace, & in the Author, the Man is lost’.
Fame and disgrace haunted Fanny as much as ever, though she had, fortunately, developed some tolerance of publicity since the publication of Evelina. She could now hear out strangers’ praise with polite resignation, be ‘attacked and catechised’ by the curious without running out of the room, and sounded almost pleased to be ‘poked […] in with all the belles esprits’ in some verses about contemporary women writers that appeared anonymously in the Morning Herald. Perhaps she knew, or suspected, that the author was in fact her own father.* He was almost bursting with pride and had bragged to half of London about his daughter’s forthcoming book (Mrs Thrale dealt with the other half): ‘he is fond of [Cecilia] to enthusiasm, and does not forsee the danger of raising such general expectation’, Fanny wrote anxiously to Susan.53 Though she was not named on the title-page, Fanny’s authorship of Cecilia was known to everyone well before publication. But Charles Burney was enjoying the advantages of Fanny’s success too much to be discreet about it. He had been invited to Court (where he hoped to be appointed soon as Master of the King’s Band) and, as Crisp reported, was ‘now at the Top of the Ton. He is continually invited to all the great Tables, and parties, to meet the Wits and Grandees, without the least reference to Music.’54
Dr Burney had sold the copyright of the novel to the bookseller Thomas Payne while Fanny, as bridesmaid, was accompanying Susan and her husband on their honeymoon at Chesington in January 1782. The Burneys and Paynes were already on friendly terms. James was paying court to Payne’s younger daughter, Sally, and married her three years later. Perhaps this introduced too great an element of goodwill into the sale of Cecilia. Payne paid £250 for the copyright, a sum Crisp marvelled at, but which was once again underselling Fanny’s work considerably. Dr Burney and his daughter were naively surprised to discover later that Payne’s first edition of Cecilia was of two thousand copies, four times that of Evelina, and that his profits from that edition alone would have been in the region of £500 (as calculated by Dr Johnson).
Fanny rushed to copy and revise her manuscript during the first half of the year, and Payne printed up each volume hot from her hands. ‘I would it were in my power to defer the whole publication to another spring’, Fanny wrote to Crisp, frustrated at the lack of time she had to polish the work, ‘but I am sure my father would run crazy if I made such a proposal’.55 The book was published in June 1782 and sold out almost immediately. Cecilia seemed to please everyone, the reviewers, the ton and the intellectuals – Edward Gibbon purportedly read it in one sitting and Burke, the foremost orator of the day, thought so highly of it that he wrote the novelist a fan letter, offering his ‘best thanks for the very great instruction and entertainment I have received from the new present you have bestowed on the public’.56 The morality of the book also won the approval of Mrs Delany, a highly respectable elderly authoress who was close to the Royal Family, and probably through her recommendation Cecilia came to the notice of the Queen, who, after having it vetted by a bishop, allowed her daughters to read it – the first novel ever to penetrate that far into the Royal Household.
Crisp was impressed not just by the very favourable critical reception of Cecilia, but by its material success, noting with approval that the publishers Payne and Cadell were intending to present the author with a ‘handsome pair of Gloves’ over and above the ‘bare price stipulated’ of £250.57 Two months after the publication of the novel, Crisp arranged his own treat for Fanny. He commissioned a portrait of her by her talented cousin Edward, who arrived at Chesington Hall in August with a carriage-load of materials and produced the charming, ‘horribly flattering’ portrait in Van Dyke dress which now hangs in the gallery at Parham Park, Sussex. Crisp also sat to Edward Burney that summer, his portrait finding its way into Fanny’s possession in 1792 on the death of Kitty Cooke. Perhaps he commissioned it because he suspected he hadn’t much longer to live. He had been a martyr to gout and rheumatism for years (he and his sister Mrs Gast were even thinking of trying out the new-fangled electrification treatment for the latter), but in the early months of 1783 he went into decline. When he died in April the whole Burney family was plunged into grief for the loss of their kind, cultured and benevolent friend. ‘That all but matchless man’ continued to haunt Fanny’s works in various guises, but the old retreat of Chesington Hall was never the same again.
* Astonishingly he was not executed for his incitement of the mob, but lived long enough to become a convert to Judaism.
* Phillips and Burney must have viewed with amazement and anger the relative ease with which Williamson found subsequent promotion in the Navy. While Burney’s petitions for work in the 1790s fell on deaf ears, Williamson was honoured with the command of the Agincourt in the action later known as the battle of Camperdown in October 1797. In strange repetition of his abandonment of the shore party at Kealakekua Bay, Williamson removed the Agincourt from the action, leaving the Ardent, on which many died, unsupported. At his court martial in December that year, charges of ‘cowardice and disaffection’ were not proved, but negligence was ‘proved in part’ and Williamson was rendered incapable of ever serving again.16
* James Burney was buried at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in 1821 and Molesworth Phillips in 1832, but there is no record of the gravestone positions or memorial inscriptions of either. The churchyard was grassed over in 1881.
* Johnson’s remark could be seen as a rather slovenly generalisation; he had only read one volume of Cecilia at the time and, as with Evelina, there is no proof he ever finished reading the novel. Macaulay’s conviction, expressed in his famous review of Madame D’Arblay’s Diary and Letters and repeated by many later commentators, that Johnson helped revise the manuscript, even wrote parts of it, is wholly untenable.
* George Austen, sending his daughter Jane’s first novel to the publisher Cadell, specifically described it as ‘about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina’.43
* See Chapter 3.
* This was proved by the discovery of the manuscript, with corrections and additions, among his posthumous papers. Fanny noted at the time of their publication that her father ‘carries them constantly in his pocket, and reads them to every body!’,52 but imagined that his pride derived from seeing ‘Little Burney’s quick discerning’ lauded in print.