On their return to England in 1815, the d’Arblays settled in a pleasant terraced house at 23 Great Stanhope Street, Bath. The fashionable spa town suited Fanny and her ‘poor Boiteux’1 very well, being cheaper than London and more genteel. In Louis XVIII’s lavish dispersal of honours during the Hundred Days d’Arblay had been made a Count, but he chose not to use his title in England (except at the bank and the War Office). He and Fanny simply couldn’t live up to the social expectations of being ‘titled’ – nor did they want to.
Soon after arriving in Bath Fanny discovered that there were several of her old acquaintances from her travels with Mrs Thrale and Mrs Ord still living in the city ‘in perfect preservation’,2 and in the autumn of 1815 Mrs Piozzi herself was living in Gay Street, a few hundred yards from the d’Arblays’ lodgings just north of the Circus. Fanny felt compelled to call on her, but the reception she met with was frosty. Mrs Piozzi was wearing mourning, as she had done permanently in the six years since Piozzi’s death, and other people’s attitudes to her late husband remained the benchmark by which she judged them overall. When Mrs Piozzi sold off the contents of Streatham Park in 1816, she kept only two of the magnificent set of portraits by Reynolds, those of Henry Thrale and Arthur Murphy, the latter ‘the only friend who had been equally attached to both my husbands’.3 All the others, including the portraits of Dr Burney, Garrick (both bought by the acquisitive Charles Burney junior), Dr Johnson and the double portrait of herself and Queeney were ultimately disposable.*
Fanny, on the other hand, still carried with her ‘whithersoever I go’4 a locket which Mrs Thrale had given her years before, containing a lock of Hester’s hair wound together with a lock of Susan’s. Two years later, Fanny and Mrs Piozzi had another meeting which was more successful – in Fanny’s view, at least. To the end of her life, Fanny believed that some sort of restitution had been made, but the older woman revealed in her commonplace book that she remained cynically unmoved:
My perfect Forgiveness of l’aimable Traitresse, was not the act of Duty, but the impulsion of Pleasure rationally sought for, where it was at all Time sure of being found – In her Conversation. I will however not assist her Reception in the World a Second Time –5
Life in Bath was never comfortable for d’Arblay, whose wound continued to pain him and who had many reservations about settling in England. He saw little reason for staying if their son did not make a success of his university career; Madame d’Arblay therefore made it clear to Alex that it was for her sake as much as his own that he should ‘procure Honour & Independence’6 – she certainly did not want to live in France again, although she conceded (in theory) to a yearly visit.
Alex did not respond well to being nagged, as his mother well knew: ‘he pines, he sickens, or rebels, under mental or intellectual restraint’, she wrote to Lady Keith.7 Though she monitored his work relentlessly and made him socialise in Bath during the vacations, Alex responded with ‘sighing & moaning’,8 and returned to his obsessive life of recreational mathematics, chess and solitude as soon as he was back in Cambridge. He distressed his mother by rarely answering her letters until she was in a complete panic (this did not necessarily take long), but perhaps reasoned that there was not much to answer to communications such as this:
Have you Cocoa?
Have you got Shoes?
Do you take a Rhubarb pill from time to time?
an analeptic if you have any headache?
a black one if Nature is coy?9
Alex had difficulty applying himself to learning – it was not something he had ever had to do. His memory was as astonishing as his mother’s (at about this time he recited to Charlotte Barrett the whole of Pope’s ‘Lines to an Unfortunate Lady’ to illustrate a point about his translation of it into French, which he also recited), but he lacked any particle of her drive towards self-improvement.
Alex was forced to transfer from Caius to Christ’s College in the Michaelmas term of 1816, and at the same period had to resign the Tancred scholarship because neither he nor his parents had understood it was for students taking a medical degree. Fanny knew that without the entree to a Cambridge fellowship granted by a high degree Alex’s chances in life were not going to be good, and that there was not enough money to maintain him otherwise. D’Arblay had the same worries about his son, but thought of a different solution. Despite his poor health, d’Arblay made a three-month visit to France in the summer of 1816 to visit his family (Fanny stayed behind to watch over Alex), during which he rapidly evolved a scheme for Alex to marry the beautiful daughter of one of his wealthy old friends from Joigny. The attraction of this idea to the ageing and ailing General is easy to see – it would have re-established the d’Arblay blood-line in its native country, solved the problem of money-earning for Alex and possibly, by removing that worry and making him take on responsibilities he had hitherto shirked, woken the dreamy youth out of his indolence. But Fanny objected strongly to any marriage of convenience, a shockingly old-fashioned, even barbaric practice in her view (as d’Arblay should have known from her works). Apart from thinking that Alex was far too young and immature to be married, she insisted on him ‘seeing, selecting, chusing, wholly for himself’10 when the time came, just as his parents had been able to do. She urged d’Arblay to keep even the suggestion of such a match secret from their son, and he reluctantly gave in. He returned to England in November with little to show for his troublesome journey apart from a small amount of back-pay and an attack of jaundice.
Continuing problems with his pension – which was reduced because he was living abroad and which he was required to collect in person – necessitated d’Arblay’s return to France in the summer of 1817. It was on this, his last journey home, that he arranged for the completion of his portrait painted in oils by father and son Carle and Horace Vernet.* Posterity was on his mind: ‘People will always remind Alex who his mother is, but not who his father was!’ he said rather sadly. ‘I have had this portrait made and dedicate it to him so that he doesn’t forget me.’12
In the Vernets’ picture, the Lieutenant-General appears in full dress uniform and medals, seated as if on the edge of a battlefield, with a warhorse behind him looking nobly animated, and a battle scene featuring a dragoon and guns in the background. Even making allowances for convention, this representation could only seem absurd, not to say fraudulently self-aggrandising, to anyone who knew the history of d’Arblay’s war. The horse, certainly, recalled the source of his injury, but not its banal circumstances. The obvious implication of the picture is that d’Arblay had been at Waterloo or one of the other major battles of the Hundred Days, instead of being posted about as far away from the action as possible, doing little more than keeping his equipment polished and having dinner with General Kleist.
D’Arblay left among his papers a neat sketch-plan of the battlefield of Waterloo which oddly substantiates the impression that he was present at the battle. ‘These sketches of the field were taken on the spot from the Summit of a perpendicular bank immediately above the high road from Brussells to Genappe in the front of the British position’, he wrote by way of explanation on ‘Plate B’. Who was ‘on the spot’, and when, is not stated. If on one of his trips to France in 1816 or 1817 d’Arblay made the tourist pilgrimage to Waterloo that was so popular in those years, he never mentioned it in his surviving letters or wrote home from any location on that route. The only other way that he could claim his picture was made ‘on the spot’ would be if it was a copy of one so made. Charles Parr Burney had been among the first deliberate tourists, arriving in Brussels in July 1815 while his aunt was still there. It is possible that d’Arblay derived his information from someone like Charles Parr who had seen the field and perhaps made sketches of his own, or from an ‘official’ representation, such as appeared in illustrated magazines and public exhibitions, ‘dioramas’ and ‘panoramas’.13 The two-part structure of his sketch, which is meant to represent a 360-degree all-round view, and the description of the parts as ‘plates’ rather support the latter suggestion.
When d’Arblay went back to France in the summer of 1817 on what was intended to be his annual visit, Fanny decided once again to stay home to monitor Alex, who was approaching his finals, yet, ‘unwatched, un-urged, does NOTHING!’14 They joined a group of his Cambridge associates on a ‘reading party’ that summer in Ilfracombe, North Devon, where Fanny gradually learned from Alex’s young tutor, Edward Jacob, the extent of her son’s laziness at the university. Alex was no longer in a position to achieve high honours, Mr Jacob admitted. His habits were obsessive and his lifestyle alarmingly unhealthy, almost neurasthenic, as Fanny reported anxiously to her husband:
[He would] never partake of any meal; but go on with whatever he is about till he feels gnawn with hunger […] never go to Bed, till his burnt out candles leave him suddenly in the dark! & then, his clothes hardly taken off, & no night cap on his head, he rolls himself between the Bedcloaths, falls into a quick sleep of fatigue; but quickly awakens from it, cold, shivering, or feverish.15
Even allowing some latitude for maternal hyperbole, Alex’s behaviour was clearly abnormal and unhealthy. ‘Morbid’ was again the word that suggested itself to the anxious parent: ‘There is something, I firmly believe, in his obstinate feelings more morbid than wilful bad habits’.16 It cannot be ignored that Alex’s symptoms have similarities to those of a drug or alcohol addiction, specifically opium addiction, so commonplace at the time (when opium was the main ingredient in patent remedies for anything from teething pain to cholera). Most households had opium in some form among their medicines, and its widespread use as an analgesic makes it highly likely that Monsieur d’Arblay was taking some form of opiate for his bad leg and his recent chronic bowel pain, just as Fanny had been dosed up with laudanum at various times in her life, notably at Court and during and after her mastectomy. She had been encouraging Alex to take his analeptic pills and ‘a black one if Nature is coy’ – the colour is associated with many opium preparations such as the Black Drop (a favourite tipple of Lord Byron) and the Black Draught. Alex’s listlessness, which was to become more marked as the years went by, bears a resemblance to certain side-effects of opiates – ‘A dull, mopish and heavy Disposition […] Anxieties and Depressions of Spirits’.17 That he was melancholic and depressive is certain, but the exact causes – and how he coped with them – remain obscure.
It is perhaps not surprising that during their holiday in Ilfracombe, Fanny ended up putting her own life in danger through sheer inattention. She had gone with her dog Diane to a part of the shore known as the Wildersmouth, a steep-sided bay at Capstone Point to which there was access only at low tide. She was so absorbed in picking up pebbles for d’Arblay’s mineral collection, thinking of him far away in France and of their problematic child, that she failed to notice when the exit to the cove was cut off by the incoming tide. According to her own lengthy account, written up six years later as her ‘Ilfracombe Journal’, Fanny took refuge from the sea on a small, steep island with a grassy top, which she assumed would lie above the high-water mark. As the sea boomed into the bay, however, she found it more difficult than she had anticipated to reach the safety of the grass, even going on all fours. The steep and slaty rock cut her hands and feet and bruised her knees, she said, and her long dress must have been a handicap, too. She reached a point very near the top, where her head was on a level with the grass, but could go no further and had to haul the dog up by the collar (ingeniously using the handle of her parasol). They were forced to stay put, balanced precariously on a ledge, unable to move. Using her eyeglass, Fanny tried to see whether the tide had turned, but to her horror realised it was still rising, and that there was no vessel anywhere in sight: ‘All was vacant and Vast! – I was wholly alone, wholly isolated.’18
The dramatic colouring in Madame d’Arblay’s account heavily emphasises the picturesque and romantic potential of the scene and turns it into a mortal struggle with the forces of Nature – she might have been Manfred on the Jüngfrau rather than an old lady on a rock:
The next Waves reached to the Upper end of my Chamber, which was now ALL SEA, save the small Rock upon which I was mounted! […] The Wind roared around me, Pushing on the Waves with a frothy velocity that, to a bye-stander, – not to an inmate amidst them! – would have been beautiful […] A Wave, at length, more stupendous in height, in breadth, in foam, & in roaring noise than any which had preceded it, dashed against my Rock as if enraged at an interception of its progress, & rushed on to the extremity of this savage chamber, with a foaming impetuosity from which I felt myself splashed. This Moment I believed to be my last of Mortality!19
The tide was on the turn, however, and Fanny was saved by hanging on to the rock for ten hours20 until she heard voices from the clifftop, Alex’s among them.
That was her story. Another very different (and much shorter) version of the incident exists, in a letter solicited by the collector F. Leverton Harris from the son of John Le Fevre, a student friend of Alex’s who was one of their party. According to Le Fevre, Alex had come to him in some distress when he began to worry about his mother’s absence. Le Fevre suggested that Madame d’Arblay might have got caught by the tide in some bay or other (exactly what had happened), and the two young men set out along the cliffs to search. Eventually they spotted the old lady on the sand in a bay below, returned to Ilfracombe and rescued her by boat. Le Fevre’s son Baron Eversley dispenses with the rest in a few sentences: ‘My father said that the lady’s account of her adventure was greatly exaggerated. She was in no real danger. The sea had not come up to her. She was not clinging to the rocks – She was seated on the sand – The incident of the little dog Fidèle was an invention so far as my Father recollected.’21
Le Fevre’s downbeat account of the day, though it has obvious slips such as calling the dog Fidèle rather than Diane (he was thinking perhaps of Fidel, the dog in Cecilia), sounds the alarm about Madame d’Arblay’s veracity again. On investigation, the presence of the dog seems highly unlikely. According to Madame d’Arblay’s note-form diary Diane whelped (one puppy only) on or just before 24 September,22 the same day that she records her ‘Adventure terrific on A Rock at Ilfracomb!’ The bitch’s unplanned pregnancy had been the source of a rather cruel joke between the d’Arblays against their old friend Madame de Staël, who had a child by a ‘secret husband’ in 1812. Fanny had noted going to ‘Capston with Diane’ twice before this date – on 16 and 17 September – but it is highly improbable that the dog would have been out on a long excursion so soon after having a puppy. If, as Le Fevre said, the dog’s involvement was ‘an invention’, it is a pretty shameless one, full of guilefully particular detail such as the use of the parasol handle as a hoist. And if Madame d’Arblay was ‘inventing’ the presence of Diane, it is all too likely, as Le Fevre claimed, that the rest was ‘greatly exaggerated’.
Madame d’Arblay’s account seems to bear as much upon the time when it was composed (1823) as the time it describes. In the mid-1820s the dog Diane was a constant companion and solace to her widowed owner, more reliable and attentive than Alex, as Madame d’Arblay overtly stated (‘I have always a delighted Companion in Diane, though I have not always my Minister’23). She wrote up her Ilfracombe adventure as a devoir to her late husband, who, as we shall see, asked Fanny during his final illness to make a record of such events for their friends and for posterity. The Ilfracombe Journal can be seen therefore as a piece of retrospective prophecy, the Germanic-sounding ‘Wildersmouth’ representing the jaws of death and the inrushing flood-waters Madame d’Arblay’s uncontrollable fears about separation from her husband and son. The imminent ‘death’ she foresees for herself in this nightmarish fantasy is survival, her intense and wholly justifiable terror of being alone, cut off from the familiar world, looking out on nothing but the blank sea of extinction. In a letter to her sister Hetty in 1825, Fanny declined to return to Ilfracombe not because it reminded her of being caught by the tide in Capstone Bay (an incident she never mentions in her many retrospective references to Ilfracombe in her letters of the 1820s) but because the landscape was too strongly associated with the solitary walks on which she read letters from her absent husband ‘such as scarcely any one ever received, & as no one breathing ever more tenderly more devoutly valued’.24 Well might she look back on those letters with a pang once the absence had become permanent and reunion after death was all she had to look forward to. D’Arblay had written to her from Calais at the beginning of their separation in the summer of 1817:
The sea lies between us, my darling Fanny, but I trust that soon we will be reunited, and anyway nothing can ever come between our hearts – I swear it on mine.25
1817 saw the beginning of the wave of family deaths which blighted the last twenty years of Fanny Burney’s life. In April of that year she witnessed the death of fifteen-year-old Ralph Broome, Charlotte’s only child by her second husband, when Charlotte and her family came to Bath in their latest attempt to find a cure for her consumptive son. Charlotte bore the death with apparent fortitude: ‘she scarcely permits herself to deem it a misfortune,’ Fanny wrote with admiration, ‘so deeply religious is her sense of his own eternal advantage from the change’.26 Such piety was certainly a useful specific against bereavement; Fanny seems not to have had it in as great a degree as her sister, who in turn was regarded by her Evangelically-minded daughters, Charlotte Barrett and Marianne Francis, as falling short of the Christian ideal. Many of their older relations, worldly uncle Charles, for example (though a cleric), were judged by both the nieces to be hopelessly materialistic and sensual.
These differences were highlighted in the winter of 1816 when Fanny was composing the epitaph for her father’s memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey. Her fulsome tribute to the Doctor’s personal and professional virtues met with a mixed response among the family, many of whom (Marianne Francis most strongly) felt it inappropriate to stress his worldly achievements on a sacred memorial. Fanny defended the wording of her tribute vigorously, but had never met with so much opposition before. It was a surprise to her that no one else in the family seemed to share her view of their father as ‘Unrivalled Chief and Scientific HISTORIAN of his Tuneful Art’, whose ‘High Principles’ and ‘Conscience without Reproach’ had ‘Prepared, through the whole tenor of his Earthly Life, with the mediation of our Blessed Saviour, his Soul for Heaven’.27 The relegation of the deity to a parenthesis did not strike her as inappropriate, nor the superlative adjectives describing her father’s principles and achievements, which clearly irritated her brother James and embarrassed Charles junior. He cavilled at references to Dr Burney’s powers of conversation and ‘self-acquired accomplishments’, a misleading term, in Charles’s opinion, given the Doctor’s years at Chester Free School and his apprenticeship under Arne. The phrase did not finally appear on the memorial stone when it was laid in the North Choir of the Abbey in the summer of 1817, but Fanny made it clear that she would return to the subject in the biography of her father she intended to write. In her view, Dr Burney’s ‘indefatigable self-directed industry’ was not simply admirable in itself, but the key to his character.
Hard-drinking, kind-hearted Charles had been complaining for some time of pains in the head, and died of a stroke at the age of sixty just after Christmas 1817. He left behind a treasure-house of books and manuscripts, which was assessed by a committee of experts (including Thomas Payne’s son, also a bookseller called Thomas) on behalf of the British Museum and subsequently bought for the nation. Charles’s library included the earliest printed editions of every Greek classic ‘and several of the scarcest among the Latins’, and almost four hundred manuscripts, including two Greek gospels (tenth and twelfth century), fifteenth-century copies of Callimachus and of Ptolemy’s Geography, and, the star item, a late-thirteenth-century copy of the Iliad, formerly belonging to the antiquarian Townley. The whole collection was valued at £14,500 – truly ‘a sum enormous’ – and was bought by negotiation with the heir, Charles Parr Burney, for the bargain price of £13,500. It was at this date that Charles Parr found out about his father’s youthful theft of books at Cambridge and decided not to write the memoir he had been planning, for fear of dragging the story into public notice. The question remains, though, how his father, on a clerical schoolmaster’s income and within forty years, had managed to acquire ‘probably the most complete [classical library] ever assembled by any man’.28
D’Arblay had returned from France in October 1817 ‘altered – thin – weak – depressed – full of pain’.29 In Paris he had consulted Baron Larrey, who said there was no need for an operation, but he was being prescribed treatments conventional for a stricture of the rectum, which suggests that he may have been suffering from cancer.30 Whatever the cause, the symptoms were extremely painful, and by the winter of 1817 d’Arblay must have suspected that he was mortally ill.
The Lieutenant-General cut a nobly pathetic figure that December when he was presented to the elderly Queen Charlotte at the Pump Room in Bath on her first ever Royal Progress without the failing, blind King from whom she had been separated for several years. D’Arblay was having so much trouble merely standing that some ladies offered him their seats, but of course he felt unable to accept and endured the torture of the morning as well as he could, speechless with pain. He was clearly trying his best for Fanny’s sake; she had been looking forward to this mark of favour with an ardour reminiscent of her father’s for all things royal. One would think that she had never known the inside of a palace or cavilled at the fatuity of Court life. The details of the morning were lovingly recalled in her journal, written retrospectively after d’Arblay’s death. Old, ugly, unexciting Queen Charlotte is described in terms fit for a deity:
she rose to make her round, & with a Grace indescribable, &, to those who never witnessed it, inconceivable; for it was such as to carry off Age, Infirmity, sickness, diminuitive & disproportioned stature, & Ugliness! – & to give to her, in defiance of such disadvantages, a power of charming & delighting that rarely had been equalled.31
It was d’Arblay’s first presentation to the Queen – a long-awaited public acknowledgement – and it was also his last public appearance. Fanny was bursting with pride, so much so that in her account she dwells on the Queen’s inconceivable graciousness at greater length than on poor d’Arblay’s heroic endurance of it. She records with delight that the Queen had so much small-talk with d’Arblay that only ‘a word sufficed for those who remained’; she also notes that d’Arblay’s exertions were such that he had to retreat and collapse on a bench as soon as the Queen had finished with him, and that the rest of the day was spent ‘in bodily misery’. There is something monstrous in this valuation of royal attention unless you happen to believe fervently, as Fanny did, in the Divine Right of Kings. When, subsequent to this Bath meeting, the Queen sent her a gift of some rather dull books and a pair of candlesticks, Fanny wrote in thanks: ‘the honoured signature of my beloved Royal Mistress – my venerated Queen, I have pressed to my lips & my Heart, & shall prize as my first possession to the end of my life’.32 (However, neither the books nor the autograph appears on the list of treasures in her will.)
Fanny was not able to accept the seriousness of d’Arblay’s condition, and even chose to think that he might be exaggerating, though this was far from the truth. The private diary he kept between February and April 181833 reveals the extent of his physical sufferings, his anxieties for his wife and son and his intuition that he was dying. D’Arblay’s love for Fanny and understanding of her character shows itself more clearly than ever in his concern to prepare her for the inevitable, just as her refusal to acknowledge what he was trying to tell her in the latter half of 1817 is testimony to her equally strong feelings for him. She was so sure she could not possibly outlive her ‘meilleur ami’s death that there was really no point in anticipating it.
The result of her denial was, however, to impede his recovery. In January 1818 d’Arblay demanded a consultation with a surgeon, but by then he was far gone in his disease. ‘My Invalid was right!’ Fanny wrote in distress to Mrs Locke; ‘measures were required that had far more happily been employed sooner! – alas alas.’34 Still she maintained a false optimism in front of her sister Hetty (who was living at this date near Bath with her daughters Maria and Sophia) and in front of the invalid himself, whom she continually tried to rally. It was only when d’Arblay had received the last rites from the local Roman Catholic priest and began to tell Fanny his dying wishes that she ‘dared no longer oppose to him my hopes of his recovery’. She heard his counsel ‘with deluges of long restrained tears’, at last ‘awakened to a sense of his danger’.35
D’Arblay was of course deeply concerned about his wife’s likely reaction to his fast-approaching death. He adjured her to seek support from her sisters and friends, to solidify her friendships with the Queen and princesses, to keep as much as she could in the world and not to clam up as she had done so damagingly after Susan’s death in 1800: ‘Parle de moi!’ he urged her, as Fanny recalled in her long ‘Narrative of the Illness & Death of General d’Arblay’, ‘Parle – et souvant. Surtout à Alexandre; qu’il ne m’oublie pas!’36 He also instructed her to write up some of the critical episodes of their later life together, guessing that the process would have some therapeutic benefit for her.
Alex, who had graduated from Christ’s as tenth Wrangler in January 1818 and had been elected a Fellow of the college in March, was called back from Cambridge at the end of April to see his father once more. The Lieutenant-General was still in possession of his faculties and able to give his son a blessing, but Fanny was by this time in a state bordering on distraction and so desperate to see symptoms of recovery that she was even prepared to wake her husband up with sal volatile when he fell into unconsciousness. The doctor, unsurprisingly, took a dim view of such behaviour. On 3 May d’Arblay leant forward, took Fanny’s hand between both of his and said, ‘I don’t know if these are my last words, but this will be my last thought – Our Reunion!’37 He did speak again, even attempting a pleasantry about the way Alex plumped up his pillow, but these were his last words to his wife, chosen with great care and sincere feeling. Thoughtful and selfless to the last, d’Arblay provided Fanny with the only possible comfort with which to face her coming bereavement.
D’Arblay died in his sleep later that day while his wife and son were in the room, watching, though neither of them realised when the actual moment of death came. Ironically, Fanny had mistaken his calm for ‘a favourable crisis’ that might turn the course of her husband’s illness. Hours passed, during which she noticed ‘a universal stillness in the whole frame such as seemed to stagnate – if I so can be understood – all around’.38 She called for their servant Payne, convinced that ‘this sleep was important’ (as indeed it was), and was astonished when the woman slipped off during the next hour of waiting, telling Alex she ‘would go and take her tea!’ Fanny did not dare look for her husband’s pulse or touch his lips, but felt that his hands were turning cold, so covered them with new flannel. Payne – and presumably Alex, too, since he did not stop the servant leaving – saw what Fanny simply could not bear to see, that d’Arblay was already dead.
Confirmation of the death was made by the doctor, Mr Tudor, soon after. ‘How I bore this is still marvellous to me!’ Fanny wrote later, in an extraordinary reconstruction of the effects of the shock; ‘I had always believed such a sentence would at once have killed me’:
I had certainly a partial derangement – for I cannot to this moment recollect any thing that now succeeded with Truth or Consistency; my Memory paints things that were necessarily real, joined to others that could not possibly have happened, yet amalgamates the whole so together, as to render it impossible for me to separate Truth from indefinable, unaccountable Fiction. Even to this instant, I always see the Room itself changed into an Octagon, with a medley of silent & strange figures grouped against the Wall just opposite to me. Mr Tudor, methought, was come to drag me by force away; & in this persuasion, which was false I remember supplicating him, with fervent humility, to grant me but one hour, telling him I had solemnly engaged myself to pass it by his side.39
This hallucinatory experience, more peculiar in its details than any of the ‘visions’ she had written in her fiction, marked Fanny Burney’s passage into a long declining widowhood. Her marriage to d’Arblay had lasted twenty-five years, and despite all the vicissitudes of their separations, illnesses and privations during that period, they had remained utterly devoted to and dependent on each other. Back in 1793 Fanny had praised her lover’s ‘nobleness of character – his sweetness of disposition – his Honour, truth, integrity with so much of softness, delicacy, & tender humanity’.40 Remarkably, she spoke of him in almost exactly the same terms a quarter of a century later, with an apparently unquenchable freshness of appreciation and love. Even the wording of the memorial tablet which she paid to have erected in Walcot Church expressed a persistent sense of incredulity at her good fortune:
But who shall delineate his noble Character?
The Spirit of his Valour, or the Softness of his Heart?
[…] The PURITY of his INTEGRITY: the TRANSPARENCY of his HONOUR;
or the indescribable charm of his Social Virtues!
Madame d’Arblay only remained in Bath a few months following the death of her husband. She gave Alex the choice of where they should live, and he decided on London, a good choice, since Fanny had never lived in the capital with d’Arblay; her loss, ‘though Internally forever the same’ would not be ‘so acutely goaded on by All that is external also’ there.41 She was too distraught to be able to tolerate any avoidable distress, and shunned Bath after she left it in September 1818. As much as ten years later she could still be overset by the unexpected sight of one of their old friends, and could never mention her husband’s name in letters without breaking down into exclamation marks and silence.
The house she found in the capital was at 11 Bolton Street, a quiet, narrow road off Piccadilly to the north, handy for the greenery and fresh air of Green Park and within easy reach of her brother’s household in James Street, Westminster. The first weeks there were ‘the most forlorn that can be conceived even by the darkest Imagination!’, as she described them to her sister:
a seclusion complete from all but sorrow – save, my dear Hetty, Prayer & Future Hope. Without those, I think I had surely sunk. And with them, this solitary affliction was so nearly heart-breaking, that I seemed to myself living in a Hearse! – – Yet I did all I could – & walked out daily with Diane – & made short visits to James street very frequently – but the long – dreary afternoons & Evenings were always alone.42
Fanny remained very ‘nervous and low’, as her niece Charlotte observed,43 for the whole of the first year of her widowhood and hid herself from public as much as possible. For the first time in her life, writing had become ‘a great toil to me – it is ungenial – recollective – laborious – recollective!’44 She could not bear to listen to music, nor did she want to be in the company of small children. The organ at church ‘dissolved’ her. ‘Oh my dear Charlotte!’ she wrote to her sister in the spring of 1819, ‘What havock in all my existence has that dread dread blow occasioned!’45
Fanny’s life came to revolve around the small group of family and friends within easy reach; she did travel to see her sisters Hetty and Charlotte, but these outings were rare, long-planned and postponed if the slightest illness or difficulty presented itself. James and his wife Sally were only a short walk away, and she had frequent visits from Susan’s daughter, Fanny Raper, who lived in Chelsea (and was by now the author of a novel, Laura Valcheret, and a pamphlet, Pastoral Duties, published in 1814 and 1818 respectively). Her cousin Edward Francesco Burney, now almost sixty, niece Fanny Burney (Hetty’s daughter), Mrs Locke, Amelia Angerstein (née Locke) and the Cambridges were also faithful visitors. George Owen Cambridge was now Archdeacon of Middlesex and one of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, a useful patron for Alex, who had taken Holy Orders in the year of his father’s death. The Cambridges’ semi-adoption of the fatherless youth probably had something to do with the fact that they had no children of their own, but may also have reflected residual feelings of guilt on the part of George Cambridge for the pain he had caused Fanny back in the 1780s. Remarkably, she had become one of their most admiring friends.
Fanny was more grateful than ever for the support of her affectionate family and friends: ‘I am very glad of your correspondences’, she wrote to Hetty. ‘They keep Life alive.’46 One of the few solid comforts of these years when Fanny was living in discreet retirement in Mayfair was that her friendships with the princesses blossomed. Since the death of their mother in 1818 the princesses were enjoying a modest amount of freedom for the first time. Their father was still alive, but incapacitated and kept in confinement at Windsor; their brother, the Prince Regent (after 1820 King), had proved a much more generous and liberal head of the family. The princesses were all middle-aged by now: the eldest, Charlotte, was married to the King of Württemburg; her sister Elizabeth (with whom Fanny was in correspondence) to the Prince of Hesse-Homburg; and Mary to the Duke of Gloucester. None of these was a love-match, unlike the secret relationships, possibly secret marriages, which are thought to have been going on between Princess Augusta and an Irish officer, Brent Spencer, and Princess Sophia and one of the King’s equerries. Princess Sophia was even rumoured to have borne an illegitimate child to her beau in 1800, an item of gossip that didn’t become widespread until 1829. It is unlikely that Fanny knew or heard much about any of these scandalous suggestions in the early 1820s, or credited them if she did. She accepted the princesses’ friendship gratefully and was treated with flattering familiarity by them in return. ‘I received not only consent, but command to come forth in that Form where it had never before made its entrée’, she wrote amusedly to her sister and niece,
& Mobbled, & Muffled, & Hooded, & Bas Chapeaued, I presented myself at Kensington Palace – to the no small wonder, no doubt, – & probably Horror, of the Heralds preceding my ushering into Presence, – who, having received orders to take care I caught no cold, came forward as the royal vehicle drove up to the Gates, Two pages with a large umbrella in front, & two footmen to each touch an elbow in the rear, – & two underlings spreading a long carpet from the Coach steps onward to the Hall, – – & all, no doubt, inwardly, sniggering when they saw it was for such a Figure of Fun!47
Fanny’s main occupation in the years following d’Arblay’s death was to fulfil her promise to make a comprehensive record of certain episodes for posterity. The retrospective ‘journals’ she composed as a result – covering her experiences in Dunkirk and Brussels and the journey to Trèves in the years 1812–15, her presentations to Louis XVIII in London in 1814 and to his sister the Duchesse d’Angoulême in Paris the same year and her ‘Ilfracombe Adventure’ – run to several hundred pages. It must have struck her when she had completed this task that she was halfway to having finished an autobiography. In the same period, she was at last getting down to the job of sorting her father’s voluminous manuscripts. She had originally imagined that it would be a relatively easy task to select from his correspondence a book’s-worth of material and to write an accompanying memoir. However, when she first inspected the papers closely (on the ill-fated Ilfracombe holiday in 1817) she was severely disappointed by (as she said) the poor quality of the letters both to and from Charles Burney’s many famous friends. She reported back to Hetty that there were ‘Few […] not fit to light Candles’, and that it simply wouldn’t be worth the effort of ‘about 3 years hard reading’ to provide ‘about 3 quarter’s of a hour’s reading’ for others.48 She persuaded Hetty that they should abandon the project, though Hetty had been hoping to derive some income from the manuscripts, a matter of importance to her since the death of her husband, faithful Charles Rousseau Burney, in 1819.
Whether or not Madame d’Arblay genuinely felt disgusted at the literary shortcomings of Dr Burney’s papers or not is impossible to say, but it seems likely that her strong revulsion at her father’s letters and memoirs (of which there were some twelve ‘cahiers’) was complicated by the portrait which emerged from them, which was very much at variance with her own idealised view. She had hoped that the Doctor’s memoirs would show him ‘the Carressed, sought, honoured & admired Friend’ of the greatest men of his age, ‘as much loved & esteemed as if he had been the Universal Patron of them all’.49 It is not surprising, therefore, that she was disappointed. The 165 fragments of original memoir that remain show Charles Burney at his most unassuming, relaxed and self-mocking about his early efforts to make a name for himself in the professional music world. Fanny judged his reminiscences of merely ‘local interests of the day, now sunk from every memory, & containing Nothing that could either benefit or amuse a single Reader by remaining on record’. She stressed to Hetty how thoroughly she had scoured the material, twice, for anything ‘that may be usefully, or ornamentally, Biographical’, but that all the rest, which she considered ‘utterly irrelevant, or any way mischievous’,50 she had destroyed.
‘Mischievousness’ seems to have been the real sticking point. Fanny was surprised that her father had not taken more care with the disposal of his papers, ‘an omission that has often astonished me, considering the unexamined state of his private memorandums, & the various papers that could not have been spread, even in a general Family review, without causing pain, or Confusion’.51 Clearly there were things in them that gave her cause for ‘pain, or Confusion’.52 It is unlikely that Charles Burney would have revealed specific secrets such as his cohabitation with Fanny’s mother before their marriage, but there may have been clues to rouse his daughter’s suspicions (she was very reticent about letting Hetty see the material for herself), and there would certainly have been matter relating to the Doctor’s second wife which contradicted Fanny’s ideas about her. When Fanny reported to her sister that she had ‘dissected this multifarious Work’ and ‘removed all that appeared to me peccant parts’,53 it was no coincidence that she was employing the same adjective she had used to describe the life-threatening ‘atoms’ of her cancer. In their mutilated state, the Doctor’s memoirs were left, for the time being, to rest in peace.
In the summer of 1821 James Burney was finally promoted to the rank of Rear-Admiral on the retired list. He had reached the top of the retired Captains list through seniority many years before this without promotion, but no one in the Burney family was in the mood to view the long delay as a humiliation. Her brother’s new rank afforded Fanny more solid pleasure than anything had for years, far more than she ever derived from her own title of Comtesse (which she seems only to have used to spare the princesses’ servants’ feelings). She began to call herself ‘the Admiral’s sister’, and to fill her letters to James and his wife with arch references to his new status.
The family’s pleasure was short-lived, however. James dropped dead in November of the same year, aged seventy-one, and the three widowed sisters, Hetty, Fanny and Charlotte and their half-sister Sarah were left as the only remnant of the old Burney family. James’s death brought back into view an unwelcome survivor of the old days, Molesworth Phillips. Phillips had married again in 1800, scandalously soon after Susan’s death, but abandoned his second wife, Ann Maturin, and their children and had been openly keeping a mistress in London for some years. James had stayed loyal to him despite his sisters’ disgust towards the ‘unfeeling wretch’. Phillips was often to be seen at James Street, and was followed there on one occasion by bailiffs and arrested for the non-payment of his wife’s house-rent (which kind James stumped up, unsurprisingly).54 It was Phillips who assumed the role of chief mourner after James’s death, helping to organise the funeral (which the sisters did not attend) and arranging – but not paying – for a bust to be made of the dead man.55
Alex did not get an appointment in the Church until he was almost thirty years old, despite the active support of friends such as George Cambridge. Because of the Peace, the Church was flooded with young clergymen all competing for a relatively small number of livings, and it was necessary to gain a name as a preacher in order to advance. Alex’s preaching style was not to everyone’s taste – certainly not his mother’s, who confined her praise to his clear delivery (something that would have concerned her, since Alex was prone to ‘stuttering and hesitation’ in his ordinary speech56). She was alarmed to hear from her sister Hetty that Alex was thought by some observers to be deliberately affecting a style of theatrical declamation, perhaps in direct imitation of ‘a particular actor’57 (Alex was a great admirer of Edmund Kean and of Talma). Addicts of pulpit ‘enthusiasm’ were less difficult to please. When Charlotte Barrett went to hear Alex preach at Ely Cathedral in 1823, some of the ladies in the congregation were ‘in raptures’. Whether this was actually because of the sermon, or the sermoniser’s expensive French clothes, slim figure and meticulously curled hair is impossible to tell.
Alex’s long wait for a curacy was as much a matter of indolence on his part as anything else, and suggests that he had misgivings about his chosen career. In 1821 he had travelled to Switzerland with his Cambridge mathematician friends Charles Babbage (later the inventor of an analytical machine now thought of as the forerunner of the computer) and John Herschel, son of the astronomer. The trip, which was meant to last only a few weeks, extended to nine months when Alex left his friends and went on an impromptu solitary walking tour around Lake Geneva and to Mont Blanc. The mountain impressed him forcibly – as it had most romantic and poetical young travellers of the time, Coleridge and Shelley among them – and he gave himself over to writing an ‘Ode on Mont Blanc’ (in English) and later a ‘Dithyrambe’ (in French) on the same subject.* Unlike his interesting translations of Lamartine into English and Byron into French, Alex’s own poetry tended to swell uncontrollably:
La Pensee! Elle seule atteste ta Puissance
Roi du Monde et des Dieux!
Plus que de ces Rochers l’Amphitheatre immense,
Plus que le Firmament, et la magnificence
De ses points radieuse.59
The quantity of Alex’s poetry that has survived in the family archive and, more tellingly, the meticulous care with which he reworked, revised and rewrote it, suggests that he had serious ambitions in this field. In Paris, he had alarmed Madame de Maisonneuve by saying that he would like two more years of ‘wandering’ before even looking for a curacy. His mother was naturally ‘not quite easy’ at all the ‘wandering’ that had gone on already: ‘If you repeat on those summits 3 or 400 lines of DeLille, or 3 or 4 odes of Le Brun’, she wrote to him, using an all-too-appropriate metaphor, ‘your Enthusiasm may make you bound too high or leap too low for your Equilibrium’.60
Fanny was desperate for her son to come home, secure a job and find ‘some distinguished Fair one’61 to marry. Having protested for years that he was too young and immature to marry, she now saw marriage as one of the only possible remaining cures for Alex’s ‘oddity’.62 Since the death of her husband, too, she had developed a strong desire to see the family secure in another generation, and fantasised about grandchildren reading her journals and set-piece memoirs in some ‘Fire-side Rectory’ in the future. The task of memorialising, which became her main work and raison d’être, depended of course on there being heirs to hand it down to. ‘Look me out a fair Belle Fille who may gently be my Friend’, she told Alex, with shameless selfishness, ‘as well as delightingly yours, & fix permanently your Happiness, your Character, & your Fame’.63
Over the next ten years Alex fixed on at least three young women whom he said he wanted to marry, but nothing came of his ardent and fleeting passions. Two were granddaughters of Fredy Locke, Cecilia Locke and her cousin Caroline Angerstein, the other was a Miss Sarah White. It is not surprising that the Reverend d’Arblay, dandified, poetry-spouting curate-in-theory, was not considered an appropriate suitor by the Locke family or the wealthy Whites. Even his own family had their doubts about ‘poor dear Alex’ as a potential husband. When Marianne Francis detected that he was ‘deeply smitten’ with her niece Julia Barrett (Charlotte Barrett’s daughter), she wrote to warn her sister about it. ‘For all his cleverness’, she didn’t think that Alex was ‘at all nice enough’ for his beautiful cousin.64
In 1824 Alex was appointed to a curacy at last, of the new Camden Chapel, with a salary of only £150 per year and accommodation in the parish. The Cambridges were present with Madame d’Arblay on the day in August 1824 when Alex was to preach the inaugural sermon at the consecration of the chapel. The Bishop had completed the consecration, the morning service was over, but the congregation waited in vain for the appearance of the preacher. ‘I felt myself tremble all over’, Fanny reported to Charlotte:
The Archdeacon […] quite shook, himself, with apprehension, – he thought Alex had lost his Sermon – or had suddenly conceived a new end for it! – & Mrs Moore believed he was siezed [sic] with affright, & could not conquer it – Finally – the last verse finished – & no Alex! Mr Wesley* ran & re-ran over the Keys, with fugish perseverance – & I was all but fainting – when, at length, – the New Camdenite appeared. I was never more relieved.65
This was characteristic of Alex’s behaviour in general – ‘always just in time to be too late’, as he said himself66 – and of his performance as a minister in particular. Typically, he didn’t begin writing his sermons until the last moment and would stay up all night to finish them. Once his servant had to wake him on a Sunday morning as the chapel bell tolled, and there were to be many unscheduled absences from his duties at Camden which did not endear the new curate to his flock. Alex’s insouciance about his duties contrasted violently with his mother’s embarrassingly thorough brand of worrying. She had visited St Paul’s Cathedral three times in the weeks prior to Alex giving a sermon there in 1823, just to look at the pulpit from which her son would speak.
The fusspot side of Madame d’Arblay’s nature seemed mostly reserved for Alex. To her nieces and friends she often appeared remarkably lively and cheerful for a woman in her seventies. Julia Barrett described to her grandmother the ‘pleasantest possible evenings’ with Aunt d’Arblay. ‘She tells such amusing stories as you well know – sometimes repeats poetry – takes off all the curious people she used to know &c that you can easily imagine how pleasant it is’.67 Charlotte Barrett remarked how her aunt was ‘in excellent health & spirits, takes long walks without fatigue, puns & jokes, & enters into all our little intrigues, & is as Mama says, one of the youngest in our party’.68 Marianne Francis, a slightly less charitable observer than her sister or niece, left another valuable description of her aunt from this period, the only one to remark on Madame d’Arblay’s acquired Frenchness and the fact that even when ill the old lady was an almost unstoppable talker:
I called on Aunt d’Ary, & found her very kind & willg to see me, & pleased at my comg & waitg on her a little, but very feeble & full of cough, & would talk so much, & in her animated, handclaspg, energetic french way, that I was quite alarmed, & findg she expected her Dr every moment, left her, the moment there was a knock at the door, on purpose that she might cease to talk, the worst thg that she can do but impossible, I see, to prevent.69
The mid-1820s seem to have been relatively happy years for Fanny because of the frequent company of Charlotte, her daughters and granddaughters. She had been called ‘the Old Lady’ when she was a child on account of her reserve, but as a real old lady Fanny became an accomplished raconteur and seems to have developed a taste for being the centre of attention. ‘All her merry stories set her, & us laughing for the hour together,’ Julia Barrett wrote to her sister Henrietta,
but sometimes in the midst of her grave ones, Grandmama [Charlotte] falls asleep, & when she wakes again, Aunt d’Arblay insists upon my telling all the story over again, up to the point where Grandmama fell asleep – Only fancy how appalling! to have to tell Aunt d’Arblay’s stories before her face!70
The comical picture of Charlotte nodding off during the grave tales and her sister obligingly running through them all again when she woke up also gives a hint of how forceful – even, Julia implies, intimidating – Fanny had become. Having to tell ‘Aunt d’Arblay’s stories before her face’, and get them right, and match her skills as an entertainer was clearly no laughing matter.
Madame d’Arblay had lived long enough to enjoy a second wave of celebrity as the survivor of a bygone literary age. Among the visitors at Bolton Street who were introduced by her friend and neighbour Samuel Rogers (probably the most ardent literary networker of his day) were the poet George Crabbe and Sir Walter Scott, the latter an admirer of Fanny’s ‘uncommonly fine’ first two novels (though he had rated The Wanderer ’a miss’). Rogers was surprised that Madame d’Arblay hadn’t heard of Scott’s lameness: ‘when he limped towards a chair, she said, “Dear me, Sir Walter, I hope you have not met with an accident?” He answered, “An accident, madam, nearly as old as my birth.”’71 Scott was impressed with Madame d’Arblay’s ‘simple and apparently amiable manners with quick feelings’ and her old-world agrémens, as he recorded in his diary:
[She is] an elderly lady with no remains of personal beauty but with a gentle manner and a pleasing expression of countenance. She told me she wished to see two persons – myself of course being one, the other Geo. Canning. This was really a compliment to be pleased with, a nice little handsome pat of butter made up by a neat-handed Phillis of a dairy maid instead of the grease fit only for cart-wheels which one is dosed with by the pound.72
The reference to the Foreign Secretary, Canning, was probably connected with Fanny’s concern about the progress of the Greek War of Independence.* For all her talk about retirement, Fanny liked to keep abreast of events. Being sought out by the most famous novelist of the day was highly gratifying to the elderly authoress, who took the opportunity to recount to her guests the history of the publication of Evelina. The mulberry tree story (purportedly from 1778) makes its first appearance in Scott’s record of the day: ‘The delighted father [Charles Burney] obtained a commission from Mrs Thrale to purchase his daughter’s work and retired the happiest of men’, he wrote in his diary. ‘Made. D’Arblay said she was wild with joy at this decisive evidence of her literary success and that she could only give vent to her rapture by dancing and skipping round a mulberry tree in the garden.’74 If Madame d’Arblay had told this story before, it is odd that it hadn’t seeped into print earlier, or got into circulation in the way that the less memorable (and untrue) story of Dr Burney ‘having brought home [Fanny’s] own first work and recommended it to her’ had done already. When the mulberry tree incident appeared in the Memoirs six years later, it had changed in one significant way from the version told to Scott, and had become even more ‘tellable’. The revised reason for Fanny’s ‘rapture’ is given as the fact that ‘Doctor Johnson himself had deigned to read the little book.’
It was in this year, 1826, and very probably on this visit by Walter Scott and Samuel Rogers, that Madame d’Arblay ‘received an intimation’75 that the publishers of Chalmers’ General Biographical Dictionary were intending to include an article on Dr Burney in their next volume: ‘they had only forborne to do [so earlier]’, her informant told her, ‘from respect to intelligence […] that I [Madame d’Arblay] always intended bringing the work to light.’ This startled Fanny into action. She began preparing her father’s correspondence for the press immediately (they were mostly letters to him), and was ready to have the text copied before she found out that a legal precedent in an 1813 copyright case disallowed the publication of letters without their writer’s permission. Most of the material she had intended for her book – letters from Johnson, Twining, Greville, Mrs Thrale and others to her father – was not hers to publish, unless she contacted the heirs, which she seemed to think was impossible.76 She was therefore in a quandary, convinced on one side that ‘rivals’ were likely to bring out a biography of Charles Burney ‘mangled in a manner disagreeable to all his Race’,77 and on the other side having little to go on for a book of her own apart from her own memories, since she had destroyed so many of her father’s papers.
The fact that Madame d’Arblay felt pressured to write something – anything – about her father as quickly as possible goes a long way towards explaining why Memoirs of Doctor Burney is such an awful book. That she knew it was faulty is evident from the fact that she considered deferring publication till after her death. Alex and Charles Parr Burney both objected to a delay, on the grounds that none of the younger generation would be qualified to defend the ‘many things’ in the book ‘that might be disputed’.78 But as the date of publication approached, Fanny’s misgivings increased. ‘O I was so tired of my Pen!’ she wrote of the effort it had cost her; ‘Should my Readers be as fatigued of its product! – And nothing is more likely, for Ennui is as contagious as Yawning’.79
When the Memoirs were published in November 1832 it was to almost universal scorn. ‘Surely such a quantity of unmixed nonsense never was written before’, Baroness Bunsen wrote to her mother,80 while Maria Edgeworth deplored the book’s ‘pedantry and affectation’: ‘Whenever [Madame d’Arblay] speaks of herself some false shame, some affectation of humility or timidity, or I know not what, […] spoils her style’.81 It was obvious to everyone that the author’s portrait of Charles Burney was absurdly idealised, and the book did nothing but harm the reputation Fanny had been so keen to foster. The Doctor was presented as a heroic figure whose achievements were almost unrivalled: ‘allowed throughout Europe to have risen to the head of his profession; and thence, setting his profession aside, to have been elevated to an intellectual rank in society, as a Man of Letters […] with most of the eminent men of his day’.82 Bleached of the very things that gave Burney his charm – his natural gaiety, vulgarity, energy and unstoppable drive – he came over as a faultless, bloodless prig. Fanny’s apology in the closing pages of her work for the potential dullness of her father’s perfection is an astonishing admission of her own delusions on this subject:
to delineate the character […], with its FAILINGS as well as its EXCELLENCIES, is the proper, and therefore the common task for the finishing pencil of the Biographer. Impartiality demands this contrast; and the mind will not accompany a narrative of real life of which Truth, frank and unequivocal, is not the dictator.
And here, to give that contrast, Truth is not wanting, but, strange to say, vice and frailty! The Editor, however, trusts that she shall find pardon from all lovers of veracity, if she seek not to bestow piquancy upon her portrait through artificial light and shade.83
The note of surprise suggests that the only person Fanny was in danger of convincing was herself. She seems to have made a mental shift from thinking that there were things the public had no right to know about her father to believing that those things actually were not. The deliberate suppression of many facts and the distortion of others in the Memoirs went far beyond what filial piety could excuse. And as with Fanny’s self-censorship of her judgement of Queen Charlotte, what rushed into the vacuum was hyperbole and a form of grandiloquent euphemism, a style which Macaulay roundly denounced as ‘the worst […] that has ever been known among men. No genius, no information, could save from proscription a book so written’.84 Fanny’s description of the meeting of her parents (which, it might be remembered, took place at a ‘hop’ in Hatton Garden) illustrates both the otiose style and the hagiographical approach:
Who shall be surprised, that two such beings, where, on one side, there was so much beauty to attract, and on the other so much discernment to perceive the value of her votary, upon meeting each other at the susceptible age of ardent youth, should have emitted, spontaneously, and at first sight, from heart to heart, sparks so bright and pure that they might be called electric, save that their flame was exempt from any shock?85
The convolutions of the Memoirs seem symptomatic of Fanny’s unease with the project as a whole. As Macaulay said when he wrote on this painful subject later, the book revealed ‘not […] a decay of power, but […] a total perversion of power’.86 There is, indeed, something almost deranged about a biographer who claims that her work represents ‘[not] a thought’ by her subject ‘that I knew not to be authentic’,87 when she has tampered with all the evidence. ‘It can be stated with confidence that hardly a single quotation from Burney’s papers in her Memoirs escaped her interference’, Roger Lonsdale has said in his biography of Fanny’s father. And as he has demonstrated, the ‘interference’ often takes the form of ludicrously exaggerating Fanny’s own importance in her father’s life; Lonsdale gives the example of the King and Queen asking after the Doctor’s family in 1802, ‘particularly of Made d’Arblay, & Miss Phillips’, which Fanny adjusted so that it read ‘Their Majesties then both condescended to make some inquiries after my family, though by name only after my daughter d’Arblay’.88
Such crimes were hidden, but the author’s egotism and ‘affectation of humility’ were obvious to any reader. Maria Edgeworth had noted Madame d’Arblay’s ‘strange notion that it is more humble or prettier or better taste to call herself the Recluse of West Humble or your unworthy humble servant or the present memorialist than simply to use the short pronoun I’.89 To the charge of personal vanity, John Wilson Croker added that of ‘literary vanity’, accusing Madame d’Arblay of the deliberate suppression of dates to insinuate that she was much younger than twenty-six when Evelina was published. Croker had gone as far as applying for Fanny’s baptismal certificate from the vicar of St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn. He found a willing accomplice there, for Stephen Allen was still the incumbent, and very much resented Fanny’s portrait of his mother in the book. The issue of Fanny’s birthdate became something of a red herring, however. It was easy to prove that Madame d’Arblay had never deliberately lied about her age in the Memoirs, and her supporters used this to dismiss Croker’s criticisms as a whole. But much of what he had said was valid, especially on the subject of Fanny’s suppression of original documents. Macaulay realised the justice of some of Croker’s remarks and politely passed by the opportunity to defend Madame d’Arblay in print in 1833, even though he detested Croker and might have been expected to jump at the chance to score against him.* Macaulay reserved his opinions on Madame d’Arblay until after her death when, in his essay on the Diary and Letters, he felt free both to criticise her shortcomings and praise her real achievements.
What were the reasons for Fanny’s deplorable performance in the Memoirs? Senility is out of the question; she could still write perfectly naturally in her private correspondence long after 1832. Bad taste and bad judgement are part of the answer, as is her residual terror of her father. But it also seems to me significant that the Memoirs represent the nether end, almost the logical conclusion, of Fanny’s persistent neurosis about authorship. Though it was her last published work, it was in one important respect a long-deferred, long-dreaded debut. With the exception of the pamphlet Brief Reflections, the dedication to Camilla and the preface to The Wanderer (all notably stilted), Fanny had always been able to hide her own voice in fictional forms, whether poetry, novels or plays. The nearer these were to her natural modes of expression – such as the correspondence in Evelina – the more comfortable she felt, but the important thing was that they were fiction. When she had to speak unequivocally in her own voice, the same sorts of terrors and inhibitions afflicted her that had disabled her at every public performance throughout her life. It was like the moment when the curtain went up on those amateur dramatics long ago, and Fanny was ‘discovered Drinking Tea’ alone on stage. She knew she looked unnatural, she suffered, but couldn’t do anything to save herself.
Hetty Burney did not live to see the Memoirs published, nor did Frederica Locke. 1832 was a terrible year for Fanny, which also saw the deaths of her nephew William Phillips and her forty-two-year-old niece Marianne Francis. Clement Francis junior had died three years before, and two of Hetty’s daughters, Cecilia and Fanny, were also dead. Charlotte Barrett, now in her forties, was the only one of Charlotte Burney’s four children left alive. With the next generation disappearing before their eyes, the two elderly sisters, Fanny and Charlotte, drew together for comfort.
One final and irreparable heartbreak lay in store for Fanny – the death of her son and heir. In the sad story of Alex d’Arblay’s wasted and apparently unhappy life, it is hard not to conclude that he suffered from the very ‘Wertherism’ that his mother had identified in her novels as the greatest evil of the age. In the mid-1830s, when he had just turned forty, a crisis was brewing in Alex’s affairs. His long absences from duty at Camden Chapel had so tested the patience of some of the parishioners that as early as 1832 they were getting up a petition to have the curate dismissed. But still Alex spent months away, often in hotels, a circumstance which the editors of the Journals and Letters think ‘a symptom perhaps of nervous weariness or some deviation’.91 At home at 1 Half Moon Street (where she had moved in 1829),* Madame d’Arblay had got into the habit of reading the ‘epistolary litters’ on her son’s desk, ostensibly to prevent important business being overlooked by him. Perhaps she discovered more than she bargained for. She professed to believe that her son was indulging in solitary recreation during his unscheduled absences, but clearly feared that there was some more dangerous ‘manie’ being pursued: ‘O be careful for watch is the word!’ she wrote to him mysteriously when he was staying in Brighton in 1834; ‘Let nothing strange occur’.93
A long poem which Alex composed in 1833, ‘Urania, or The Spirit of Poetry’, suggests that one of the things that was depressing the clergymanpoet was the failure of his literary ambitions. The poem ends with the lines:
Grant but one flash of heavenly light,
One hour of inspiration’s might,
Then plunge him in the shades of night,
To be forever free.94
The willingness to bargain eternity against ‘one hour of inspiration’ and the equation of death with freedom are unexpectedly bleak ideas for a pious man to entertain. The poem shows that Alex was subject to strong passions, which are expressed almost exclusively in negative images: ‘Shame veiled her conscience-clouded brow/For whom was spread the lure’; ‘… on the havoc she had made/I saw false beauty smile’, and so on. At the beginning of 1835 Sarah Harriet Burney had heard gossip that a Mrs Clara Bolton, wife of a society doctor, had ‘conceived a mad fancy’ for Alex d’Arblay. ‘She is reported to be very handsome, immoderately clever, an Astrologer, even […] She is very entertaining, & has something of the look of a handsome Witch’.95 ‘The Sibyl’, whose husband had a house very near the d’Arblays in St James’s Square and another in Dover, had been the mistress of Benjamin Disraeli a few years before, and was now soliciting her former lover on Alex d’Arblay’s behalf to get him promoted to a better job than his one at Camden. Even Alex’s mother was drawn into a correspondence with Disraeli on the subject, though at this point she had no idea what role ‘Mrs George Buckley Bolton’ played in the lives of either man.
That Mrs Bolton had a powerful hold over Alex is indisputable. A copy of part of a letter to Alex ‘of Mrs B’ (whom I take to be Clara Bolton), received on 4 April 1835, shows a manipulative woman at work:
My friend M.A.S is very good & we often talk of you – I am convinced if you liked her & popped, you would be accepted […] if I held out to you she was a genius, I should lie – nor is she enthusiastic – her nature is formed in a different mould […] – there now – do you not intend giving us a look ere we leave – we may never meet again under such happy circumstances – the steamboat runs regularly to Dover & comes in one hour less than the coach – do come next week if possible – contrive & give the boobys the slip.96
Alex was peculiarly vulnerable to such a call from ‘the Sibyl’ at that time; a day or two earlier he had received from his mother the harshest letter she had ever written him, betraying exasperation and disgust with her incurably negligent son:
What is all this conduct, Alex? & What does it mean? if a Joke – does it not go too far […]
If it be from worn-out affection – helas! – then, it is from mere, though perhaps unconscious Indifference –
What a Change! – And why did you say write the other day ‘My Nature is so very affectionate – ’
To whom, Alex?97
Alex was stirred by this to take the only sort of action that would guarantee to placate his mother. Astonishingly, within three weeks, he not only let Mrs Bolton introduce him to her pliable friend ‘M.A.S.’, but had proposed and was accepted.
Madame d’Arblay’s reaction was all he could have hoped. ‘Take my tenderest – & delighted Benediction, my dearest – dearest Alex!’ she wrote ecstatically from London.98 Though alarmed by ‘the precipitancy with which you have hurried into so solemn an engagement’, she was prepared to swallow all her misgivings at the prospect of at last seeing him settled. Oddly, though, Alex seemed in no hurry to show off his fiancee. Madame d’Arblay had to wait until July to meet her.
‘M.A.S.’ was a Miss Mary Ann Smith, of Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, who may have been a teacher at a private school in Dover.99 When Charlotte Barrett met her she described Mary Ann as ‘very kind, gentle & pleasing – not really pretty, but nothing unpretty’.100 Sensible, pious, modest and – as it turned out – endlessly patient, Mary Ann won her prospective mother-in-law’s affection immediately: ‘my beloved Charlotte I have seen the young lady – & she has put me in Heaven!’ Fanny wrote excitedly to her sister.101 Alex himself did not seem to feel the same degree of enthusiasm about his bride-elect, however, and it is impossible not to suspect that the whole matter of his engagement was one of convenience, to win a reprieve from disappointing his mother. By the end of the year her pleasure at the betrothal had worn away and she was more than ever distressed by Alex’s continued unexplained absences and neglect of both herself and Miss Smith. An undated letter, thought by the editors of the Journals to be a reply to a frantic one from his mother on 15 December 1835, shows the depths of depression to which Alex was sinking. It seems to be addressed to his mother, but is more like a confessional effusion written under the influence of drink, drugs or desperation:
A deep deep gloom has laid hold of me & God knows if I shall ever shake it off –
The more I pine in solitude the worse it grows
Poor generous noble May! Her fresh heart her happiness ought not to be put at stake upon one whose spirit is broken whose soul is fled – […]
O my dear dear Mammy how – – beautiful your patience your forbearance has been – How unworthy I feel of it – how it cuts me to the Soul
Why have I fled from you who alone can even attempt to console me –
O it is a madness – a delirium without a name –102
While Alex had absconded into his romantic nightmare of dejection and melancholy, Mary Ann and Madame d’Arblay became closer by the day. Mary Ann was long-suffering, but no fool, and wrote candidly to Fanny in January 1836 about her fears for Alex and ‘the influence’ (presumably that of Mrs Bolton) ‘that has sunk into apathy so fine, so noble a mind – but he will recover dearest Madme D’Arblay & be again the comfort to you he has been & to me he will ever be all & every thing’.103 Charlotte Barrett had heard rumours that led her to guess that Alex ‘had some Chère Amie – many people suspect as much from his conduct’, as she wrote to her mother. ‘It would be far best to marry Miss Smith directly’.104
But Alex did not marry Miss Smith. In March 1836, he resigned at last from his post at Camden and the search began again for a suitable living or lectureship. Through the good offices of George Cambridge, he was appointed minister of Ely Chapel, a thirteenth-century church (originally, and latterly, known as St Etheldreda’s) in a neglected backwater of Holborn. The chapel had been out of use for some years, and when it was reopened in the late autumn of 1836 it was still damp, cold and unwelcoming. The Reverend d’Arblay came down with a violent form of ‘flu after the Christmas services which turned to a high fever. By the middle of January he was sinking, and when Archdeacon Cambridge called at Half Moon Street to see Alex, he was not invited in. Madame d’Arblay’s message was that she felt her son’s case was ‘hopeless’, and that ‘by poor Alexander’s express wish she did not go to his Bedside’.105 Alex did not want a repetition of the scenes at his father’s and grandfather’s deathbeds.
It seems appropriate that the only surviving portrait of Alex d’Arblay as an adult is a shadowy silhouette. Mysteriously solitary to the end, he died alone in his room on 19 January 1837, with his poor rejected mother alone in another part of the same house.
‘I cannot describe the chasm of my present existence – so lost in grief – so awake to Resignation – so inert to all that is proffered – so ever & ever retrograding to all that is desolate! – I am a non-entity!’106 Fanny Burney was eighty-four when her son died, a cruelly advanced age at which to lose her only child. Among her friends and relations she appeared to be ‘a pattern of Resignation to the Divine Will’,107 but from her diaries and notebooks of the time she seems to have been more numbed than resigned. 1837 was ‘the most mournful – most earthly hopeless, of any and of all the years yet commenced of my long career!’108 Alex’s expensive library, his papers, his chattels and his debts were now all her responsibility, and she was at a loss to know what to do with ‘this killing mass of constant recurrence to my calamity’.109 The papers, adding to her vast archives of unsorted manuscripts that had belonged to her sister, her father and her husband, presented a huge problem to the bereaved old lady. She was unwilling to destroy so much material ‘that may be amusing & even instructive […] for future times’ – and which was now her only posterity – but the task of examining it was by this time simply beyond her powers. Not only was she tormented by ‘all that was recollective’, but her eyesight, which had been deteriorating steadily throughout the 1830s, was now near ‘total Eclipse’.110
Worst of all, she was plagued by bitter misgivings and self-reproaches about her son. Even a cursory examination of his poems and letters would have shown her (if she had not already understood it) the extent of his melancholia. A remark in one of Charlotte’s condoling letters had arrested her and provoked some miserable self-examinations. Charlotte had said that Alex was ‘no match for the World’, and that it seemed ‘a mercy for him to be taken to Heaven’.111 ‘You thought it a mercy he was taken while yet watched & cherished in This world of which he so little knew how to combat the ways & arts’, Fanny replied in distress. ‘I could read no more! – I had often, transiently admitted that idea – but recoiled from it with shuddering & anguish’.112
Mary Ann Smith, probably realising that her fiancé’s heartbroken parent would not have long to live, offered to come and live with Madame d’Arblay. After some resistance (Fanny was worried that it was too self-sacrificial a gesture on Mary Ann’s part) an arrangement was agreed, and in August 1837 (a month after the young Queen Victoria had acceded to the throne) Madame d’Arblay moved to a new address in Mount Street, which she and Miss Smith intended to share. When Mary Ann moved in the following year, the two women soon evolved a modus vivendi that ensured they both remained independent – ‘that each may have time for our separate business or fancies’ – yet had the comfort of each other’s company if need be. This mitigated the pain of Fanny’s evenings previously spent alone in ‘lassitude & weariness’ and long days spent trying ‘to persecute myself into a new existence that might somewhat repair the havoc of calamity upon the worn-out old one’.113
Fanny was fated to endure one more bereavement. Her sister Charlotte, having travelled from Brighton to visit her in the summer of 1838, took ill and died in lodgings in Mount Street on 12 September at the age of seventy-six. At the beginning of 1839 Fanny wrote in her diary, ‘One more melancholy year let me try – since for some hidden mercy it seems granted me – hidden – for all Life’s happiness is flown with my Alexander.’ Though feeble, depressed, almost blind and still sporadically subject to ‘breast attacks’ that required blistering and bleeding of the old wound, Madame d’Arblay soldiered on through her last year. Despite her fondness for Mary Ann Smith, she did not adopt her as heir – that role was taken by Charlotte Barrett, her tender, clever and sympathetic niece. In the new will Fanny drew up that year, Charlotte was entrusted with ‘my […] immense Mass of Manuscripts collected from my fifteenth year […] with full and free permission according to her unbiassed taste and judgment to keep or destroy them’.114 Generous annuities were bequeathed to Sarah Harriet and to James’s eccentric son Martin, smaller bequests to a host of nephews, nieces and friends. Charles Parr Burney was left the residue of Dr Burney’s papers and Charlotte’s son, Richard Barrett, was made residuary legatee of the estate and of Madame d’Arblay’s manuscripts.
In the summer of 1839 Madame d’Arblay’s health relapsed and she took to her bed. In November Charlotte Barrett came from Brighton to nurse her and the family gathered round, expecting the old lady to die at any moment. Fanny rallied and held on, though her attention was wandering, and when her nieces tried to read to her she said to them, ‘My dear, I cannot understand a word – not a syllable – but I thank God, my mind has not waited till this time.’ ‘Her kindness remained as ever,’ Fanny Raper recalled, ‘though it became more and more distasteful to her to receive us – she could not endure the exertion of speaking.’
By an odd coincidence, or – perhaps – a strange effort of will, Fanny Burney held on to life until 6 January 1840, the day upon which Susan had died exactly forty years before, and which she had kept as a solemn memorial day of prayer and meditation ever since. Her last recorded words to her nieces were, ‘I know I am dying, but I am willing to die; I commit my soul to God, in reliance on the mercy & merit of my redeemer’;115 but these were not her only thoughts. Among the kind words for the nieces and pious hopes for herself, there were still instructions, directions and matters of business about where to find the keys to unlock her boxes of papers. Part of her mind was on posterity to the last.
* Charles Burney junior reported the progress of the Streatham Park sale in a series of letters to Fanny (in the Comyn collection). His observations must have given her pain, for included in the sale were the copies of Evelina and Cecilia which the author had presented to Mrs Thrale. The first leaf of the latter (on which Fanny would have written an inscription) had been torn out; in the former, ‘From the Scribler’ was annotated by Mrs Thrale, ‘N.B. Scribler with one B, Madame Dab!’
* It is not clear when this portrait was begun, but it was probably during d’Arblay’s 1816 trip. His comment in late June 1817 that ‘poor Vernet has not yet finished my portrait’ betrays a certain impatience, and Fanny’s response, ‘let me not pass another Winter without it,’ shows it was begun at least a year before.11
* William Hazlitt made a sardonic observation on the banality of the subject in 1825: ‘The Crossing of the Alps has, I believe, given some of our fashionables a shivering-fit of morality; as the sight of Mont Blanc convinced our author [Tom Moore] of the Being of God – they are seized with an amiable horror and remorse for the vices of others.’58
* S.S. Wesley, the famous organist and composer.
* Lally-Tolendal had asked her to promote the cause of the refugee Constantine Sevastopulo – he visited Bolton Street three times in 1826.73
* Macaulay and Croker were both, at this date, Members of the House of Commons and involved in parliamentary controversy over the 1832 Reform Bill. They also had a number of long-running literary feuds, notably over Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. ‘I detest him more than cold veal,’ Macaulay once said of his rival.90
* An interesting reference to these premises survives in P. Cunningham’s Handbook of London (1850): ‘I remember Madame D’Arblay (Fanny Burney) living on the east side of the street, in the last house overlooking Piccadilly. Her sitting-room was the front room over the shop, then a linendraper’s, now a turner’s, shop.’92