Her journals abound in traits of the time and its noted people. Dr. Johnson brings blind Mrs. Williams to tea in St Martin’s Street In his vast presence, that lively American, Mrs. Paradise, makes Barry dance a minuet with herself — Barry, whose politeness was as “rare as a bit of Peg Woffington’s writing”! Barry provokes Susan by insisting on bringing her home from a tea-party, although her father’s man-servant has been sent for her, and by staying in St. Martin’s Street (she “verily believes”) till midnight. Uninvited guests leave the house about eleven; after which there is supper, “an excuse with us, as you know,” (says Fanny,) “for chatting over baked apples.” Hetty, her husband, and his brother Edward, now and then “drop in” to supper; Dr. Burney appears, perchance with sword and bag, on his way from the King’s brother’s music party to his own “Chaos.” He says a few kind and pleasant words; then bids all good night, and “outwatches the Bear,” pondering over the little which has been spared to tell us of the manner of the music made by the “godlike Greek.”
PERSONS OF THE DRAMA
A LIST OF THOSE MEMBERS OF THE BURNEY FAMILY WHO APPEAR IN THESE PAGES
MRS. ANN BURNEY (born Cooper), widow of James Burney (or Mac Burney), Esq.; a Shropshire lady, of advanced age, as she is said to have refused Wycherley, the dramatist, who died in 1715.
[She was the second wife of James Burney; his first having been Rebecca Ellis. James had fifteen children, of whom nine lived; but in some cases it is not clear of which marriage they came.]
1. RICHARD, of Barborne Lodge, Worcester, elder son of James and Ann Burney; of whom more hereafter.
2. ANN, a daughter of James and Ann Burney.
3. CHARLES (known as Dr. Burney), their second son and youngest child. He was born in 1726, and married first, Esther Sleepe, who died September 28, 1761. Doctor of Music (Oxford, 1769); F.R.S., 1773; Member of the French Institute, Classe des Beaux Arts, 1811.
The children of Charles and Esther Burney were:
1. ESTHER, married her Cousin, Charles Rousseau Burney.
2. JAMES (the Admiral), born June 5, 1750, married Sarah, daughter of Thomas Payne.
3. FRANCES, born at Lynn Regis, on the 13th of June, 1752, married Lieutenant-General Comte D’Arblay, an officer of the (Noble) “Corps de Gardes du Roi,” and sometime commandant of Longwy; a Knight of the Orders of St. Louis, the Legion of Honour, and the “Lys.”
4. SUSANNA ELIZABETH, married Molesworth Phillips, Lieut.-
Colonel of Marines.
5. CHARLES, married a daughter of Dr. Rose, of the “Monthly Review.”
1. CHARLOTTE ANN, married, first, Clement Francis, Esq., of Aylsham, Norfolk, secondly, Ralph Broome, Esq., of the Bengal Army.
DR. BURNEY married secondly (in October, 1767), Elizabeth, widow of Stephen Allen of Lynn Regis, who appears to have been her cousin, as she was born an Allen.
The children of Charles and Elizabeth Burney were: —
1. RICHARD THOMAS, in the Indian Civil Service.
2. SARAH HARRIET, a novelist.
REBECCA BURNEY, who was living with Mrs. Burney the elder, was, most likely, a half-sister of Dr. Burney. There was also a sister, or half-sister, Mrs. Gregg, and a half-sister Mrs. Mancer.
RICHARD BURNEY, of Worcester, had five sons, and three daughters, but as we do not know their precise order of birth, we put first (as he is always called “Mr. Burney”): —
CHARLES ROUSSEAU, who, in 1770, married his cousin Esther. [Their eldest child, the only one named in these journals, was Anna Maria, who married M. Bourdois, an early friend of General D’Arblay. He was aide-de-camp to General Dumourier, and distinguished himself in the battle of Jemappes.
2. RICHARD.
3. EDWARD FRANCIS, the painter.
4. THOMAS.
5. JAMES.
6. ELIZABETH.
7. REBECCA (Mrs. Sandford).
8. ANNE (or Hannah), called “Nancy” (Mrs. Hawkins.)
The step-children of Dr. Burney were the Rev. Stephen Allen and his sisters, Maria (Mrs. Rishton) and “Bessy” (Mrs. Meeke).
The other connexions mentioned are Mr. Sleepe of Watford (some kinsman of Dr. Burney’s first wife); Mr. Thomas Burney, who had taken the name of Holt, “a cousin of ours”; Mrs. Allen, mother of the second Mrs. Burney; Mrs. Arthur Young (Patty Allen), Mrs. Burney’s sister; and her husband, the well-known writer on agriculture.
We have no baptismal registers to quote for the ages of Hetty, Susan, or Maria Allen, but it is near the truth if we assume that when these diaries begin, Hetty was in her nineteenth year, Susan in her fourteenth, and Maria Allen about seventeen.
1768.
EDITOR’S NOTE FOR THE YEAR
THE first of these journals is wrapped in soft, old-fashioned, blue paper, to which it has once been stitched. Madame D’Arblay has written on the cover, “Juvenile Journal, No. I. — Curtailed and erased of what might be mischievous from friendly or Family Considerations.” Within the cover, some figures, which seem to be hers, are hard to make out. There are also these words— “Original old Juvenile Private Journal, No. I. — Begun at 15 — total 66.” If “total 66” refers to the number of leaves, or of pages, no such number is left, nor can any part of it have been written at the age of fifteen, unless it be the fanciful address to Nobody, which is upon a loose leaf, of a yellower and more worn look than the yellow and worn leaves which follow; it is also in slightly different handwriting. Upon this prefatory leaf we find again, “This strange Medley of Thoughts and Facts was written at the age of fifteen, for my genuine and most private Amusement.” Below this, in a girlish round hand, is written “Fanny Burney.”
More than fifty years, it is probable, lie between the writing of the Diary, and the writing of the notes on, and within, the cover; and in those years many of the “changes and chances of this mortal life” had befallen their writer; enough to blur a memory even so excellent as hers. Fame, and much life in public; a court life; a married life, involving a residence in a foreign country for ten years at a stretch; a stolen visit to England, a return to Paris, a flight to Brussels before Waterloo, England again, the death of a father, of a husband, changes of dwelling from Loudon to Bath, from Bath to London; the burden of examining Dr. Burney’s piles of manuscript, a toil which we have proof was not ended in 1820. What marvel, if looking over her own papers, from which she had been parted while living abroad, and which she seems not to have read and revised until she needed them to recall incidents essential to a memoir of her father, what marvel that she erred in her dates? The mistake of a year (be it for more or for less), in the life of any one, man or woman, is so common, in youth or in age, that it need not be mentioned unless other facts depend upon it. Miss Edgeworth (one of the least likely of women to be suspected of making herself out to be younger than she was), wrote, and published, in the memoirs of her father, that she was twelve years old when she first went to Ireland, whereas it is indubitable that she was fifteen; but she believed it, and that her first impressions of Ireland were taken at twelve years old, and not at the far more sensitive age of fifteen. So Miss Burney believed herself to have been fifteen in 1768; but that is disproved by the register of the Chapelry of St. Nicholas, in the parish of St. Margaret’s, King’s Lynn, which gives her baptism upon the 7th of July, 1752, by the Rev. Thomas Pyle — about three weeks after her birth on the 13th of June.
As the date of Dr. Burney’s second marriage was uncertain, the register of St. James’s, Westminster, has been examined for the sake of complete accuracy. Under the marriages was found in “1767, No. 7, 294. Charles Burney, of this parish, to Elizabeth Allen, of Lynn Regis, Norfolk, by Licence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, 2nd October, M. Pugh, Curate.” The witnesses were Isabella Strange, and Richard Fuller.
This completely tallies with the entry on “Monday night, May 30th,” in this Diary, that “last night, Hetty, Susey, Charlotte, and I were at tea, mama and Miss Allen not being returned from Harrow,” when the “charming” Arthur Young “entered th
e room.” This second marriage was a secret from all the friends of Dr. Burney, except Mr. Crisp and Miss Dolly Young, for reasons which concerned the lady. Her mother, who seems to have had much control over her, and the brothers of her first husband (who was an Allen also and most likely her cousin), would apparently have opposed the match. The Allen family was rich, her husband’s brothers were the guardians of her three children, and she had lately lost all the money which she could herself control by trusting its investment to an imprudent speculator.
Dr. Burney’s income was a good one, but it depended upon his health, which had once before failed, and driven him for years, from London to Lynn. Then he had six children, the eldest old enough to give trouble to a stepmother, had she not been so sweet-tempered as was Hetty; the youngest, Charlotte, about seven years old. “Since 1724” (according to an historian of Lynn), “when Stephen Allen was made a freeman of Lynn, on the payment of twenty nobles,” the Allens had “figured among the first families in the town.” The loss of Mrs. Allen’s own fortune proved to her that Dr. Burney took little interest in her money; and it was agreed between them that a secret marriage was the best way to avoid opposition to an open engagement. After a honeymoon spent near Chesington, the lady came to live for a while in Poland Street, but still as Mrs. Allen, and in a house of her own. In the end all came out through the wrong delivery of some letter. Things had been smoothed by the 30th of May, 1768. The two families were then living together, in Poland Street. Most likely before this journal begins, Fanny had made that famous bonfire of her writings in the paved court of her father’s house (which his children used as a playground), while he was at Chesington, and her stepmother at Lynn.
To Lynn Mrs. Burney was drawn every year by her mother; perhaps, too, by the uncles of her children, and others of their Allen kinsfolk. Besides, she had a house settled upon her, and some one must live in it. Later on, we find Hetty or Fanny going to take her place at Lynn when she went to London. To that house the delicate Susan was sent for change of air, and Charlotte (during her holidays, and after she was taken from school), spent most of her time at Lynn, with little Bessy Allen. In the November of this year, Richard, Dr. Burney’s son by the second marriage, was born at Lynn. With a stepmother so much in Norfolk, and with Dr. Burney giving lessons from eight, and in one case from seven, in the morning; often dining in his coach, and coming home mainly to sit up the night through, writing in his study, Hetty, Fanny, and Susan were often almost entirely thrown upon their own guidance when in London. It will be seen that they ran some risks, but their innocent steadiness of character preserved their hearts from harm. Sweeter and purer girls it would be hard to find in any century; nor did Susan lack aught but the health which was never granted her for long, to give her distinction as an author — scarcely second to that of her sister Fanny.
In the following transcript square brackets denote (unless otherwise explained) that the words or passages enclosed within them are insertions, alterations, or substitutions in the Diary as originally written; all probably made by Mme. D’Arblay at a much later period of her life. Where asterisks or points occur they indicate that leaves have been cut away or the writing obliterated.
JUVENILE JOURNAL: ADDRESSED TO A CERTAIN MISS NOBODY
Poland Street, London, March 27.
TO have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a Journal. A Journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole heart! But a thing of this kind ought to be addressed to somebody — I must imagion myself to be talking — talking to the most intimate of friends — to one in whom I should take delight in confiding, and remorse in concealment: — but who must this friend be? to make choice of one in whom I can but half rely, would be to frustrate entirely the intention of my plan. The only one I could wholly, totally confide in, lives in the same house with me, and not only never has, but never will, leave me one secret to tell her. To whom, then, must I dedicate my wonderful, surprising and interesting Adventures? — to whom dare I reveal my private opinion of my nearest relations? my secret thoughts of my dearest friends? my own hopes, fears, reflections, and dislikes? — Nobody!
To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved — to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my life! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody? No secret can I conceal from Nobody, and to Nobody can I be ever unreserved. Disagreement cannot stop our affection, Time itself has no power to end our friendship. The love, the esteem I entertain for Nobody, Nobody’s self has not power to destroy. From Nobody I have nothing to fear, the secrets sacred to friendship Nobody will not reveal when the affair is doubtful, Nobody will not look towards the side least favourable.
I will suppose you, then, to be my best friend, (tho’ God forbid you ever should!) my dearest companion — and a romantick girl, for mere oddity may perhaps be more sincere — more tender — than if you were a friend in propria persona — in as much as imagionation often exceeds reality. In your breast my errors may create pity without exciting contempt; may raise your compassion, without eradicating your love. From this moment, then, my dear girl — but why, permit me to ask, must a female be made Nobody? Ah! my dear, what were this world good for, were Nobody a female? And now I have done with preambulation.
Monday Night, May 30.
O my dear — such a charming day! and then last night — well, you shall have it all in order — as well as I can recollect.
Last night, while Hetty, Susey, [Charlotte] and myself were at tea, mama and Miss Allen not being returned from Harrow, and Papa in his study busy [as usual, that lively, charming, spirited] Mr. Young enter’d the room. O how glad we were to see him. He was in extreme good spirits. Hetty sat down to the harpsichord and sung to him — mama soon returned, and then they left it. Well, and so — upon the entrance of fathers and mothers — we departed this life of anguish and misery, and rested our weary souls in the Elysian fields — my Papa’s study — there freed from the noise and bustle of the world, enjoy’d the... harmony of chattering, and the melody of musick! — there, burying each gloomy thought, each sad reflection, in the hearse [?] of dissipation, lost the remembrance of our woes, our cruel misfortunes, our agonizing sorrows — and graciously permitted them to glide along the stream of reviving comfort, blown by the gentle gale of newborn hope, till they reposed in the bosom of oblivion — then — No ’tis impossible! this style is too great, too sublime to be supported with proper dignity — the sublime and beautiful how charmingly blended! yes! I will desist — I will lay down my pen while I can with.... It would be miraculous had I power to maintain the same glowing enthusiasm — the same — on my word I can not go on, my imagination is rais’d too high, it soars above this little dirty sphere, it transports me beyond mortality — it conveys me to the Elysian fields — but my ideas grow confused — I fear you cannot comprehend my meaning — all I shall add, is to beg you would please to attribute your not understanding the sublimity of my sentiments to your own stupidity and dullness of apprehension, and not to my want of meaning — which is only too fine to be clear. —
After this beautiful flow of expression, refinement of sentiment and exaltation of ideas, can I meanly descend to common life? can I basely stoop to relate the particulars of common life? can I condescendingly deign to recapitulate vulgar conversation? I can!
O what a falling off is here! — what a chatter there was! — however I was not engaged in it.... and therefore, on a little consideration, a due sense of my own superlative merit convinces me that to mention anything more of the matter would be nonsense. Adieu, then, most amiable — who? Nobody!
Not so fast, good girl! not so fast— ’tis true, I have done with last night — but I have all to-day — a charming one it is, too — to relate. Last night, to
my great satisfaction, Mama prevail’d on Mr Y —— — to promise to be of our party to-day to Greenwich. Well, he slept here. For my part, I could not sleep all night, I was up before five o’clock — Hetty and Susette were before six, — and Miss Allen soon after — while we were all adorning our sweet persons, — each at a looking-glass — admiring the enchanting object it presented to our view, who should rap at the chamber door but — (my cheeks are crimsoned with the blush of indignation while I write it) — Mr. Young! I ran into a closet, and lock’d myself up — however he did not pollute my chamber with his unhallow’d feet, but poor Miss Allen was in a miserable condition — her Journal, which he wanted to see, in full sight — on her open bureau. He said he had a right to it as her uncle. She called Hetty into her room and they were a long time ere they could turn him out of it.
Well but, now for the Greenwich party. We set out at about ten or eleven — the company was, mama, Mr. Young, Miss Allen, Stephen, and your most obsequious slave. — The Conversation as we went was such as I would wish to remember — I will try if I can, for I think it even worthy the perusal of Nobody! — what an honour!
Well, I have rack’d my brains half-an-hour — in vain — and if you imagine I shall trouble myself with racking the dear creatures any longer you are under a mistake. One thing, however which related to myself, I shall mention, as that struck me too forcibly to be now, or perhaps ever, forgot: besides, it has been the occasion of my receiving so much raillery, &c., that it is requisite for you to hear it, in order to observe the decorum due to the Drama. Talking of happiness and misery, sensibility and a total want of feeling, my mama said, turning to me. “Here’s a girl will never be happy! Never while she lives! — for she possesses perhaps as feeling a heart as ever girl had!” Some time after, when we were near the end of our journey, “and so,” said Mr. Young— “my friend Fanny possesses a very feeling heart?” He harp’d on this some little time till at last he said he would call me feeling Fanny was characteristick, he said, and a great deal more such nonsense, that put me out of all patience, which same virtue I have not yet sufficiently recovered to recount any more of our conversation, charming as part of it was, which part you may be sure I had my share in, how else could it be charming?....
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 450