“And then it all goes over again!
“This story is always a-propos; if health is mentioned, it is instanced to show its precariousness; if life, to bewail what he has lost of it; if pain, to relate what he has suffered; if pleasure, to recapitulate what he has been deprived of; but if a physician is hinted at, eagerly indeed is the opportunity seized of inveighing against the whole faculty.”
There is more, especially of the General grumbling over the newspaper; but enough has been given. In all these pictures, it may be noted, Miss Burney insists upon her fidelity to fact. “I never mix truth and fiction,” she tells “Daddy” Crisp. “I have other purposes for imaginary characters than filling letters with them.” “The world, and especially the Great world, is so filled with absurdity of various sorts, now bursting forth in impertinence, now in pomposity, now giggling in silliness, and now yawning in dullness, that there is no occasion for invention to draw what is striking in every possible species of the ridiculous.” As time went on, her opportunities for study rather increased than decreased. At the beginning of 1780, as already related, the question of her comedy was again partly revived. Then there were proposals for a tour in Italy with the Thrales which was afterwards abandoned. But in April she went with her friends to Bath, making acquaintance en route, at the Bear at Devizes, with the hostess’s clever son, who afterwards became Sir Thomas Lawrence. At Bath they lodge (like Smollett’s Mr. Bramble) in the South Parade, with Allen’s Prior Park, the meadows, and “the soft flowing Avon” in view; and are speedily absorbed in the fashionable diversions of the place. Prelates were preaching at the Abbey and St. James’s Churches; there were public breakfasts in the Spring Gardens; the Pump Room was crowded with company and the Walks with promenaders; Mrs. Siddons was playing Belvidera at Mr. Palmer’s Theatre in Orchard Street; and life was one endless round of fiddles, dinners, concerts, assemblies, balls, card-parties and scandal. Miss Burney’s canvas becomes more and more crowded, and less detailed, affording space only for occasional vignettes such as the following: “In the evening we had Mrs. L —— , a fat, round, panting, short-breathed old widow; and her daughter, a fubsy, good-humoured, laughing, silly, merry old maid. They are rich folks, and live together very comfortably, and the daughter sings — not in your fine Italian taste! no, that she and her mother agree to hold very cheap — but all about Daphne, and Chloe, and Damon, and Phillis, and Jockey!” Or this, — on the same page,— “Mrs. K —— is a Welsh lady, of immense fortune, who has a house in the Crescent, and lives in a most magnificent style. She is about fifty, very good-humoured, well-bred, and civil, and her waist does not measure above a hogshead. She is not very deep, I must own; but what of that? If all were wits, where would be the admirers at them?”
Dr. Johnson did not take part in the Bath expedition. He would, indeed, have come; but Mrs. Thrale had discouraged his doing so, feeling sure that a watering-place life would have horribly wearied him, which is not only possible but extremely probable. Literature — that is to say the literature of 1780 — was nevertheless fairly represented in Bladud’s ancient City. First and foremost there was Mrs. Thrale’s rival, Mrs. Montagu, with her attendant train of blue-stockings; there was Anstey of the New Bath Guide, whom — as we have seen — wiseacres had credited with Evelina; there was Mrs. Susannah Dobson, the translator of Petrarch; there was Melmoth of Pliny’s Letters; there was Miss Elizabeth Carter of Epictetus; there was Lady Miller of Batheaston and the famous Frascati vase wherein — according to Macaulay— “fools were wont to put bad verses,” but which, however, at this precise moment of time, was not en fonction.[46] To the failings of her confrères and consœurs, Miss Burney, it must be confessed, in her capacity of “faithful historian” is not always “very kind.” Of poor Lady Miller, who died a year later, she writes, “She is a round, plump, coarse-looking dame of about forty, and while all her aim is to appear an elegant woman of fashion, all her success is to seem an ordinary woman in very common life, with fine clothes on. Her habits are bustling, her air is mock-important, and her manners very inelegant.” Of Mrs. Dobson, she reports that “though coarse, low-bred, forward, self-sufficient, and flaunting, she seems to have a strong and masculine understanding, and parts that, had they been united with modesty, or fostered by education, might have made her a shining and agreeable woman; but she has evidently kept low company, which she has risen above in literature, but not in manners.” Of Miss Carter, on the contrary, then growing old, Miss Burney says, that she “never saw age so graceful in the female sex yet, her whole face seems to beam with goodness, piety and philanthropy.” Anstey she finds not very agreeable— “shyly important, and silently proud,” and moreover unable to forget that he is the author of a popular work; while Pliny Melmoth is written down as “intolerably self-sufficient.”
Some of the Bath visitors were naval officers who — it should be observed — did not at all accept Captain Mirvan’s portrait as typical of their profession. One of them, Mrs. Thrale’s cousin, Captain Cotton, pretended “in a comical and good-humoured way” to resent it highly; and so — he told the author — did all the Captains in the Navy. Admiral Byron, too, — the Byron of the “narrative” in Don Juan, — though he admired Evelina, was “not half pleased with the Captain’s being such a brute.” But Miss Burney herself is unconvinced and impenitent. “The more I see of sea-captains, the less reason I have to be ashamed of Captain Mirvan; for they have all so irresistible a propensity to wanton mischief, — to roasting beaux, and detesting old women, that I quite rejoice I showed the book to no one ere printed, lest I should have been prevailed upon to soften his character.” What the sea-captains, and the Bathonians generally thought of their critic, is not related, save in a sentence from Thraliana:— “Miss Burney was much admired at Bath (1780); the puppy-men said, ‘She had such a drooping air and such a timid intelligence’; or ‘a timid air,’ I think it was, and ‘a drooping intelligence’; never sure was such a collection of pedantry and affectation as filled Bath when we were on that spot.” The almost imperceptible feline touch in this passage serves to remind us that, in the padlocked privacy of her personal records, Mrs. Thrale did not scruple (like Dr. Johnson) to mingle praise with blame when occasion required. From other entries in Thraliana, Fanny seems to have sometimes vexed her friend by her prudish punctiliousness and dread of patronage, as well as by her perhaps more defensible preference for her own family. “What a blockhead Dr. Burney is to be always sending for his daughter home so! what a monkey! is she not better and happier with me than she can be anywhere else?” . . . “If I did not provide Fanny with every wearable — every wishable, indeed — it would not vex me to be served so; but to see the impossibility of compensating for the pleasures of St. Martin’s Street, makes one at once merry and mortified.” There were other reasons, as we shall learn presently, why Dr. Burney was anxious that Fanny should come back.[47]
Meanwhile, early in June, the Bath visit came to a premature conclusion. Returning from a visit to Lady Miller, Mrs. Thrale received intelligence of the Gordon riots. Her house in the Borough had been besieged by the mob, and only saved from destruction by the assistance of the Guards and the presence of mind of the superintendent, Mr. Perkins. Streatham Place was also threatened, and emptied of its furniture. What was worse, Mr. Thrale, then in a very unsatisfactory state of health, had been falsely denounced as a papist; and as there were also rioters at Bath, Mrs. Thrale and Fanny decided that it would be best to quit that place, and travel about the country. They started for Brighton; but before they got to Salisbury, London was again, in Dr. Burney’s words, “the most secure residence in the kingdom.” For the remainder of the year 1780, Fanny seems to have stayed quietly at St. Martin’s Street and Chessington. In March, 1781, she came to town to find the Thrales settled for the time in a hired house in Grosvenor Square and talking vaguely of continental travel — to Spa, to Italy, and elsewhere. But Mr. Thrale was obviously growing worse; and in April he died suddenly of apoplexy, “on the morning o
f a day on which half the fashion of London had been invited to an intended assembly at his house.” His death threw an infinity of additional care upon his already over-burdened widow; but, as soon as she was able, she again summoned Miss Burney to Streatham Place, where off and on, she lived until September. Then “Daddy” Crisp, descending from his Surrey retreat, bore her away perforce to Chessington; and at Chessington she continued to stay until the beginning of 1782, when she returned to Newton House in order to be present at her sister Susan’s marriage at St. Martin’s Church to Captain Molesworth Phillips of the Marines, a comrade, in Cook’s last voyage, of James Burney. After this, Fanny remained for some time quietly at home.
The reason why Dr. Burney wished to get his daughter away from Streatham Place, and why, at last, Mr. Crisp fetched her thence, — may perhaps be guessed. She had begun to work upon another novel; and her long absences from home seriously interfered with its progress. During the latter half of 1780, she had written steadily; but, in the following year, her renewed intercourse with Mrs. Thrale once more interrupted her labours; and her two fathers grew anxious that she should lose no further time. Of the advantages up to a certain point of her connection with the Streatham circle, both of them had been fully aware — Crisp especially. “Your time,” he had written to her in April, 1780, “could not be better employed, for all your St. Martin’s daddy wanted to retain you for some other purpose. You are now at school, the great school of the world, where swarms of new ideas and new characters will continually present themselves before you, —
‘which you’ll draw in,
As we do air, fast as ’tis ministered.’”[48]
But there must be a limit, even to schooling; and that limit, in the opinion of Dr. Burney and his friend, had now been reached. So Fanny saw no more of Streatham or Mrs. Thrale till her new book was finished.
[36] Edward Francis Burney, 1760-1848, the artist referred to in the above paragraph, was a frequent contributor to the Royal Academy between 1780 and 1793. His solitary “portrait of a Lady,” 1785, may have been his cousin’s picture. His first exhibits (418-20) were three “stained Drawings” for Evelina, in which Mme. Duval, Captain Mirvan, Mr. Villars, the heroine and her father, were all introduced. The Evelina of these designs is said to have strongly resembled the beautiful Sophy Streatfield; and an artful compliment was paid to Johnson by hanging his portrait in Mr. Villars’ parlour. Archdeacon Burney has one of these delicate little pictures.
[37] No doubt The Castle of Otranto, which Lowndes himself had published in 1764.
[38] The bibliography of Miss Burney’s first book is extremely perplexing. In the “Advertisement” to Cecilia, the author says that Evelina (which, it will be remembered, appeared in January, 1778) passed “through Four Editions in one year.” In the Memoirs of Dr. Burney, she implies that it went through three editions in five months (ii. ). But the second and third editions are both dated 1779; and it must have been in the first months of that year that the sale was most active. In May, 1779, comes a reference to the fourth edition as on the stocks. “Evelina continues to sell in a most wonderful manner; a fourth edition is preparing, with cuts [it should be copper plates], designed by Mortimer just before he died, and executed by Hall and Bartolozzi” (Diary and Letters, 1892, i. ). John Hamilton Mortimer, A.R.A., the artist indicated, died 4th February, 1779. His drawings, which cost £73, still exist. It may here be added that Mrs. Chappel, of East Orchard, Shaftesbury, possesses a copy of the second edition of Evelina (1779), presented to Dr. Burney, — whose name is filled up in the heading of the dedicatory verses,— “From his dutiful scribler,” i.e. “F. B.”
[39] This phrase of “Little Burney” — or more generally “dear little Burney” — to the sensitive Fanny’s “infinite frettation” got into print. A certain Rev. George Huddesford embodied it in a rhymed satire upon the camp which fears of French invasion had established at Warley Common in Essex, and which King George and Queen Charlotte visited in October, 1778. Johnson had gone there earlier, as the guest of Bennet Langton, who was a Captain in the Lincolnshire militia.
[40] Idler, June 9 and 16, 1759.
[41] See ante, .
[42] Miss Hannah More’s successful tragedy of Percy was produced at Covent Garden, 10 December, 1777.
[43] See Diary and Letters, 1892, i. .
[44] Probably that afterwards produced at Drury Lane in 1781 as The Royal Suppliants, and based upon the Heraclidæ of Euripides.
[45] Miss Burney here forgets that she had already assisted at a private view of Miss Streatfield’s performance (Diary and Letters, 1892, i. -6).
[46] There is an account of the Batheaston Thursday Parnassus in a letter from Walpole to Conway, 15 January, 1775. The historical urn no longer exists. But the verses cannot have been all bad. Garrick was responsible for some of them, and Graves of The Spiritual Quixote. Another contributor was Anstey, who wrote his Election Ball for Lady Miller.
[47] Autobiography, etc. of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale), by A. Hayward, 1861, (2nd edn.), i. p, 126.
[48] Cymbeline, Act 1. Sc. i.
CHAPTER V. CECILIA — AND AFTER
Either from Mr. Crisp’s injunctions as to secrecy, or from suppressions in the Diary as we now have it, Miss Burney’s record contains but few references to the progress of Cecilia — which was the name of the new book. And these references occur chiefly in her letters to her critic at Chessington. As already stated, there had been a shadowy “Cecilia,” with an imperilled fortune, in the comedy of The Witlings. In December, 1779, Miss Burney had shown her “Daddy” a sketch of a fresh heroine (then apparently called “Albina”); and he speaks of this fresh heroine’s story in the following April as a “new and striking” idea, affording, among other advantages, “a large field for unhackneyed characters, observations, [and] subjects for satire and ridicule.” It further appears that the Cecilia or Albina in question was to be “unbeautiful” but “clever,” — a deviation from the conventional in which (whether she carried it out or not) Miss Burney must have anticipated some of her distinguished successors. Ten months later, in February, 1781, she is hard at work. “I think I shall always hate this book which has kept me so long away from you, as much as I shall always love Evelina, who first comfortably introduced me to you,” — she tells Mrs. Thrale. Then, — a year later still, — after the long interruption in her task following upon Mr. Thrale’s death, there are groanings over the labour of transcription, — a volume (and there are five) takes a fortnight, — impatience on her father’s part for publication, — the usual nervous apprehensions of hopeless failure, and much defence and discussion of detail with “Daddy” Crisp. At last, — when Mrs. Thrale has declared that Evelina was but a baby to the new venture; and the cautious critic of Chessington, protesting that there had been nothing like it since Fielding and Smollett, has rashly proclaimed his willingness to ensure its rapid and universal success for half-a-crown, — on Friday the 12th July, 1782, Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress: By the Author of Evelina, price 12s. 6d., sewed, is published by Messrs. Payne and Cadell, in five duodecimo volumes. The first edition was of two thousand copies; and the price paid to the author for the copyright, £250.[49] As the Payne above mentioned was none other than the friend of the family, “Honest Tom Payne” of the Mews’ Gate, afterwards James Burney’s father-in-law, it may fairly be assumed that this amount, trifling as it must seem, — contrasted with the sums received modern authors addressing larger audiences under different conditions, — was not considered inadequate by Fanny’s advisers. Indeed, from a chance reference in the Memoirs to the arrangement of “the Cecilian business,” we may conclude that, upon this occasion, Dr. Burney himself took charge of the negotiations.
Neither for ingenuity nor novelty had the plot of Miss Burney’s first story been remarkable. The plot of her second attempt, though still conventional, was somewhat more ambitious. Miss Cecilia Beverley, a young lady in her twenty-first year, is heir, not only to ten thousand pounds from her father, bu
t to three thousand per annum from her uncle, the Dean of —— , to which latter inheritance is attached the restrictive condition that, should she marry, the happy man must take her name as well as her money. This turns out to be a very material detail in the novel. When the story begins, the Dean of —— is just dead; and Miss Beverley and her fortune, during the brief remainder of her minority, are left in the hands of three guardians — a fashionable and extravagant Mr. Harrel, a vulgar and miserly Mr. Briggs, and a very proud and pompous Mr. Delvile (of Delvile Castle). In the first chapter of the story, Cecilia is quitting Mrs. Charlton, with whom she has been staying, to take up her quarters in town with the Harrels, — Mrs. Harrel, in her green and salad days, having been the heroine’s “most favourite young friend.” In London, where would-be suitors — most of them attracted to the beaux yeux de sa cassette — cluster about her like flies round a honey pot, she speedily becomes aware that the playmate of her youth is terribly “translated” by the dissipations of a London life, that her friend’s husband is an irredeemable gamester, and that both are palpably on the down-grade. Her available means become speedily involved in Harrel’s ever-urgent necessities; and the crisis of this part of the narrative is reached, about the middle of volume three, by his suicide in a very melodramatic fashion at Vauxhall Gardens, where, for the nonce, the chief personages in the book are ingeniously assembled. After Harrel’s death, Cecilia goes to stay at Delvile Castle. Here an attachment already begun with the son, Mortimer Delvile, a young man at once excitable and irresolute, is further developed. But now the dead hand comes in. The haughty Delviles cannot bring themselves to consent to the change of the family name, even “for a consideration” of £3000 per annum. There are consequently scenes, in one of which Mrs. Delvile, after using extremely exaggerated expressions, exclaims “my brain is on fire!” — and breaks a blood vessel. Eventually, after she has been softened by illness, a suggestion is made that Cecilia shall surrender her uncle’s fortune, with its vexatious obligations, and content herself with her Mortimer and her patrimony of ten thousand pounds. Unfortunately for this proposition, the ten thousand pounds in question are now non-existent, having been absorbed by the creditors of Harrel and others, — that is to say, by the Jews. After this, a private marriage takes place, with the connivance of Mrs. Delvile. But Cecilia’s troubles are not yet at an end. Fresh and very unforeseen complications arise, and, for a brief period, she goes as mad as Clementina or Clarissa. At length the curtain comes down upon a Johnsonian passage in which she is left exhibiting the pensive and reluctant optimism of Rasselas.
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 703