Fanny Burney: A biography

The Burney children were too young to attend the famous pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, Bagnigge Wells or Marylebone, but they could admire the fashion-conscious crowds strutting and posing in Pall Mall and St James’s Park, or the guests, magnificently dressed for masquerades and balls, arriving by carriage or chair outside Mrs Corneley’s assembly rooms in Soho Square. When Fanny was writing her novel Evelina a decade and a half later, the remembered excitement of her own arrival in London made all the difference to her treatment of a familiar fictional device. The first impressions of a fresh-faced country heroine had been used by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, even Cleland (unlikely though it is that Fanny Burney ever read Fanny Hill), to provide a sardonic commentary on the London social scene, but Burney knew it from life as well as from fiction. Evelina’s breathless letters to her guardian, Mr Villars, catch the childish beguilement of the author herself experiencing the bustling, brightly-coloured, noisy, smelly and dangerous life of the capital for the first time when she arrived there in 1760, an open-minded, open-eyed and open-mouthed eight-year-old.

Charles Burney admitted that a great deal of his success as a music teacher on his return to London in 1760 derived from ‘the powers of my little girl’, eleven-year-old Hetty. Musical child prodigies were fashionable, and even before the family’s move to London, Hetty had performed on the harpsichord at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket53 and attracted the praise of the king’s brother by her mastery of ‘some of the most wild and difficult lessons of Scarlatti’.54 Burney wrote showy exercises for her and for his brother Richard’s eldest son, Charles Rousseau Burney, a precociously talented violinist and keyboard player. The next generation of musical Wunderkinder to hit London would be Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1764, but for the time being the Burneys held the laurels. The proud Charles published a volume of harpsichord lessons to cash in on the method he had used to teach these two celebrated young performers, and was overcome with requests for new pupils, especially from among the ‘great folks’ in whose drawing rooms and music rooms his ingratiating charm went down particularly well.

Compared with her high-achieving older sister, her lively brother James and ‘angelic’ little Susan, Fanny must have seemed dull. She did play the harpsichord, but unsurprisingly chose not to be heard doing so in a household full of virtuosi, restricting herself to ‘thrumming’ occasionally on the keyboard when she thought she was alone. Hetty not only got intensive music tuition from her father; she was also her mother’s ‘chief attention’.55 Together mother and eldest daughter were reading all of Pope’s works and the Aeneid in translation, heavy fare by the standards of the day for female education, while at eight, Fanny couldn’t even make out the letters of the alphabet. Susan was more advanced than Fanny, though three years younger. The struggle to teach Fanny to read had been going on some time. In Lynn, she had been ‘taught’ by her older brother, who teased her by holding the book she was meant to be reading from upside-down. The letters were so incomprehensible to her that she didn’t notice any difference either way, but the real pathos of this story is in the fact that she had been relegated to the tutorship of James at all.

Though her father was to say that his second daughter ‘was wholly unnoticed in the nursery for any talents, or quickness of study’,56 he admits that in her ‘childish sports’ she was unusually inventive. When she was with her siblings or playmates she displayed a marked talent for mimicry and spontaneous invention, repeating scenes they had seen together at the theatre (where the Burneys often had the use of Mrs Garrick’s box) and happy, before an uncritical audience, to ‘take the actors off, and compose speeches for their characters’.57 In a memorandum book for 1806 Fanny included the reminiscence of one of her childhood acquaintances, a Miss Betty Folcher: ‘You were so merry, so gay, so droll, & had such imagination in making plays, always something new, something of your own contrivance’.58 In front of adults, though, the young girl clammed up. When a family friend dubbed Fanny ‘the little dunce’, her mother stood up for her, saying she ‘had no fear about Fanny’; but privately Esther and Charles had begun to worry about their third child’s ‘backwardness’.59 ‘Today’, the psychoanalyst Kathryn Kris has noted in a study of Fanny’s case, ‘such visual perceptive difficulty, in sharp contrast to auditory fluency, would be recognised as a form of dyslexia’.60

When Fanny did eventually learn to read it happened, according to her father, ‘all at once […] as if by intuition, nor did any of the family ever know how the talent was acquired’.61 The miraculous style of this turnaround sounds suspicious, and one is tempted to see it as a symptom of Charles Burney’s curious inattentiveness to the details of his children’s lives. If the children did not display conspicuous ‘talent or quickness of parts’, he was unlikely to notice them, being, in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s opinion, ‘as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet-tempered man can well be’.62 Fanny wrote later of the ‘conscious intellectual disgrace’ she had felt about her illiteracy, indicating the degree of shame she experienced as well as the harshness with which she was apt to judge herself. Like many dyslexic people, she had developed complex and often arduous methods to get round the problem, and had learned a great deal of poetry, especially that of Pope, by committing Hetty’s overheard lessons to memory.* Her powers of recalling things, and of making up what she could not recall, were indeed very strong, although her parents didn’t seem to realise it. But the shame was strong, too. Later in life she habitually denied having any talents at all: if she wasn’t perfect in a subject, she would say she had no knowledge of it. On the question of her struggle into literacy, it is likely that she learned to read gradually, certainly with difficulty and mostly on her own, but waited to reveal her learning until it was substantial enough to impress her father.

Fanny claimed to have begun writing her own compositions as soon as she could read, using a scrawling form of handwriting, like ‘scrambling pot-hooks’,63 that was ‘illegible, save to herself’.64 This too sounds odd, more like the sort of scribble-writing most pre-literate children experiment with than the real thing. The earliest surviving examples of Fanny’s handwriting are remarkably neat and eminently legible. The ‘pot-hooks’ claim of a private, unreadable hand also suggests a childish stratagem to deflect the kind of jeering criticism she had experienced from her brother. It is worth bearing in mind that Fanny’s eyesight was poor, and that her short sight can only have hindered her progress with letters. Though apparently reading and writing by the age of ten, it is likely that she was still relying heavily on her memory and composing, as she had done for years, mostly in her head.

Charles Burney was often absent from the house because of his long teaching hours, both at Mrs Sheeles’s school in Queen Square, where he had an annual salary of £100, and at the many private houses he attended. He loved his family strongly and sentimentally, and if, as Macaulay rather acidly put it, ‘it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them’,65 there are worse things he could have done. The affection he inspired in his family, and in Fanny particularly, was deep and sincere, and was often remarked on with envy by outsiders. He was a volatile man, highly strung and sometimes manically energetic. Family life was a balm to him, a source of entertainment and relaxation, and the more sensitive of the children must have intuited that it was important not to disturb this state of things. The girls strove all their lives to please and placate him, and the boys, oppressed by the struggle to be sources of pride to their father, each dropped out in rather spectacular ways.

Charles Burney had more than his usual preoccupations of work and money and self-advancement to deal with at this time. Not long after the move to Poland Street, Esther’s health began to decline. She was pregnant for the ninth time in twelve years, and had developed a cough which was thought to be consumptive. In the summer of 1761 she was ordered to Bath and Bristol Hotwells, leaving her husband tied to his teaching at Queen Square until the end of the term. At first, there seemed to be some improvement as a result of the curative waters, but back in London Esther grew weaker. The baby, Charlotte Ann, was born on 3 November and put out to nurse. All through 1762 Esther’s condition deteriorated, and she died on 29 September, after a week or more of ‘a most violent bilious complaint, wch terminated, after extreme torture, in an inflammation of the bowels’.66 Of the children, only Hetty was at home to witness this dreadful calamity. Fanny, Susan and Charles had been sent to Mrs Sheeles’ ‘to be out of the way’,67 and James, who had been discharged from duty on the Magnanime at his father’s request eleven days earlier, does not seem to have got home in time.

Mrs Sheeles said later that of the many children she had known, none had displayed so much grief over anything as Fanny Burney did at the death of her mother. She ‘would take no Comfort – & was almost killed with Crying’.68 Fanny must have been dreading the blow for some time, for in a letter to her father many years later she described how one of the girls at the school (where the little Burneys seem to have been parked fairly often) had complained of her sullenness ‘when I had been dejected by some hints of the illness of my dear mother’.69 When the ‘hints’ became sad reality, despite weeks, perhaps months, of desperate praying, Fanny was inconsolable. Stuck in Queen Square among strangers, she had not even been able to say goodbye to her mother, and must have heard with a pang of the melancholy deathbed intimacies with which Hetty had been honoured.

Charles Burney was prostrated by the death of his wife, catapulted into an impenetrable world of private grief:

I shut myself up inadmissable & invisible [to] all but relations, without a thought on anything else till after the funeral, and then for a fortnight did nothing but meditate on my misery. I wrote elegyac Verses on her Virtues & Perfection. […] It was painful to me to see any one who knew & admired her as all my acquaintance did. But having my mind occupied by business was a useful dissipation of my sorrow; as it forced me to a temporary inattention to myself and the irreparable loss I had sustained.70

The younger Burneys, aged ten, seven and four, were not brought home immediately, but had to suffer the exposure of their bereavement among the rich young ladies boarded in Queen Square, one of whom, Lucy Fox-Strangways (the older sister of the girl who had complained about her dullness), compassionately took Fanny under her wing, ‘called me her Child, & took the office of School Mother upon her for me’.71 When they did go back to Poland Street, the children were neglected by their grief-stricken father. None of them, as Fanny wrote sadly, was ‘of an age to be companionable’,72 and he was writing to his old friend Dolly Young in desperate terms: ‘From an ambitious, active, enterprizing Being, I am become a torpid drone, a listless, desponding wretch!’73 Fanny found this letter (she claimed) when going through her father’s posthumous papers: it was ‘so ill-written and so blotted by his tears, that he must have felt himself obliged to re-write it for the post’.74 It contains a long and highly emotional account of Esther’s death and his subsequent distress. Perhaps Charles Burney thought better of sending it, or, as Fanny claimed to think, wept so much writing the letter that in order to send it, he had to make a fair copy.

The tears, conversely, might have been those of tender-hearted Dolly Young herself, who died in 1805 and might well have left this memorial of former times to her former friend. But it is odd that the document seems to have been unknown to Fanny when she was weeding her father’s papers in the 1820s and wrote to Hetty complaining how little material she had found ‘relative to our dear & lovely own Mother; […] from whatsoever Cause, he is here laconic almost to silence. 3 or 4 lines include all the history of his admiration & its effects’.75 Roger Lonsdale has pointed out the inaccuracy of this statement – at least two pages of Dr Burney’s surviving memoirs deal with his first wife – but Fanny’s hyperbole indicates her disappointment at her father’s omission. The letter to Dolly Young only exists in Fanny’s printed version of 1832, but would seem to answer all the shortcomings she noted in Charles Burney’s memoirs, and bears witness to the perfect union which she believed her parents’ marriage to have been. She quotes the whole of it (131 lines rather than ‘3 or 4 lines’), with the prefatory remark that ‘a more touching description of happiness in conjugal life, or of wretchedness in its dissolution, is rarely, perhaps, with equal simplicity of truth, to be found upon record.’76 Could she possibly have made this letter up, from the accounts of her mother’s death which she had heard her father and Hetty relate, in order to fill what she felt was a yawning gulf in the record? Could this long and gushing tribute to Esther, suspiciously materialising in her father’s archive and then disappearing again, have’ been another of Fanny’s attempts at impressionistic truth?

According to the letter, the dying Esther had attempted to comfort her eldest daughter by assuring her that they would meet again in the next world:

She told poor Hetty how sweet it would be if she could see her constantly from whence she was going, and begged she would invariably suppose that that would be the case. What a lesson to leave a daughter! – She exhorted her to remember how much her example might influence the poor younger ones; and bid her write little letters, and fancies, to her in the other world, to say how they all went on; adding, that she felt she should surely know something of them.77

The role that was being passed on to Hetty was a heavy one; Charles Burney, in ‘an unrestrained agony of grief’ at his wife’s bedside, was incapable of giving consolation to anyone. Esther’s concern for Hetty and ‘the poor younger ones’, and her businesslike last day full of instructions and advice to her husband (including her recommendation to him that he marry Dolly Young), indicate how much Charles needed ‘mothering’ too. Mothering their father was what all the Burney daughters ended up doing to a greater or lesser extent all their lives – none more assiduously than Fanny.

But at the time, what must have affected the children most strongly in their mother’s dying words was the comforting assurance that she would be looking down on them ‘from whence she was going’, and the fantastical suggestion that she would be able to receive letters after she was dead. It was a fancy that had been given wide currency by Mrs Elizabeth Rowe’s bestselling book Friendship in Death: Twenty letters from the Dead to the Living, published in 1729 and kept more or less constantly in print until the late nineteenth century, a book which Fanny had certainly read* and which is highly likely to have been introduced into the household by her mother. Mrs Rowe’s book discouraged excessive mourning (which is of course, strictly speaking, an impiety): ‘If you could conceive my Happiness instead of the mournful Solemnity with which you interr’d me’, she imagines a two-year-old boy writing to his bereaved mother, ‘you would have celebrated my Funeral Rites with Songs, and Festivals’.78 Esther Burney no doubt wanted to blunt her children’s grief in the same way, with the assurance of an afterlife that is suggested by her advice to Hetty to ‘write little letters […] to her in the other world’. But to Fanny, this must have made her unliterary status seem even more of a deprivation than ever, not simply ‘conscious intellectual disgrace’ but a barrier to communion with her dead parent. The ‘angelic’ mother on her ‘sublime’ deathbed had emphasised the value she set on literariness not just by quoting from favourite works (including parts of Gray’s ‘Elegy’) and suggesting poetry-writing as a form of therapy to her husband, but by endorsing the death-defying, almost magical properties of the written word.

After the death of his wife, Charles Burney threw himself into his teaching and often left the children to their own devices. The girls never had a governess; Hetty, who was busy at the harpsichord much of the time, was expected to undertake that function more or less. (It was no accident that both Fanny and Susan became extremely discriminating and appreciative listeners to music.) A succession of housekeepers must have been employed, but none stayed long enough or impressed herself on the children strongly enough to have been kept in the family records, apart from ‘an old Welsh woman’ whose accent amused Mr Burney.79 It was a melancholy and lonely time for Fanny, who went to bed every night praying ‘for my dear Mamma, & that I might be good enough to join her’.80

The children had always been close, but they drew closer, Fanny and Susan especially. Two anecdotes about them in their father’s fragmentary memoirs illustrate both his pleasure in their childish charms and the girls’ characteristics of sense and sensibility respectively. The story about Susan, the tender-hearted darling of the family, dates from before Esther’s death. At the age of five, she was so overcome by the acting in a performance of the melodrama Jane Shore that she cried out from the box to the apparently starving heroine of the piece, ‘Ma’am, will you have my ollange?’ which, her father recalls, ‘the audience applauded much more than the artificial complaints of the actress’.81 The story about Fanny illustrates her ‘natural simplicity and probity’, which in Charles Burney’s view had ‘wanted no teaching’. She and her sisters were playing with the wigmaker’s children next door:

[T]he door of the wig magazine being left open, they each of them put on one of those dignified ornaments of the head, and danced and jumped about in a thousand antics, laughing till they screamed at their own ridiculous figures. Unfortunately, in their vagaries, one of the flaxen wigs, said by the proprietor to be worth upwards of ten guineas – in those days a price enormous – fell into a tub of water, placed for the shrubs in the little garden, and lost all its gorgon buckle, and was declared by the owner to be totally spoilt. He was extremely angry, and chid very severely his own children; when my little daughter, the old lady, then ten years of age, advancing to him, as I was informed, with great gravity and composure, sedately says; ‘What signifies talking so much about an accident? The wig is wet, to be sure; and the wig was a good wig, to be sure; but its of no use to speak of it any more; because what’s done can’t be undone’.82

This story is made to sound comical in the Memoirs,* and the thought of the little girls running round in judges’ and advocates’ wigs, screaming with laughter – until the accident, and probably then still sniggering – is a charming one. But it has a melancholy undertow. What’s done can’t be undone. If the statement of Fanny’s age is accurate, the incident took place in the year when Esther was dying or dead. The coining of such a fatalistic apothegm by a ten-year-old (‘the wig is wet’ became family shorthand for any situation that had got beyond their control) suggests an unusual degree of reflectiveness. It must have served to remind the wigmaker quite sharply that the ruination of a hair-piece was a relatively paltry loss.

Fanny was referred to in that story as ‘the old lady’, a nickname which settled on her ‘from the time she had reached her eleventh year’. In a passage from the Memoirs apparently ‘Copied from a Memorandum-book of Dr. Burney’s’,* she has her father recall:

in company, or before strangers, [Fanny] was silent, backward, timid, even to sheepishness: and, from her shyness, had such profound gravity and composure of features, that those of my friends who came often to my house, and entered into the different humours of the children, never called Fanny by any other name, from the time she had reached her eleventh year, than The Old Lady.83

Fanny would not have left this in the record if she had not thought it to her credit. Behaving like an old lady, decorously, soberly and with ‘gravity and composure of features’, was for her the only proper way. ‘From the time she had reached her eleventh year’ clearly aligns the onset of ‘profound gravity’ with her mother’s death, after which it may have seemed to Fanny irreverent and inappropriate to be gay in public – in her novels, only the heartless characters ‘get over’ a death. People often described Fanny Burney as ‘shy’, but ‘reserved’ seems a much more accurate word. From her diaries and letters, which exist from her sixteenth year, we know that, privately, she was sharp, witty, devastatingly observant, judgemental, romantic and prone to ‘fits’ of irrepressible high spirits. Her sobersides public persona was clearly a form of camouflage, developed through the long habit of not wanting to have attention drawn to herself, with the criticism she imagined would inevitably follow of her looks, her melancholy, her ‘backwardness’, her lack of polish. To be reserved was also to be preserved.

* According to the ‘Worcester Memoirs’. Wycherley died in 1716, aged about seventy-six, and Ann Cooper was born in 1690, but although it sounds an unlikely courtship, Wycherley in fact married a woman even younger than Ann a fortnight before his death.

* Margaret Anne Doody’s suggestion that a homosexual attraction between Greville and Burney ‘does not seem impossible’14 seems to me too far-fetched to be helpful in this connection.

* Esther Sleepe’s parentage and date of birth are difficult to ascertain, and scholars disagree over them. She is either the ‘Esther ye Daugh’ of Mr Sleepe by – his Wife’ born 19 May 1723 and baptised on 9 June at St Vedast, Foster Lane (Joyce Hemlow’s choice), or the Hester, daughter of Richard and Frances Sleepe baptised at St Michael le Quern on 1 August 1725 (the choice of the editors of Dr Burney’s memoirs). Professor Hemlow bases her decision on the information given by Esther’s great-grandson, Richard Allen Burney, in his application to the College of Arms in 1807, where he names her father as ‘James Sleepe of Foster Lane’. The Memoir editors cite the passage by Dr Burney that describes his first wife thus: ‘the daughter of old Sleepe, the head of the City waits and furnisher of bands for municipal festivities, and Mrs Sleepe, the daughter of a M. Dubois, who kept a Fan Shop in Cheapside’. This encourages the identification of Esther’s father as Richard Sleepe, a freeman of the Company of Musicians (as was she) and leader of the City waits (the Lord Mayor’s band), who died in 1758. He married a Frances Wood in 1705, whom the Memoir editors reasonably assume was the daughter of the M. Dubois mentioned in Dr Burney’s account, with her surname anglicised, as were those of many exiled Huguenots.18 The two ‘Mr Sleepe’s could, of course, have been one and the same person (there is no mention of the name ‘James’ except in the 1807 document), or they could have been brothers. It also strikes me as a strong possibility that the two registered births – of ‘Esther Sleepe’ (1723) and ‘Hester Sleepe’ (1725) respectively – were those of sisters, and that the second girl was given, as was very often the case, the name of a sibling who had died in infancy. The likelihood of ‘Mr Sleepe’ and ‘Richard Sleepe’ being the same man and Esther and Hester sisters is increased by the fact that after the Great Fire of 1666, the parish of St Michael le Quern was amalgamated with that of its neighbour, St Vedast, Foster Lane (both churches having been destroyed, and only St Vedast rebuilt – by Wren). The two girl babies were therefore baptised at the same font, two years apart, and not at two different churches, as scholars have hitherto assumed. This would favour the identification of Esther as the daughter of Richard Sleepe, d.1758, and Frances Wood (Dubois), d. before 1776, who was baptised on 1 August 1725, which I take to be correct.19 Professor Hemlow’s alternative identification is further weakened by the uncertain reliability of Richard Allen Burney’s information. Known in the family as a snob (an accusation which seems borne out by his desire to acquire a coat of arms), Richard Allen Burney was trying to present his genealogy to the College of Arms in the best possible light. As I discuss elsewhere (see Preface), he may not have known of his own mother’s illegitimacy; or if he did, he concealed it from the College. His apparent knowledge of a ‘James Sleepe of Foster Lane’ may have been handed down in the family (though it is odd that it disagrees with Dr Burney’s version), or perhaps extrapolated, for purposes of establishing some presentable facts, from the very records which Professor Hemlow used to corroborate his evidence.