Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay)

It must have been in 1776, after the publication of the first volume of Dr. Burney’s History of Music, that Fanny began definitely to think of print. Having been long accustomed to act as secretary for her father, she grew apprehensive lest her ordinary script should be recognised at press; and she therefore proceeded to transcribe her work “in a feigned hand.” “The fear of discovery,” she writes, “or of suspicion in the house, made the copying extremely laborious to me; for in the daytime, I could only take odd moments, so that I was obliged to sit up the greatest part of many nights, in order to get it ready.” By the time two volumes were completed, she was sufficiently tired out – with “all this fagging” – to wish to know whether her labour was likely to be in vain. She accordingly wrote a letter to Dodsley of Pall Mall, without signature, offering him what she had already prepared, and promising to transmit the remainder in the following year. The reply was to be addressed to the Orange Coffee House in the Haymarket, under cover to an imaginary “Mr. Grafton.” Dodsley’s answer was to the effect that he could not consider the work without being informed of the author’s name. Thereupon Fanny, and her only confidantes, her sisters, after sitting in committee upon this discouraging reply, decided that it would be wiser to try a less fashionable publisher. They fixed upon Mr. Thomas Lowndes of 77 Fleet Street, who expressed a desire to see the manuscript. It was accordingly carried to Fleet Street, “in the dark of the evening,” by Fanny’s brother Charles, who, having been admitted to the secret, was disguised for the occasion by his sisters in appropriate costume. But the bookseller’s reply, though one which might have been expected, was a disappointment. Mr. Lowndes informed his correspondent at the Orange Coffee House, that, while (with some reservations) he approved the instalment submitted, he could not think of printing the book until it was finished; and that he would consequently await the author’s pleasure, hoping to receive it as soon as it was ready for type.

Here was a blow which, for the moment, suspended all further progress. “I had hardly time,” says Fanny, “to write half a page in a day; and neither my health nor inclination would allow me to continue my nocturnal scribbling for so long a time, as to write first, and then copy, a whole volume.”30 Nevertheless, she must have gone on with it at intervals. In March, 1777, when, as already related, she went to Chessington, she was certainly at work upon it. “Distant as you may think us from the great world,” she writes to her sister Susan, “I sometimes find myself in the midst of it, though nobody suspects the brilliancy of the company I occasionally keep.” This is a transparent reference to the characters of the book upon which she was engaged. In April, she went to Worcester; and before starting, appears to have determined that the time had arrived when she must divulge her secret to her father. Hitherto she had never taken any serious step without his knowledge; and on this occasion had refrained from obtaining his concurrence, first from an unwillingness to acknowledge her authorship, and secondly, from a dread that he might ask to see what she had written. Upon this latter head, however, she was speedily reassured. Although Dr. Burney – who, we must remember, was wholly without previous information on the subject – treated the communication very lightly, he was evidently surprised. In amused compliance with his daughter’s urgent appeal for secrecy, he nevertheless forbore even to ask the title of the book, or to make any further enquiries. He only requested to be informed, from time to time, of its progress towards completion; and then left Fanny to follow her own devices. Probably he thought no more of the matter. Preoccupied with his own affairs, he can have attached but slight importance to the intelligence conveyed to him; and certainly never dreamed that his daughter’s attempt would be attended with success. And so Fanny, having liberated her mind, and eased her filial conscience, set off for Worcester.

When she got back to St. Martin’s Street, she finished the preparation of vol. iii., which was handed to Mr. Lowndes, who, in a few days, offered £20 for the manuscript, – “an offer which was accepted with alacrity, and boundless surprise at its magnificence,” by the anonymous author.31 The next we hear of the book is in the middle of January, 1778. About this date, Edward Burney, the artist, who had been promoted to the post of confidential agent in place of his cousin Charles, then in the country, arrived with news that a parcel was waiting for “Mr. Grafton” at the Orange Coffee House. It proved to contain a printed but incomplete and unbound copy of Evelina, which was accompanied by a letter from Mr. Lowndes, requesting that a “List of Errata” might be supplied without delay. This was accordingly done; and the book was returned to the publisher, by whom, shortly afterwards, it was advertised in the London Chronicle for January 27-9, and elsewhere, as on sale, in three volumes, 12mo, price 7s. 6d. sewed, and 9s. bound, under the title of Evelina; or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Mrs. Burney read out the announcement at the St. Martin’s Street breakfast table; but, being ignorant of the circumstances, naturally failed to detect the signs of intelligence which passed between Fanny and her sisters. Whether Dr. Burney was present, is not recorded; but as he did not know the name of the book, what was to its writer the earliest notification of its public appearance would probably have escaped his attention. For some weeks nothing more was heard of the matter, although, in March, the sisters and their cousin Edward, making enquiry at Bell’s Library in the Strand, found that Evelina was in circulation; and that, as Fanny puts it, “a work which was so lately lodged, in all privacy in her bureau, was now to be seen by every butcher and baker, cobbler and tinker, throughout the three kingdoms for the small tribute of three pence.” After this, Dr. Burney fell ill of fever. Having helped to nurse him, Fanny herself had inflammation of the lungs; and, in May, went off to Chessington to recruit. It was at Chessington that she received, at this late hour, the first copy of her book, for which she had hitherto applied unsuccessfully to Mr. Lowndes. He now forwarded a set “most elegantly bound” (which may be taken as an indication that it was growing in popularity), and this copy was apparently followed by ten further copies. Some time, however, was still to elapse before Evelina became thoroughly well known, and we may occupy the interval with an examination of its contents.32

The plot is neither very original nor very intricate. With the parentage and early history of the heroine, Evelina Anville or, more properly, Belmont, the reader has already been made acquainted. At the beginning of the story, her low-born grandmother, Mme. Duval, having ignored her for seventeen years, has begun to show disquieting signs of seeking to obtain control over her, much to the dismay of her guardian, the excellent Mr. Villars. But nothing happens until Mr. Villars, having permitted Evelina to visit his and her friend, Lady Howard, at Howard Grove, is unwillingly persuaded to let her accompany Lady Howard’s daughter, Mrs. Mirvan, on a visit to London. Mrs. Mirvan is going to town to meet her husband, a Captain in the Navy, newly returned from a seven-years’ absence on a distant station. They take lodgings in Queen-Anne-Street, Cavendish Square. From this point Evelina mainly holds the pen. Almost as a matter of course, one of the first persons they encounter is Mme. Duval, travelling with a Frenchman named Du Bois. (Du Bois, it may be mentioned in parenthesis, was the name of Fanny’s Huguenot grandfather.) To Mrs. Mirvan’s aristocratic acquaintances, Mme. Duval speedily opposes her own vulgar connections, the Branghtons, a silversmith’s family on Snow-Hill, with whom, in due time, originates the suggestion that “Miss,” as they call Evelina, shall endeavour to obtain recognition by her father, – an idea which obviously has its source in their desire to secure Mme. Duval’s fortune for themselves. At the instance of Mme. Duval, then staying at Howard Grove, Lady Howard writes to Sir John Belmont, who returns an answer from the studious ambiguity of which it is impossible to extract anything but a rather contemptuous negative. The Mirvans, who have been temporising with Mme. Duval in order to keep Evelina with them as long as possible, are now obliged to surrender her for a time to her objectionable grandmother, by whom she is carried to London and her Snow-Hill cousins. Eventually she returns to Mr. Villars. But during her stay in Holborn, she has become acquainted with one of the Branghtons’ lodgers, a young Scotchman in destitute circumstances, named Macartney, whom she saves from suicide. In Paris Macartney has fallen in love with a beautiful English girl, the alleged daughter of a baronet, who turns out to be Sir John Belmont himself. This girl is a certain Bessie Green, who has been palmed off upon his paternal remorse as Caroline Evelyn’s child. Finally, at Bath, things come right. While Evelina is there on a visit, her father arrives to drink the waters, accompanied by the pseudo-Miss Belmont. But Evelina’s striking resemblance to her dead mother is unmistakable; she is at once acknowledged by Sir John Belmont with appropriate heroics, and at the close of volume three, bestows her hand upon Lord Orville, the best of a fair number of eligible and ineligible suitors.

This, reduced to an outline, is the plot of Miss Burney’s story; and that it has any special novelty of construction, can scarcely be contended. Nor, although she has adopted the “epistolary Style” of Richardson, can it be said to bear any great likeness to the work of that master. There is no endeavour after mental analysis; or – it may be added – any obtrusive evidence of prolixity. The book does not, like the novels of Fielding and Smollett, deal with humanity in the rough; but rather with humanity in the circumscribed arena of domestic life. Its distinctive merit consists in the skill and graphic power of the character drawing; in the clever contrast of the different individualities; in the author’s keen if somewhat crude sense of the ridiculous; and, above all, in the sprightliness and vivacity of her narrative, especially when she writes in the person of the heroine. And this last, in great measure, is due to the fact that in Evelina Miss Burney has portrayed her younger self. Until the publication of the Early Diary, this, though conjectured, was not clearly established. But a perusal of the letters to Mr. Crisp, of the Teignmouth and Worcester Journals, and of half a dozen of the reported conversations, shows clearly that Evelina Anville, narrating her adventures to Mr. Villars, was using very much the same pen as Frances Burney had employed for those nouvelles à-la-main which, from time to time, she despatched to “Daddy” Crisp at Chessington. The writer who describes the theatricals at Barborne Lodge, or recounts the long conversations with Mr. Barlow, is precisely the same person who, in the novel, reproduces the small talk in the tea-room at the Pantheon, or records the rough-and-tumble misadventures of Mme. Duval at Ranelagh. All these people and places Miss Burney had seen; or if she had not, it needed little but her perceptive faculty, her sense of humour, and her dramatising gift, to enable her to invent similar characters, and exhibit them in action.

It is possible, of course, that, in some cases, Miss Burney leaned upon her predecessors, especially where her own experiences fell short. Lord Orville, it has been suggested, is a recollection of the hero of Sir Charles Grandison; Sir Clement Willoughby, of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen or Mr. Greville in the same novel. That she should think of these then-established types would, indeed, be only natural. But while Richardson drew his male heroes mainly from his moral consciousness, Miss Burney has rectified her puppets from her personal recollections. Lord Orvilles, perhaps, were not very common in her environment. Still, to say nothing of King in Lord Ogleby (she knew the Clandestine Marriage by heart), she had seen and heard a live fine gentleman in Fulke Greville; and in Mr. Anthony Chamier and Mr. Charles Boone had conversed with some flesh-and-blood specimens of men of the world, who helped to make her characters, objectively at all events, more convincingly real than those of Richardson. For Lord Orville – though somewhat shadowy – is really a nobleman; and Sir Clement Willoughby, a not-inconceivable specimen of the genus “agreeable rake.” As to the impertinent fop, Mr. Lovel, one can imagine that she would have little difficulty in constructing him – with an added sprinkle of malice – out of the “scraps and heel-taps” of her coxcomb cousin, Richard Burney of Worcester, or of that other fantastic feather-head, the Spanish traveller, Mr. Twiss. But the Lovels, and the Orvilles, and the Willoughbys, clever as they are, would scarcely have made the fortune of Evelina; still less would the benedictory Mr. Villars, the exemplary Lady Howard, Mrs. Mirvan and her daughter, or that melancholy concession to sentimentalism, Mr. Macartney. These belong to the working machinery of the story; its prominent interest, apart from its accurate pictures of contemporary character and manners, is concentrated upon the two antagonists, Captain Mirvan and Mme. Duval, and upon the inimitably vulgar Branghton group, which includes the Holborn beau, Mr. Smith.

Madame Duval, in particular, is drawn with remarkable vigour, though it is difficult to imagine how, at any period of her life, an educated man could possibly have married her. Her illiterate English with its cheap French tags, her Ma fois and her Shakespearean superlatives, all combine to make a most graphic broad-comedy portrait. She would perhaps have been better for a touch, which Goldsmith would certainly not have omitted, of tenderness somewhere; as it is, the only sign of anything approaching that quality is her solicitude for M. Du Bois, the poor French gentleman who accompanies her, – one hardly knows why, – for he has no very definite purpose in the book beyond swelling the list of Evelina’s admirers, and opposing his courtesy and unobtrusive good manners to the rudeness of his immediate associates. But though no softer traits make us admire Mme. Duval, one can at least be sorry for her. A certain amount of horse-play – and even the ruining of a new Lyons silk costume – are perhaps permissible in a roaring farce; but to drag an elderly woman forcibly along the high road, shake her furiously, deposit her in a ditch (bumping her vigorously the while), and then tie her feet together, leaving her “almost roaring, and in the utmost agony of rage and terror” – certainly seems to be going to unusual lengths in the pursuit of practical joking, even with a person who has so far forgotten herself as to spit in your face. If Mme. Duval was not a person of “position” in one sense, she was at least (as the Colonel says in Punch) a person of exceedingly “uncomfortable position” in another. Yet, as Miss Burney has depicted the episode, we must presume that she has actually depicted something she had heard of or seen. And there is no doubt that there was an under side to the often superficial and conventional refinement of her day, – a side of absolute heartlessness and insensibility, begotten of brutal pastimes, butcherly penal laws, and a cynical disregard for the value of human life. Even in that admirable comedy of Goldsmith which Miss Burney had seen played not so very many years before the appearance of Evelina, there are traces of this, though Goldsmith was the most amiable of men. Yet even Goldsmith allows Tony Lumpkin to tell an audience that, after jolting two ladies, one of them his own mother, to a jelly, he has finally lodged them in a horsepond; and everyone seems to think the joke an excellent one. Nor are there any indications that Johnson or Reynolds ever commented upon the callous barbarity of the proceeding.

This being so, we could perhaps hardly expect any superfine delicacy from the rough sailor whom Miss Burney has invented for Mme. Duval’s discomfiture. Captain Mirvan is an officer of the Oakum and Hatchway type rather than of the Lieutenant Bowling order. His twin aversions are a fop and a Frenchman; and he meets them both; or rather, in place of the latter, he meets an Englishwoman naturalised in France, which does as well. Indeed, it is a little curious that, in his hatred of “Madam Frog,” as he calls Evelina’s grandmother, Captain Mirvan entirely overlooks the fact that Mme. Duval is really nothing more than a vulgar English barmaid. Captain Mirvan is excellently conceived, but only partially exhibited. To say nothing of the fact that he is a seaman on shore, it would have been impossible for Evelina to depict him except in expurgated form. She herself allows as much to Mr. Villars. “Notwithstanding the attempts I so frequently make of writing some of the Captain’s conversation, I can only give you a faint idea of his language; for almost every other word he utters, is accompanied by an oath, which, I am sure, would be as unpleasant for you to read, as for me to write. And, besides, he makes use of a thousand sea-terms, which are to me quite unintelligible.” Miss Burney had a brother who was a lieutenant in the navy, and no doubt was sufficiently instructed as to the manners and customs of the mariners of Cook’s day. She moreover appreciated to the full their delight in hoaxes and practical jokes. As regards their oaths and asseverations no one can blame her reticence, – a reticence which was commended even by her contemporaries. But it is permissible to criticism to observe that a Georgian ship-captain ad usum Delphini, and deprived in great measure of his picturesque nautical jargon is an artistic contradiction which it is difficult to invest with complete and convincing reality. It is no doubt owing in part to the absence of his uncouth amphibious atmosphere that Captain Mirvan’s baiting of Mme. Duval leaves such an unpleasantly cold-blooded impression upon the modern reader. On ship-board, and in his own element, he was no doubt a brave man and a smart officer. On shore, he is an unmitigated bear; and since Mme. Duval was in a way his guest, an absolutely inconceivable host.

Of the Branghton family, Miss Burney has given, at the outset, a rather fuller introductory description than she usually gives of her characters. The father, Mme. Duval’s nephew, is a silversmith on Snow-Hill, a man about forty, intelligent, but contracted and prejudiced, having spent his life in the city, and contemptuous of all who reside elsewhere. His son is “weaker in his understanding, and more gay in his temper; but his gaiety is that of a foolish, over-grown schoolboy, whose mirth consists in noise and disturbance. He disdains his father for his close attention to business, and love of money; though he seems himself to have no talents, spirit, or generosity, to make him superior to either. His chief delight appears to be tormenting and ridiculing his sisters, who, in return, most heartily despise him.” The elder girl is not ill-looking; but is proud, ill-tempered and conceited. “She hates the city, though without knowing why; for it is easy to discover she has lived no where else.” The younger sister, Polly, is “rather pretty, very foolish, very ignorant, very giddy and very good natured.” This worshipful family, after the fashion of the eighteenth century, live at the shop in the city, and let some of the rooms. One of the garrets is occupied by the already mentioned Scotch poet, Macartney, while the dining room is in possession of the Holborn beau, who, besides keeping a foot-boy of his own, is – according to Miss Polly Branghton – “quite like one of the quality, and dresses as fine, and goes to balls and dances, and everything quite in taste.” Mr. Smith, with his underbred gentility and his awkward sprightliness, is the most vivid of the portraits in the book.

With enforced associates of this type, it is easy to conceive that Evelina is continually involved in vexation and embarrassment, and even landed in some equivocal situations. The Branghtons take her to the Opera, but carry her to the shilling gallery. They take her to Vauxhall, where, unlike Goldsmith’s pawnbroker’s widow, she does contrive to see the famous waterworks. But by the heedlessness of her cousins, she is decoyed into the dubious Dark Walks, where she is rescued from a gang of rakes by Sir Clement Willoughby, only to be subsequently subjected by him to impertinent gallantries on his own account. After this, she goes to a ball at the Long Room at Hampstead with Mme. Duval, where she has the greatest difficulty in avoiding to “hop a dance” with the importunate Holborn beau, who, in the phrase of his circle is “as fine as fivepence.” At Marylebone Gardens an explosion of M. Torré’s fireworks terrifies her into seeking the protection of some very undesirable companions of her own sex, in whose compromising company, to her intense annoyance, she is discovered both by Lord Orville and Sir Clement Willoughby. Finally, after she has been pestered by the attentions of Mr. Smith, and threatened by Mme. Duval with young Branghton as a husband, the full measure of her mortification is filled at Kensington Gardens, where, in a soaking shower, her cousins contrive to borrow Lord Orville’s coach, in her name, although against her will. As a result the coach is badly injured in taking these discreditable connections to Snow Hill. There are other consequences to this misadventure, but they cannot be touched upon here.

These scenes at the old London pleasure resorts of Evelina’s century – as was admitted by her contemporaries – are depicted with full knowledge, and with a spirit and animation not to be found elsewhere, though it is difficult to make quotation from them without presenting them imperfectly. One passage, however, which Johnson admired, we may venture to cite, with the caveat that a brick is not a building. The party are in the Great Room at Vauxhall, looking at one of Hayman’s paintings; – we may assume it, from the reference to Neptune, to be that which commemorated Admiral Hawke’s defeat of the French in Quiberon Bay. Evelina has asked M. Du Bois for an explanation of the subject: Mme. Duval invokes the assistance of Mr. Smith, who, for the moment, is sorely crestfallen at the superior ease and splendour of Sir Clement Willoughby: —

“ ‘Don’t ask him [M. Du Bois]’ – she cries – ‘your best way is to ask Mr. Smith, for he’s been here the oftenest. Come, Mr. Smith, I daresay you can tell us all about them.’

“ ‘Why, yes, Ma’am, yes,’ said Mr. Smith: who, brightening up at this application, advanced towards us, with an air of assumed importance, which, however, sat very uneasily upon him, and begged to know what he should explain first: ‘For I have attended,’ said he, ‘to all these paintings, and know everything in them perfectly well; for I am rather fond of pictures, Ma’am; and, really, I must say, I think a pretty picture is a – a very – is really a very – is something very pretty – ’

“ ‘So do I too,’ said Madame Duval, ‘but pray now, Sir, tell us who that is meant for,’ pointing to a figure of Neptune.

“ ‘That! – Why, that, Ma’am, is, – .. I can’t think how I come to be so stupid, but really I have forgot his name; – and yet, I know it as well as my own too, – however, he’s a General, Ma’am, they are all Generals.’

“I saw Sir Clement bite his lips; and, indeed, so did I mine.

“ ‘Well,’ said Madame Duval, ‘it’s the oddest dress for a general ever I see!’

“ ‘He seems so capital a figure,’ said Sir Clement to Mr. Smith, ‘that I imagine he must be Generalissimo of the whole army.’

“ ‘Yes, Sir, yes,’ answered Mr. Smith, respectfully bowing, and highly delighted at being thus referred to, ‘you are perfectly right; – but I cannot for my life think of his name; – perhaps, Sir, you may remember it?’

“ ‘No, really,’ replied Sir Clement, ‘my acquaintance among the generals is not so extensive.’

“The ironical tone of voice in which Sir Clement spoke, entirely disconcerted Mr. Smith; who again retiring to a humble distance, seemed sensibly mortified at the failure of the attempt to recover his consequence.”

After volume two, we hear little of Mme. Duval or the Branghtons; and Captain Mirvan only appears at the end of the book for the exposure of the fop, Mr. Lovel, which he accomplishes with his customary cruelty. Croker thought this latter part “very tedious,” but his objection was not shared by Miss Burney’s first readers. There are, it is true, no characters in it as broadly drawn as Captain Mirvan and Mme. Duval; but those that are new, have all the trick of the time. Lord Merton and Mr. Coverley are typical examples of the Georgian man of pleasure, and the race of old women by which they settle their wager, could easily, painful as it seemed to the lookers-on, have been paralleled from the annals of the day. Indeed, something of the kind was devised by Garrick for the diversions of his Hampton Villa. Lady Louisa Larpent is an excellent specimen of the die-away, lackadaisical lady of quality who must have abounded at the old watering places, while the remorseless Mrs. Selwyn, secure in her age and independent means, and devoting herself entirely to the reckless gratification of her caustic humour, is again a thoroughly recognisable society type. In fact, these latter personages are truer to the social conditions of the day than even “Madam French” and the Captain, and only failed of equal applause because they were less novel. So far from being tedious, the last volume seems to us the most easily written. The intrigue, slight as it is, is artfully entangled, and the style has the additional freedom which might be expected from the fact that there was now a definite publisher in sight, as soon as the work should be brought to an end.