classical scholar. In 1760 the family removed to London, and
Dr Burney, who was now a fashionable music master, took a
house in Poland Street. Mrs Burney died in 1761, when Fanny
was only nine years old. Her sisters Esther (Hetty), afterwards
Mrs Charles Rousseau Burney, and Susanna, afterwards Mrs
Phillips, were sent to school in Paris, but Fanny was left to
educate herself. Early in 1766 she paid her first visit to Dr
Burney’s friend Samuel Crisp at Chessington Hall, near Epsom.
Dr Burney had first made Samuel Crisp’s acquaintance about
1745 at the house of Fulke Greville, grandfather of the diarists,
and the two studied music while the rest of the guests hunted.
Crisp wrote a play, Virginia, which was staged by David Garrick
in 1754 at the request of the beautiful countess of Coventry (née
Maria Gunning). The play had no great success, and in 1764
Crisp established himself in retirement at Chessington Hall,
where he frequently entertained his sister, Mrs Sophia Gast, of
Burford, Oxfordshire, and Dr Burney and his family, to whom
he was familiarly known as “daddy” Crisp.[1] It was to her
“daddy” Crisp and her sister Susan that Fanny Burney addressed
large portions of her diary and many of her letters. After his
wife’s death in 1767, Dr Burney married Elizabeth Allen, widow
of a King’s Lynn wine-merchant.
From her fifteenth year Fanny lived in the midst of an exceptionally brilliant social circle, gathered round her father in Poland Street, and later in his new home in St Martin’s Street, Leicester Fields. Garrick was a constant visitor, and would arrive before eight o’clock in the morning. Of the various “lyons” they entertained she leaves a graphic account, notably of Omai, the Otaheitan native, and of Alexis Orlov, the favourite of Catherine II. of Russia. Dr Johnson she first met at her father’s home in March 1777. Her father’s drawing-room, where she met many of the chief musicians, actors and authors of the day, was in fact Fanny’s only school. Her reading, however, was by no means limited. Macaulay stated that in the whole of Dr Burney’s library there was but one novel, Fielding’s Amelia; but Austin Dobson points out that she was acquainted with the abbé Prévost’s Doyen de Killérine, and with Marivaux’s Vie de Marianne, besides Clarissa Harlowe and the books of Mrs Elizabeth Griffith and Mrs Frances Brooke. Her diary also contains the record of much more strenuous reading. Her stepmother, a woman of some cultivation, did not encourage habits of scribbling. Fanny, therefore, made a bonfire of her MSS., among them a History of Caroline Evelyn, a story containing an account of Evelina’s mother. Luckily her journal did not meet with the same fate. The first entry in it was made on the 30th of May 1768, and it extended over seventy-two years. The earlier portions of it underwent wholesale editing in later days, and much of it was entirely obliterated. She planned out Evelina, or A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, long before it was written down. Evelina was published by Thomas Lowndes in the end of January 1778, but it was not until June that Dr Burney learned its authorship, when the book had been reviewed and praised everywhere. Fanny proudly told Mrs Thrale the secret. Mrs Thrale wrote to Dr Burney on the 22nd of July: “Mr Johnson returned home full of the Prayes of the Book I had lent him, and protesting that there were passages in it which might do honour to Richardson: we talk of it for ever, and he feels ardent after the denouement; he could not get rid of the Rogue, he said.” Miss Burney soon visited the Thrales at Streatham, “the most consequential day I have spent since my birth” she calls the occasion. It was the prelude to much longer visits there. Dr Johnson’s best compliments were made for her benefit, and eagerly transcribed in her diary. His affectionate friendship for “little Burney” only ceased with his death.
Evelina was a continued success. Sir Joshua Reynolds sat up all night to read it, as did Edmund Burke, who came next to Johnson in Miss Burney’s esteem. She was introduced to Elizabeth Montagu and the other bluestocking ladies, to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and to the gay Mrs Mary Cholmondeley, the sister of Peg Woffington, whose manners, as described in the diary, explain much of Evelina. At the suggestion of Mrs Thrale, and with offers of help from Arthur Murphy, and encouragement from Sheridan, Fanny began to write a comedy. Crisp, realizing the limitations of her powers, tried to dissuade her, and the piece, The Witlings, was suppressed in deference to what she called a “hissing, groaning, catcalling epistle” from her two “daddies.” Meanwhile her intercourse with Mrs Thrale proved very exacting, and left her little time for writing. She went with her to Bath in 1780, and was at Streatham again in 1781. Her next book was written partly at Chessington and after much discussion with Mr Crisp. Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress, by the author of Evelina, was published in 5 vols. in 1782 by Messrs Payne & Cadell (who paid the author £250—not £2000 as stated by Macaulay). If Cecilia has not quite the freshness and charm of Evelina, it is more carefully constructed, and contains many happy examples of what Johnson called Miss Burney’s gift of “character-mongering.” Burke sent her a letter full of high praise. But some of her friends found the writing too often modelled on Johnson’s, and Horace Walpole thought the personages spoke too uniformly in character.
On the 24th of April 1783, Fanny Burney’s “most judicious adviser and stimulating critic,” “daddy” Crisp, died. He was her devoted friend, as she was to him, “the dearest thing on earth.” The next year she was to lose two more friends. Mrs Thrale married Piozzi, and Johnson died. Fanny had met the celebrated Mrs Delany in 1783, and she now attached herself to her. Mrs Delany, who was living (1785) in a house near Windsor Castle presented to her by George III., was on the friendliest terms with both the king and queen, and Fanny was honoured with more than one royal interview. Queen Charlotte, soon afterwards, offered Miss Burney the post of second keeper of the robes, with a salary of £200 a year, which after some hesitation was accepted. Much has been said against Dr Burney for allowing the authoress of Evelina and Cecilia to undertake an office which meant separation from all her friends and a wearisome round of court ceremonial. On the other hand, it may be fairly urged that Fanny’s literary gifts were really limited. She had written nothing for four years, and apparently felt she had used her best material. “What my daddy Crisp says,” she wrote as early as 1779, “’that it would be the best policy, but for pecuniary advantages, for me to write no more,’ is exactly what I have always thought since Evelina was published” (Diary, i. 258). Her misgivings as to her unfitness for court life were quite justified. From Queen Charlotte she received unvarying kindness, though she was not very clever with her waiting-maid’s duties. She had to attend the queen’s toilet, to take care of her lap-dog and her snuff-box, and to help her senior, Mrs Schwellenberg, in entertaining the king’s equerries and visitors at tea. The constant association with Mrs Schwellenberg, who has been described as “a peevish old person of uncertain temper and impaired health, swaddled in the buckram of backstairs etiquette,” proved to be the worst part of Fanny’s duties. Her diary is full of amusing court gossip, and sometimes deals with graver matters, notably in the account of Warren Hastings’ trial, and in the story of the beginning of George III.’s madness, as seen by a member of his household. But the strain told on her health, and after pressure both from Fanny and her numerous friends, Dr Burney prepared with her a joint memorial asking the queen’s leave to resign. She left the royal service in July 1791 with a retiring pension of £100 a year, granted from the queen’s private purse, and returned to her father’s house at Chelsea. Dr Burney had been appointed organist at Chelsea Hospital in 1783, through Burke’s influence.
In 1792 she became acquainted with a group of French exiles, who had taken a house, Juniper Hall, near Mickleham, where Fanny’s sister, Mrs Phillips, lived. On the 31st of July 1793 she married one of the exiles, Alexandre D’Arblay, an artillery officer, who had been adjutant-general to La Fayette. They took a cottage at Bookham on the strength, it appears, of Miss Burney’s pension. In 1793 she produced her Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy. Her son Alexandre was born on the 18th of December 1794. In the following spring
- ↑ His letters to Mrs Gast and another sister, Anne, were edited with the title of Burford Papers (1906), by W. H. Hutton.
