Mrs Allen found this poem presumptuous, and refused to see the music master for over a year. He had to retreat with his tail between his legs, admitting later that, ‘After this rebuff I had very little hopes that our acquaintance wd ever be renewed’.7
With the failure of his attempt to restart some kind of home life, Burney began to wonder what to do with his children. He decided to send two of the girls to France to be educated on the cheap by boarding with a respectable Protestant woman in Paris, where they would pick up what they could of the language and culture. The two he chose were not the eldest girls, Esther and Fanny, but Esther and Susan. Burney’s anxiety about finding a suitably Protestant governess was such that he was prepared to pay over the odds: ‘I thought it best’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘whatever might be the expence, to avoid putting them in the way to be prejudiced in favour of any religion except our own, as it might distract their minds, &, if opposed, render them miserable for the rest of their lives.’8 Was this a reasonable fear on his children’s behalfs? Were they really made of such flammable stuff as to be ‘rendered miserable for the rest of their lives’ by a change of ideology? Fanny, certainly, became such a person, fiercely clinging to what she knew, but she, more than any other of the Burney children, had spent a lifetime trying to anticipate her father’s wishes.
There was another consideration in Charles Burney’s decision not to send Fanny abroad – her ‘backwardness’. Although Fanny had managed to learn to read and write, Susan was the quicker and more advanced student, and her education a more worthwhile use of funds. Burney was clearly thinking in terms of efficiency. He knew he couldn’t subsidise his children indefinitely (especially now that he had been spurned by the rich widow), and he sought to launch his family at the earliest opportunity ‘to shift for themselves as I had done’.9 Young Charles, aged only six in the summer of 1764, would cost money to educate (he went to Charterhouse in 1768 and on to Cambridge); James, fortunately, was already established in his naval career – he had joined the Niger as Captain’s Servant in 1763 and was made a midshipman as soon as he turned sixteen three years later. For the girls, however, ‘shifting for themselves’ could only mean marrying as well as they could, and for Fanny, the ‘dunce’, staying at home and acting as secretary-cum-housekeeper to her father was probably thought (by him, at any rate) more than sufficient preparation.
Charles Burney returned from depositing Hetty and Susan in Paris in the summer of 1764 in a mood of renewed optimism. He had bought a great many books and indulged one of his favourite pastimes, introducing himself to famous men (in this case the philosopher David Hume, then secretary to the English Ambassador). Burney’s ambitions were still unfocused. He couldn’t work out how to insert himself into the literary world except through the theatre, where his friendship with Garrick – who consistently encouraged his work as a composer for the stage – gave him a foothold. A nice opportunity opened up in 1765 when Garrick suggested that Burney should translate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s operetta Le Devin du village for production at Drury Lane. Burney happened to have made an English version of this piece some years before, and its transition to the stage was swift, though not as successful as the translator probably hoped. The first night of The Cunning-Man, in November 1766, was watched from Mrs Garrick’s box by the Burney children Hetty (who had stayed in Paris only a year), Fanny, Charles and possibly even little Charlotte, all sitting forward to monitor the audience’s reactions to their beloved father’s debut as a writer. They themselves were being watched from the orchestra by Garrick, who seems to have been more interested by the spectacle in the box than the one on the stage, and described to Charles Burney later,
the innocent confidence of success with which [the children] all openly bent forward, to look exultingly at the audience, when a loud clapping followed the overture: and their smiles, or nods; or chuckling and laughter, according to their more or less advanced years, during the unmingled approbation that was bestowed upon about half the piece – contrasted with, first the amazement, next, the indignation; and lastly, the disappointment, that were brought forth by the beginning buzz of hissing, and followed by the shrill horrors of the catcall: and then the return – joyous, but no longer dauntless! – of hope when again the applause prevailed.10
The possibility of hissing and catcalls had clearly not crossed the children’s minds. It was a rude awakening to the fact that though their father seemed a demi-god at home, he had yet to prove himself to the rest of the world. The children were not ignorant of theatre audiences’ rough manners. Noisy commentary, free criticism, missile-hurling and occasional fisticuffs were part and parcel of a night out at either of London’s licensed playhouses. The attention of the crowd was hard to attract and, once gained, fickle and demanding, and though the segregation of the crowd into gallery, pit and boxes afforded some protection to members of the audience from each other, no part of it felt any obligation to respect what was going on on the stage. Fanny Burney satirised the situation memorably in the Drury Lane episode in Evelina, where the fop Lovel says of theatre-going, ‘one merely comes to meet one’s friends, and shew that one’s alive. […] I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about, and finding out one’s acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage […] pray – what was the play tonight?’11 The onus was on the manager and players, but most of all on the author, to entertain an essentially indifferent rabble. The unharmonious ‘buzz of hissing’ and ‘shrill horrors of the catcall’ that greeted their musician father’s first literary performance was, to the Burney children, a startling demonstration of that audience’s power.
With hindsight, Fanny Burney was in no doubt that her father’s ultimate aim in life had been to achieve fame as an author, and that The Cunning-Man marked a turning point for him. Her remarks in the Memoirs about the vocation they shared are revealing:
it was now that, vaguely, yet powerfully, he first fell into that stream of ideas, or visions, that seemed to hail him to that class indefinable, from its mingled elevation and abjectness, which, by joining the publicity of the press to the secret intercourse of the mind with the pen, insensibly allures its adventurous votaries to make the world at large the judge of their abilities, or their deficiencies – namely, the class of authors.12
Fanny was writing this (in the 1820s) at the end of her own long career as a writer, which makes her persistent anxieties about the ‘mingled elevation and abjectness’ of authorship all the more interesting. When her own first book came to be published she was impressed, with traumatic intensity, by the fact that the author’s initial ‘intercourse of the mind with the pen’ (secretive and confidential) led to the total exposure of him or herself to an unknowably large and critical audience. As a novelist, Fanny Burney became both audience and performer, watching and anatomising the world around her which then, in the form of her readers, was free to read and anatomise her.
The example of the careless crowd at Drury Lane hissing her father’s work is likely to have intensified her fears of the judgemental ‘world at large’, but also demonstrated the mutually exploitative nature of the compact between artist and audience and the complexity of the traffic between doing, looking, speaking, writing and reading. The passage in the Memoirs about the first performance of The Cunning-Man both describes and demonstrates this. It records Garrick’s observations, but was actually written up by Fanny, one of the children he was observing, when she was composing her father’s Memoirs sixty years later. The passage seems to be a recollection by Garrick of watching the Burney children watching the audience that was watching their father’s translation of Rousseau’s operetta. It is actually a recollection by the elderly Madame d’Arblay of what her father reported that Garrick had acted out for him after the performance. The ‘incident’ when unpicked is seen to be not one but many, the different parts relating to each other in casual or even chaotic ways.