On the death of Christopher Hamilton, Chesington Hall passed to his sister Sarah, who, guided by Crisp’s advice, let half the house and most of the surrounding land to a farmer named Woodhatch, retaining the other part as ‘a competant establishment for receiving a certain number of boarders’.28* Crisp became, in effect, the head of a household that consisted of himself, Mrs Hamilton,† her good-natured niece Kitty Cooke, and a shifting cast of lodgers. The Burneys were always welcome, and over the years Chesington Hall became a second home, especially when any of them needed a convalescent ‘change of air’. Crisp took great interest in all the children, but was particularly fond of Fanny, who returned his affection abundantly. She was an adolescent who sometimes behaved like an ‘old lady’; he an old gentleman who like to indulge youthful high spirits. Genial, cultivated and attentive, Crisp became a kind of ideal grandfather to the Burney children, a second ‘Daddy’ – the pet name he was more than happy to adopt.
In the year during which Hetty and Susan were away in Paris, Fanny had the house on Poland Street to herself for long stretches of time. She was twelve years old, had free access to her father’s growing library, and was keen to improve herself. She studied conscientiously, made notes, copied extracts and kept a catalogue raisonné, possibly in competition with her two sisters abroad. A long manuscript translation from the French of Fontanelle’s ‘Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes’ has survived30 which may have been made during these years: it indicates the seriousness of Fanny’s studies, her ambition and also her characteristic self-consciousness – underneath the title appear the words ‘Murdered into English by Frances Burney’.
Her reading, as suggested by entries in her early diaries,31 was heavily weighted towards works of moral instruction, sermons, standard histories, poetry and the ‘female conduct books’ which were deemed an essential part of a young woman’s mental baggage. One of the most popular and influential of the conduct-book writers was James Fordyce, whose Sermons to Young Women Fanny knew well.* Fordyce asserted the authority of his sex with confidence: ‘Men […] are in general better judges than women, of the deportment of women’,32 while its moral inferiority was also acknowledged: ‘The world, I know not how, overlooks in our sex a thousand irregularities, which it never forgives in yours’.33 The disturbing sexual power of women could only, in Fordyce’s view, be put to proper use as an inducement to and reward for good male behaviour. A roomful of riotous men, he asserted, could be ‘checked all at once into decency’ by the accidental entrance of a virtuous woman.34 Restraint was the key to proper female conduct: wit, in women, ‘is commonly looked upon with a suspicious eye’, and ‘war, commerce, politics, exercises of strength & dexterity, abstract philosophy & all the abstruser sciences, are most properly the province of men’.35 This left little for women to do (besides entering rooms virtuously) other than going astray, the irreparable personal disaster which opened the way to widespread social disintegration.
Because Fanny had no one with whom to discuss her reading or to guide it, and because her veneration for the written word was intense, the messages of authors such as Fordyce impressed her very strongly, reinforcing an already anxious and conservative nature. Their severity appealed to the neglected child, whose ‘straightforward morality’, in her father’s opinion, had ‘wanted no teaching’.36 At this impressionable age, and unguided, she assumed a set of standards which proved a constant agitation to her natural morality. She assented to the conventional view, as articulated by Fordyce, of the superior authority of the male sex, although her common sense and sense of justice often told her otherwise. For example, reading the Iliad, aged sixteen, she found herself ‘provoked […] for the honour of the sex’:
Venus tempts Hellen with every delusion in favour of her Darling, – in vain – Riches – power – honour – Love – all in vain – the enraged Deity threatens to deprive her of her own beauty, & render her to the level with the most common of her sex – blushing & trembling – Hellen immediately yields her Hand.
Thus has Homer proved his opinion of our poor sex – that the Love of Beauty is our most prevailing passion. It really grieves me to think that there certainly must be reason for the insignificant opinion the greatest men have of Women – At least I fear there must. – But I don’t in fact believe it – thank God!37
The poet – not just a man, but a truly ‘great man’ – had to be right: but wasn’t. ‘Fear’ and ‘belief’ contradicted one another, and the only way Fanny could resolve the problem was by sticking to the evidence of her own experience. She lost no opportunity in her books to expose the disadvantages under which her own sex laboured, but did so, characteristically, through realistic representation of women rather than by direct criticism of men. Modern readers can’t help interpreting her works as feminist, but Fanny Burney herself would have been shocked and distressed to have been associated with anything so subversive. In the fight between duty and justice, duty was always going to win. A person such as her father, who embodied her primary duty, thus became an idealised figure, incapable of doing wrong – even though she knew he did act wrongly sometimes. It was a paradox that affected her profoundly, creating tensions in her writing which provide much of her works’ interest, but which ultimately may have inhibited her from becoming a great artist.
Fanny Burney’s attitude to novels and novel-writing reflects the same anxieties. She never completely outgrew her poor opinion of the form, derived from the views of old-fashioned moralists such as Fordyce (who thought that novels ‘carry on their very forehead the mark of the beast’). She projected onto her father the same strict tastes. Novels were not banned in the liberal Burney household; as well as Richardson and Fielding, Fanny had read Sterne (although she pityingly called him ‘poor Sterne’) and many other works which Fordyce would have abominated. The house was full of reading-matter quite apart from the mostly musical and classical texts in Charles Burney’s library, and lack of supervision meant that while Fanny read much more demanding books than most ‘educated’ young ladies would have encountered, she also read a great deal more ‘low-grade’ literature, and knew many risqué works, such as Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, well enough to parody them.38 The sort of literature she enjoyed and the sort of literature she felt ‘allowed’ to write were not the same thing at all.
When she tried to amalgamate entertainment with moral instruction in her own work, the results were patchy. In Evelina, which was published anonymously, the attempt was successful because Burney felt free to make her heroine mildly fallible, and open to moral improvement; in the later books, when she had to own authorship, her heroines represented pure virtue under attack – a very much less dramatic or entertaining formula. Clearly, the only way Fanny Burney could justify to herself her own persistent interest in writing fiction (and her last novel, The Wanderer, though her least satisfactory, is probably the most ambitious) was by stressing its moral purpose. ‘If many turn aside from all but mere entertainment presented under this form’, she wrote in the dedication to The Wanderer, ‘many, also, may, unconsciously, be allured by it into reading the severest truths, who would not even open any work of a graver denomination’.39
Fanny’s juvenilia seems to have been mostly of a ‘grave denomination’: ‘Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces, – nay,