The Essay was only a short work but it kept Dr Burney up late at night, and its completion was followed by an acute bout of rheumatic fever. The pattern of overwork, hurry and collapse during the composition of his books may have impressed the Doctor’s daughter with the idea that writing was something urgent, difficult and heroic. Burney had by this time formulated the plan for his General History of Music, the first scholarly attempt in English to cover the development of the subject from ancient times to his own day. To choose a project so massive and challenging suggests that Burney had tired of dabbling and wanted a surefire ticket to fame (and fortune, of course), to be the author of a work which would virtually put itself beyond criticism on account of its novelty, authority and sheer size, and which, like the Dictionary of his admired Johnson, would contribute substantially to knowledge, in an age when all the best minds of Europe seemed engaged on writing works of reference.
Burney felt that his book would only make the proper impact if it derived from original research in the great music libraries of Europe, also that ‘the present state of modern music’ was the most important part of his subject. Armed with letters of recommendation from his influential friends to British officials in France and Italy, he set off on a six-month Continental tour in June 1770. It was an arduous but extremely productive journey, and though Burney was in a state of collapse on his return, he had met many famous and learned people, including Padre G.B. Martini in Bologna, the foremost musicologist of the time, the castrato Farinelli in Venice, the seventy-five-year-old Voltaire at Ferney (by an engineered accident), and in Paris Denis Diderot and the great Rousseau himself. The ‘Man Mountain’ was sitting in a dark corner, wearing a woollen nightcap, greatcoat and slippers, an informal reception which perhaps encouraged Burney to show him his plan for the History, which to the budding author’s delight, and after a little initial resistance on Rousseau’s part, went down encouragingly well.
Burney kept a detailed journal of his tour, and soon after his return to London began to think of publishing it as a money-spinner and as an advertisement for the forthcoming History. With the help of the girls, he had a manuscript ready within four months which was published in May 1771 as The Present State of Music in France and Italy. The market for ‘tour’ books was saturated at the time, but Burney’s had the novelty of its focus on music and performers, as well as gripping passages about the difficulties of travel, such as this description of crossing the Apennines:
At every moment, I could only hear them cry out ‘Alla Montagna!’ which meant to say that the road was so broken and dangerous that it was necessary I should alight, give the Mule to the Pedino, and cling to the rock or precipice. I got three or four terrible blows on the face and head by boughs of trees I could not see. In mounting my Mule, which was vicious, I was kicked by the two hind legs on my left knee and right thigh, which knocked me down, and I thought at first, and the Muleteers thought my thigh was broken, and began to pull at it and add to the pain most violently.15
The reviews of the book would probably have been good anyway, but Burney, in his acute anxiety to succeed, fixed the two most influential ones, in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review.16 He described himself as a ‘diffident and timid author’,17 but he had a ruthless streak, especially when it came to nobbling the opposition (as he did shamelessly when a rival History of Music, by Sir John Hawkins, appeared before his own). His later anxieties about his daughter’s literary career centred on the possible critical reception of her books; he felt it better for her not to publish at all than to risk adverse reviews.
With their father’s absence abroad in 1770, followed by the rush to write his book, and another long trip to Europe in 1772 to gather material for a sequel, the Burney children were left even more than usual in the undiluted company of their stepmother. While the Doctor was in Italy, Mrs Burney found and purchased a new home for the amalgamated Burney-Allen household. It was a large, luxurious house on the south side of Queen Square, an area familiar to the children from their long association with Mrs Sheeles’s school (Burney’s appointment there lasted from 1760 to about 1775). Fanny liked the open view of the villages of Hampstead and Highgate to the north, and rooms that were ‘well fitted up, Convenient, large, & handsome’, but regretted leaving Poland Street, which represented the old days of her parents’ marriage.
One of the reasons for the move was to get away from the family’s former neighbour Mrs Pringle, at whose house the Burney girls had met Alexander Seton, the baronet’s son who had been so impressed with Fanny’s conversational powers. His flirtation with Hetty had been so on-and-off for the past two years that she felt forced to give up seeing him altogether for her own peace of mind, and Mr Crisp’s advice (backed up by ‘Mama’) was that the Burneys should end contact with Mrs Pringle too. Fanny was pained to cut her old friend, but did it all the same, and was ready with some lies when the puzzled matron asked what the matter was. In all ‘difficult’ dealings of this kind, the Burneys displayed unattractive qualities: panic, fudging and petty cruelty, such as in the case of their former friend Miss Lalauze, whom they treated with a species of horror after she was reputed to have ‘fallen’. Their own struggle to sustain their upward mobility seems to have prevented them from behaving more magnanimously to such people ‘however sincerely they may be objects of Pity’.18
Hetty recovered from her disappointment over Seton (and avoided having to join the new step-household) by marrying her cousin and fellow musician Charles Rousseau Burney in the autumn of 1770. Dr Burney was abroad at the time and unable to give his consent. He would not have approved the match; he was very fond of his nephew, a gentle, talented man, but knew as well as anyone how hard it was to make a decent living out of music. The marriage was happy, but never prosperous materially. Before long, Hetty was expecting the first of her eight children (the last of which was born as late as 1792). Her career as a harpsichordist was of course over. Fanny, as the eldest unmarried daughter, now acquired the title ‘Miss Burney’.
At about the same time, Maria Allen was jilted by a young man called Martin Rishton. To cheer her up after this disappointment, Fanny wrote her a poem called ‘Female Caution’, which contains these stanzas:
Ah why in faithless man repose
The peace & safety of your mind?
Why should ye seek a World of Woes,
To Prudence and to Wisdom blind?
Few of mankind confess your worth,
Fewer reward it with their own:
To Doubt and Terror Love gives birth;
To Fear and Anguish makes ye known.
[…] O, Wiser, learn to guard the heart,
Nor let it’s softness be its bane!
Teach it to act a nobler part;
What Love shall lose, let Friendship gain.
Hail, Friendship, hail! To Thee my soul
Shall undivided homage own;
No Time thy influence shall controll;
And Love and I – shall ne’er be known.19
This accomplished poem, which, strangely, has never found its way into any anthology of eighteenth-century verse, displays an advanced state of sexual cynicism in its eighteen-year-old author; men, she claims, do not have it in their nature to