Fanny’s early diaries describe a life of seemingly uninterrupted gaiety in the company of her loving sisters, adored father and some of the greatest artists of the day. The ‘abominably handsome’ Garrick continued to be a frequent visitor, loved by the whole family; on one occasion he picked Charlotte out of her bed and ran with her as far as the corner of the street. When he threatened to abduct the other girls ‘we all longed to say, Pray do!’66 But as the editors of Fanny’s diaries have pointed out, the consistently cheerful portrait of life in St Martin’s Street is deceptive, since most of the material relating to Fanny’s stepmother was destroyed. From other sources, such as a letter to Fanny from Maria Rishton in September 1776, a different picture emerges:
I knew you could never live all together or be a happy society but still bad as things used to be when I was amongst you they were meer children falling out to what they seem to be now … You know the force of her expression. And indeed I believe she writes from the heart when she says she is the most miserable woman that breathes.67
When Mrs Burney was nervous and dictatorial, the girls responded with outward deference and private ill-will. She was perceived by them as grossly insensitive; perversely, this led them to treat her with gross insensitivity, almost as if they were testing her, trying to prove their worst apprehensions. A cabal formed against ‘the Lady’, and to his shame ‘Daddy’ Crisp joined it gleefully, going so far as to be ‘excessively impudent’ to her face and satirical behind her back, ‘taking her off! – putting his hands behind him, & kicking his heels about!’68
The portrait of Mrs Ireton in Fanny Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer, seems to draw on many of the second Mrs Burney’s supposed attributes (as well as those of Fanny’s later bête noire at Court, Mrs Schwellenberg, whom she called Mama’s double). The heroine of The Wanderer, Juliet, whom Mrs Ireton oppresses from sheer bloody-mindedness and sadism, is forced to act as ‘humble companion’, a symbolic representation of Fanny’s subordination to her stepmother. An explanation for Elizabeth Burney’s ‘love of tyranny’ is suggested in the story by Mrs Ireton’s brother-in-law, who knew the old harpy in youth as ‘eminently fair, gay, and charming!’69 Perhaps the inextinguishable spleen of the Burney ‘Family Scourge’ was, like Mrs Ireton’s, a kind of shock reaction to the withdrawal of sexual attention:
without stores to amuse, or powers to instruct, though with a full persuasion that she is endowed with wit, because she cuts, wounds, and slashes from unbridled, though pent-up resentment, at her loss of adorers; and from a certain perverseness, rather than quickness of parts, that gifts her with the sublime art of ingeniously tormenting.70
Mrs Burney had plenty of fuel for sexual jealousy, not just at home among her stepdaughters (whom William Bewley had once described as Charles Burney’s ‘seraglio’) but among the Doctor’s pupils too. No doubt his male friends teased Charles Burney about his access to an endless supply of nubile young women, and perhaps not without cause: he appears in James Barry’s 1783 allegorical painting The Triumph of the Thames surrounded by naked Nereids, and in C.L. Smith’s caricature ‘A Sunday Concert’ in an obscenely suggestive pose in front of John Wilkes’s daughter Mary. Burney was clearly susceptible to female charms: he became openly infatuated with the lovely Sophy Streatfield after her lover Henry Thrale was dead, to the extent that Mrs Thrale felt he was making a fool of himself.71 Even Fanny noticed and joked about her father’s ability to make ‘conquests’, though she saw it mostly as proof of his charm. But a wife would be likely to view such persistent ‘charm’ rather differently. Elizabeth Burney may have had much more to put up with in her marriage than we know.
* Fanny’s impression differs radically from John Strype’s description of St Martin’s Street in 1720 as ‘a handsome, open Place, with very good Buildings for the Generality, and well inhabited’.52
* It was later renumbered 35. The house was condemned in 1913 and the site is now occupied by the Westminster Reference Library.
† This room in the Burneys’ house has been reconstructed at Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, using the original panelling and mantelpiece.55
From the origin of her first literary attempt, [she] might almost be called an accidental author.
Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney1
Fanny’s diary was not addressed to ‘Nobody’ for long. Craving news from town and the company of his dear Burney girls, Samuel Crisp had developed an apparently insatiable appetite for their letters, and singled out Fanny’s as the best. His attention was extremely gratifying to the ‘little dunce’ and encouraged her to invest time and effort in the correspondence. Her diary gradually modulated into a series of journal-letters to the hermit of Chesington which Crisp felt free to circulate to his sister and her friends.
While it stimulated Fanny to have a discerning and appreciative audience (in a way that addressing passive ‘Nobody’ could never do), there was of course a danger that these semi-public letters might become self-conscious. Fortunately, Crisp was not only a forthright man but astute, and foresaw the kind of inhibitions to which Fanny might be prey. ‘I profess there is not a single word or expression, or thought in your whole letter,’ he wrote in the winter of 1773, when their correspondence was just taking root, ‘that I do not relish’:
– not that in our Correspondence, I shall set up for a Critic, or schoolmaster, or Observer of Composition – Damn it all! – I hate it if once You set about framing studied letters, that are to be correct, nicely grammatical & run in smooth Periods, I shall mind them as no others than newspapers of intelligence; I make this preface because You have needlessly enjoin’d me to deal sincerely, & to tell You of your faults; & so let this declaration serve once for all, that there is no fault in an Epistolary Correspondence, like stiffness, & study – Dash away, whatever comes uppermost – the sudden sallies of imagination, clap’d down on paper, just as they arise, are worth Folios, & have all the warmth & merit of that sort of Nonsense, that is Eloquent in Love – never think of being correct, when You write to me.2
Crisp granted Fanny a licence to be natural, and the benefits were enormous. He encouraged her to entertain him, not with anything fanciful or affected, but with the events of her everyday life, written in her everyday language, really as if she were talking to him. It was in their degree of deviation from ‘nicely grammatical’ writing that he would judge the vitality of her letters. Uneducated Fanny had appealed to the family monitor to correct her faults, and he had replied that she wasn’t to give her style a moment’s notice.
‘Dash away, whatever comes uppermost’: Fanny’s letters to Crisp became studiedly informal, making use of character sketches and long passages of dialogue as a substitute for straightforward chronicling.