But young Charles’s was not a brooding nature, and he recovered far quicker from this shameful episode than did the rest of his family. By the following spring he had been found a place at King’s College, Old Aberdeen – a far cry from Caius, and in a Presbyterian country (which his father thought might be a further hindrance to his taking Holy Orders, as they still hoped he would some day). He was writing verses, such as ‘Farewell to Shinfield’, which indicate that his spirits were pretty well restored:
Let me shake off the rustic – & once more
The gayer joys of college life explore.18
The ‘gayer joys’ in question may well have been what got him into trouble in his short Cambridge career, where any kind of high living would have very rapidly used up young Charles’s small allowance. Ralph S. Walker, in his article on the thefts,19 points out that when Charles junior’s own son, Charles Parr Burney, was going up to Oxford, he warned him feelingly of ‘three stumbling blocks: Gaming, Drinking and the Fair Sex’, the greatest being gaming: ‘Its fascinations are matchless and when they once influence the mind, their power is uncontrollable’.20 This is surely the voice of experience, and perhaps young Charles did steal and sell the books in order to avoid owning up to debt at home.
Fanny puts a different slant on the matter in a letter written many years later to Charles Parr Burney (who had only just found out about the episode), in which she states ‘the origin of that fatal deed to have been a MAD RAGE for possessing a library, and that the subsequent sale only occurred from the fear of discovery’.21 Charles’s bibliomania, which far surpassed his father’s, resulted in him possessing at the time of his death in 1817 one of the most splendid private libraries of the age, which, along with his magpie hoards of old newspaper cuttings (ninety-four volumes) and an extensive archive of material relating to the history of the stage, formed a core collection of the new British Library. Fanny’s suggestion that her brother suffered a pathological ‘rage for possessing a library’ seems psychologically convincing. In the days of his prosperity, he acquired books conventionally; when he was a student from the lower bourgeoisie, let loose in the treasure-house of a university library, he just acquired them anyway.
If Fanny was trying to make enough money from Evelina to bail out her brother, she failed, even though the twenty guineas she received from the publisher for the copyright seemed ‘a sum enormous’ to her at the time. She said later that she had given the proceeds of her first novel to her brother Charles, but his disgrace at university post-dates her rush to finish Evelina. Perhaps even at Charterhouse, where he stayed until the late age of nineteen, Charles had run into the kind of debt that seems to have burdened him as a student. It is even possible that he might have been desperate (from whatever cause) to the point of attempting suicide. There is a cryptic reference in Fanny’s diary to a conversation with the writer Giuseppe Baretti in 1788, when Baretti used the image of ‘running a dagger into your own breast’. This made Fanny shudder, ‘because the dagger was a word of unfortunate recollection’.22* Is it possible, as Mrs Thrale heard on the grapevine the same year,24 that Charles Burney junior was the model for the suicidal Macartney in Evelina, whom the heroine (later revealed to be his half-sister) discovers preparing to use a pistol on himself? The heroines of Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer undergo traumatic encounters with potential suicides too, and in each case the desperado is brandishing a weapon. There may have been something more painful behind her ‘decision to print’ than Fanny Burney was prepared to let anyone know.
By the winter of 1776, Fanny had completed the first two volumes of her novel and had copied out at least one volume in the feigned, upright hand she developed to prevent recognition of the author of the manuscript. This was not as neurotic as it might seem. Fanny’s handwriting was well known in the London printing shops from her extensive copying of her father’s works, and as she would have no control over the production of her novel – should a publisher take it up – there was a real risk that her cover would be blown, or worse, that her father might be disgraced by association with the book.
The task of transcribing her text into the unnatural handwriting was irksome, and by Christmas 1776 she was losing patience with it. In conspiracy with Susan, Charlotte and Charles she had already approached the bookseller James Dodsley, but he had refused to consider an anonymous work. The next bookseller she fixed on was Thomas Lowndes, whose premises were in Fleet Street. Fanny felt she couldn’t approach him directly, so using the Orange Coffee House in the Haymarket as a decoy address, she sent Charles as go-between, weirdly dressed up by his sisters to look as adult as possible and melodramatically concealed behind the pseudonym ‘Mr King’. Fanny herself became the work’s anonymous and genderless ‘editor’, writing to Lowndes, ‘I have in my possession a M:S. novel, which has never yet been seen but by myself.’25 She hoped to have the first two volumes ‘printed immediately’, with two more appearing later if they were successful. This might have been desirable to the young author, fed up with the slog of transcribing her half-completed manuscript and keen for cash; but Lowndes, unsurprisingly, wanted the thing complete. He returned volume one via ‘Mr King’, hoping to see the rest by the summer of 1777, but Fanny did not complete the book until November, staying up ‘the greatest part of many Nights, in order to get it ready’,26 and it was not published until January of the following year. For one who claims to have had a ‘vague’ desire ‘to see her works in print’, it was an arduous process, requiring hard work, determination, patience and concentration.
The manuscript that finally found its way to Lowndes’s shop late in 1777 was prefaced with three layers of anxious authorial disclaimer: first there was an ode dedicating the work to the ‘author of my being’ (Dr Burney) and explaining that anonymity was the only course open to one who ‘cannot raise, but would not sink’ the fame of a matchless parent; then there was a petition for clemency ‘to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’, entreating them to remember that ‘you were all young writers once’. Lastly there was a preface from ‘the editor’ of the book, admitting that though novels (with a few notable exceptions) were held in low regard, ‘surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, might rather be encouraged than contemned’. Apparently forgetting the role of ‘editor’, she declared an intention not to copy the style of ‘the great writers’ (Johnson, Rousseau, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Marivaux) or to deal with ‘the same ground which they have tracked’. She is of ‘the vulgar herd’, and they ‘great’. Another reason why Fanny Burney’s novel was unlikely to fit into the existing ‘great’ tradition was that she was female, but since the title page did not even feature the conventional anonymous credit ‘By a Lady’, that fact was hidden.
The novel tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl, beautiful – of course – virtuous and naive, whose sheltered upbringing in Dorset under the protection of an elderly cleric, Mr Villars, is brought to an abrupt end by her entrance into London society in the company