The eventual restoration of Evelina to her rightful name and identity, and the parallel story of her troubled courtship by courtly Lord Orville, provide the double framework within which Fanny Burney creates a vivid satire of eighteenth-century manners, told, for the first time, from a feminine viewpoint. The love story of Evelina is entertainingly perverse: as in Pride and Prejudice (which owes a great deal – possibly including its title* – to Burney’s work), the couple start out by meeting at an assembly and getting on very badly. Endless accidents and misconceptions make Orville’s poor opinion of Evelina, ‘a poor weak girl!’,28 fall even further, and only through the passage of time, painfully good behaviour and the couple’s persistent sexual attraction to each other are they eventually united.
Burney packed her ‘little narrative’ with matter, rather in the way that Dickens was to do a century later. There are sentimental scenes, ‘sublime’ scenes (notably the tear-jerking reconciliation between Evelina and her repentant father, Sir John Belmont), high drama, low comedy and a large cast of characters catering for all tastes. A great deal of the book’s novelty and charm, however, comes from the sympathetic way in which Burney depicts the heroine’s youth and inexperience. The scene at Evelina’s first assembly is both funny and painful, for she is concentrating too hard on the formalities to behave any way other than idiotically. Her letters home to Dorset chart this frustrating ‘entrance into the world’ with an endearing candour that also performs an important ironic function: the reader sees (almost) all Evelina’s troubles coming long before she does, from the manoeuvrings of her intemperate grandmother Madame Duval, to the dangerously plausible Sir Clement Willoughby’s persistent attempts at seduction.
Evelina is at the mercy of appearances in every way, judged to be as vulgar as the company she is forced to keep, that of her meddling and exploitative grandmother and her self-seeking cousins, the Branghtons. Burney’s portrayals of mean-spirited, selfish and socially ambitious characters immediately show where her genius lies. Years of studying the manners of the aspirant middle class (most notably, of course, her own father) had given her ample material to work on; her traditionally limited female upbringing added a claustrophobic intensity and weight of disgust to her observations. The Branghtons come in for particularly stinging satire. They are silversmiths (like the Burneys’ own tenant in Long’s Court), with premises on Snow Hill, near Smithfield. Their alertness to class signals is extreme – even the disposition of their accommodation reflects it like a three-dimensional model. The Branghtons themselves live on the second floor, with a poor Scotch poet, Macartney, lodging in the garret and ‘classy’ Mr Smith in the former reception rooms on the first floor. The stratification is relative, of course. Only to a Branghton could Mr Smith be a model of gentility, and the poet, needless to say, turns out to be a man of sensibility and noble blood. Fanny Burney revels in exposing the small-mindedness of her vulgar characters, and Smith is the best of them all. ‘Such a fine varnish of low politeness!’ said Dr Johnson of his favourite, ‘– such a struggle to appear a Gentleman!’29 Smith is constantly on his guard, yet every word and action betrays him. He doesn’t, for instance, like to lend his rooms to the grubby Branghton girls (who guilelessly admit how seldom they put on clean clothes). ‘The truth is,’ he explains, expecting to impress Evelina,
Miss Biddy and Polly take no care of any thing, else, I’m sure, they should always be welcome to my room; for I’m never so happy as in obliging the ladies, – that’s my character, Ma’am; – but, really, the last time they had it, everything was made so greasy and so nasty, that upon my word, to a man who wishes to have things a little genteel, it was quite cruel. Now, as to you, Ma’am, it’s quite another thing; for I should not mind if every thing I had was spoilt, for the sake of having the pleasure to oblige you; and, I assure you, Ma’am, it makes me quite happy, that I have a room good enough to receive you.30
The Branghtons’ ineradicable vulgarity provides much of the humour of the book. Forced to take a party to the opera, Mr Branghton is totally unprepared for the expense of the tickets and makes a scene at the booth, thinking he can haggle over the prices as he might with a fellow tradesman. His purchase of the cheapest possible seats, still in his view extortionately expensive, pleases no one in the party, for they have neither the satisfaction of hearing or seeing the performance properly, nor of being seen by the ‘quality’ in the pit. When the opera begins, their disappointment is intensified: ‘Why there’s nothing but singing!’ Mr Branghton exclaims, and is disgusted by the realisation that it is all in a foreign language too. ‘Pray what’s the reason they can’t as well sing in English?’ he asks; ‘but I suppose the fine folks would not like it, if they could understand it.’31
‘The fine folks’ come off rather worse than the vulgarians, although Burney’s depiction of them is necessarily less convincingly observed. Lord Merton and his friends are all (except for super-virtuous Orville) as stupid as the Holborn crowd, and more culpable. Their affectations and excessive language are evidence of moral malaise; while they should be leading society (Lovel is a Member of Parliament and all the others landowners), their time is wasted in gaming, dangerous sports and dalliance. Evelina’s blue-stocking chaperone, Mrs Selwyn, is the scourge of this set, endlessly showing up their ignorance and folly. When she suggests that they have a competition to see who can quote longest from Horace, none of the fops can join in, despite their expensive ‘classical’ educations: ‘what with riding, – and – and – and so forth’, says one of them, ‘really, one has not much time, even at the university, for mere reading.’32 But while Mrs Selwyn’s ‘masculine’ learning and wit is the vehicle for many of the novel’s home truths, the author makes clear that she finds it ultimately sterile. Mrs Selwyn is too busy ‘reserving herself for the gentlemen’ to function as the sympathetic mother-figure the orphaned heroine needs.
There is no doubt that Evelina’s worth is only recognised at all by Lord Orville because she is also beautiful, but in this profoundly feminist novel Burney gives an original view of the conventional heroine – the view from the pedestal. Evelina’s instant physical impact on other people – of which she is imperfectly aware – is shown as something of a liability (inflaming lustful men and making enemies of jealous women). It is her guarantee of attention, but at the same time an impediment to being truly seen. Evelina exposes – in a way undreamed of by earlier novelists – the double standards applied towards women, in whom everything but beauty and goodness are ‘either impertinent or unnatural’.33 The wit, Mrs Selwyn, is seen as unnaturally intellectual (‘oddish’), and Evelina’s grotesque grandmother, Madame Duval, as impertinently immodest; both commit the cardinal sin of being old. ‘I don’t know what the devil a woman lives for after thirty,’ says dissolute Lord Merton, in one of the novel’s bleakest remarks; ‘she is only in other folks’ way.’34 The lovely young heroine’s hold on her admirers will soon, it is implied, be turned to just such withering scorn, for women past their bloom are not just negligible but irritating – ‘in other folks’ way’ – and a resented financial liability on some man or other.
The scene in Evelina in which the gambling-mad fops organise a race between two very old women is a graphic example of the point. Like the episode in which a dressed-up monkey attacks Lovel, it has been criticised for being excessive and unlikely, but this is not the case: gambling was the mania of the period and the occasions for it bizarre.