Names and problems of identity are centrally important in all Fanny Burney’s novels, which makes it rather ironic that the name of the author herself has become a contentious issue. None of her novels revealed her name on the title page – her first novel did not even sport the conventional tag ‘By a Lady’, and the subsequent ones were attributed to ‘the author of Evelina’, etc. Memoirs of Doctor Burney ‘by his Daughter, Madame d’Arblay’, was the only work she signed in her lifetime. Her diaries, published posthumously, were attributed to ‘Madame d’Arblay’ until the publication in 1889 of the Early Diary, which introduced her baptismal name ‘Frances Burney’. ‘Fanny Burney’, the name by which she was known familiarly until her marriage in 1793 and to the world through Johnsoniana, was adopted in the title of Austin Dobson’s 1903 biography and was used extensively by critics and biographers during the twentieth century, including the eminent Burney scholar, biographer and editor Joyce Hemlow. This is the name under which the Burney Project is publishing her Journals and Letters and Early Journals and Letters even though a number of critics, notably and most eloquently Margaret Anne Doody, have been arguing since the 1980s that the diminutive is a patronising form which should no longer be tolerated. ‘It makes the author sound the harmless, childish, priggish girl-woman that many critics want her to be’, Doody has written. ‘Let her have an adult full name’.20
But which ‘adult full name’? It comes in many forms, making the search for material in catalogues and indexes peculiarly time-consuming. She is variously listed under A [Arblay], B [Burney] and D [d’Arblay], sometimes, as in the London Library, under all three. As preparations are made to raise a memorial to the author in Westminster Abbey, an ardent debate is taking place among members of the Burney Society on both sides of the Atlantic as to which name will appear, with the threat of an absurd compromise: ‘Frances (Fanny) Burney d’Arblay’.21 Bibliographical convention would dictate the use of her name at death, Frances d’Arblay, but no one seems happy with that; it is unfamiliar. Similarly, though ‘Frances Burney’ is used on the title pages of several modern reprints of her novels, ‘correctness’ rarely extends as far as the cover, where the author is most often still known as ‘Fanny Burney’, presumably because it is more recognisable to the reading public.
I have decided to use the latter style (interspersed with her married name in the later part of her life), despite the danger of appearing overfamiliar. In a work of criticism, I feel that the more formal ‘Burney’ or ‘Frances Burney’ would be correct throughout; in a biography, that deals with a subject from earliest childhood, the informal name is often more appropriate. I have also used familiar versions of some names within the Burney family which are subject to confusion through multiple use; to distinguish between Fanny’s mother and sister I have called the first Esther and second Hetty, and have used the familiar shortening of Susanna Burney’s name to Susan and Frederica Locke’s to Fredy on the grounds that they were Fanny Burney’s intimates. Her father is called Charles Burney (Dr Burney after 1769), her brother Charles Burney Junior (although he too gained a doctorate in 1808). Her husband is referred to as d’Arblay or M. d’Arblay, and their son, who was given the anglicised form of his father’s Christian name, as Alex.
‘The Burneys are I believe a very low Race of Mortals’, wrote Dr Johnson’s confidante Hester Thrale in February 1779 of her daughter’s music master and his family. The remark was scribbled in the margin of her journal as a gloss on her opinion that Dr Burney’s second daughter, Fanny, was ‘not a Woman of Fashion’.1 This was such an obvious thing to say about twenty-six-year-old Fanny Burney that it hardly bore mentioning, unless from mild spite. The Burneys were indeed not ‘people of Fashion’; they were representative of the coming class, the intelligentsia; self-made, self-educated, self-conscious people in uneasy amity with their wealthy and well-born patrons. No doubt those patrons found it obliquely threatening that a ‘low race’ could produce so many high achievers: in 1779 Dr Burney, author, composer and teacher, was halfway through publishing his ground-breaking General History of Music; Fanny had shot to fame the previous year with her first novel, Evelina; another of the Burney daughters was a famous harpsichordist; and one of the sons had circumnavigated the world with Captain Cook. The Burneys, and people like them, had every reason to think they were being admired rather than sneered at.
There had been no patrimony, titles or property to smooth Dr Burney’s path in life; he had achieved his position through a combination of natural genius and unstinting hard work, his eye forever on the main chance, his ‘spare person’ worn to a ravelling. Mrs Thrale claimed not to understand the devotion Burney inspired in his children – ’tis very seldom that a person’s own family will give him Credit for Talents which bring in no money to make them fine or considerable’,2 she wrote in her diary; but what was ‘no money’ to Mrs Thrale was riches to the Burneys, just as their reception among the ‘Great folks’ – at her own house, Streatham Park, for instance – was more than enough to make them feel ‘considerable’. Fanny Burney’s pride in the insignificant-looking man who had effected these miracles was boundless, and she saw no absurdity in describing her father as the powerful ‘trunk’ of the Burney tree.3 Charles Burney had so successfully overcome his humble background that he really did seem to have sprung up from nowhere and to have started his family history afresh.
One of the Doctor’s other harpsichord pupils in 1779 (they were all young ladies ‘of Fashion’) had told Mrs Thrale that ‘these Burney’s are Irish people I’m sure; Mac Burneys they used to be called’.4 Where the girl picked up this information one can hardly imagine, unless through class instinct; the Doctor did not advertise his changed name. Charles MacBurney, as he was first known, was born in Shrewsbury in 1726, the twin to a sister called Susanna and the youngest son of his father’s second family. His grandfather, James, who was of Scottish or Irish descent (accounts differ), had had an estate in Shropshire and a house in Whitehall in the late seventeenth century, but by the time of Charles’s birth the family money had all but disappeared. The story goes that the grandfather MacBurney was so disgusted by his son James running off with a young actress, Rebecca Ellis, that he disinherited him. The old gentleman rather perversely followed up this gesture of affronted rectitude by marrying his own cook and starting a second family, of whom the eldest son, Joseph, inherited most of the property. This son frittered his inheritance away, was imprisoned for debt and supported himself later by becoming a dancing-master; but despite his fall from grace and wealth, he seemed happy with his lot (or so Charles Burney, his half-nephew, thought when they met in the 1750s), and that branch of the family was noted for its cheerfulness and striking good looks.
The outcast older brother James and his teenaged bride Rebecca had their first child in 1699 and went on to have fourteen more over the next twenty years, of whom at least nine survived. James had been expensively educated at Westminster School and had had some training in portrait painting under Michael Dahl, a fashionable Swedish portraitist who had painted the Swedish royal family as well as Queen Anne and members of the English aristocracy. James’s character was not, however, one to capitalise on these advantages, being ‘volatile, & improvident’.5 He was more concerned with keeping up his reputation as a convivial dinner-guest and bon-viveur (an activity which presumably got him away from his home full of babies) than with establishing himself in any one place or profession long enough to make anything of his talents as a painter, dancer, copyist or fiddler. As one of his children recorded later, the inevitable consequence of his fecklessness was that ‘his family was left to lament, that his talent for pleasantry, & love of sociability, overcame his prudential care, either for himself or them’.6