Fanny Burney: A biography. Claire Harman

impatience with the hackney coach, the muck sweat, the obscurity of the Shilling Gallery and the sense of eavesdropping on his own work’s first performance all seem to typify the urgency, anxiety and effort with which Burney strove to establish himself in the world. His work habits became almost manic; he pushed himself to the point of collapse, and then sank into protracted illnesses. In the winter before the debut of Alfred, he spent thirteen weeks in bed, a disastrously long time for a breadwinner, and certain to have agitated his restless mind. He was a small, very thin man, whose constitution was in fact as strong as an ox but who looked as if he might turn consumptive with every passing chill. In this, as well as in frame and feature, his second daughter was to resemble him closely.

      The illness of 1751 must have alarmed Burney considerably. A short convalescence in Islington (then a balmy village) made him begin to credit his doctor’s insistence that he seek a permanent change of air. Reluctantly, he began to think of leaving the capital. When the offer of the post of organist at St Margaret’s Church in Lynn Regis, Norfolk, came up, combining sea air, light duties, a much larger salary and, since 1750, a regular coach service to London (splendidly horsed and armed to the teeth with muskets and bludgeons), it would have been folly to refuse. Burney moved there alone in September 1751 ‘to feel his way, & know the humours of the place’.³⁶

      Lynn Regis (now known as King’s Lynn) was a thriving mercantile centre in the mid-eighteenth century, with valuable wine, beer and coal trade and corn exports worth more than a quarter of a million pounds a year. It supplied six counties with goods, and sent river freight as far inland as Cambridge. The wealthy aldermen of Lynn were keen to improve the cultural life of the town and to acquire a good music-teacher for their daughters; to this end they had increased the organist’s salary by subscription to £100 a year in order to attract Burney (clearly some influential friend or friends had a hand in setting this up), and were prepared to raise the pay even further when they feared they might lose him.

      Burney at first resented his provincial exile: the organ in St Margaret’s was ‘Execrably bad’ and the audiences as unresponsive as ‘Stocks & Trees’,³⁷ but over the months his attitude changed. He began to be patronised by some of the ‘great folks’ of north Norfolk – the Townshends at Raynham, the Cokes at Holkham Hall, the Earl of Buckinghamshire at Blickling, Lord Orford (Horace Walpole’s nephew) at Houghton – and his spirits rose. All these grandees had large estates, beautiful grounds, art collections and libraries. Burney found that in Norfolk there might be, if anything, even more influential patrons at his disposal than in London, and that the burghers of Lynn were prepared to treat him as the ultimate authority on his subject. Soon he was writing to Esther in encouraging tones. Pregnant for the fourth time, she and the three children joined him in the spring of 1752, and it was probably at their first address in Lynn, Chapel Street, that their daughter Frances was born on 13 June. The new baby was baptised on 7 July in St Nicholas’s, the fishermen’s chapel just a few yards away, with Frances Greville, returned from the Continent, named as godmother.

      The choice of Mrs Greville helped re-establish Charles Burney’s connection with his former patrons, but it also had a literary significance, since Mrs Greville was not just a formidable intellectual but an accomplished poet, whose ‘Prayer for Indifference’ – published in 1759 – became one of the most famous poems of its day. The Burneys must have expected something substantial to come of the connection, for Fanny’s sharp judgements of her godmother both personally – she thought Mrs Greville ‘pedantic, sarcastic and supercilious’³⁸ – and as a godparent – ‘she does not do her duty and answer for me’³⁹ – betray more than pique.

      The modest provincial household into which Mrs Greville’s namesake, Frances, was born was bent on intellectual improvement; Charles and Esther Burney had set themselves a course of reading in the evenings which included ‘history, voyages, poetry, and science, as far as Chambers’s Dicty, the French Encyclopédie, & the Philosophical transactions’.⁴⁰ Not many young couples went to the expense of subscribing to the first edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and not many Lynn housewives would have relished reading it of an evening, but Esther Burney was an earnest autodidact, ‘greatly above the generality of Lynn ladies’,⁴¹ whose card-playing evenings bored her, and whom she was soon making excuses to avoid. Esther was a city girl, born and bred, and was probably keener even than her husband to get back to London. He had his teaching and the great houses to visit; she had four young children to look after in an unfamiliar provincial community. As their daughter was to observe later: ‘That men, when equally removed from the busy turmoils of cities, or the meditative studies of retirement, to such circumscribed spheres, should manifest more vigour of mind, may not always be owing to possessing it; but rather to their escaping, through the calls of business, that inertness which casts the females upon themselves’.⁴²

      Esther found two like-minded women in Lynn during her nine years’ residence there, Elizabeth Allen and Dolly Young, with whom she formed a sort of miniature literary salon. They met regularly at the house of the richest, most beautiful and most voluble of the three, Mrs Allen, a corn merchant’s wife, who had a ‘passionate fondness for reading’ and ‘spirits the most vivacious and entertaining’.⁴³ Dolly Young was nearer to Esther in temperament; studious and sensitive, she became Esther’s particular friend, and a sort of aunt to the children, several of whom, including Fanny, she helped deliver. Unlike her two married friends, Dolly Young was not at all beautiful; her face had ‘various unhappy defects’ and her body was ‘extremely deformed’⁴⁴ (almost certainly through smallpox) – an odd companion for Mrs Allen, who was widely regarded as the town’s great beauty. Charles Burney admired all three: ‘I thought no three such females could be found on our Island’, he wrote later, noting with approval, ‘They read everything they cd procure’.⁴⁵

      Only a few months after baby Frances was born, her year-old brother Charles died and was buried on the north side of St Nicholas’s. Esther was soon pregnant again, but this child, also named Charles, did not survive infancy. Her sixth child, a daughter christened Susanna Elizabeth, was born in January 1755, a frail baby who was lucky to escape the smallpox outbreak that lasted in Lynn from 1754 to 1756. There were so many deaths during this period that St Margaret’s churchyard was closed due to overcrowding, and the hours of burial had to be extended from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day to cope with the demand. Typhus outbreaks were also common in Lynn, and Charles Burney must sometimes have wondered if the ‘change of air’ for which he had left London was going to cure him or kill him.

      By the mid-1750s the Burneys had moved to a house on the High Street, near to stately old St Margaret’s Church and in sight of the masts of the ships docked on the Great Ouse. It was a just a few minutes’ walk to the foreshore, where the children could watch the traffic on the river. The waterfront was full of warehouses with watergates to let small boats in at high tide, and the quays were always busy, with coal and wine and beer being loaded, or the fishing fleet bringing cod and herring in. Salters and curers’, shipbuilders’, sail and ropemakers’ premises lined the docks, with their noise and smell of industry. Once a year, in July or August, the whaling fleet came in from its far journey to Greenland, the decks laden with monstrous Leviathan bones. The bells of St Margaret’s would peal in celebration and the town enjoy a general holiday, for Lynn was proud of its mercantile nature, never mind the reek from the blubber houses as the rendering process got under way, or the stench of the Purfleet drain at low tide.

      Fanny Burney, like her mother, was essentially a city-lover, and spent most of her adult life living right in the middle of London or Paris. Her childhood in Lynn was happy because she was constantly in the company of her ‘very domestic’ mother⁴⁶