Frances Burney and the Arts 3030988899, 9783030988890

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Frances Burney and the Arts Edited by Francesca Saggini

Frances Burney and the Arts

Francesca Saggini Editor

Frances Burney and the Arts

Editor Francesca Saggini Università della Tuscia Viterbo, Italy University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-98889-0 ISBN 978-3-030-98890-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Lynn, the artist

Contents

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“Obscure Be Still the Unsuccessful Muse”: Frances Burney and the Arts Francesca Saggini

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“Clio I Court”; or, Frances Burney and Historiography Mascha Hansen

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Frances Burney and the Art of Dance Beth Kowaleski Wallace

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Life and Work: Frances Burney and the Needle Arts Alicia Kerfoot

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Frances Burney and the London Opera Scene in the Late Eighteenth Century Stephen A. Willier

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“To Distinguish Us Dilettanti from the Artists”: Instrumental Music in The Wanderer Cassandra Ulph

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Burney’s Musings on the Muses Barbara Witucki

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CONTENTS

“Stories for Miss Cecilia”: Inspiration and the Muses in the Burney Family Archive Lorna J. Clark

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Lorna J. Clark is Research Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, is on the editorial board of The Burney Journal, and has edited the Burney Letter since 1998; she is also an international assessor for the Australian Research Council. She has edited volumes 3 and 4 of the Court Journals of Frances Burney (2014) and published a collection of essays on Frances Burney (2007). She has also published The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney (1997) and edited one of her novels, A Romance of Private Life for Chawton House Library (2008; 2016). Her most recent editions are The Diary of Lucy Kennedy (2015) and the juvenilia of Sophia Elizabeth Burney (2016). She has published almost fifty articles, essays, or chapters, including work on Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and George Eliot. She is currently working on a volume of The Letters of Dr Charles Burney for Oxford University Press. Mascha Hansen is a Lecturer in British Literature at the University of Greifswald, Germany. She has published on Frances Burney, the Bluestockings, and Queen Charlotte, among others, and her interests range from eighteenth-century women’s novels, autobiographies, and letters to their involvement in science and education, their medical history, and their visions of the future. Her recent publications include a collection of essays she has co-edited, British Sociability in the European Enlightenment: Cultural Practices and Sociable Encounters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

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Alicia Kerfoot is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Brockport, State University of New York. She has published on the topic of shoe buckles in Frances Burney’s Cecilia in The Burney Journal (2011), and on fashion and dress in Bloomsbury Academic’s A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Enlightenment (2017). Her work has appeared in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Fashion Theory, and most recently in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’s special issue on “Material Fictions” (2019). She is currently writing a monograph that considers the role of footwear in the literature of the long eighteenth century. Francesca Saggini is Professor of English Literature at the Università della Tuscia (Italy), and Senior Associate at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. Currently, she is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Edinburgh with the Horizon2020-financed project “OpeRaNew: Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences,” on Frances Burney’s court dramas. She is the author of Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts (Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work in eighteenthcentury studies, 2012) and La messinscena dell’identità. Teatro e teatralità nel romanzo inglese del Settecento (“Mario di Nola” Prize awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for an outstanding monograph in literary, historical, and philological studies, 2005). She has published widely on modern and contemporary topics, ranging from Jonathan Swift to vampire fiction and the representation of ghosts. Recent publications include The Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations (2015, Honourable Mention at the European Society for the Study of English Book Awards, Category “Literatures in the English Language−Senior Scholars”) and the first critical edition of “Miss Tully”’s Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa (2014). An edited collection, Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives, was published by Bucknell University Press in 2018 and a critical edition of nineteenth-century Fantastic stories came out in 2020. Cassandra Ulph is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester, where she is currently researching Reading Practices as part of the AHRCfunded project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers. Her doctoral thesis (University of Leeds, 2012) was on Frances Burney’s professional identity in relation to her upbringing in Charles Burney’s musical household. Her research focuses on women’s artistic professionalism, particularly the work

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of Frances Burney and Hester Piozzi, life-writing, and female participation in intellectual life in the long eighteenth century. She has published articles on Burney, Piozzi, and Anne Lister. Her current projects include an article on “pseudo-Burney novels” of the late eighteenth century and plans for a book-length project on Hester Piozzi: Gender, Genre and Memory. Beth Kowaleski Wallace is a Professor of English at Boston College. She is the author of Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford, 1991), Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the 18th Century (Columbia, 1997), and The British Slave Trade in Public Memory (2006), as well as many essays on eighteenth-century literature and culture. Her most recent work on Frances Burney includes “‘I Will Wear My Heart Upon My Sleeve’: Haunted Stages in Frances Burney’s Camilla,” Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research (2016). Stephen A. Willier earned a doctorate in musicology in 1987 at the University of Illinois where his dissertation was “The Impact of the Gothic on Early Nineteenth-Century Opera.” He has taught at Arizona State University and at the University of Illinois. Currently, he is Associate Professor of Music History at the Boyer College of Music at Temple University, where he teaches courses on the history of opera and music 1600−1950. He served as Chair of the Music History Department from 1995 to 2005. He has been at Temple since 1989 and in 2000 was awarded the Lindback Award for excellence in teaching. His publications include Vicenzo Bellini: A Guide to Research (2002), and articles and reviews in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Fontes artis musicae, Studi musicali, The Opera Quarterly, Opera News, Grove Dictionary of Opera, International Dictionary of Opera, St. James Opera Encyclopedia, Music Library Association Notes, Ostinato rigore (Sorbonne, Paris), and Journal of the American Liszt Society. He has completed a biography of the late eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti. Barbara Witucki is a Professor of English (retired) at Utica College, NY. She is a generalist with degrees in both Classics and English who mainly works in classical reception theory, particularly as it manifests itself in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and French novel. Her recent publications include: “Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments,” in Diciottesimo Secolo 4 (2019);

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“The Tyranny of Tyrannies: Italian Culture in Burney’s The Wanderer; Or Female Difficulties ” in Entangled Histories: Politics and Culture in 18th-Century Anglo-Italian Encounters (Cambridge Scholars, 2019); and “An Aeschylean Waterloo: Responding to War from the Oresteia to Vanity Fair,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus (2017). Forthcoming is “Rural Burney” in Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre (Routledge). She is currently finishing a chapter, “Mary Barton: A Tale of Healing Arts, Traditional and Modern,” for Myth and (Mis)information: Constructing the Medical Professions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Manchester University Press).

Abbreviations

AJL

Camilla

Cecilia CJL

EJL

Evelina

History

Frances Burney, The Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, general editor Peter Sabor, 2 vols. Vol. I, 1784−1786. Eds Stuart Cooke and Elaine Bander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Frances Burney. Camilla, or a Picture of Youth. Eds Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) Frances, Burney. Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress. Eds Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) Frances Burney, The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, general editor Peter Sabor, in 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011−2019). Cited in the text with volume number in roman numerals and page numbers in arabic numerals. Frances Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 1768–1783, general editor Lars Troide, in 5 vols. (Oxford-Montreal: Oxford University Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972−1984). Cited in the text with volume number in roman numerals and page numbers in arabic numerals. Frances Burney. Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, Edward Bloom (ed.), with an introduction and notes by Vivien Jones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Joyce Hemlow. The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).

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ABBREVIATIONS

JL

Memoirs

Wanderer

Frances Burney, The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 1791−1840, general editor Joyce Hemlow, in 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972−1984). Cited in the text with volume number in roman numerals and page numbers in arabic numerals. Frances Burney. Memoirs of Doctor Burney, arranged from his own manuscripts, from family papers, and from personal recollections. By his daughter, Madame d’Arblay. 3 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1832). Frances Burney. The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties. Eds Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2

Fig. 1.3

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

The Nine Muses of Great Britain, inc. Elizabeth Carter, Angelica Kauffman, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith, Hannah More, et al. After Richard Samuel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. (https://upl oad.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Nine_L iving_Muses_of_Great_Britain.jpg) Sir Valentine Green after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Ladies Waldegrave. Reference D37981. (©National Portrait Gallery, London) Esther Sleepe sampler. 1732. The Collection at Parham Park. Long Gallery. E8A0769. (©Parham House & Gardens, West Sussex) Shoes, 1740–1760 (possibly British) (Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Herman Delman, 1954. Accession Number: 2009.300.4741a, b) Black and pink satin shoes with floral embroidered vamps, English, 1780–1785 (© 2019 Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Canada. Image by Hal Roth) Oval embroidered darning sampler (panel from a fire screen), c. 1750–1810 (©The Olive Matthews Collection, Chertsey Museum. Image by John Chase Photography)

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CHAPTER 1

“Obscure Be Still the Unsuccessful Muse”: Frances Burney and the Arts Francesca Saggini

Abstract Francesca Saggini introduces this collection of essays by leading scholars in Burney studies and provides an interdisciplinary critical consideration of the relationship of one of the major authors of the long English Romanticism with the arts. The encounter, Saggini claims, was not devoid of tensions and indeed often required a degree of wrangling on Burney’s part. As evidenced by its complex biographical implications, this was a revealing and at times contentious dialogue, allowing us to reconstruct in an original and highly focused way the feminine negotiation with such key concepts of the late Enlightenment and Romanticism as virtue, reputation, creativity, originality, artistic expression, and selfconstruction. Saggini underlines the interconnections between mutually reinforcing forms of neighbouring artistic activities as components of a

F. Saggini (B) Università della Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6_1

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broader spectrum of interartistic and intermedial cultural signification, pivotal to contextualize and reassess Frances Burney’s work. Keywords Frances Burney · Arts · Applied arts · Muses · Material culture

I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse … . I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist. From Leonora Carrington’s Obituary (Hernandez) Finding, probably, that her early literary performances procured her more discredit than honour, Miss Burney very sagely resolved to devote herself to some usual and common-place feminine avocations, … always scrupulously devoting her time to needlework till after dinner. (Elwood, II: 36)

I Over the past two decades, Frances Burney (1752–1840) has been the subject of a steady, indeed growing, stream of studies. Her place in the canon of eighteenth-century literature is by now fully assured—largely owing to her first highly acclaimed novel, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778), available in many affordable editions suited for adoption in the classroom. Furthermore, she is finally on the verge of being recognized as having also played a role in the historical and cultural period known as Long Romanticism (see, among others, Sharren; Wagner; Wood). Such a canonical relocation is quite natural, albeit long overdue, unearthing as it does how much Burney’s vision and subjects have in common with Romantic epistemology. After all, her last published novel, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, came out on 28 March 1814—and it was by no means her last work, as will become clear from the present volume. Therefore, reference will be made throughout to the often-sidestepped Memoirs of Doctor Burney (1832) as much as to her intense literary and journalistic activity, which continued unremittingly well into the nineteenth century until her death, three years after the coronation of Queen Victoria. It should be borne in mind, for one, that Walter Scott’s Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, published a mere three months after The Wanderer in July 1814, is commonly considered a fully developed exemplar of the British Romantic novel.

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An initial phase, during which Burney was studied primarily as a diarist and letter writer, a genteel chronicler often overshadowed by the massive figure of her friend, the ‘great’ Samuel Johnson—as attested by that notorious, programmatic sobriquet, “Johnson’s Little Burney” (Crosbie)—was soon followed by an increasingly in-depth engagement with her work as a novelist, starting with Evelina and then including the later novels. Eventually, it was the turn of Burney’s recognition as a playwright, although there is still relatively little scholarship on the serious dramas written during her years at the court of George III.1 Book-length studies as well as shorter and occasional pieces that refocus critical attention on the influence of the contemporary theatre on Burney’s prose, or that address her plays directly, are no longer the novelty they would have been before the publication of the watershed critical edition of Burney’s Complete Plays , edited by Peter Sabor (Burney). Burney was much more than this anyway, proving an indeed generically protean writer: an occasional pamphleteer (Brief Reflections on the Emigrant French Clergy, 1793, whose proceeds went to charity), she also tried her hand at religious verse, as recently demonstrated by Jody L. Wyett. Moreover, Burney’s work moves seamlessly between contrasting cultural spheres—astride the so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ generic divide—deftly wielding the gruff physicality and slapstick-like comedy of the earlier Evelina together with the grotesque and near-tragedy of the later Camilla. But Burney is also, and above all, an author interested in conversations and interartistic contaminations, reflecting a cultural context in which transmediality and creative cross-fertilization were key as well as sustained and common practices (as proven by Lorna J. Clark’s chapter on the interartistic conversations in the wider Burney circle). As this collection demonstrates, it is therefore high time to move on from the monovocal Burney of her first two eighteenth-century novels and look beyond them towards this new plural and polivocal Burney. Burney’s complete range of dramatic personae spreads and mingles across a very broad human and social spectrum, including labourers and artistic professionals, where singers and actors, musicians and milliners form a narrative chorus to the drawing rooms and aristocratic homes in which even allusions to the classical tradition are not out of place (suffice it to remember the influence of Euripides’ tragedy on Hubert de Vere, a play composed during her years at Court, c. 1790). No less relevant to her aesthetics is the burgeoning genre of marine art, in which the meaningful detail influences, or rather gives direction to, the

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process of decoding the whole, as in J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), with its arresting, horrific detail of the corpses sinking down into the foaming ocean. We might also recall this arch-Romantic painter’s studies of the arrival of the English packet in Calais, dating from 1802 to 1803, and place them side by side with that wide-angle introduction to The Wanderer, which slowly shifts the focus of the eye and ear of the narrative away from the epic voice of History, with its heroes and magniloquence (OBJECTIVE PERCEPTION) towards the minute, slightly out-of-focus detail—momentarily displaced, yet inexorably accusatory of a harrowing, bodiless voice (SYMPATHETIC PARTICIPATION): During the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre, and in the dead of night, braving the cold, the darkness and the damps of December, some English passengers, in a small vessel, were preparing to glide silently from the coast of France, when a voice of keen distress resounded from the shore, imploring, in the French language, pity and admission. (Wanderer, 10; my emphasis)

Despite such expert tours de force, Burney’s novelistic muse is nonetheless all too often “offend[ed] … fickle, or only whimsical” (JL, II: 124). She may be elusive, fleeting, and difficult to intercept when Burney solicits “some intercourse” with her in order to finally, through effort and discipline, succeed in writing. “[T]o work we go!” Burney urges herself on (JL, III: 125), well aware that the disciplined and submissive Muse envisioned for her by Samuel Crisp many years earlier was in fact just the convenient (male) construction of female creativity. As Crisp wrote to his sister Sophia, later Mrs Gast on 25 January 1782: You see how triumphantly [Fanny] goes on. If she can coin gold at such a Rate, as to sit by a warm Fire, and in 3 or 4 months (for the real time she stuck to it closely, putting it all together, will not amount to more, tho’ there have been long Intervals, between) gain £250 by scribbling the Inventions of her own Brain—only putting down in black and white whatever comes into her own head, without labour drawing simply from her own Fountain, she need not want money. (Hutton, 74; my emphasis)2

On closer inspection, rather than a creative muse, Crisp seems to be conjuring up a reassuring lare, a tame household deity.

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As she earnestly declared to her father Charles in one of the most vibrant vindications of her own powerful artistic drive, Burney’s muse is also a muse who reclaims her right to find expression in variety, jumping over genre fences and challenging gender expectations. “My Muse loves a little variety,” she states with apodictic and unusual assertiveness following the enforced withdrawal from the stage, in the wake of the death of her sister Susanna, of the comedy A Busy Day, which had already been accepted by Thomas Harris for staging at Covent Garden. Burney’s is a discerning muse attuned to the times: on the one hand, serenely reconciled to market requirements (“Now heed no more what Critics thought ’em / Since this you know — All People bought ’em, — —,” as per the editorial strategy of her brother and literary agent, Charles Jr, JL, III: 206) and on the other hand, sensitive to the multiple artistic media through which the muse expresses herself best. Years later, Burney avows in an apologia pro operibus suis addressed to her father her desire to hear him say: After all—’tis like Father like Child—for to what walk do I confine myself?—She took my example in writing—She takes it in ranging—Why, then, after all, should I lock her up in one paddock, well as she has fed there, if she says she finds nothing more to nibble—while I find all the Earth unequal to my ambition, & mount the skies to content it? Come on then, poor Fan—The World has acknowledged you my offspring—and I will discourage you no more. Leap the pales of your paddock—let us pursue our career—& while you frisk from novel to Comedy, I, quitting Music and Prose, will try a race with Poetry & the Stars. (JL, IV: 395; original emphasis)

Sycophantic as it may be, this confession remains indeed unique, at least as far as Burney is concerned, in terms of artistic awareness. The semes of the boundary and the (metaphorical) limit—to confine, to range, to lock up, paddock, to leap, pales —cluster in this kowtowing statement, which dis-orders any hierarchies, whether Foucauldian or of the ancient muses. In Burney’s case, the model is therefore a plural, interartistic muse (Skinner; Saggini), going beyond a narrow view of intertextuality as a practice restricted to the textual medium, to straddle the static and dynamic arts divide.3 We need only recall here, for example, the recurrence and value of ekphrastic references in Burney’s works, from the subtitle of Camilla, A Picture of Youth, to the famous dedicatory preface “To Doctor Burney” in The Wanderer ¸ in which the term “picture” recurs

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three times (6, 7, 10), ending in a strong visual climax: “what I observed in my long residence abroad, presented another picture; and its colours, not, indeed, with cementing harmony, but to produce a striking contrast, have forcibly, though not, I hope, glaringly tinted my pen” (Wanderer, 10).4 In everyday life, praise for the sublime painting of Sir Joshua Reynolds, “the first artist in Europe” (EJL, III: 211), President of the Royal Academy and a regular visitor to the drawing room in St Martin’s Street, could coexist without contradiction with admiration for elegant floral embroidery designs or the botanical paper mosaics created by Mary Delany, Burney’s close friend during her Windsor years. Likewise, in Burney’s plots, macro-history is brought to life through micro-history. The broad brushstrokes of the fresco of the World (with a capital letter) reverberate in the miniature of the individual story, compellingly claiming a strong role for the so-called lesser or ‘minor’ applied arts—“divest[ed], for a moment, … from [their] stationary standard of insignificance” (I freely adapt here yet another passage from the introduction to The Wanderer, 7)—valuable and indeed signifying, even in terms of gender and identity, story-telling and society-making, no less than the ‘major’ arts. The metaphorical function of crafts and the applied arts in Frances Burney’s intellectual and artistic development deserves careful analysis, and the current critical panorama, with the new possibilities and analytical horizons opened by the material studies turn, offers a particularly opportune moment to present a coherent edited collection, alert to the creative potential of aesthetic cross-fertilization (Dyer; Zurowski & Yonan). In the following chapters, therefore, critical consideration will be given to the role(s) that the arts, often represented as the Muses and considered in anti-hierarchical fashion, against the grain of the clichéd ‘high art’ vs ‘low art’ aesthetic divide, might play in Burney studies going forward. As this collection testifies (and as Lorna J. Clark also amply demonstrates here and elsewhere), the extended Burney family was at the very centre of cultural life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. At the forefront of their professions—including painting (with Edward Francisco Burney, Frances’s cousin) and music (Dr Charles Burney’s undisputed realm of influence)—the Burney family members provided Frances with a nurturing environment where her manifold talents could flourish from an early age, albeit within a set of codified genres and modes vetted by her father and by the many advisers surrounding her (including the abovementioned Samuel Crisp, but also Hester Lynch Thrale and the eminent

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figures belonging to Samuel Johnson’s artistic and cultural coterie) (cf. also Clark). Considering this unique familial and social context, the present volume explores the connection between Burney and the ‘Muses,’ understood in a broad sense as a metaphor for the arts and the feminine creative process. The project takes its cue from the proud assertion of her own versatility that—no accident—Burney placed in Memoirs of Doctor Burney, her father’s (auto)biography (and, from my point of view, also the daughter’s autobiografiction by proxy of her father), an assertion that has perhaps not yet received its critical due and which not surprisingly contributors return to time and again. In this crucial meta-critical selfassessment, Burney, now in her eighties and a renowned novelist as well as a (widowed) wife and mother, recalls the famous “bonfire of the vanities” with which as a 15-year-old she had purged her nascent authorial ambitions. Among the manuscript juvenilia consigned to the flames—her so-called “prose goods and chattels” (Memoirs, II: 125)—Burney lists “Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces—nay, Tragedies and Epic Poems” (124). This is, of course, an a posteriori reconstruction, and as such all the more significant from a meta-discursive standpoint, if not from a purely biographical one. It shows Burney’s literary production to have been diverse from the start, evidencing (or perhaps imaginatively re-creating, by taking stock of her long career) the broad range of Burney’s earliest literary experiments as well as her interest in various art forms and genres. Accordingly, this collection also addresses indirectly Burney’s relationship to the improvisational aesthetics of dilettante artists, including oral extemporizations (the bathetic realm of the poetaster Dabler in the comedy The Witlings , 1779); the amateur theatricals privately staged at home by the Burneys, echoed in The Wanderer; and finally, Burney’s own (auto)biographical writings, which, with typical mock self-deprecation, she referred to as her “scriblerations” (Sabor; I will come back to the relegation of women’s writing to mere scribble several times in this introduction). Every scale of values is intrinsically the result of the hic et nunc, hence ideologically connoted. Deciding what is decorative, trivial, and superficial—be it a fabric sample, a patchwork, a fragment of paper—means constructing an inclusive/exclusive classification according to cultural parameters reflecting the episteme that produced them. All these minor and ‘unordered’ (Lipking) art forms speak to central concerns in Burney’s overarching poetics: performativity,

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(artistic) performance, and the artwork at large as media for both selfexpression and self-construction. And it is consequently also through the relationship with the aesthetic object—whether ‘high’ or ‘low,’ professional or amateur, static or dynamic—that the aesthetic subject in Burney is constituted.

II Frances Burney and Arts explores the notion of interartistic encounters in Frances Burney’s long writing career and investigates the semes of Burney’s complex relationship with female learning, creative expression, and the interart and intermedia dialogue present throughout her oeuvre. The contributors approach these forms of multifaceted artistic expression in an inclusive and anti-hierarchical fashion, also covering minor applied arts. In this, the volume differs from recent studies devoted exclusively to the presence of a particular type of art in Burney, as does Joseph Morrissey, for example, who focuses on musical accomplishments in Burney’s work (cf. also Wood). The collection is organized thematically into seven chapters, each devoted to individual arts, sub specie the Muses: dance (the muse Polyhymnia; Beth Kowaleski Wallace), music (the muse Erato; Cassandra Ulph), song (the muse Terpsichore; Stephen A. Willer), poetry (the muses Melpomene and Clio; Barbara Witucki), and history (Clio once again; Mascha Hansen). In choosing to place needlework (Alicia Kerfoot) side by side with these artistic domains of Hellenistic derivation, I deliberately circumvent the vetus ordo of the classical ordering. The minor arts play such a significant role throughout Burney’s works (from The Witlings , 1779, to The Wanderer) (Wigston Smith) that their inclusion in this collection is more than warranted. Furthermore, such applied arts evoke an ephemeral, informal, and yet meticulous type of feminine creativity that comes into dialogue with, and thus reconfigures, lofty, resolutely masculine contemporary artistic forms such as historical painting and epic poetry. Embroidery and needlework often employed patterns, hence entering in fraught dialogue with the complex roles of the original and the copy in creative production. “The iconography of women’s work is rarely given the serious consideration it deserves,” maintains Rozsika Parker, “embroidery is all too often treated only in terms of development” (12). Such a critical stance forgets that the choice of a design to copy has a meaning of its own, no less than do making a poetic copy, an imitation,

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or even downright plagiarism. Finally, and importantly, the explicit reference to the muse I have chosen as the epigraph to this chapter addresses the unresolved and deliberately ambiguous epochal tension between the subject and the object of representation (active participant vs source of inspiration), which is closely related to contemporary discourse about artistic vocation, theorizations about gender, and consequently the place of women in the public sphere between the Enlightenment and Romantic cultural moments. Several aspects of Burney’s artistic and interart dialogue will be addressed in the following chapters, particularly those relating to female agency and creativity in the arts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fluid use that the author makes of ornamental, uncodified, ‘unordered’ (I am paraphrasing Lawrence Lipking here), often ephemeral forms of artistic expression which are usually relegated to the private sphere of the feminine and associated with female accomplishments at the margins of (gentlemanly) professionalism. The famous, and highly artificial, allegorical portrait The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, painted by Richard Samuel and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1779, sets the stage for the collection’s problematization of the ideological-discursive dualism inherent in the concept of ‘arts’ and, hence, ‘muse.’ Samuel’s painting presents a group of demure-looking female intellectuals and artists frozen on the brink of expression. Significantly, they are depicted “in the Temple of Apollo,” as Samuel’s subtitle explains, decorously arranged around a statue of the (male) god Apollo raised on a pedestal at the centre of the composition (Fig. 1.1). The ‘muse’ can thus be read as a problematic, Janus-faced metaphor at once for the female inspiration of male genius and for female creative expression itself. Female accomplishments, however, famously responded to male expectations of femininity and pleasant womanliness. In Pride and Prejudice, Mary Bennett is described as more capable than her sister Elizabeth in the art of drawing-room entertainment, to make up for her own lack of charm, “in consequence of being the only plain one in the family” (Austen, 223). For her part, Elizabeth seems to reject the facile equation performance = performativity kept up by the acquiescent Charlotte Lucas and questions the opportuneness—as well as woman’s actual wish—to perform. “You are a very strange creature by way of a friend!—” Elizabeth chides Charlotte, “always wanting me to play and sing before any body and every body!” (222). But the muses could also be portrayed as more solitary and less ostentatious than those satirized by Austen, showing

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Fig. 1.1 The Nine Muses of Great Britain, inc. Elizabeth Carter, Angelica Kauffman, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith, Hannah More, et al. After Richard Samuel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe dia/commons/0/07/Nine_Living_Muses_of_Great_Britain.jpg)

themselves discreetly, within friendly and cultural exchanges that were predominantly female and private and therefore ideologically and materially opposed to the demands and interference of drawing-room performativity. A good example of such alleged artistic modesty is the famous conversation piece known as “The Ladies Waldegrave” by Sir Joshua Reynolds (Fig. 1.2). In this case, however, the artistic act—destined in any case for future consumer circulation through copies and other forms of reproduction—belies the privateness of female accomplishments, once again captured by a (double) male artistic subject (Reynolds/Green), thus reproducing, and bolstering, conventional artistic as well as cultural and ideological values. Indeed, I cannot help noticing in this classically elegant

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Fig. 1.2 Sir Valentine Green after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Ladies Waldegrave. Reference D37981. (©National Portrait Gallery, London)

portrait, originally completed c. 1780, the possible adaptation and domestication, in the form of three genteel and demure sisters, of the fateful Greek Moirai or Moirae, the three goddesses of fate who collaboratively spin out the thread of Man’s future. I would like to further pinpoint the imbrication of craft and writerly creativity by recalling the metaphorical significance of an oft-forgotten piece of needlework by Esther Sleepe, Charles Burney’s first wife and Frances’s mother (Fig. 1.3). Before her premature death aged 37 in 1762—five years prior to the above-mentioned “bonfire of the vanities” in which Frances Burney recounts the pyric destruction/sacrifice of all her juvenilia—Esther passed on to the eight-year-old Frances a needlework sampler, “in coloured silks on linen, worked in cross-stich” (Doré,

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Fig. 1.3 Esther Sleepe sampler. 1732. The Collection at Parham Park. Long Gallery. E8A0769. (©Parham House & Gardens, West Sussex)

14), metonymic fetish of Esther’s own precious authorial self (cf. Doody, 23).5 Samplers such as Esther’s establish a remarkable connection with Frances Burney’s early writing career, in my opinion, particularly as

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regards the composition of Evelina. They could be stitched with astonishing skill by young children as much as by women, in contexts of informal and unschooled creativity, and they would “provide evidence of a child’s ‘progress’ on the ladder to womanhood” (Parker, 85). Shall we say that they served a disciplinary function, helping to train young girls to properly enter into the world (this time with a lower-case letter) of femininity and domestic worthwhileness? After all, according to the etymology, the noun “sampler” comes from the Latin exemplum. By creating and replicating the sampler (the example), a woman risks being subsumed into the pattern, becoming herself ‘exemplary,’ however. ‘Exemplary,’ in the two meanings of the term, here probably conflated: both representative and ideal.6 Serena Dyer has not missed this similarity between domestic craft and writing (both one’s own self and others); indeed, the critic refers to the material culture of making as a form of “material life writing” (7–8). And this is where the connection with Evelina tightens. As I said, Esther Sleepe’s sampler, worked by the seven-year-old in 1732, is an excellent example of Dyer’s cultural material theorization. The bottom band reads: “Esther Sleepe is my name and in my youth I wrought the same [sampler] and by this work you may plainly see what care my parents took of me. November the last in the year 1732” (Doré, 14; my emphasis). Stitch after stitch—sign after sign, if you like—young Esther’s needle, like the needle of the creators of these standardized alphabets or “narrative” embroidery,7 performs a real act of para-writing of the Self, not immediately appreciable, nor indeed measurable, with reference to the public ‘high’ aesthetic categories of the time, and therefore long overlooked. It was no coincidence that the not-so-soft-spoken Matthew Gregory Lewis seized upon the almost ludicrous similarity between female needle workers and “female scribblers” (the nod here was in the direction of the novelist Susan Ferrier): “the needle, not the pen, is the instrument they should handle, and the only one they ever use dexterously” (cit. in Bury, IV: 117). The Sleepes took care of Esther in body as well as in spirit, the sampler gratefully states, and the result of this demiurgic parenthood is a wright, a skilled craft worker, which is the exact homophone of (to) write. Writing is equivalent to making, just like the Greek poiesis (πo´ιησις), so that Esther’s grateful dedication to her parents recalls from afar the perhaps less disinterested captatio benevolentiae, posited as the opening of Evelina:

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OH author of my being!— … If in my heart the love of Virtue glows, ’Twas planted there by an unerring rule; From thy example the pure flame arose, Thy life, my precept—thy good works, my school. (Evelina, 3, ll. 1–8)

Perhaps less disinterested, I was saying, perhaps also less humble than it was meant to sound. A line placed almost at the end of this composition, in my opinion central to Burney’s early poetic agenda, reads: “obscure be still the unsuccessful Muse / Who cannot raise, but would not sink, your fame” (ll. 15–16). The far-from-linear syntax of the entire dedication recommends we take a flexible look at the grammatical construction of this appeal to the Muse. The conjunction still acts as a mobile and therefore artfully indeterminate semantic hinge of the verse. With a sleight of hand, its position can be equally referable to obscure as to unsuccessful. When prefixed to obscure, the meaning is in line with the young author’s overall tone of apparent deference: ‘still obscure’ in the eyes of her father, the public, and critics at large. If prefixed to unsuccessful, however, the authorial discourse becomes more disruptive, as it implies a possible proleptic thrust. In this latter case, it would be a ‘still unsuccessful’ muse, but one that may not be destined to remain so for long. At that point, Burney’s no-longer-unsuccessful Muse will take up the lyre and, finally, will drink deep, rather than simply taste, the Pierian Spring.8 This collection of essays by leading scholars in Burney studies provides an innovative, interdisciplinary critical consideration of the relationship of one of the major authors of the long English Romantic period with the arts. The encounter was not devoid of tensions, as the following chapters confirm, and indeed often required a degree of wrangling on Burney’s part. As evidenced by its complex biographical implications, this was a revealing and at times contentious dialogue, allowing us to reconstruct in an original and highly focused way the feminine negotiation with such key concepts of the late Enlightenment and Romanticism as virtue, reputation, creativity, originality, artistic expression, and self-construction. Each form of artistic expression is addressed separately, yet the contributors emphasize the interconnections between these mutually reinforcing forms of neighbouring artistic activities as components of a broader spectrum of interartistic and intermedial cultural signification. While there is now a flourishing body of work on Frances Burney and, more broadly, Romantic women authors, this volume concentrates for the first time on

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the rich artistic and material context that surrounded, supported, and shaped Frances Burney’s oeuvre.

Notes 1. Francesca Saggini will be able to give a significant boost to this new area of research through the EU-financed two-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action project OpeRaNew, “Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences,” Grant agreement ID: 892230, URL: https://cordis.europa.eu/pro ject/id/892230. Accessed 30 April 2021. 2. “Fountain” may here well refer to the spring in Macedonia sacred to the Muses (see below). Crisp’s lack of critical and metaliterary awareness, already demonstrated in his contribution to the suppression of The Witlings , is coupled with his poor insight, as evidenced later in this wellknown letter: “Suzette’s Husband, Captain Phillips, is a noble, Brave, open, agreeable fellow but 26; and I really believe, now he is married and settled (apparently in a high degree to his own liking) He will prove OEconomical, for which he naturally has a turn—when not led away by high Spirits of Company” (75). In the years to come, not only did Molesworth Phillips incur many crippling debts, even to his father-in-law, but he forced Susanna to move to Ireland, subjecting her to a domestic regime that today we would not hesitate to call abusive. 3. See Lorna J. Clark’s discussion of the illustrated hand-made juvenilia “Stories for Miss Cecilia.” 4. Camilla’s original title was not coincidentally to contain the programmatic line “sketches of Characters & morals, put in action” (JL, III: 117), a choice which distinctly recalls the debate on the concept of ut pictura poesis at the centre of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766). 5. The crucial connection between the minor arts, particularly fan making linked to the luxury trade, and Esther Sleepe has been definitively proven by Amy Louise Erickson, who makes it clear that at the time of her marriage to Charles in 1749, “Esther Burney ran a very successful business and certainly earned the major part of the household income” (21). Therefore, it is conceivable that Esther’s and, by matrilineal transmission, Frances’s sensitivity to the signifying circuit minor artistic expression → female artistic expression → economy is worthy of careful consideration within a study dedicated to Frances’s plural relationship with the arts. 6. A study of allegorical female representations, including those of female artists—a mixing practice in which the conflation between the representative and the ideal becomes dangerously inextricable—would be a topic of study interesting in its own right. A typical example of such an

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allegorical/real-life admixture is offered by a picture of the singer Elizabeth Linley Sheridan (who is mentioned in Cassandra Ulph’s contribution), represented as the Virgin Mary in a Nativity Scene in the West Window of the Chapel, New College in Oxford. A print of the stained glass is available at URL: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_Aa-13-42. Accessed 30 April 2021. 7. Here I adapt the concept of narrative title theorized in Barchas (19–60). 8. The reference is to a line of Censor in The Witlings (Burney, 13; I.201), which refers to Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711): “A little learning is a dang’rous Thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring” (Pope, 42; ll. 115–16). In classical tradition, the eastern slopes of Olympus, the so-called Pieria, were among the oldest sites of muse worship, hence the name Pierids given to the Muses.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. In The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 209–421. Barchas, Janine. Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Burney, Frances. The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, ed. Peter Sabor, 2 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995). Bury, Lady Charlotte Campbell. Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth: Comprising the Secret History of the Court, During the Reigns of George III and George IV ... with Original Letters from ... Queen Caroline, the Princess Charlotte, and from Other Distinguished Persons, ed. John Galt, 4 vols. (Henry Colburn: London, 1839). Clark, Lorna J. “Hidden Talents: Women Writers in the Burney Family.” In Temma Berg and Sonia Kane (eds), Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Memory of Betty Rizzo (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2013), pp. 145–66. Crosbie, Mary. “Johnson’s Little Burney.” The Times Literary Supplement 2628 (13 June 1952): 390. The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, link-gale-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/apps/doc/EX1200296739/ TLSH?u=ed_itw&sid=bookmark-TLSH&xid=0571c93c. Accessed 30 April 2021. Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Doré, Judith. Needlework and Tapestry at Parham Park, Pulborough, West Sussex (Parham Park Limited, Parham Park [Sussex], 1993). Dyer, Serena. Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021).

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Mrs [Anne Katharine Curteis] Elwood. “Madame D’Arblay.” In Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England, from the Commencement of the Last Century. 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1843), vol. I, pp. 33–65. Erickson, Amy Louise. “Esther Sleepe, Fan-Maker, and Her Family.” EighteenthCentury Life 42, 2 (2018): 15–37. Hernandez, Daniel. “Leonora Carrington Dies at 94; a Leading Figure of the Surrealist Movement.” Chicago Tribune, 20 September 2011. Available from https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituaries/la-me-leonoracarrington-20110527-story.html. Accessed 30 April 2021. Hutton, William Holden. Burford Papers: Being Letters of Samuel Crisp to His Sister at Burford; and Other Studies of a Century (1745–1845) (London: Constable, 1905). Lipking, Lawrence. The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). Morrissey, Joseph. Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820: Dangerous Occupations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1984). Pope, Alexander. Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Robin Sowerby (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1988). ProQuest Ebook Central, Available from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID= 169478. Accessed 30 April 2021. Sabor, Peter. “Journal Letters and Scriblerations: Frances Burney’s Life Writing in Paris.” In Daniel Cook and Amy Culley (eds), Women’s Life Writing, 1700– 1850 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 71–85. Saggini, Francesca. Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theatre Arts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). Sharren, Kandice. “The Texture of Sympathy: Narrating Sympathetic Failure in Frances Burney’s Camilla and The Wanderer.” European Romantic Review 28, 6 (2017): 701–27. Skinner, Gillian. “‘My muse loves a little variety’: Writing Drama and the Creative Life of Frances Burney.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, 2 (2011): 197–208. Wagner, Tamara S. “Nostalgia for Home or Homelands: Romantic Nationalism and the Indeterminate Narrative in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer.” Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 10 (June 2003). Available from http:// www.romtext.org.uk/articles/cc10_n03/. Accessed 30 April 2021. Wigston Smith, Chloe. “The Haberdasher’s Plot: The Romance of Small Trade in Frances Burney’s Fiction.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 37, 2 (2018): 271–93.

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Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. “The Burney Baroque.” In Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 53–87. Wyett, Jody L. “Ecumenical Burney? Frances Burney, Feminism, and Catholic Tolerance.” The Burney Society (North America) Virtual Zoom Conference, 5– 7 July 2021. Available from https://www.mcgill.ca/burneycentre/files/bur neycentre/burney_society_conference_schedule_2021_0.pdf . Accessed 6 July 2021 (Talk). Zuroski, Eugenia and Michael Yonan. “Material Fictions: A Dialogue as Introduction.” In “Material Fictions,” ed. Zuroski and Yonan, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31, 2 (2019): 253–70.

CHAPTER 2

“Clio I Court”; or, Frances Burney and Historiography Mascha Hansen

Abstract During her long life, Frances Burney witnessed several historically important events at first hand—the ‘madness’ of King George III, the Hastings trials, the aftermath of the French Revolution in France under Napoleon, and the effects of the battle of Waterloo—events which she recorded and commented on in her copious letters and journals, now considered a valuable resource for historians of the period. Yet all too often, Burney is read as a mere witness, not as a historian in her own right. In accordance with fairly restrictive notions of what counts as historiography, today’s scholars tend to praise Burney’s observational powers, and while such praise is certainly deserved, it nevertheless indicates an insufficient approach even to her journalizing, as it tends to reduce any discussion of her contribution to the art of history writing to quibbles about either her accuracy or her veracity. In this chapter, Mascha Hansen

M. Hansen (B) University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6_2

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considers Frances Burney as a historiographer in her own right, to highlight her own interest in particular aspects of history, such as gender, sociability, and politeness, and to discuss her sense of historical authority by considering her writings, with a particular focus on the Memoirs of Doctor Burney (1832) in the historiographical context of their time. Keywords Memoirs · History · Historiography · Sociability · Politeness · Gender

During her long life, Frances Burney witnessed several historically important events at first hand—the ‘madness’ of King George III, the Hastings trials, the aftermath of the French Revolution in France under Napoleon, and the effects of the battle of Waterloo—events which she recorded and commented on in her copious letters and journals, now considered a valuable resource for historians of the period. Yet all too often, Burney is read as a mere witness, not as a historian in her own right. In accordance with fairly restrictive notions of what counts as historiography, today’s scholars tend to praise Burney’s “powers of observation and description” (EJL, II: xxii), and while the praise is certainly deserved, it nevertheless indicates an insufficient approach even to her journalizing, as it tends to reduce any discussion of her contribution to the art of history writing to quibbles about either her accuracy or her veracity. However, there is more to those descriptions than the desire to put down her own version of what happened, even if that desire was influential and is voiced in her journals: on King George’s being attacked by Margaret Nicholson, for instance, she tells her sister, “you may have heard it wrong; I will concisely tell it right” (JL, I: 61). Yet even on this occasion, Burney adds her own angle to the story by recounting what was, for her, “the most interesting manner” in which the news was broken to the Queen. In this chapter, I will consider Frances Burney as a historiographer in her own right, to highlight her own interest in particular aspects of history, such as gender, sociability, and politeness, and to discuss her sense of historical authority by considering her writings in the historiographical context of their time. My focus will be on the Memoirs of Doctor Burney (1832) which, I argue, is a work of socio-cultural history superimposed on what was never quite meant to be a biographical account of her father’s life in the first place.

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This is not to say that Burney considered herself to be a historian, as she understood the term. Already as a young diarist she was aware that the events she then had to record, and more particularly her focus on those events, would be considered irrelevant by contemporary readers of history, a certainty which gave her the liberty to make fun of the very process of record-keeping: “what will become of the World if my annals are thus irregular!” (EJL, II: 3). Neither was history necessarily a thing of the past to her: she uses the term “historiographer” when relaying the physicians’ daily reports on the King’s illness (CJL, V: 3). Looking at Burney’s choices of reading matter provides proof enough that she was interested in all kinds of histories, whether fictional, biographical, or factual, and that she was well aware of the different kinds of historiography prevalent at the time. Indeed, it is important to keep in mind that as an adult, Burney saw the concept of what counts as ‘history’ evolve considerably, with works such as her own father’s History of Music (1776−1789) blazing a new path. Her father may have been bold enough to court Clio, but, as Catherine Moreland famously complains in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Austen, 79), the focus of late eighteenthcentury historians was still mostly on political events and male agents.1 To read Burney as a historiographer, we must rely on more recent conceptions of what counts as history. Reinhart Koselleck noted important changes in the conception of history at the time and points out that modern historians should capture the number of histories—or stories— told before ‘history’ in the sense of a unified general history began to emerge (131). Bonnie Smith reminds us of the fact that there was not, as yet, a dominant formal method of writing history in the long eighteenth century, and that archival research was “by no means the universally accepted road to historical truth” even at the beginning of the nineteenth century (28). Smith further claims that “the style of historical writing was also undetermined” and that historical novels and plays were still being cited as evidence. Amateur historians vied with ‘professional’ historians in producing knowledge of the past: “early amateur knowledge was a mesh, a web of subjectivities, personal entanglement, a matted clump of amazingly disparate material” (28−29). Such contributions were marginalized in the course of the nineteenth century to make way for professional historians and proper historical methods, and it is in the context of that marginalization that the Memoirs of Doctor Burney should be read in order to be perceived as a history of social and polite life in their own right.

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Recent developments in gender history, which has gained momentum by including the writings of (female) amateurs, suggest that we should first question what is accepted as historiography in order to reassess women’s contributions to that field and to reconsider questions of veracity in connection with historiographical genres (Epple and Schaser, 16; Looser, 2−4). In British Women Writers and the Writing of History, Devoney Looser has demonstrated that throughout the early modern period, women’s contributions were much more substantial than previously thought, and that future historians must redefine ‘history’ in broader terms to be able to appreciate the changing nature of historiography throughout the period, and women’s participation in effecting those changes (12). Curiously, though, she does not name Burney in her list of possible women historiographers of the long eighteenth century (16), while she is fully prepared to re-read novels such as Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752) as historiographical texts to highlight the fluidity between the genres of fiction and history at the time (21). This oversight may be due to the fact that large parts of Burney’s journals focus on personal experiences, blurring the lines between personal recollection, or life writing, and historiography in the basic sense of marking or explaining important events from a vantage point of temporal distance.2 Besides, her preference for character analysis over politics still runs counter to conventional expectations concerning historical genre(s). The seeming privacy of her journals may be yet another reason why we do not read Burney as a historian, though one would be hard put to argue that the size of the envisioned audience should determine what is to be read as history. Many parts of Burney’s journals were written to the (historical) moment, for instance her copious transcripts of the Hastings trials, but the very fact that much of the material now collected as her Court Journals was actually composed up to a year in arrears should make us reconsider the notion that these are merely records kept to amuse friends and families (Sabor, “Introduction,” in CJL, I: xx). We do not know whether she had a larger audience than a small circle of friends and family in mind while composing her journals, though it seems likely that she knew they would be of interest to a wider public from the moment she began to record the conversations of her father’s renowned visitors. As she never destroyed her records, we may safely assume that she intended her writings to be read by “posterity” (Memoirs, I: 291). To say that we should consider at least parts of Frances Burney’s oeuvre as contributions to historiography is not an entirely new argument, of

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course: Margaret Anne Doody pointed out that the historical novel as developed by Sir Walter Scott was indebted to works such as Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), which dealt with the French Revolution (318). Tara Ghoshal Wallace reads Burney’s The Wanderer as recent history, or “history written close to the historian’s own time,” in an illuminating essay that proves Burney to have been an innovative historiographer even as a novelist (9). Nevertheless, Burney gave “glorious pre-eminence” to works of fiction in her preface to that novel, highlighting the merely relative significance of “historic truth” or even “authenticity” when compared to the universal appeal of the art of fiction (The Wanderer, 7; cf. Wallace, 16). Here, my focus is on her non-fictional writings, but it is important to keep in mind that for Burney, history did not claim superiority over literature; in her view, it was neither more truthful nor more instructive. Imagination, too, revealed “the turn of men’s minds” (Memoirs, I: 157), and fiction had to be truthful in its turn. To achieve “literary glory,” on the other hand, a work of history had to prove its allure (Memoirs, I: 220). And yet, her spirited commendation of the novel in the preface to The Wanderer borders on the defensive, signalling a certain doubt as to the superordinate value of fiction.

Conceptualizing the Memoirs of Doctor Burney To readers who hoped to find biographical information concerning Dr Burney, the Memoirs of Doctor Burney proved to be a severe disappointment when it was first published. Yet instead of asking what Frances Burney may have meant to achieve in the Memoirs, the general tendency was, and has been ever since, to accuse her of substituting her own biography for that of her father. While this may be partly the case, the result cannot be called an autobiography either, disappointing yet others of her readers who hoped to hear more about the daughter’s life. Sensitive as she was about the Burney family’s hard-won rise in social standing, a truthful biographical account—particularly of her father—would have been, for Burney, akin to destroying his greatest achievement (see Hemlow, 452). This may be why she awkwardly refers to herself in the third person throughout (as the “Memorialist,” the “daughter,” the “Editor,” and even “the hermit”) in an attempt to depersonalize the narration. Even so, the Memoirs of Doctor Burney have met with such resistance, even calumny, in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, that a reappraisal must be alert to possible reasons for the rejection that go beyond

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the ones most frequently cited: her objectionable style, the ever-to-bedeplored decision to destroy the bulk of her father’s own manuscripts containing his own memoirs, or the fact that she substituted her own recollections for her father’s in the second volume.3 To change that perspective, we should re-read the Memoirs as a historiographical work, indeed as a kind of retrospection—very different from Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Retrospection (1801) in scope and content but nevertheless with a similar interest in social, cultural, and even anecdotal history. Yet read as a work of historiography, the Memoirs are nonetheless liable to objections: Burney’s authority as her father’s biographer is based on her own claims of pre-eminence in his life, since she presents herself as his favourite child and confidante already in the preface, significantly entitled an “apology” (I: v and vii). She was well aware of the fact that her readers would also look for her own history in that of her father, but here she frequently and deliberately defies readers’ expectations, for instance about her life at Court: while she talks at length about the events that contributed to her appointment as Keeper of the Robes, she is silent about her experiences at Queen Charlotte’s Court and instead takes a stance against what she deems unwarranted curiosity concerning George III’s bout of madness: “this event, then, is foreign to all domestic memoirs; and to such as are political, Dr Burney’s can have no pretensions” (II: 108).4 In a preface attached to the abridged American edition of 1833, the unnamed editor—presumably the publisher—already addresses the critics’ accusation that the book was an autobiography rather than a memoir, boldly claiming that, if true, such an aspersion would in fact amount to “a recommendation.” However, the editor opines, “the chief interest of the work will be found in the rich and new anecdotes furnished of the celebrated characters of the day,” and that, read as an ana or a collection of anecdotes, it possessed “a charm which no mere detail of Dr Burney’s habits could afford” (Memoirs 1833, iii). Margaret Anne Doody, too, reads the Memoirs as a collection of anecdotes comparable to, or even competing with, Hester Thrale Piozzi’s Anecdotes of Dr Johnson (378). And yet, this does not suffice as a characterization of the Memoirs. Instead, a fresh look at Burney’s method, if it can be called a method, of her intentions, as far as these can be ascertained, and at her choice of topics in the Memoirs is needed to determine the nature of Burney’s writing.

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With regard to both method and content, one should note that all three volumes are subdivided by chapter headings referring to places, people, and projects—including projects that failed such as Dr Burney’s musical seminar (I: 233−44) or Oliver Goldsmith’s Encyclopaedia (I: 272−73)—rather than years, historical dates, or biographical events. Though they loosely span the lifetime of Charles Burney Senior, they frequently ignore chronology to intersperse a fair amount of commentary on literature, society, character, manners, morals, education, and conversation, in no discernible order. However, as Devoney Looser points out, the term ‘memoir’ is not as clear-cut as we may think today: it was used to refer to a work of history, albeit a one-sided, imperfect, or unfinished one, before it came to denote a biographical account (35−36). Burney’s indications about her father’s original conceptions of his memoirs reveal that she had more in mind when writing the Memoirs than either a biography or a collection of anecdotes. Dr Burney’s own plan, she says, conceived as early as 1782, was to have provided an “expansive, informing, general, or philosophical view of society” (III: 382). Her unhappy choice to commit large parts of her father’s papers to the flames may be due to this (mis)conception of his intentions, of which his actual accounts, written some twenty years later, fell far short in her estimation (III, 383−84). Indeed, her comments on Dr Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, written and discussed while she was at Streatham with him, may serve to illustrate her own approach to writing her father’s life: “Lives, however, strictly speaking, they are not; he merely employed in them such materials, with respect to biography, as he had already at hand, without giving himself any trouble in researches. … The critical investigations alone he considered as his business” (II: 176). Writing anecdotal history similarly relieved Burney of the burden of searching for evidence, and like Johnson she showed her knowledge in passing, proving that she was well informed about what we would now call the historical context, e.g. Hardwick’s Marriage Act or the Edict of “Nantz” (I: 79). Historiography nevertheless relies on the collection and selection of data (Vorster, 148), and the long hours Burney spent as her father’s amanuensis during the composition of the History of Music would certainly have taught her the importance of research. Doody outlines the difficulties Burney herself faced when trying to make use of numerous papers to collect ‘data’ for the Memoirs: she had to curtail the use of letters written to Dr Burney because of copyright issues, for instance, and was besieged by former friends who did not want to be named (376; Hemlow, 454). Data had to be interpreted

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according to the historian’s personal views to make a history, Burney conceded: on discussing the various histories of music that competed with her father’s, Burney asserted that “each, as usual, has received the mede of pre-eminence, according to the sympathy of its readers with the several views of the subject given by the several authors” (II: 70). Burney provides rather contradictory hints throughout the three volumes concerning her own view of, or sympathy with, her subject. She begins with a bold assertion that all opinions expressed in the work were shared by her father, but then she actually denies any intention to shed light on his views: “the professional history, as well as the opinions of Dr Burney, are so closely inserted in his History of Music, that they are all passed by in the memoirs of his life” (II: 114). While it is entirely understandable that she would want to avoid any assumption of authority in musical matters, the open avowal of such a crucial omission in the narrative of her father’s life is startling. Burney touches on Dr Burney’s expertise here and there, outlining how much research was necessary for the History of Music (II: 71), but her own diary entries must suffice to glean an opinion concerning the abilities of a particular singer. Outdoing even Tristram Shandy, with regard to music at least, the Memoirs pay scant attention to either Dr Burney’s life or his opinions. Curiously, Burney claims that “where the life has been as private as that of Dr Burney, its history must necessarily be simple” (I: viii), and that her father’s life was of interest primarily because of his Cinderellalike rise from obscurity to eminence. In the preface to the second volume, however, she boasts that “to enumerate the friends or acquaintances with whom he associated in the world at large, would be nearly to ransack the Court Calendar, the list of the Royal Society, of the Literary Club, of all the assemblages of eminent artists; and almost every other list that includes the celebrated or active characters, then moving, like himself, in the vortex of public existence” (II: 1). Many of these important men and women are dealt with in the Memoirs, but the “Editor” does not refrain from freely adding her own opinions concerning their morals. Her quiet assumption of authority may have been more galling to nineteenthcentury critics than the proud vindication of her own importance in the preface. Her depictions of Dr Burney’s first patrons, Thomas Arne and Fulke Greville, for instance, may not go beyond what was generally said about them, but her critique is uttered freely and pointedly, and includes cutting remarks on Greville’s literary ambitions (I: 112).5 Members of the aristocracy are paraded as Dr Burney’s acquaintances, but arguably even

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David Garrick’s dog gets more attention in the pages of the Memoirs than do many of the merely fine lords and ladies mentioned in passing (I: 168). In the second volume, she capitalizes on the “justly admired, and justly censured, David Hume” (II: 161), whose atheism she considers indefensible, but whose freedom of thought she nevertheless defends (II: 162). Such comments, and such omissions, in a historical work written by a woman, would have provoked the likes of John Wilson Croker, whose attacks on other female amateur historians were quite as savage as those on Burney.6 Such attacks on women’s works on the grounds of their alleged ignorance, bolstered by ridiculing their style rather than discussing their arguments, were only too effective in their attempts to trivialize women’s historiographical writings in the eyes of the public (Looser, 8−9).

A History of Language, Literature, and the Life of the Mind Burney’s somewhat cumbersome use of parataxis may be due to an awareness that she was intruding on the by then already male-connoted field of historiography. Joyce Hemlow, while deploring Burney’s “curious prose,” surmises that the language indicates Burney’s efforts “to depersonalize the vast mass of highly personal” Burney materials that went into what Hemlow considers to be a biography (457; original emphasis). Depersonalization, though, is also a stylistic means to indicate historiography rather than (auto)biography. Indeed, there are noticeable changes in style throughout those volumes as Burney experiments with various narrative voices.7 The first volume, dealing with the mid-eighteenth century, is presented almost exclusively by a voice-over narrator, whereas the second volume, encompassing the later eighteenth century, is to a considerable extent made up of Frances Burney’s old diaries. The third volume, outlining the beginning of the nineteenth century, includes a significantly larger number of letters and memorandums written by Dr Burney himself than either the first or second volumes. On occasion, she appears to forget that she is not writing a novel and turns her younger self into the heroine of the story: “she hesitated—she breathed hard—she could not attempt to speak—” (III: 82). At other times, she attempts a somewhat unusual variety of risqué humour: the beautiful Miss Linley is said to have not only enflamed the students, but “almost maddened with admiring enthusiasm” even “the learned professors” (I: 213). Generally, though, her narrative

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voice reverts to a less complicated style towards the very end of the first volume. Her descriptions of people and conversations get more animated, and also more spiteful, for instance when she compares the ageing Mrs Greville to “a penetrating, puissant, and sarcastic fairy queen” (I: 103). In her assessments of character, Burney frequently uses a pointed, even epigrammatic style; thus, she considered Edward Gibbon “a man whose sole care in existence seemed that of paying his court to posterity” (II: 238), and her former friend Mrs Thrale (later Piozzi) is called “a child of witty irreflection” (II: 173). Concerning Samuel Johnson’s humility, she contends that it “was not that of thinking more lowly of himself than of others; it was simply that of thinking so lowly of others, as to hold his own conscious superiority of but small scale in the balance of intrinsic excellence” (II: 85). George Walpole, Third Earl of Orford, is taken to task both for selling his grandfather’s famous art collection to Catherine the Great and for being immoral, indeed “as dangerous to the neighbourhood … as the political corruption of his famous progenitor, the statesman” (I: 100). While she may sound conventional at times, her decision to include even political assessments—as the one on Sir Robert Walpole here—was a bold move and would not have escaped her critics. Besides political remarks, literary allusions abound in the Memoirs (e.g. I: 81). For Burney, the literary marketplace played a crucial part in what we would now consider social history: the Memoirs are a testimony to the importance she attached to “the press,” which, she claims, enabled “associations of rank, talents, literature, learning, and fashionable coteries” to emerge (I: 258). Burney evaluates works of history and works of the imagination side by side in a lengthy tribute to public libraries, which, she claims, allowed Dr Burney to become a historian in the first place, and to “wander amidst those stores, that commit talents to posterity … to develop as accurately the systems of nations, the conditions of communities, the progress of knowledge, and the turn of men’s minds, two or three thousand years ago, as in this our living minute; to visit, in fact, the Brains of our fellow creatures” (II: 157). The “turn of men’s minds”— and thus the history of mentality—may also underlie her fascination with character: her highest recommendation is reserved for people who master the triad of “Understanding, Character, and Conduct” (II: 399), a task of which the likes of Greville fell short. Burney could claim to be in women’s proper province here, as she did not deal in politics but manners, and placed on that particular moral high ground, she felt free to criticize men, and failures in male conduct. Her praise of their Otaheitan guest

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Omai who “rather appeared capable to bestow, than requiring to want, lessons of conduct and etiquette in civilized life” (Memoirs, I: 283), is meant to provide a foil to contemporary British gentlemen, such as Mr Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield’s son, to whom the best of educations had merely given “a heavy, ungainly, unpleasing character” (I: 287). Her own proud patriotism is tinged with frequent reflections on “John Bull,” not all of which are flattering (I: 238).

A History of Gender, Education, and Polite Conversation Burney had always claimed that women should think and act for themselves, and her interest in the females among her father’s family, friends, and professional acquaintances is noticeable throughout the Memoirs. In all three volumes, women get as much space as do men, and in spite of Alexander Pope’s notorious claim in “Epistle to a Lady,” all the women mentioned by Burney have characters. Moreover, they have a presence in their own right in Dr Burney’s Memoirs: they are part of society as a matter of course. Some are distinguished for their musical abilities, some for their literary talents, some for their generosity, some as hostesses of Bluestocking salons, only a very few are mentioned solely because they are connected to eminent men or to Dr Burney himself.8 Despite her obvious interest in telling the stories of women, however, Burney does not reveal early feminist tendencies: referring to Lady Louisa Stuart, for instance, she prefers her “sense, taste, and amiability” to the “ready wit” and “dauntless spirit” of her grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (III: 46). Abilities count, but a woman’s character is to be assessed on the grounds of exemplary conduct. In the first volume, Burney loses sight of her father for quite a while to exculpate her mother’s lack of education, which she uses as a springboard to discuss the difference between educational practices then and now: “to excel in music, or in painting, so as to rival even professors, save the highest, in those arts, had not then been regarded as the mere ordinary progress of female education: nor had the sciences yet become the playthings for the nursery” (I: 64). In a typical instance of Burney’s defensiveness concerning her family’s status, she praises her mother’s taste, developed despite a defective education, without ever naming her professional activities as a fan-maker (Erikson, 15). While Burney makes fun of “the super-accomplished aspirants at excellence in a mass, of the present

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moment” (I: 65), she is not nostalgic about the past here, advocating a middle course—that is, an amalgamation of the old and new educational systems. When discussing her father’s stay at King’s Lynn, she lambasts the inertia of small-town life with the arrogance of the born metropolitan and warns that “feebleness of character among the females” is passed on from mother to daughter in places where there is no intellectual stimulus to enliven conversation (I: 95). This, however, is not to say that men fare better in small towns: “that men … 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” (I: 96). She did not regret that these times were finally passing and would only be remembered thanks to “the retrospective and noble services of the press” (I: 97)—that is, thanks to works such as her own. In fact, Burney throughout evaluates the new age—Queen Victoria would ascend the throne only five years after the publication of the Memoirs —against the old one, that of her father, rating present social innovations in comparison with the past. Looking back, she deplores the decline in the art of conversation. Indeed, the numberless pages of the Memoirs devoted to conversations may be alien to twenty-first-century notions of what is worth reporting, but they serve as remarkable instances of polite talk in the eighteenth century and include a rare appraisal of occasions when attempts to engage in conversation actually failed (II: 107−8). Somewhat critical of her father’s anxious approach to entertaining his guests, she praises the powers of “the first queen” of the Bluestockings, Mrs Vesey, who deliberately upset all etiquette to make her guests feel at ease (II: 113). Perhaps the most remarkable parts in the Memoirs concern the value of conversation and freedom of speech. Here, the opinions of Dr Burney and his daughter were clearly in accord: while the father famously defended Rousseau (“was I to shun and detest the whole man because of his peccant parts?” [Memoirs, III: 372]), his daughter voiced similar views concerning the importance of listening to controversial opinions: “to exclude from meetings formed for social enlargement, all who are not in all things of the same opinion, seems assembling a company to face an echo, and calling its neat repetition of whatever is uttered, conversation” (III: 258). She praised the Literary Club, which could contain both a Samuel Johnson and a Charles James Fox, and her argument for the importance of freedom of speech sounds strangely apposite even to our own times: “dissensions through politics

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… must necessarily be endured; nay, cannot rationally be lamented; they are the unavoidable offsprings of the most exalted exercise of the human faculties, freedom of debate; that freedom whence spring independence, justice, and liberty” (III: 257). Burney’s claim to have contributed to the field of historiography, then, should not be made to rest on method, or her effectiveness as a writer of history, as her works—journals as well as the Memoirs —clearly belong to the field of ‘amateur’ history. Yet they provide what is equally valuable, a focus on the importance of sociability, conversation, and debate in the field of history, a focus which, in her copious records at least, offers equal shares in history to men and women by breaking up the “master narrative of modern historiography” (Epple and Schaser, 14). Burney’s comments on society are astute assessments of both the recent as well as more distant past and shed light on the developments of socio-cultural issues over time. Read as a history of eighteenth-century sociability, the Memoirs still prove to be instructive, and make up for some of their defects as biography.

Notes 1. My title quotation, “Clio I court, to reveal every mystery ǀ of musical lore, with its practice and history,” is taken from Charles Burney’s autobiographical doggerel verse as given in the Memoirs (I: 266). 2. Interesting discussions of concepts of historiography are provided e.g. in De Certeau (1988), Epple and Schaser (2009), and, in German, by Rüsen (1999) and Epple (2003). On enlightenment historiography in the field of music, see e.g., Vorster (2013, in German). 3. See Hemlow (446−66) for an account of the composition of the Memoirs, and Doody (377−78) for a brief account of the critical attacks; see Ulph for a reading of the Memoirs in the context of contemporary biography. 4. Burney claims that there could be no reason to insert her personal recollections here, as Dr Burney himself knew no more than the public did at the time, and by 1832, she claimed, the public was already well informed about a malady that had spawned “not a page but a volume of history” (Memoirs, II: 107). 5. Burney takes the reader along with Greville through the clubs and races of the day, evoking the flair of eighteenth-century sociability while claiming to disapprove of it. 6. Croker similarly dismissed Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Account of the Court of George I” when it finally appeared in print in 1837 (Looser, 65). See also his attacks on Sidney Owenson, Lady Morgan (Croker).

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7. Cassandra Ulph argues that Burney uses “the narrative prose of the editor” in the Memoirs (153), but that editor’s voice, to me, is prominent only in the third volume. 8. See especially the first part of the second volume for a discussion of the powers of female singers; for the Bluestocking circles, see II: 262−85.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey and Other Works, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Burney, Frances. Memoirs of Doctor Burney, Arranged from His Own Manuscripts, from Family Papers, and from Personal Recollections. By his daughter, Madame d’Arblay (Philadelphia: Key & Biddle; Boston: Allen & Ticknor, 1833). Croker, John Wilson. “Review of France by Lady Morgan.” The Quarterly Review 17 (1817): 260–86. De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Epple, Angelika. Empfindsame Geschichtsschreibung. Eine Geschlechtergeschichte der Historiographie zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2003). Epple, Angelika and Angelika Schaser. “Multiple Histories? Changing Perspectives on Modern Historiography.” In Angelika Epple and Angelika Schaser (eds), Gendering Historiography: Beyond National Canons (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 2009), pp. 7−23. Erickson, Amy Louise. “Esther Sleepe, Fan-Maker, and Her Family.” In “New Perspectives on the Burney Family, 1750–1850,” ed. Sophie Coulombeau, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life 42, 2 (2018): 15–37. Hemlow, Joyce. The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). Koselleck, Reinhart. Vergangene Zukunft : Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). Looser, Devoney. British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2000). Rüsen, Jörn (ed.). Westliches Geschichtsdenken: Eine interkulturelle Debatte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). Smith, Bonnie. “Gendering Historiography in the Global Age: A U.S. Perspective.” In Angelika Epple and Angelika Schaser (eds), Gendering Historiography: Beyond National Canons (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 2009), pp. 7−23. Ulph, Cassandra. “Authoring the ‘Author of My Being’ in Memoirs of Doctor Burney.” In “New Perspectives on the Burney Family, 1750–1850,” ed.

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Sophie Coulombeau, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life 42, 2 (2018): 152−69. Vorster, Christiane Marianne. Versuche von Musikgeschichtsschreibung in Zeiten musikalischer Kanonbildung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013). Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. “History as Heuristic in The Wanderer.” The Burney Journal 14 (2017): 6−23.

CHAPTER 3

Frances Burney and the Art of Dance Beth Kowaleski Wallace

Abstract Despite the initial impression that Burney was relatively inattentive to dance, it functions as social fact in her life and her oeuvre. This chapter describes how her novels evince an awareness of the labour of dance and its difficult physical conditions. John Weaver’s seminal and often-reprinted essay An Essay Toward a History of Dancing (1712) serves as a reference for issues later appearing in Burney’s novels. Through an examination of key dance scenes in Evelina and Cecilia, the chapter shows how Burney often aligns the art of dance with self-promotion and recognizes how choreographed movement in a public space can be a key indicator of character, in both positive and negative ways. The chapter further discusses how in Camilla dance provides a powerful metaphor for the narrative itself. In these ways, it becomes apparent that the art of dance was thoroughly integrated into Burney’s sensibility, life, and work. Keywords Sociability · Politeness · Performativity · Dance · Gender

B. K. Wallace (B) Boston College, Newton, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6_3

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Introduction In the work of Frances Burney, dance is only occasionally in evidence. Nonetheless, among all the performative arts, dance was for Burney and her contemporaries an unstated fact of social existence: dance was very often observed on the stage of the opera house and in the theatre, and it was visible on smaller stages, in various venues like balls, dances, and private parties. In fact, it seems safe to say that, during Burney’s life, the art of dance was well integrated into public consciousness as spectacle on the one hand and as a necessary part of a young person’s socialization on the other. With careful scrutiny, we can begin to see that, though Burney rarely turns her full novelistic attention to dance, it nevertheless was both a part of her own life and a significant element contributing to her life’s work in several key ways. Before turning to the question of where dance does appear, it seems worth noting that, if dance is rarely front and centre in Burney’s work, this may owe something to her family’s aesthetic preferences. Beginning with her father’s choice of musicology as a profession, music was revered above all other arts in the household. Burney’s own journals record numerous visits to the family from important musicians and singers, including, on one notable occasion, the soprano Lucrezia Aguiari. Burney herself had a long correspondence with Gasparo Pacchierotti, a remarkable and wellregarded castrato, and her own enthusiasm for Italian opera in particular is obvious in several of her novels (Kowaleski Wallace 1992 and 1994; see Stephen A. Willier’s chapter in this same collection). In addition, the journals of Burney’s sister Susanna offer an especially rich portrait of the eighteenth-century musical scene (Olleson). All in all, beginning with Burney’s paternal grandfather who was said to have been a good violin player, the entire family seems to have privileged and enjoyed music above all other arts. However, this ranking of music above dance by Frances Burney and her family would not have been unusual in British society. During her lifetime, dance had become an art form likely to generate interest based on an especially virtuosic performance. But dance culture itself did not see the larger and splashier cultural debates that often characterized the musical scene. Not that there had not been a notable effort to raise the profile of dance. For example, the opening decades of the eighteenth century had seen the publication of an important treatise arguing for the elevation of the art form. In An Essay Toward a History of Dancing (1712), John Weaver

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had argued that dance, with its long and noble history, ought to be taken seriously and appreciated not only for the skills it nurtured, but also for the important social work it could do. As a dancer, choreographer, and translator, Weaver aimed to make certain that his audience understood the long and noble history that preceded the art of contemporary dance. His seminal essay introduces key ideas about dance to which Burney will later, both explicitly and implicitly, respond. Weaver begins his essay with the observation that “dancing alone has been generally neglected, or superficially handled by most authors; being thought perhaps too mean a subject for ingenious men of letters” (2−3). Yet he also explains the dearth of writing about dance on the grounds that it was most often taught by word of mouth. Nonetheless, his purpose is to acknowledge that, since both body and mind do benefit from dancing, it deserves “esteem and countenance” (3). Over the course of his treatise, Weaver ranges widely through a series of writers, both classical and modern, who have promoted dance for numerable reasons, including as exercise for both body and mind; as a crucial part of military training; and as a means of spiritual expression. Weaver enlists John Locke for his comment that learning dance gives “modest assurance and handsome confidence” (20). He also seeks to refute the criticisms of those including St. Augustine, Sallust, Cornelius Agrippa, Cicero, the Puritans, and the Waldensians, who all argued against dance, suggesting the important difference between true dance and a kind of false dance that smacks of lascivious excess. For Weaver, the best kind of dancing is “kind of artful carelessness, as if it were a natural motion, without a too curious and painful practicing” (65). In this and other ways, Weaver’s text appears set up to answer the ignorant comments of a character like Mr Meadows in Cecilia who opines that dance is a “barbarian exercise, and of savage origin” (Cecilia, 335). Thus, Burney’s satire can be seen to pick up where Weaver left off. One of Weaver’s more curious assertions concerns the way that dance can give “modest assurance and handsome confidence” to anyone, regardless of rank. He argues that dance can become a kind of class leveller, since it makes the lower orders more confident in themselves and better able to advance their own interests (23−24). For Weaver, a facility for the art of dance allows a man to present himself effectively in any social circle, regardless of birth, thereby benefiting society as a whole. He proposes that “it fits and qualifies men to put forth those endowments, and embellishments, which would else be obscure and buried in bashful rusticity

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and offensive negligence” (6). As he later elaborates, without dance “the Public loses many a Man of exquisite intellectuals [sic], and unbiased Probity, purely for the want of this so necessary Accomplishment, Assurance” (24; original emphasis). Women, too, lose their “bashful rusticity” when they learn to dance. As with the young man seeking to advance himself socially, women who subject themselves to the discipline of dance gain an “assurance absolutely necessary to set off their perfections and render them conversible, and which puts a very different distinction betwixt the unpolished appearance of a country education, and that of cities and courts” (29). Lessons in dance add to natural female beauty and strengthen “the conquest of their eyes” (29). Though we have no evidence that Burney herself read Weaver, as we will see, her novels appear to respond to the idea that dance can telegraph important facts about female character. Weaver’s treatise did much to advance the claims of those seeking to have dance recognized as a legitimate field of artistic expression. The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century would see his positive message echoed in similar treatises—for example, in Sketches Relative to the History and Theory, but More Especially to the Practice of Dancing by Francis Peacock (1805) or A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Dancing by James Cassidy (1810). However, that dance continued to be shadowed by the association with uncouth behaviour is apparent in the subtitle to the 1798 anonymous treatise, A Gentleman’s & Lady’s Companion; Containing the Newest Cotillions and Country Dances, to which is added Instances of Ill Manners, to be Carefully Avoided by Youth of Both Sexes (London: J. Trumbull). Perhaps as a result of its misperceived status as a “lesser” art, eighteenth-century dance culture left few historical records. To this day, scholars lament that it is so difficult to uncover a visual history of dance. As Judith Milhous points out, actors were eight times more likely than dancers to have their pictures recorded during the eighteenth century. This fact makes it difficult to recreate the world of eighteenth-century dance, but it also suggests the ways in which dancers had a lower profile and—as Milhous suggests—lower incomes to pay for such representation (Milhous; Thorp). On this point, we find the first evidence that Burney was not only aware of dance culture, but that she sympathized with the arduous conditions of dancers’ labour. In Burney’s last novel The Wanderer, for example, the minor character Mr Scope spews a bitter invective against the upper classes who enjoy their dissipated luxuries at

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the expense of the hard labour of others. In one example, he intimates his author’s awareness that dancers in particular endured a hard life: And because you, at idle hours, and from mere love of dissipation, lounge at your box at operas and concerts, to hear a tune, or to look at a jump, do you imagine he who sings, or who dances, must be a voluptuary? No! all he does is a pain and toil to himself; learnt with labour, and exhibited with difficulty … [The dancer] skips those gavots, and fandangos, when he would rather go to bed! And all this, to gain himself a hard and fatiguing maintenance, in amusing your dainty idleness, and insufficiency to yourselves. (Wanderer, 325)

Similarly, in Cecilia, Burney aims her satire at those who—just as Mr Scope describes—fail to recognize the human being beneath the art. When Cecilia admits to never having seen a dance rehearsal at the opera, Mr Morrice assures her: You will be excessively entertained, then, I assure you. It’s the most comical thing in the world to see those signores and signoras cutting capers in a morning. And the figuranti will divert you beyond measure; you never saw such a shabby set in your life: but the most amusing thing is to look in their faces, for all the time they are jumping and skipping about the stage as if they could not stand still for joy, they look as sedate and as dismal as if they were so many undertaker’s men.” “Not a word against dancing!” cried Sir Robert, “it’s the only thing carries one to the Opera; and I am sure it’s the only thing one minds at it. (Cecilia, 61)

“Mind” dance as the gentlemen may, characters like Mr Morrice and Sir Robert are clearly reprehensible for their callous indifference to the actual human beings labouring to the point of exhaustion for an art that is scarcely appreciated. We can only speculate that Burney’s sympathy for the laborious life of the dancer might have been based on her contact with actual individuals from the world of dance. We do know, for example, that she greatly enjoyed the friendship of David Garrick’s wife, Eva Marie Veigel. Prior to her marriage in 1749, Veigel had enjoyed a considerable reputation as a dancer—and as a great beauty—on the continent. Did she share her backstage reminiscences with her young acquaintance?

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Dance in Burney’s Biography The question of Burney’s own personal experience with dance is more difficult to ascertain. Although we have fairly extensive documentation of her intellectual training, we lack direct evidence that she herself was tutored in dance (cf. History). We do know that, when Burney’s mother died, the necessary burden of her education fell upon her father. In 1764, he decided that two of his daughters—Esther and Susanna—would be educated in France, where they surely picked up training in the latest steps and most fashionable choreography.1 Perhaps, then, young Frances received her training in dance from her sisters upon their return. Her early journals and letters do evince a spirited adolescent enthusiasm for any opportunity to dance, beginning in 1768, when she writes, of receiving a ticket for a private assembly, where she has never before been, “though I have been often, & once at a private Ball at an Acquaintance, where I danced till late in the morning …” (13 August 1768; EJL, I: 25−26). A few months later, she describes an amateur production of Tamerlane, which she enjoyed immensely. After the performance, the actor who had played the lead role came and asked her to “open the ball”: “God, I was frighten’d to Death—I beg’d and besought him not [to begin].” She prevailed and ultimately followed her sister and her partner as the second couple. “I assure you,” she writes, “I danced like any thing —& call’d the second Dance [words missing] after which, I hopped about with the utmost ease and chearfulness” (15 November 1768; EJL, I: 43; original emphasis). On yet another occasion in January, she mentions dancing at a private party until 2 o’clock in the morning (29 January 1769; EJL, I: 54). Another journal entry from February 1770 offers an impressive account of what sounds like an extraordinary marathon at Mr Pugh’s. When the men begin by choosing not partners, but their hats, Burney does not approve of their plan. Then, when she is introduced to her own partner, Captain Bloomfield, she jokes in a self-deprecating fashion, “I was ready to say God help him! He deserves better! Indeed he was very unfortunate—for he did not himself tire the whole Evening, & poor little I was fatigued to Death after the second dance” (7 February, 1770; EJL, I: 109). It is scarcely surprising to read (supper having been served at 2 am!), that Burney finds herself scarcely able to “hop 2 or 3 dances, but with great pain to myself, being more fit for bed” (EJL, I: 110). Further stressful but largely good-natured negotiations with her partner Captain

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Bloomfield follow, apparently until 5 o’clock “when everyone gave up.” The Burney family eventually makes its way home at 7 in the morning. Here we have the documentation that attending parties where dance was a crucial part of the evening’s agenda was a common activity for the Burney family. The family made and sustained vital social connections in various settings where dance was the focal point of the evening. As an adolescent, Burney clearly enjoyed the activity itself, even when it proved exhausting. Yet for the young author the actual art of dancing appears to have taken a back seat to other pressing social matters—the question of the right partner, for instance, or of changing etiquette in relation to the rituals of the dance floor. Thus, we see how, even in her youth, Burney was keenly aware of how the dance floor could magnify issues of social performance.2 Though dancing foregrounds a necessary bodily discipline, with its steps and manoeuvres practised according to a pre-set choreography, it also leaves room for improvisation, for wit, for resistance when a partner no longer suits. Later, in the court journals, the mention of dances and balls also occasionally finds its way into the narration, though here the events are mostly observed only in passing, or at distance. Clearly, when dance becomes part of a state ceremony, it proves less interesting to Burney herself.

Dance in Burney’s Novels The most famous—and indeed often cited—dance scene in Burney’s oeuvre appears in Evelina when the eponymous heroine finds herself attending a dance for the first time. Feminist critics, among others, have rightly identified the blatantly sexist behaviours of the male participants at the dance. As Evelina describes, “the gentlemen, as they passed and repassed, looked as if they thought we were quite at their disposal, and only waiting for the honour of their commands; and they sauntered about, in a careless, indolent manner, as if with a view to keep us in suspense” (Evelina, 28). In this way, the young heroine identifies the dance as a place where women are objectified, put on view for the advantage of the men who hold all the power of the gaze. Burney subsequently appears to channel some of her own youthful experiences at the dance as she describes Evelina’s responses to being in a public forum without the necessary preparation. “A confused idea now for the first time entered my head,” writes Evelina, “of something I had heard of the rules of an assembly; but I was never at one before, I have only danced at school

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…” (Evelina, 33). Despite the inadequacies of her preparation, Evelina is determined not to make a social misstep. Yet the actual dance floor appears to have several baffling rules. Is it acceptable to turn down a partner? How does one respond to someone— like Mr Lovel—whose behaviour seems overbearing, if not bullying? Lovel’s presence in Burney’s novel links back to Weaver’s assertion that dance can give “modest assurance and handsome confidence” (20) to anyone, regardless of rank, as indeed Lovel seems to have taken the message too much to heart. He seems to believe the simple fact that he has been educated in the rules of the dance floor entitles him to a degree of familiarity or intimacy with those who are arguably his social betters. Burney’s portrait of this fop suggests that she departs politically from Weaver: where he, as an advocate for social mobility, promotes the kind of self-assurance brought on by an education in dance, Burney’s novel makes that same attitude an occasion for satire, deeming it a “negligent impertinence” (Evelina, 29). For Burney, “inner worth” such as that possessed by the young Evelina herself should not be confused with a facile knowledge of social conventions. Meanwhile, those like Lovel, who erroneously believe that an acquaintance with dance can propel them higher in the social sphere, are nothing more than poseurs. If Evelina has not yet lost what Weaver would call her “bashful rusticity,” all the better, the novel seems to say: such ignorance makes her more authentic and residually pure by contrast with others who have been touched by the artificial mores of the dance floor. Where Weaver celebrates the social mobility resulting from an acquaintance with dance, Burney demurs: actual rank must run deeper. Lord Orville, for one, doesn’t need to flaunt his rules of etiquette in order to announce who he is. Evelina draws his portrait: he is “about six-and-twenty years old, gaily but not foppishly dressed, and indeed extremely handsome, with an air of mixed politeness and gallantry” (Evelina, 29). Unlike Lovel, he instinctively recognizes Evelina’s social missteps as simple mistakes, not tell-tale signs of being out of her proper sphere, and he quickly addresses Evelina as his social equal, without actual knowledge of her birth. “His conversation was sensible and spirited,” Evelina enthuses, “his air, and address were open and noble; his manners gentle, attentive, and infinitely engaging; his person is all elegance, and his countenance the most animated and expressive I have ever seen” (Evelina, 230). Thus, despite her disagreements with Weaver, Burney does acknowledge that, for better or worse, both dance and the setting

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which frames it as a social event are profoundly performative occasions that do the necessary work of telegraphing important social information. Evelina is not the only Burney heroine who will need to come to terms with this fact about social life and to learn to adjust her behaviour accordingly. For example, in The Wanderer, having presumably received her dance lessons in France, Juliet (her true identity still unknown) is able to pre-empt Miss Arbe as she attempts to stage a cotillion based on an incomplete set of choreographic steps brought from France by Mr Ireton. Elinor worries that “in keeping the whole group thus imperfect, in both the play and the dance, it was the design of Miss Arbe to expose them all to ridicule, that her own fine acting and fine steps might be contrasted to the greater advantage.” So, she asks Juliet to instruct them all instead. Juliet does so: she “gave a general, though unpremeditated lesson to everyone, by the measured grace and lightness of her motions, which, little as her attire was adapted to such a purpose, were equally striking for elegance and for modesty” (Wanderer, 84). Paradoxically, in preparation for the social performance that is to become the dance, Juliet does not need to perform: Burney adds the arresting word “unpremeditated” to describe Juliet’s lesson in order to convey several key ideas. Juliet’s relationship to the art of dance is organic and seamless—and utterly unself-conscious. She has no ulterior motive. Unlike Miss Arbe, she doesn’t seek to self-promote or to make herself look superior through her tuition. She is “naturally” elegant and modest and thus more intuitively in tune with the art she professes. Here, still early in the novel, she announces who she really is. She achieves the very effect that Weaver praised, in which the best kind of dancing is “kind of artful carelessness, as if it were a natural motion, without a too curious and painful practicing” (65). Yet she demonstrates an “artless art” that renders the very idea of practice invisible. Juliet’s behaviour epitomizes a perfect kind of performativity for Burney. Through her dance lessons and her own modelling of the art, she images an art that is “artless,” and that appears to come from a place untouched by baser human motivation. In this way, Burney’s appreciation for an ideal form of dance can be gleaned and recognized. Whether such social performance through dance or other art forms can ever really be achieved remains, of course, something to contemplate. Burney’s final use of dance—as a metaphor for complicated forms of affiliation—departs from her interest in dance as performance, yet her use of this trope is not unrelated, as we can see as we turn to Camilla. In this

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novel, the eponymous heroine and her intended will be repeatedly drawn together, only to be kept apart by various elements that propel them away from each other. Though both partners repeatedly long for the dance that would emblematize their union, each time the occasion is presented, the two are sent off in different directions. Burney’s plot is very much structured as a forward and backward motion—a push and pull of sorts— where the effect is similar to a tortured choreographic design wherein the dancers, whatever their own individual feelings, seem compelled to follow footsteps not of their own intention. Early in the novel, the idea of the dance as a metaphor for union is introduced when a ball is planned in order to allow Indiana, who is Camilla’s beautiful cousin, to make her first public appearance. While Indiana’s brilliant dress and demeanour first capture the public eye, Camilla is described as possessing “a graceful simplicity, a disengaged openness and a guileless freedom from affectation” (Camilla, 61)—in other words, a most fetching partner indeed. Yet Camilla reaches out in a selfless gesture to ask Edgar to dance instead with Eugenia, who (as she assures Edgar) has been trained to dance yet has drawn no partners (Camilla, 64). In this satiric scene, the minor character Dubster appears in a sort of reprise role of Mr Lovel. He makes a commotion over having lost his glove, but more importantly he becomes one of the many blocking forces that keep the two lovers apart from their dance. To be sure, the main obstacle to Edgar’s dance with Camilla is the mistrust and doubt of Camilla’s character that his tutor originally implanted in him. As a woman of high fashion and visibility, Mrs Berlinton does not have Edgar’s approval, and he obsesses about her influence over Camilla, about whom he wonders, “has she discretion, has she fortitude … to withstand public distinction? Will it not spoil her for private life; estrange her from her family concerns? render tasteless and insipid the conjugal and maternal characters meant by Nature to form not only the most sacred of duties, but the most delicious of enjoyments?” (Camilla, 444). As he observes Camilla confidently responding to various persons in Mrs Berlinton’s society, he decides, “the degradation from true female character is already begun! Already the lure of fashion draws her from what she owes to delicacy and propriety, to give a willing reception to insolence and foppery!” (444). Obviously, as the hyperbolic tone of his rhetoric suggests, Edgar is wrong in his assessment: when seen from Camilla’s point of view, her

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interaction with the dissipated society proves both blameless and innocent. Burney slips into Edgar’s point of view to capture the way patriarchy can so easily misread and misperceive female inclination. Edgar leaves the party, and Camilla is both mortified and disappointed when she discovers she has yet again lost her chance at a dance with him. The unfulfilled promise of the dance once again stands in for the unfulfilled promise of a union between the two lovers. Burney sets the scene against the high drama of a society party and the ritualized dancing at its centre to emphasize how the demands of public performance can distort perception and elevate the danger for any young woman who must carefully monitor her reputation. Edgar creates a false binary when his mind places public distinction in a different category from private life, “corrupt” involvement with social life, from domestic life and a “natural” inclination to motherhood. Burney’s heroine is meant to be the proof that a “private” and a “public” female identity need not differ. The extreme phrasing suggests the narrator neither approves nor sanctions the binary, which Edgar himself did not create. It belongs instead to patriarchy in one of its most insidious forms. Yet this is the situation that Camilla must learn to navigate. The rest of the novel will concern itself with exactly how she must do this—and the price that such action exacts on her person. Burney’s use of the “dance not danced” invites comparison to a very different scene in a very different novel—Elizabeth Bennett’s and Darcy’s first dance in Pride and Prejudice. Where Austen allows her partners to come together, to gloriously spar and spark only to spin off until their steps can bring them back together again, Burney blocks the action. She resorts to repeated obstruction, delay, and impediment. For her, the dance floor can become a microcosm of society. In darker moments such as this one in Camilla, it can become a place where men and women are brought together and yet kept apart by forces over which they have no control. All of this suggests Burney’s somewhat darker view of the ways in which, for her, social performance is necessarily embedded in larger and more sinister patriarchal contexts.3 In conclusion, despite the initial impression that Burney was relatively inattentive to dance as a performative art, dance functions as a social fact in her own life and her work. As we have seen, her novels evince an awareness of the labour of dance and the fact that dancers were indeed artists working under difficult physical conditions. Second, Burney often aligns the art of dance with self-promotion, recognizing the ways in which choreographed movement in a public space can be

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a key indicator of character, in both positive and negative ways. Lastly, dance provides a powerful metaphor for the narrative itself. In all these ways, Burney’s works highlight the way in which the art of dance was thoroughly integrated into her sensibility and her life.

Notes 1. Some biographers speculate that Dr Burney did not send Frances herself based on her early expression of certain spiritual proclivities that made her appear too vulnerable to Catholic indoctrination. 2. Later in her life, once she was well known as the author of Evelina, Burney was said to have been hesitant to appear on the dance floor for fear that her movements would provoke “observations” comparing her to her heroine. See CJL, V: 234 n. 591. 3. For an additional argument on the dangers of performance for Burney, see Kowaleski Wallace (2016).

References Kowaleski Wallace, Beth. “Shunning the Bearded Kiss.” Prose Studies 25 (1992): 153−70. Kowaleski Wallace, Beth. “A Night at the Opera.” In Beth Fowkes Tobin (ed.), History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 140−58. Kowaleski Wallace, Beth. “‘I Will Wear My Heart Upon My Sleeve’: Haunted Stages in Frances Burney’s Camilla.” Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research 30, 1 (2016): 21−37. Milhous, Judith. “Picturing Dance in Eighteenth-century England.” In “Dance & Image,” ed. Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorpe, special issue of Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 36, 1−2 (2011): 29−52. Olleson, Philip. The Journals and Letters of Susanna Burney: Music and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Thorp, Jennifer. “‘Borrowed Grandeur and Affected Grace’: Perceptions of the Dancing-Master in Early Eighteenth-Century England.” In “Dance & Image,” ed. Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorpe, special issue of Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 36, 1−2 (2011): 9−27. Weaver, John. An Essay Toward the History of Dancing (London: Jacob Jonson, 1712).

CHAPTER 4

Life and Work: Frances Burney and the Needle Arts Alicia Kerfoot

Abstract Alicia Kerfoot explores Frances Burney’s depiction of the needle arts in her court journals and letters and in her novels. She looks at the way that Burney uses needlework, often referred to merely as ‘work,’ to speak about her friendships and to negotiate her space at court and her public persona as an author. Similarly, in her four major novels, Burney uses needlework to make material the internal thought processes and emotions of her characters, which demonstrates how central this type of artwork was to women in the era. She also constructs a very distinct difference between fine needlework and plain work, which she associates with more monotonous activity as well as charity work and a viable alternative for women’s financial security. Keywords Needlework · Embroidery · Women’s communities · Stitching · Material culture

A. Kerfoot (B) SUNY Brockport, State University of New York, Brockport, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6_4

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Often referred to simply as ‘work’ in the eighteenth century, the needle arts are integral to Frances Burney’s fiction and her life; her novels depict characters who engage in such work across a broad social spectrum and her journals and letters offer insights into the cultural significance of needlework and her personal experience of it. The needle arts themselves are subject to a class distinction that places fine or fancy work (such as embroidery) in the foreground, as something the well-educated perform, and plain sewing in the background, as a useful skill for women and one that they might use to support themselves. Burney replicates this division in her novels, journals, and letters, but she also depicts the interplay between the multiple forms of needlework that compose the fabric of an eighteenth-century woman’s life. In her court journals and letters, Burney uses needlework to express her feelings about her friendships with Mary Delany and Frederica Lock as well as her service to Queen Charlotte. In her novels, on the other hand, Burney shows how needlework embodies the emotions of characters because it connects mind and body. In Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796), Burney also associates needlework with acts of charity, while in The Wanderer (1814) narratives of female community and self-sufficient industry come together to complicate (but ultimately reinforce) the class divisions associated with fancy and plain work. For Burney, the creative work of writing is indivisible from the everyday embodied work of the needle arts, so that they make up the fabric of a performed everyday self both in her journals and letters and in her fictional works.

Court Work and Female Community In the letters and journals she wrote at court between 1786 and 1789, Burney shows how she interacts with the royal family and maintains friendships from afar with the help of the needle arts, the tools of such arts, and their associated final products. In The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker argues that in the eighteenth century, the growth of needlework and other craftwork was a result of women’s lack of access to formal art education; she claims that this “secondary status … can be seen clearly in embroidery” because embroiderers ignore what the art “offers in terms of textures, stitches, and material” to imitate painting techniques (120). Parker analyses how needlework focused on realistic portrayals of nature and, in turn, associated nature with feminine accomplishments and femininity itself (123). Amanda Vickery notes that the history of such crafts

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has been impacted by the debate about what constituted useful compared to ornamental accomplishments in the Georgian era; she argues that “by the 1790s accomplishments had become a hook on which to hang an attack on current female education and femininity for feminist critics and educational reformers, both radical and Tory” (232–33). The needle arts are at the centre of this debate, and a close reading of Burney’s journals and letters alongside her four major novels shows how she participated in it. Frances Burney’s friendship with Mary Delany is what led to her introduction to King George III and Queen Charlotte (Davenport, 14). Delany was well known for her exquisite needlework and intricate paper collage flowers, and in a letter to Susanna Burney Phillips in 1784, Burney explains that Delany had received a loom from the Queen and a “knotting needle” from the King (AJL, I: 2–3). Mary Delany and Queen Charlotte shared what was seen as an upper-class feminine interest in craftwork, but one that was often framed as both innocuous and frivolous at the same time that it inspired the imagination and encouraged “engagement in the publicly aware life” (Vickery, 242). Needlework and other handicrafts could be marshalled for more individualistic and even feminist purposes, while they maintained within them a narrative of compliance and productive femininity. For example, Lisa Moore argues that Mary Delaney’s paper collages’ “botanical accuracy distinguish Delany’s works from those of lady flower-painters or flower-makers whose interests were primarily aesthetic,” though she goes on to acknowledge that even “primarily aesthetic” flower work contains within it the possibility for women to intervene in what was seen as the masculine field of botany (67). Needlework could also provide a pastime that was more self-reflexive than mindlessly reproductive, depending on how each practitioner approached it. Burney often comments on the role that needlework plays in her own relationship with Queen Charlotte and places it alongside the creative activities of reading and writing. For example, on 17 August 1786 she gives an account of being called to the Queen’s dressing room, where “she then employed me in helping her to arrange her work, which is Chair Covers done in Ribbon; & then told me to fetch her a Volume of the Spectator … & then, suddenly, but very gently, [she] said ‘Will you read a Paper while I work?’” (CJL, I: 138–39). Burney’s position as reader is reversed when, in 1788, Colonel Digby reads to her as she works: “he then began reading ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination.’ And

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I took some Work, for which I was much in haste, & the pleasures of My Imagination were amply gratified” (CJL, IV: 369). Burney often places reading and/or writing in a relationship with stitching. On another occasion, she says, “as I could neither read nor write, my first attempt at employment was working at the Plants, from the implements of my beloved Fredy,—& I thought as I worked how happy it would have made her had she seen herself my kind supplyer with the only business I could undertake” (CLJ, I: 163). Frederica Lock’s “implement” is one that uses a natural method of plant impressions to create embroidery patterns, and when Burney uses it, it becomes an embodied representation of her absent friend. Frederica Lock’s “implement” for making embroidery patterns attests to the popularity of natural floral designs in the era, though it is an unconventional way to create such a pattern. Normally, as a 1756 needlework manual explains, “the designs [are] drawn only with an out-line, shadowed with Indian ink, then pricked with a needle, and pounced with charcoal dust … and then drawn with a pen” (Smith, 47; original emphasis). In her journal for 1787, Burney further develops the way that needlework patterns and tools stand in for the women who use them to create, and she aligns these tools with her role as a public figure when she suggests that her fame makes these objects valuable beyond their superficial use. Mlle La Fîte begs Burney for a lock of hair to give to Mlle De La Roche, but Burney is reluctant to give her one. Mlle La Fîte is insistent, though, and begs “anything, a bit of paper I had twisted, a morsel of an old Gown, the impression of a seal from a Letter,—Two pins out of my Dress,—in short, any thing …. At a last, I was obliged to let her have one of those poor pattern Garlands that I made with Plant Impressions, under the Eye & direction of my Fredy” (CJL, II: 312; original emphasis). This leads another courtier, Mlle De Luc, to follow suit, and when Burney drops her needle, she exclaims “o! I have found it!—may I have it?” followed by “I shall keep it for ever & never! it was worked by Miss Beurney!” (312; original emphasis). The theme is repeated in 1788 when General Grenville plays with Burney’s workbox (given to her by Fredy) and then takes “a threaded needle from my work … beginning to sew his own fingers” (CJL, IV: 506). When Colonel Goldsworthy draws attention to this action, Grenville says “Tis only a little gallanterie … to have something to carry about me of Miss Burney’s!—” (506; original emphasis). The natural embroidery pattern born of Burney’s friendship with Frederica Lock and the similarly associated workbox, in which she

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keeps all sorts of things including the needles she works with, are here constructed as parts of herself that others desire and that become relics of her persona as a famous author. This complicates a reading of needlework as simply a sign of female accomplishment or a useful activity that replaces the activity of the mind; instead, Burney makes it clear that the art of needlework encourages networks of female friendship and she uses it to frame the way she reads, writes, and negotiates public authorship. In December 1786, Burney received a gift that shows how needlework represents status and friendship: “two pieces of Black Stuff very prettily embroidered for Shoes” from the Queen. Of this gift, Burney notes, “these little tokens of favour she has a manner all her own, in its grace & elegance, of bestowing” (CJL, I: 283, 303). The graceful way in which the Queen gives Burney the black stuff distinguishes her from others, and Burney singles out the quality of the embroidery in her description. A pair of white wool shoes (1740–60) show how a stitched design would have looked on material such as “Stuff”. The design utilizes long-and-short stitch, stem stitch, satin stitch, and cording that has been tacked on to make the stems. Another surviving pair of stitched shoes from about 1780 demonstrate what embroidery on black material would have looked like, though they are made of silk, rather than wool. Though Burney doesn’t tell us whether the Queen stitched the “Black Stuff” herself, it is very possible she did, since embroidery patterns for shoes such as those in Figs. 4.1 and 4.2 (and indeed those given to Burney) would have been readily available in the period.1 As Amanda Vickery notes, “the frequency with which handicrafts were given as gifts suggests both the prestige wrought upon them and the power they had to connect women” (246). In her study of Bluestocking crafts, Elizabeth Eger also argues that such female accomplishments “formed an integral part of everyday sociability … often in productive parallel with individual scholarship or the shared pleasures of conversation” (113). Burney acknowledges this role of handicrafts, as she uses the needle arts to organize her time and negotiate her space at court. In a letter to Susanna Burney Phillips, she describes an interaction with Colonel Greville and Mr Guiffardière in which her action of winding silk plays a major part. On leaving a room where she was working in their company, Burney explains, “I gathered together my work, which consisted chiefly of skanes [sic] of silk I was winding for netting.” But the gentlemen refuse to let her leave, offering instead to hold the silk for her

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Fig. 4.1 Shoes, 1740–1760 (possibly British) (Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Herman Delman, 1954. Accession Number: 2009.300.4741a, b)

as she winds; in response, she insists that she has access to “Chairs too, which serve me just as well” (CJL, II: 112; original emphasis). The silk becomes the focus of a power struggle between Burney and these men, as they attempt to demand her presence and she insists she can work alone. As with other accounts in which needlework figures, Burney acknowledges that in many ways such work is part of an elaborate strategy she has developed both as a woman and as a writer. In her early journals, she explains: I make a kind of rule never to indulge myself in my two most favourite persuits [sic], [r]eading & writing, in the morning … I give that up wholly … to [needle] work, by which means my Reading & writing in the afternoon is a pleasure I ╓am not╖ blamed for, ╓& does me no harm,╖ as it does not take up the Time I ought to spend otherwise. (EJL, I: 15)

In this early journal, Burney already places needlework in relation to reading and writing and is explicit about how this negotiation of her time allows her to feel more virtuous. Chloe Wigston Smith argues that attending to the material labour of needlework is important because it tells us “about time and gender, traditions of multitasking, amateur

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Fig. 4.2 Black and pink satin shoes with floral embroidered vamps, English, 1780–1785 (© 2019 Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Canada. Image by Hal Roth)

artistry and the value of craft” (“Gender,” 166). An attention to her needlework shows us how Burney negotiates public displays of femininity with private desires, much in the way her characters in her novels must, and with similar needlework tools.

Mind, Body, and Needlework in the Novels In the novels, Burney’s use of needlework develops an accurate picture of the relationship between material and bodily actions and characters’ patterns of mind. She also contrasts elite needlework with the plain work of women of the lower classes. Emotional engagement with needlework is both a bodily and socially-structured experience oriented around the object. Women often used needlework as a distraction from grief or boredom. In one such example, Anna Larpent found “a monotony in

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X stitch and a cheerfulness in forming the various shades” that soothed her mind when her niece died (Vickery, 245). Bridget Long argues that “both sociable and solitary sewing provided sources of emotional support” (179). But this is not to say these experiences were not socially constructed; as Rozsika Parker notes of embroidered pictures at the end of the eighteenth century, the mother-daughter bond was embedded in the emotional experience of the needlework, which “became implicated in an intense relationship, shot through with as much guilt, hatred and ambivalence as love” (130). Burney takes up this emotional connection between embroidery and the body to demonstrate her characters’ feminine performance of feeling in their public negotiations of selfhood. In Camilla, Burney returns to the experience of silk winding to make physical Camilla’s anxiety about her preference for Edgar Mandlebert. Camilla’s cousin Indiana and her governess Miss Margland suggest that Camilla’s attention to Edgar will disturb the assumed match between Edgar and Indiana, which horrifies Camilla; the narrator tells us that this is “the first bitter moment” Camilla “had ever known” (Camilla, 168). When she must appear in company with Edgar, Camilla attempts to show her presence of mind by busying herself “in preparing to wind some sewing silk upon cards” (169). The narrator notes that she “could have chosen no employment less adapted to display the cool indifference she wished to manifest …. She pulled the silk the wrong way, twisted, twirled, and entangled it continually; and … her shaking hands shewed her whole frame disordered, and her high colour betrayed her strong internal emotion” (171). The disorder of Camilla’s mind is apparent in the physical action of silk winding. Though she attempts to use the action as a shield, the physicality of working with the silk reveals her disordered mind. As a result, she acts in a way that misrepresents her character and suggests a frivolity that goes no further than the surface: “having completely spoilt one skein, she threw it aside, and saying ‘the weather’s so fine, I cannot bear to stay within,’—left her silk, her winders, and her work-bag, on the first chair, and skipt down the stairs” (171). The needlework reveals Camilla’s inability to hide her emotions, which reinforces her association with the natural. In the act of throwing aside the skeins and skipping down the stairs, Camilla reacts to her environment in a way that foreshadows Edgar’s later misreading of such enthusiasm as frivolity. In Evelina (1778), Burney also connects bodily health and mental well-being with needlework. In fact, Evelina’s inability to work reveals her state of mind to Mr Villars, and as a result, he suggests he can read

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her like a book (264). Evelina is distressed because she received an inappropriate letter from Lord Orville (though it is in fact from Sir Clement Willoughby) and her distress affects her state of mind and health. Initially, Mr Villars converses with Evelina while she works but then leaves the room. Evelina explains: The moment I was alone, my spirits failed me; the exertion with which I had supported them, had fatigued my mind: I flung away my work, and, leaning my arms on the table, gave way to a train of disagreeable reflections, which, bursting from the restraint that had smothered them, filled me with unusual sadness. This was my situation, when, looking towards the door, which was open, I perceived Mr Villars, who was earnestly regarding me. (263)

In this account, Burney demonstrates how needlework supports Evelina’s fragile state with both the community of Mr Villars and the occupation of her work. The sentiment is similar to the examples that Vickery and Long give of women who attest to the needle’s powerful emotional support. When Evelina is not occupied with her work, her state of mind becomes more visible to Mr Villars and she loses a sense of the present; when she spends some time staring out the window, she says she “forgot the present; and so intent was I upon the subject which occupied me, that the strange appearance of my unusual inactivity and extreme thoughtfulness, never occurred to me” (263). In contrast to Camilla, Evelina’s work is a welcome distraction, and it is only when she puts the work down that she becomes “a book that both afflicts and perplexes” Mr Villars (264). Sarah Eron argues that “Evelina’s acquisition of self-conscious subjectivity … emerges … through her engagement with time” as it interacts with material objects (173). Evelina “flings” away her needlework in order to achieve introspection and interiority, and then forgets “the present” (Evelina, 263). This makes sense considering Eron’s argument about the relationship between temporality and subjectivity, as Burney uses the object of needlework to demonstrate a shift between the material and interior thought process through time. Stuart Sherman notices Burney’s “deep strategic engagement with the problems and possibilities of eighteenth-century women’s time” in both her diaries and her novels (248–49). Burney uses needlework to negotiate her heroine’s subject position in time and in relation to the material world, just as she does in her own life. We have access to Camilla’s and Evelina’s emotions not

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just because we can read their bodies, but also because of the way their bodies interact with objects, which constructs a relatable sense of time and interiority for the reader. Cecilia also reveals her emotional state and how that state is predicated on her imaginative interior life in her inattention to a fire screen that she embroiders. We see Cecilia’s screen after Mortimer Delvile has demonstrated his affection for her, though Cecilia knows there is some obstacle to their union that he won’t speak of (the obstacle is that her inheritance depends on her husband to take her name, which Mortimer, as the only heir to the Delvile name, cannot). When she sees him after an illness, she “congratulated him on his recovery: and then, taking her usual seat, employed herself in embroidering a screen” (Cecilia, 489). He then leaves Cecilia alone with Mrs Delvile, who “sent for her own work” (489). This idyllic scene of women’s work and community is interrupted by Lady Honoria Pemberton, who comes “flying into the room” with the gossip that “Mr Mortimer” has a kept mistress and a child (490). When Cecilia hears this information, her reaction is both mental and physical and her needlework manifests her discomfort: Cecilia, to whom Henrietta Belfield was instantly present, changed colour repeatedly, and turned so extremely sick, she could with difficulty keep her seat. She forced herself, however, to continue her work, though she knew so little what she was about, that she put her needle in and out of the same place without ceasing. (490)

Cecilia learns earlier in the novel that Henrietta Belfield is also in love with Mortimer Delvile (350), which is why she thinks of her as her rival and places her in the role of Delvile’s mistress. The instant presence of Henrietta in her thoughts leads to a combination of physical illness, a repeated change in colour, and a mechanical type of needlework. This repeated action of stitching the “same place without ceasing” marks a rupture between Cecilia’s thoughts and the actions of her body. Her mindless repetition makes her like an automaton, which Julie Park has argued is an apt way to think about Burney’s use of the novel form, and “its forward-moving engine of narrative” which works “in tension with Burney’s own efforts to depict the liminal subjectivity of heroines trapped between social codes on one hand and their own repetitive reflexes of loss and abjection on the other” (Park, 124). Burney uses the screen to orient Cecilia’s subjectivity in relation to that of the imagined mistress,

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who turns out not to be a mistress, but an ill “gipsey” woman to whom Mortimer provided charity (Cecilia, 494). She also uses the screen to orient Cecilia in contrast to Lady Honoria, Mrs Delvile, and Henrietta Belfield. In an essay on “the ways in which bodies are directed toward things,” Sara Ahmed explains how material objects place our bodies within time and space; she notes “the work of repetition is not neutral work; it orients the body in some ways rather than others …. Bodies tend toward some objects more than others given their tendencies” (247; original emphasis). Cecilia’s screen and needle are two such materially orienting objects because they mediate the telling of Lady Honoria’s story and of Cecilia’s face and complexion. Lady Honoria draws attention first to Cecilia’s embroidery and then to her face in order to comment on the effect the story has on her; of the screen, she says: “bless me, Miss Beverley, what are you about! why that flower is the most ridiculous thing I ever saw! you have spoilt your whole work” (Cecilia, 490). Cecilia unpicks her work while Lady Honoria draws attention to her face, noting that “she’s red and white, and white and red half a dozen times in a minute. Especially … if you talk to her of Mortimer!” (491). Lady Honoria then focuses on Cecilia’s embroidery again, asking, “what are you about now? do you intend to unpick the whole screen?” (491). Cecilia’s mechanical stitching and unstitching reveal her emotions, just as her complexion and eye movements do, but her thoughts of Henrietta Belfield are internal. Cecilia’s interaction with her screen constructs a relationship between absent and present and upper- and lower-class women. Her blush and the spoilt flower are both indicators of ideal femininity because both are associated with nature and bodily reflexes that reveal the truth of Cecilia’s emotions.2 An embroidered fire screen panel (1750–1810) provides a comparative text for this moment in Cecilia (see Fig. 4.3). Instead of depicting an elaborate embroidery picture, this panel acts as a sampler that showcases the needleworker’s skill. Maureen Daly Goggin notes that samplers shifted in the early eighteenth century from a place for “invention” to one where women demonstrated their domestic ability (33). The sampler fire screen in Fig. 4.3 showcases several different stitches and floral designs alongside fancy darning in gold silk thread. This combination of useful plain stitching with ornate materials and feminine flower designs means it fuses the types of stitching women would learn for everyday use with the more elite work of embroidered pictures and

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Fig. 4.3 Oval embroidered darning sampler (panel from a fire screen), c. 1750– 1810 (©The Olive Matthews Collection, Chertsey Museum. Image by John Chase Photography)

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flowers. Burney’s depiction of Cecilia’s embroidered flower alongside her thoughts of the poor “gipsey” and Henrietta Belfield does similar work to this fire screen sampler because Burney uses Cecilia’s fine stitching to show how both she and Honoria Pemberton develop their imaginative selves against a lower-class other, who acts as a foil (like the plain stitching in the example). Plain stitching is a necessary background skill for women in general, but imagination and feeling are associated with the fine work of landscapes, copies of paintings, or floral design in needlework. In Burney’s final novel, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, the wanderer of the title is Lady Juliet Granville, who is fleeing a forced marriage and the French Revolution (for most of the novel she does not reveal her true name and identity). Juliet is trained in fine needlework and attempts to work in a milliner’s shop, for a mantua-maker, as a commissioned fine embroiderer with her friend from France, Gabriella, and as a haberdasher with Gabriella in London. Burney places these sewing professions alongside one another to show how Juliet must balance her hidden upper-class position with her need to find work. Juliet prefers work with Gabriella over work with the women at the milliner’s and mantua-maker’s shops (Wanderer, 426; 453–54). She places the busy, public, and indelicate space of the milliner’s shop alongside her memory of completing “fine muslin-work” (401) with Gabriella: work which required “patterns, silver and gold threads, spangles, and various other articles” (403). Juliet finds the juxtaposition disconcerting: “o hours of refined felicity past and gone, how severe is your contrast with those of heaviness and distaste now endured!” (429). When she is at the mantua-maker’s shop, she contrasts the type of plain sewing she does there with the lighter sewing of the milliner’s shop and decides she is no better off: Juliet now … found, that … there was nothing to prefer in her new to her former situation … . The taste and fancy, requisite for the elegance and variety of the light work which she quitted … rendered it, at least, less irksome, than the wearying sameness of perpetual basting, running, and hemming … . What little difference, therefore, she found in her position, was, that [at the milliner’s] she had been disgusted by under-bred flippancy; here, she was deadened by uninteresting monotony; and that there, perpetual motion, and incessant change of orders, and of objects, affected her nerves; while here, the unvarying repetition of stitch after stitch, nearly closed in sleep her faculties, as well as her eyes. (454)

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Juliet prefers “light” work with Gabriella because it embodies upper-class feminine sensibility and brings her “sweet contentment, soft hopes, and gentle happiness” (402). This sensibility separates Juliet very clearly from the needle women who work in the milliner’s shop or at the mantuamaker’s and aligns her with the respectable female community she builds with Gabriella. Helen Thompson argues that in her depiction of Juliet’s work, “Burney refuses to collapse being and doing. Working will not reduce the wanderer to something she is manifestly not ‘brought up’ to be—a worker” (978). Though Burney depicts Juliet Granville as ill-suited to plain sewing because of her class status, the theme of plain sewing as a way to help the impoverished or distressed comes up more than once in her novels, and the idea of sewing as a form of labour women can fall back upon even occurs in Burney’s journals and letters. Cecilia helps Mrs Hill set up a haberdasher’s shop with a cousin (something Juliet and Gabriella also do in The Wanderer) and she agrees to provide for two of Mrs Hill’s children by placing “them in some cheap school, where they might be taught plain work, which could not but prove a useful qualification for whatever sort of business they might hereafter attempt” (Cecilia, 201). Similarly, Camilla’s goodness is embedded in her needlework practices when a servant describes how she has sewed for others since she was a child: “when she had nothing to give’em, she used to take her thread papers and needle books, and sit down and work for them” (Camilla, 574). Her willingness to perform plain needlework for others offers a flattering picture of her humility. Burney, too, thinks about the economic usefulness of the needle arts. In a 1787 letter, she regrets that she cannot help a distressed veteran: “I tried … to give him some counsel … about two Daughters, who … copied from Nature Landscapes in needle-work” (CJL, II: 200). She explains that the man plans to take his daughters to Bath, where they can “sell their works” and the story ends well, with the man and his daughters prospering in their “Bath expedition” (CJL, II: 200). This advice shows that Burney considered the needle arts as a valuable source of income for women, even though the fine work of nature landscapes is very different from plain sewing. Needlework could be a source of charity and financial support for both elite and working-class women, but its portrayal as either useful or ornamental remains representative of different kinds of femininity in this role. Catherine Keohane and Cynthia Klekar have noted the intricacies of charity and gift-giving

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in relation to the Mrs Hill plot in Cecilia, which Keohane sees as one that “de-objectifies” Mrs Hill because it makes “her crucial to the novel’s larger plot” (390), while Klekar argues that Cecilia’s apparent agency as a charitable entity is undermined because women are only given temporary power in “a male-dominated economic system” (3). However, as Chloe Wigston Smith notes, the haberdasher’s shop in both Cecilia and The Wanderer holds financial promise “as a commercial alternative to the cycle of debt experienced by so many of Burney’s heroines” (“The Haberdasher’s Plot,” 288). That Burney also uses Cecilia’s floral embroidery work to set her against Henrietta Belfield and the unnamed “gipsey” recipient of Mortimer Delvile’s charity perhaps suggests that the division between the “plain” labour of the lower classes and the “fine” work of figures like Cecilia and Juliet is not one Burney completely dismantles. The needle arts in the eighteenth century encourage networks of female community and individual expression, while they reinforce a proper, compliant, feminine behaviour. Burney’s characters use needlework to negotiate their public selves just as Burney herself “made conscious choices about the sort of public identity she would adopt” (Schellenberg, 348). She places needlework alongside reading and writing in her accounts of court life and in her novels, where her heroines are read by others and orient themselves against and towards both needlework and the absent others that such works call to mind. Burney shows how workboxes, needles, shoes, and embroidery patterns create a community of women working and creating together, and she thinks about how such objects are part of a much larger structure of women’s labour: a structure that oftentimes reinforces class distinctions in its very materiality.

Notes 1. See Batchelor and Wigston Smith (“Fast Fashion”). 2. For more on the blush in eighteenth-century art and literature, see Rosenthal.

References Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations Matter.” In Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 234–57.

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Batchelor, Jennie. “The great Lady’s Magazine Stitch-Off.” University of Kent blog The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre (2016). Available from https://www.kent.ac.uk/english/ladys-mag azine/patterns/index.html. Accessed 30 April 2021. Daly Goggin, Maureen. “Stitching a Life in ‘pen of steele and silken inke’: Elizabeth Parker’s circa 1830 Sampler.” In Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (eds), Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950 (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 31–49. Davenport, Hester. Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the Court of King George III (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2000). Eger, Elizabeth. “Paper Trails and Eloquent Objects: Bluestocking Friendship and Material Culture.” Parergon 26, 2 (2009): 109–38. Eron, Sarah. “More Than a Conscious Feeling: Reading Evelina’s Mind in Time.” Studies in the Novel 50, 2 (2018): 171–96. Keohane, Catherine. “‘Too Neat for a Beggar’: Charity and Debt in Burney’s Cecilia.” Studies in the Novel 33, 4 (2001): 379–401. Klekar, Cynthia. “‘Her Gift Was Compelled’: Gender and the Failure of the ‘Gift’ in Cecilia.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 18, 1 (2005): 107–26. Long, Bridget. “‘Regular Progressive Work Occupies My Mind Best’: Needlework as a Source of Entertainment, Consolation and Reflection.” TEXTILE 14, 2 (2016): 176–87. Moore, Lisa L. “Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, 1 (2005): 49–70. Park, Julie. The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: I.B. Tauris, 1984). Rosenthal, Angela. “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture.” Art History 27, 4 (2004): 563−92. Schellenberg, Betty A. “From Propensity to Profession: Female Authorship and the Early Career of Frances Burney.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14, 3–4 (2002): 345–70. Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form, 1660– 1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Smith, Godfrey. The Laboratory; or, School of Arts Volume II (London: printed for C. Hitch and L. Hawes, R. Baldwin, S. Crowder and H. Woodgate, in Pater-Noster-Row, 1756). Thompson, Helen. “How The Wanderer Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu.” ELH 68, 4 (2001): 965–89. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

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Wigston Smith, Chloe. “Fast Fashion: Style, Text, and Image in Late EighteenthCentury Women’s Periodicals.” In Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell (eds), Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690−1820s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 440−57. Wigston Smith, Chloe. “Gender and the Material Turn.” In Jennie Batchelor and Gillian Dow (eds), Women’s Writing, 1660–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 159−78. Wigston Smith, Chloe. “The Haberdasher’s Plot: The Romance of Small Trade in Frances Burney’s Fiction.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 37, 2 (2018): 271–93.

CHAPTER 5

Frances Burney and the London Opera Scene in the Late Eighteenth Century Stephen A. Willier

Abstract Because of their father’s eminence in British musical life, Frances and the other Burney children were used to meeting and being entertained by artistic celebrities who visited them at 35 St Martin’s Street, the home of Sir Isaac Newton from 1710 to 1727. The Burneys took up residence there in 1774; it had the great advantage for this operaloving family of being within short walking distance of London’s principal opera venue, the King’s Theatre at the Haymarket. The great thespian David Garrick loved to visit and entertain the Burneys with his acting and mimetic abilities, and from his house in adjacent Leicester Fields (as it was then known), Sir Joshua Reynolds would call on the Burneys, as would James Barry, the actor who resided in Oxford Market. The little Burneys in turn took part in dressing-up and enacting entertainments, diverted themselves by reading books aloud and making and listening to music. Someone in the family, or else a visiting professional musician, often a

S. A. Willier (B) Boyer College of Music, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6_5

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famous name from the Continent, was frequently to be heard playing the violin, the harpsichord, or singing. Stephen A. Willier’s chapter sheds new light on this aspect of the life of Frances Burney and her musical family. Keywords Singers · Music · London · Opera · Sociability

Because of their father’s eminence in British musical life, Frances and the other Burney children were used to meeting and being entertained by artistic celebrities who visited them at 35 St. Martin’s Street, the home of Sir Isaac Newton from 1710 to 1727. The Burneys took up residence there in 1774; it had the great advantage for this opera-loving family of being within short walking distance of London’s principal opera venue, the King’s Theatre at the Haymarket. The great thespian David Garrick loved to visit and entertain the Burneys with his acting and mimetic abilities, and from his house in adjacent Leicester Fields (as it was then known), Sir Joshua Reynolds would call on the Burneys, as would James Barry, the actor who resided in Oxford Market. The little Burneys in turn took part in dressing-up and enacting entertainments, diverted themselves by reading books aloud and making and listening to music. Someone in the family, or else a visiting professional musician, often a famous name from the Continent, was frequently to be heard playing the violin, the harpsichord, or singing. Frances and Susanna, who were the closest among the siblings, had been attending the opera regularly from the time they were teenagers and had close associations with the managers of the King’s Theatre since 1773. Musicians such as the Italian castrato Vito Giuseppe Millico and the composer Antonio Sacchini, both of whom had arrived in England in 1772, the violinist Eligio Celestini, and the soprano Lucrezia Agujari, among others, were Burney favourites and were present at some of their musical soirées. (For the significance of music for Frances Burney, see Cassandra Ulph’s chapter in this collection.) One especially noteworthy occasion (“the most heavenly Evening!”) was reported to the family friend Samuel “Daddy” Crisp by Frances in January 1773, when Celestini, Millico, and Sacchini, “the first men of their Profession in the World,” were all gathered together in the Burney music parlour. Frances had “no Words to express the delight” that Millico’s singing provided her: “the mere recollection fills me with rapture” (EJL, I: 234–38). Garrick and

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Millico, two of Frances’s very favourite artists, appear in her first novel, Evelina (1778), depicting performances Frances had experienced in real life. Madame Agujari (1743–83) remained a touchstone for singing among the Burneys for many years. Referred to quite openly in the music world as “La Bastardina” [the little bastard], she was able to sing extremely difficult passages and with a range of three-and-a-half octaves. Agujari’s voice possessed a “mellowness, a sweetness, that are quite vanquishing. She has the highest taste, with an expression the most pathetic” (Memoirs, II: 29 ff). Singing with pathos, with a plaintive vocal timbre, was the quality Frances Burney admired most in an opera singer. Frances hailed her as “the singer of singers!” who “has talents that almost surpass belief to those who have not heard her” (EJL, II: 155–56). When Mme. Agujari finally sang privately for the Burneys in June 1774 (she had to decline previously due to a sore throat), she stayed for five hours, singing “almost all the Time; whether she most astonished, or most delighted us, I cannot say—but she really is a sublime singer.” Frances wrote to “Daddy” Crisp that “we wished for you! I cannot tell you how much we wished for you!” Crisp had evidently waxed enthusiastic over a few great castrati of the past Frances had not been privileged to hear. I could compare her to nothing I ever heard but only to what I have heard of—Your Carestino [Carestini]—Farinelli—Senesino—alone are worthy to be ranked with the Bastardini. Such a powerful voice!—so astonishing a Compass—reaching from C in the middle of the Harpsichord, to 2 notes above the Harpsichord! Every note so clear, so full—so charming! Then her shake—so plump—so true, so open!

Agujari had not performed de haut en bas as a celebrated Italian diva, but had integrated herself into the Burneys’ musical-family life. The session had begun when, After Tea, we went into the Library, & Hetty [Esther] was prevailed upon to play a Lesson of Bach of Berlin’s [Carl Philip Emanuel Bach’s], upon our Merlin Harpsichord. It was very sweet & she [Agujari] appeared to be really much pleased with it, & spoke highly of the Taste & Feeling with which she played. (EJL, II: 77−78; original emphasis)

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There was no more talk about her being “conceitedly incurious” about fellow sopranos: “her Talents are so very superior that she cannot cause but hold all other performers cheap” (Charles Burney, Letters, I: 156). The singer who truly captured the hearts of the Burneys, particularly of Frances and Susanna, and with whom they had the longest, most personal relationship, was the Italian castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti (1740– 1821). Through numerous extant diaries and letters by Frances, Susanna, Dr Burney, Pacchierotti himself, and others, the relationship between Pacchierotti and the Burneys is well documented. Frances, who helped Pacchierotti with his English, as did others (including the poet William Mason, a family friend), took to the singer immediately, her affection and respect never lessening throughout his career nor for the rest of his life. Pacchierotti is mentioned numerous times in Frances’s letters and diaries and further appears in an extensive scene at the opera in her second novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, published in 1782. This novel treated the same subject as had her debut novel Evelina, the subtitle of which was History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. In this second novel the author presented her character as moving in society as a fascinated observer. In Evelina, Frances had drawn pictures of London opera and musical life, especially praising the evirato Millico, the creator of Paris in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Paride ed Elena in Vienna in 1770. Likewise, Cecilia contains extensive descriptions of the London opera scene, and of Vauxhall, the Pantheon, and other performance venues. When the eponymous heroine attends an opera rehearsal as part of her “finishing,” the opera is one that Frances attended at the King’s Theatre, Artaserse, a pasticcio arranged by Ferdinando Bertoni, Pacchierotti’s musical colleague and travelling companion. The work was premiered on 23 January 1779 and given a total of five performances. In Chapter VIII of Cecilia, we read of how the heroine is affected by Pacchierotti’s singing, so full of pathos, one of the prized features of castrato singing and the other being accomplished execution of florid passages. [S]he found herself by nothing so deeply impressed, as by the plaintive and beautiful simplicity with which Pacchierotti uttered the affecting repetition of [the text] sono innocente! his voice, always either sweet or impassioned, delivered those words in a tone of softness, pathos, and sensibility, that struck her with a sensation not more new than delightful. (Cecilia, 64−65)

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A few of the numerous encounters (although manifestly not as many as either would have wished) and the growth of feeling between Frances and Pacchierotti may be traced. When Frances was sent to the home of family friend Crisp, in early May 1778, to recover after a serious illness, Susanna began a musically informative “letter-journal” to keep her sister abreast of news and activities she was missing: details about life at home, the London opera scene, specifically the activities of Pacchierotti, who had arrived in London in November 1778.1 Already by December of that year, Frances felt drawn to him and his art. She comments on several aspects of his personality—his affability and fervent desire to master the English language—and features of his voice that were to be noted by others as Pacchierotti trademarks, i.e. his susceptibility to colds and thus unclearness of voice, and his ability to sing tenor arias in tono. She found “such taste, expression, freedom, fancy & variety never were before joined, but in Agujari” (EJL, III: 182–84). It soon became evident that, as much as he admired and revelled in the company of other members of the Burney family, Pacchierotti was always hopeful that he would encounter Frances at home and his disappointment when that failed to happen, as it did too often, was clear. On many occasions, however, Frances crossed paths with the castrato. On Saturday 22 January 1780, Frances and Susanna attended the premiere of Quinto Fabio by Bertoni, Pacchierotti’s calling-card opera.2 In her letter-journal, Susanna, as always, described several persons and artists she recognized in the audience, among them the evirato Giusto Fernando Tenducci, “Il Senesino.”3 Pacchierotti’s benefit was given at the King’s Theatre on Thursday 9 March 1780, a performance of L’Olimpiade, a pasticcio of the Metastasio libretto with music principally by Bertoni, who conducted the orchestra. Frances, Susanna, and Charlotte arrived at the theatre just as the overture was beginning. Several illustrious persons were in attendance, including Dr Burney, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, and several other female Pacchierotti admirers including Lady Clarges, Lady Edgcumbe, and the Miss Bulls. The castrato Venanzio Rauzzini sat close to the orchestra and in the front boxes were Tenducci and others.4 It is evident that Frances took more than a purely musical interest in Pacchierotti. On 8 July 1780, she characterized him to her friend Mrs Thrale as

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not only the first, most finished and most delightful of singers, but an amiable, rational, and intelligent Creature, who has given to himself a literary Education, & who has not only a mind superior to his own Profession, which he never names but with regret in spite of the excellence to which he has risen, but he has also, I will venture to say, talents and an understanding that would have fitted him for almost any other, had they, instead of being crushed under every possible disadvantage, been encouraged and improved. (EJL, IV: 205)

Beth Kowaleski Wallace makes clear an important common bond between Frances and Pacchierotti, one that helps explain why they felt such deep feelings for each other: Frances saw in Pacchierotti a model for the social construction of gender and an image of her own position as a woman writer. In starting and sustaining her writing career, Frances had certainly experienced a “culturally induced handicap” (163). That she took great pains to publish her first novel anonymously attests to this. It was a deeply personal emotion: as part of their education, sisters Susanna and Esther had been sent to study in Paris, whereas Frances was considered not nearly as clever as they by Dr Burney, a misapprehension she spent much of the rest of his life trying to correct. Frances sees in Pacchierotti that his profession—not decided by himself—is exactly that of a celibate priest, someone who has eschewed a personal life for total devotion to his art, as what the Italians call a musico, indicating someone who has devoted his life to that art. Of her feelings for a suitor, Frances once told Susanna that on the whole she thought single rather than married life would make her the happier. The combination of marriage (which for a woman at that time meant subservience to a master) and the life of a writer demanded too much compromise. Frances sees in Pacchierotti that the social handicaps under which he operated provide “the conditions which will produce great art” (Kowaleski Wallace, 163), an idea that forges a deep bond with him. Kowaleski Wallace points out that Frances’s identification with Pacchierotti is not based on sympathy or pity because of his incomplete body: “what matters is not the fact of his ‘mutilation’ but the resulting social perception which invests so much erotic energy in his body at the expense of his soul” (163). After spending the 1780–1781 season performing mainly in Italy, in late Summer 1781 Pacchierotti returned to London. His first opera performances were in the title-role of the pasticcio Ezio, with music mostly by Bertoni. He had been sorely missed by Frances. Soon after his

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return to London he as usual called upon the Burneys at home, a visit that Frances described in a letter of 4 November to Mrs Thrale. Pacchierotti, she wrote, “sung to us one Air from Ezio, and his Voice is more clear and sweet than I ever heard it before. I made but little inquiry about the Opera, as I was running away from it, and wanted not to be tempted to stay” (EJL, IV: 497–98). Early in 1782, Frances wrote to Susanna of a night at the house of one Mr John Paradise, a talented linguist, educated at Padua and recipient of a doctorate from Oxford University. “You will wonder, perhaps … why I went thither; but when I tell you Pacchierotti was there, you will not think it surprising.” This is one of several instances in which Pacchierotti is reported to have sung an aria written for a tenor.5 We were very late, for we had waited cruelly for the Coach, & Pac. had sung a song out of Artaserse, composed for a Tenor, which we lost, to my infinite regret. Afterwards he sang “Dolce Speme,” set by Bertoni, less elegantly than by Sacchini, but more expressively for the Words. He sung it delightfully. It was but the 2d Time I have heard him in a Room since his return to England [in August 1781]. (EJL, V: 22−23)

One afternoon in November 1782, Pacchierotti visited Frances at St. Martin’s Street, Frances finding him “very sweet and amiable, in exceedingly good humour, and tolerably in spirits.” Soon after, she and her friend Mrs Fitzgerald attended the opera, “the new serious one,” Medonte. Frances describes the same interaction that is part of her Pacchierotti chapter in Cecilia, as Pacchierotti acknowledged the “perpetual bows” from “almost every box in the house.” In the music of the opera, Frances found “a general want of something striking or interesting.” Pacchierotti, however, sung most sweetly,—without force, effort, or pain to himself, but with an even excellence he is seldom well enough to keep throughout a whole Opera. He is but too perfect; for how we shall bear his successors I cannot guess. He found me out, and gave me several smiles during the performance; indeed, he could never look either to the right or left without a necessity of making some sort of acknowledgement in return to the perpetual bows made him from almost every box in the house. (EJL, V: 177−78)

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No other contemporary singer satisfies like Pacchierotti. In December 1782 on a day that “Mrs Crewe sent her opera Ticket here!—huzza!” Frances went in the evening to the comic opera, Il Convito by Bertoni. The leading lady was Teresa Maddalena Allegranti6 and Frances “was not much pleased: yet Allegrante [sic] is a sweet singer. But Pacchierotti is so much sweeter, that he spoils me for all singing but his own. He came & paid us a visit during the opera, but was not well, nor in spirits” (EJL, V: 199–200). Nor did even the illustrious Mrs Siddons prevail over her beloved Pacchierotti. For Saturday 14 December 1782, she accepted an invitation from Mrs Thrale’s for the Siddons benefit. As Frances explains, however, Medonte was unexpectedly performed, & Mrs Fitz. invited me to a place in her Box;—& as Nothing gives me any pleasure in competition with hearing Pacchierotti, I called & excused myself to Mrs Thrale, though not without infinite difficulty, & solaced myself at night by hearing his most exquisite Voice. He sung so sweetly, so very sweetly I did nothing but congratulate myself upon the relinquishment of the Play. (EJL, V: 201)

Bertoni’s Cimene, in which Pacchierotti sang the principal role of Rodrigo, was premiered on 7 January 1783. On Friday 3 January, Frances and a friend, Mrs Ord, attended a “grand Rehearsal.” With her background and experience, Frances was able to point out several salient and unusual features of the score and we can see how perspicacious she was about opera matters. She identified the subject as The Cid and the music as Bertoni’s: Some is very pretty, some very trite, and a good many passages borrowed from Sacchini.7 Many things, however, in the scheme of the opera were, to me quite new: The Duet they begin & end together, without one solo bit for either singer; it is extremely pretty, & if Pozzi 8 had the upper part, would have been beautiful. The conclusion is a long historic finale [ensemble finale], such as we have been only used to in comic operas. Another irregularity occurred when just before the last Chorus, Pacchierotti has a solo air accompanied by the mandolin, which has a mighty pretty effect, but, not being expected, John Bull did not know whether it would be right or not to approve it, & therefore, instead of applauding, the folks only looked at one another.

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She reported on the new singer, Signora Carnevale, making her London debut in Cimene, who had a loud, violent voice, very harsh & unpleasing, & as little manageable or flexible as if she had sung all her life merely by Ear, & without teaching of any sort. She has all the abilities to be a great singer, and she is worse than any little one.

She then returned to praise of Pacchierotti: “Oh, such singing!—so elegant!—so dignified!—so chaste!—so polished!” Sadly, however, the “Opera is only in 2 acts & he has only 2 songs” (EJL, V: 239–40; original emphases). On Thursday 17 July 1783, Frances was invited with her “dear Father” to “Dine & spend the Evening” at Lady Mary Duncan’s, where she found Pacchierotti “in good humour and more tolerable spirits than I have lately seen him in ….” English weather was very hard on Pacchierotti, and he was often ailing. This encounter with the singer was especially noteworthy, giving us a sense of the singer’s versatility, for Pacchierotti “did not sing one song accompanied, but he sang several little airs & Ballads, English, Scotch, French, and Italian, most deliciously.” She characterized it as “light summer singing from Pacchierotti” (EJL, V: 389–90). During Pacchierotti’s final London visit beginning in 1790, Frances was able only to see and hear him fleetingly because of her demanding schedule working for Queen Charlotte. On Thursday 13 May of 1790, she wrote in her diary of “a musical party at our Esther’s.” She heard, “as usual because of [my] onerous schedule at court, only the opening of the concert.” She ran across several friends, “but my first pleasure was in seeing Pacchierotti, that sweetly gentle old friend and favourite, whose fascinating talents would carry me almost anywhere, without any other inducement.” Fortunately for her, “he was so kind as to sing one song, and that almost at the opening, for my indulgence. I was forced to fly without thanking him” (CJL, VI: 87–88). A similar situation occurred on Monday 30 May 1790 when she obtained leave to visit Lady Mary Duncan, a great Pacchierotti fan and who “had an excellent concert, but I could only hear its opening! I was obliged to return home after the first song of Pacchierotti, which he sang in his first manner, with every sweetness of expression and sensibility that human powers can give the human voice” (CJL, VI: 119).

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At this time a new prima donna appeared on the London scene, Madame Felicitas Agnesia Benda (1756–1835). She had been trained by her sister’s husband, Domenico Steffani, and had married the violinist and composer Friedrich Ludwig Benda, son of the noted Czech composer Georg Benda. In 1791, she undertook a three-month tour in England and Scotland, appearing with success in London. She is just arrived from Germany [wrote Frances], & has been humbly recommended to the notice of Her Majesty ... and the Queen was herself interested I should hear her success. … My dearest father fetched me from the Queen’s House ... . And, oh, how Pacchierotti sung!—how!—with what exquisite feeling, what penetrating pathos!—I could almost have cried the whole time, that this one short song was all I should be able to hear!— … Poor Madame Benda pleased neither friend nor foe: she has a prodigious voice, great powers of execution, but a manner of singing so vehemently boisterous, that a Boatswain might entreat her to moderate it. (CJL, VI: 73−75; original emphasis)

The Pacchierotti-Burney story, however, was not finished. After Pacchierotti left England for good in 1791, he and Frances never saw each other again. Life’s vicissitudes took them in different directions. Pacchierotti was in the original cast of the opera that inaugurated Venice’s newest opera house, La Fenice; he retired in great comfort to Padua, keeping company with intellectuals, giving a few lessons, visited by illustrious figures such as Stendhal and Gioachino Rossini, and at one point forced to perform for Napoleon. Frances herself married a Frenchman, General Alexandre d’Arblay, lived for many years in exile on Continental soil, and outlived the members of her own generation of the Burneys. What happened in 1821, thirty years later, very much at the end of Pacchierotti’s life, provided a bittersweet—and also quite novelistic—coda to his final days. In 1821, James Burney’s daughter Sarah came to Padua on her wedding tour and sent Pacchierotti a note in English telling of her arrival there. In a letter of 21 October 1821 to Esther, a letter full of reminiscences of “our Susanna,” who had died in Ireland in 1800, and of Pacchierotti, Frances wrote: How charmed I have been, & how pleased you will be, to hear that Pacchierotti is living, & spending his latter days in splendour, yet rationally, elegantly, & benevolently, in Padua, where our niece, Sarah P[ayne] saw him ... .

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He expressed to Sarah P. the most animated nay fervent desire to renew our correspondence ... . & I wrote him a very long, explanatory, melancholy, yet very cordial Letter: He returned me an Answer immediately, written by his Nephew,9 but signed by his well known hand. It is in English, & very refined English, poetical & elevated ... . (JL, XI: 291−92)

The letter of 10 October that Pacchierotti dictated to his nephew is an emotionally powerful envoi to Frances, the Burneys, and to his own life. Later Frances wrote at the top of this exquisitely handwritten letter: “after 35 years of broken correspondence, though never broken esteem & regard. He died before I had answered this Letter to my true concern.” The following is a short excerpt from this letter, dated Padua, 10 October 1821. Even though Pacchierotti dictated the letter, he himself signed it. He died a few weeks after this letter was written, on 28 October. … the presence of so near a relation of the house of Burney roused me to a kind of delirious rapture ... . The visit of your Niece seemed to have restored to me my spirits, and even my health, which since that day has continually improved ... . (JL, XI: 291, n. 19; cf. Willier 2009)

Personal feelings for a specific performer aside, it is evident that Frances Burney was keenly fascinated by and knowledgeable of the operatic voice demanded by eighteenth-century opera seria and was in an excellent position to appreciate and evaluate its quality by virtue of her birth into the Burney family, which accorded her direct, at-home exposure to the most celebrated executants of the day and provided her both excellent musical training and frequent attendance at the opera. Moreover, she was not only provided the opportunity of attending opera rehearsals and performances through her father, but through social connections was friends with several well-to-do, socially prominent women who often offered her and the other Burneys complimentary tickets to rehearsals and performances. She was able to comment pertinently on a specific singer’s qualities, to compare singers she had heard over a period of decades, to detect deviations from expected formal structures within the genre of opera seria, and to pronounce on the quality of a composer’s setting of a text and on the relative merits of two composers’ (e.g. Bertoni’s and Sacchini’s) setting of the same aria text. Both she and Susanna may have initially written letters and journals to share their musical experiences with family, friends, and acquaintances (and also because they were naturally inclined to record

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experiences and emotions in writing), but at some point (especially after the death of her much-worshipped father in 1814) and for a number of reasons—including appreciation of her father’s historical importance as the author of the first history of music in English and her own reputation as a novelist, without forgetting her long life and unique experiences, not only in the areas of music and literature—her thoughts turned towards posterity. Redactions aside, she left invaluable insider’s descriptions and interpretations of an operatic era whose very being and whose conventions are so foreign to our lives that, without Frances’s testimony, it is a world we might have found much less illuminated today.

Notes 1. The manuscript of this “Letter-Journal” is in the Egerton collection of the British Library and has been examined by the author. Cf. Willier (2000). 2. This Quinto Fabio was the third opera Ferdinando Bertoni had fashioned on this subject, the previous two having been heard at the Teatro Interinale in Milan and at the Teatro Nuovo in Padua, both in 1778. In the Padua production, Pacchierotti had sung the title role, with the celebrated tenor Giacomo Davide as his son. 3. Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci (c. 1736–90), Italian evirato and composer. He came to London initially in 1758. He was a musical friend of Johann Christian Bach. 4. Venanzio Rauzzini (1746–1810), Italian soprano castrato and composer for whom Mozart wrote the primo uomo role in Lucio Silla and the motet Esultate, jubilate, K. 165/158a. 5. “There can be little doubt that Pacchierotti’s extraordinarily long durability was in large part owing to the power and effectiveness of his tenor range and by Bertoni’s ability to invent arias in which the climaxes come in the expressive middle sections rather than in the spectacular high passage towards the end. Quinto Fabio may therefore be an early signal of one of the most important developments in opera history—the ultimate replacement of the male soprano by the tenor” (Price et al. , 233–36). 6. Teresa Maddalena Allegranti (1754–c. 1802), Italian soprano Dr Burney first heard on his 1772 German tour. Her first London appearance was in Pasquale Anfossi’s I viaggiatori felici in 1781. 7. There was a perceived rivalry between Bertoni and Sacchini; the latter was considered a rather more talented composer. Beginning with the 1783–84 season, Bertoni did not in fact return to London with Pacchierotti. 8. Anna Pozzi (fl. 1776–93), Italian soprano described by Dr Burney as “young, handsome, and possessed of a voice uncommonly clear, sweet and powerful” (General History of Music, II: 884). She had been engaged as

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prima donna in London, then demoted to second donna, singing in four operas by Giuseppe Sarti. 9. Giuseppe Cecchini Pacchierotti (fl. 1820–44). Cf. his memoirs, Ai Cultori ed Amatori/della musica vocale/cenni Biografici/intorno/a Gasparo Pacchierotti (Padua, 1844).

Works Cited Burney, Charles, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, ed. Frank Mercer, 2 vols. (London: Dover, 1935). Burney, Charles. The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, gen. ed. Peter Sabor, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991–). Kowaleski Wallace, Beth. “Shunning the Bearded Kiss.” Prose Studies 25 (1992): 153−70. Price, Curtis, Judith Milhous, and Robert D. Hume. Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, vol. 1. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Willier, Stephen A. “Pacchierotti in London: The 1779−1780 Season in Susanna Burney’s Letter-Journal.” Studi musicali 29, 2 (2000): 251−91. Willier, Stephen A. “The Illustrious Musico Gasparo Pacchierotti: Final Triumphs and Retirement Years.” Studi musicali 32, 2 (2009): 409−43.

CHAPTER 6

“To Distinguish Us Dilettanti from the Artists”: Instrumental Music in The Wanderer Cassandra Ulph

Abstract In The Wanderer (1814), Frances Burney reimagines the acute physical and intellectual scrutiny that had marked her years at court as Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte (1786–91). In her post-court novels, Burney moves away from the public entertainment culture of London, firmly into the polite drawing rooms of the gentry; in The Wanderer, Burney exposes the disruption of artistic value by the ‘polite’ audience. As a gifted aristocratic musician forced to turn her talent to profit, Ellis makes the transition from tasteful consumer to producer of cultural capital, embodying the problematic dynamic between the two. Burney satirizes the conspicuous cultivation of musical ‘accomplishment’ by the fashionable dilettanti and refigures the immobility, dependency, and degradation she had experienced under court patronage.

C. Ulph (B) University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6_6

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Keywords Music · Performance · Body · Femininity · The Wanderer · Court life

As this volume recognizes, Frances Burney engaged imaginatively and widely with the creative arts and was enabled to do so through a deep familiarity with creative culture, yet relatively little has been written about her engagement with music. (For the significance of opera singing for Frances Burney see Stephen A. Willier’s chapter in this collection). This important connection, given Burney’s upbringing in a specifically musical household—that of her father, the musicologist Dr Charles Burney— has only more recently begun to be explored. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, in Romanticism and Music Culture, makes this connection in the assessment of Burney’s late style as a conscious distancing of her work from her father’s musical tastes. Likewise, critics have begun to recognize Burney’s fashionable but ignorant audiences, and the critique of elegant feminine accomplishments, as characteristic of Burney’s representation of musical performance. The Wanderer (1814) in particular has attracted readings that attempt to trace the line between the mechanical and the artistic, with its heroine’s practical skill often placed at odds with her refined musical sensibility. Barbara Witucki has argued, for example, that “by showing the mechanics behind the art, Burney paints the art of music as nothing more than a trade” (177) (a reading that I would dispute). Similarly, Regula Hohl Trillini remarks that the difference between being accomplished enough to mark gentility and accomplished enough to seem professional must be observed. Juliet’s [the character Ellis’s real name] proficiency discredits the romantic hypothesis that she might be a princess in disguise and encourages people to treat her as a servant who is always ordered to perform. (76)

In this context, Joseph Morrissey has read the Wanderer as “marked by a deep conflict between genuine sensitivity to the lived experience of engaging with music and a desire to lay claim to music in supporting an ideological construction of feminine domesticity;” a conflict that in Morrissey’s view remains unconvincingly resolved (76). However, the combination of mechanical proficiency and true musical taste ascribed to Ellis in The Wanderer, and the apparent conflict between the two is, I would argue, a deliberate and radical strategy to expose the inherent

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contradictions in the discourses surrounding women’s artistic endeavours, and in particular, female artistic professionalism. The casting of Ellis as an instrumentalist, rather than a vocalist, is significant because it allows Burney to explore what happens when artistic labour is visible, and the artist can be seen at work. It also directly critiques the idealized image of a female musician in eighteenth-century culture as essentially a static one, in which the most appropriate instruments were those which allowed a kind of performative stillness. This aesthetic is observed by Heather Hadlock in relation to the Davies sisters, who famously performed on voice and glass harmonica across Europe: as Hadlock notes, the minimal movements required to produce sound allowed for “the erasure of both performer and instrument [and] made this the ideal medium for women’s music” (509).1 Conversely, Ellis’s harp-playing in The Wanderer is problematic because its physicality is visible, engaging her in a bodily economy as much as an artistic one. While I note, as others have, the ambivalent status of musicianship in Burney’s work, I will examine this not solely from the perspective of proper femininity but also that of the relationship Burney explores between labour and art, taste and fashion, and most importantly, the ways in which these can be disrupted or determined by an audience. In The Wanderer, I will argue, Burney uses instrumental music as a figure for the specular relations that undermine women’s creative work. While all of Burney’s novels explore this specular relationship to some degree, from Evelina’s transformation from audience member to spectacle, to the constant assault on Ellis’s identity in The Wanderer, Burney’s post-court novels transplant those specular relations from the public to the private sphere.2 In The Wanderer, the performances that are most scrutinized are those that take place in the drawing rooms of private homes. Burney’s early exposure to the world of artistic, performative professionalism, meant that musical performance in particular would prove a potent symbol in her works. Wood argues that Burney’s “attitude to music in her writing became increasingly defensive through her career” (56), offering this as an explanatory factor in the marked difference (according to Wood, deterioration) in style between Evelina (1778) and the later novels, in particular Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer. In many respects Wood’s analysis bears scrutiny, as the public musical arenas that are prominent in Evelina and Cecilia (1782) gradually disappear from Burney’s later novels in favour of private homes and drawing rooms. However, Wood’s suggestion that Burney attempted to systematically

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dissociate herself (and her father) from the musical culture that was their social origin seems a strange one considering her choice of protagonist in her final novel: The Wanderer’s Ellis is a harpist, and where Burney’s earlier heroines had possessed a keen appreciation for musical performance, Ellis is herself an accomplished musician. Rather than abandoning, in Camilla and The Wanderer, the performance spaces that populated Evelina and Cecilia, Burney intensifies her examination of the relationship between performers and audience by transplanting that dynamic into private social and domestic spaces. Burney’s concern with the slippage between artistic consumer and artistic producer is longstanding. At the court of George III, where she was Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte from July 1786 to July 1791, Burney found physical performance (of dress, movement, waking, and sleeping) constantly dictated by her patron. In The Wanderer, then, she explores what happens when one’s performance and one’s body cannot be separated. Ellis’s equivocal subject position denies her any space in which to exercise her private identity. Unable to avow that identity, Ellis is assumed by those around her to be constantly performing. This renders her an object of both fascination and suspicion, whose authenticity is perpetually in question. Through absence of a fixed identity, Ellis has the potential to ventriloquize others which, as Burney had remarked of family friend and actress Jane Barsanti, is a “dangerous talent,” and one much like her own (EJL, I: 197).3 Thus, Ellis is simultaneously viewed with social suspicion and marginalized as a performer whose creative abilities are at the constant command of that society. While Miss Bydell interrogates Ellis for a rehearsal of her history—“Pray, first of all, young woman, what took you over to foreign parts? I should like to know that?”— Miss Arbe demands a demonstration of her musical talents: “Don’t let that young person go,” she cries, “till I have heard her play and sing” (Wanderer, 80–81). Both women, here, demand a form of “recital” from Ellis: Miss Bydell, in the earlier sense of the word, demands a narrative account; Miss Arbe demands a musical performance.4 Miss Bydell’s repeated and intrusive demands for Ellis’s history result in her (mis)constructing, from hearsay, a narrative which “his young Lordship told to Mr Ireton, from whom I had it; that is from Mrs Maple, which is the same thing.” Although Miss Bydell relies on a refracted authority, from Lord Melbury by way of Mr Ireton and Mrs Maple, her account that Ellis has rejected the advances of Lord Melbury is essentially true; however, it is a clumsy and graceless display, and to Ellis “a recital

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as offensive to her ear as it was afflicting to her heart” (Wanderer, 263). Miss Bydell’s social performances are emulative, attempting to reconstruct authority by retelling the narratives of her social betters. Far from accomplished, her performance appears amateurish to the more refined Ellis. Burney’s emphasis on the aural effect of such a recital playfully characterizes Miss Bydell’s speech as an inept musical performance and Miss Bydell herself as devoid of natural artistic ability. The impertinent, presumptuous behaviour that Burney depicts in The Wanderer is typically of this nature: a crude performance designed to reinforce the social hierarchy, perpetuating a shallow relativism that eschews individual merit in favour of a system of one-upmanship. Burney portrays a social world in which narrative control is continually in contest: by appropriating or reinterpreting Ellis’s story, other characters attempt to claim an authority that she, anonymous, is unable to. The most conscious parade of authority comes from Mrs Ireton, who delights in exercising her power over Ellis through a recital of her anonymity, her isolation, and her equivocal status: … I recollect you now, Mrs … Mrs … I forget your name, though, I protest. I can’t recollect your name, I own. I’m quite ashamed, but I really cannot call it to mind. I must beg a little help. What is it? What is your name, Mrs … Mrs … Hay?—Mrs … What? (Wanderer, 480)

Mrs Ireton’s demands for Ellis’s name are an attempt to assert ownership and control of her “humble companion.” Mrs Ireton’s repeated demands upon Ellis’s identity, and her ironic recitals of Ellis’s dependency, demonstrate the performative nature of social structures of power: If she feared that any one of the party had failed to remark this augmentation of her household and of her power, she would retard the willing departure by some frivolous or vexatious commission. (Wanderer, 493)

Mrs Ireton not only delights in demonstrating her power to Ellis herself, then, but is also anxious that she should be seen by others to exert it. Thus, the home becomes an arena in which purchasing power is paraded to establish social identity, which can only be effected by the “remark” of her guests. By controlling Ellis’s physical movements, “retard[ing] her willing departure” and enforcing her continued presence in the public rooms of her private home, Mrs Ireton’s demands emphasize the nature

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of the drawing room as a performative space in which the distinction between audience and performer becomes unstable. During the visit of Lord Denmeath, Ellis’s uncle, the drawing room becomes a stage set: Ellis is concealed against her will, “encircled … completely within the broad leaves of the screen” (Wanderer, 612) by Mr Ireton, so is both absent from, and privy to, the conversation that takes place. Ellis’s mere physical presence, once discovered, implicates her in an (albeit unwilling) surreptitious act as a direct result of her loss of bodily autonomy. Ellis is powerless to direct her own physical movements; constrained by her inability to escape Mrs Ireton’s drawing room, she must constantly perform. Burney takes to the extreme the patronage structures that threatened her own creative autonomy: the dynamics of performance that pervade Mrs Ireton’s drawing room demonstrate the absolute bodily submission required by patronal exchange, and those dynamics infiltrate even domestic spaces. Despite the supposed privacy of those spaces, the introduction of an audience renders them instantly performative. This reconfiguration of private spaces is mirrored in the false designation of performance as “private” merely because socially exclusive. The concern for delicacy that prevents Ellis’s students engaging in “public” performance leads them, ironically, to perform with less concern for propriety in the pseudo-privacy of the drawing room. Burney emphasizes this irony in a speech by Sir Giles Arbe, who describes “those young ladies who play and sing in public, at those private rooms, of four or five hundred people” (Wanderer, 300). In “private rooms” that are paradoxically described as “public,” the “young ladies” perform in front of “four or five hundred people” and are recompensed with “compliments.” These performances, to this carefully controlled (if numerous) audience, expose the “private” performer not to candid scrutiny, but to “compliments,” in the system of flattery and sycophancy that characterizes such private performance circles. Here, Burney appears to valorize the shift towards “public” patronage which, as Deborah Rohr notes, began to exert influence on “artistic decisions and professional employment” in eighteenth-century musical England (53). The scrutiny of publicity offers both fairer judgement of artistic merit (and of its attendant value) and more rigorous demands for proper feminine conduct. There is a tension, though, between Burney’s observation here and the anxieties she expresses about the financial exchange inherent in artistic professionalism. Burney describes Ellis’s “dependant condition” upon “an audience by which she could be regarded only as an artist, who,

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paid to give pleasure, was accountable for fulfilling that engagement” (Wanderer, 320). That Ellis is considered “only as an artist” reflects the problem of her anonymity: without knowledge of her birth, her social condition, or even her name, the other women are unsure exactly what she is. Yet, this merely makes smoother the transition of the female artist from human to dehumanized commodity. Burney’s own experience of such a “dependant condition” is recorded in her journal-letters to her sister Susanna during her time at court. These reveal how the nature of that appointment transformed her understanding of private spaces. The transition from the public patronage of print publication to the private patronage of the Queen collapsed the distance between author and audience to an uncomfortable proximity. The authority extended by Burney’s patrons over her bodily movements, like that of Mrs Ireton over Ellis, physically and visually reinforces the power dynamics of the patronage relationship, with Burney moving only when, and in the manner, required by court etiquette. The physical discipline required of Burney at court is exemplified by her account of what she comically terms “the true court retrograde motion”: I have come on prodigiously, by constant practice, in the power and skill of walking backwards, without tripping up my own heels, feeling my head giddy, or treading my train out of the plaits—accidents very frequent among novices in that business … . (CJL, I: 125)

Burney subtly emphasizes the impracticality of this court custom, that leads to “tripping up my own heels, feeling my head giddy, or treading my train out of the plaits.” Her reference to “novices” suggests that she has been committed to a religious order and harks back to her ironic self-appellation in the subtitle to her play The Witlings as “a sister of the order.” This characterized the “Espirit Club,” ostensibly modelled on Elizabeth Montagu’s bluestocking circle, as cloistered and self-referential (Witlings ). Burney’s “constant practice” ultimately renders her physically dexterous, developing her “power and skill” for the performance required of her in the manner that, in The Wanderer, Ellis devotes herself to both her harp and her needle. Burney’s court journals and letters offer a fascinating parallel to the themes of The Wanderer, as her new employment requires her to relinquish her bodily autonomy. In a letter to her sister Esther before her appointment, Burney satirizes the physical demands of court attendance

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as “Directions for coughing, sneezing, or moving, before the King and Queen”: you must not, upon any account, stir either hand or foot. If, by chance, a black pin runs into your head, you must not take it out. If the pain is very great, you must be sure to bear it without wincing … . If the blood should gush from your head you must let it gush … . If, however, the agony is very great, you may, privately, bite the inside of your cheek, or of your lips, for a little relief … . And if, with that precaution, if you even gnaw a piece out, it will not be minded, only be sure either to swallow it, or commit it to a corner of the inside of your mouth till they are gone—for you must not spit. (AJL, I: 360)

This visceral description of the self-effacement required in the royal presence emphasizes the removal of the subject’s physical autonomy. The subjugation of the courtier to their patron is portrayed as a surrender of bodily ownership which prohibits unauthorized movement. Julia Epstein describes this passage as “a portrait of controlled agony ending, astonishingly, in self-cannibalism,” in which Burney “posits and dramatizes violence as an effect—the inevitable effect—of oppression” (31–33). However, the physical nature of that dramatization is significant in its own right, as Burney articulates the consumer appropriation of the artist’s body. The conflation of mental and physical subjection inherent in Burney’s court experience echoes the insistent identification of the artistic professional with their product. Burney’s “self-cannibalism,” as Epstein terms it, could be interpreted as a form of resistance through selfsabotage: by becoming the consumer rather than the consumed object, Burney can reclaim herself and her body. In the self-violence she commits, she manifests the bodily pain she cannot express in the performative pseudo-privacy of court. In The Wanderer, Burney portrays just this kind of visceral revolt against the effacement of a performer’s bodily autonomy. Ellis’s nameless position has deprived her of authority, and of the power to speak and act for herself; her resort to performance as a means of subsistence compounds this erasure of identity, effacing her bodily needs and positioning her as a mechanism of the music she performs. As a professional producer of art, Ellis is expected to renounce all claims to nature, and even her natural, private behaviour is interpreted as performative. Her inability to perform due to illness is “spread about the room,

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as an excess of impertinence”: “the words, ‘What ridiculous affectation!’—‘What intolerable airs!’—‘So she must have a cold? Bless us! how fine!’—were repeated from mouth to mouth” (Wanderer, 319). There is a striking echo here of the drama of Caterina Gabrielli’s hotly anticipated, and much delayed, debut at the King’s Theatre, which was postponed due to the singer’s claims of illness.5 It is also reminiscent of the Burneys’ encounter with another prima donna, Lucrezia Aguiari: unable to offer the singer her “pantheon-price,” the Burneys are refused a private performance on account of the Aguiari’s “bad cold, & slight sore Throat!” Burney’s account suggests some scepticism, and she describes the singer as “self-sufficient & imperious,” yet this is assumed to be in keeping with her professional identity (EJL, II: 75–80). Neither acknowledged gentlewoman, nor professional prima donna, Ellis’s attempt to maintain the dignity of either is denied. As Miss Bydel relates, “what a monstrous air [the ladies] thought it, for a person that nobody knew any thing of, to send excuses about being indisposed; just as if she were a fine lady; or some famous singer, that might be as troublesome as she would” (Wanderer, 352). By refusing to recognize Ellis’s ill health, the amateur musicians not only imply that her illness is a display consistent with the supposed character of the female performer, but also render her a separate, non-human entity. Ellis becomes, by dint of her skill, a mere performing machine to whose standards the dilettanti need not aspire, rather than a productive, creative agent. This commodifies the professional performer, in particular the female performer, whose physical dexterity is at her audience’s command. This appropriation of the professional body is compounded in The Wanderer by the visual economies employed to maintain the distinction between amateur and professional musicians. In preparation for Ellis’s reluctant benefit concert, Miss Sycamore observes with “contemptuous haughtiness” that “as our uniform is fixed to be white, with violetornaments, it was my thought to beg Miss Arbe would order something of this showy sort for Miss Ellis; to distinguish us Dilettanti from the artists” (Wanderer, 314). The reason for this distinction of “uniform” is to delineate the “artists” as “showy” and the “Dilettanti” as virginal in their “white”; however, Burney exposes this amateur musicianship, or dilettantism, as inherently, and deliberately, showy in itself, and thus explodes the simplistic symbolism of costume. This is exemplified by Ellis’s pupil Miss Brinville, who values her own performance only for the visual impression it makes:

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To sit at the harp so as to justify the assertion of the Baronet [Sir Lyle Sycamore], became her principal study; and the glass before which she tried her attitudes and motions, told her such flattering tales, that she soon began to think the harp the sweetest instrument in the world, and that to practise it was the most delicious of occupations. (Wanderer, 236)

“To practise” and “to sit at the harp” are one and the same for Miss Brinville’s purposes. Her “attitudes” and “motions,” of which this “practice” is composed, constitute a performance of sorts, but not a musical one. Indeed, these “attitudes” are reminiscent of the popular and exhibitionist poses of Emma Hamilton, whose tableaux exploited the ideal of feminine performative stillness associated with women’s music-making.6 Another of Ellis’s pupils, Lady Barbara Frankland, similarly attempts to learn these musical “attitudes”: Her whole mind was directed to imitating Miss Ellis in her manner of holding the harp; in the air of her head as she turned from it to look at the musical notes; in her way of curving, straightening, or elegantly spreading her fingers upon the strings; and in the general bend of her person, upon which depended the graceful effect of the whole. (Wanderer, 229−30)

Lady Barbara, although one of the few characters to value Ellis for her inherent merits, is, like Miss Brinville, more interested in perfecting a visual than musical “effect.” The technical discipline and musical talent required in playing the harp, which Ellis as a professional must perfect, are of secondary importance: Miss Brinville dismisses Ellis’s teaching as merely “point[ing] out one note, or one finger, instead of another” (Wanderer, 322). The placing of a finger, or playing the correct note, is dismissed by the ladies because its effect is aural, not visual. Musical ability here becomes, in fashionable terms, a visual quality, of which sound is a meaningless by-product. As a musical performer, particularly within the intimate domesticity of her family group, Ellis is an artist; yet as a music teacher, she merely contributes to the fashionable trappings of genteel, marriageable femininity. Her pupils treat musical performance as a visual accessory to accompany their white gowns and “violet ornaments.” While the dilettanti cultivate musical accomplishment as a form of display, attaining a professional level of skill suggests that those accomplishments are immodestly public. While this is exposed as an absurdity, The Wanderer demonstrates the very real consequences of the persistence of such an absurdity in British culture, as Ellis’s natural abilities repeatedly

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expose her to this kind of commodification. The only rebellion available to her is unconscious, through those abilities that she has internalized by application: those abilities refuse, repeatedly, to perform for an unsympathetic or tyrannical audience. The inadmissibility of bodily weakness by a performer echoes Burney’s account of the demands of courtly behaviour: pain, illness, and emotion must be suppressed in order to fulfil the physical, mechanical requirements of the role. While Ellis does continue to fulfil these mechanical requirements, Burney emphasizes the distinction between arbitrary mechanical performance and tasteful, refined musicianship. In contrast to the machines of Cox’s Museum in Evelina, Ellis’s performance is not merely an empty recital of somebody else’s notes: her performance is emotionally informed, and thus is inconsistent under duress.7 Ellis’s resistance to public performance, even within the pseudoprivate setting of a rehearsal, manifests itself in a detrimental effect on her playing: Ellis was seized with a faint panic that disordered her whole frame; terrour [sic] took from her fingers their elasticity, and robbed her mind and fancy of those powers, which, when free from alarm, gave grace and meaning to her performance. (Wanderer, 310)

Ellis’s “disorder” here suggests a natural revolt in her body and mind against public performance, particularly against Miss Arbe’s suggestion that she perform at a subscription concert, confirming that performance as part of a financial exchange. Ellis’s musical ability, so refined that it can revolt against its own inappropriate employment, demonstrates the doctrine of employment as inherently virtuous and self-regulating.8 The self that has been refined by music is, through that refinement, naturally virtuous and delicate. Ellis’s “fancy” is a constituent element of her performative ability, a term that incorporates both imaginative power and pleasurable enjoyment. That Ellis’s own enjoyment inflects her performance realigns that performance as an expression of artistic taste as well as of mechanical ability. The nature of that performance, and of the performer’s own enjoyment of it, is transformed by the nature of the audience for whom they perform, who in turn alter the nature of the performance space. Ellis’s resistance to even the semi-public performance of the rehearsal room is in sharp contrast to the willingness with which she performs within what she knows to be a family circle. Within the

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domestic privacy of this family setting, her true virtuosity is demonstrated in a performance that is informed by her soul. This true, familial privacy thus entails a removal of the dynamics of consumer exchange that pervade even the pseudo-privacy of the polite drawing room. In an echo of her father’s musical parties, which admitted only “real lovers of music” (Memoirs, II: 9), Burney creates in the Granville family a picture of musical sympathy and specialization that allows a proper appreciation of music as an art form rather than a commodity. While she believes she performs unheard, Ellis’s playing “announced a performer whom nature had gifted with her finest feelings, to second, or rather to meet the soul-pervading refinements of skilful art” (Wanderer, 74). Here, Ellis’s employment at the harp is an internalized one, which “refines” and “pervades” the “soul.” The product of that employment is thus an intellectual and emotional development, rather than an ornamental achievement performed for an audience. This private music-making is thus mirrored within the intimate circle of the musically proficient Granville family. Of Ellis’s half-sister, Lady Aurora, we are told that her “whole soul was music”; Lord Melbury is “a tolerable proficient upon the Violoncello” (Wanderer, 116). Burney’s portrayal of this musical family offers the perfect, valorized scene of virtuous musicmaking: in this “interval of retirement,” Ellis’s performance is received with “rapturous applause” and “melting tenderness” (Wanderer, 116) by her young auditors. This is in pointed contrast to Mrs Howel, who is merely “sufficiently in the habit of going to concerts, to have acquired the skill of discriminating excellence from mediocrity” (116). The emotional and intellectual response of Lady Aurora and Lord Melbury is juxtaposed with Mrs Howel’s commercial appreciation of the performance value in relation to the standards of a paying, or at least subscribing, audience.9 Ellis’s technical proficiency thus aligns her with professionals in the eyes of Mrs Howel, despite the latter being “by no means a scientific judge of music.” However, Lord Melbury and Lady Aurora, whose “souls” have been improved by their own pursuit of music, are able to appreciate the art as a purer expression of self that, ironically, elides an examination of the technical proficiency that supports the performance. Indeed, Lady Aurora’s musicality provides the metaphor for sympathy between the sisters, whom Burney describes as “in unison” (Wanderer, 117). This “unison” between Ellis and Lady Aurora is reminiscent of the sympathetic musical correspondence between Burney and her sister Susanna, which I discuss elsewhere (Ulph). Like Burney, Ellis can rely upon her

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sister’s true appreciation of music as art; Mrs Howel’s strictly commercialized relationship with music, gleaned solely from her “habit of going to concerts” (Wanderer, 116), similarly echoes the non-specialist response of fashionable opera audiences from whom the Burney sisters dissociated themselves. In The Wanderer, Ellis’s instrumentalism provides the ultimate lens for the relationship between artistic professional and their audience. In the social spaces of musical London, the formalized distinctions between producer and consumer constructed a dynamic that relied upon social status and patronage relationships. Burney’s journals during her time at court render the most extreme manifestation of this dynamic, in which a highly exclusive private space is transformed into an arena of constant bodily and mental scrutiny. In the specialized and meritocratic privacy of the Burney musical parties, however, the dynamics of cultural consumption were effectively effaced by the communality of cultural participation. Far from a rejection of her musical inheritance, it is this possibility that Burney explores in The Wanderer: a privatized, domestic model of musical conversation that is uninflected by the presence of a fashionable audience. In rendering Ellis both tasteful and technically proficient, Burney valorizes professional specialization, while upholding the familial domestic space as one in which artistic virtuosity can be practised without commodification.

Notes 1. The armonica, invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1762, was composed of musical glasses, played by gently touching the wetted rim of the glass. It was popular in the 1760s and 1770s, but by the late 1780s, Hadlock says, “enthusiasm for the armonica’s sound was tempered by concern over its physical and moral dangers” (508). The armonica became widely associated with excessive sensibility, Franz Anton Mesmer, and the supernatural. 2. Although space does not permit me to explore it here, a similar movement away from public and into private and pseudo-private spaces is notable in Camilla, Burney’s first published novel after leaving court. 3. Despite her concern, Burney seems to have delighted in her friend’s talent for mimicry. Moreover, it was a talent which she herself possessed, often ventriloquizing acquaintances. In a 1780 letter to Samuel Crisp, for example, Burney peppers her discourse with “There I had you, my Lad!” and “There I had you again, my Lad!” (EJL, IV: 216–17; original emphasis) in imitation of family friend Kitty Cooke. Burney was highly aware, however,

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

that accomplished mimicry could lead to charges of social emulation, for authors as well as actors. Of the various definitions of “recital,” I have in mind two in particular: “an account, a narrative, a discourse;” and “a performance of a single musical piece or esp. a selection of music (in earlier use only from one composer) by a soloist or small group.” Oxford English Dictionary, “recital,” n., 2b; 3b. Caterina Gabrielli made her debut in the winter of 1775 at The King’s Theatre (Woodfield, 150–51). She caused a sensation by delaying her opening night due to illness, which was strongly suspected by the Burneys to be a pretence. The performance was not cancelled until the last moment, and Burney reports that “Poor Yates the manager, was obliged to stand at the Door from 5 till past 7 o’Clock, to appease the rage of the disappointed Public” (EJL, II: 166). The notorious Emma Hamilton was famous for her attitudes, in which she would recreate famous portraits by posing as their subject, transforming stage into canvas. The first recorded performance of these attitudes was on 16 March 1787 (Fraser, 114). For Evelina’s visit to Cox’s Museum see Evelina, 77. Nancy Armstrong has noted the importance of such employment in the context of contemporary fears about the use of women’s leisure time (99). For a discussion of the cultural phenomenon of ‘private’ subscription concerts see Leppert, 205.

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Burney, Frances. “The Witlings: A Comedy by a Sister of the Order.” In Peter Sabor (ed.), The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, 2 vols., vol. I Comedies (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995), pp. 1−102. Epstein, Julia. The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Fraser, Flora. Beloved Emma (London: John Murray, 1986). Hadlock, Heather. “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000): 507−42. Hohl Trillini, Regula. The Gaze of the Listener: English Representations of Domestic Music-Making (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008). Leppert, Richard. Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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Morrissey, Joseph. Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770−1820: Dangerous Occupations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Rohr, Deborah. The Careers of British Musicians, 1750−1850: A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Ulph, Cassandra. “Frances Burney’s Private Professionalism.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, 3 (2014): 377−93. Witucki, Barbara. “Music, Don Quixote, and the Novels of Miss Burney.” In Rosamaria Loretelli and Frank O’Gorman (eds), Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century: Literary and Art Theories (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2010), pp. 165−80. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770−1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Woodfield, Ian. Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

CHAPTER 7

Burney’s Musings on the Muses Barbara Witucki

Abstract Barbara Witucki considers the relationship between Frances Burney’s third novel, Camilla, and her expressed familiarity with the muses. She focuses on Burney’s journals and letters recounting her interactions with the intimates of Streatham after the publication of her first novel, Evelina; and during the writing of her second novel, Cecilia, and notes that Burney also begins jotting ideas that ultimately evolve into Camilla during these years. Witucki points out that although Burney’s first two novels evoked comments about her being one with, or inspired by, the muses, as she works on this third novel she claims that she cannot find the muses, who had in the past “found her.” Unlike her circumstances as a dependent in her father’s house when she wrote the first novels, Burney turns to this third novel out of financial necessity to support her household. Ironically, in discussing the financial aspects of the novel and its publication through subscription, Burney suggests a disharmony in linking money and inspiration (the muses) that suggests that when money is the object, the muses abandon the author. Despite

B. Witucki (B) Utica College, Utica, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6_7

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Burney’s laments at the muses’ absence, she fashions the characters in Camilla almost as a paean to them. Keywords Camilla · Muses · Classics · Female learning · Disability

The Muses Frances Burney served as amanuensis for Volume I of her father’s A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period just prior to writing Evelina.1 In this volume, Dr Burney dedicates a separate though brief section to the Muses. He describes them as “those celebrated female musicians, so dear to men of genius, and lovers of art” and claims “the possessors of every liberal art in all the countries of Europe, still revere them, particularly the poets, who seldom undertake the slightest work, without invoking their aid” (A General History, 291). He includes an Epigram of Callimachus characterizing the attributes of each, but notes that poets and artists are not uniform in their disposition of these attributes (293). Nonetheless, he describes the nine Muses as they are presented on the capitals at Herculaneum. Of the nine, the following four pertain directly to this paper: “Clio, seated, her head crowned with laurels; in her left hand she holds an open volume in which she appears to be reading. … Thalia, the Comedian, with a comic mask in her left hand. … Melpomene, the protectress of Tragedy, with a tragic mask in her left hand. … Calliope the Poetess, with a roll of paper, or volume, in her hand, as the Muse who presides over heroic verse, or epic poetry” (294−5). Perhaps not coincidentally, Burney references a guiding Muse in the dedicatory poem to her first novel, Evelina: “Obscure be still the unsuccessful Muse” (Evelina, 3; see Francesca Saggini’s Introduction in this collection). The Muse who is obscure parallels the author, Burney, who is anonymous. After the publication of Evelina and coincident with Burney becoming generally known as the author of the novel, the Streatham circle embraces her and numbers her among the muses. She is referred to as “Dr Burney’s 10th muse” (EJL, III: 294−5). Doctor Johnson suggests that, like the muses, she is a denizen of the Castalian Stream of inspiration though, rather than drinking of the water, he says she has been “dipped over Head and Ears” (EJL, III: 172). During her years of intimacy at Streatham,

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Burney makes the acquaintance of Dr Delap who is writing a tragedy, The Royal Suppliants, at the same time she is writing a comedy, The Witlings . Burney notes, “it is droll enough that there should be, at this Time, a Tragedy & Comedy in exactly the same situation, placed so accidentally in the same House” (EJL, III: 280). Mrs Thrale makes numerous references to Delap and Burney as Tragedy and Comedy (presumably the Muses of Tragedy and Comedy) accompanying her on either side. While being fêted both as inspired by the muses and as a muse herself, Burney’s entry into the Streatham circle coincides with her early consideration of a novel based on an “un-beautiful, clever Heroine” or a “clever, sensible, Ugly Girl,” as her friend Samuel Crisp labels her in a variety of letters (EJL, IV: 75 and 332; the first of these is dated 27 April 1780; another follows on 15 May 1781). It also coincides with many discussions among the group on the social effects that studying Greek, or as one of the Streatham circle called it, “the Crooked letters,” has on Sophia Streatfield (e.g., EJL, III: 224, 254, and 303; letters dated 11 January 1779, 26 February 1779, and 15 June 1779). Though not an “Ugly Girl,” they seem to concur that her cleverness is a social detriment. Burney wonders if she will find herself in a similar quandary when she, together with Miss Thrale, undertakes the study of Latin under the tutelage of Samuel Johnson, something of which her father very much disapproved.2 Years later when Burney finally turns to writing what will evolve into Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth in 1793, she finds herself once more in the realm of the muses and discovers her single muse difficult to command at will: Do you know anything of a certain young lady who eludes all my enquiries, famous for having eight sisters, all of uncommon talent? I had formerly some intercourse with her, & she used to promise she would renew it whenever I pleased: but whether she is offended that I have slighted her offers so long or whether she is fickle, or only whimsical, I know not,—all that is quite undoubted, is, that she has concealed herself so effectively from my researches, that I might as well look for Justice & Clemency in the French Convention, as for this former friend in the plains and lanes of Chessington, where, erst, she met me whether I would or no! (JL, II: 124)

Despite trying to regain what she could of the milieu where she worked on her first two novels by retreating to Chessington, Burney initially found the composition difficult, or, as she writes, her muse avoided her.

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This was also the first time she was writing under personal necessity. The comparison of her missing muse to justice and clemency missing in the French Convention suggests the origin of her problems: a penniless French exile, General d’Arblay, whom she wants to marry despite her father’s disapproval on the grounds that they would not have the means to live. Once married despite her father’s dissatisfaction, Burney needs to make sure that they do, indeed, have the means to live. Thus, writing by necessity for the first time, Burney calls “les Muses … the most skittish ladies living” and realizes that in the past “they found me,” she did not find them!” (JL, III: 121; original emphasis). Now, however, they are nowhere in sight. Despite their absence, the novel that resulted is an amalgamation of archetypes associated with the muses, particularly Clio, Calliope, Melpomene, and Thalia.

Clio and Calliope: History and Epic Burney opens Camilla; or, a Picture of Youth (1796) with a nod to history in her comparison of “the historian of human life” and “the investigator of the human heart” (7).3 Perhaps not coincidentally, the Greek ̔ ιστoρ´ια means “story,” and she tells the story of a family, Mr Augustus Tyrold, Mrs Georgiana Tyrold, their children, Lionel, Lavinia, Camilla, and Eugenia. Burney connects this eighteenth-century family with the foundation myth of Rome as told in the first century BCE epic, the Aeneid. Three of the five members of the Tyrold family are linked to the Aeneid through their names: Mr Augustus Tyrold and his daughters, Lavinia and Camilla. The name Augustus “connotates: ‘venerable’ in wisdom, ‘consecrated’ in piety, and ‘classical’ in learning” (Camilla, 930, n. 4). Burney describes Mr Augustus Tyrold as “gentle with wisdom and benign in virtue” (8). He is rector of Etherington and seeks “to educate a lovely race of one son and three daughters” (8).4 The use of the word “race” to describe the Tyrold family links Augustus Tyrold with another Augustus, Augustus Caesar (63 BCE–14 CE), the pater familias not only of his own family but also of the Roman people.5 It was at the behest of Augustus Caesar that the poet Virgil composed the Aeneid, in which the future Roman race depended on the marriage between the Trojan Aeneas and Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, king of the Latin tribes.6 In the Aeneid, Lavinia is a passive figure. She does not speak. While Burney’s Lavinia is not passive to that extent, there is a similar lack of character development. At one point, she is described as “unexceptionable Lavinia” (238).7

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Nonetheless, she follows the epic template by marrying a stranger, Mr Henry Westwyn, who is the son of an old friend of her Uncle Hugh. Aeneas’s courtship of Lavinia is beset by innumerable obstacles including war between the Latin tribes and the Trojans. As told in the Aeneid, Aeneas is aided by a female warrior, Camilla, among other allies.8 At this point, multiple transformations of the original take place. Burney replaces the male hero, Aeneas, with a female, Camilla. Like Aeneas, Camilla loses her “ancient home” and spends most of the novel seeking to find her way back. In the case of Aeneas, he flees from burning Troy after it has been conquered and follows oracles to find his “ancient homeland” in Hesperia (Italy) and re-establish his race through his marriage to Lavinia. Camilla’s home consists of two equally loved places, her family’s home in Etherington and her uncle’s estate of Cleves. More than the places though, her home consists of her harmonious family life. It is this that she loses through domestic disharmony: her brother Lionel’s fraud against their maternal uncle, the loss of their mother as she goes abroad to care for her brother, and Camilla’s discontent and confusion over her feelings for Edgar Mandlebert. In trying to find his “ancient homeland,” Aeneas makes several false stops, loses his way, and is almost deterred from the undertaking through his dalliance with Dido (Aeneid, Book IV). Burney’s novel follows the wanderings of Camilla further and further away from her home: first to socialize locally with Mrs Albery, then to Tunbridge Wells, and finally London. Like Aeneas’s loss of his wife, Creusa, Camilla “loses” her beloved Edgar and faces a dalliance with Sir Sedley that threatens the possibility of ever returning to the ancient harmony. Both the ancient hero and the modern heroine face a “conquest of death”: Aeneas travels to the underworld where he sees Dido who has killed herself and refuses to speak to him, and then he converses with his dead father, Anchises, who lays out the future of Rome; Camilla metaphorically travels to the underworld when, after thinking she cannot return home to face the displeasure of her father and mother, she stumbles upon a corpse in an inn, falls ill and delirious, and thinks she is dying. A “clergyman” is brought to her who turns out to be Edgar Mandlebert. Once they recognize each other’s voices, Edgar begs for Camilla to speak to him, but she does not speak, and he leaves the room at her increased agitation. Finally, Camilla has what she thinks is a vision of her mother who reassures her there is a way forward to return to the bosom of her family, her ancestral home (all references from, respectively, Aeneid, Book

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VI and Camilla, Volume V, Book x, Chapters 9−11). In the end, Aeneas defeats the allied Latin tribes to win his bride, Lavinia, and Camilla returns to Etherington, reconciles with her family, marries Edgar, and settles in the midst of the familiar setting of her childhood. In addition to the similarity of plot structure, duty ultimately motivates the actions of both Aeneas and Camilla. According to Dryden, “piety alone comprehends the whole duty of man towards the gods, towards his country, and towards his relations” (“Dedication,” 25). He defines “piety” as comprehending “not only devotion to the gods, but filial love and tender affection to relations of all sorts” (23). Whenever he slips from his “duty,” his mother, the goddess Venus, or Jupiter through the agency of Mercury, reminds Aeneas of it. Likewise, the story of Camilla is a story of devotion to her family and those with whom she has relations. When she appears to be on the brink of abandoning the duties and the “love of right implanted … in [her] nature,” her father “place[s] before [Camilla her] immediate duties” (Camilla, 355). The final duty, the duty to country, which impels Aeneas forward also finds an echo in Camilla. Dryden writes, “to love our native country, and to study its benefits and its glory, to be interested in its concerns, is natural to all men, and is indeed our common duty” (“Dedication,” 34). When, therefore, Mr Tyrold refers to his family as a “race,” the term’s imperial overtones implicitly equate “the country” with the family. The Roman Empire depended on the marriage of Aeneas and his descendants; so, the continuation of the Tyrold family rests on the marriage of the daughters. Ironically, the daughters lose their paternal name in taking a husband. However, the Aeneid concludes with Juno agreeing to end her enmity against Aeneas and the Trojans as long as the Latin name, language, and customs remain and the name of Troy and its fame are destroyed (xii.424). Thus, the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia results in the Latin race continuing, not the Trojan. Burney’s dedication to Queen Charlotte and her use of Georgiana, a feminized reference to King George III, another empire builder and patron of the arts, links the Roman world of Augustus Caesar and the Georgian world of Burney.

Thalia and Melpomene: Comedy and Tragedy In his “Dedication” to the Aeneid, Dryden notes that “the original of the stage was from the epic poem” (7). Fielding, one of Burney’s starting

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posts (Evelina, 9), writes in the “Preface” to The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams that “the EPIC, as well as the DRAMA, is divided into tragedy and comedy” and that “Homer … gave a pattern for both of these.” Although Camilla is a “prose epic,”9 it is also possible to discern both comedy and tragedy interwoven in it. In her early notes, Burney planned a comic character she labelled Mr Jocoso who becomes Lionel Tyrold (Camilla, “Introduction,” xi). At the start of the novel, he is introduced as comic and carefree, a “the little boy” who, casting a comic glance at Camilla … purs[es] up his mouth to hide his laughter” (12). He is the “light-hearted mirthful Lionel” who is “a candidate for every whim” and for whom “laughter seemed not merely the bent of his humour, but the necessity of his existence” (79). After his defrauding of his wealthy maternal uncle comes to light and his consequent family disgrace, Lionel is nevertheless aggravated that his sisters wonder at his good spirits: “O hang it, if one is not merry when one can, what is the world good for?” (Camilla, 224). To their dismay over his actions he responds, “the fraud! what a horrid word! Why it was a mere trick! A joke! A frolic!” (239−40). Lionel is akin to a character from pantomime or the earlier commedia dell’arte. He exists only in the laughter of the moment. His actions are a mix of slapstick and the spectacular, as evidenced by the theatricals at Mrs Albery’s during which he transforms himself into a maid, his abandonment of Camilla and Eugenia with Mr Dubster, and his appearance to both Camilla and Eugenia disguised in a long black cloak with a large hat. When he appears thus garbed to Camilla, she is frightened and does not recognize him. In response, “he laughed heartily … and extolled his own skill in personating a subtle ruffian; declaring he liked to have a touch in all trades” (728). Each time Lionel appears in the novel, he causes general chaos of one kind or another. Like a character in pantomime, he lives in “a kind of fantastic world where the usual rules of cause and effect [do] not apply” (O’Brien, 103). These references to pantomime, however, may serve a deeper purpose that echoes that of epic since “pantomime clearly took part in the period’s neoclassicism, that attempt to articulate a culture and potentially an empire as the successor to Rome” (O’Brien, 105). Though Lionel is the most spectacular of the comic figures, Burney draws satirical portraits of Sir Hugh, Dr Orkborne, Sir Sedley Clarendel, and Mr Dubster. Eugenia, too, is a comic figure, but here Burney exaggerates the comedy, veering to the grotesque and, finally, into drama.

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Eugenia embodies the “clever, sensible, Ugly Girl” that Burney first envisioned during her stays at Streatham. Not content merely with “Ugly,” Burney develops Eugenia into a kind of grotesque. Not only is her complexion badly scarred from childhood smallpox, but an early injury leaves her lame and somewhat stunted and deformed as she grows. At her first social outing, others describe her as “that ugly little body” and “that little lame thing” (77). Later in the novel, she is called a “young Hecate” (568), conjuring up the image of a grotesque, someone deformed and frightening. In addition to her physical disfigurements, she is clever in the way of Sofia Streatfield: she has learned Greek and Latin, a detriment to a woman, as the Streatham circle had decided. Eugenia may be a comic figure, an object of laughter and ridicule in the world of the novel, but in character she is also the representative of tragedy. Unlike her sisters, Eugenia does not receive a Latinate name; instead, she receives a Hellenized name meaning well-born or noble,10 qualities that characterize all her actions. Through her unique education, Eugenia is immersed in the classics and the heroic world of the ancients, but, through her sisters and her status as the heiress of her Uncle Hugh, she remains grounded in the world around her. She is a Greek heroine transplanted into the modern world with all of her values, uncompromising as they are, intact. When she reaches the age of fifteen, Eugenia’s mind is described as a place where “in its purest proportions, moral beauty preserved its first energy” (50−51). Together with her sisters and cousin, Eugenia participates in the broader story of courtship and marriage; in her actions, however, she is sister to such Greek models as Iphigenia in Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis or Iphigeneia in Tauris, and Macaria in his The Children of Heracles. Though it is impossible to judge Burney’s knowledge of the classical texts either directly (in English translation) or through the filter of Latin or French translations, it is possible to consider the classical antecedents Burney used in shaping Eugenia’s character and actions through contemporary adaptations for popular entertainment. The stories of Greek tragedies were commonly known in the eighteenth century since “by 1789 the majority of the Sophoclean and Euripidean plays had been rewritten (often radically) for performance in the English language” (Hall and Macintosh, x). These performances included tragedy, comedy, opera, and pantomime. Iphigenia was cherished above all other heroines and “the sensational sacrifice of a lovely maiden was a favourite theme in popular spectacles,” though the interest in the sacrificial virgin yields at

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the end of the century to a new focus on the “distressed mother”(Hall and Macintosh, 28 and 63). Burney moulds Eugenia on the exemplum of the sacrificial virgin, in particular the characters of Macaria in John Delap’s tragedy The Royal Suppliants, and Iphigenia in the opera Ifigenia in Aulide. After having read Delap’s tragedy, she writes to her sister, Susanna, “the story is such as renders his … ignorance of common Life and manners … not very material, since the Characters are of the Heroick Age, & therefore require more classical than Worldly knowledge, &, accordingly, it’s only resemblance is to the Tragedies of Aeschylus & Sophocles” (EJL, III: 286−8).11 Burney describes Eugenia in much the same way as Delap had, ignorant of common life and worldly knowledge. Faced with a mysterious admirer contacting her via a clandestine letter, Eugenia is puzzled. Burney says of her: “having read no novels, her imagination had never been awakened to scenes of this kind; and what she had gathered upon such subjects in the poetry and history she had studied … had only impressed her fancy in proportion as love bore the character of heroism, and the lover that of an hero” (Camilla, 315). In Delap’s adaptation, Macaria is to be sacrificed to end the looming war between Argos and Athens. This is a sacrifice to deceit and violence since the Argive prophet had given a false oracle. Not knowing this, Macaria willingly undertakes to be the sacrificial victim to save her mother from that fate. She is continuously characterized as having every virtue and “every virtue / More virtuous made by filial piety.” Indeed, her virtue is called her beauty (Suppliants, Act III, 36; Act I, 15). Even Demophon, the King of Athens, who is willing to see her die to save his city from war, questions, “Wherefore … should such unblemished virtue die?” (Act II, 31). Eugenia, too, is a victim of deceit and violence. Early in the novel, Bellamy, a fortune hunter pretending to be an enamoured suitor, managed to separate Eugenia from her family, but a family friend fortuitously found her before she could be whisked away. This early scene foreshadows the ultimate separation of Eugenia from her friends at the opera and consequent abduction by and forced marriage to her mysterious suitor, a de facto fortune hunter. As she relates the events to her father, Eugenia says that when “she comprehended her situation, and made an attempt for her own deliverance—he prevented her from being heard— … she could not, to the questions of her Father, deny, that force, from that moment, was used, to repel all her efforts for obtaining help” (Camilla, 805). When Mr Tyrold finds Eugenia and her new husband after this abduction and their marriage, he describes her as

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“a sacrifice to deceit and violence” (804) stressing that “force was used” (805). Eugenia, contrary to the wishes and prayers of her family, refuses to renounce her marriage saying, “solemn is my vow—I must hold it” (805). As with Macaria, “virtue” is used repeatedly to characterize Eugenia and her actions. Though she loves Melmond, after she realizes that he loves another and despite the personal anguish it causes her, Eugenia heroically encourages him to woo the other lady. Further, she determines to share her wealth with them so that they will have the financial means to marry. Once she has made this decision, Burney describes Eugenia as having “a bright beam upon her countenance, which in defiance of the ravaging distemper that had altered her, gave it an expression almost celestial. It was the pure emanation of virtue, of disinterested, or even heroic virtue” (754). Melmond, in turn, recalls Eugenia’s “cultivation of the mind and the nobleness of her sentiments” (812). Elsewhere in the novel, Burney notes Eugenia’s “native heroism” (639) and “a sort of heroic philosophy, that enabled her to execute and to endure the hardest tasks, where she thought them the demand of virtue” (786). Both Delap’s Acamas and Burney’s Melmond in knightly fashion vow to save the threatened maiden. When Acamas finds Macaria and her family as suppliants in the temple of Jove, and he learns the danger surrounding them, he cries: “divine Macaria! / …’tis thy virtue! —forth I go, / To prove [its] power upon a soldier’s sword” (Suppliants, Act I, 15). (Note that Eugenia was celestial and Macaria is divine). Later, when Acamas realizes the imminent threat to Macaria as the sacrificial victim, he says to her mother, “to her I dedicate / My life; and, on this sword, avow myself / The champion of her wrongs” (Suppliants, Act III, 36). Likewise, when her family and friends realize that Eugenia must have been abducted from the opera by her clandestine suitor, Melmond was … determined to ride post himself in the pursuit. ... His heart was most sincerely in this business; what he owed to the noble conduct which the high sentiments and pure regard of Eugenia had dictated, had excited tender veneration, which made him hold his life as too small an offering to be refused for her service … . To have risked his life in her rescue, at this moment, seemed to him nothing … . (Camilla, 799−802)

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The story of Eugenia, then, abstracted from the larger frame and multitude of characters in Camilla, mimics that of eighteenth-century adaptations of Greek tragedy. In addition to Delap’s tragedy, it also mimics the opera Ifigenia, which Burney attended more than once.12 The story of the opera begins in Aulis where Agamemnon is filled with grief at the oracle that he must sacrifice his daughter Ifigenia to appease the goddess Diana.13 Achilles, the betrothed of Ifigenia, returns to Aulis. Once he learns of this threat to Ifigenia, Achilles swears to protect her despite a new attachment. When she claims the right to honour heaven’s will and to be sacrificed for her country, Achilles reluctantly yields to her desire. Through a number of last-minute revelations and actions, Ifigenia is saved and re-united with Achilles. Ifigenia, like Macaria and Eugenia, is a sacrificial victim. She is given the same attributes as Macaria and Eugenia—youth, innocence, and virtue. She is described as “an innocent victim in the prime of her years” (Ifigenia in Aulide, II.i, p. 29) and “a rare example of virtue” (II.v, p. 42), and “her virtue, her tender years” are lamented (III.i, p. 54). Achilles calls her virtue “wonderful” but “inimitable” (III.iii, p. 58), and he, too, is willing to risk everything to save her. To Achilles’s insistent request that she allow him to attempt to rescue her, Ifigenia says, “dost thou advise me to betray my country, the public welfare, and my honour?” (III.iii, p. 57). In the face of her imminent death, Ifigenia seeks to console her father and Achilles with the words “let my fortitude inspire you with strength and virtue” (III.v, p. 66). In a similar way, Burney describes Eugenia refusing to save herself from the living death of the forced marriage: “‘… the die is cast! And I am his! Solemn has been my vow! Sacred must I hold it!’ … no representations could absolve her opinion of what she now held her duty” (Camilla, 805−6). In her own way, Eugenia shows her love for her country by strictly abiding by its laws, as is her duty. According to Burney, Eugenia, too, has fortitude: “Eugenia had recovered her gentle fortitude [and] seemed to submit to her destiny” (807). Through her behaviour, she gives an example of “the purity of her love, the cultivation of her mind, and the nobleness of her sentiments” (812). At the end of the opera, Achilles and Iphigenia sing of love and call on Hymen to descend and “join their souls with … silken bands” (Ifigenia in Aulide, III.v, p. 70). At the end of the novel, Eugenia, freed from her fortune-hunter husband by his unexpected death, marries Melmond who has himself been freed from his mistaken love for another. Stripped

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down to their essentials, the stories of Iphigenia and Eugenia are identical. A young woman who is in love temporarily “loses” her beloved to another. She herself becomes a sacrificial victim and refuses all efforts at “rescue” on the grounds of doing her “duty” to her country. In the end, the sacrifice is unexpectedly overturned, the love conflict resolved, and each is “reborn” to marriage and happiness.

Final Musings Eugenia, then, is a hybrid. In form she belongs to comedy, but in spirit and character to tragedy. She embodies Homeric epic which encompasses within it both tragedy and comedy. Burney has expanded Dryden’s paradigm of the shift from the epic poem (narrative) to the stage (action) by adding another step, stage (action) to prose epic (narrative). Thus epic, tragedy, and comedy all play a role in Camilla, which is at base a “story” or history. The Muses, or “those skittish ladies” represented in the novel, proved themselves to be somewhat skittish indeed as Camilla, despite selling well, did not find an overly favourable critical reception (Harman, 268; see also “Appendix,” JL, III). The genesis of the novel and its publication decisions were based on financial necessity not inspiration: the need to support a husband and then also a child (Pink). Burney herself seems to presage the coming disappointment with the novel in her suggestion of the dichotomy between art (the muses) and money when she considers publishing the failed tragedy, Edwy and Elgiva, by subscription: “The good & wise seer Cambridge … is sure the Names, &c, would be splendid, etc also the consequences—which shall be nameless, being rather vulgar where the Muses are in question” (JL, III: 110). The “vulgar, nameless consequences” are financial rewards. The nickname she and General d’Arblay gave to their son, “The Idol of the World,” illustrates Burney’s shift from inspiration to “vulgar” reality.14 Perhaps not coincidentally, Aristophanes’s Plutus (meaning wealth) as translated by Lewis Theobald was titled: Plutus: or, the World’s Idol (Hall and Macintosh, 57).

Notes 1. The publication of this first volume in 1776, two years before the publication of Evelina, allowed Burney somewhat more time to pursue her novel. See Harman (85) and “Introduction” (EJL, II).

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2. Burney first mentions these lessons to Susanna Elizabeth Burney 21−27 May 1779. She describes their progression 5−20 July 1779 and mentions them again 6−9 December 1779 (EJL, III: 268, 336, and 452). 3. In her preface to Evelina, Burney had noted Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias Smollett among other authors as her precursors (9). See Beasley (74 ff). 4. See Clarke, particularly Chapter VI, “Porson and his Contemporaries,” for the close link between a classical education and clergymen and teachers in the eighteenth century. 5. Burney dedicated the novel to Queen Charlotte in whose household she had been Keeper of the Robes from 1786 to 1791. Giving Mrs Tyrold the name Georgiana is doubtless a reference to the Queen through her spouse, King George III. What larger purpose Burney may have had in these royal references is beyond the scope of this paper. Kraft analyzes the significance of the use of Camilla and Lavinia, names from the Aeneid, in terms of the epic goals of the novel and the contemporary Georgian goals. 6. At the end of Book II of the Aeneid, the ghost of Creusa, Aeneas’s dead wife, tells him he has a royal bride waiting for him in Latium. In Book VII, when the Trojans meet with King Latinus he tells them that his daughter is destined to marry a foreigner from afar who is an excellent warrior and deduces that Aeneas is that man (130, 252). The references throughout are to the Aeneid. 7. The editors of Camilla attribute Lavinia’s name to the influence of Thomson’s Ruth or Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent, but they do not mention the link to Lavinia, Aeneas’s destined bride in Italy (Camilla, 930−1, note for p. 11). 8. The connection between Camilla’s name and the Aeneid has been noted frequently. 9. The terminology of “prose epic” used by Henry Fielding is also used by Burney in describing her new work to her father in a letter of 6 July 1795. This is noted in Camilla (“Introduction,” xiv). 10. The editors of Camilla note that the name references a third-century martyr and suggest a 1767 play by Pierre Beaumarchais as the source of Eugenia’s name (930−1). 11. Note that although Burney cites Aeschylus and Sophocles, the play is really based on Euripides, The Children of Hercules, and Aeschylus, The Suppliants. 12. Writing to her sister Susanna in 1783, Burney mentions that she has gone to see Ifigenia again and mentions going to the same opera about a week later (EJL, V: 311 and 318). 13. All references to the opera are taken from Ifigenia in Aulide.

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14. See, for example: “the little Idol of the World is this Day half a year old” (JL, III: 116) and, “I here sign for The Idol of the World, your godson” (JL, III: 135).

Works Cited Beasley, Jerry C. Novels of the 1740s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982). Burney, Charles. A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. To which is Prefixed, a Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients (London: published for the author, 1776). Available from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nc01.ark:/13960/t54f34 k1s;view=1up;seq=362. Accessed 30 April 2021. Cigna-Santi, Vittorio Amadeo. Ifigenia in Aulide, a serious opera, as performed at the King’s Theatre in the Hay-Market. With additions and alterations, by Signor A. Andrei. The music entirely new, by Signor Bertoni (London: Printed by H. Reynell, No. 21, Piccadilly, near the Hay-Market, M,DCC,LXXXII. [1782]). Eighteenth Century Collections Online, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CW0106665018/ECCO?u= ed_itw&sid=primo&xid=67de4a94&pg=1. Accessed 30 April 2021. Clarke, M.L. Greek Studies in England 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945). Delap, John. The Royal Suppliants. A Tragedy. As Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane (London: Printed for J. Bowen, corner of Beaufort-Buildings, Strand: and at his Circulating Library, on the Steyne, Brighthelmstone, MDCCLXXXI. [1781]). Eighteenth Century Collections Online, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CB0127570366/ECCO?u= ed_itw&sid=primo&xid=1dd019ab&pg=1. Accessed 30 April 2021. Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and his Friend Mr Abraham Adams / Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes (London: A, Millar, 1743). Available from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=inu.30000115426474;view=1up;seq=9. Accessed 30 April 2021. Hall, Edith and Fiona Macintosh. Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660– 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Harman, Claire. Fanny Burney: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 2000). Kraft, Elizabeth. “Female Heroic Action in France Burney’s Camilla.” In Bernard Schweizer (ed.), Approaches to the Anglo and American Epic, 1621−1982 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

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O’Brien, John. “Pantomime.” In Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (eds), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730−1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 103−14. Pink, Emma E. “Frances Burney’s Camilla: ‘To Print My Grand Work … by Subscription.’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, 1 (2006): 51−68. Virgil. Aeneid, trans. John Dryden (New York: Collier, 1909). Available from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822015108103;view=1up; seq=34. Accessed 30 April 2021.

CHAPTER 8

“Stories for Miss Cecilia”: Inspiration and the Muses in the Burney Family Archive Lorna J. Clark

Abstract Frances Burney drew inspiration from her family which provided a stimulating environment that encouraged self-expression through creative arts. Artistic talent developed in several generations and flourished in works of juvenilia found in the family archive. This chapter explores one example, written by Burney’s nieces Frances and Sophia for their five-year-old sister, Cecilia. Intended as an early reader, it describes the playmates, toys, and pets that make up her world, making her the centre of her own narrative. Written in simple language for the young child, it is generously illustrated with drawings, some by their uncle, the artist Edward F. Burney. Stories for Miss Cecilia is housed in a tailor-made cloth sleeve, representing a multi-media artefact. Each chapter focuses on a cousin or friend of Cecilia, showing the seeds of personality being sown in childhood. Capturing a generation of young Burneys at one moment in time, the storybook contains a record of family history and becomes

L. J. Clark (B) Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6_8

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a vehicle for that history as it is handed down. Authorship defines the Burneys’ sense of identity; this chapter presents Stories as giving a glimpse into a family culture of creativity, and both reflecting and embodying the atmosphere in which artists, writers, and musicians would flourish. Keywords Juvenilia · Edward F. Burney · Childhood · Authorship · Children’s literature

“But where, Miss Burney, where can, or could You pick up such Characters?—Where find such variety of incidents, yet all so natural?” (EJL, III: 201). After the publication of her first novel, Evelina, in 1778, Frances Burney was assailed with questions as to where she found her inspiration. For a new and untested author who had lived a seemingly sheltered life at home, unschooled, and untrained, the range of characters and incidents in her novel seemed simply “wonderful !”1 But as Burney herself claimed, she had simply “observed” the variety of personalities around her: “o, Ma’am! any body might find, who thought them worth looking for!” (EJL, III: 202). Her vantage-point in the Burney home provided sufficient stimulation, in “the variety of visitors, personalities, and creatures in St. Martin’s Street itself,” as Joyce Hemlow has pointed out (History, 77). Notably, the fertility of invention displayed in Evelina is similar to that seen in the Early Diary, in which vividly drawn characters spill from the pages; as Burney herself would insist, she simply painted “from life.” That Burney drew inspiration from her family has long been noted. Contemporary observers, such as Hester Thrale, exclaimed on their exceptionality: “The Family of the Burneys are a very surprizing Set of People” (Thraliana, I: 309). The “family saga [is] more dramatic, more varied, interesting, and moving than fiction” as Hemlow observed (Hemlow, xviii). Later biographers (Doody; Chisholm; Harman) continued to remark on the importance of Burney’s family as a source of emotional support and a primary social milieu. The environment evidently encouraged the development of talent but there also seems to have been a marked family inheritance or predisposition towards creative expression, judging from the number of Burneys who engaged in the arts, whether painting, music, literature, or even dance. This cultural heritage can be traced back through several generations: Burney’s maternal grandfather was a musician (Comyn, 5), and on her father’s

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side, the tendencies were even stronger. Charles Burney’s father and grandfather were both portrait-painters and his mother was daughter to a herald-painter.2 Musicians and dancing-masters figured among his numerous half-siblings, and his only brother Richard earned his living from music, as did three of Richard’s five sons, while the other two were artists. A musician and man of letters, Charles Burney passed down both talents to his offspring: music, particularly to his eldest daughter, Esther, who was a child performer in London (Scholes, I: 98−99; see also “Memoranda,” 11), while others showed prowess in writing. His sons James and Charles published widely within their field: Charles, a clergyman, produced works of theology and classical scholarship, and James, a sea captain, wrote maritime histories. Frances and her half-sister Sarah Harriet each produced several novels, and there were other women writers, down through several generations of Burneys, who published in a variety of genres (Clark, “Hidden Talents”). Of course, it is not only in the public realm that works of art may be discovered: an abundance of letters, poems, plays, stories, musical compositions, and drawings created by the Burney clan have been preserved in archives around the world. The Burney family seems to illustrate Margaret Ezell’s “model of a manuscript culture in which members of a social or family circle engaged in reading, annotating, amending and responding to one another’s work …” (Levy, 7). Many influences were operating on Frances Burney in this context and evidently fuelling her artistic muse. Evidence of the creativity can be found in the archive, but the roots often lie in childhood. An awareness of this family culture enhances the value of the discovery of several works of Burney family juvenilia. These were produced, not by Burney herself (whose juvenilia have not survived) but by other Burney children of the next generation, in response to the stimuli around them: sons and daughters of Esther and Charles Rousseau Burney, first cousins who married in 1770, both talented musicians, who raised a large family in a household that fits the description of being filled with “books, music, laughter and love” (History, 14). Within a five-year period, they quickly produced a family of five children (1772−1777), with two more born several years later (1788, 1792). These children grew up in London, where they were closely associated with the household of their grandfather, Charles Burney, and also had strong connections with the equally gifted family of their other grandfather, Richard Burney, in whose rambling country house at Worcester, the amateur theatricals that are so vividly described in Burney’s Early Diary took place.3

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The years 1792−1793 appear to have been especially creative ones for this group of children, particularly the older set, who had by then reached adolescence. Two or three of them collaborated on a family magazine, patterned after one of the first periodicals specifically aimed at children, John Marshall’s Juvenile Magazine. Edited by 17-year-old Frances Burney (1776−1828), the Juvenile Magazine of the Burneys ran for six issues (dated January to June 1792), a compendium of essays, poems, stories, plays, news items, charades, etc. (I have discussed it fully elsewhere: Clark, “Teaching”). This exercise seems to have inspired her younger sister Sophia (1777−1856) to gather some of her own contributions, together with other writings, into several anthologies. Three carefully copied manuscripts have survived, dated 1793, dedicated to her aunt Frances Burney (now Madame d’Arblay) who had sent her strong encouragement, and whose success with her first two novels had perhaps provided the ultimate inspiration.4 Both of these siblings then teamed up again to create a remarkable work, a book of stories written for their much younger sister, Cecilia. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to a close examination of this artefact, both as a product and a reflection of the children’s fertility of invention and the versatile artistic talents that flourished within an encouraging family culture. This third surviving example of juvenilia in the Burney family is of particular interest in that it combines the features of a work written by children (fifteen-year-old Sophia and her seventeen-year-old sister Frances)5 and for children (their younger sister Cecilia). Entitled “Stories / for Miss Cecilia Charlotte Esther Burney. Aged five years,” it was presented to her on the eve of her fifth birthday, on 18 September, which (since Cecilia was born in 1788) dates it to 1793. This unique work represents an early example of family-authored juvenilia as well as of children’s literature, anticipating the flowering of the genre in the nineteenth century. Written by children and for children, it is also about children, as Patricia Crown has pointed out (399); consisting of a collection of stories which are little vignettes of cousins and playmates of Cecilia; describing their activities, pets, and playthings, it mentions things that Cecilia had seen or would see when she visited them. As Victor Watson has noted, “probably the most magical thing any storyteller can do for young readers or listeners—[is] … to put them into their own story” (42; original emphasis),6 a realization that lies at the heart of the bedtime story that makes a narrative from the events of a child’s day, or the custom-made books that insert a child’s name in the place of the hero.

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“Stories for Miss Cecilia” enacts this realization; as an early example of a personalized children’s book, it takes the social world around Cecilia as its purview, successfully creating an individually tailored child-centred text. “Stories for Miss Cecilia” captures a moment in family history, depicting the childhoods of a generation of young Burneys, viewed by their peers. The small hand-made book, preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library, not only contains a record of family history, it becomes itself a vehicle for that history as it is handed down to the next generation, acquiring a subsequent history of its own. When Cecilia herself grew up, she gifted it to her nephew, Henry Burney (1814–1893), when he was four years old, thus creating another reader-audience of comparable age to her own at the time she had received it. Her own presentation inscription reads: “Henry Burney from his affectionate Aunt Cecilia Burney. August 23d 1818,” given in the year that Cecilia, a lifelong spinster, turned 30. Young Henry undoubtedly would have read the stories differently, as the children they describe, captured in all the freshness of their youth, were those whom he would know as ageing or even deceased relatives. The gift seems to have had a lasting impact, as Henry would remain interested in family history throughout his life, judging by the records and “scraps” he kept in his rectory study, which were discovered after his death by his son who then compiled them, creating a family history that covered almost 250 years.7 Besides its value as a record of family history, “Stories for Miss Cecilia” also offers biographical insights by describing the formative years of men and women whose ultimate destiny is already known. “The child is father of the man,” in Wordsworth’s immortal words (in the poem “My Heart Leaps Up”), and since all the children described grew to adulthood and had subsequent histories of their own, the narrative of their early years holds interest, in showing the seeds of later characteristics being sown in childhood. For instance, the future schoolmaster is seen as a young boy already immersed in books. The collection of stories in itself represents the gift of creativity being passed on to future generations; its very existence as artefact attests to the value accorded within the family to different forms of artistic expression whose practice and development were given encouragement in the formative years. Making sense of Cecilia’s world by narrating it for her, the authors express their own creativity, while both reflecting and modelling the familial talents for artistic expression that were channelled into various art forms, such as music, art, or literature.

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The carefully crafted booklet, 48 pages long, uses more than one medium to convey meaning. Given its small size (10 × 12 cm), simple language, and large print, it is well-suited to be an early reader for a child just learning to read or still being read to. The authors have done their best to simulate the look of a real publication, creating a title-page and a page giving the date and place of publication (“Titchfield Street,” where the family home was located). Most striking are the illustrations: nine drawings in ink and watercolour used to illustrate the eight stories. Each one highlights a different moment in the story, bringing it to life: little Cecilia playing with her dolls, her cousin Fanny learning to dance, her cousin Martin pulling a toy horse. Three were done by Cecilia’s uncle, the professional artist Edward F. Burney,8 and the rest presumably by Frances or Sophia Burney. The illustrations are often referred to explicitly in the text, with phrases such as “as you see here,” so text and art are welded together. A specially designed envelope is housed with the little booklet: a hand-sewn sleeve of coloured material, perfectly sized to encase the small booklet. The “Stories for Miss Cecilia” can thus be seen as an amalgamation of several artistic forms, effectively creating a multi-media artefact.9 In terms of content, there are eight stories or chapters in all, each of which introduces a young cousin or family friend who is approximately the same age as Cecilia. All the cousins are on Cecilia’s mother’s side (she had none on her father’s side). The eldest of six, her mother had married long before her siblings, and started her family almost immediately, so that her children had no cousins for the early part of their lives.10 Perhaps, for Sophia and Frances, part of the appeal of writing about such a large extended family was the novelty of the situation. As Esther’s siblings began to marry and have their own children in the 1780s, the family quickly grew, so that by 1793, little Cecilia was surrounded by cousins, many of whom were closer in age than her siblings.11 Perhaps the two co-authors were trying to make sense of all these relatives, and help little Cecilia negotiate this newly expanded and complicated social universe. The book of “Stories” begins with a story about Cecilia’s best friend, Miss Nanny, in which Cecilia has a walk-on part, and so is introduced by way of indirection, as her visitor. (All subsequent references are to the manuscript of “Stories for Miss Cecilia”). “The history of little Miss Nanny” opens in fairy-tale style: “there was once a lady and gentleman who had only one little girl, and her name was Nanny.” In this safe and ordered world, Nanny “had a very good Papa and Mama who loved her

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dearly, because she was so good, and behaved so prettily.” The reassuring tone of the narrator presents the world as an ideally nurturing environment, full of kindly adults and well-behaved children, including Cecilia. She was very fond of little Miss Nanny, and Miss Nanny was very fond of her; they never quarrelled with one another about their play-things. The story follows the pattern of didactic fiction, such as The History of Little Ann, and her brother, Little James, mentioned in another story, in which the behaviour of the two principals is exemplary and worthy of being emulated by their young readers: here, Miss Nanny and Cecilia model proper behaviour which, in turn, gives positive reinforcement for it. An indirect literary reference (meant as a kind of in-joke), is found in the name of Cecilia’s doll, Evelina, named after the heroine of the famous first novel of her aunt Frances, just as Cecilia herself was named after the eponymous heroine of the second.12 This metafictional reference to another family-produced fiction is a sign of the importance accorded to authorship in the family. The second chapter, “Cecilia,” presents Cecilia herself at the centre both of her own story, and of a large family: “she had a great many brothers and Sisters they were all fifteen, but one.” The reference to the ubiquity of siblings aged fifteen may be a family joke, perhaps repeating a childish misconception of Cecilia herself; in truth, the only one fitting that description would be the author herself, Sophia. The story also mentions Cecilia’s baby sister, Amelia, her mother, who “was so good as to teach her to play upon the Piano Forte,” and her three older sisters, one of whom taught her to dance, one to sing, and one to spell. Evoking music as part of the Burney family heritage, the story highlights female talents and versatility. Two important characters are then introduced, a “very good Aunt and Uncle, who lived at a beautiful place called HALSTED”—Cecilia’s aunt Ann, and husband, the Revd John Hawkins, Vicar of Halstead, Essex, whose importance is marked by the first illustration in the book, a lovely landscape of their home, drawn by Edward F. Burney. This couple came to play a large part in Cecilia’s life, one that might even suggest a possible motive for the writing of the book. Aunt and Uncle Hawkins “invited little Cecilia to see them, and the clergyman taught her to say her prayers and her Aunt taught her to behave well. … So this little girl grew so

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good, that all her friends loved her dearly”—so dearly, in fact, that eventually, she would come to be effectively adopted by the Hawkinses and leave home to live with them entirely. It is not certain when exactly this happened, but probably early in 1794, judging by two letters of Frances (Burney) d’Arblay to her sister, Esther. One, written in January 1794, shows that the arrangement was not yet finalized, although it had evidently been discussed, and the other, sent in May 1794 (JL, III: 35), indicates that the transfer had already taken place. In it, Frances (Burney) d’Arblay sympathizes with Esther’s feelings of loss at parting with her child, but assures her that she would be “amply paid” for the sacrifice (JL, III: 60). The language used suggests that one motive for the change was financial, to ease the burden on Esther and Charles Rousseau who were struggling to support their six children, but it would also benefit the Hawkinses who were childless. But no matter how beneficial in theory, the transition must surely have been jarring to little Cecilia, “all beauty, grace, and enchantment” (JL, I: 228), who had to leave behind her home, parents, and siblings, to be brought up instead as an only child. If, as seems likely, the idea was being bandied about in late 1793, then that might account for the authors’ urge to sketch the family landscape for Cecilia, as though to reassure her that, with all these relations within her extended family, she would never be alone. In the event, while successful in some ways, the adoption would come to a rather sad end. Although Cecilia would remain affectionately attached to the Hawkinses, the connection may have led indirectly to her early death at the age of 32 from consumption, which she had probably caught from her aunt Hawkins whom she had nursed devotedly when she was dying from the same disease. Cecilia herself “attributed her decline of health from the time that she lost this kind friend” (“Memoranda,” 67–8, 71–3). The timing of the gift of “Stories” to her nephew may be significant: it was during the last months of her aunt’s life that she felt the urge to pass on to her nephew a relic from her own childhood. The remaining six stories evidently appeal to the tastes of the audience, focusing on things that would be important in Cecilia’s world. For instance, toys are the focus of the third story about “Master Frederick,” son of William and Frederica Lock, wealthy friends of Cecilia’s aunt, Susanna (Burney) Phillips who lived near her on their estate, Norbury Park. Master Frederick had a great many playthings, as befitting a child of privilege, which are dwelt on in loving detail: “a beautiful rocking-horse,

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and a very handsome coach, which he drew about his papa’s Gardens and Park.” He also has a kind older sister Amelia, who showed her dollhouse and wax dolls “to the little girls that came to see her,” one of whom may have been Cecilia who had spent a year in the neighbourhood from October 1789 to December 1790.13 Cecilia would have been too young to remember the details of any visits to the Locks which may have been recounted to her by her older sisters (One detail that is not included is that one of Amelia’s dolls was also named Cecilia [Johnson, 170]). The connection with the Lock family is commemorated in a finely wrought watercolour by Edward F. Burney, of Amelia with little Frederic on her knee, set in the famous room at Norbury Park in which frescoes (painted by Sawrey Gilpin and George Barret) covered the walls, connecting the interior to the landscape seen from the windows. Edward F. Burney’s drawing, the most highly finished in the book, could be taken as suggesting the intrinsic connection or slippage between the world of the storybook and Cecilia’s world (Hussey). A second drawing in Cecilia’s story shows her playing with dolls, which is a central image evoked throughout the storybook. Frederic’s story also emphasizes education, as it describes his being sent to school, where he learned to read and write “well enough to send a letter to his Mama, and one to Miss Amelia they were both very pretty, and written very neatly.” Frederic’s interests may reflect the literary tastes of the Lock family, which, interestingly enough, have been preserved in an artefact from Frederic’s own childhood. A scrapbook kept when he was five is held at Princeton University and is described by Andrea Immel: “Its twenty-two pages bound in light-yellow wrappers, are filled with neatly arranged images of plants, animals, and people cut out of late eighteenthcentury prints” which reveal much about “the roles print could play in a child’s acquisition of literacy during the late eighteenth century.” Like the “Stories of Miss Cecilia,” the scrapbook “bears witness to extraordinarily complex interactions been image, text, child, family, and culture in the process of becoming literate.” Immel suggests that it may have been lovingly preserved by Frederic’s family because he, too, like Cecilia, died young (Immel, 65–66, 83). Another area of childhood interest, that of pets, is the focus of the fourth chapter, “Charlotte,” one of three children of Cecilia’s aunt Charlotte (Burney) Francis. The description of the eldest daughter Charlotte emphasizes her good behaviour and nurturing tendencies. She had a menagerie of pets: “four beautiful gold-fishes,” “two pretty pigeons,” and

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a large dog, all of which she tended carefully. The nurturing of pets is tied to the nurturing of children, as her young brother Clement, “a fine little fellow,” benefits (like Cecilia) from his sisters’ care (which is reinforced by a sunny drawing of the “three pretty children” with their Mama, walking in green fields). Pets also figure in the description of Charlotte’s visits to her “Grand-Papa” and “Grand-mama” (Charles Burney and his wife Elizabeth Allen), and Aunt Sally, who are noted for the treats they kindly offer to visiting grandchildren: “mulberries, or apples, or Walnuts.” The presenting of food emphasizes the love and care with which the children are surrounded. Food features again in the fifth chapter on “Norbury” (eldest son to Susanna (Burney) Phillips), in which Mrs Lock figures as a kind of fairy godmother figure. A wealthy and gracious hostess, she shares with visiting children the bounty of her gardens at Norbury Park: she “was very fond of them, and gave them fruit to eat, and let them walk in her garden, where there were all sorts of beautiful flowers, and a great deal of fruit, Peaches, and Nectarines, apricots, Strawberries and grapes, besides Oranges.” The language evokes the fairy-tale genre, in which food is often offered as a source of comfort. The description of Norbury Park also emphasizes the rural beauty of its surroundings: the “pretty green fields, and several high hills, and a fine wood in a large park.” Important events that played a role in family history are also recounted. These include the meetings of Susanna’s children with royalty which seems in keeping with a heightened atmosphere of fairy-tale enchantment, but probably had a realistic basis dating from the years (1786–1791) when their aunt Frances Burney served in the Queen’s household. There are passing references, in her Court Journals and Letters, to Susanna Burney bringing her children to visit their aunt at the palace where they occasionally encountered members of the royal family (Burney, 240–1, 248). One anecdote shows Norbury as a successful courtier, impressing the King with a clever answer in Latin, for which he was rewarded with expensive toys. Another encounter with royalty occurred when he had an accident in a carriage and was brought home by the Duchess of York, an incident mentioned in family letters.14 The story also relates that his elder sister once played an imaginary game of role reversal, “Lady and Maid,” with the little princess Amelia. Both of these last two incidents were captured in an illustration, the former by Edward F. Burney, in a striking drawing that foregrounds the angelic figure of a lady in white, a frightened child, and a runaway horse.

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A study in contrasts is presented in the stories of two male cousins. (The eight chapters are evenly divided between male and female subjects). The sixth chapter, “Charles,” depicts Charles Parr, the only child of headmaster and scholar Charles Burney Jr, and a future schoolmaster himself. He is described as a “very clever” child who owned “a great many books” but whose favourite was the thoroughly didactic Sandford and Merton, which was destined to become a classic. The moral earnestness of his favourite reading seems apt, as Charles Parr would ultimately become a clergyman. Meanwhile, Martin Burney, only son of Captain James Burney, appears in these stories as a hapless five-year-old who awkwardly breaks his favourite toy, a gift of his Grandpapa; Martin would grow up to be something of a social misfit. Ironically, the illustrations seem to complicate any simple message: Martin is depicted in beautiful rural surroundings at the family’s favourite refuge, Chessington, whereas Charles and his playmates are drawn in rather dark colours, in a schoolyard bounded by a red brick wall. Perhaps the two co-authors had a sneaking sympathy for the scapegrace, rather than the young prodigy. The penultimate chapter features “Fanny” (Susanna’s daughter), presented as “the best girl in the world,” a paragon of virtue to be emulated. Cecilia’s eldest female cousin, ten-year-old Frances provides a model for feminine deportment; her many accomplishments are held up as worthy of emulation. She studied languages, music, and dance and was also clever with her needle: She could besides play “a very pretty tune upon the Piano forte” and went to a dancing-School where she learned to dance a Minuet, and to go down Country dances … .

The listing of the dances and tunes that she knew (marked by an illustration) may recall some visit during which she performed for, or tried to teach, Cecilia. Similarly, the description of Fanny’s toys focuses on her dolls, of which she had “a great many”; dolls recur throughout the “Stories,” suggesting Cecilia herself was fond of playing with them. Their many costumes and accoutrements are dwelt on in loving detail: Fanny’s doll had “a pretty green silk Jacket” and a beautiful dollhouse, “full of pretty chairs and Tables.” Fanny admirably “took great care of her toys” and was also kind to her younger brother, towards whom she played a nurturing and instructive role (which links her to Cecilia’s sisters, the two co-authors). She planned to teach him to read and had “several books to

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teach him with” including “a very pretty story” that “was full of pretty pictures,” perhaps somewhat like this storybook (an indirect metafictional reference). The storybook ends with the claim that it not only offers moral lessons but evokes pleasure and enjoyment, a reiteration of the dulce et utile theme that by now had become de rigueur in children’s literature: “here ends … this little Book which we hope Cecilia will like, as we wrote it on purpose to give her pleasure; and Uncle Inny15 was so good as to draw three beautiful Pictures for it.” The wedding of didacticism with entertainment sounded in these closing words emphasizes the value of the storybook created by these young authors, which invites the young reader to the full enjoyment of the world of creative play. “Stories for Miss Cecilia” is a remarkable artefact—at once a work of juvenilia and of children’s literature. With its rich evocation of daily life from a child’s point of view, and its detailed presentation of Cecilia’s friends and relations, their hobbies and habits, pets and playthings, favourite haunts and cherished books, it brings the past vividly to life, providing an authentic glimpse into childhood in the late eighteenth century. An amalgamation of text and image, the stories and drawings together reflect the fertility of invention that formed part of the family heritage. The creation of the storybook marked an important moment in the lives of all three young people (co-authors and reader) who later built on its creative legacy. The two co-authors, Frances and Sophia Burney, continued to write, and both went on to teach, serving as governesses in wealthy families.16 Frances, in particular, continued her rich creative life, surprising her family with the beauty of her singing voice in private performances.17 She also, at the age of 42, published a set of “Tragic Dramas,” written for “private representation,” with a “Preface” that contained an impassioned defence of the benefits of amateur theatrics, in promoting “general entertainment” with “individual improvement.” While two of the plays were written in adulthood, and the “junior members of a Family of distinction” who performed them were probably her charges, one was apparently a “juvenile attempt” begun when she was seventeen, which would date it to the same creative period as the storybook, 1793. Frances states that it was “written for a very limited, as well as youthful company,” presumably her siblings, for whom she seems to have written several plays.18 When Frances died, on 28 March 1828, at the age of at 52, her relatives were surprised by what they found in her room: books in several

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languages, including Greek and Latin, “M.S. works of her own composition, both in music, & Poetry, for which she had a decided talent” (“Memoranda,” 86–87). Meanwhile, Cecilia went on to write juvenile poems of her own (some when she was as young as eight). When she grew up, she published some musical compositions: a piano sonata (1810?) and a song (1817).19 The first was privately printed (presumably paid for by the author) when Cecilia was 22, which suggests the support of those around her. Even the act of publishing implies a belief in her own abilities and the confidence to share them which attests to the legacy created (left) by the “Stories for Miss Cecilia.” Michelle Levy has written of “family authorship” as a “cultural formation of the Romantic period” in which “sociability” was key (2). Catherine Gallagher has noted that authorship was at the core of the Burneys’ sense of their own identity (216−17). “Stories for Miss Cecilia” give a glimpse of the family culture of creative energy and versatility, that rich artistic heritage on which Frances Burney was able to draw, which was expressed by other family members through different artistic mediums. In this, and other works of juvenilia in the Burney family archive, the children’s creativity can be seen as both a reflection and an engendering of an atmosphere in which so many professional artists, musicians, and writers were to flourish.

Notes 1. The words are those of Samuel Crisp, a close family friend, included in Frances Burney’s account of [2 August] 1778 (EJL, III: 64; original emphasis). 2. [Henry Edward Burney], “Memoranda of the Burney Family 1603– 1845,” 1–2; hereafter “Memoranda.” The manuscript is not known to have survived, but a typescript has, once owned by Percy A. Scholes, who drew on it for his biography of Charles Burney. 3. EJL, II: 231−85, where a long account of an amateur theatrical production is given on 235−51. 4. See Lorna J. Clark, “Introduction” to S.E. Burney, “Works”. 5. Although the title-page states that it was written by Sophia Burney and printed by Frances Burney, the authorship may be more collaborative than that, judging by the final page, which states that “we wrote it.” This is not the sole instance where a work said to be authored by one of the two sisters is attributed in another place to both. 6. Watson’s comment, which seems so apt for these stories, is also quoted by Crown (405).

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7. The “Memoranda,” cited in n. 2 above; it was completed by Henry Burney’s son, Henry Edward Burney on 20 January 1899. 8. Crown, an expert on the artist Edward F. Burney, identifies his contributions on 405. 9. The connection between women’s labour, sewing, and authorship is made in Batchelor; see also Wigston Smith. 10. “Genealogical Table” and “Biographical Notes” on the Burney Family are found in JL,I: lxviii–lxxv. 11. Six cousins were born in the 1780s, and three more before 1793, with two more soon afterwards (1794, 1796). However, one cousin died in 1793, and then, in 1801, the last of that generation was born. (These figures do not include the families of Esther Burney’s two half-siblings or three step-siblings.) 12. In an entry in her journal dated 21 September 1788, Frances Burney writes that she felt “ashamed” that Esther had named her daughter after the novel “but Esther protested if I resisted, I should lose my God-Daughter!—” (CJL, IV: 450). 13. Esther Burney rented a cottage near her sister Susanna for a year from October 1789, primarily for Cecilia and her nurse, but she, her husband and children would spend time there as well. The family finally packed up and left for London in early December 1790. A description of family outings and visits, and of Cecilia as an endearing toddler, can be found in the letters of Susanna Burney. 14. On 18 August 1792, Norbury was returning from a family visit when the chaise broke down; in jumping down from it, he fell, and the wheel went over his leg. The Duchess of York, who was passing by, carried him home in her own carriage. The incident is related in a letter by his mother dated 18 September 1792, printed in Susan Burney, Journals and Letters (251–2). 15. “Uncle Inny” was a family nickname for Edward F. Burney. 16. Frances Burney (niece to the novelist) was working as a governess by 1795; she is known to have had at least three positions. Her sister Sophia followed suit in 1803. See JL, IV: 281−2 and 287; S. H. Burney, Letters (47 n. 8; 50). Also, Charles Burney to Frances (Burney) d’Arblay, 28 July 1802, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation. 17. See, for example, Sarah Harriet Burney to Charlotte (Francis) Barrett, née Burney [c. 16] October [1811] (S. H. Burney, Letters , 146). 18. Judging by the back covers of two issues of the Burneys’ “Juvenile Magazine,” which were clearly recycled. The inside covers still bear the titles of two plays written in 1791, evidently as part of a series, “The Eastern Theatre,” which included at least four plays.

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19. Cecilia Burney, “Le Séjour agréable. A sonata, for the piano forte … Op. 2” (London: G. Walkar [sic], [1810?]), and “Lady Avondel’s Song, the Words taken from ‘The Refusal,’ by Mrs West; composed, and respectfully inscribed to Mrs Holroyd.” The former will be included by Eleanor Gummer in a collection of Classical Sonatas by Women, to be published by One Eye Publications. A copy of the latter has not been found, but it was reviewed in the 1 January 1818 issue of The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, 2nd ser., 5, 25 (1818): 231–32. The discovery was made by Michael Kassler and disclosed in two emails to the author (4 and 6 August 2018).

References Batchelor, Jennie. Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750−1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, ed. Lorna J. Clark (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997). Burney, Sophia Elizabeth. “Works” and “Novels, Plays, and Poems,” ed. Lorna J. Clark (Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2016). Burney, Susan. The Journals and Letters of Susan Burney: Music and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Philip Olleson (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012). Chisholm, Kate. Fanny Burney: Her Life 1752–1840 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998). Clark, Lorna J. “Hidden Talents: Women Writers in the Burney Family.” In Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Memory of Betty Rizzo eds. Temma Berg and Sonia Kane (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2013), pp. 145–66. Clark, Lorna J. “‘Teaching the young idea how to shoot’: The Juvenilia of the Burney Family.” Journal of Juvenilia Studies 1 (2018): 20–36. Comyn, C.J.F. “Recording the Burney Pedigree at the College of Arms.” Burney Letter 5, 2 (Fall 1999): 5−6. Crown, Patricia. “Stories for Cecilia Burney Written by her Sisters and Illustrated by Edward F. Burney and Other Hands: A Manuscript for, by and about Children.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, 3 (2006): 399– 411. Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670−1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Harman, Claire. Fanny Burney: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

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Hemlow, Joyce. A Catalogue of the Burney Family Correspondence, 1749–1878 (New York: New York Public Library, 1971). Hussey, Christopher. “Italian Light on English Walls.” Country Life (17 February 1934): 161–64. Immel, Andrea. “Frederick Lock’s Scrapbook: Patterns in the Pictures and Writing in the Margins.” The Lion and the Unicorn 29, 1 (January 2005): 65–85. Johnson, R. Brimley. Fanny Burney and the Burneys (London: Stanley Paul, 1926). Levy, Michelle. Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Scholes, Percy A. The Great Dr Burney, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). Thrale, Hester Lynch. Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs Piozzi), 1776–1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951). Watson, Victor. “Jane Johnson: A Very Pretty Story to tell Children.” In Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson (eds), Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600−1900 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Wigston Smith, Chloe. Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Index

A Aeschylus, 103, 107 Aguiari (or Agujari), Lucrezia, 36, 87 Allegranti, Teresa Maddalena, 72, 76 Anfossi, Pasquale, 76 Aristophanes, 106 Austen, Jane, 9, 21, 45 Pride and Prejudice, 45 B Barret, George, 119 Barsanti, Jenny, 82 Bastardina (or Bastardini). See Aguiari (or Agujari), Lucrezia Benda, Felicitas Agnesia, 74 Bertoni, Ferdinando, 68–72, 75, 76 Bluestockings, 30, 51, 85 Burney, Charlotte (married Francis; married Barrett), 69, 124 Burney, Dr. Charles, 6, 7, 23–29, 69, 70, 80, 96 A General History of Music, 96 Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 2, 7, 20, 21, 23

Burney, Edward Francisco (or Francesco), 6, 116, 124 Burney, Esther, neé Sleepe, 11–13, 15, 124 Burney, Frances, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 22, 23, 27, 36, 48, 49, 66, 67, 75, 80, 96, 112, 114, 120 Brief Reflections on the Emigrant French Clergy, 3 Camilla, 3, 5, 43–45, 48, 54, 60, 81, 82, 91, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103–106 Cecilia, 37, 39, 48, 56, 57, 60, 61, 68, 71, 81, 82 Complete Plays , 3 Evelina, 2, 3, 13, 41, 42, 54, 55, 67, 68, 81, 82, 89, 96, 101, 112 The Wanderer, 2, 4–8, 23, 38, 43, 48, 59–61, 80–83, 85–88, 91 The Witlings , 7, 8, 15, 16, 85, 97 Burney, James, 74, 121 Burney, Sarah Harriet, 113, 124

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Saggini (ed.), Frances Burney and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98890-6

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INDEX

Burney, Susanna, 5, 36, 40, 66, 68–71, 75, 85, 90, 120

C Cassidy, James, 38 Catherine the Great, 28 Chesterfield, Lord P.S., 29 Cox’s Museum, 89 Crisp, Samuel, 4, 6, 66, 67, 69, 91, 97, 123 Croker, John Wilson, 27

D d’Arblay, General Alexandre, 74, 98, 106 Davide, Giacomo, 76 Delany, Mary, 6, 48, 49 Delap, John, 97, 103–105 Dryden, John, 100, 106

E Euripides, 3, 102

F Farinelli (Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi), 67 Ferrier, Susan, 13 Fielding, Henry, 100, 107 Fox, Charles James, 30 Francis, Charlotte, née Burney, 119 Franklin, Benjamin, 91

G Gabrielli, Caterina, 87, 92 Garrick, David, 27, 39, 66 Gast, Sophia, née Crisp, 4 George III, 3, 20, 24, 49, 82, 100, 107

Gibbon, Edward, 28 Gilpin, Sawrey, 119 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 68

H Hamilton, Emma, 88, 92 Harris, Thomas, 5 Hume, David, 27, 76

J Johnson, Samuel, 3, 7, 28, 30, 97

L Lennox, Charlotte, 22 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 15 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 13, 106 Locke, John, 37 Lock, Frederica, 48, 50, 118, 119

M Marshall, John, 114 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 91 Metastasio, Giuseppe, 69 Millico, Giuseppe, 66, 67 Montagu, Elizabeth, 85 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 29

N Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte), 20, 74 Newton, Isaac, 66 Nicholson, Margaret, 20

O Omai, 29 Owenson, Sidney, 31

INDEX

P Pacchierotti, Gasparo, 36, 68–76 Parker, Rozsika, 8, 13, 48, 54 Peacock, Francis, 38 Phillips, Molesworth, 15 Piozzi, Hester, 24, 28 Pope, Alexander, 16, 29 Pozzi, Anna, 76 Q Queen Charlotte, 48, 49, 73, 82, 100 Queen Victoria, 2, 30 R Rauzzini, Venanzio, 69, 76 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 6, 10, 66, 69 Richardson, Samuel, 107 Rossini, Giocchino, 74 Rousseau, J.J., 30 Rowe, Nicholas, 107 S Sacchini, Antonio, 66, 71, 72, 75, 76 Samuel, Richard, 9 Scott, Walter, 2, 23 Sheridan, Elizabeth née Linley, 16

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Siddons, Sarah, 72 Smollett, Tobias, 107 Sophocles, 103, 107 Steffani, Domenico, 74 Stendhal (Marie-Henry Beyle), 74 Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy, 26 Streatfield, Sophia, 97, 102 Stuart, Lady Louisa, 29 T Tenducci, Giusto Fernando, 69, 76 Theobald, Lewis, 106 Thrale, Hester Lynch, 6, 24, 28, 69, 71, 72, 97. See also Piozzi, Hester Turner, J.M.W., 4 V Veigel, Eva Marie, 39 Virgil, 98 W Walpole, George Third Earl of Orford, 28 Weaver, John, 36–38, 42, 43