Some of the Bath visitors were naval officers who—it should be observed—did not at all accept Captain Mirvan’s portrait as typical of their profession. One of them, Mrs. Thrale’s cousin, Captain Cotton, pretended “in a comical and good-humoured way” to resent it highly; and so—he told the author—did all the Captains in the Navy. Admiral Byron, too,—the Byron of the “narrative” in Don Juan,—though he admired Evelina, was “not half pleased with the Captain’s being such a brute.” But Miss Burney herself is unconvinced and impenitent. “The more I see of sea-captains, the less reason I have to be ashamed of Captain Mirvan; for they have all so irresistible a propensity to wanton mischief,—to roasting beaux, and detesting old women, that I quite rejoice I showed the book to no one ere printed, lest I should have been prevailed upon to soften his character.” What the sea-captains, and the Bathonians generally thought of their critic, is not related, save in a sentence from Thraliana:—“Miss Burney was much admired at Bath (1780); the puppy-men said, ‘She had such a drooping air and such a timid intelligence’; or ‘a timid air,’ I think it was, and ‘a drooping intelligence’; never sure was such a collection of pedantry and affectation as filled Bath when we were on that spot.” The almost imperceptible feline touch in this passage serves to remind us that, in the padlocked privacy of her personal records, Mrs. Thrale did not scruple (like Dr. Johnson) to mingle praise with blame when occasion required. From other entries in Thraliana, Fanny seems to have sometimes vexed her friend by her prudish punctiliousness and dread of patronage, as well as by her perhaps more defensible preference for her own family. “What a blockhead Dr. Burney is to be always sending for his daughter home so! what a monkey! is she not better and happier with me than she can be anywhere else?” . . . “If I did not provide Fanny with every wearable—every wishable, indeed—it would not vex me to be served so; but to see the impossibility of compensating for the pleasures of St. Martin’s Street, makes one at once merry and mortified.” There were other reasons, as we shall learn presently, why Dr. Burney was anxious that Fanny should come back.[[47]]
Meanwhile, early in June, the Bath visit came to a premature conclusion. Returning from a visit to Lady Miller, Mrs. Thrale received intelligence of the Gordon riots. Her house in the Borough had been besieged by the mob, and only saved from destruction by the assistance of the Guards and the presence of mind of the superintendent, Mr. Perkins. Streatham Place was also threatened, and emptied of its furniture. What was worse, Mr. Thrale, then in a very unsatisfactory state of health, had been falsely denounced as a papist; and as there were also rioters at Bath, Mrs. Thrale and Fanny decided that it would be best to quit that place, and travel about the country. They started for Brighton; but before they got to Salisbury, London was again, in Dr. Burney’s words, “the most secure residence in the kingdom.” For the remainder of the year 1780, Fanny seems to have stayed quietly at St. Martin’s Street and Chessington. In March, 1781, she came to town to find the Thrales settled for the time in a hired house in Grosvenor Square and talking vaguely of continental travel—to Spa, to Italy, and elsewhere. But Mr. Thrale was obviously growing worse; and in April he died suddenly of apoplexy, “on the morning of a day on which half the fashion of London had been invited to an intended assembly at his house.” His death threw an infinity of additional care upon his already over-burdened widow; but, as soon as she was able, she again summoned Miss Burney to Streatham Place, where off and on, she lived until September. Then “Daddy” Crisp, descending from his Surrey retreat, bore her away perforce to Chessington; and at Chessington she continued to stay until the beginning of 1782, when she returned to Newton House in order to be present at her sister Susan’s marriage at St. Martin’s Church to Captain Molesworth Phillips of the Marines, a comrade, in Cook’s last voyage, of James Burney. After this, Fanny remained for some time quietly at home.
The reason why Dr. Burney wished to get his daughter away from Streatham Place, and why, at last, Mr. Crisp fetched her thence,—may perhaps be guessed. She had begun to work upon another novel; and her long absences from home seriously interfered with its progress. During the latter half of 1780, she had written steadily; but, in the following year, her renewed intercourse with Mrs. Thrale once more interrupted her labours; and her two fathers grew anxious that she should lose no further time. Of the advantages up to a certain point of her connection with the Streatham circle, both of them had been fully aware—Crisp especially. “Your time,” he had written to her in April, 1780, “could not be better employed, for all your St. Martin’s daddy wanted to retain you for some other purpose. You are now at school, the great school of the world, where swarms of new ideas and new characters will continually present themselves before you,—
‘which you’ll draw in,
As we do air, fast as ’tis ministered.’ ”[[48]]
But there must be a limit, even to schooling; and that limit, in the opinion of Dr. Burney and his friend, had now been reached. So Fanny saw no more of Streatham or Mrs. Thrale till her new book was finished.
| [36] | Edward Francis Burney, 1760-1848, the artist referred to in the above paragraph, was a frequent contributor to the Royal Academy between 1780 and 1793. His solitary “portrait of a Lady,” 1785, may have been his cousin’s picture. His first exhibits (418-20) were three “stained Drawings” for Evelina, in which Mme. Duval, Captain Mirvan, Mr. Villars, the heroine and her father, were all introduced. The Evelina of these designs is said to have strongly resembled the beautiful Sophy Streatfield; and an artful compliment was paid to Johnson by hanging his portrait in Mr. Villars’ parlour. Archdeacon Burney has one of these delicate little pictures. |
| [37] | No doubt The Castle of Otranto, which Lowndes himself had published in 1764. |
| [38] | The bibliography of Miss Burney’s first book is extremely perplexing. In the “Advertisement” to Cecilia, the author says that Evelina (which, it will be remembered, appeared in January, 1778) passed “through Four Editions in one year.” In the Memoirs of Dr. Burney, she implies that it went through three editions in five months (ii. p. 135). But the second and third editions are both dated 1779; and it must have been in the first months of that year that the sale was most active. In May, 1779, comes a reference to the fourth edition as on the stocks. “Evelina continues to sell in a most wonderful manner; a fourth edition is preparing, with cuts [it should be copper plates], designed by Mortimer just before he died, and executed by Hall and Bartolozzi” (Diary and Letters, 1892, i. p. 139). John Hamilton Mortimer, A.R.A., the artist indicated, died 4th February, 1779. His drawings, which cost £73, still exist. It may here be added that Mrs. Chappel, of East Orchard, Shaftesbury, possesses a copy of the second edition of Evelina (1779), presented to Dr. Burney,—whose name is filled up in the heading of the dedicatory verses,—“From his dutiful scribler,” i.e. “F. B.” |