"Last Sunday (July 28) Mr and Mrs Lock, my sister and Captain Phillips, and my brother Captain Burney, accompanied us to the altar in Mickleham Church; since which the ceremony has been repeated in the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador, that if, by a counter-revolution in France, M. d'Arblay recovers any of his rights, his wife may not be excluded from their participation.
"You may be amazed not to see the name of my dear father upon this solemn occasion; but his apprehensions from the smallness of our income have made him cold and averse: and though he granted his consent, I could not even solicit his presence."
From Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney after his first visit to her at Bookham.
"Bookham, August '94.
It is just a week since I had the greatest gratification of its kind I ever, I think, experienced:—so kind a thought, so sweet a surprise as was my dearest father's visit! How softly and soothingly it has rested upon my mind ever since!...
"How thankfully did I look back, the 28th of last month, upon a year that has not been blemished with one regretful moment!"
It was at Bookham that Madame d'Arblay wrote Camilla, and out of the sale of the novel she built her cottage, Camilla Lacey, on a plot of ground at West Humble leased to her by her friend Mr. Lock. Camilla, which Horace Walpole thought deplorable, infinitely worse than Cecilia, which was not so good as Evelina, was an instant success. Within a month Madame d'Arblay had made £2,000, and Macaulay's estimate of her whole profits was over three thousand guineas. There was never a stranger climb down a ladder to fortune than Fanny Burney's. Evelina, her first and incomparably her best novel, brought her £30; Cecilia, her next, £250; then came Camilla; and her last novel, The Wanderer, which she wrote after ten years' absence with her husband in France, actually sold 3,600 copies in six months at two guineas a copy, and was an absolute and hopeless failure.
Camilla Lacey, invisible from the road, has been enlarged and altered to look like nothing the d'Arblays knew. Juniper Hall has also changed, but the splendid cedars which stand round its lawns must have been familiar to Talleyrand and Madame de Staël. They have grown curiously slowly; they do not strike one as larger than many trees which are known to be not more than a hundred and twenty years old—those, for instance, at Farnham Castle; but John Timbs, in his Promenade Round Dorking, written in 1823, speaks of them as "immense," and as "said to be of the finest growth in England."
Cedars at Juniper Hall.